bondolo

I know that I am excited that they will be providing soft realtime threads. I've felt this is a necessary addition for consumer media operating systems for a long time.

Considering how competitive physics graduate programs are at top schools it is a shame to hear that so few are pursuing careers in physics and some appear to be calculating in advance their move to CS. I love CS but if I had a passion for physics I would be pissed to see someone that society, schools, mentors, peers have invested in to do physics go be quant at an investment bank. It is not that working for a bank is intrinsically bad, more the case that individuals should consider the opportunity they may have been taking from others in pursuing a specialized education they subsequently don't use.

Culture matters. In 1997 I had offers from both Apple and Sun. I was working at a Macintosh ISV which was very badly impacted by Steve cancelling the Mac clones. I knew from friends about the secrecy and siloed environment at NeXT and in Steve's Apple. While I had respect for Steve's accomplishments and vision I made a very conscious effort to choose a different work culture.

I ended up working at Sun (and eventually Oracle) for 16 years. It may not have been great for all those years but I can't imagine that I would have lasted at Apple that long and I certainly wouldn't have had the mobility between projects that I did at Sun.

Doing it again I would still choose the company with the culture that I felt was the best fit for me with that company's potential being secondary.

Have you heard of the BATS group and mailing list?

http://bats.fyi/

Both were Apple's choice. Apple's Java 6 relied on proprietary interfaces that were not part of the contribution to OpenJDK. Oracle could not have even recreated the Java 6 MacOS port. The other big reason was that new MacOS versions were only x64 and going to the trouble of making a 32 bit port for only obsolete OSes was a non-starter.

Key management is pretty primitive. It would be nice if SSH integrated better with PGP/GPG. I recently spent too much time messing with monkeysphere, keychain, gpg-agent, gpgsm etc. trying to use GPG derived keys for SSH. While I could cobble something together I didn't feel that it was a solution I could recommend to others as a general "best practice" because it involved too much installing and configuring and was still somewhat brittle (eg. providing key names to gpg-agent in my .bashrc file).

His endorsement of survivor bias seems like a gaff.

I can imagine quite a few blind people are creaming their jeans about now.