"An overflowing inbox is a sign of difficulty with this skill." Maybe in your world, but not for many people.
In many (most?) cases this is about good old server-queue theory, with you (the reader of email) being the server. When the workforce is cut over and over, the remaining staff get what used to be many people's workloads. Eventually they can't keep up.
In my case: Before I retired I was working with several (more than 5) wholly distinct intra-coprorate communities -- each with its own email chains and questions and initiatives. I was generally a key participant in each community, meaning my input was required. It took 2-3 hrs/day to work through them on a good day.
But if I was out on vacation or sick or traveling or at training or at a conference, then the email stacked up. When I got back, the backlog was in hundreds or thousands. The normal daily load did not stop to wait for me to catch up. I might throw in a couple more hours for a few days to catch up, but I also needed think time to plan the next project, attend meetings, deal with personnel issues, etc.
So despite best intentions, you fall behind. You can't even scan it to find what is critical. Certainly not enough time to send apology notes. Eventually you give up on that entire tranche -- just delete the hundreds or thousands of lost causes and start fresh. Why delete? In my context if anyone needed my input from that tranche, they would resend it and call or stop by my office to make sure I got to it.
Why is Agile a moving target? I think it goes like this:
The original vision was great: Many projects are hard because they require high-quality human interfaces. Humans are lousy at pre-specifying what they want for interfaces, so waterfall specs are slow and useless. The better approach is to just prototype stuff and have the user try it out. If your development cycle is vastly faster than users review cycle, you do real code instead of prototypes. Continue to grow the app as users' understanding of their needs evolves.
What's missing? Agile is all about doing one new app very well/quickly. Often (in my experience ) the app shouldn't have been done in the first place -- it was a workaround to a workaround, adding one more plop to the enterprise steaming heap. Instead we need to do systems (portfolio-wide) architecture at the start of a project to determine business case go/no-go, impact to data model, impact to data allocation to logical resources (which apps handle which data?), and external interfaces. Then use Agile for evolution of the user interface.
Isn't architrecrture too slow -- defeating the purpose of Agile? On a small project the architecture phase is 2 days. On a serious project it is maybe 2 weeks. Anyone doing 2 months of architecture either a) doesn't know what they are doing, or b) is dealing with a topic too loose to architect much less code. Assuming the project proceeds, revisit the architecture when the data model, data allocation, or external interfaces change
So why does Agile itself change? Agile gets in trouble when its true believers claim it is the revolutionary solution to everything software engineering. And then has to jump and jig to handle what it calls special cases. “Uh, we meant of course to include interface control governance; we just forgot to mention it". Calling something "Agile Enrterprise Architecture" doesn't make it so.
As others have noted, it costs money to run servers, apply patches, and man help desks. Any attempt at getting someone else to pay (sponsors, states, ads) leads right back to trouble. To be trusted, it will have to be fully paid by user-fees, iron-clad no-commercialization, and have user voting rights on changes to the bylaws.
So, how much would it cost? Given community-supported OSS software, cloud servers, and volunteer help communities, it wouldn't take much per person "at scale". If you assume $5/mo for 10M users (a reasonable start toward world domination), you have $600M/yr. You can run a lot of servers on that.
But how to get people to move, given the network effect of Facebook? I mostly leave it to others to solve -- I don't use Facebook precisely because I knew the business model from the start. But I would suggest:
a) Offer Facebook a free pass on the 2011 settlement ($40,000 per violation times 87M users) in exchange for open copyright on Facebook's look-and-feel.
b) Ask the Parkland students to define a new-and-better Facebook replacement (i.e, copyright issues). They in turn would communicate with their vast Internet-native community. Then us old(er) guys could code it up.
c) Write it in Python, with optimizations where needed in C. I don't trust democracy to Java, Javascript, and C++.
At best, this is an historical sidebar. At worst, a ploy to take us off topic. I'll respond once and then drop out.
I agree the 2nd Amendment was there originally to protect the others, or worst case it was "the reset button on the constitution". Reading the letters and essays by Federalists and Anti-Federalists makes clear this was the intent. Military technology at the time made it sensible.
However, successful rebellion means "We won", not "We killed a lot of people and then we were killed". For a rebellion, you are putting yourself on the line, not some proxy nation/tribe/oppressed people. "Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor" et al. The Gatling gun (Civil War), the Maxim (WW I), the tank (WW II), the Apache attack helicopter (Vietnam), and the AI-controlled drone (Middle East) pretty much obliterated the value of rifles (automatic or not) for purposes of successful rebellion against the US Govt. Furthermore, for urban rebellion, guns make enough noise to be triangulated, and any human holding one will be caught on video and identified. Any serious rebel is thinking Cambridge Analytica-style Big Data, weaponized drone swarms, and infowar campaigns to convince a few million peiople to risk death for the cause. [Ohhh, so that is what the Koch brothers and Mercers are up to...:-)]
It becomes pretty clear that informed (not mal-informed) voting is vastly more efficient than guns for changing the nation's path. For that we need a sense of community, not wedge issues like gun control. Which brings us back to the need for a non-commercial free-as-in-speech social media mechanism.
So, while I reload carefully enough to shoot "ragged clover leafs" with my rifle, and can watch the rechamber with my pistol, all my energy these days goes into makerspaces, meetups, and playing music. "Make love not war".
Way before the late 2000's. In the early 2000's several of us were trying to explain these issues to the county auditor (who controls election mechanisms), and used this site to collect talking points: http://www.seanet.com/~hgg9140/politics/evote/index.html
When we were researching, we found the main issues were already old news by then.
Even then we were advocating paper ballots and manual processing of those ballots. That it is still not solved nationwide is due to well-funded politics, not technical incompetence: "You can wake a man who is sleeping. You cannot wake a man who is pretending to be alseep."
As a practicing dilettante I have at times drifted into polymath territory (see: http://www.seanet.com/~hgg9140/ ) NOTE: That website deliberately does not cover topics I actually did for a living (sysadmin, developer, DBA, OSS champion, systems modeler and architect, etc.) Also haven't yet written up cartridge reloading, bow hunting, metal working, woodworking, boat building, and Italian cooking.
On that basis I think the key ingredients are:
a) Unquenchable curiosity and naivete -- if some human can do it/think it, why not me?
b) Acceptance that getting there takes work -- you have to do the homework and live the experiences. I'm still struggling with Reiman curvature, so I can read about relativistic fluid dynamics. Also bogged down on homeric greek on the way to reading The Odyssey.
c) Thus willingness to be the most ignorant/incompetent guy in the room, but with a grim resolve to "catch up with the others" It is emotionally painful, but you have to do this topic after topic, year after year, decade after decade.
d) Experience in the act of learning -- where to get the best books and youtube videos, when to splurge on expensive equipment, when to take classes or entire degree programs, etc.
e) Some sense of what "success" means. In my case, I want to be well-grounded -- so I can later learn from true masters and can recognize BS when it showed up.
f) Willingness to share what you have learned. You don't have to be a full master to help other raw beginners get going.
Microsoft holds some of the OPENGL patents So now isn't Ubuntu in danger of "submarine" patent cases? http://www.zdnet.com/news/microsoft-claim-shakes-graphics-world/124000
Usually these cases don't surface until the transition is well locked-in.
I agree with the sentiments, but that's not the reality. When I did the OSS m3na package (Modula3 Numerical Analysis package), I started with a clean-room implementation of the function calls in "Numerical Recipes". Their lawyers claimed even using the same function names and parameter lists was copyright infringement. Being a lowly individual working out of my basement, I restarted the package. (Actually I think it turned out much better than NR, because I restructured around "groups" and their operations rather than a random collection of functions)
Since then I've learned enough about US and International law to deeply distrust all legal actions surrounding "intellectual property" . Not to get too class-war about it, but if the big boys claim the law says X, then by gollies, it is X and there will be be armed enforcers to help you understand.
What I find ironic is that everyone was worried about Microsoft suing open source implementors of.NET, and claiming that Java should be used instead.... Oops.
Not everyone. Some of us have distrusted Java since its unveiling. It was and is a proprietary lockin mechanism that (by design) does not play well with others. Further, Sun has had off/on love for OSS. When Sun was hurting, it was "Hey, everyone should do OSS in Java". When Sun was flush, it was "Tough nuggies. We own the licenses and you OSS wimps will never get the libraries or the test suite." IBM caught on and helped make Java a pure single-vendor-at-a-time play. I'm not saying Sun and IBM were worse than Microsoft, but I am saying they were playing the same game.
In a corporate context I failed to stem the Java tide, but we have at least established enclaves of Pythonistas. Kind of like those rat-like mammals hiding underground waiting for dinosaurs to die off.
It is true that ALCU and NRA have broken agendas. That is no reason to sit on the sidelines and quibble.
When Lawrence Lessig told FSF members to get political or get buried, I read FSF's analysis of PATRIOT ACT II. That afternoon I joined both ACLU and NRA, then went looking for political parties. I joined the Dems, becamse a PCO, became an Executive Board member at LD and County levels, and became an LD Chair. I've given speeches on liberty (including 2nd amendment) -- and had roomsful of peace activists nodding in agreement.
30 years of Noise Machine and 8 years of Neocons has jolted a lot of people into thinking clearly about what it means to be a US Citizen. People at the gun range chat about my "Impeach Bush" bumper stickers. People at peace rallies chat about reloading. We're all Americans here at the grassroots. Those neocons are something else.
Microsoft employees must be having a grand time with this discussion. The reality is:
1. The conference will be attended by people who want the facts and have limited time to absorb them. Microsoft intends to muddy the water enough to mislead. Let them do that at their innumberable sales gigs. Let the conference concentrate on facts and data, not obfuscation.
2. OSS and Shared Source are not in the same ballpark, despite sales hype to the contrary.
3. Just as soon as Linux advocates are invited along for equal time on Microsoft sales calls, Microsoft should be invited to OSS conferences.
1978 is pitifully late. My dad told me the story in the early/mid 1960's. His version had the car hitting trees, turning to shrapnel as it hit the second line of trees, etc. I've emailed him to ask where/when he heard it. (He was a Boeing engineer at the time, working on missles.)
Slashdot Mirror
"An overflowing inbox is a sign of difficulty with this skill." Maybe in your world, but not for many people.
In many (most?) cases this is about good old server-queue theory, with you (the reader of email) being the server. When the workforce is cut over and over, the remaining staff get what used to be many people's workloads. Eventually they can't keep up.
In my case: Before I retired I was working with several (more than 5) wholly distinct intra-coprorate communities -- each with its own email chains and questions and initiatives. I was generally a key participant in each community, meaning my input was required. It took 2-3 hrs/day to work through them on a good day.
But if I was out on vacation or sick or traveling or at training or at a conference, then the email stacked up. When I got back, the backlog was in hundreds or thousands. The normal daily load did not stop to wait for me to catch up. I might throw in a couple more hours for a few days to catch up, but I also needed think time to plan the next project, attend meetings, deal with personnel issues, etc.
So despite best intentions, you fall behind. You can't even scan it to find what is critical. Certainly not enough time to send apology notes. Eventually you give up on that entire tranche -- just delete the hundreds or thousands of lost causes and start fresh. Why delete? In my context if anyone needed my input from that tranche, they would resend it and call or stop by my office to make sure I got to it.
Why is Agile a moving target? I think it goes like this:
The original vision was great: Many projects are hard because they require high-quality human interfaces. Humans are lousy at pre-specifying what they want for interfaces, so waterfall specs are slow and useless. The better approach is to just prototype stuff and have the user try it out. If your development cycle is vastly faster than users review cycle, you do real code instead of prototypes. Continue to grow the app as users' understanding of their needs evolves.
What's missing? Agile is all about doing one new app very well/quickly. Often (in my experience ) the app shouldn't have been done in the first place -- it was a workaround to a workaround, adding one more plop to the enterprise steaming heap. Instead we need to do systems (portfolio-wide) architecture at the start of a project to determine business case go/no-go, impact to data model, impact to data allocation to logical resources (which apps handle which data?), and external interfaces. Then use Agile for evolution of the user interface.
Isn't architrecrture too slow -- defeating the purpose of Agile? On a small project the architecture phase is 2 days. On a serious project it is maybe 2 weeks. Anyone doing 2 months of architecture either a) doesn't know what they are doing, or b) is dealing with a topic too loose to architect much less code. Assuming the project proceeds, revisit the architecture when the data model, data allocation, or external interfaces change
So why does Agile itself change? Agile gets in trouble when its true believers claim it is the revolutionary solution to everything software engineering. And then has to jump and jig to handle what it calls special cases. “Uh, we meant of course to include interface control governance; we just forgot to mention it". Calling something "Agile Enrterprise Architecture" doesn't make it so.
As others have noted, it costs money to run servers, apply patches, and man help desks. Any attempt at getting someone else to pay (sponsors, states, ads) leads right back to trouble. To be trusted, it will have to be fully paid by user-fees, iron-clad no-commercialization, and have user voting rights on changes to the bylaws.
So, how much would it cost? Given community-supported OSS software, cloud servers, and volunteer help communities, it wouldn't take much per person "at scale". If you assume $5/mo for 10M users (a reasonable start toward world domination), you have $600M/yr. You can run a lot of servers on that.
But how to get people to move, given the network effect of Facebook? I mostly leave it to others to solve -- I don't use Facebook precisely because I knew the business model from the start. But I would suggest:
a) Offer Facebook a free pass on the 2011 settlement ($40,000 per violation times 87M users) in exchange for open copyright on Facebook's look-and-feel.
b) Ask the Parkland students to define a new-and-better Facebook replacement (i.e, copyright issues). They in turn would communicate with their vast Internet-native community. Then us old(er) guys could code it up.
c) Write it in Python, with optimizations where needed in C. I don't trust democracy to Java, Javascript, and C++.
At best, this is an historical sidebar. At worst, a ploy to take us off topic. I'll respond once and then drop out.
I agree the 2nd Amendment was there originally to protect the others, or worst case it was "the reset button on the constitution". Reading the letters and essays by Federalists and Anti-Federalists makes clear this was the intent. Military technology at the time made it sensible.
However, successful rebellion means "We won", not "We killed a lot of people and then we were killed". For a rebellion, you are putting yourself on the line, not some proxy nation/tribe/oppressed people. "Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor" et al. The Gatling gun (Civil War), the Maxim (WW I), the tank (WW II), the Apache attack helicopter (Vietnam), and the AI-controlled drone (Middle East) pretty much obliterated the value of rifles (automatic or not) for purposes of successful rebellion against the US Govt. Furthermore, for urban rebellion, guns make enough noise to be triangulated, and any human holding one will be caught on video and identified. Any serious rebel is thinking Cambridge Analytica-style Big Data, weaponized drone swarms, and infowar campaigns to convince a few million peiople to risk death for the cause. [Ohhh, so that is what the Koch brothers and Mercers are up to... :-)]
It becomes pretty clear that informed (not mal-informed) voting is vastly more efficient than guns for changing the nation's path. For that we need a sense of community, not wedge issues like gun control. Which brings us back to the need for a non-commercial free-as-in-speech social media mechanism.
So, while I reload carefully enough to shoot "ragged clover leafs" with my rifle, and can watch the rechamber with my pistol, all my energy these days goes into makerspaces, meetups, and playing music. "Make love not war".
Way before the late 2000's. In the early 2000's several of us were trying to explain these issues to the county auditor (who controls election mechanisms), and used this site to collect talking points:
http://www.seanet.com/~hgg9140/politics/evote/index.html
When we were researching, we found the main issues were already old news by then.
Even then we were advocating paper ballots and manual processing of those ballots. That it is still not solved nationwide is due to well-funded politics, not technical incompetence: "You can wake a man who is sleeping. You cannot wake a man who is pretending to be alseep."
What drives a polymath?
As a practicing dilettante I have at times drifted into polymath territory (see: http://www.seanet.com/~hgg9140/ ) NOTE: That website deliberately does not cover topics I actually did for a living (sysadmin, developer, DBA, OSS champion, systems modeler and architect, etc.) Also haven't yet written up cartridge reloading, bow hunting, metal working, woodworking, boat building, and Italian cooking.
On that basis I think the key ingredients are:
a) Unquenchable curiosity and naivete -- if some human can do it/think it, why not me?
b) Acceptance that getting there takes work -- you have to do the homework and live the experiences. I'm still struggling with Reiman curvature, so I can read about relativistic fluid dynamics. Also bogged down on homeric greek on the way to reading The Odyssey.
c) Thus willingness to be the most ignorant/incompetent guy in the room, but with a grim resolve to "catch up with the others" It is emotionally painful, but you have to do this topic after topic, year after year, decade after decade.
d) Experience in the act of learning -- where to get the best books and youtube videos, when to splurge on expensive equipment, when to take classes or entire degree programs, etc.
e) Some sense of what "success" means. In my case, I want to be well-grounded -- so I can later learn from true masters and can recognize BS when it showed up.
f) Willingness to share what you have learned. You don't have to be a full master to help other raw beginners get going.
Microsoft holds some of the OPENGL patents So now isn't Ubuntu in danger of "submarine" patent cases?
http://www.zdnet.com/news/microsoft-claim-shakes-graphics-world/124000
Usually these cases don't surface until the transition is well locked-in.
I agree with the sentiments, but that's not the reality. When I did the OSS m3na package (Modula3 Numerical Analysis package), I started with a clean-room implementation of the function calls in "Numerical Recipes". Their lawyers claimed even using the same function names and parameter lists was copyright infringement. Being a lowly individual working out of my basement, I restarted the package. (Actually I think it turned out much better than NR, because I restructured around "groups" and their operations rather than a random collection of functions)
Since then I've learned enough about US and International law to deeply distrust all legal actions surrounding "intellectual property" . Not to get too class-war about it, but if the big boys claim the law says X, then by gollies, it is X and there will be be armed enforcers to help you understand.
What I find ironic is that everyone was worried about Microsoft suing open source implementors of .NET, and claiming that Java should be used instead. ... Oops.
Not everyone. Some of us have distrusted Java since its unveiling. It was and is a proprietary lockin mechanism that (by design) does not play well with others. Further, Sun has had off/on love for OSS. When Sun was hurting, it was "Hey, everyone should do OSS in Java". When Sun was flush, it was "Tough nuggies. We own the licenses and you OSS wimps will never get the libraries or the test suite." IBM caught on and helped make Java a pure single-vendor-at-a-time play. I'm not saying Sun and IBM were worse than Microsoft, but I am saying they were playing the same game.
In a corporate context I failed to stem the Java tide, but we have at least established enclaves of Pythonistas. Kind of like those rat-like mammals hiding underground waiting for dinosaurs to die off.
It is true that ALCU and NRA have broken agendas. That is no reason to sit on the sidelines and quibble.
When Lawrence Lessig told FSF members to get political or get buried, I read FSF's analysis of PATRIOT ACT II. That afternoon I joined both ACLU and NRA, then went looking for political parties. I joined the Dems, becamse a PCO, became an Executive Board member at LD and County levels, and became an LD Chair. I've given speeches on liberty (including 2nd amendment) -- and had roomsful of peace activists nodding in agreement.
30 years of Noise Machine and 8 years of Neocons has jolted a lot of people into thinking clearly about what it means to be a US Citizen. People at the gun range chat about my "Impeach Bush" bumper stickers. People at peace rallies chat about reloading. We're all Americans here at the grassroots. Those neocons are something else.
http://www.seanet.com/~hgg9140/history/us_constitution.html
http://www.seanet.com/~hgg9140/politics/patriot/liberty2.pdf
http://www.seanet.com/~hgg9140/sustainable/
It doesn't stop with just highschool. The same approaches work for K-6 all the way to grad school:
http://www.seanet.com/~hgg9140/math/index.html
Microsoft employees must be having a grand time with this discussion. The reality is:
1. The conference will be attended by people who want the facts and have limited time to absorb them. Microsoft intends to muddy the water enough to mislead. Let them do that at their innumberable sales gigs. Let the conference concentrate on facts and data, not obfuscation.
2. OSS and Shared Source are not in the same ballpark, despite sales hype to the contrary.
3. Just as soon as Linux advocates are invited along for equal time on Microsoft sales calls, Microsoft should be invited to OSS conferences.
1978 is pitifully late. My dad told me the story in the early/mid 1960's. His version had the car hitting trees, turning to shrapnel as it hit the second line of trees, etc. I've emailed him to ask where/when he heard it. (He was a Boeing engineer at the time, working on missles.)