In the wake of the blackout there were a lot of calls to create a centralized, monolithic dispatching center that would manage all electric generation and transmission in North America.
To me, this report give a good example of why a monolithic (monocultural) dispatching system is not a good idea. If every transaction were controlled by a central center, a single software bug could shut down the entire North American grid.
Cluetrain Manifesto is not reality, and probably never will be.
The Cluetrain one hurts, I think, because so many on-line denizens thought it was real. But 95% of the US population, while using e-mail and occasionally surf the web, does not live its life on-line, and they probably don't want to.
I personally view the "speed of change" argument as a mere excuse. If anyone in any industry were to say that about their job as to why they don't learn the new tools, they'd be asked to leave. Why should computing be much different?
That sums it up very nicely. Well, not nicely, but accurately and precisely!
I am glad you are feeling better! But I am left with one question: are you ripping into my OP? Or agreeing with it? Or both? Or is your course somewhere between 45 and 180 degrees different from mine?
While starting Computer Science students off with assembly (without first introducing them to a high-level language) may be a relatively new concept these days, the idea of teaching low-level languages to Computer Science students is not a revolutionary technique whatsoever.
Yes, that's a very new concept. Dating from 1970 or so! See Sterling & Pollack; also the First Course textbook by the same authors!
I will say however, having had to TA many students through the course based on those works, that starting with assembly language works well for some but not for most. And the ones it works for probably didn't need the class anyway.
I think this article points out one of the major weaknesses in the IT profession currently: a lack of people skills and empathy for the end user.
I've been a computer professional for over 25 years now. I'm still aghast at system administrators who take servers down on the last day of the month for maintenance, with total disregard of the fact that the company's biggest transaction volume occurs that day. Or help desk people who answer the phone in an impatient tone of voice, as if it's a major annoyance that someone is disturbing them.
As with any line of work, there are "IT" people who are rude, unfriendly, or unhelpful. That is unfortunate, but it can happen.
The reality, however, is that the vast majority of Business Information Management (note the difference between that description and "IT") people are helpful, friendly, business oriented, and above all patient. They have to be, given the circumstances under which they work. I recently had to tell one of my support techs that after 10 years of trying to assist a certain employee with a specific task, she should say "no" next time - as there was no positive return on investment to the organization in her continuing down that path. The "computer guys" (pretty rude description IMHO) do get frustrated and angry sometimes - after the 10th, 15th, or 20th attempt to work someone through a problem. That kind of attitude on the part of the employee receiving assistance wouldn't be tolerated in an assembly line worker, but it seems to be the norm in the office.
Because what it is all about, in the end, is business: not technology. There needs to be a positive cost/benefit to any business activity, and consuming infinite support resources without making any attempt at self-criticism or self-education makes it very difficult to achieve any benefit.
In 1985, 1990, even 1995 there might have been some excuse for business employees to refuse to challenge themselves and develop basic skills in business information management. In 2004 I really don't see any remaining excuse. Oh, except for "those computer nerds lack social skills".
I often use the analogy of the car when describing tech tasks: no one expects to buy a car and have it run forever (and remain safe) without maintenance. Most people understand the need to check tires (treadwear, air pressure), get the oil changed, etc.
I take it a little farther, actually. If a driver is proceeding along a fast road and, approaching an intersection, makes a fast left-hand turn into the wrong lane of oncoming traffic, what will happen to him? There will be a head-on collision and he will die. Will the traffic signals stop him from doing that? No. The car? No. The road? No. Henry Ford? No.
What stops him from dying every time he makes a left turn? Knowing, based on some combination of training, experience, and observation, that he can't do that.
Yet the same person will sit in front of a computer for hour after hour, making the same mistake over and over again, and blame (a) the computer (b) the software vendor (c) the Training Department, for "not giving him good training" (d) the "techies", for "not giving him good support" (e) the "techies", for "talking down to him" {well, they are: from the 4th time on} (f) pretty much anyone except himself.
Well, it makes him feel good (or less "uncomfortable") I guess, which is something. It doesn't help him get anything done, though, which is particularly a bit of a problem in profit-making organizations.
Originally the ISS was going to serve as the garage for exploration of the solar system. But, political reasons for collaborating with the russians ("let's be friends to show everyone that the cold war is over") forced to change the orbit four out of the sola system plane to let the russians, from their higher latitude launch pads, reach it and help a bit.
There were also those unstated goals of "let's keep all those Russian rocket scientists employed so they don't have to think about going to North Korea, or even China, to feed their families", and "let's keep some sort of friendly, open relationship with a country which is currently on the mat, but which historically has always had the potential to be a great power, and with which we often disagree politically". Both of which are quite valid reasons for what was done, although not anything that can be spoken aloud.
Huh? MS is publicly traded. What are you talking about?
I start up a company and hire some crazy Generation Q'ers to get it going. It is quite successful.
I split the company into 1000 shares:
700 I keep.
I give my superstars options on 199 shares at $1.00.
300 I sell in an IPO, taking the company public
Following the IPO, fortune continues to smile on us and the stock goes up to $1000/share. My friendly employees want to cash out their 199 options. No problem: I give them 199 from my stash, mourning the $2,000,000 it costs me but leaving me with 501 shares and control of the company. Life is good.
Same scenario, except this time I gave 400 options. Now when my happy friendly employees want to cash out, I have to either go out into the market and buy those shares at $1000 to give them, or issue more shares. Either course of action has problems from my point of view. At best it will reduce the value of my holdings; at second worst it will leave me no longer in control of my company; at worst it will zero out my net worth.
That's about where Microsoft stands today: if any significant number of their "old hands (say post-1995 hires) decide to cash out their options in a single quarter or even a single year, Microsoft has a bit of a problem on its hands.
Of course, that scenario has been around since before the dotcom bust, and it hasn't happened yet, so maybe it won't. But let Microsoft report just one quarter of declining revenue and the results might be interesting.
This points up one of the things I've never understood. Conventional wisdom is that it's cheaper to reward employees with stock options than cash, or cash equivalents like private use of a company car, for that matter.
Um, if the founder pays you with cash, it comes out of cash flow from operations. Which might be needed for, say, operations.
Whereas if he gives you stock options, and they vest to your advantage, you will be paid by the greater fools who buy the publicly-traded shares. No cash out of the founder's hand. At least until he runs out of privately held shares to give you, which is where Microsoft if headed now...
wonder what exactly the "right" conditions might be?
Not being in SCO's sights, maybe?
Or it could be the other way around. With no IPO underway, Google would be free to file suit against SCO, Canopy, and their backers. With $20 billion of Canopy, Baystar, and RBC's money in their pocket Google would then have no need to go public.
Frankly I'm all for them never releasing an IPO. Sure it brings in extra cash in the short term but in the long term, your buisness focus shifts from your product and customers to the whims of your shareholders.
Problem is that without a public offering it is very difficult to reward the worker bees who created the company by working 20-hour days for the first x years. You can only distribute closely-held shares up to a point, as Microsoft found.
Yeah, that parody is right on the mark. Even Pournelle admitted to liking it. He generates a lot of strong responses in both directions, but over 20 years I have found that everything he has predicted about NASA has come to pass.
Bottom line: bureaucracies don't fail, people do (because they can always work the system).
Somewhat similar, and related to, the argument that classical microeconomics and Schumperian analysis are always right and always optimal, because if you as an economic actor don't like your job you can just go out and find another one.
Perfect, unless you like sleeping indoors and feeding your children that is. It appears that various bureaucracies brought enormous pressure to bear to shut up the engineers who were reporting problems. Sure, they could have tried to run to the New York Times. Assuming anyone at the NYT would have listened to them, that would have gotten them a vote of thanks from a grateful public (monetary value: 0.00) and a lifetime blacklist from the aerospace industry (monetary value: $-2,000,000). What would you have done?
Most of the current discussion on the Columbia accident is being driven by NASA management and the Bush Administration. I would suggest that you read William Langewiesche's article in The Atlantic. and Jerry Pournelle's comments on the overall space access and the NASA situation (that's one of them; he write an essay about every month on that topic). Then the overall picture might be clearer.
OP #1: I went to high school 1983-87 and LotR was not to be found within either of the two high schools.
Wow - sorry about that, dude. I am sadly quite a bit older than you, and my high school might have been dragged right out of the 1950s, but even our cranky old spinster/bachelor English teachers assigned some Tolkien.
OP #2: I am 28, a nerd for the last 15 years and I've never read any Tolkien, nor have I seen any of the movies. I'm just not interested in fantasy or sci-fi, so I've naturally avoided it (and it was never required through school).
Ah, but I bet you don't go around making half-baked analogies to LotR either, particularly ones which self-referentially draw attention to how half-baked they are.
What you are saying is that SCO is being savaged in the court of public opinion and hasn't defended itself there.
Should it have to defend itself there if it can get legal remedy by presenting its evidence in court before a judge?
To the best of anyone's knowledge, SCO has no patents that would bear on Linux, so patent lawsuits are out.
By definition, if SCO's trade secrets have been revealed in Linux, they are no longer trade secrets. While they might collect from an entity that revealed those trade secrets, they would have no grounds to sue end users or other Linux developers.
That leaves copyright violations. And in order to collect for damages from copyright violations, you must make an attempt to mitigate the damages you have suffered. SCO has been asked by IBM and Linus to specify the copyright infringements so that they can remove them from Linux. SCO has refused, failing to mitigate the harm suffered (if any exists). I will leave the conclusion to you...
Can we trust them to be fair and unbiased in their "research"?
Groklaw, the intelligent posters on the Yahoo Finance SCOX message board, IBM, Novell, and Linus Torvalds have all been asking (in some cases begging) SCO to provide solid legal evidence of their claims for the last 9 months. SCO has failed to do so, and in fact has on numerous occasions provided material which turned out to show the opposite of what they claimed. Perhaps the team of MIT scientists has the real information, I don't know, but at some point open-mindedness turns to skepticism, and disbelief follows fairly quickly after that. IMHO at this point the burden of proof lies on SCO, and they aren't delivering.
I will have to call "troll" on this one. Any person in technical management who knows enough to make an analogy to LotR would know the work well enough to get the analogy correct. Heck, LotR is on the reading list in most high schools these days (contrary to Tolkien's wishes) so I doubt anyone who has gone to school since 1975 would get that analogy that far wrong. Your statement seems to have been written explicitly to inflame.
Copyright lasts for more than half a century after the author's death. Christopher is the administrator of his father's estate--who ELSE do you think that the royalty checks will be sent to?
Under the law as it existed in the 1950s, only 500 copies of a work that had not been, or was in the process of being, copyrighted in the United States could be imported from outside the US. If more than 500 copies were imported before the US copyright was issued, the work entered the public domain.
Allen & Unwin, the original publisher of LorR, grossly underestimated the demand for the book in the US. After the first 500 sold out, they shipped a couple thousand more from England to the US. They did this before registering a US copyright.
Therefore, LotR is not copyrightable in the United States. That is the reason for the various "respect for living authors" prefaces in the Ballentine editions, and possibly for some of the small changes Tolkien made in the text in later editions - he may have been trying to create enough of a change to justify a new copyright filing.
One of the saddest aspects of the entire saga of Middle Earth is that JRR Tolkien never really got to enjoy the monetary benefits of his work. During then 50s and 60s he received enough royalties to avoid starving to death on his professor's salary, but sales didn't really start their exponential growth until the very end of his life. Due to the delays in the payment of royalties, he saw very little of that money. Then again, he expressed overall satisfaction with his life in his last letters, so perhaps it all worked out for him.
Christopher Tolkien, however, recognized very well what was going on, and he has exerted iron control on copyright and publication rights ever since. He has even managed to bully US publishers and bookstores into ignorning that little copyright issue and paying him royalties. So I think it will be at least 100 years until you see a Gutenberg Project release of LotR.
The whole point of having the Faramir/Boromir combo in the book was to contrast them - one brother who tries to steal the ring (and pays for it), and the other who has an opportunity to take the ring and purposely does not.
The way Jackson did it, this contrast is completely lost. Boromir tries to steal the ring, and Faramir probably would have if it wasn't drawing Nazgul to him. As it is in the movie, there is little difference between Boromir and Faramir except that Daddy doesn't like one of them...
Thank you. I was starting to think I was the only person who noticed the complete destruction of the contrast between the brothers.
You think that JRR guy knew a little about epics? Having translated Beowulf for example?
Yes, I absolutely loved all the films directed by J.R.R. Tolkien...
Beowulf, of course, was performed live in front of an audience for what - 200 years? - before it was ever written down. It might, it just might, include certain elements of timing and pacing. Of course a translator dedicated to his craft would never take that sort of thing into account...
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To me, this report give a good example of why a monolithic (monocultural) dispatching system is not a good idea. If every transaction were controlled by a central center, a single software bug could shut down the entire North American grid.
sPh
- The Internet is not reality. Not yet, anyway.
The Cluetrain one hurts, I think, because so many on-line denizens thought it was real. But 95% of the US population, while using e-mail and occasionally surf the web, does not live its life on-line, and they probably don't want to.Cluetrain Manifesto is not reality, and probably never will be.
sPh
sPh
I am glad you are feeling better! But I am left with one question: are you ripping into my OP? Or agreeing with it? Or both? Or is your course somewhere between 45 and 180 degrees different from mine?
Inquiring minds want to know!
sPh
I will say however, having had to TA many students through the course based on those works, that starting with assembly language works well for some but not for most. And the ones it works for probably didn't need the class anyway.
NIP and SNORE forever!
sPh
The reality, however, is that the vast majority of Business Information Management (note the difference between that description and "IT") people are helpful, friendly, business oriented, and above all patient. They have to be, given the circumstances under which they work. I recently had to tell one of my support techs that after 10 years of trying to assist a certain employee with a specific task, she should say "no" next time - as there was no positive return on investment to the organization in her continuing down that path. The "computer guys" (pretty rude description IMHO) do get frustrated and angry sometimes - after the 10th, 15th, or 20th attempt to work someone through a problem. That kind of attitude on the part of the employee receiving assistance wouldn't be tolerated in an assembly line worker, but it seems to be the norm in the office.
Because what it is all about, in the end, is business: not technology. There needs to be a positive cost/benefit to any business activity, and consuming infinite support resources without making any attempt at self-criticism or self-education makes it very difficult to achieve any benefit.
In 1985, 1990, even 1995 there might have been some excuse for business employees to refuse to challenge themselves and develop basic skills in business information management. In 2004 I really don't see any remaining excuse. Oh, except for "those computer nerds lack social skills".
sPh
What stops him from dying every time he makes a left turn? Knowing, based on some combination of training, experience, and observation, that he can't do that.
Yet the same person will sit in front of a computer for hour after hour, making the same mistake over and over again, and blame (a) the computer (b) the software vendor (c) the Training Department, for "not giving him good training" (d) the "techies", for "not giving him good support" (e) the "techies", for "talking down to him" {well, they are: from the 4th time on} (f) pretty much anyone except himself.
Well, it makes him feel good (or less "uncomfortable") I guess, which is something. It doesn't help him get anything done, though, which is particularly a bit of a problem in profit-making organizations.
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
I split the company into 1000 shares:
- 700 I keep.
Following the IPO, fortune continues to smile on us and the stock goes up to $1000/share. My friendly employees want to cash out their 199 options. No problem: I give them 199 from my stash, mourning the $2,000,000 it costs me but leaving me with 501 shares and control of the company. Life is good.I give my superstars options on 199 shares at $1.00.
300 I sell in an IPO, taking the company public
Same scenario, except this time I gave 400 options. Now when my happy friendly employees want to cash out, I have to either go out into the market and buy those shares at $1000 to give them, or issue more shares. Either course of action has problems from my point of view. At best it will reduce the value of my holdings; at second worst it will leave me no longer in control of my company; at worst it will zero out my net worth.
That's about where Microsoft stands today: if any significant number of their "old hands (say post-1995 hires) decide to cash out their options in a single quarter or even a single year, Microsoft has a bit of a problem on its hands.
Of course, that scenario has been around since before the dotcom bust, and it hasn't happened yet, so maybe it won't. But let Microsoft report just one quarter of declining revenue and the results might be interesting.
sPh
Whereas if he gives you stock options, and they vest to your advantage, you will be paid by the greater fools who buy the publicly-traded shares. No cash out of the founder's hand. At least until he runs out of privately held shares to give you, which is where Microsoft if headed now...
sPh
Just a thought.
sPh
sPh
sPh
Perfect, unless you like sleeping indoors and feeding your children that is. It appears that various bureaucracies brought enormous pressure to bear to shut up the engineers who were reporting problems. Sure, they could have tried to run to the New York Times. Assuming anyone at the NYT would have listened to them, that would have gotten them a vote of thanks from a grateful public (monetary value: 0.00) and a lifetime blacklist from the aerospace industry (monetary value: $-2,000,000). What would you have done?
sPh
sPh
sPh
By definition, if SCO's trade secrets have been revealed in Linux, they are no longer trade secrets. While they might collect from an entity that revealed those trade secrets, they would have no grounds to sue end users or other Linux developers.
That leaves copyright violations. And in order to collect for damages from copyright violations, you must make an attempt to mitigate the damages you have suffered. SCO has been asked by IBM and Linus to specify the copyright infringements so that they can remove them from Linux. SCO has refused, failing to mitigate the harm suffered (if any exists). I will leave the conclusion to you...
sPh
sPh
I will have to call "troll" on this one. Any person in technical management who knows enough to make an analogy to LotR would know the work well enough to get the analogy correct. Heck, LotR is on the reading list in most high schools these days (contrary to Tolkien's wishes) so I doubt anyone who has gone to school since 1975 would get that analogy that far wrong. Your statement seems to have been written explicitly to inflame.
sPh
Allen & Unwin, the original publisher of LorR, grossly underestimated the demand for the book in the US. After the first 500 sold out, they shipped a couple thousand more from England to the US. They did this before registering a US copyright.
Therefore, LotR is not copyrightable in the United States. That is the reason for the various "respect for living authors" prefaces in the Ballentine editions, and possibly for some of the small changes Tolkien made in the text in later editions - he may have been trying to create enough of a change to justify a new copyright filing.
sPh
Christopher Tolkien, however, recognized very well what was going on, and he has exerted iron control on copyright and publication rights ever since. He has even managed to bully US publishers and bookstores into ignorning that little copyright issue and paying him royalties. So I think it will be at least 100 years until you see a Gutenberg Project release of LotR.
sPh
sPh
sPh