For applications and frameworks, other languages provide the abstractions in a less difficult to wrangle fashion. Ada is perhaps my favorite example but you actually don't even have to leave the C family -- Objective-C is very pleasant to use in such a role. (No, it's not just an Apple thing, I use it all the time for Linux and cross-platform code.)
Yes, but in startups, being a PM is often very hard, because no one has to listen to you. So you need to bring your own credibility and influence so the product gets done properly.
Oh, definitely. Sorry, I sounded like I was criticizing the post. I really just want to make the case that PM is not a fluffy role. "Architect", "CTO", "advocate", "community manager", "evangelist", "information design" --- all carry fluffy connotations. PM owns nuts-and-bolts stuff that companies need to be doing, no matter who's doing them.
Love it, but it has one problem. Your argument is basically that it's a free market.
So, assuming the market is bad and jobs are hard to find, is it then ok to work nights and weekends like the article describes? Or should there be some kind of limit to "slavery"?
If it's a free market and "jobs are hard to find", or in other words "the supply of quality employees is lower than the demand" then it's the perfect time to start a business. You can get a good deal hiring good people. You don't even need an awesome business strategy, just make reasonable, productive use of their talents and there's plenty of room for you to come out ahead.
To the extent it's hard to do this -- there aren't many talented, underutilized people floating around unable to find work -- that's the extent to which it's not actually hard to find a job.
On one hand, as a hacker myself, I like the idea. It's as free-form as possible. Which is exactly the right spirit of hacking: no forms to fill out, no rules and procedures.
On the other hand, they are bound to end up with thousands of weird requests. Sorting through those will be a lot of work, in order to find a handful of gems, I'm afraid.
But I hope it works out for them and trickles down to the entire hacker community.
Actually, it had two huge benefits: a lock-in for early adopters, and it is memorable. Don't discount the second benefit. Once enough early adopters talk about it, the general public will come to remember the name. This is extremely important for a consumer product.
By the way, technically if the text of your home page has not changed since you wrote it in 2008, it would be illegal for you to claim a copyright year of 2009.
Why? Because the date serves a purpose: so that people can know when your copyright expires and your content falls into the public domain. If you move up the date incorrectly, you are cheating the rest of the world.
As you can imagine, we are not that eager to copy your home page for free 75 years from now, but the law doesn't care.
No it wouldn't, there's no penalty for falsely claiming a copyright unless the copyright belongs to someone else.
Having a date and copyright symbol isn't required by the Berne convention, however it can impact the size of damages awarded in a copyright infringement case.
"Copyright notice was required under the 1976 Copyright Act. This requirement was eliminated when the United States adhered to the Berne Convention, effective March 1, 1989." (First Hit on Google, 2009, p.1)
The copyright notice is unnecessary, but the grandparent is absolutely correct on how it works. The year is date of first publication. See http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf.
That's the key restriction from Linus right there. He was talking about system-level code.
For everything else (application-level, frameworks, etc.), you need the abstractions that C++ provides.