I thought this was a well written article and I loved the graphics (especially the one about 30 minute meetings actually taking 68 minutes). However, it's worth noting that this company is fairly small (48 members according to their About page) and that the group has been together for quite some time.
I'm not sure how well this would scale past the Dunbar number, or for organizations growing rapidly.
"People are born with an innate calling to drug dealing,"
What the hell is this author talking about? While the he's a pretty accomplished individual, he lost me with his shitty analogies based on false premises.
We're all reading these articles because we're excited about the future. In that context, the issues you've raised don't seem to be that big. Cost for the bill of materials will drop with mass production, and many of the major parts are already cheap.
After seeing personal computing and mobile computing revolutions unfold during my lifetime, I'm pretty sure the technical obstacles to making a reliable and cheap oven that Myhrvold describes are surmountable. Electric cars, jet planes and search engines deal with much harder engineering challenges.
Going from a simple millionaire to creating a company like Microsoft takes a lot of hard work to pull off.
But if you want to run with your line of reasoning then no one in the US really qualifies as self-made, from the point of view of let's say a poor person in India. We're all rich to someone who makes less than a dollar a day.
I hate what I know about Intellectual Ventures. But I love Nathan's cook book (http://modernistcuisine.com/) . I may not like what he does with IV, but it's hard to deny the dude's a genius.
@augustl: We manage connections with curl and requests(python). We haven't seen any bottlenecks here yet, so we haven't thought to revisit it.
We do, however, use ZeroMQ for other stuff. But I'll always reach for HTTP for an API, unless there's a need to do otherwise. It's super simple to get running, interface and debug with. Every backend engineer knows how to use curl.
Why would the average user want to see that warning before every movie? It's a waste of time for most people.
If one is such a nitpicker, Netflix isn't a good fit. Pay for the BluRay director's cut. Netflix $7.99/month, and it's a pretty good deal for what they provide.
"And at the same time, we can de-emphasize the branch switcher since it’s so rarely used."
WRONG. This is why designers shouldn't be "redesigning" stuff they don't use.
Branching and merging with ease is what makes distributed scm's so much better than the previous generation. Why would one want to de-emphasize this?
And let's talk about what really used. Github is great for viewing code easily and making comments. So what did they do to the code view div in the latest redesign? They made it smaller! Unbelievable!
These "designers" aren't entirely to blame though. A lot of what the author suggested makes things better. Unfortunately, coders are a tough crowd to please.
Live in downtown Seattle here. Although I enjoyed not paying for bus rides while it was free, I'm much happier with the service now that payment is required.
As a side note, the wait time for paying was reduced drastically once the Orca Card system (rfid based bus pass) went into use. From my experience, with the Orca Card the wait times for paying aren't that much longer compared to the free bus method. It's only when a group of tourists get on the bus and pay with coins is it noticeable.
My team's inherited code (legacy code) where not all lines are trimmed to 80 or even 120 chars. Long file names or deeply nested directories aren't something I run into currently, but I recall running into them on several J2EE apps in the past.
It looks like the code viewing area was narrowed. If the redesign was meant to put more focus on content, this decision is perplexing.
I wish they'd make a responsive design that would make use of my 24" monitor. Right now I've resorted to writing a Chrome plugin to widen the code viewing area via CSS.
I don't think was that easy to do all this virtualization stuff back in 2003. And even if it was, why would he invest resources to do this when the artists were willing to pay him?
I'm not sure how well this would scale past the Dunbar number, or for organizations growing rapidly.
Either way, I'm glad they published this.