DARPA is probably seeking junior faculty members because they are more likely to have fresh ideas than do the more-established senior faculty. Also, junior faculty are in greater need of funding, especially in this economy where a lot of corporate funding for computer science research has been cut. Those research funds primarily support graduate students working on their advanced degrees. Finally, DARPA is sort of marketing itself to these young researchers, who may never have considered working with DARPA, especially when it was so directly focused on military programs.
There are many of us in the academic computer science research community (including me) who have never applied for DARPA funds or participated in their programs. But everyone with a computer has been the beneficiary of DARPA-funded projects.
Even with all of this commercial activity, anyone can go to drupal.org, freely download the community edition with any desired modules and themes, and participate as a member of the Drupal community, contributing to the project in many different ways.
You're going to find a laptop useful, not just for your email, but for restaurant guides, theatre tickets, and all of the usual travel info. As in the US, the expensive hotels will charge you a fortune for Internet access, and the less expensive ones will provide it for free. You just need to find and set the appropriate SSID. You will find pay WiFi at Heathrow (The Cloud is pretty good service), and that will come in handy if your flight is delayed or cancelled. You should bring an unlocked GSM mobile phone, and buy a prepaid SIM card for about $20 at Phones 4U or Carphone Warehouse. I've had good success with Virgin Mobile there. That gives you a local phone and number, and avoids the roaming and data charges of your US carrier. It's easy to find an unlocked GSM phone in the US before you travel - try Craigslist.
London theatre is outstanding, and you can often find discounted tickets at the official ticket booth in Leicester Square. Be careful about this, since there are many other ticket agencies in that neighborhood pretending to be the official one.
Others have suggested the various London tourist attractions, but I would add that you would do well to get out of London. Both Cambridge and Oxford are easily reachable in about an hour by train (Liverpool Street for Cambridge and Paddington for Oxford). It's well worth a day trip to each, and I highly recommend seeing some of the various colleges, as well as the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
As for shopping, prices in London (all of England, really) are so high that you're not going to want to buy a lot of stuff. In addition, one effect of globalization is that many products that you will find there are available in the US at lower prices. Of course, it's still enjoyable to wander through Harrod's, Hamley's, Liberty, and other unique London shops. Oxford Street and Regent Street stores will be nicely decorated for the holidays, which makes for great window shopping.
Here's why I think that H-P is unlikely to do this:
I would not be at all surprised to learn of talks between Oracle and HP, but I would really be shocked if this deal happened.
There are hundreds of commercial open source vendors that offer open source products with a traditional support/subscription model. These include SugarCRM, Jaspersoft, Zenoss, Groundwork, and many more. (Apologies to the 200+ I have omitted.) The issue here might be more about the vendor than about the support, though the key point may be that the potential buyer doesn't even know that these companies and products exist.
Think about Drupal vs. Acquia. One is a community-based project that is open to everyone at no cost using a forum-based model for support. Acquia was created as a commercial business to provide a supported distribution of Drupal. If you need or want product support, then you can buy that from Acquia; if not, then you can use the community version of Drupal forever.
In the case of MySQL, well over 99% of downloads are unsupported. But they built a successful business by selling commercial licenses and support to companies and governments that wanted that support.
The last example is Ubuntu, where Canonical has released LTS (long-term support) versions as part of their twice-a-year release program. Customers wanting support can install the LTS version and be assured of Canonical support for that version over several years.
Going back to Open Source for America, a key goal there is to get open source considered for adoption in the myriad acquisitions of the thousands of federal agencies. So a big part of the effort is educational -- letting them know where there are high quality open source projects and products that should be considered alongside traditional commercial (proprietary) software.
It's tricky to be a first time manager. You have to learn how to review, hire, and dismiss employees. You have to avoid micro-managing and delegate responsibilities to your team. You have to improve your communication skills so that you can work effectively with your managers, your peers, and your [new] subordinates. It will be useful to find a manager you respect and get some mentoring. All of these activities take away from "techie" time, so it's a real challenge to be a good manager and retain your technical skills. My suggestion is that you begin to look at technology from a strategic perspective, focusing on those issues that are most important for the long-term success of the product(s) and the company. That approach should help senior management to recognize that you are successfully moving into a management role.
Good luck!
I still contend that we don't have a selection of consumer-oriented desktop applications for Linux, and little indication that the situation is likely to change in the foreseeable future. We agree that the retail store possibilities are very unlikely.
We could easily construct a wishlist or consumer apps for Linux. My list would include Adobe's Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, as well as their professional graphics products (Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop). I'd also add Intuit's Quicken and TurboTax, Roxio Creator or Toast, a Linux equivalent of WinDVD or CyberDVD, drawing programs like Visio and CorelDraw, a painting program, a website creation program like RapidWeaver or Freeway Express, and much more. There's also a very long list of educational titles and game titles that are almost entirely absent from Linux.
I don't see that level of development as happening anytime soon, so I have backed away from the notion of Linux on the desktop for all but the small percentage of people (including many
To the best of my knowledge, none of the major commercial vendors of consumer-oriented desktop software for MacOS X or Windows also build products for Linux. I don't mean vendors of development tools or enterprise apps like Oracle or SAP, but rather vendors like Microsoft, Apple, Intuit, Adobe, Pinnacle, and Corel that sell to the individual user.
It would certainly make Linux on the desktop much more competitive if I could go into a store (like Fry's or MicroCenter) or onto the web and choose from a selection of proprietary packaged products that would run on my Linux desktop. I don't yet see such a market developing, and the Linux community would probably have to address the multiple installation format issue (rpm vs. deb, etc.) first.
Your note gave me an idea for some other measures that we could use to evaluate the success of desktop Linux. One is the number of vendors who make Linux their primary platform. Another is the revenue generated from license sales of independent software vendors for the Linux platform. When do you think that we will have an application software vendor who can sell $25M of their desktop products for Linux?
At the time, I estimated that we were around the 50% mark toward that goal (lots of missing device drivers, buggy OpenOffice, no high-quality equivalent tools for photo editing, page layout, video editing, and much more). In short, anyone using a Linux desktop would need to have another machine to accomplish these other tasks.
In recent weeks, I have installed SLED 11, openSuse 11.1, Fedora 10, and Ubuntu 9.04 on several netbooks, notebooks, and boxes. My goal (once again) was to make one of these systems my everyday workhorse machine, one that I could recommend to friends and family for all of their computing tasks. While the situation is much improved from three years ago, we are still quite a way from reaching that elusive 100% goal. For myself and my family, I would guess that we are in the 80's, but gamers would give a much lower score.
Installation and setup is vastly improved. The desktop layouts, particularly GNOME, are reasonably familiar to users of other platforms. Individual applications, notably OpenOffice and Firefox, have come a long way. The usability of system update mechanisms ranges from the smooth (Ubuntu) to the challenging (SuSE). (Development tools are outstanding, but that isn't the issue here.)
However, I had to install restricted drivers to make wireless work, had to install commercially licensed Flash to be able to view many websites, and still found myself without programs for video editing, page layout, and photo editing that compared well with their commercial counterparts (e.g., Scribus vs. MS Publisher or Pages). Watching commercial DVDs occasionally required the use of terminal commands to download and install software, not to mention the associated legal issues. Webcams and microphones were unreliable at best, making it impossible to do video chat or broadcasting (e.g. uStream) with web-based applications.
So I renew the challenge to make it possible for average computer users to do 100% of their work using open source software. That means moving development efforts up from the operating system and infrastructure level to concentrate on creating high quality, easily used applications. That also rules out using WINE or VirtualBox to run proprietary apps.
Let's create personas and scenarios for different types of users, identify their needs, and build the needed applications and drivers. Let's also continue to push device makers to supply Linux drivers. Let's find a workable solution for Flash and SWF-based web content. (Gnash isn't quite there.) In that way, we can make some progress toward that magic 100% number that would allow people to do all of their computing on a Linux desktop.
I have some friends who were prepared to sell their very new startup to a high-tech megacorp that approached them. They decided to accept the offer rather than to raise a VC round, but the megacorp dragged out the negotiations, the founders ran out of money, and the VCs decided not to invest. End of company.
You should also beware of accepting stock with sales restrictions. I have a colleague who sold his company at the end of the dot-com boom for stock that was worth $19M to him personally, but he was restricted from selling it for a year. By the time he was free to sell, the value of the stock had dropped to $200K.
You can take steps to partially protect you and your teammates. One of these steps is employment contracts for you and your team, assuring salary and benefits for a couple of years no matter what. You can also ask for a "change of control" clause that gives you additional options should Megacorp itself be acquired or change its CEO.
That said, if you have a dream and Megacorp isn't going to set you up for life, then you should find a couple of hardened veterans who've been down this road and ask them to serve as advisors. They'll tell you that lightning doesn't strike very often and that there is a good chance that things won't work out. However, if you are at a stage of your life where you don't have a lot of commitments in the form of mortgages, debts, and children, this is as good a time as any to take a chance on seeing your dream through to fruition.
Good luck!
We would love to join the civilized world and have high speed rail in the US. Less than 5 hours from SF to Denver, Portland, Seattle, LA, San Diego, Phoenix, Tahoe, Vegas, and Salt Lake City. Leave SF at 6 PM on overnight trains to the East Coast, too. With any luck, we wouldn't have the TSA to make us take off our shoes or leave our bottled water behind.
Today's Amtrak passenger service is only good by the standards of a developing country; even the Acela is pretty much of a joke as high speed trains go. I think of our passenger rail system as equivalent to a two lane road when advanced countries use 6 lane highways.
The 1950's needed the Interstate Highway System. Today we need to supplement that with high speed rail.
With that in mind, you should focus on how to provide the highest value IT services for your University. That means building a business case around any changes that you proposed, including the upfront and ongoing costs of transition, training, and support. As many others have noted, "free" software isn't free.
Your University has thousands of users, including a broad diversity of stakeholders, including executive and administrative staff, faculty, and students. All of them expect to have systems up and running 24x7. Any lengthy downtime in a critical system must be avoided.
So what should you do?
Of course, there is no assurance that these methods will work, or that proprietary vendors won't try an end run around your efforts. But I've found these techniques to be an effective guerrilla marketing approach in the past. Good luck.
"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra