dougb

A Friend of a friend is a technical recruiter for SWA. They told me that SWA pays their Software Engineers below market salaries. They complained that because of that, its hard to recruit people, and they end up with mediocre developers.

I was able to copy a c64 cartridge by inserting it crooked and then dumping the memory to floppy disk. Then you could load it and run `sys 32768` to get it to run.

I started at Akamai in July 2002 and I received an option grant as part of my offer. Since I had options before, I thought they were all priced at the closing price on the day they were approved by the board. But Akamai had a provision in their option agreement that priced the options at 4 different prices. The price of the first quarter of my stock was the closing price the day the grant was approved by the board. The 2nd quarter was priced 90 days later, the 3rd 90 days after that, and the final price as 270 days after the initial grant. No one mentioned this odd pricing during the interview process, and I never thought to ask about it in the interview process, I just assumed they priced them all at once like my previous options.

I was told after I complained to HR, that they did this for MY benefit! Because their stock went straight to $300/share at the IPO and then started a slow decline. This was a good policy for people that started after the stock hit $300 and before I started because each quarter of their stock was priced lower than the previous quarter. But for those of us that started close to the bottom $2/share, it sucked!

One guy who started after me quit when he found out about the 4 different prices.

This is would be the perfect time for IBM to apply all Watson technologies and resources to develop new insight into Covid-19.

I used a SPARCbook back in 1996 for a business trip to Germany to install our search engine at t-online.de. The CFO of the company wanted to know who had this machine at all times because it was so expensive, around $20k USD. It didn't have any usable battery life, if you tried to do any type of development, it would last about 20 minutes before it shutdown. The many disk partitions made us get creative to fill the 1.2GB disk with data. We had to put files all over the place, and use softlinks get our software to work. This odd setup lead a sysadmin to "clean things up" one afternoon. He delete most of the OS in the process. He was really mad because he had to stay up all night to do a reinstall.

Wow, I forgot about that machine until this post.

I'd like to see the source code for Altavista released to the Computer History Museum. I think it is of historical significance. If anyone knows who currently has that code, please post a comment. I think there is a lot to learn from examining old computer code.

Radix Trees are used extensively at Akamai. They are very useful in dealing with blocks of network addresses. When I was there, they had 2 libraries which shared the on disk format. One was mutable and had all sorts of operations you could do on them. The other was immutable and optimized for very fast lookups.

Doesn't work for streaming Live Events (pay per view), which is the main use case for multi-CDN