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http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-... good times.

The biggest mistake any company makes? Treating IT as a cost center.

Unless your company sells IT services, by definition IT is a cost center. This is basic accounting.

There was a good Dilbert about this in 1997.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1997-...

They are doing what they always do.

An MBA's role is not to make a profit. An MBA's role is to *maximize* profit. That's where the destructive behavior comes from.

Not to the extent of "destructive behavior" that harms the company. For example if a CEO at a publicly traded company makes a short term decision that is destructive in the long term the failure is not in their MBA training. Their MBA training actually teaches them not to do so. Interestingly MBA training considers CEOs (or any employee) acting in personal self-interest rather than in the company's interest. An MBA would say that the incentives are wrong. They are taught that if you reward bad things you will get bad things, even from otherwise good people. Again, Dilbert is much beloved in business school too. Wally and his minivan are likely to come up while discussing this topic. http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-...

http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-...

It's filled with people. Obligatory Dilbert.

This all reminds me of an old Dilbert:
Wally writes a minivan

Scott Adams does a good job explaining how these tokens work.

http://blog.dilbert.com/2017/1...

I admit I'm ignorant here and the explanation doesn't clear it up for me. I don't understand why blockchain is such a big deal - can someone explain it?

The only benefit it seems to offer is decentralization of authority. Is Joe SixPack really going to suddenly buy products and services that he normally wouldn't because the transactions are verified by a decentralized computing network? The only examples that make sense to me are avoiding money-transfer fees and black markets.

Scott Adams does a good job explaining how these tokens work. http://blog.dilbert.com/2017/1...

There is even a Dilbert about them!

http://dilbert.com/strip/1991-12-02

(Pro tip: <url> tag)

The problem with rapid prototyping is that too often the prototype ends up being shipped as the actual product.
http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-...

Relevant Dilbert, on luck and hard work: http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-12-30

Really. As an analogy, this Dilbert strip.

If you don't know something as basic as what a pre-condition is, you have no business discussing the health insurance industry.

You sound like a PHB discussing databases, and deciding based on the color.

And of those, how many care?

I care. I am going to sign up as a writer, whip up a Selenium script to "clap" my articles, and then write myself a minivan. If that doesn't work, I will hire clappers on Mechanical Turk.

can anyone provide evidence of trump being a nazi?

Here you go.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25

You mean, because of the RAM?

Here's a nickel, go buy yourself a real computer system

Now, that's a genuine oldie.

ob. Dilbert, working from home: http://dilbert.com/strip/1994-...

I thought the Linux (ok, not Unix...) philosophy was this: http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-...

Mauve is a good color choice for a database: Dilbert comic

http://dilbert.com/strip/2011-...

An absurd absolute is a restatement of the other personâ(TM)s reasonable position as an absurd absolute. For example, if your point is there is high crime in Detroit, the absurd absolute would be your debate opponent saying something such as âoeSo, youâ(TM)re saying every person in Detroit is a criminal.â When your debate opponent recasts your opinion to include an âoeabsoluteâ word, such as every, always, never, all, completely, universally, and the like, you are seeing cognitive dissonance.

Some people call what I just described a strawman argument. But a strawman argument refers to any sort of inaccurate recasting of your opponentâ(TM)s argument. That is the generic case. Iâ(TM)m referring to a specific strawman argument that uses an absurd absolute. When your debate opponent recasts your point as an absurd absolute, you won the debate. Thatâ(TM)s as far as you can go.

How to know you won a debate on the internet

http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-...

I made a basic 3D model a few weeks ago and it took about half an hour to do a decent quality render on my moderately powerful desktop.

Obligatory Dilbert. It's a pretty old strip, so you might replace 286 PC with iPad...

Don't be an arsehole with the "CXX" not being "Staff". If you work for the company, you are simply staff / employees. You know exactly what he meant.

Quite possibly not. I work for a medium-tech company that gives all sorts of authority to the IT and Procurement organizations. Unfortunately, all of the accountability is assigned to the Science and Engineering teams. Not having to be responsible for their own f@ck-ups has created a culture where these groups work without oversight, and project managers have to pad schedules about 40% for the inevitable "you wanted a cable--what's wrong with this perfectly good rope I ordered?" moments.

Or Yale?

Everytime I read about the systemd wars I think of this Dilbert comic strip and smile!

"I didn't change anything on my configuration, but my computer is not working any more, so it must be some automatic security restriction that happened automatically . . . "

Obligatory

http://dilbert.com/strip/2011-...

Guess what doesn't mean goodness.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1992-...

Scott Adams would like a word with you:

Kahan found that increased scientific literacy actually had a small negative effect: The conservative-leaning respondents who knew the most about science thought climate change posed the least risk. Scientific literacy, it seemed, increased polarization. In a later study, Kahan added a twist: He asked respondents what climate scientists believed. Respondents who knew more about science generally, regardless of political leaning, were better able to identify the scientific consensus—in other words, the polarization disappeared. Yet, when the same people were asked for their own opinions about climate change, the polarization returned. It showed that even when people understand the scientific consensus, they may not accept it.”

Notice how the author slips in his unsupported interpretation of the data: Greater knowledge about science causes more polarization.

Well, maybe. That’s a reasonable hypothesis, but it seems incomplete. Here’s another hypothesis that fits the same observed data: The people who know the most about science don’t think complex climate prediction models are credible science, and they are right.

In fact, there's more incentive to lie about climate science than cancer research: More immediate funding is at stake, more groupthink applies, it will be decades before others can prove you wrong, and unlike falsified cancer research, people won't die because you misdirected searcher.

And as for saying "the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself," that's like saying "Well, Anthony Weiner was only caught sexting. He never actually cheated." The odds that the fraud we've caught is the only fraud committed by those willing to commit fraud would seem pretty low...

Also you have interface complexity. Adding these features requires some way to use the features, possibly including configuration options, menu items, hotkeys and so on. Prior to the Ribbon, Microsoft tried to fix this in Word by hiding all the menu items you had not used yet, so you'd never know those features were there to be used. My boss constantly asks me to remove menu items and "simplify" but he never has any answers on where he thinks users should go to access those features if they're no longer in the menu. Relevant Dilbert.

If your goal is to "Invent" you might wind up with an incremental improvement.
If you "explore" a system you have a chance of combining things in a way that creates a disruptive technology.
Recommend Scott Adams blog post "Goals vs. Systems" http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102964992706/goals-vs-systems.

> Surely, you mean this one: https://www.xkcd.com/1807/

I'll see your XKCD and raise you a Dilbert http://dilbert.com/strip/1994-...

Even more obligatory:

Dilbert, 1994

Choice is good, so more choice must always be better, right? Nope, that's a fallacy. Instead, too much choice becomes a confusopoly and that isn't good. And accidentally creating a confusopoly without even having a profit motive, but instead just out of sheer "not invented here" syndrome, is even worse!

Don't get me wrong: having too much choice is still way better than having too little. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that making every new Linux user choose between dozens or hundreds of distros can't have negative practical consequences just because choice is theoretically good.

I see your XKCD and raise you Dilbert.

I agree with Dilbert's creator, Scott Adams:

The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science

reference

http://dilbert.com/strip/2017-03-29

You're missing the boat. The lazy slacker is the most efficient employee you can have. He'll find a way to get the job done in a quarter of the time and a tenth of the cost- just so he can goof off the rest of the day.

Already been there: Dilbert.

Bingo, Sir

"When you're playing phone tag with someone is quite different than when you're sitting next to someone and can pop up behind them and ask them a question," Peluso says.

And drag me right out of the coding zone, wasting a lot more time than if I was allowed to respond to your voicemail/email at my own pace.

Not all IBM employees see it that way.

No, I'm pretty sure all employees do see it as "quite different". The difference is whether it is a good, bad, or neutral different.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-08-24
Lawyers must love you. "I can lie any way I want to because the meaning of words changes."

It's a Dilbert reference.

Here's a good example of what they're doing: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1...

Supressing fake news, so that's good. (Was Adams always a douchenozzle or was that a recent development?)

Here's a good example of what they're doing: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1...

Welcome to the darkness you've embraced. It will have consequences.

I'm actually an independent, not a conservative.

There's planks in the conservative platform that I don't agree with; for example, I think women should be able to choose abortion and we're probably wrecking the climate. A couple of other positions as well.

The problem is, coming out in favor of either of these puts me in the company of Liberals: People who leak classified information for political assassination, people who call for a military coup, people who riot to suppress free speech... I don't want to be associated with any of that.

I used to be a global warming believer, but I'm now having second thoughts. That "97 percent of scientists" figure people keep throwing around? It's fake. This whole thing about the left has caused me to reexamine my beliefs about global warming, and how I came by them. 'Turns out most of it was passively accepted without a critical thought, because I kept seeing it in the news.

This is troubling, and not in the false sense of the word that Liberals use. Global warming is conceivably the most important decision we'll face, and we need to get it right the first time.

And yet, debate on the issue is stifled by insult and threats. Scientists fear losing their livelihood if they question the dogma. Policies are "our way and nothing else", and always require reducing our standard of living while increasing economic disparity.

No where do I see proposals that would actually help the problem, such as calls to modernize our electrical grid, calls to change tax code to encourage telecommuting (section 1706), tax rebates for rooftop solar, or increased funding in helpful technology.

I'm having a tough time keeping my position about global warming, simply because it's the clarion call of the left.

There's an old saying among geeks: it's not enough to be right, you also have to be effective.

The left is so ineffective that it's tough to agree with them.

Even when they're right.