Right after I guessed the password for "pudge@bourque".
(Note to low-iQ moderators who seem to mod things they don't grok with Troll: This is a joke. If you don't get it, save your mod points. I didn't really hack into the guy's Macbook as a non-privileged user, and then escalate to root.)
This person is clearly poking fun at the Slashdot libertarian. Obviously they are aware that this type of spending is entirely equivalent as an economic stimulus, for a failed corporate IT project, and a failed government IT project.
Manager: This guy is one of those "I can do it better using the new language i learned in college" kids
*rolls eyes* -- the idea that a manager who'd say this is common is a complete flight of fancy. Where the hell are you going to find a manager in corporate America who is hostile to Java and sees it as something "new" that's the province of green college kids?
On the contrary, this general attitude is very, very common among managers of the Fortune 500 and US Federal government IT shops. There are pockets here and there that actually welcome fresh ideas, but think about that a moment. Most people don't like change. Fresh ideas are change. Like a new kid in a small town, Java was a fresh idea for the first, oh, ten or eleven years of its lifetime. People encountered exactly this sentiment, about exactly Java, for years, long after it was the sharpest blade in the drawer for certain tasks, and long before it suddenly become common knowledge that Java was a widely accepted enterprise tool.
There is an interesting problem with trying to persuade management of a problem like a giant failing project. They usually have a vested interest in the project success, and often the team. On the one hand they will dismiss arguments with insufficient detail. On the other, they will ignore or dismiss as "pedantic" or "overly detailed" any argument supported solidly by evidence. More often, however, they bog the bearers of bad news down with a giant pile of pointless assignments: "go produce document which explains "code fragility" and documents the extent of code fragility in this project, using industry standard metrics. " The point is, this debate cannot be won without going above the level of management that is causing the problem, up to the level of management which actually gives a hoot about whether the business objectives can be met. Doing so will probably cost the whistleblower their job, or their career.
Sadly, the responses noted would be somewhat common. Non sequiturs included. Most managers do not understand the value of systems architects (who should be responsible for the architecture of the integration of many complex systems) nor software architects (who should be responsible for the technical implementation details. As I'm sure you know, Bruce, these decisions are often made for political reasons, by people who don't have time to even hear about the consequences of different choices, who then essentially require their team to justify the decisions post-facto. In fact, this model is rather more common than any manner of objective careful reflection. Certain technologies never would have reached their current level of dominance, had IT decisions been made by people who understood exactly how much more expensive those decisions would turn out to be.
There are other effects, similar to that, in the US and elsewhere in the world. Consider Africa, where a confluence of war, famine, and AIDS have basically decimated a continent.
Entrenched poverty, and related gang and drug activity has combined with discrimination or bias in the judicial system in the US with the result being so many black men are in prison that it's affecting the demographics of the Republican party's most sacred institution, marriage. Of course, they are so concerned about preventing gay men and women from participating in the sanctity of marriage, whatever that means, that they haven't noticed so many of our nation's daughters will fail to follow God's sacred instructions to be fruitful and multiply, within the sanctity of marriage.
Consider that lead exposure, and probably mercury exposure, too, knock IQ points off the potential of those exposed. How much better off would this nation be if we hadn't exposed generations of kids (including the generations holding office today) to lead exposure? Hey, you Baby Boomers, do you think your kids are smarter than you? Well, guess what, they are. Kids under the age of about 25 or 30 in this country didn't grow up breathing lead fumes. If we would stop spewing mercury all over the atmosphere and oceans we could probably get another five points.
I meant to mention a slightly more hopeful thing that also sometimes happens in these situations. Senior management sometimes hires consultants to review a project like this, precisely because they suspect it really isn't going well. You talk to several folk at different levels, and they all tell you the same thing, which on the project described in the parent article would be something like, "it will fail unless several things radically change." Of course, they may represent several different visions about how to fix it, and what precisely is the problem causing the failure, though usually those overlap to some degree and are seldom mutually exclusive.
This can happen at all levels of the organization, the truth, more or less, might be an open secret. However, for reasons of internal politics and personalities, they need someone from the outside to be the one to tell them.
I once witnessed senior management bring in Peter Drucker, at great expense and inconvenience. Before he takes a gig like this, he basically tells the senior management that he gets unlimited access to anyone in the organization, or he's not interested. Then he starts talking to people, in private. He follows threads of interest. He doesn't spread gossip, and he doesn't make judgements, except those in the final report to his client, who is usually the CEO or Board of Directors. In conversation with people he spends almost all of his time listening. With a strategy like that, you can get to the truth of the matter, even though the truth is often very complex, from the standpoint of organizational politics, anyway.
Later, they replaced the CIO, partly on the basis of his report, which most likely didn't say anything like, "get a new CIO" anywhere. Rather it said something like, "this project has already failed, you just haven't realized it, yet," and "here are the indicators that it has failed," etc.
Watching that particular new CIO come in was fascinating, too. He was one of the best CIOs I've ever met. He spent about two months getting his bearings, using essentially the same techniques, only in a manner that seemed lower profile. He just visited with people at different levels of the organization, in the course of normal business, and without any apparent agenda. He didn't march in as a trumpeted turn around artist or anything like that. He was all business. Once he started making decisions, they were big decisions, and they were almost immediately recognizable as the right decisions -- or at least members of the class of possible right decisions for the given problem domain. It took a little while, but people who had been demoralized on this giant failing project (which had involved nearly the entire IT staff to greater and lesser extents) got back a sense of esprit de corps.
Yes, and unfortunately, the typical bureaucracy enforces this thermocline, brutally. People get fired, not for wasting years and tens of millions of dollars through incompetence, nor for hiding the truth, nor for outright lying about the true status of a failing project, but rather more often, for attempting to fix problems by trying to go around a roadblock that is preventing the truth from going up the corporate ladder. When they are not outright fired, they are certainly blacklisted, and get to watch, as their own career stagnates, and the careers of those erecting the roadblocks advances. As a consultant, I've had the opportunity to see this happen to highly competent, dedicated, organizationally loyal people who should have been given million dollar bonuses, and promoted to Director, or CIO. It's quite sad, but I could never recommend to anyone to be the voice of reason on a project thats failing like this, unless they are prepared to lose their job.
Well, now, Human Chromosome 2 really is very interesting. The wikipedia page on ALU could stand to be edited by somebody who knows how to talk to people who don't already have a degree in genetics, but it's interesting, too.
I meant to reply to the post two levels up, and missed. I think it's fascinating that Apple is doing this with Snow Leopard. It's like the polar opposite of Microsoft's track record with.Net, which when push came to shove, Microsoft wanted 3rd parties to use before they used it themselves.
If you're really experiencing lots of kernel panics on Leopard, you should check to see if you have a hardware problem. Bad RAM or a flakey disk drive can both cause that problem.
Well, not really. What its really about is spreading some of the interesting innovations in Leopard universally throughout the system. For example, the reference to multi core processors in the Snow Leopard press release is clearly about spreading the new NSOperation, among other things. Stuff like that. This goes pretty far beyond a "bug fix" release.
Well, it's true that AT&T will have nationwide 3G coverage, for certain definitions of "nationwide" which exclude several entire states, and major portions of the country. Although their map shows presence in every state, this is a mirage. There are quite a few states where AT&T doesn't offer service at all. If you happen to be an AT&T customer from somewhere else, you get 3G coverage from a parter, but you can't get a local phone number on an iPhone (or any other AT&T phone) in those locations.
I do have confirmation that what I said was funny, because I received personal LOLs from Slashdot users. For those of you who didn't get the joke, I replied to a post which:
criticized the original iPod, and
did so using a short string of simple adjectives ("expensive bulky..."), and which therefore, although perhaps unconsciously,
appeared to reference a very particular complaint about the original iPod, which is quite famous among Slashdot readers.
CmdrTaco (possibly suffering from low blood-caffeine levels) effectively demonstrated a curious lack of big picture thinking which is often exercised a certain type of "new gadget" critic, who, in a hurry to their point in a succinct and stylistic manner, totally miss the interesting aspects of the device, subject of critique. (And some of whom, in the case of the iPod, didn't make money by purchasing shares of AAPL, but did manage to go down in history as "missing the point.") Unfortunately for CmdrTaco, the amazing market success of the iPod family has meant that there were lots of opportunities over the years for people to tease him, by quoting him. Nearly every time Apple comes out with a new product, there are variations on a theme of this critique, in various discussions in this forum.
Most of the references to this event, and there have been many, end in "Less space than a Nomad. Lame." I elected to be a little more subtle, but clearly some people got the joke.
"Slower than a nimrod" is uproarious, if you know this back story, and see that I found a subtle, indirect, and possibly even unintentional reference to the original critique upon which to play, and then transformed the tag line from the original critique, by approximately the same vector.
Please allow me to break it down for you.
The key to look for something that might be funny was "You forgot..." which is, with some frequency here in Slashdot, used to signal that one is making a reference to a canonical Slashdot joke. However, despite making a reference to what is now a very, very old joke, I went the extra mile and did strive to be fresh and original.
I further referenced a very specific linguistic pattern, borrowed directly from the original critique, " than a ".
Then I transformed "Nomad" into "nimrod", keeping the initial letter of the noun, as a further reference and signal that something amusing was afoot. My little joke is probably also a pun as a result of this tidbit.
Not yet satisfied with the polish, I then transformed "less space" into "slower" so that the complaint would match the object (less space than a nimrod makes no sense, yet slower than a nimrod could apply to an electronic gadget, as well as a moron.)
I did, however, forget to capitalize Nimrod.
Furthermore, the Slashdot user to whom I replied, "Catch23" clearly *does* get the point, which one could easily ascertain by reading their comment. Obviously it's clear I wasn't insulting them. The point, of course, was that Apple did something which some of us now see to be a technique they often use. They said, "hey, we're all using these music player gadgets. We all love the idea, but the gadgets suck. Why do they suck?" Then they made a list. Then they fixed the things on the list, and made a product.
Nowhere, on anybody's list of things that sucked about MP3 players at the time was "wireless" nor "less space than a Nomad". Nobody on the planet cared about either of those. Wireless was too slow and too power hungry to do what you wanted to do at the time, which was sync quickly and listen a long time. Nobody knew what a Nomad was. They still don't (I assume it was a reference to the
The details which cause the problem are different, but the effect is the same. When you email support, do you get a form email back which suggests you try their broken password recovery procedure? There must be a template somewhere that people use to achieve this maximally annoying standard interface. The series of tubes folds back on itself to achieve this beowulf cluster-ah*m of a modern internets interface. Not just anyone could design this. There must be a distributed project capturing the wisdom of many web developers at the heart of this. Probably GPLed.
This is almost as good as asking spammers to Set the Evil Bit, so we can filter them out. If all the spammers sign on for address space in this block, we can just route that block to/dev/null and be done with it.;-)
One little detail you overlooked is important to understanding what Apple might possibly do with this stuff.
Apple doesn't have much in the way of ARM code at all, to the extent that nearly all of their ARM code is generated by a compiler. Apple has C and Objective C code, and has LLVM sitting between the hardware and the Apple application source code. Apple can run on any hardware platform they like. They can support more than one hardware platform at almost negligible marginal cost. While the rest of the industry flails about, with their obsolete notions of "platform wars", Apple can simultaneously participate on the industry standards platform (or platforms as the case happens to be) and also invent a better platform, for one or many other product categories. Those can also overlap.
Apple is essentially platform agnostic, with respect to hardware.
That's easy. If Microsoft had made a decent smart phone OS in the first place, the market opportunity for iPhone never would have existed, and this br1kd00d wouldn't be here spawning this absurd discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Right after I guessed the password for "pudge@bourque".
(Note to low-iQ moderators who seem to mod things they don't grok with Troll: This is a joke. If you don't get it, save your mod points. I didn't really hack into the guy's Macbook as a non-privileged user, and then escalate to root.)
This person is clearly poking fun at the Slashdot libertarian. Obviously they are aware that this type of spending is entirely equivalent as an economic stimulus, for a failed corporate IT project, and a failed government IT project.
I agree these types of observations are often dismissed by management. They are not, however, very often debunked, which implies that they were incorrect, and proven to be so by a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
There is an interesting problem with trying to persuade management of a problem like a giant failing project. They usually have a vested interest in the project success, and often the team. On the one hand they will dismiss arguments with insufficient detail. On the other, they will ignore or dismiss as "pedantic" or "overly detailed" any argument supported solidly by evidence. More often, however, they bog the bearers of bad news down with a giant pile of pointless assignments: "go produce document which explains "code fragility" and documents the extent of code fragility in this project, using industry standard metrics. " The point is, this debate cannot be won without going above the level of management that is causing the problem, up to the level of management which actually gives a hoot about whether the business objectives can be met. Doing so will probably cost the whistleblower their job, or their career.
Sadly, the responses noted would be somewhat common. Non sequiturs included. Most managers do not understand the value of systems architects (who should be responsible for the architecture of the integration of many complex systems) nor software architects (who should be responsible for the technical implementation details. As I'm sure you know, Bruce, these decisions are often made for political reasons, by people who don't have time to even hear about the consequences of different choices, who then essentially require their team to justify the decisions post-facto. In fact, this model is rather more common than any manner of objective careful reflection. Certain technologies never would have reached their current level of dominance, had IT decisions been made by people who understood exactly how much more expensive those decisions would turn out to be.
There are other effects, similar to that, in the US and elsewhere in the world. Consider Africa, where a confluence of war, famine, and AIDS have basically decimated a continent.
Entrenched poverty, and related gang and drug activity has combined with discrimination or bias in the judicial system in the US with the result being so many black men are in prison that it's affecting the demographics of the Republican party's most sacred institution, marriage. Of course, they are so concerned about preventing gay men and women from participating in the sanctity of marriage, whatever that means, that they haven't noticed so many of our nation's daughters will fail to follow God's sacred instructions to be fruitful and multiply, within the sanctity of marriage.
Consider that lead exposure, and probably mercury exposure, too, knock IQ points off the potential of those exposed. How much better off would this nation be if we hadn't exposed generations of kids (including the generations holding office today) to lead exposure? Hey, you Baby Boomers, do you think your kids are smarter than you? Well, guess what, they are. Kids under the age of about 25 or 30 in this country didn't grow up breathing lead fumes. If we would stop spewing mercury all over the atmosphere and oceans we could probably get another five points.
I meant to mention a slightly more hopeful thing that also sometimes happens in these situations. Senior management sometimes hires consultants to review a project like this, precisely because they suspect it really isn't going well. You talk to several folk at different levels, and they all tell you the same thing, which on the project described in the parent article would be something like, "it will fail unless several things radically change." Of course, they may represent several different visions about how to fix it, and what precisely is the problem causing the failure, though usually those overlap to some degree and are seldom mutually exclusive.
This can happen at all levels of the organization, the truth, more or less, might be an open secret. However, for reasons of internal politics and personalities, they need someone from the outside to be the one to tell them.
I once witnessed senior management bring in Peter Drucker, at great expense and inconvenience. Before he takes a gig like this, he basically tells the senior management that he gets unlimited access to anyone in the organization, or he's not interested. Then he starts talking to people, in private. He follows threads of interest. He doesn't spread gossip, and he doesn't make judgements, except those in the final report to his client, who is usually the CEO or Board of Directors. In conversation with people he spends almost all of his time listening. With a strategy like that, you can get to the truth of the matter, even though the truth is often very complex, from the standpoint of organizational politics, anyway.
Later, they replaced the CIO, partly on the basis of his report, which most likely didn't say anything like, "get a new CIO" anywhere. Rather it said something like, "this project has already failed, you just haven't realized it, yet," and "here are the indicators that it has failed," etc.
Watching that particular new CIO come in was fascinating, too. He was one of the best CIOs I've ever met. He spent about two months getting his bearings, using essentially the same techniques, only in a manner that seemed lower profile. He just visited with people at different levels of the organization, in the course of normal business, and without any apparent agenda. He didn't march in as a trumpeted turn around artist or anything like that. He was all business. Once he started making decisions, they were big decisions, and they were almost immediately recognizable as the right decisions -- or at least members of the class of possible right decisions for the given problem domain. It took a little while, but people who had been demoralized on this giant failing project (which had involved nearly the entire IT staff to greater and lesser extents) got back a sense of esprit de corps.
Yes, and unfortunately, the typical bureaucracy enforces this thermocline, brutally. People get fired, not for wasting years and tens of millions of dollars through incompetence, nor for hiding the truth, nor for outright lying about the true status of a failing project, but rather more often, for attempting to fix problems by trying to go around a roadblock that is preventing the truth from going up the corporate ladder. When they are not outright fired, they are certainly blacklisted, and get to watch, as their own career stagnates, and the careers of those erecting the roadblocks advances. As a consultant, I've had the opportunity to see this happen to highly competent, dedicated, organizationally loyal people who should have been given million dollar bonuses, and promoted to Director, or CIO. It's quite sad, but I could never recommend to anyone to be the voice of reason on a project thats failing like this, unless they are prepared to lose their job.
Stone cold dead.
Well, now, Human Chromosome 2 really is very interesting. The wikipedia page on ALU could stand to be edited by somebody who knows how to talk to people who don't already have a degree in genetics, but it's interesting, too.
Snow Leopard press release.
I meant to reply to the post two levels up, and missed. I think it's fascinating that Apple is doing this with Snow Leopard. It's like the polar opposite of Microsoft's track record with .Net, which when push came to shove, Microsoft wanted 3rd parties to use before they used it themselves.
If you're really experiencing lots of kernel panics on Leopard, you should check to see if you have a hardware problem. Bad RAM or a flakey disk drive can both cause that problem.
Well, not really. What its really about is spreading some of the interesting innovations in Leopard universally throughout the system. For example, the reference to multi core processors in the Snow Leopard press release is clearly about spreading the new NSOperation, among other things. Stuff like that. This goes pretty far beyond a "bug fix" release.
Well, it's true that AT&T will have nationwide 3G coverage, for certain definitions of "nationwide" which exclude several entire states, and major portions of the country. Although their map shows presence in every state, this is a mirage. There are quite a few states where AT&T doesn't offer service at all. If you happen to be an AT&T customer from somewhere else, you get 3G coverage from a parter, but you can't get a local phone number on an iPhone (or any other AT&T phone) in those locations.
I do have confirmation that what I said was funny, because I received personal LOLs from Slashdot users. For those of you who didn't get the joke, I replied to a post which:
CmdrTaco on the original iPod:
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
CmdrTaco (possibly suffering from low blood-caffeine levels) effectively demonstrated a curious lack of big picture thinking which is often exercised a certain type of "new gadget" critic, who, in a hurry to their point in a succinct and stylistic manner, totally miss the interesting aspects of the device, subject of critique. (And some of whom, in the case of the iPod, didn't make money by purchasing shares of AAPL, but did manage to go down in history as "missing the point.") Unfortunately for CmdrTaco, the amazing market success of the iPod family has meant that there were lots of opportunities over the years for people to tease him, by quoting him. Nearly every time Apple comes out with a new product, there are variations on a theme of this critique, in various discussions in this forum.
Most of the references to this event, and there have been many, end in "Less space than a Nomad. Lame." I elected to be a little more subtle, but clearly some people got the joke.
"Slower than a nimrod" is uproarious, if you know this back story, and see that I found a subtle, indirect, and possibly even unintentional reference to the original critique upon which to play, and then transformed the tag line from the original critique, by approximately the same vector.
Please allow me to break it down for you.
I did, however, forget to capitalize Nimrod.
Furthermore, the Slashdot user to whom I replied, "Catch23" clearly *does* get the point, which one could easily ascertain by reading their comment. Obviously it's clear I wasn't insulting them. The point, of course, was that Apple did something which some of us now see to be a technique they often use. They said, "hey, we're all using these music player gadgets. We all love the idea, but the gadgets suck. Why do they suck?" Then they made a list. Then they fixed the things on the list, and made a product.
Nowhere, on anybody's list of things that sucked about MP3 players at the time was "wireless" nor "less space than a Nomad". Nobody on the planet cared about either of those. Wireless was too slow and too power hungry to do what you wanted to do at the time, which was sync quickly and listen a long time. Nobody knew what a Nomad was. They still don't (I assume it was a reference to the
You forgot slower than a nimrod.
I can't believe you put Hackers in the same category with Tron.
Clearly you've seen Tron to many times. You are drain bamaged.
Did I stop submitting when the editors started rephrasing all submissions in the form of catchy imbalanced questions?
Tags (experimental): {Yes, Definitely, Sadly, Slashdot+has+become+digg}
It helps to watch Blade Runner with an above average IQ. It's the opposite of Tron, which, I'm told, is only watchable while stoned.
Hey, stop confusing people with the facts! How do you expect them to start up a decent Apple hating flame war?
The details which cause the problem are different, but the effect is the same. When you email support, do you get a form email back which suggests you try their broken password recovery procedure? There must be a template somewhere that people use to achieve this maximally annoying standard interface. The series of tubes folds back on itself to achieve this beowulf cluster-ah*m of a modern internets interface. Not just anyone could design this. There must be a distributed project capturing the wisdom of many web developers at the heart of this. Probably GPLed.
This is almost as good as asking spammers to Set the Evil Bit, so we can filter them out. If all the spammers sign on for address space in this block, we can just route that block to /dev/null and be done with it. ;-)
One little detail you overlooked is important to understanding what Apple might possibly do with this stuff.
Apple doesn't have much in the way of ARM code at all, to the extent that nearly all of their ARM code is generated by a compiler. Apple has C and Objective C code, and has LLVM sitting between the hardware and the Apple application source code. Apple can run on any hardware platform they like. They can support more than one hardware platform at almost negligible marginal cost. While the rest of the industry flails about, with their obsolete notions of "platform wars", Apple can simultaneously participate on the industry standards platform (or platforms as the case happens to be) and also invent a better platform, for one or many other product categories. Those can also overlap.
Apple is essentially platform agnostic, with respect to hardware.
That's easy. If Microsoft had made a decent smart phone OS in the first place, the market opportunity for iPhone never would have existed, and this br1kd00d wouldn't be here spawning this absurd discussion.
Give me a tougher one.