CTO Breakfast Recap

The first item on today’s schedule was to get an update on the EMC acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems.

Scott gave us a report on his recent trip to the Millenials conference last month. This led to a discussion of workplace hiring and the differences in hiring kids out of school right now. They don’t ask about salary nearly as much as they ask about challenges, number of supervisors, and so on. They want multiple assignments so that they can move from one to another as they get bored or hit a roadblock.

We had a discussion of Scratch, a visual programming environment for education from MIT. It’s based on Squeak, Alan Kay’s follow-on to Smalltalk. There’s a community site where people can upload their projects and share their applications. Microphone support, sample applications, sound, are all included. There’s apparently a “scratch board” with sliders, buttons, and other physical input devices that plugs in a USB port and can be controlled with your Scratch app.

We talked about power tool drag racing. This looks like a lot of fun!

The ethics of hacking iPhones (and other similar gear) came up. The mobile companies are starting to look like th old phone company. The arguments are even the same.

I wrote an article on Google’s heavy hand yesterday at BTL. We discussed white-hat and black-hat SEO. While I deplore black-hat SEO, I’m concerned that even white-hat SEO is destroying the utility of Google. Other’s expressed similar concerns. If you build ecosystems that give economic benefits to third parties, people will go to great lengths to game the system.

Posted by windley on October 30, 2007 9:42 AM