Sometimes the world just passes you by.... Steve Ballmer at Microsoft, John Chambers at Cisco, Sir Howard Stringer at Sony. Three hugely wealthy and successful men who now seem at a loss to address, let alone control, the sweeping changes affecting their respective companies. They all have loyal Boards that have supported their companies' strategies, at least until now. So it's unlikely that they are going to push their leaders out the door without external impetus or internal scandal.

Whatever you may think of him, Einhorn has a reason to provide that impetus at Microsoft. He's losing money on his Microsoft investment, which makes him and his hedge fund look bad. When his hedge fund performs poorly compared to others, investors take out their money and invest it somewhere else. So Einhorn's complaint is strongly in his own self-interest, since he is unlikely to concede that he made a bad decision to invest in Microsoft. The question is whether other institutional (large and influential) investors will support him. If so, then they can put more financial pressure on the Microsoft Board, and hold down the Microsoft stock price.

I live in SF, and have also run a business here. We were at 2nd and Market, very close to all kinds of public transportation, including GG Transit from Marin (bus and ferry). We couldn't do much about the absence of BART, since that issue was decided in 1962 when only San Francisco, Alameda (Berkeley, Oakland, Fremont), and Contra Costa Counties voted in favor of BART. The other counties didn't want to spend the money and were afraid that criminal elements from the urban areas would use BART to reverse commute and rob them and their homes. (Really!) My current commute to Mountain View from SF can be pretty painful, again because of that long-ago vote.

Back to the subject at hand, though...

The GG Bridge toll is now $5-6, depending on the time of day. A fair amount (15%?) of that is out-of-staters and drivers of rental cars, many of whom drive across the bridge Northbound to the vista point on the Sausalito side, then drive under the bridge to return to the City Southbound through the toll booths. The word will quickly get out about the toll system, and most of those revenues will be lost. So I still think that taking away the human toll takers is a bad idea in every sense.

I'm mystified about how the Golden Gate District is going to save money by eliminating human toll takers on the Golden Gate Bridge. Here are some questions that immediately came to my mind -- each has negative financial implications for the District.

1) How will the District be able to collect tolls from drivers in new vehicles? There is no license plate available to the cameras.

2) How will the District collect tolls from out-of-state vehicles? If I have an Oregon or Florida car, I'll just sail right through and ignore any bill that I receive.

3) Who's going to send out the bills to the people whose license plates were captured by photo driving through the toll area without a FasTrak? Apart from the postage, how much will that cost per driver? Will they have to hire back the toll takers to send out these notices? The number of cars without a FasTrak is pretty high.

4) Who's going to open up all of the envelopes that contain the payment checks? Toll takers can collect about 5-6 fares per minute. It takes longer to open and sort envelopes.

5) Who's going to follow up on the bounced checks? That takes time, too.

In all, my sense is that the switch away from human toll takers is likely to result in lower revenues and higher costs for the District. They'll have to hire all of the toll takers for the manual tasks, and then some more people. Overall, it looks like a terrible business decision, even apart from the human costs.

Count me as someone who has not drunk the Facebook Kool-Aid. No wall, no friends -- poor me. Every now and then, I get an invitation from a friend or personal acquaintance to join. But lately almost all of the invitations are from corporations -- inviting me to Like them in return for some coupon or other offer. I know that the Supreme Court recognizes corporations as people, but I'm still able to make the distinction. Will I offer my identity (which they probably already have) in return for a sweepstakes entry or a 10% discount on some product I don't really need? Probably not. FB is clearly very exciting and innovative in developing countries, at least for now. If I lived in Indonesia, where FB seems to be a basic part of life, then I would surely sign up. From my perspective, though, FB's growth is in quantity of users, not necessarily in quality. Not a good sign.

If you are a high-status member of American's AAdvantage frequent flyer program, you are probably already booking directly on the AA.com site or through a travel agent who has access to all of American's flights through SABRE or one of the other reservation systems. If you want to fly in or out of DFW, you may know that American has about 85% of the total traffic, since Southwest flies to the more convenient Love Field. But that doesn't cover a very large percentage of American's potential customers. While many of us know about Kayak and other fare comparison sites, there are a lot of people who automatically go to Travelocity or Expedia to arrange their flghts. If the American flights don't pop up on a search, then these people are going to choose from the options that are shown. It's not as if American has retained the strong passenger loyalty that they had back in the days when their crew smiled at you and fed you. So American loses those revenue opportunities, and gives a different carrier the opportunity to fill the seat. If I were an AMR stockholder, I would bail. AMR stock was even in 2010 while JetBlue, Southwest, Delta and other airline stocks were up. Without a presence on a major reservation site, AMR is likely to lose market share (and thus stock value) in 2011. I can't imagine what American execs have been smoking to have made such a poor decision.

Yes, you can enlarge text in individual applications, but here you have to go to considerable effort to end up with a solution that is inferior to what was standard before. All I want is the option to buy an i7-based 15" MacBook Pro with a matte screen and 1440x900 rez.

My 3 year old MacBook Pro has a matte display with a 1440x900 screen. In the current MacBook Pro product lineup, the matte display is only available with the high rez 1650x1080 screen. That's not so great for those of us with aging eyes, which presumably includes Steve Jobs, who is now 55. I tried the screen in an Apple store, and (fortunately) I could still see everything OK. I also tried stepping the resolution down to approximate the current resolution. That gives you 1440x852, which means that the resolution is 5% worse than on the current matte displays. Even the staff at the Apple Store were surprised by that. So I'm hoping that those of us with a strong preference for matte over glossy will be able to prevail on Apple's MacBook product managers to again offer a matte display with a 1440x900 resolution.

Some respondents have misread what DARPA is trying to do here. From the announcement, it appears that DARPA is looking to put together a study panel of computer science researchers composed of junior computer science faculty to help them identify promising research areas for the future; they aren't hiring anyone. Some of the panel's ideas will lead to fundable research, and the members of that study panel will have an inside track on getting funded, something that is likely to help them get promoted to a tenured position in their universities. In the old days, many DARPA-funded projects were "dual use", meeting the needs of the military, but also having value for the public at large. The Internet is a good example of that, as is BSD Unix. Many of the US's top computer science departments have received a very substantial percentage of their external research from DARPA. Under Bush, DARPA's focus was more on the military side, but the focus may now be shifting back toward dual use.

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.

Another interesting example of commercial success around a "pure" FOSS project is Drupal, originally developed about 10 years ago as the centerpiece of Dries Buytaert's Ph.D. research. About two years ago, Acquia was started to provide a supported distribution of Drupal with commercial support and now hosting for Drupal projects (drupalgardens). With so many themes and modules being developed for Drupal, many of which are free, we are now seeing new Drupal distros spring up, in much the same way that Linux distros sprung up in the 1990's. The various distros package a "trusted" collection of modules and themes, which work across all community and commercial versions of a specific version of Drupal, e.g.,Drupal 6.x. The recent Drupalcon in San Francisco had about 3000 registrants, hundreds of sessions, and about 20 vendors of Drupal training and professional services. The registration fee averaged about $200, so that added up to some significant revenue, along with some very substantial expenses from holding the event in Moscone Center, the same place that Oracle holds their OpenWorld event with 40,000 attendees.

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.

London is a surveillance society, with closed-circuit cameras everywhere: in the museums and theatres, on public transport, in and near office buildings, in your hotel lobby, and probably even in the public restrooms. I personally find that to be very creepy, and it has caused me to stop going to London. As others have noted, Heathrow Airport is pretty terrible, but you can take the Piccadilly Line subway into Central London quite easily. Make sure that you buy an Oyster Card at your first opportunity so that you don't pay the highest fares on the Underground.

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.

While I think that it makes good sense for Oracle to sell off the hardware business that they acquired from Sun, I find it hard to imagine H-P as a potential buyer. I'd be much more likely to believe the story if the buyer were Fujitsu, who has been involved with Sun and SPARC since the 1980's.

Here's why I think that H-P is unlikely to do this:

• They are trying to focus more on their services business, having recently spent $14 Billion acquiring EDS

• The SPARC line and the Solaris operating system would go head-to-head with HP's high-end servers (Itanium-based) and HP-UX operating system. While it would take a strong competitor off the table, it would also create uncertainty with the large SPARC installed base, especially in the financial community.

• H-P's acquisition of COMPAQ wasn't exactly a roaring success. The only good thing that came of it was that it led to the downfall of Her Worship, La Fiorina, who viewed the acquistion as her crowning achievement, even though it led to firing 30000 people. Today the COMPAQ brand is fading away and mostly is used for inexpensive PCs.

• Mark Hurd is extremely cost-conscious and very focused on quarter-to-quarter results for Wall Street. A big acquisition like this would be very disruptive and require some significant writeoffs and future earnings impairments.

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.

I agree that support is a key issue for many commercial and government users even as many of us use the frequently evolving versions of open source products.

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.

COBOL is actually 50 years old. Commander Grace Hopper was the principal inventor of the language, starting in 1959. More on Grace Hopper at http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/hopper.htm

The discussion thread pretty much looks like moral support for your to move toward management responsibilities. Make sure that you make yourself worth your salary every day, especially if you are in the US. It's hard to find a new job in the US after 40, and you have to worry about getting health insurance.

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!

Ratboy666: the examples that you cited are mostly infrastructure (MySQL) or enabling technology (Java, Flash, Moonlight). Only Adobe Reader and OpenOffice.org are end-user applications. Of course, OpenOffice.org is part of every major Linux distro, so I'm not sure how many people will pay the $35 for StarOffice.

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 /. readers) who are capable of managing their own systems and working with the available applications. Linux is an excellent platform, but it's hard to see the business opportunity for consumer apps on Linux, without which Linux will not attain significant desktop market share.