You're one of today's lucky 10,000. It was huge news at the time. The FTC considered not allowing it and the acquisition got delayed for months while back and forth public debate raged.
Easy to forget all the big moves that happened recently, especially since there haven't been (afaict) any major changes to service. I forgot the other day that Sony had bought Bungie, though it'd be pretty memorable if Sony announced Destiny 3 as a PS5 timed exclusive.
Massive media/telecom/tech companies get passed around between other massive media/telecom/tech companies so much that regardless of how much you saw the news at the time, a couple of years later it's tough to remember "Now who is it that owns Warner Bros. currently? AOL? AT&T? Netflix? The sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia?"
And Sierra. It would be amazing if MS released the source code to some of Sierra classic Hi-Res/AGI/SCI games, or the engines themselves.
IIRC, Al Lowe had retained copies of source code from the early Sierra days, and was planning to release some of it publicly a few years ago, but Activision shut him down. Maybe MS would be willing to reconsider that now that they're pursuing historical preservation.
the problem isn’t with centralized internet services, the problem is a fundamental flaw with http and our centralized client server model. the solution doesn’t exist. i’ll build it in a few years if nobody else does.
There isn't much downside, but it probably involves a small amount of money (paid for the certification) and it means spending time making sure that everything remains 100% within spec. There's lots of little edge cases where BSDs differ from the spec and it means that Apple needs to take care not to drift from the spec.
It’s a spec that doesn’t really matter in practice. Like some other comments said, Linux, BSD and Solaris are “Unix but not Unix(tm)”, and nobody cares.
As pointed out by amiga386 both here[1] and in earlier posts, macOS is not actually compliant with the Unix spec and never has been. This has apparently not been a hindrance for the certification of every single non-compliant version. Unix certification for Apple might not involve anything other than payment.
I ran 'neoprint.php' on myself at Facebook in 2007 and immediately got a stern email about it... It was some script that collected info for responding to law enforcement requests. But after chastising me, the email said "I was gratified that you ran it on yourself". (as opposed to snooping on someone else!)
It was just a summer internship and FB was like 'only' 80 engineers back then. But they still took it seriously.
I think that's a little different. It sounds like neoprint.php is an internal Facebook tool for looking up data on Facebook users. So improper usage of it is a privacy problem for users. It's something misbehaving employees might run against celbrities, exes, etc. (e.g. https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5637234/gcreep-google-enginee... )
Otoh nmap isn't a privacy problem for users of Facebook (or any other tech company).
Yea totally agree. Mainly just wanted to shoehorn in my own story about stern emails at FB! Also I think running nmap on your own development machine is totally legitimate. Lots of reasons you might want to do it.
+1. If I can't run nap or netcat, or have to justify it each time, I can't do my job. Better off elsewhere.
I've departed early at least twice over this. Draconian IT serves nobody. Been doing this long enough I deliberately poke any new employer; see what's in store.
Nobody cares, though. EDR appliances sell without careful administration. The industry will outlive us all.
meta was a weird place for a while. because of psc (the performance rating stuff) being so important… a public post could totally demoralize a team because if a legend like carmack thinks that your project is a waste of resources, how is that going to look on your performance review?
impact is facebook for “how useful is this to the company” and its an explicit axis of judgement.
How large is their headcount these days? And how many actually useful products have they launched in the last decade? You could probably go full Twitter and fire 90% of the people, and it would make no difference from a user perspective.
But... That's not an HR violation. If something a team is working on is a waste of resources, it's a waste. You can either realize that and pivot to something more useful (like an effort to take the improvements of the current OS project and apply them to existing OSes), or stubbornly insist on your value.
Why is complaining to HR even an option on the table?
One could argue that if it’s not in your swim lane, you just let it fail. And if you aren’t that person’s manager, you tell them the code or design that you are reviewing and thus the gatekeeper is not adequate. Politely. You said your part and no need to get yourself in trouble. Document and move on. If the company won’t listen then you move on. No need to turn it into a HR issue.
No matter how big or small one's "swim lane" is, an argument on technical merits without getting personal or discriminatory (assuming this was the case with J.C.) is never an HR issue. The whole "Weaponizing HR" thing is a nightmare and should not be acceptable.
Only light fun. I'm just a little perplexed at their progress and direction over the past 7-8 years. I don't understand how they can have so many high caliber people and put out...that.
First of all, AR/VR is a tough problem space, often for reasons not immediately obvious to common folk. Second, Facebook in my opinion is a wrong home for long-term efforts that may not bear fruit for many years, with its 6-month attention span of employee performance management and its "move fast and break things" culture (both of which clashed with the meticulous hardware-oriented Oculus culture). And finally, a significant portion of people working in AR/VR didn't believe in AR/VR as a product. Some were there for the gravy train, some were there for interesting OS work, some were there for bleeding-edge technology, but I'd say less than half would say "we're working on something that people will love and pay money for". To me it felt more like well-funded academia even and less like a startup (which it was supposed to be).
There were many, many influential software projects done in the past that are not games. Some of the people responsible worked in AR/VR and drove its vision and technical roadmaps.
Just because something isn't an HR violation doesn't mean it's not wrong, rude, or unprofessional. Society is not a computer program. Being tactful is important to well adjusted people.
Hard disagree. Being tactful is only relevant when dealing with people, criticise an idea, a project, a solution as much as you like. Intellectual debate is the fire from which genuinely good ideas are forged.
Unfortunately people have ideas, projects, and solutions that they care deeply about. Like it or not, some tact when dealing with these things goes a long way.
I mostly notice that those people aren't emotionally grown up enough to actually produce good results.
When your emotions over your work become more important than the quality of the work you're outputting, you become a problem for people who use your work.
> Unfortunately people have ideas, projects, and solutions that they care deeply about.
This is true of course, but this is also true for the “search for truth” in science. Do we fail to point out the flaw in the reasoning of someone’s life's work for fear of offence? The truth is the higher ideal that must be strived for!
In the same way, an idea is only good once it has been challenged. It may fail and dissolve, it may survive, it may morph into something that can no longer be assailed. This is the forgers fire, and it is necessary.
I know this isn’t as black and white as I’m painting it, but the ideal is still something worth striving for.
Yeah, yeah all that’s true. Ideas are better if they’re challenged, etc. but the fact is people don’t like being challenged.
Also, software engineering is a field where there’s rarely some ideal truth we’re trying to achieve, and indeed even in science, people do often fail to point out flaws in reasoning for fear of offense.
Facebook has literally done very little in terms of new breakthrough products in a decade at least, and Bytedance has apparently just beat them on revenue.
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