Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Microsoft Agrees to License Windows Source Code
source: http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/01/25/1629205.shtml
DISNEY TO ACQUIRE PIXAR
Long-time Creative Partners Form New Worldwide Leader in Quality Family Entertainment
Ed Catmull Named President of the Combined Pixar and Disney Animation Studios and John Lasseter Named Chief Creative Officer; Steve Jobs to Join Disney's Board of Directors
Disney Increases Stock Repurchase Authorization
Burbank, CA and Emeryville, CA (January 24, 2006) – Furthering its strategy of delivering outstanding creative content, Robert A. Iger, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS), announced today that Disney has agreed to acquire computer animation leader Pixar (NASDAQ: PIXR) in an all-stock transaction, expected to be completed by this summer. Under terms of the agreement, 2.3 Disney shares will be issued for each Pixar share. Based on Pixar's fully diluted shares outstanding, the transaction value is $7.4 billion ($6.3 billion net of Pixar's cash of just over $1 billion).*
This acquisition combines Pixar's preeminent creative and technological resources with Disney's unparalleled portfolio of world-class family entertainment, characters, theme parks and other franchises, resulting in vast potential for new landmark creative output and technological innovation that can fuel future growth across Disney's businesses. Garnering an impressive 20 Academy Awards, Pixar's creative team and global box office success have made it a leader in quality family entertainment through incomparable storytelling abilities, creative vision and innovative technical artistry.
"With this transaction, we welcome and embrace Pixar's unique culture, which for two decades, has fostered some of the most innovative and successful films in history. The talented Pixar team has delivered outstanding animation coupled with compelling stories and enduring characters that have captivated audiences of all ages worldwide and redefined the genre by setting a new standard of excellence," Iger said. "The addition of Pixar significantly enhances Disney animation, which is a critical creative engine for driving growth across our businesses. This investment significantly advances our strategic priorities, which include - first and foremost - delivering high-quality, compelling creative content to consumers, the application of new technology and global expansion to drive long-term shareholder value."
Pixar President Ed Catmull will serve as President of the new Pixar and Disney animation studios, reporting to Iger and Dick Cook, Chairman of The Walt Disney Studios. In addition, Pixar Executive Vice President John Lasseter will be Chief Creative Officer of the animation studios, as well as Principal Creative Advisor at Walt Disney Imagineering, where he will provide his expertise in the design of new attractions for Disney theme parks around the world, reporting directly to Iger. Pixar Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs will be appointed to Disney's Board of Directors as a non-independent member. With the addition of Jobs, 11 of Disney's 14 directors will be independent. Both Disney and Pixar animation units will retain their current operations and locations.
"Disney and Pixar can now collaborate without the barriers that come from two different companies with two different sets of shareholders," said Jobs. "Now, everyone can focus on what is most important, creating innovative stories, characters and films that delight millions of people around the world."
"Pixar's culture of collaboration and innovation has its roots in Disney Animation. Our story and production processes are derivatives of the Walt Disney 'school' of animated filmmaking," said Dr. Catmull. "Just like the Disney classics, Pixar's films are made for family audiences the world over and, most importantly, for the child in everyone. We can think of nothing better for us than to continue to make great movies with Disney."
The acquisition brings to Disney the talented creative teams behind the tremendously popular original Pixar blockbusters, who will now be involved in the nurturing and future development of these properties, including potential feature animation sequels. Pixar's 20-year unrivaled creative track record includes the hits Toy Story, Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Disney will also have increased ability to fully capitalize on Pixar-created characters and franchises on high-growth digital platforms such as video games, broadband and wireless, as well as traditional media outlets, including theme parks, consumer products and live stage plays.
"For many of us at Pixar, it was the magic of Disney that influenced us to pursue our dreams of becoming animators, artists, storytellers and filmmakers," said Lasseter. "For 20 years we have created our films in the manner inspired by Walt Disney and the great Disney animators - great stories and characters in an environment made richer by technical advances. It is exciting to continue in this tradition with Disney, the studio that started it all."
"The wonderfully productive 15-year partnership that exists between Disney and Pixar provides a strong foundation that embodies our collective spirit of creativity and imagination," said Cook. "Under this new, strengthened animation unit, we expect to continue to grow and flourish."
Disney first entered into a feature film agreement with Pixar in 1991, resulting in the release of Toy Story, which was hailed as an instant classic upon its release in November 1995. In 1997, Disney extended its relationship with Pixar by entering into a co-production agreement, under which Pixar agreed to produce on an exclusive basis five original computer-animated feature films for distribution by Disney. Pixar is currently in production on the final film under that agreement, Cars, to be distributed by Disney on June 9.
The Boards of Directors of Disney and Pixar have approved the transaction, which is subject to clearance under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antritrust Improvements Act, certain non-United States merger control regulations, and other customary closing conditions. The agreement will require the approval of Pixar's shareholders. Jobs, who owns approximately 50.6% of the outstanding Pixar shares, has agreed to vote a number of shares equal to 40% of the outstanding shares in favor of the transaction.
The Disney Board was advised by Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Bear, Stearns & Co. The Pixar Board was advised by Credit Suisse.
Separately, the Disney Board approved the repurchase of approximately 225 million additional shares, bringing the Company's total available authorization to 400 million shares. Since August 2004 through the end of December 2005, Disney has invested nearly $4 billion to purchase nearly 155 million shares. Disney anticipates further significant share repurchases going forward, reflecting Disney's continued commitment to returning value to shareholders over time.
* Based on Disney's closing share price of $25.52 as of 1/23/06.
About The Walt Disney Company:
The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS), together with its subsidiaries and affiliates, is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise with four business segments: media networks, parks and resorts, studio entertainment and consumer products. Disney is a Dow 30 company, had annual revenues of nearly $32 billion in its most recent fiscal year, and a market capitalization of approximately $50 billion as of January 23, 2006.
Investor Conference Call:
An investor conference call will take place at approximately 2:15 p.m. PT / 5:15 p.m. ET today, January 24, 2006. To listen to the Webcast, turn your browser to www.disney.com/investors/presentations or http://corporate.pixar.com. If you cannot participate in the live Webcast, re-plays will be available for domestic callers at (888) 286-8010 (PIN 56666399) and for international callers at (617) 801-6888 (PIN 56666399), or at www.disney.com/investors/presentations until 4:00 p.m. PT on Tuesday, February 7, 2006. An .mp3 version of this Webcast replay will also be available approximately 24 hours after the Webcast concludes at www.disney.com/investors/presentations.
Forward-Looking Statements:
Certain statements in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are made on the basis of the views and assumptions of the management of The Walt Disney Company and Pixar regarding future events and business performance as of the time the statements are made and they do not undertake any obligation to update these statements. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied. Such differences may result from legal or regulatory proceedings or other factors that affect the timing or ability to complete the transactions contemplated herein, actions taken by either of the companies, including restructuring or strategic initiatives (including capital investments or asset acquisitions or dispositions), as well as from developments beyond the companies' control, including: adverse weather conditions or natural disasters; health concerns; international, political or military developments; technological developments; and changes in domestic and global economic conditions, competitive conditions and consumer preferences. Such developments may affect assumptions regarding the operations of the businesses of The Walt Disney Company and Pixar separately or as combined entities including, among other things, the timing of the transaction, the performance of the companies' theatrical and home entertainment releases, expenses of providing medical and pension benefits, and demand for products and performance of some or all company businesses either directly or through their impact on those who distribute our products. Additional factors that may affect results are set forth in the Annual Report on Form 10-K of The Walt Disney Company for the year ended October 1, 2005 under the heading "Item 1A—Risk Factors" and in the Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q of Pixar for the quarter ended October 1, 2005 under the heading "Risk Factors" section of Part I, Item 2.
For Additional Information:
This material is not a substitute for the prospectus/proxy statement Disney and Pixar will file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Investors are urged to read the prospectus/proxy statement which will contain important information, including detailed risk factors, when it becomes available. The prospectus/proxy statement and other documents which will be filed by Disney and Pixar with the Securities and Exchange Commission will be available free of charge at the SEC's website, www.sec.gov, or by directing a request when such a filing is made to The Walt Disney Company, 500 South Buena Vista Street, Burbank, CA 91521-9722, Attention: Shareholder Services or by directing a request when such a filing is made to Pixar, 1200 Park Avenue, Emeryville, CA 94608.
Pixar, its directors, and certain of its executive officers may be considered participants in the solicitation of proxies in connection with the proposed transactions. Information about the directors and executive officers of Pixar and their ownership of Pixar stock is set forth in the proxy statement for Pixar's 2005 annual meeting of shareholders. Investors may obtain additional information regarding the interests of such participants by reading the prospectus/proxy statement when it becomes available.
The Walt Disney Company
Zenia Mucha – 818-560-5300
Michelle Bergman – 818-560-8231
Pixar
Katie Cotton – 408-974-7269
Nils Erdmann – 510-752-3374
source:http://corporate.disney.go.com/news/corporate/2006/2006_0124_pixar.html
Three-Dimensional Structure of HIV Revealed
source:http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/01/24/2254227.shtml
Google co-founders cash in
Last month, the 32-year-old celebrity co-founders of Google each sold more than $160 million worth of their company's stock.
That may sound like the ultimate jackpot to most people, but to Sergey Brin and Larry Page it was just another month in their billionaire-in-a-year lives.
Since the search giant went public in August 2004, Brin has sold about 6.5 million shares at a market value of $1.68 billion. Page has sold about 5.8 million shares at a market value of $1.4 billion, according to calculations from Thomson Financial. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, who was brought in to run the company before it went public, has sold more than 2.1 million shares, worth more than $502 million.
Of course, there's nothing new about executives at hot tech outfits getting rich selling their stock once their companies go public. Microsoft's Bill Gates didn't become the richest man in the world because of his take-home salary. And Oracle's Larry Ellison didn't exactly fund his far-flung yachting adventures by cashing in a 401K plan.
But the speed at which the Google bosses have sold their stock and the eye-popping value of the sales have raised some eyebrows among corporate governance experts.
"Any time you sell stock it is an affirmative decision that your assets are better deployed somewhere else," said Charles Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. "I just don't think that for the top leadership of a company, large stock sales send a particularly strong message to the other shareholders. I don't think it's a good thing."
He wasn't the only one to take notice, though he was more critical than Wall Street stock analysts who can take comfort in the fact that everyone who invested in Google early on has been amply rewarded by a stock price that has increased nearly 400 percent in 17 months.
"The insider-selling cases are never a positive for the stock and sometimes they could be red flags," Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy wrote in an e-mail response to questions. "(But) by itself, I don't think this sale activity is a major telling point, although it does appear to be quite large and is somewhat concerning."
Not too concerning, apparently. Rashtchy raised his 2006 price target for Google stock to $600 a share from $445 a few weeks ago.
Sales planned long ago
Why the nonchalance? One answer could be that so far there's little reason to think Google's bosses are doing anything unseemly or separating their interests from those of other shareholders. Yes, they've already made a gargantuan amount of money, and stand to make a lot more if Google continues to rebound from a surprising 8.5 percent share price drop on Friday--the biggest single-day drop in the company's brief history. The drop came amid a broader Wall Street decline and one day after it became public that Google is fighting a Justice Department request for random search data.
But the Googlers' stock sales were carefully planned before the search giant went public. Unlike insider sales that are made by company executives accused of unloading stock right before a suspected downturn, the Google executives' sales were decided long ago. They were coordinated under a schedule that allows insiders to pre-arrange the sale of a certain number of shares over a period of time.
The plan, called a 10b5-1, allows them to sell stock on a regular basis without appearing as though they are reacting to market movements up or down. When they announced that they were adopting the plan in 2004, Google said that after the sales were completed Brin and Page would each retain more than 80 percent of their current holdings and Schmidt would retain nearly 85 percent.
That means they've just made a dent in their holdings. As of Jan. 9, Brin still held 32.4 million shares directly and indirectly, meaning he had sold about 17 percent of the shares he held around the time of the IPO. Page still held 32.9 million shares directly and indirectly, after selling 14.5 percent of his shares. And Schmidt held 12.7 million shares directly and through limited partnerships and a trust, reflecting the sale of about 14 percent of his total.
Google's meteoric stock rise has catapulted the two co-founders, who pay themselves $1 per year in actual salaries, onto the shortlist of America's wealthiest people. Forbes magazine estimates Brin and Page's net worth at $11 billion each as of September 2005 and ranks them both at 16th among the richest Americans. Schmidt, who also has cut his annual salary to $1, is ranked 52nd at $4 billion. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates tops the list at $51 billion.
Google executives declined to comment beyond this statement: "At the time of Google's IPO, more than a year ago, all senior executives were asked to enter into 10b5-1 plans. Any sales by Eric, Larry and Sergey are simply a consequence of those required plans. They each retain a large proportion of their initial holdings in Google stock."
They've certainly made a lot more in the first 17 months at a publicly traded company than executives at other big Internet companies. Yahoo co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo did not sell any company stock in the first year-and-a-half after that company went public in April 1996, while former Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle sold just less than 300,000 shares in that time at a market value of $10.6 million, according to Thomson Financial.
Over at eBay, founder Pierre Omidyar was busier, selling 1.7 million shares at a market value of $274 million. eBay CEO Meg Whitman sold more than 900,000 shares at a market value of $137 million in that time. And Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos sold 180,000 shares with a market value of $23 million.
But the fact that the Google executives still own such a large percentage of Google shares significantly lessens any potential harm from the sales, argues Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at The Corporate Library, which researches corporate governance issues.
"I don't think anybody would raise any objection to the Google founders selling shares because they already have such a significant stake in the company," Hodgson said. "Their commitment to the company is still very plain."
And so far, shareholders do not seem to be complaining. Shares rebounded Monday from Friday's drop, rising more than 7 percent to $427.50. Google's $117 billion market capitalization now dwarfs Yahoo's market cap, which is $48 billion, eBay's $60 billion cap, and Amazon's $18 billion. Google even towers over AOL's parent company, media giant Time Warner, which has an $80 billion cap.
As long as Google keeps enriching its investors, it's unlikely many of them will complain that the guys in the executive suite are also cashing in.
"While the (insider stock sales) numbers are pretty incredible, so has been the increase in Google's stock price, and other stockholders have benefited from that increase also," Hodgson said. "There is nothing wrong with diversifying your holdings."
Google execs keep $1 salaries
SAN FRANCISCO--Top executives of Google have once again agreed to be paid annual salaries of $1 each in 2006, counting instead on stock options and grants of the company's volatile stock for their pay.
In a regulatory filing on Monday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Web search leader said it had approved a base salary of $1 for Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt and its two co-founders and co-presidents, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The three were paid $1 a piece in salary during 2005.
The action--which was approved by Google last Tuesday but only disclosed this week--occurred ahead of the 14 percent decline in the company's stock price last week amid investor concerns over the Internet sector's growth outlook and revelation of a legal spat with the U.S. Justice Department.
But before anyone offers to spring for bus fare for Google executives, note that the 7 percent rebound in the price of the company's stock on Monday alone means that Schmidt's shares had recovered $413.8 million in value during the one-day trading session, according to CNET's CEO Wealthmeter site. As a result, his total wealth in shares is roughly $6.3 billion.
Shares of Google gained $28.04 to close at $427.50, almost fully recovering from a sharp sell-off on Friday. Bullish Wall Street analysts argued that Google continues to gain market share that may insulate it from any slowing of the overall market.
The practice of paying the top Google executives $1 per year in base salary started in the second quarter of 2004, during the run-up to the company's initial public offering in August 2004, according to the company's regulatory filings.
Previously, Schmidt had earned $250,000 and Brin and Page had been paid about $150,000 in salary, even as they accumulated stock options that have made them billionaires, at least in the potential value of their shares and options.
Four additional executives received a 43 percent increase in their base salary, to $250,000 from $175,000 in 2005, according to the company's latest regulatory filing.
They include Chief Financial Officer George Reyes; legal counsel David Drummond; Omid Kordestani, sales chief and developer of Google's original advertising business; and Shona Brown, senior vice president of business operations.
source:http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6030190.html
Yahoo! gives up quest for search dominance
Yahoo! Inc., one of the first Internet search companies, has capitulated to Google Inc. in the battle for market dominance.
"We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."
Yahoo!'s comments underline the difficulties any Internet company faces in trying to challenge Google's dominance of the Web search industry. Google has at least double the market share of Yahoo! and Microsoft Corp. in Internet search, the largest and most profitable segment of online advertising.
"In some countries, it's already game over in search, with Google the clear victor," said RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan in New York. "Google's product development pipeline runs at such a fast rate that it's very difficult for any company, Microsoft or Yahoo! to catch up."
Shares of Yahoo! fell as much as 13 percent Wednesday, the day after the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company reported fourth-quarter profit that missed analysts' expectations. The stock rose 43 cents to $34.17 Monday in Nasdaq stock market composite trading.
"It kind of makes you wonder about how serious they are about search," said Danny Sullivan, editor of London-based SearchEngineWatch.com, which tracks the search industry. "It really ought to be their goal" to be No. 1, he said. "Whether it's realistic or not."
Yahoo! founded in 1994 as one of the first online directories of Web sites, switched from Google's search engine to its own technology two years ago.
To boost revenue from each search, Yahoo! plans to make ads more relevant to search terms, meaning people will be more likely to click on them. Advertisers pay Yahoo! a fee when Internet users click on the ads.
"We have held our own, and we should gain revenue share in the industry as we roll out these new initiatives," Decker said in the interview after the company reported earnings last week.
"Our goal has been to hold our share and to be a leading, if not the leading, total marketing platform, which would include both brand and search."
Yahoo! handled 19 percent of global Internet searches in November, a drop from 27 percent a year earlier, according to Web tracker ComScore Networks Inc.
Google's share, by contrast, rose to 60 percent from 47 percent.
Decker last week cautioned analysts on a conference call against taking the ComScore figures too literally, saying the data exclude Asian countries where Yahoo! is "exceptionally strong."
source:http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/256748_yahoo24.html
WORLD'S FIRST BANNER AD
What was the world's first banner ad?
When HotWired decided to make money from their website in 1994, they set in motion events that would come back to haunt us all: The creation of banner ads.
AT&T was the first to dish over some money to HotWired to display the beast they created, a 468 x 60 banner that came to life on October 25 1994.
The world's first banner was quite the ugly thing as seen below and clicking it will not take you to the AT&T website, but just may take you somewhere else.
The First Banner Ad
source:http://thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com/first66.html
Cores Duo/Solo: "My God, they're full of flaws"
BLURB
[UPDATE 1/25/2006 8:25 A.M.: Stephane Hockenhull pointed out a problem with the AE27 entry; that's been fixed now.]
Today is January 23, 2006, making it less than 20 days since the Core Duo was officially released, and T-minus ?? days until Core Solo is officially released. Yet, if we turn to Intel's Errata documentation for the Core Duo and Core Solo lines, we already find 34 known problems. That averages out to an error-and-a-half found every day since the chips were released.
The errata are shown below, with some of the more obnoxious ones highlighed (click the image for a readable version, though you may want to save it instead of allowing your browser to resize it automatically, thus making it hard to read again):
As you can see, only one errata item is even planned to be fixed. It's worth noting that leaving known errors in processors is nothing new, as many of Pentium 4's 65 known errata (download the PDF) have no plans for correction either.
Still, the Core Duo and Core Solo processors are just out of the gates, and this high number of immediate errata should leave one a little chilled, I'd say. Releasing a brand new processor with 34 known errors seems almost criminal to me, especially with some of the more obnoxious ones highlighted above.
If you're thinking about buying a Core Duo-based machine, you might want to stop by Intel's documentation department and pick up the latest errata updates, which are promised to be released on the following dates: February 15, March 15, April 19, May 17, June 14, July 19, August 16, September 13, October 18, November 15, December 13.
Visit Intel's Core Duo homepage, check out the Core Duo 65 nm specification page, and don't forget to checkout the updated errata page.
To pre-extinguish some of the flames I can smell already, I'm working on a similar list of errata for AMD64. Restraint, ChipGeeks!
How to do what you love
The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't-- for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.
And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.
The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn't, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy.
Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of them. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of kids instead of lying on a beach. You couldn't just do what you wanted.
I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later. [1]
Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun-- fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that.
Jobs
By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we would go to see them at work. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: the private jet pilot. But I don't think the bank manager really did.
The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you despised your job, but a social faux-pas.
Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do. That's where the upper-middle class tradition comes from. Just as houses all over America are full of chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things.
What a recipe for alienation. By the time they reach an age to think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."
Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.
The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. [2] Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house. [3]
It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren't identical.
The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habit of so many years my idea of work still included a large component of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.
If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.
Bounds
How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige-- or sheer inertia.
Here's an upper bound: Do what you love doesn't mean, do what you would like to do most this second. Even Einstein probably had moments when he wanted to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.
It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they'd rather do. There didn't seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? Honestly, no.
But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn't mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.
Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.
As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else-- even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.
I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you'll have terrible problems with procrastination. You'll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.
To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.
So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.
I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things that would make your friends say wow. But it probably wouldn't start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven't had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then.
Sirens
What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? [4]
This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. [5] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.
That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.
Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind-- though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.
Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.
The other big force leading people astray is money. Money by itself is not that dangerous. When something pays well but is regarded with contempt, like telemarketing, or prostitution, or personal injury litigation, ambitious people aren't tempted by it. That kind of work ends up being done by people who are "just trying to make a living." (Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say this.) The danger is when money is combined with prestige, as in, say, corporate law, or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young, who hasn't thought much about what they really like.
The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it-- even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?
This test is especially helpful in deciding between different kinds of academic work, because fields vary greatly in this respect. Most good mathematicians would work on math even if there were no jobs as math professors, whereas in the departments at the other end of the spectrum, the availability of teaching jobs is the driver: people would rather be English professors than work in ad agencies, and publishing papers is the way you compete for such jobs. Math would happen without math departments, but it is the existence of English majors, and therefore jobs teaching them, that calls into being all those thousands of dreary papers about gender and identity in the novels of Conrad. No one does that kind of thing for fun.
The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money. It seems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelists and whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctors and whose parents want them to be novelists. The kids think their parents are "materialistic." Not necessarily. All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences.
Discipline
With such powerful forces leading us astray, it's not surprising we find it so hard to discover what we like to work on. Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain. Those who escape this are nearly all lured onto the rocks by prestige or money. How many even discover something they love to work on? A few hundred thousand, perhaps, out of billions.
It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don't underestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably.
Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think-- because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it-- finding work you love does usually require discipline. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just glide along as if they were on railroad tracks. But this seems the exception. More often people who do great things have careers with the trajectory of a ping-pong ball. They go to school to study A, drop out and get a job doing B, and then become famous for C after taking it up on the side.
Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldy carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche.
Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.
Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.
"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.
Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible. [6]
It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."
Another related line you often hear is that not everyone can do work they love-- that someone has to do the unpleasant jobs. Really? How do you make them? In the US the only mechanism for forcing people to do unpleasant jobs is the draft, and that hasn't been invoked for over 30 years. All we can do is encourage people to do unpleasant work, with money and prestige.
If there's something people still won't do, it seems as if society just has to make do without. That's what happened with domestic servants. For millennia that was the canonical example of a job "someone had to do." And yet in the mid twentieth century servants practically disappeared in rich countries, and the rich have just had to do without.
So while there may be some things someone has to do, there's a good chance anyone saying that about any particular job is mistaken. Most unpleasant jobs would either get automated or go undone if no one were willing to do them.
Two Routes
There's another sense of "not everyone can do work they love" that's all too true, however. One has to make a living, and it's hard to get paid for doing work you love. There are two routes to that destination:
the organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don't.The organic route is more common. It happens naturally to anyone who does good work. A young architect has to take whatever work he can get, but if he does well he'll gradually be in a position to pick and choose among projects. The disadvantage of this route is that it's slow and uncertain. Even tenure is not real freedom.
the two-job route: to work at things you don't like to get money to work on things you do.
The two-job route has several variants depending on how long you work for money at a time. At one extreme is the "day job," where you work regular hours at one job to make money, and work on what you love in your spare time. At the other extreme you work at something till you make enough not to have to work for money again.
The two-job route is less common than the organic route, because it requires a deliberate choice. It's also more dangerous. Life tends to get more expensive as you get older, so it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job. Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If you work too long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. And the best paying jobs are most dangerous, because they require your full attention.
The advantage of the two-job route is that it lets you jump over obstacles. The landscape of possible jobs isn't flat; there are walls of varying heights between different kinds of work. [7] The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music. If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, you have more freedom of choice.
Which route should you take? That depends on how sure you are of what you want to do, how good you are at taking orders, how much risk you can stand, and the odds that anyone will pay (in your lifetime) for what you want to do. If you're sure of the general area you want to work in and it's something people are likely to pay you for, then you should probably take the organic route. But if you don't know what you want to work on, or don't like to take orders, you may want to take the two-job route, if you can stand the risk.
Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong.
A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!" (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way-- including, unfortunately, not liking it.
Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.
When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it. But this is certainly not so with work. When you're deciding what to do, you have to operate on ridiculously incomplete information. Even in college you get little idea what various types of work are like. At best you may have a couple internships, but not all jobs offer internships, and those that do don't teach you much more about the work than being a batboy teaches you about playing baseball.
In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media. So unless you're fairly sure what you want to do, your best bet may be to choose a type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job career. That was probably part of the reason I chose computers. You can be a professor, or make a lot of money, or morph it into any number of other kinds of work.
It's also wise, early on, to seek jobs that let you do many different things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work are like. Conversely, the extreme version of the two-job route is dangerous because it teaches you so little about what you like. If you work hard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you'll quit and write novels when you have enough money, what happens when you quit and then discover that you don't actually like writing novels?
Most people would say, I'd take that problem. Give me a million dollars and I'll figure out what to do. But it's harder than it looks. Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems.
Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically there.
Notes
[1] Currently we do the opposite: when we make kids do boring work, like arithmetic drills, instead of admitting frankly that it's boring, we try to disguise it with superficial decorations.
[2] One father told me about a related phenomenon: he found himself concealing from his family how much he liked his work. When he wanted to go to work on a saturday, he found it easier to say that it was because he "had to" for some reason, rather than admitting he preferred to work than stay home with them.
[3] Something similar happens with suburbs. Parents move to suburbs to raise their kids in a safe environment, but suburbs are so dull and artificial that by the time they're fifteen the kids are convinced the whole world is boring.
[4] I'm not saying friends should be the only audience for your work. The more people you can help, the better. But friends should be your compass.
[5] Donald Hall said young would-be poets were mistaken to be so obsessed with being published. But you can imagine what it would do for a 24 year old to get a poem published in The New Yorker. Now to people he meets at parties he's a real poet. Actually he's no better or worse than he was before, but to a clueless audience like that, the approval of an official authority makes all the difference. So it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. The reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people they want to impress are not very discerning.
[6] This is isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously. The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index of that.
[7] A more accurate metaphor would be to say that the graph of jobs is not very well connected.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Dan Friedman, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Peter Norvig, Robert Morris, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this.
source:http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
When Data Goes Missing: Will You Even Know?
How many people currently own flash memory drives? Tens of millions. And how many companies control the use of flash drives? You can count them on one hand. I travel a lot, and on a recent trek through airport security, I found a flash drive that had fallen under the security table. This lost drive had no distinguishing characteristics -- no labels to tell me who owned it or where he worked. With some time to kill before my flight, I decided to see if I could track down the owner. I had to invade the owner's privacy to see what I could discover from the content of the files. Turns out the files contained fairly innocuous content -- some project plans and a short PowerPoint in draft form -- but no way to identify the owner. (As a result of this experience, I have put a small .txt file on my devices with my name and address, and I figure an address label on the outside can't hurt either.)
Why is this an issue? Well, for starters, the storage capacity of these devices is growing at the "silicon curve" rate. Within the next two to three years, instead of the 500MB or 1GB drives commonly available today, you'll be able to purchase for about the same money a stick-like drive of 10GB or greater capacity. What if an employee decided to download a customer database to one of these devices (say, to transfer the data to another machine) and then proceeded to lose it? Is the data protected from loss? Probably not, even though there are many devices now available that include encryption capability (which is rarely used). And what if a competitor picks it up?
The potential to lose data on portable devices is a massive hole in most companies' security plans. The laws being passed in a number of states that require data loss to be reported to affected consumers work only if the company actually discovers the loss. With more and more employees using flash drives, smart phones with Secure Digital memory cards, portable hard drives, etc., the likelihood of companies actually knowing about all instances of data loss is declining rapidly. And as a result, the possibility of companies breaking laws, whether for data-loss disclosure or regulatory compliance, is growing dramatically. Most companies attempting to come to terms with this problem are still aiming at technologies that are at least 10 years old (e.g., loss of data backup tapes), when an even greater potential mechanism for loss is increasingly appearing in their organizations with virtually no control and no disclosure, nor for that matter internal discovery.
So what should companies do? Certainly I wouldn't suggest eliminating external memory devices, since they provide real benefit to many users. But companies must take steps, starting with user education on what is and is not appropriate use. Further, companies should track sensitive data with trails of user access. Finally, companies should employ techniques that can discover when devices are connected and by whom, and make sure such devices have protection enabled (or better yet, provide users who need them enterprise-class, protection-enhanced storage devices).
It is highly likely that within the next year, we will see at least one publicized major case of unencrypted data loss from a portable device. Afterward, a lot of companies will ban such devices. But it would be better for them to formulate a proactive strategy now. Educate users, and deploy technology that will prevent data loss even if portable devices are lost. Educated users will be more aware of the ramifications of losing the valuable data that has become so easy to carry around.
source:http://computerworld.com/printthis/2006/0,4814,107967,00.html
Genius Requires Just the Right Mix
source:http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/23/2150239
