Memory Leak

Back in the day during the dot com boom, my wife and I were living in San Francisco and working long hours at a technology consulting firm called Scient. After a long day of coding, our co-workers and I would stumble out the office usually past 10pm and headed towards Chinatown. The normal first stop was the Buddha Bar, a local hole in the wall bar, for a few drinks. The next stop was Sam Wo’s restaurant for an order of flat noodles. This was one of the few places still open past midnight in Chinatown and perfect food after a couple of drinks.

To my surprise, Conan O’Brian had a very funny skit about Sam Wo’s, Check it out …

Update:  It seems that the folks at NBC have pulled the video from YouTube.  You can find it here on the NBC website.  It’s about half way down on the list of clips.

I’m pretty new to the world of hyper-large corporate companies. Hewlett-Packard is the largest company that I have worked for with about ~150,000 employees worldwide. I joke that my HP employee number has more digits than the social security number.

Well, there was an article posted on Slashdot today that outlines Palmino’s (CEO) LEAN plan to reduce upwards of 150,000 employees or 40% of the US workforce. I was shocked by these numbers. First of all, I had no idea that IBM has a total of 350,000 employees worldwide. How in the world do you manage an organization with that many employees? Can anything really get done? Second, 40% of the US workforce? That’s amazing. The article states,

LEAN is about offshoring and outsourcing at a rate never seen before at IBM. For two years Big Blue has been ramping up its operations in India and China with what I have been told is the ultimate goal of laying off at least one American worker for every overseas hire. The BIG PLAN is to continue until at least half of Global Services, or about 150,000 workers, have been cut from the U.S. division. Last week’s LEAN meetings were quite specifically to find and identify common and repetitive work now being done that could be automated or moved offshore, and to find work Global Services is doing that it should not be doing at all. This latter part is with the idea that once extraneous work is eliminated, it will be easier to move the rest offshore.

My engineering team is currently building out a team in China to offshore a bulk of the non-innovative work. Previously, we had offshored much of our work to Israel where there was a large R&D location. However, how the hell do you effectively manage offshoring the work of 150,000 employees while still maintaining any momentum. This seems impossible to me.

Well, we’ll need to wait and see how the layoffs go. If you’re working for IBM Global Services, I would get tidy up your desk for a quick departure.

Just like a child having a temper tantrum, the users of digg.com fell to the ground and slammed their hands and feet in anger. There was a online revolt this past week on the very popular news site in response to the site yielding to the Motion Picture Association of America.

The above hex code is used for HD DVD decoding and when combined with the right tools, can be used to create copies of HD DVD’s. Obviously, the Motion Picture Association of America didn’t like that it was posted and ordered web sites to remove it and cited that it was their intellectual property. Well, Digg.com heard the request and pulled the story. Then, all hell broke loose! Everyone was posting the hex code as stories and others were digging the stories faster than they could pull them down. It was awesome. The front page looked like a war zone of these stupid hex codes. Jay Adelson posted the following response.

Hey all,

I just wanted to explain what some of you have been noticing around some stories that have been submitted to Digg on the HD DVD encryption key being cracked.

This has all come up in the past 24 hours, mostly connected to the HD-DVD hack that has been circulating online, having been posted to Digg as well as numerous other popular news and information websites. We’ve been notified by the owners of this intellectual property that they believe the posting of the encryption key infringes their intellectual property rights. In order to respect these rights and to comply with the law, we have removed postings of the key that have been brought to our attention.

Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law. Digg’s Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property. This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.

Our goal is always to maintain a purely democratic system for the submission and sharing of information – and we want Digg to continue to be a great resource for finding the best content. However, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down.

Thanks for your understanding,

Jay

Well, that seemed to anger folks even more and the chaos continued. It was truly fun to watch the site become helpless to its users. All of the top stories had to do with this hex code. Later that day, Kevin Rose responded.

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

Lesson learned, if the Motion Picture Association of America calls, pretend that you didn’t get their message.