Friday, October 18, 2013

SpaceX 325m vertical decent



Note the Quad rotors when the rocket hits its peak.

Computer Science: Job prospects?

Last year, just 1.4 percent of high school AP students took the computer science exam, compared to almost 40 percent that took exams in English. Far more students took AP exams in Spanish language, psychology, calculus, and history than in programming. 
Insufficiencies in school can translate into a bigger problem on an economic level. Each year, U.S. companies need to fill almost 150,000 jobs related to computer science and mathematics, but colleges and universities only graduate about 100,000 students with degrees in those fields.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Largest open source company on Earth?

Is Facebook The World's Largest Open Source Company?
Quick question: which is the largest open source company on Earth? That's easy, right? It's clearly Red Hat. After all, the company pulls in over $1 billion each year selling services around open-source software like Linux and JBoss. 
But as I've argued before, such a distinction fits a very old-school understanding of open source business. Back in 2009, I suggested that Google was the world's biggest open source company, given the copious quantities of code it contributes, not to mention its source code repository, inspiration of massive projects like Hadoop and other contributions. While some took exception to my classification of Google as an open source company, I still think it was accurate.
Except that Google is no longer the biggest open source company. Facebook is.