Matt Loney's Blog
What it says on the box
Friday 22 February 2008, 3:51 PM
Looking for a new job? ZDNet might be able to help
We've just added job listings to the search on ZDNet, which means you can use our general search feature to find jobs, and you’ll also get a tag cloud of terms related to whatever you searched on, which may be useful in narrowing your search.
So if you search on a particular keyword in jobs, such as "Oracle", then you’ll get a list of some 2600-plus jobs. The tag cloud to the right will look something like the image below:
Clicking on your tag will narrow your search, for instance to 10g, Oracle dba, or Oracle forms. You'll notice that some tags aren’t terribly useful; this is an artefact of the fuzzy nature of the search we use; we reckoned it might be more useful – and certainly more interesting – to include all the tags rather than none of them. The size of the text is a rough measure of the importance of keywords, which is turn is based on the number of times a keyword appears, together with other metrics such as how high up in job ads it appears. Like I said, it's fuzzy. We hope you find it useful, though if you just want to search the old fashioned way you can still use our traditional Jobs Search.
And our IS team have asked me to point out that if you’re looking for a systems admin job, we currently have an opening here at the CNET Networks office in London supporting our Linux-based hosting systems. You can find out more about that job here.
Thursday 21 February 2008, 5:28 PM
Microsoft: The difference this time is that we're actually doing something
We're on a conference call right now with Bob Muglia (senior VP of server business) and Brad Smith (general counsel) among others, who are talking about the announcement that we posted as a news story half an hour ago. One message coming through loud and clear is that they are sitll making a very clear difference between non-commercial software and commercial software, which means that companies selling open source software in the way that Novell does, for instance, will still need to buy patent licences to protect themselves from litigation.
Bob Muglia: "Just as we did when we hammered out our compliance, there is aclear difference between people who are developing OS software ad engaging in non-commercial distribution, and those engaged in commercial distribution."
"The basic analysis is," added Brad Smith, "that we have valuable intellectual property in our patents. We will continue to view that as valuable IP, and will continue to commercialise that from all users. We also have some trade secret information that we still value but which we will make free of charge. We are opening up but at the same time we will retain the value in our IP."
Smith also indicated there will be more to come: "We have always said in the past that any step would not be the last step we would ever take. Ths has been a continuing evolution."
Perhaps the most interesting quote I picked out among the noise and the news that the European Commission is not terribly impressed is that "The difference this time is that we're backing it up with actions." The 30,000 pages of documentationp promised today, together with more details of the deal, are posted on Microsoft's website here.
