Track Days

Upcoming Track days for 2008 can be found here: http://www.mytrackschedule.com/ViewUser.asp?UserName=galapk

A Couple of new items:

A Taste of Computer Security - http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/security/
Great Hackers - an article by Paul Graham - http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

Interesting article on Linux Filesystems on Linux.com

April 20, 2004
Markets Main
'Apprentice' Runner-Up Got
Trumped by Own Experience
No. 2 Came from Goldman Sachs,
Where Humility Is Everything;
On TV, That Earned Him Nothing

By SUSANNE CRAIG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

NEW YORK -- One of the biggest lessons Kwame Jackson learned in his three years as a stockbroker at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. helped get him fired by "The Donald."

Mr. Jackson, 30 years old, came in second out of more than 200,000 contestants vying to be hired by Donald Trump on the hit reality-TV show "The Apprentice." In the show's final episode, Mr. Trump said he passed over Mr. Jackson largely because of his laid-back style. Mr. Trump selected a more rah-rah manager to be his apprentice.

Mr. Jackson, who left Goldman to appear on the show, says the elite Wall Street investment bank taught him: "You can do things quietly, humbly, and still be successful." He adds: "I didn't have anything to prove to anybody. ... In the end it was up to Trump."

Goldman prides itself on its low profile; its downtown Manhattan headquarters here doesn't have a sign noting the firm's presence. Mr. Trump, on the other hand ... well, his self-promotion is legendary: His name is on everything from helicopters to casinos to bottles of water.

"The two firms are about as polar opposite as two things could be," says Roy Smith, a professor of finance at New York University and a former partner at Goldman. Although Mr. Smith was on sabbatical in Barcelona for the past several weeks, he said he had heard of the show. "That is the show where Trump fires people, right?" he said. "Did a guy from Goldman really give up his job for that?"

He had little choice: Last summer the firm turned down Mr. Jackson's request for a leave of absence to appear on the show. "I was told it was too much of a reputational risk for me to go on the show while a Goldman employee," Mr. Jackson says. "Senior management basically thought I was crazy."

Goldman has long shunned those who seek the spotlight. In the mid-1980s, James Cramer, a former Goldman trader turned hedge-fund manager and TV commentator, found himself in hot water after his photo ran in the New York Times with a caption suggesting he could buy anything he wants. "Life was never the same after that article," Mr. Cramer writes in his book, "Confessions of a Street Addict." He confessed: "I had broken the code." Mr. Cramer left Goldman a few months after the article appeared.

Yesterday Mr. Trump said that while Goldman's approach to business is quite different than his, he actually likes the firm's low-key approach to things: "It is not a bad idea, but it has never worked that way in my firm. I should try it."

Several Goldman staffers have requested leaves to appear on reality-TV programs in recent years. So far all have been given the cold shoulder. "We can understand why people want to do this, but being thrust into the limelight is the antithesis of the way we do business," says a Goldman spokesman. "That said, Kwame had a lot of fans rooting for him here."

Mr. Jackson's decision took some people by surprise for other reasons. A number of traders at the firm make in excess of $10 million a year. As a securities broker, Mr. Jackson earned an estimated $125,000 a year, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Jackson's decision to leave Goldman took even Mr. Trump by surprise, who said on one of the show's episodes that Mr. Jackson gave up so much "it scared him." The apprentice's job pays $250,000 a year.

Left out: Ex-Goldman broker Kwame Jackson (standing, far right) got passed over by Donald Trump in 'The Apprentice' because of the low-key management style he says he learned at Goldman.

Now, after having a taste of Mr. Trump's world, Mr. Jackson has two words for the ways of Goldman: You're fired! "If I wind up back at Goldman then the plan has gone awry," he says. "I'm focusing on the commercial opportunities related to the celebrity world as well as starting my own company."

He says one of those opportunities is a job offer from Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, to run one of his investment portfolios. He says the offer was made after the show's wrap-party Thursday night. "I don't know how many times you can get a billionaire to wait for you at your party," he says. "Maybe Warren Buffett will be at my next party."

Mr. Jackson says he did get valuable experience at Goldman. Managing money at Goldman for wealthy individuals prepared him for the challenges that Mr. Trump threw his way. "You learn to present yourself in a fashion that really helps you to seem reputable as well as trustworthy as well as confident," Mr. Jackson says. "So when you're sitting in the boardroom with Donald Trump, it's not the first time you have been in front of someone who is wealthy and powerful. You're not intimidated."

His style hurt him most when it came to dealing with cast member Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, whom Mr. Jackson picked to be on his team in one of the final episodes despite her track record on the show as a schemer. She lied to him, costing him points with Mr. Trump, who said Mr. Jackson should have "fired her or severely reprimanded her" after this incident. Mr. Trump ended up picking micromanager Bill Rancic, who previously ran an online cigar company, to be his apprentice.

"I have always worked around very skilled and competent people," Mr. Jackson says. "You had to work with what you had and that is what I did."

Write to Susanne Craig at susanne.craig@wsj.com

This article appeared in today's Wall Stree Journal under the Portals column by Lee Gomes. The idea of a technology cooperative is pretty interesting and the implications for software firms are enormous. I think this type of initiative dovetails very well with the Open Source movement and will provide even more choices for corporate software users.

-kish

Avalanche Project
Is Clearing the Path
For Tech Cooperation

By LEE GOMES
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Co-ops have been a fact of life in U.S. agriculture for decades, with farmers banding together to solve common problems. Now, a group of computer chiefs at some of America's biggest companies are trying to do the same thing with technology.

If their Project Avalanche is a success, and it's hard to imagine it failing, it will be the biggest thing to hit the technology scene since open-source software like Linux. And just as with Linux, Avalanche threatens to be enormously disruptive to many of the tech industry's big players.

Avalanche is the brainchild of Andrew Black, head of computer operations at Jostens Inc., the people who make class rings, and Scott Lien, who holds the same post for ePredix, which does employee testing.

Both companies are in Minneapolis. Three years ago, the two men found themselves in the sort of gripe session common to their line of work. Why, they asked each other, were they writing such big checks to their software companies, but getting so little in return? Why were their in-house programming staffs writing the same sorts of custom programs written at thousands of other companies? If Detroit car makers can collaborate on research, why couldn't U.S. technology users?

The problem, they decided, was an imbalance of power between technology companies and their customers. Project Avalanche is their way of restoring that balance.

Avalanche is a legally constituted intellectual-property cooperative. Companies pay $30,000 a year to become members. They can then donate any in-house software they choose to the Avalanche library, with the project becoming the legal owner of the code. Project members get to use, free of charge, any of the other programs in the library.

While just a few weeks out of the chute, Avalanche already has some impressive sponsors, including tier-one names like Best Buy, Cargill and Medtronic. The group has a board of directors and full-time CEO, Jay Hansen, a former IT consultant. Its Web site is www.avalanchecorporatetechnology.com. Maybe it will buy itself a shorter URL one of these days.

Mr. Black says most of the past three years have been spent ironing out legal issues to immunize companies from the risks associated with either giving their software to Avalanche or using programs they get from it.

One of the first software donations to Avalanche was from Best Buy. It is a piece of so-called plumbing software called AppTalk that allows programs to communicate with each other. It may not be sexy stuff, but it took Best Buy about 100 programmer-years to write it.

John Schmidt, the Best Buy executive in charge of AppTalk, says his company was willing to give it away because it expects to benefit from the additional improvements made to the program from the others using it. Those improvements could also be donated back to the Avalanche library, a technique common in the open-source software world.

While many of the programs donated to Project Avalanche will work with Linux, it isn't a precondition. Avalanche takes all kinds of software, including programs that work with Windows. Members, says Mr. Hansen, aren't expected to give away any in-house software that gives their companies a unique competitive advantage.

So what exactly is so threatening about this effort to big software companies? Just listen to the plans the men have for the group.

Suppose, says Mr. Lien, that some Avalanche members chipped in money to create custom software to run their call centers? Any other Avalanche member would then be able to use the code -- and wouldn't have to write checks for millions of dollars to Siebel Systems, which makes much of its money on these sorts of programs.

Or, asks Mr. Black, what if Avalanche members collaborated on a foolproof collection of open-source programs that could be used on their corporate desktops instead of the Windows and Office combinations from Microsoft? Mr. Black grumbles about having to pay Microsoft hundreds of dollars a year per employee for programs like word processing and spreadsheets, which he says should be commodities by now.

The men say U.S. companies have all sorts of talented programmers on staff, and could easily match, or exceed, the quality of the code from the best-known software companies. Their ultimate goal is to allow companies to spend less of their time and money on fairly generic software, much of which brings no specific business advantage, and more working on projects that will bring clear benefits to their business.

Because large corporations like those in Avalanche are the biggest customers of software companies, any shift like this would have enormous repercussions. The last thing any company wants is to have its customers banding together.

As residents of Minnesota, Mr. Black and Mr. Lien know their snow, and they say the name of their project was carefully chosen. An avalanche isn't only unstoppable, it also either buries everything in its path or carries everything along. Software companies may soon be needing to choose their fate.