First, the refrigerant used in their independent calculation is R-22, a cloroflorocarbon that kills the ozone layer, implicated in crop failure due to high uv exposure.
This one is not a big deal because R-22 can almost always be replaced one of the common modern refrigerants (I'm not sure which offhand, might be R-409c), which has extremely similar properties and is often used to replace R-22 in old air conditioning units. It's a little bit less efficient though (and most equipment can be redesigned to use more modern chemicals that work better). I have no idea why they used R-22 here.
Your other points are more significant problems.
(Incidentally, R-22 is an HCFC but not a CFC, and is not a major threat to the ozone layer, you're thinking of the banned R-12 which was both a CFC and a major issue. However, R-22 is being phased out anyway because there are better choices available which are even less harmful and no particularly compelling reasons to use R-22 any more)
We're like the 3rd generation of rich kid, the one that pisses away the fortune on gambling and yahts instead of doing something productive with it.
Gambling is zero-sum; nothing is created or destroyed. It's merely a mechanism for transferring money from people who are bad at math to the mafia. It therefore cannot constitute 'waste' at this point (what the recipients do with it is unclear).
Off topic: I was amazed that a Japanese hentai game maker respects the GPL more than, say, SCO, a multi-million dollar company
It's not so surprising; where the national character of Americans is arrogant and all about number one, the Japanese are fundamentally in love with rules and structure. It's not universally true, but it is particularly common amoung Japanese businessmen: they would rather die than go against the grain. If the rules clearly say "you must do X", the Japanese will often just do it (where an American would spend years arguing the point in court and trying to weasel out of it). It's a cultural thing.
In fact, I've found (through timed tests) that erlang and java code can run a shitload faster than the equivalent C
Your tests were wrong. Your C implementations were suboptimal compared to your java and erlang ones, or else they were comparing non-interesting examples. To pick one of many possible examples, any language with automatic garbage collection is going to be measurably slower than a language where the programmer optimises the memory allocation by hand, in many real-world cases (because garbage collecting takes extra processing time, which the language without it does not need to expend).
Most likely all that you discovered was that the people who implemented your java compiler were better programmers than you were (and so the java compiler managed to find a major optimisation that wasn't possible for your C version).
I don't want to take either side, but it is true that whilst a mere 99.999% of the cars don't suffer from reboots of their onboard computers, our desctops still do.
This is actually not true. Car computers *do* crash and reboot, they just do it automatically and very very quickly. The thing has to respond correctly within X milliseconds, or a supervising piece of hardware simply resets it, and it starts working again within Y more milliseconds - maybe you get a couple misfires, but the car basically keeps on working.
Also, they're tested much better than desktops and they're much easier to test (since they operate only in a single fixed configuration, no users meddle with them, and they only do one thing).
Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user
on
Driving Plan 9
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· Score: 1
I use it still because the user environment is the best one I have encountered for text editing and interecting with the shell. Most users use VNC to get to their X11/Windows desktops where their web browser lives.
"Instead of driving a car, I get about using a pogo stick. It's much better because you can carry it with you when you're not using it, so you always have it available, and also you can get into smaller spaces than you could with a car. When I need to go someplace that's too far away, I use my car instead."
What exactly is the point if you just use a real OS whenever you need to do something more complicated than text editing?
As a micro/macro kernel hybrid all this is achieved in just 37 syscalls which is a source of amusement and a feeling of superiority when compared to Linux' 300+
"My pogo stick is assembled using just fourteen screws. This is a source of amusement and a feeling of superiority when compared to the thousands of screws, nuts, and bolts needed to assemble a car."
I can only presume that you are easily amused.
Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user
on
Driving Plan 9
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· Score: 1, Troll
If it were simply a matter of being a better OS, OpenBSD would have flattened Linux a long time ago.
I think you mean: if it were simply a matter of having an idea how to build a better OS, OpenBSD would have flattened Linux a long time ago. The big problem with OpenBSD is that they haven't built most of it; it's sorely lacking in (native) features. It doesn't matter how good or bad your kernel is, emacs and firefox are basically the same on every platform. OpenBSD has so few actual (working) pieces that it's not really any different to yet another Linux platform - except for a handful of low-level tools which tend to be less featureful than the corresponding Linux versions.
The other problem is that these ideas often don't work very well in practice (microkernels are slower and can't actually do anything new, openssl has unreadably foul code, etc). Linux took off because, in practice, it's faster and more featureful than anything else that wasn't specifically designed for the task you're currently trying to do. All these other things may do some things better, but inevitably do all the other things worse, and that's what counts.
given how supply chains are evolving, and the increasing emphasis on services, even they will realize what an asset those darned overheads actually comprise... or they'll be out of business
People have been saying that for at least a hundred years now. Probably longer. Hasn't happened yet.
I realize this is going to be an unpopular opinion here, but no one ever considers the idea that maybe Microsoft is trying to actually change it's old business practices.
I don't believe that anybody has ever changed their business practices with a press release. Neither have they done it with a list of a dozen trite platitudes.
Changing a culture just isn't that easy.
(Decide for yourself whether the MS leadership is aware of this or not, which is equivalent to saying whether this is just PR noise)
If you don't mind me asking: how many users (corporate desktops, not friends/family) have you migrated from MS Office to OpenOffice?
A few dozen - companies are small around here, so 'hundreds' would mean changing jobs a lot.
Suffice it to say: people do NOT want to change, and will put up with amazing amounts of wasted time and inconvenience to avoid doing so.
This is nonsense. In my experience, almost every user has no interest in the matter at all. They don't "want to change" but neither do they "not want to change". In fact, they don't want to be bothered by the decision. I could install MS Office; they wouldn't understand how to use it. I can install OpenOffice; they don't understand how to use that either, but it costs less and reduces worm damage. Either way, I'm going to get the same number of calls from people who can't figure out how to change the font size.
It's not that they're willing to put up with amazing amounts of wasted time and inconvinience to avoid switching - it's that they're willing to put up with wasted time and inconvinience, period. That has got nothing to do with their choice of software; they assume that all software is going to waste their time and inconvinience them, and consider it to be what they are paid for.
There are occasionally a small number of 'power users', who like to play with all the toys in a piece of software. These are the ones who loudly and strongly object to (any) changes. I simply forward all their complaints to the company directors, along with a quote for a copy of MS Office to install on that user's workstation; the directors can then decide whether this person is worth spending the extra money on. Interop between different versions of Office with different paper sizes is a joke anyway (because the users do not understand how to make it work), so they don't notice any extra problems caused by converting back and forth between MS and OpenOffice formats. The users understand that if they want a document to look the same way to the person receiving it, they should either (a) print it, or (b) send it as a PDF (because that's what I tell them every time they have trouble with this).
The reason for all this is simple: word processing and other 'office' applications are largely comprised of things that are not 'business-critical'. This means that so long as you can get a tidy-looking document onto a piece of paper, the rest is not significantly going to affect the business. The efficiency of this process does not have any visible effect on the bottom line (regardless of whether it has any actual effect) - because producing documents is 'overheads', not a part of the 'productive' side of the business (for most businesses). If you were in a business where the documents were your actual product, then it might matter, but you probably aren't (I'm not). Once I sketch these things out for the company directors, they invariably say "do it the way that doesn't involve spending £300 per workstation". They don't care about anything else, and consider the requests for expensive copies of Office in the same manner that they consider requests for expensive leather office chairs. While it is somewhat perverse to think of Office as a luxury, I don't have a problem with this because it means I have less copies of the thing to support.
It's not incompetence - it's following the path of least resistance. That results in less friction, which results in happier staff which results in more productivity, which results in more profit, which means that the executives get richer, the lackeys don't get fired, and everybody is satisfactorially miserable.
My goodness, where did you get that idea? Nobody seriously cares about the happiness of employees doing office work, because they are interchangeable and frequently changed. It comes back to that "not business-critical" thing again. You want the employees producing your
The comment is about growth and return on investment, not on sum capital.
The comment should have been about growth and return on investment. The comment actually was:
so at this rate it will take about 166 years to get your investment back
which is a comment about sum capital. The correct statement would have been:
It will take about 166 years to double your money.
(Ignoring for the moment the fact that the number is wrong, as others have pointed out, and that it fails to account for the possibility of compound interest)
Google's p/e may not be very good but that's no excuse for being sloppy when discussing it.
But never, in no way, will someone be able to tell you if it will rain in 3 weeks, let alone 30 years. I've studied the accuracy of forecasts quite a bit (as an energy analyst), and you can't get much better than climatology once you go 2 weeks out.
It's possible that someday it'll be possible to tell that it'll rain in three weeks. What won't be possible is to tell you *how much* and on *what days*. It's generally much easier to predict the rough sequence of events than it is to predict when they are going to happen (becoming easier as time approaches the event). So it's possible to say "there will be a big hurricane this year" and be fairly certain about that, when you don't have any real idea when or where it'll hit.
That's not the really big problem with this approach. This is:
It takes about 15-20 years to train a human to the point of usefulness. The first couple of those years are spent cooing and drooling. An effective synthesis of the human brain in hardware would be expected to take about as long and about as much effort to train before becoming useful. Sure, at that point you could duplicate it relatively easily - but who is willing to spend years making baby noises into a microphone in the hope that *this* time the thing is going to work? You can't just run the hardware faster, because these things learn based on their input data and we can't synthesise parenting yet.
Faithful reproductions of the human brain structure are unlikely to generate results any time soon because of this. We have no idea whether it's possible to design the thing to grow up faster, nor sufficient understanding to make an educated guess. Trying to take shortcuts may work, or it may cause the thing to stop working entirely, and we're not even sure how to tell the difference between the two states in a reliable fashion.
It's entirely possible that we might someday solve this problem, but I don't *expect* it. My bet is that we crack the problem of how to upload an already-formed human mind first, and go from there.
Where were you when the ASBO was introduced, before the last general election? And Blair still got voted in.
In the UK, elections are heavily influenced by old people (who love to stick their oar in, so far more of them vote, and also there's just more of them than any other group). Before the last general election, ASBOs were being used to get punk kids off the streets. Old people loved it, everybody else was pretty indifferent. They actually weren't a bad idea in that form.
Using them for everything else is a relatively recent invention. Looks like the government found a loophole in the boundaries of the law and are exploiting it.
Let's see what the non-beta software looks like, and see what a independent lab reports.
I wasn't aware that any independent labs existed in the security field. Certainly Microsoft try to prevent it (any 'independent' group will be a prime target for their convert-or-crush strategy) and most places want to push their own products anyway.
The network stacks that exist for, say, BSD and Linux are rather more convoluted than I would have thought necessary. I believe they could be made a lot simpler and faster, without sacrificing one iota of capability, flexibility or configurability.
Unless you actually cite specific examples, this is just handwaving. Personally I find it unlikely.
The court has ordered them to stop, and clean up the mess as punishment. The fine is for contempt of court, not monopoly abuse. People seem to forget that a lot: Microsoft are being fined for willfully ignoring a court order over a period of several years.
If MS try to treat it as a tariff, the EU court can and likely will take more drastic measures, which can go so far as restricting or revoking Microsoft's copyright on the offending software. That's fairly improbable though - more likely, they would take a copy of the source code from Microsoft, give it to a third party, and tell that third party to document it (and bill the whole thing to Microsoft).
More likely still is that Microsoft will produce documentation (eventually), but with a grossly restrictive license on it. The court would then simply edit the license to suit.
When you ignore the courts, their power to force corrective action increases.
I don't buy computer magazines any more. In the UK, most computer magazines seem to "magically" have the same cover price of around £6.00 - on the basis of mounting a cover CD or DVD
Actually, no. They 'magically' have the same price because most of them are owned by the same publisher (Ziff Davis). There is very little competition in the UK computer-related magazine market these days - ZD have bought most of it.
I, too, have become so much safer since I turned off my antivirus software and instead relied on good old, tried-and-tested intuition to detect malicious software and vulnerabilities.
You too? I got rid of mine when I realised that I was spending far more time cleaning up after the crashy and slow antivirus software than I would have spent reinstalling windows after the (rare) virus infections. One of those cures that's worse than the disease.
Think about that carefully: if the manufacturer makes a product with a dangerous defect, they are excused from responsibility by producing a long list of all possible classes of defects that they can imagine occurring.
How is that supposed to make any kind of sense? Certainly this is not actually protecting anybody from product defects.
And the warnings about Li-Po batteries are pretty explicit.... In the R/C hobby we are smart enough (well the majority anyhow) to treat Li-Pos with respect - but consumer laptops, that's somewhat scary.
Every consumer laptop comes with a thick book stating that each and every component may catch fire, explode, fail to work, cause the end of the world, kill your dog, or any number of other things, and it's your own damn fault if that happens and the manufacturer is not responsible. This means that nobody pays any attention to the 'safety' warnings, because 99% of them are total nonsense.
Consumer education is impossible until the manufacturers stop crying wolf about everything.
A good manager removes problems without people noticing. A bad manager creates problems in order to be noticed.
Problems to be removed particularly include anything that could waste the time of people who are supposed to be doing real work. Problems that are often created are ways of wasting those people's time - like compensating for the manager's lack of understanding by explaining things to them, instead of doing something productive.
If you can't understand what you're employees are doing without them explaining it, you probably aren't qualified to manage them. This problem seems extremely common in the technology sector. Presumably people think that because managers are interchangeable in the low-skill sectors (retail, customer service, etc) where anybody can understand what the workers are doing, the high-skill sectors should work the same way - but they don't.
That's not to say that managers need to be smarter than their workers - they don't need to be able to *do* those jobs. They just need to be nearly-as-smart as their workers in order to understand without needing to be educated all the time.
No, really. Any given area should have precisely one manager assigned to it, who can say 'go' or 'no go' quickly and without a lot of fuss. They may need assistants; they do not need other managers 'helping' the decision (or, ugh, a committee). Huge numbers of corporate structuring blunders (in practice) result from assigning multiple managers to a single task, often out of fear that some of them are incompetant. Most corporations could get by much better with a tiny fraction of their management personnel.
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This one is not a big deal because R-22 can almost always be replaced one of the common modern refrigerants (I'm not sure which offhand, might be R-409c), which has extremely similar properties and is often used to replace R-22 in old air conditioning units. It's a little bit less efficient though (and most equipment can be redesigned to use more modern chemicals that work better). I have no idea why they used R-22 here.
Your other points are more significant problems.
(Incidentally, R-22 is an HCFC but not a CFC, and is not a major threat to the ozone layer, you're thinking of the banned R-12 which was both a CFC and a major issue. However, R-22 is being phased out anyway because there are better choices available which are even less harmful and no particularly compelling reasons to use R-22 any more)
Gambling is zero-sum; nothing is created or destroyed. It's merely a mechanism for transferring money from people who are bad at math to the mafia. It therefore cannot constitute 'waste' at this point (what the recipients do with it is unclear).
It's not so surprising; where the national character of Americans is arrogant and all about number one, the Japanese are fundamentally in love with rules and structure. It's not universally true, but it is particularly common amoung Japanese businessmen: they would rather die than go against the grain. If the rules clearly say "you must do X", the Japanese will often just do it (where an American would spend years arguing the point in court and trying to weasel out of it). It's a cultural thing.
Your tests were wrong. Your C implementations were suboptimal compared to your java and erlang ones, or else they were comparing non-interesting examples. To pick one of many possible examples, any language with automatic garbage collection is going to be measurably slower than a language where the programmer optimises the memory allocation by hand, in many real-world cases (because garbage collecting takes extra processing time, which the language without it does not need to expend).
Most likely all that you discovered was that the people who implemented your java compiler were better programmers than you were (and so the java compiler managed to find a major optimisation that wasn't possible for your C version).
This is actually not true. Car computers *do* crash and reboot, they just do it automatically and very very quickly. The thing has to respond correctly within X milliseconds, or a supervising piece of hardware simply resets it, and it starts working again within Y more milliseconds - maybe you get a couple misfires, but the car basically keeps on working.
Also, they're tested much better than desktops and they're much easier to test (since they operate only in a single fixed configuration, no users meddle with them, and they only do one thing).
"Instead of driving a car, I get about using a pogo stick. It's much better because you can carry it with you when you're not using it, so you always have it available, and also you can get into smaller spaces than you could with a car. When I need to go someplace that's too far away, I use my car instead."
What exactly is the point if you just use a real OS whenever you need to do something more complicated than text editing?
"My pogo stick is assembled using just fourteen screws. This is a source of amusement and a feeling of superiority when compared to the thousands of screws, nuts, and bolts needed to assemble a car."
I can only presume that you are easily amused.
I think you mean: if it were simply a matter of having an idea how to build a better OS, OpenBSD would have flattened Linux a long time ago. The big problem with OpenBSD is that they haven't built most of it; it's sorely lacking in (native) features. It doesn't matter how good or bad your kernel is, emacs and firefox are basically the same on every platform. OpenBSD has so few actual (working) pieces that it's not really any different to yet another Linux platform - except for a handful of low-level tools which tend to be less featureful than the corresponding Linux versions.
The other problem is that these ideas often don't work very well in practice (microkernels are slower and can't actually do anything new, openssl has unreadably foul code, etc). Linux took off because, in practice, it's faster and more featureful than anything else that wasn't specifically designed for the task you're currently trying to do. All these other things may do some things better, but inevitably do all the other things worse, and that's what counts.
People have been saying that for at least a hundred years now. Probably longer. Hasn't happened yet.
I don't believe that anybody has ever changed their business practices with a press release. Neither have they done it with a list of a dozen trite platitudes.
Changing a culture just isn't that easy.
(Decide for yourself whether the MS leadership is aware of this or not, which is equivalent to saying whether this is just PR noise)
"child cruelty, child endangerment, depriving children of food, selling children AS food, and misrepresenting the weight of livestock"
A few dozen - companies are small around here, so 'hundreds' would mean changing jobs a lot.
This is nonsense. In my experience, almost every user has no interest in the matter at all. They don't "want to change" but neither do they "not want to change". In fact, they don't want to be bothered by the decision. I could install MS Office; they wouldn't understand how to use it. I can install OpenOffice; they don't understand how to use that either, but it costs less and reduces worm damage. Either way, I'm going to get the same number of calls from people who can't figure out how to change the font size.
It's not that they're willing to put up with amazing amounts of wasted time and inconvinience to avoid switching - it's that they're willing to put up with wasted time and inconvinience, period. That has got nothing to do with their choice of software; they assume that all software is going to waste their time and inconvinience them, and consider it to be what they are paid for.
There are occasionally a small number of 'power users', who like to play with all the toys in a piece of software. These are the ones who loudly and strongly object to (any) changes. I simply forward all their complaints to the company directors, along with a quote for a copy of MS Office to install on that user's workstation; the directors can then decide whether this person is worth spending the extra money on. Interop between different versions of Office with different paper sizes is a joke anyway (because the users do not understand how to make it work), so they don't notice any extra problems caused by converting back and forth between MS and OpenOffice formats. The users understand that if they want a document to look the same way to the person receiving it, they should either (a) print it, or (b) send it as a PDF (because that's what I tell them every time they have trouble with this).
The reason for all this is simple: word processing and other 'office' applications are largely comprised of things that are not 'business-critical'. This means that so long as you can get a tidy-looking document onto a piece of paper, the rest is not significantly going to affect the business. The efficiency of this process does not have any visible effect on the bottom line (regardless of whether it has any actual effect) - because producing documents is 'overheads', not a part of the 'productive' side of the business (for most businesses). If you were in a business where the documents were your actual product, then it might matter, but you probably aren't (I'm not). Once I sketch these things out for the company directors, they invariably say "do it the way that doesn't involve spending £300 per workstation". They don't care about anything else, and consider the requests for expensive copies of Office in the same manner that they consider requests for expensive leather office chairs. While it is somewhat perverse to think of Office as a luxury, I don't have a problem with this because it means I have less copies of the thing to support.
My goodness, where did you get that idea? Nobody seriously cares about the happiness of employees doing office work, because they are interchangeable and frequently changed. It comes back to that "not business-critical" thing again. You want the employees producing your
The comment should have been about growth and return on investment. The comment actually was:
which is a comment about sum capital. The correct statement would have been:
It will take about 166 years to double your money.
(Ignoring for the moment the fact that the number is wrong, as others have pointed out, and that it fails to account for the possibility of compound interest)
Google's p/e may not be very good but that's no excuse for being sloppy when discussing it.
It's possible that someday it'll be possible to tell that it'll rain in three weeks. What won't be possible is to tell you *how much* and on *what days*. It's generally much easier to predict the rough sequence of events than it is to predict when they are going to happen (becoming easier as time approaches the event). So it's possible to say "there will be a big hurricane this year" and be fairly certain about that, when you don't have any real idea when or where it'll hit.
30 years is a long time even for that, though.
That's not the really big problem with this approach. This is:
It takes about 15-20 years to train a human to the point of usefulness. The first couple of those years are spent cooing and drooling. An effective synthesis of the human brain in hardware would be expected to take about as long and about as much effort to train before becoming useful. Sure, at that point you could duplicate it relatively easily - but who is willing to spend years making baby noises into a microphone in the hope that *this* time the thing is going to work? You can't just run the hardware faster, because these things learn based on their input data and we can't synthesise parenting yet.
Faithful reproductions of the human brain structure are unlikely to generate results any time soon because of this. We have no idea whether it's possible to design the thing to grow up faster, nor sufficient understanding to make an educated guess. Trying to take shortcuts may work, or it may cause the thing to stop working entirely, and we're not even sure how to tell the difference between the two states in a reliable fashion.
It's entirely possible that we might someday solve this problem, but I don't *expect* it. My bet is that we crack the problem of how to upload an already-formed human mind first, and go from there.
In the UK, elections are heavily influenced by old people (who love to stick their oar in, so far more of them vote, and also there's just more of them than any other group). Before the last general election, ASBOs were being used to get punk kids off the streets. Old people loved it, everybody else was pretty indifferent. They actually weren't a bad idea in that form.
Using them for everything else is a relatively recent invention. Looks like the government found a loophole in the boundaries of the law and are exploiting it.
I wasn't aware that any independent labs existed in the security field. Certainly Microsoft try to prevent it (any 'independent' group will be a prime target for their convert-or-crush strategy) and most places want to push their own products anyway.
Unless you actually cite specific examples, this is just handwaving. Personally I find it unlikely.
The court has ordered them to stop, and clean up the mess as punishment. The fine is for contempt of court, not monopoly abuse. People seem to forget that a lot: Microsoft are being fined for willfully ignoring a court order over a period of several years.
If MS try to treat it as a tariff, the EU court can and likely will take more drastic measures, which can go so far as restricting or revoking Microsoft's copyright on the offending software. That's fairly improbable though - more likely, they would take a copy of the source code from Microsoft, give it to a third party, and tell that third party to document it (and bill the whole thing to Microsoft).
More likely still is that Microsoft will produce documentation (eventually), but with a grossly restrictive license on it. The court would then simply edit the license to suit.
When you ignore the courts, their power to force corrective action increases.
Actually, no. They 'magically' have the same price because most of them are owned by the same publisher (Ziff Davis). There is very little competition in the UK computer-related magazine market these days - ZD have bought most of it.
You too? I got rid of mine when I realised that I was spending far more time cleaning up after the crashy and slow antivirus software than I would have spent reinstalling windows after the (rare) virus infections. One of those cures that's worse than the disease.
Think about that carefully: if the manufacturer makes a product with a dangerous defect, they are excused from responsibility by producing a long list of all possible classes of defects that they can imagine occurring.
How is that supposed to make any kind of sense? Certainly this is not actually protecting anybody from product defects.
Every consumer laptop comes with a thick book stating that each and every component may catch fire, explode, fail to work, cause the end of the world, kill your dog, or any number of other things, and it's your own damn fault if that happens and the manufacturer is not responsible. This means that nobody pays any attention to the 'safety' warnings, because 99% of them are total nonsense.
Consumer education is impossible until the manufacturers stop crying wolf about everything.
It's far more likely that they found a new exploit and thought "now who shall I try this on today?"
I can make that even shorter:
A good manager removes problems without people noticing. A bad manager creates problems in order to be noticed.
Problems to be removed particularly include anything that could waste the time of people who are supposed to be doing real work. Problems that are often created are ways of wasting those people's time - like compensating for the manager's lack of understanding by explaining things to them, instead of doing something productive.
If you can't understand what you're employees are doing without them explaining it, you probably aren't qualified to manage them. This problem seems extremely common in the technology sector. Presumably people think that because managers are interchangeable in the low-skill sectors (retail, customer service, etc) where anybody can understand what the workers are doing, the high-skill sectors should work the same way - but they don't.
That's not to say that managers need to be smarter than their workers - they don't need to be able to *do* those jobs. They just need to be nearly-as-smart as their workers in order to understand without needing to be educated all the time.
Two managers is too many managers.
No, really. Any given area should have precisely one manager assigned to it, who can say 'go' or 'no go' quickly and without a lot of fuss. They may need assistants; they do not need other managers 'helping' the decision (or, ugh, a committee). Huge numbers of corporate structuring blunders (in practice) result from assigning multiple managers to a single task, often out of fear that some of them are incompetant. Most corporations could get by much better with a tiny fraction of their management personnel.