Self-Service Linux: Mastering the Art of Problem Determination
by Mark Wilding, Dan Behman
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR 2005
ISBN/ASIN: 013147751X
ISBN-13: 9780131477513
Number of pages: 456
Description:
The biggest factor in a company's decision to go with Linux is overcoming the support issues. This book should be an essential part of every company's Linux adoption plan to keep the total cost of ownership down and improve the ROI of their Linux strategy. It is also a book that advanced Linux professionals running their own Linux systems will be able to use to troubleshoot. This book gives the staff the basics they need to diagnose most problems that they will face and will go into the nitty-gritty on the toughest problems.
Download or read it online here:
Download link
(4.4MB, PDF)
Startups usually involve technology, so much so that the phrase
"high-tech startup" is almost redundant. A startup is a small
company that takes on a hard technical problem.
Here is a brief sketch of the economic proposition. If you're
a good hacker in your mid twenties, you can
get a job paying about $80,000 per year. So on average
such a hacker must be
able to do at least $80,000 worth of work per year for the
company just to break even
and if
you focus you can probably get three times as much done in
an hour
I'm
claiming you could be 36 times more
productive than you're expected to be in a random corporate
job.
then a smart
hacker working very hard without any corporate
bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about
$3 million a year
f
you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a
million dollars' worth of pain.
Bill Gates is a smart, determined, and hardworking man,
but you need more than
that to make as much money as he has. You also need to be
very lucky.
If you want to create wealth, it will help to understand what it is.
Wealth is not the same thing as money.
[3]
Wealth is as old as
human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth.
Money is a comparatively recent invention.
talking about
making money can make it harder to understand how to
make money.
the craftsmen.
Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones.
A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and
create wealth. A good piece of software is, in itself,
a valuable thing.
And so it's clearer to programmers that wealth is something
that's made, rather than being distributed, like slices of a
pie, by some imaginary Daddy
we had one
programmer who was a sort of monster of productivity
A great programmer, on a roll, could
create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks.
A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or
even negative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs).
The top 5% of programmers
probably write 99% of the good software.
Hackers often donate their work by
writing open source software that anyone can use for free.
I am much the richer for the operating system
FreeBSD, which I'm running on the computer I'm using now,
and so is Yahoo, which runs it on all their servers.
You can't go to your boss and say, I'd like to start working ten
times as hard, so will you please pay me ten times as much?
A programmer, for example, instead of chugging along
maintaining and updating an existing piece of software, could write
a whole new piece of software, and with it create a new source of
revenue.
All a company is is a group of people
working together to do something people want. It's doing something people
want that matters, not joining the group
To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two
things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a
position where your performance can be measured, or there is
no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to
have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have
a big effect.
If you're in
a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich,
because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.
All you
need to do is be part of a small group working on a
hard problem
Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup
depends on the first ten employees. I agree
What is technology? It's technique. It's the way
we all do things. And when
you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied
by all the people who use it. It is the proverbial fishing
rod, rather than the fish. That's the difference between a
startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. You fry eggs or cut
hair one customer at a time. Whereas if
you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about,
you help everyone who uses your solution.
That's leverage
If there were two features we could add to our
software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty,
we'd always take the harder one
I can remember times when we were just
exhausted after wrestling all day with some horrible technical
problem. And I'd be delighted, because something that was
hard for us would be impossible for our competitors
Start by picking a hard problem, and
then at every decision point, take the harder choice.
You'd think that a company about to buy you would do a lot of
research and decide for themselves how valuable your technology
was.
Not at all. What they go by is the number of users you
have
Wealth is
what people want, and if people aren't using your software,
maybe it's not just because you're bad at marketing. Maybe it's
because you haven't made what they want.
Now we can recognize this as something
hackers already know to avoid: premature optimization. Get a version
1.0 out there as soon as you can. Until you have some users to
measure, you're optimizing based on guesses.
In that respect the Cold War teaches the same lesson as
World War II and, for that matter, most wars in recent history.
Don't let a ruling
class of warriors and politicians squash the entrepreneurs
Let the nerds keep their lunch
money, and you rule the world.
Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility -- all of these describe lighttpd (pron. lighty) which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems. And best of all it's Open Source licensed under the revised BSD license.
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