If everyone is going to have one of those robots, why not have virtual robots? In other words, an avatar in a virtual environment. That's precicely what I am involved in at the moment; we're experimenting with virtual conferences in (please don't laugh) Second Life. Our initial take on it is that virtual meetings are not as good as actually being there, but they are a damn sight better than teleconferencing (which sits way down on the list somewhere between getting a root canal treatment, and dropping a kitchen knife on your bare foot pointy side down). They also give much more of a sense of "presence" than videoconferencing. Plus, they allow for teambuilding events as well.
Sadly my suggestion for renting a virtual meeting room in Sauron's tower (in Lord of the Rings Online) was voted down. Oh well...
This reminds me of the auction for UMTS licenses that were held in the Netherlands a few years ago. This was back in the mad days when investors and corporations paid silly prices for cable and telco companies. UMTS was the next big thing, and companies were eager to bid for the licenses. So, politicians ended up congratulating each other on how much money they raked in for the public coffers... and companies suddenly found themselves so strapped for cash that they no longer had the money to invest in the expensive rollout of UMTS itself, or even for interim technologies such as EDGE. We were stuck in the stone age with GPRS, and when UMTS finally appeared on the market, it was years late, with lousy coverage, and the plans were horribly expensive (at first it wasn't even available to consumers; only to corporate subscribers). The auctions set back the development of our telco infrastructure by years.
People in favour of these auctions seem to forget that companies are not in it for charity, and investors like to see a reasonable return on the money they put in. The cash for these licenses have to come from someone, and that someone is you, the dumbass consumer.
Another anecdote, or perhaps urban myth, is that the size of the spindle hole in the CD was specified as the size of the (pre-Euro) Dutch 10c coin. They wanted the hole to be larger than the one of an LP, but smaller than the one in a single. "Make it the size of a dubbeltje" (the name of the 10c coin), is what a designer purportedly decided.
The official specifications probably have it as 15mm. But for a fact, the coin is an exact fit...
Reminds me of an ad they used to put on rental VHS tapes. Some guy buys a pirated copy of "train spotting" off some dodgy guy down at the market, and tries unsuccesfully to get his money back as the tape is of unwatchably poor quality. The follows a stern warning that pirated tapes suck and can even damage your VCR.
10 years into the future, and the situation is reversed. People now laugh at the poor dope dumb enough to buy a legitimate copy. And they don't laugh because he paid money. I'd pay, to get a decent copy without the hassle of having to find it first (and downloading it only to find it's a German language version). As long as that copy is mine.
Cooking, molecular or otherwise, is not about getting the recipe right to the nth decimal. As someone wrote in another post, you'll always have variations in products, temperatures, cooking ware etc. Completing a recipe to perfection has a lot to do with reacting to feedback: knowing your ingredients, smells, texture, taste. Mrs. Farmhouse got it right with her "looks ok" approach; the "scientific chef" was being a silly. If you ignore the feedback and just watch the egg timer, it won't come out as good.
Cooking science is about understanding what happens to food when we prepare it. It won't give us a runbook to achieve that perfect flavour, but it will help us to understand the process so that we get better at managing it.
Here's one. The same happened with two scientists in a Dutch government-run climatological research institute. I'm sure you can find others, and I am also sure each of these examples can (and have) been countered by arguments of these scientists being fired for bad science or using "improper channels" to release their counter-claims.
And while you've raised the issue, shall we discuss political meddling in the opposite direction (cough EPA report cough)?
My point is that the entire climate debate is no longer about science, but about politics. That goes for both sides of the table, however most politicians, scientists and activists have far more to gain by a "let's impose controls" attitude than with a "nothing to see here, move along" attitude, the global warming camp is far more influential than the sceptics camp.
The current rate of warming far exceeds the natural rate of cooling during glaciation.
The current rate of warming is nothing exceptional, and might even be just a ripple in the trend. The past has seen increases in temperature of higher rates and over a larger range. That's also the pattern to most ice ages (and we're at the peak following a small one of a couple 100 years ago): a slow decline in temperature, followed by a sharp ramp upwards.
It is true that eventually we will enter a new ice age, regardless of global warming, but no one is "ignoring" this fact. It's just farther off into the future; right now, the warming is what we have to deal with. If warming is a problem, you can't just ignore it because someday it will be cooler.
Warming and cooling are natural trends, on which we have some (small influence). We should be worried about the warming trend, but not exaggerate our supposed influence. Thart's like worrying about a small wave, while the normal tide raises and drops the water level by several meters.
As we have seen already, it's far easier to raise the temperature quickly than it is to cool it, having to do with the ease in emitting CO2 as a byproduct of civilization and with the long residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere.
We have seen nothing yet. The current increase in temperature might be a ripple in the trend, it fits the trend itself, and it might also be caused or aggravated by human influence. But in the history of the earth it is most certainly not anything out of the ordinary.
Ice ages are somewhat random events so saying 10,000 years we will be in an ice age is silly it may have already happened or yet to start. Looking back several million years ices ages have no where near the consistency as the seasons. They don't all get as cold they don't last the same amount of time and they don't occur on a regular basis.
They are less random than it seems. There are models to predict them based on a number of climate cycles of varying periodicity and amplitude. Last time I read about this there were 6 of these supposed cycles, with numbers 4-6 being rather disputed (but they are also the ones of the lowest amplitude). Number 1-3 are related to celestial activity and are fairly well understood. They also match previous ice ages quite well (as far as can be determined), both in time, duration and severity. That's not to say that there aren't a few ice ages that do not match these cycles, but the trend is fairly well predictable.
By unplugging all of my electronic devices (there are many of them) when not in use we saved around $30 U.S. a month. Where was all that energy going? Not sure.
It goes to heat production, mostly. However I prefer a step forward rather than taking a step back by having to turn everything off. It is possible to make equipment have a minimal power consumption on standby, by only running a small circuit that looks for the "On" button being pressed on the device. A lot depend on how you power this circuit... a transformer is a notoriously bad way of doing it.
Some equipment behaves nicely on standby. Use a Wattmeter to check how much your stuff actually consumes in standby mode; you'd be surprised how little some things consume when idle, and there is little use in unplugging these completely. You might also be surprised at the large amount of power drawn by plug in transformers (The "wall warts"). Removing these when you are not using them saves a lot.
Another good way to save without sacrificing convenience, is to use a "master-slave" power block with your computer. I have a lot of inefficient transformer power supplies next to the computer, for printers, routers, LCDs, speakers, etc. I installed a "master-slave" system, that will automatically switch off all this rubbish when the computer is switched off. The power draw of this system when idle is minimal compared to those transformers, and you don't have to switch off every individual piece of equipment either,
There is also the huge number of people who believe that the consensus of thousands of scientists on climate change is a "global conspiracy" and their fear that it may eventually mean, shock horror, more taxes.
This believe is partly justified. The conspiracy isn't by the scientists, and isn't a global conspiracy either, but the climate scare has given the meddlers of any political stripe the perfect pretext to push their own agendas. The climate debate has been thoroughly politicised, at the expense of proper science. That does not mean that all conclusions are incorrect or made up, but very often peer reviews are sorely lacking, and many reports have had chapters and sections stricken in the final draft, because those sections could cast doubt on the severity or existence of human impact on the climate. In many cases scientists voicing such doubts have not been gainsaid, but fired from "scientific" institutions. Because a widespread doubt in our impact on the climate would spoil the party for the meddlesome politicians. The political stakes are huge, perhaps the largest of any issue in our history.
Why are long term trends not taken into account in these reports, for example. It is rubbish to say that we cannot accurately predict climate that far into the future because our short-term predictions are not very good. After all, we cannot predict the little ups & downs in next month's weather, but we can predict that winter will follow summer and autumn, and we know what the trends are in each of those seasons. The long-term trends in global weather can be predicted as well.
On a geological timescale, we are in high summer. Winter is coming, and in 10.000 years we'll be in an ice age. The start of the downward trend in average temperatures is imminent (which means anywhere between now and 1.000 years)... Perhaps that is why the IPCC report does not look any further than the year 2100, the scary hockeystick curve will flatten out after that year, and if you look even further it will drop. Our distant descendants (if any) may even be grateful for the extra CO2 we have released, since it might make the next ice age a little less severe.
But with all that said, conservation and reducing our dependancy on a limited resource is a good thing. But I refuse to join in the mindless panic.
The article starts out by stating that "agile project management is notoriously least effective on very large projects." but then goes on to propose using Agile Programming techniques to fix it!
Project Management is not the same thing as Programming Techniques. Milestones are not the same as software deliverables. Also
Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.
These are good ideas even if you are not doing Agile Development. And they are not specific to Agile methods either.
So no, the article does not contradict itself. I didn't find it particularly informative though...
So aspriring project managers do not need books like Lister's, they can just read your post and know all there is to know? The point of books like these is to take a critical look at the set of common practices you call "basic project management", examine the good and bad parts, and suggest better alternatives.
You get the people for that project. You work to form them into a team that can handle that project.
Lister talks about getting the right people for that project, and that means that you don't fully staff it before you know what you're going to need.
You adjust the specs as the project evolves until it either dies or hits the target.
There are still managers out there who think that the specs that were agreed up front are set in stone, and not to be changed. Even if you do change them, when do you adjust the specs and how do you go about it? As far as I can see from the short article, these are questions addressed by this book.
There are enough managers who still royally screw up the "get people", "build the team" and "adjust specs" jobs, to warrant a book on the subject. There are a fair few out there already and I haven't read this one, but if Lister's previous work is anything to go by it might be a worthwhile read.
And getting together with your co-workers after work just so you can bond? Fuck that. If it happens, it happens. But do NOT try to institutionalize it. All you'll do is end up with a bunch of people waiting for the first person to leave so they can all go home to their families.
I tend to agree with you there, but you can be a bit more creative than either doing nothing to socialise or saying "we *are* having drinks this Friday afternoon". A manager can certainly make a difference in how a team bonds, and for those managers I have three magic words: "during office hours". Take the team out for a nice 3 Martini lunch, or an afternoon of paintball. The cost of doing this during work hours looks daunting on the spreadsheets, but it will generally earn itself back a few times over.
Do current Roombas pick up pet hair well? And do pets like them?
I have wall to wall carpets and two rather fluffy cats; not a good combination. I really need to vacuum two times a week or the place already starts to look messy.
That's where the Roomba comes in handy. It does an excellent job of dealing with cat hair on carpet, about as well as my Miele manual vacuum. I set it off twice a week to keep the place looking tidy. I do have the "advantage" of living in a smallish 3 room apartment so a single Roomba does me fine.
The cats don't mind the Roomba too much. One of them will just move to another room. The other will stay in the room, studiously ignoring the Roomba until it crosses her path, then she'll step out of the way giving the poor Roomba an annoyed, disdainful look.
Where's the chapter called "Dealing with uninformed upper management"?
Modded "funny", but you have a point. I see a lot of things in this review about managing IT work, and that includes an overload of assignments, pointy-haired bosses, and idiot customers. Is the management of geeks in such a work environment so different from managing other kinds of people in a similar environment? I don't have that much experience with managing geeks, but I have not found it hard because they were geeks.
My inbox is my todo list, everything else gets filtered to folders. I move them OUT of the folder if it's something I need to do. Now only if my company will move off MS Exchange.
Good for you if you're happy with that method, but don't think it's the be-all-end-all for the rest of the world. Time management methods are like diets: what works for one guy may not work for another. Which is why I suggested to try the "GTD" method if you feel you are swamped by your incoming email. If not, just continue as you were. But don't dismiss the method just because it doesn't fit your particular job, work mode, or personality.
It's interesting that the 12 steps don't mention anything about mitigating or reducing SPAM... seems like it should be step 0 to me.
How much time do you really spend on deleting spam?
Spam is highly annoying if you pull up your inbox every time your computer goes 'ping' and the little envelope appears in the tool tray. However if you follow the tips in the article and sit down every hour, 2 hours, day (whatever works for you) to process everything in your inbox in one go, spam takes just seconds to deal with. 99% can be identified from the subject line and/or sender, just highlight the lot and hit del. It's still annoying, but you won't waste much time dealing with it.
Perhaps the article is mr. McNamara's poor attempt at humour, but most of those 12 points are actually very good suggestions to help manage your email... If you're stressed because you get too many items in your inbox (or more probably, if you think you're getting too many mails), they'll help a lot. Perhaps they're not so good for overcoming an actual addiction though. For that, step 1 and some discipline is enough.
Most of these tips come from Getting things done, which I can highly recommend if you're stressed out because you feel you have more work than you can manage. It worked wonders for me!
IT needs to learn to provide and protect without being so intrusive as to hinder real work being done.
IT has much bigger problems than just being intrusive and untrusting. In this day and age, large IT departments are outsourced and compartimentalised to ridiculous degrees, creating a lot of overhead, paperwork and delays. In the past, you'd just call HP (or whomever) to order some hardware, set it up and tune it yourself, and you'd have a good production server farm or development box just the way you wanted and in very little time. These days, if I order hardware it takes perhaps a week for the physical machine to be placed into the datacenter... and then no less than 5 teams need to have their way with it, taking another 2-3 months. And that is for a standard build...
It's not just the delays... the guys in those tiny, myriad departments are too far removed from the actual end product (running a useful bit of software). They are not helping their "clients" bring their projects to a succesful close like they used to; they are instead only concerned with their own little SLA's, metrics and procedures. All this leads to non-delivery or delays, especially since they all have plenty of other departments to blame the delays on. Funny, but personally I have never seen any department in any business that was allowed to operate in such a manner, where the employees would not scream "we cannot work this way" after trying it for a few weeks after which a hasty reorganisation put things back into a saner structure. No dept, except IT, where apparently delays are accepted and expected.
"If you don't deliver, I'll go somewhere else." Life works like this in most departments, except where a department is more or less unavoidable. And now the end users are finding that the IT dept is no longer as unavoidable as it used to be. Good for them. But while a CIO would do well to consider how to allow end users more leeway in a responsible manner, he should worry a lot more about why users are turning away from his department as soon as they get the chance.
It is similar to what happens in countries like the Netherlands (or other nordic countries) where people *avoid* pay rises because sometimes having a rise of 10% they have to pay more taxes and end earning less than what they earned before the "raise".
1) the Netherlands is not a "Nordic" country.
2) there's no way that under the Dutch tax system a higher gross pay results in less net income. There used to be one threshold where that effect occurred: when you had to switch from the state health insurance to private insurance because of a pay rise, but these days it's all one insurance.
With that said.... $25000 would definitely put this software consultant in debt. But for a trip into space I'd still be able to come up with the money.
Okay, everyone who thinks this will happen, raise your hand. Nobody?
At least here in Europe, it is very common for cell phone companies to subsidise phones, and to offer so-called "sim only" subscriptions with vastly discounted rates to people not taking advantage of the phone subsidy.
Because the total heat contained in the natural gas is used - some is generated as electricity, and the rest remains as residual heat in the greenhouses. 100% efficiency during winter
Not just that; they use the generated CO2 as well; the plants need it. The sad thing is that NL power companies pay really shitty rates for energy fed back into the grid, something like 1/5th of the regular rates.
A more interesting development for greenhouses is the heat exchanger. Greenhouses need tremendous amounts of heat in winter, and need to be cooled in summer. A few companies started experimenting with a system using water stored deep underground for cooling in summer and heating in winter. The results are encouraging; very little additional heating or cooling is needed in the test setups, and with some extra effort and equipment, the thing can even be used to generate electricity.
The "Wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet" protesters has been manouevred into a corner by the industry and the state. The group's principal argument has always been this:
"Voting machines (without a paper trail) make it impossible to verify the fairness of an election"
In addition, they have gone to show how election results could be manipulated, and how cast votes could be read from outside the polling station. The protesters have had a lot of success getting a number of machines removed from the elections, and they have certainly managed to put the issue onto the political agenda and the public debates. However, with all this media coverage, they are failing to state, re-state and re-re-state their principle argument: that there is a fundamental problem with using voting machines. I have never heard one of their spokespersons state that fixing these small problems with the computers is not enough, and is basically a side-issue. The machine's proponents have taken this opportunity to turn the fundamental problem into a side-issue.
The press, politicians (who want to use voting machines) and the voting machine manufacturers jumped on the issue, stating: "You are right, there's an issue with certain machines but we'll get it fixed". When the machines get fixed, the protest group's role will have been played out. Any subsequent complaints about the fundamental issues with voting machines will be dismissed by the public as whining from a group who are just looking for any excuse to go on protesting.
I don't think the iPhone is going to flop because of its closed-ness. It's neat that I can install all manner of junk on my Windows Mobile device, but the main reason to do so is to replace the standard software because it is poorly designed. If Apple can deliver a phone / iPod / PDA device that "just works" and has a good user interface, I could live without the ability to add or replace software on it, And I suspect that there are many consumers like me, who do not want a hackable mini-computer.
What might kill the phone is its price and lack of features. No GPS, no G3, poor battery life, and a camera with yesterday's specs; so much for being 5 years ahead, Steve. It looks cool, but I'm not paying around $500 for a pretty case and a slick user interface, when my current WM5 phone (with GPS) costs $150 on a cheap 2 year plan.
Slashdot Mirror
Better yet: use an iRobot Roomba for your platform, and you'll clean the office as you go along!
If everyone is going to have one of those robots, why not have virtual robots? In other words, an avatar in a virtual environment. That's precicely what I am involved in at the moment; we're experimenting with virtual conferences in (please don't laugh) Second Life. Our initial take on it is that virtual meetings are not as good as actually being there, but they are a damn sight better than teleconferencing (which sits way down on the list somewhere between getting a root canal treatment, and dropping a kitchen knife on your bare foot pointy side down). They also give much more of a sense of "presence" than videoconferencing. Plus, they allow for teambuilding events as well.
Sadly my suggestion for renting a virtual meeting room in Sauron's tower (in Lord of the Rings Online) was voted down. Oh well...
Halo is a bit like that, looks pretty interesting. The company I do work for is going to set up a few of these in their offices around the world.
This reminds me of the auction for UMTS licenses that were held in the Netherlands a few years ago. This was back in the mad days when investors and corporations paid silly prices for cable and telco companies. UMTS was the next big thing, and companies were eager to bid for the licenses. So, politicians ended up congratulating each other on how much money they raked in for the public coffers... and companies suddenly found themselves so strapped for cash that they no longer had the money to invest in the expensive rollout of UMTS itself, or even for interim technologies such as EDGE. We were stuck in the stone age with GPRS, and when UMTS finally appeared on the market, it was years late, with lousy coverage, and the plans were horribly expensive (at first it wasn't even available to consumers; only to corporate subscribers). The auctions set back the development of our telco infrastructure by years.
People in favour of these auctions seem to forget that companies are not in it for charity, and investors like to see a reasonable return on the money they put in. The cash for these licenses have to come from someone, and that someone is you, the dumbass consumer.
Another anecdote, or perhaps urban myth, is that the size of the spindle hole in the CD was specified as the size of the (pre-Euro) Dutch 10c coin. They wanted the hole to be larger than the one of an LP, but smaller than the one in a single. "Make it the size of a dubbeltje" (the name of the 10c coin), is what a designer purportedly decided.
The official specifications probably have it as 15mm. But for a fact, the coin is an exact fit...
Reminds me of an ad they used to put on rental VHS tapes. Some guy buys a pirated copy of "train spotting" off some dodgy guy down at the market, and tries unsuccesfully to get his money back as the tape is of unwatchably poor quality. The follows a stern warning that pirated tapes suck and can even damage your VCR.
10 years into the future, and the situation is reversed. People now laugh at the poor dope dumb enough to buy a legitimate copy. And they don't laugh because he paid money. I'd pay, to get a decent copy without the hassle of having to find it first (and downloading it only to find it's a German language version). As long as that copy is mine.
Cooking, molecular or otherwise, is not about getting the recipe right to the nth decimal. As someone wrote in another post, you'll always have variations in products, temperatures, cooking ware etc. Completing a recipe to perfection has a lot to do with reacting to feedback: knowing your ingredients, smells, texture, taste. Mrs. Farmhouse got it right with her "looks ok" approach; the "scientific chef" was being a silly. If you ignore the feedback and just watch the egg timer, it won't come out as good.
Cooking science is about understanding what happens to food when we prepare it. It won't give us a runbook to achieve that perfect flavour, but it will help us to understand the process so that we get better at managing it.
Here you go. Page is in Dutch but it has a manual (PDF) in English on it.
My point is that the entire climate debate is no longer about science, but about politics. That goes for both sides of the table, however most politicians, scientists and activists have far more to gain by a "let's impose controls" attitude than with a "nothing to see here, move along" attitude, the global warming camp is far more influential than the sceptics camp.
The current rate of warming is nothing exceptional, and might even be just a ripple in the trend. The past has seen increases in temperature of higher rates and over a larger range. That's also the pattern to most ice ages (and we're at the peak following a small one of a couple 100 years ago): a slow decline in temperature, followed by a sharp ramp upwards.
Warming and cooling are natural trends, on which we have some (small influence). We should be worried about the warming trend, but not exaggerate our supposed influence. Thart's like worrying about a small wave, while the normal tide raises and drops the water level by several meters.
We have seen nothing yet. The current increase in temperature might be a ripple in the trend, it fits the trend itself, and it might also be caused or aggravated by human influence. But in the history of the earth it is most certainly not anything out of the ordinary.
Some equipment behaves nicely on standby. Use a Wattmeter to check how much your stuff actually consumes in standby mode; you'd be surprised how little some things consume when idle, and there is little use in unplugging these completely. You might also be surprised at the large amount of power drawn by plug in transformers (The "wall warts"). Removing these when you are not using them saves a lot.
Another good way to save without sacrificing convenience, is to use a "master-slave" power block with your computer. I have a lot of inefficient transformer power supplies next to the computer, for printers, routers, LCDs, speakers, etc. I installed a "master-slave" system, that will automatically switch off all this rubbish when the computer is switched off. The power draw of this system when idle is minimal compared to those transformers, and you don't have to switch off every individual piece of equipment either,
Why are long term trends not taken into account in these reports, for example. It is rubbish to say that we cannot accurately predict climate that far into the future because our short-term predictions are not very good. After all, we cannot predict the little ups & downs in next month's weather, but we can predict that winter will follow summer and autumn, and we know what the trends are in each of those seasons. The long-term trends in global weather can be predicted as well.
On a geological timescale, we are in high summer. Winter is coming, and in 10.000 years we'll be in an ice age. The start of the downward trend in average temperatures is imminent (which means anywhere between now and 1.000 years)... Perhaps that is why the IPCC report does not look any further than the year 2100, the scary hockeystick curve will flatten out after that year, and if you look even further it will drop. Our distant descendants (if any) may even be grateful for the extra CO2 we have released, since it might make the next ice age a little less severe.
But with all that said, conservation and reducing our dependancy on a limited resource is a good thing. But I refuse to join in the mindless panic.
So no, the article does not contradict itself. I didn't find it particularly informative though...
Lister talks about getting the right people for that project, and that means that you don't fully staff it before you know what you're going to need.
There are still managers out there who think that the specs that were agreed up front are set in stone, and not to be changed. Even if you do change them, when do you adjust the specs and how do you go about it? As far as I can see from the short article, these are questions addressed by this book.
There are enough managers who still royally screw up the "get people", "build the team" and "adjust specs" jobs, to warrant a book on the subject. There are a fair few out there already and I haven't read this one, but if Lister's previous work is anything to go by it might be a worthwhile read.
I tend to agree with you there, but you can be a bit more creative than either doing nothing to socialise or saying "we *are* having drinks this Friday afternoon". A manager can certainly make a difference in how a team bonds, and for those managers I have three magic words: "during office hours". Take the team out for a nice 3 Martini lunch, or an afternoon of paintball. The cost of doing this during work hours looks daunting on the spreadsheets, but it will generally earn itself back a few times over.
That's where the Roomba comes in handy. It does an excellent job of dealing with cat hair on carpet, about as well as my Miele manual vacuum. I set it off twice a week to keep the place looking tidy. I do have the "advantage" of living in a smallish 3 room apartment so a single Roomba does me fine.
The cats don't mind the Roomba too much. One of them will just move to another room. The other will stay in the room, studiously ignoring the Roomba until it crosses her path, then she'll step out of the way giving the poor Roomba an annoyed, disdainful look.
Modded "funny", but you have a point. I see a lot of things in this review about managing IT work, and that includes an overload of assignments, pointy-haired bosses, and idiot customers. Is the management of geeks in such a work environment so different from managing other kinds of people in a similar environment? I don't have that much experience with managing geeks, but I have not found it hard because they were geeks.
Spam is highly annoying if you pull up your inbox every time your computer goes 'ping' and the little envelope appears in the tool tray. However if you follow the tips in the article and sit down every hour, 2 hours, day (whatever works for you) to process everything in your inbox in one go, spam takes just seconds to deal with. 99% can be identified from the subject line and/or sender, just highlight the lot and hit del. It's still annoying, but you won't waste much time dealing with it.
Perhaps the article is mr. McNamara's poor attempt at humour, but most of those 12 points are actually very good suggestions to help manage your email... If you're stressed because you get too many items in your inbox (or more probably, if you think you're getting too many mails), they'll help a lot. Perhaps they're not so good for overcoming an actual addiction though. For that, step 1 and some discipline is enough.
Most of these tips come from Getting things done, which I can highly recommend if you're stressed out because you feel you have more work than you can manage. It worked wonders for me!
It's not just the delays... the guys in those tiny, myriad departments are too far removed from the actual end product (running a useful bit of software). They are not helping their "clients" bring their projects to a succesful close like they used to; they are instead only concerned with their own little SLA's, metrics and procedures. All this leads to non-delivery or delays, especially since they all have plenty of other departments to blame the delays on. Funny, but personally I have never seen any department in any business that was allowed to operate in such a manner, where the employees would not scream "we cannot work this way" after trying it for a few weeks after which a hasty reorganisation put things back into a saner structure. No dept, except IT, where apparently delays are accepted and expected.
"If you don't deliver, I'll go somewhere else." Life works like this in most departments, except where a department is more or less unavoidable. And now the end users are finding that the IT dept is no longer as unavoidable as it used to be. Good for them. But while a CIO would do well to consider how to allow end users more leeway in a responsible manner, he should worry a lot more about why users are turning away from his department as soon as they get the chance.
2) there's no way that under the Dutch tax system a higher gross pay results in less net income. There used to be one threshold where that effect occurred: when you had to switch from the state health insurance to private insurance because of a pay rise, but these days it's all one insurance.
With that said.... $25000 would definitely put this software consultant in debt. But for a trip into space I'd still be able to come up with the money.
A more interesting development for greenhouses is the heat exchanger. Greenhouses need tremendous amounts of heat in winter, and need to be cooled in summer. A few companies started experimenting with a system using water stored deep underground for cooling in summer and heating in winter. The results are encouraging; very little additional heating or cooling is needed in the test setups, and with some extra effort and equipment, the thing can even be used to generate electricity.
The "Wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet" protesters has been manouevred into a corner by the industry and the state. The group's principal argument has always been this:
"Voting machines (without a paper trail) make it impossible to verify the fairness of an election"
In addition, they have gone to show how election results could be manipulated, and how cast votes could be read from outside the polling station. The protesters have had a lot of success getting a number of machines removed from the elections, and they have certainly managed to put the issue onto the political agenda and the public debates. However, with all this media coverage, they are failing to state, re-state and re-re-state their principle argument: that there is a fundamental problem with using voting machines. I have never heard one of their spokespersons state that fixing these small problems with the computers is not enough, and is basically a side-issue. The machine's proponents have taken this opportunity to turn the fundamental problem into a side-issue.
The press, politicians (who want to use voting machines) and the voting machine manufacturers jumped on the issue, stating: "You are right, there's an issue with certain machines but we'll get it fixed". When the machines get fixed, the protest group's role will have been played out. Any subsequent complaints about the fundamental issues with voting machines will be dismissed by the public as whining from a group who are just looking for any excuse to go on protesting.
I don't think the iPhone is going to flop because of its closed-ness. It's neat that I can install all manner of junk on my Windows Mobile device, but the main reason to do so is to replace the standard software because it is poorly designed. If Apple can deliver a phone / iPod / PDA device that "just works" and has a good user interface, I could live without the ability to add or replace software on it, And I suspect that there are many consumers like me, who do not want a hackable mini-computer.
What might kill the phone is its price and lack of features. No GPS, no G3, poor battery life, and a camera with yesterday's specs; so much for being 5 years ahead, Steve. It looks cool, but I'm not paying around $500 for a pretty case and a slick user interface, when my current WM5 phone (with GPS) costs $150 on a cheap 2 year plan.