Probably true, for the map is not the territory. Except for rather extreme cases where the map is excessively and probably uselessly large, that is. (Hmm... this is the digital era. Perhaps I should remove my foot from the gunsight reticle? There's probably more information on me than there is in me, by now.)
Sorry, some of this will sound US-centric, cuz I am.....I'm pretty sure these concepts apply to other markets too....lemme know.)... Haven't you noticed that people in general seem afflicted with that "love of cellphone"?
As the PHB in Dilbert once said, "I want hourly reports on why we're behind schedule!"
More aphorisms:
o The way to herd cats is to put them in the vicinity of mice and let them do what they do best;
o Too frequent demands for reports from software developers is akin to digging up a seed every day to see if it sprouted.
These are the two prime insights I have from having run teams of up to 70 developers over a career a few decades long. It ain't your usual management job, and it's not done that well remotely. You have to troll the aisles and pick up the exceptions.
But logging is good, in moderation. And throwing away resources is always bad; inefficiencies always show up and are noticed. I remember one of my programmers dragging in a rather large library just to sort a list that never exceeded a half-dozen short strings. I was less than pleased.
There seem to be a few people who don't think it should matter at all. Those aren't my kind of people. I think people should have a heart.
More to the point, isn't the law all about being fair? Without that sense of righting injustice, making things fair, it would be nothing more than a logic game involving a lot of word math. I don't think several multi-billion dollar bullying a disabled single mother on SSD is fair on emotional grounds, and I don't know anything about the US legal codes. But the emotional grounds are the basis for the law itself, kind of like having skin in the game, so I have a certain amount of trust that somebody, somewhere, wrote the human side of the equation, the feeling side, into the codes at some point. That's what you measure against, so you have some written basis and a structure from which fairness can be measured. Is this not so?
I'm actually quite fond of the taste of dandelion-flavoured morning mist condensation, thank you very much you taste-challenged, insensitive colloidal topsoil structure!
The whole point of a wiki is that it doesn't have to be organized
Very good post!
At my company (one of the major international technology SI's, population >40k peeps) we've just moved our entire culture across to a global Wiki (Confluence) with a lot of MediaWiki imports from various wikis (our company's wikis, that is) around the world.
The existing knowledge base portal just didn't quite catch on, was too bureaucratically structured and just never achieved critical mass -- behind the scenes, a lot of individual Wikis had spread up to address the content shortfall (technical people need to store and share a **lot** of detail). Interestingly it's got full backing from our global CEO who somehow managed to read the grass roots movement and it all looks pretty good from this point. Basically he went by what he believed was the right thing to do, not from some pilot study built on guessumetrics. (It's amazing what a boost to morale this approach was, too. Leaders are supposed to Do The Right Thing.)
It's been interesting to see how the people involved wanted to echo the Wikipedia culture, but from inside the corporate firewall. So we have full attribution because it's integrated with our global AD, but from that point onward it's "everybody can edit". The reason why this openness was incorporated in the project charter is (a) It works pretty well for Wikipedia, and (b) the freedom to write and amend is going to refine the quality over time because we're a large group of professionals, so the standards will start high and raise higher, and (c) this is actually a peer review process akin to the peer review you would expect from a scholarly journal or academic institution (well yes, we do believe we're that good =). The mere fact that it's easy to use and you don't need to solicit permissions to get something written means takeup has been swift and the kb is growing daily and it's reached the point where it's useful to me in putting together a solution for a bid now. Metrics? Meh -- use disk space trends or some gross metric like that. It's useful if it's useful, and it's useful.
I'd be more interested in what their database system is. I'd like to know whether to laugh (you knocked this up in MS ACCESS???) or to cry (LAMP stack MySQL) or to fear (Google BigTables) or to fly ("actually it was in an Access spreadsheet and we just exceeded 32k rows on one little bit of it and the macro couldn't handle it and my cousin who works at a bank put it together one week, and we have most of it on a Notepad file but...).
If it takes 3 seconds to install it's almost certainly battery powered.
Dunno. Probably, but not necessarily. Clamp it around a brake light cable and send coordinates whenever the person touches their brakes, when the electronics would get enough of a kick start to load a capacitor to the point where it can run the coord scan and either record it or radio it out.
By the way a lot of trucking logistics firms are employing tattletale GPS on trailers, that record such things as when and where the doors were opened (i.e within the legitimate distribution centre or the local flea market). Such things are generally not that cheap, but the one I spec'd for a bid once was solar + battery powered. So yes, it probably is battery powered. But if I designed one of these things I'd probably aim for a chrome or body-coloured one attached to the rain rail on the passenger side. They don't really have to be all that big.
It's kind of fun trying to figure out whose legal codes -- which jurisdiction -- all this free analysis and advice is coming from, but the lack of an ability to pin-point which laws, or whose police you're discussing makes it kind of useless to an outsider.
But I live in Australia and believe with many of my colleagues that speed cameras are evidence of demonic influences in state government.
Larry Niven and Steven Barnes wrote a novel on this very subject, "Achilles' Choice" - do you want a long, boring life or a short, glorious one?. Interesting and involving read. You could compete in the Olympics in one of two classes - natural, or augmented. Augmented atheletes Gold Medals offered very substantial perks. The games themselves had an intellectual component as well as a physical one, so the augmentation had to be mental as well.
...don't forget local radio stations, either. Tell them there's no RIAA affiliation, but a plug wouldn't hurt. University radio stations are tres' useful for this, public stations, anyone with a broadcast license and a shoestring budget. Record stores? Local small shops, likely. Larger record shops, you'll need good graphics and a lower wholesale price than RIAA distributors charge, which shouldn't be difficult. They like the larger margins, and graphics sell product as much as the music inside, until you reach stardom. If you're really good and comfortable about the quality of your work send a sample to one of the indie critics such as FuriousEnnui, and word will get out.
If the RIAA offer to take you on at that point, *resist the urge* until you are so established that you've reached the end of your performing career. At that point it might make sense to sell out to Sony for far more than your brand will ever be worth. (Worked for Michael Jackson, who sold to Sony for about 1 Billion at the dead end of his career. Just another way to stick it to Sony =).
Abba did this -- set themselves up with an end-to-end operation and ended up as (rumour I've heard) one of the richest private corporations in the Nordic regions.
Ok, here's what you do. You find a good lawyer (no longer a contradiction in terms, thanks to NYCL) who knows a bit about corporate law. You don't need that much. Set up a company, limited liability sort of thing, whatever your lawyer recommends that fits within your budget to register and rational expectations for growth(you can always set up a bigger one and sell up to it if you end up needing a different governance model, probably -- YMMV depending on local laws and how you grow as a band). You talk to one of the more reputable accountancy firms and ask them to take you on as a client and find out what their terms will be (run those past your lawyer before you sign anything. In fact run *everything* from that point past your lawyer, including things you may have signed in the past that you thought weren't relevant).
Then you look at distribution media. If you want to flog CD's, find a local indie recording engineer and cut a master. Then you search out reputable CD pressing firms and get them to duplicate them. They can supply full kit including jewel case and graphics if you want, your artwork or theirs (but if you can afford Hipgnosis that's cool too).
At this point you have something to sell. You can send letters (return envelope and price list) and samples out to local record stores, coffee shops, fuel stops and other niche retailers and grow your business. Find a PC or laptop among the group and record everything you do. Don't let this job fall to one of the band members, unless they're unusually focused and don't mind sacrificing the practice, rehearsal and performance time to do this. If you're doing really well, really really well, then find a manager who's a manager and not an RIAA flack and get your lawyer to cut an agreement.
All up you're out a couple thousand for all of this. You might not get a return, audiences are fickle after all. But you might reach stardom too, become the next Savage Garden / Abba / Porcupine Tree or whatever genera, and you'll need that structure to keep the money from evaporating or going to the enemy. Do NOT sign *any* agreements without paying for a lawyer to read and explain just who gets what. In the legal and accounting professions, you do not want to go cheapest route, even if you did buy your first six-string at the five-and-dime.
Screw the karma, I'll have to explain the reference. The Apple/// had serious problems, and the Macintosh wasn't on the horizon yet. IBM brought out their Personal Computer. Mike (I think it was Markkula, could be wrong (get off my lawn!)) walked around firing everybody responsible, and a fair bit of collateral damage as well (this was during the hazy Silicon Valley heyday where the industry moved very fast on things). His reason, overheard at the time -- "IBM has just brought out a competing product. The interest on their petty cash reserves is more than we bring in in a year, and you guys are trying to invent a duck quack synthesizer."
When my lady and I bought a Mac LC in Tasmania a couple of years afterward, one of the system sounds available during the demo was a lovely "Quack!". We utterly pissed ourselves laughing in the showroom. Never explained why. Those crazy Yanks...
I worked for Apple in Cupertino during the Apple ][ / Apple/// days. The transition happened then.
Woz was a genuine engineer, and in his spec all Apple ]['s were burned in over 4 days in a hot room (50 degrees C) before they were packaged and shipped to the stores. The ]['s were very well known for reliability, which along with excellent packaging (yep, not all Jobs' competence is Reality Distortion Field) very few were returned for any sort of quality issue.
The Apple/// was a slightly different issue -- there was a problem with a clock chip supplier that worked as an object lesson that you can outsource a lot of things, but responsibilty (if not actual testing) can't be one of them.
And due to pressures of IBM's release of the flawed but powerfully marketed brand-new 8086 based PCat that point, the first real competition in the business world put pressures on Apple that it hadn't encountered before, thus a decision to release what they had in bulk to gain market share and risk returns overrode the impulse to limit supply by running them through that hot room first. This was the first disjunct and marketing lesson (see Apple and "Black Friday" and "duck quack synthesizer" if you can find the reference) for a company that was learning about how to go from company to corporation in one huge lump. Apple grew from $0.5M to $0.5B in gross sales that year, in their defense, and that's a huge amount of change to absorb.
Money wasn't really a problem, learning to land the fish was.
Imagine -- if you have a job that moves dirt 1/2 ton at a time, you're fine buying a half-ton pickup to move it. You can even scale that up a few times. But if you're suddenly faced with moving a million tons of dirt, you have to find a more complex solution than simply buying a half-million trucks. Everything Apple suffered during that phase was a result of the huge success of the Apple ][. That kind of scale didn't bother IBM, but we had trouble finding places to put people and other concerns of gearing up.
No good deed goes unpunished, I see. Now if you were considered a "thought leader" (whether you wanted the appelation or not) of a country of several billion people, and you saw you were increasingly becoming the lead polluter in the world, how would you go about fixing it? Spend trillions of tax dollars directly lining contractors pockets, brutally supress the use of non-green energy, or perhaps -- just perhaps -- try to educate your populace into doing it themselves?
It's easy to slag these efforts, yes they're flawed, but dammit **something** has to be done. Get out of the road if you can't lend a hand.
I can't think of any country that would benefit more by this sort of thing. A good working template tends to become widely adopted, and they have a visible pressing need to improve their ecological impact and the good will coupled with a lack of general knowledge might find a fertile ground for this sort of thing catching on.
A friend of me says there's a pervasive attitude of "if a little is good, an enormous lot more must be better" when approaching the use of say, pesticides or other chemical intrusions into the local environment.
Classical education doesn't help this attitude much yet, but an excellent and well publicised example community might just make the difference.
Whew! For a moment there I thought we were all doomed due to exposure to unstable isotopes in the Apple packaging. Or were we talking about a time series of Mac population diminished by the number of units that fail over time?
Slashdot Mirror
And that worked exactly how well for Ross Perot?
Probably true, for the map is not the territory. Except for rather extreme cases where the map is excessively and probably uselessly large, that is. (Hmm... this is the digital era. Perhaps I should remove my foot from the gunsight reticle? There's probably more information on me than there is in me, by now.)
"Yes Daddy, it's something you know with your skin."
Sorry, some of this will sound US-centric, cuz I am.....I'm pretty sure these concepts apply to other markets too....lemme know.)... Haven't you noticed that people in general seem afflicted with that "love of cellphone"?
+1 for balanced post;
+1 for pragmatic approach;
+"Fan" for inventing the Suck Points metric.
As the PHB in Dilbert once said, "I want hourly reports on why we're behind schedule!"
More aphorisms:
o The way to herd cats is to put them in the vicinity of mice and let them do what they do best;
o Too frequent demands for reports from software developers is akin to digging up a seed every day to see if it sprouted.
These are the two prime insights I have from having run teams of up to 70 developers over a career a few decades long. It ain't your usual management job, and it's not done that well remotely. You have to troll the aisles and pick up the exceptions.
But logging is good, in moderation. And throwing away resources is always bad; inefficiencies always show up and are noticed. I remember one of my programmers dragging in a rather large library just to sort a list that never exceeded a half-dozen short strings. I was less than pleased.
There seem to be a few people who don't think it should matter at all. Those aren't my kind of people. I think people should have a heart.
More to the point, isn't the law all about being fair? Without that sense of righting injustice, making things fair, it would be nothing more than a logic game involving a lot of word math. I don't think several multi-billion dollar bullying a disabled single mother on SSD is fair on emotional grounds, and I don't know anything about the US legal codes. But the emotional grounds are the basis for the law itself, kind of like having skin in the game, so I have a certain amount of trust that somebody, somewhere, wrote the human side of the equation, the feeling side, into the codes at some point. That's what you measure against, so you have some written basis and a structure from which fairness can be measured. Is this not so?
I'm actually quite fond of the taste of dandelion-flavoured morning mist condensation, thank you very much you taste-challenged, insensitive colloidal topsoil structure!
The whole point of a wiki is that it doesn't have to be organized
Very good post!
At my company (one of the major international technology SI's, population >40k peeps) we've just moved our entire culture across to a global Wiki (Confluence) with a lot of MediaWiki imports from various wikis (our company's wikis, that is) around the world.
The existing knowledge base portal just didn't quite catch on, was too bureaucratically structured and just never achieved critical mass -- behind the scenes, a lot of individual Wikis had spread up to address the content shortfall (technical people need to store and share a **lot** of detail). Interestingly it's got full backing from our global CEO who somehow managed to read the grass roots movement and it all looks pretty good from this point. Basically he went by what he believed was the right thing to do, not from some pilot study built on guessumetrics. (It's amazing what a boost to morale this approach was, too. Leaders are supposed to Do The Right Thing.)
It's been interesting to see how the people involved wanted to echo the Wikipedia culture, but from inside the corporate firewall. So we have full attribution because it's integrated with our global AD, but from that point onward it's "everybody can edit". The reason why this openness was incorporated in the project charter is (a) It works pretty well for Wikipedia, and (b) the freedom to write and amend is going to refine the quality over time because we're a large group of professionals, so the standards will start high and raise higher, and (c) this is actually a peer review process akin to the peer review you would expect from a scholarly journal or academic institution (well yes, we do believe we're that good =). The mere fact that it's easy to use and you don't need to solicit permissions to get something written means takeup has been swift and the kb is growing daily and it's reached the point where it's useful to me in putting together a solution for a bid now. Metrics? Meh -- use disk space trends or some gross metric like that. It's useful if it's useful, and it's useful.
I'd be more interested in what their database system is. I'd like to know whether to laugh (you knocked this up in MS ACCESS???) or to cry (LAMP stack MySQL) or to fear (Google BigTables) or to fly ("actually it was in an Access spreadsheet and we just exceeded 32k rows on one little bit of it and the macro couldn't handle it and my cousin who works at a bank put it together one week, and we have most of it on a Notepad file but...).
If it takes 3 seconds to install it's almost certainly battery powered.
Dunno. Probably, but not necessarily. Clamp it around a brake light cable and send coordinates whenever the person touches their brakes, when the electronics would get enough of a kick start to load a capacitor to the point where it can run the coord scan and either record it or radio it out.
By the way a lot of trucking logistics firms are employing tattletale GPS on trailers, that record such things as when and where the doors were opened (i.e within the legitimate distribution centre or the local flea market). Such things are generally not that cheap, but the one I spec'd for a bid once was solar + battery powered. So yes, it probably is battery powered. But if I designed one of these things I'd probably aim for a chrome or body-coloured one attached to the rain rail on the passenger side. They don't really have to be all that big.
But I live in Australia and believe with many of my colleagues that speed cameras are evidence of demonic influences in state government.
To break 256-bit encryption you need about the same energy as is generated in supernova explosions.
To which the government will respond "Ok, how do we generate one of these supernova explosion things?"
Larry Niven and Steven Barnes wrote a novel on this very subject, "Achilles' Choice" - do you want a long, boring life or a short, glorious one?. Interesting and involving read. You could compete in the Olympics in one of two classes - natural, or augmented. Augmented atheletes Gold Medals offered very substantial perks. The games themselves had an intellectual component as well as a physical one, so the augmentation had to be mental as well.
If the RIAA offer to take you on at that point, *resist the urge* until you are so established that you've reached the end of your performing career. At that point it might make sense to sell out to Sony for far more than your brand will ever be worth. (Worked for Michael Jackson, who sold to Sony for about 1 Billion at the dead end of his career. Just another way to stick it to Sony =).
Anyone?, anyone?
Abba did this -- set themselves up with an end-to-end operation and ended up as (rumour I've heard) one of the richest private corporations in the Nordic regions.
Ok, here's what you do. You find a good lawyer (no longer a contradiction in terms, thanks to NYCL) who knows a bit about corporate law. You don't need that much. Set up a company, limited liability sort of thing, whatever your lawyer recommends that fits within your budget to register and rational expectations for growth(you can always set up a bigger one and sell up to it if you end up needing a different governance model, probably -- YMMV depending on local laws and how you grow as a band). You talk to one of the more reputable accountancy firms and ask them to take you on as a client and find out what their terms will be (run those past your lawyer before you sign anything. In fact run *everything* from that point past your lawyer, including things you may have signed in the past that you thought weren't relevant).
Then you look at distribution media. If you want to flog CD's, find a local indie recording engineer and cut a master. Then you search out reputable CD pressing firms and get them to duplicate them. They can supply full kit including jewel case and graphics if you want, your artwork or theirs (but if you can afford Hipgnosis that's cool too).
At this point you have something to sell. You can send letters (return envelope and price list) and samples out to local record stores, coffee shops, fuel stops and other niche retailers and grow your business. Find a PC or laptop among the group and record everything you do. Don't let this job fall to one of the band members, unless they're unusually focused and don't mind sacrificing the practice, rehearsal and performance time to do this. If you're doing really well, really really well, then find a manager who's a manager and not an RIAA flack and get your lawyer to cut an agreement.
All up you're out a couple thousand for all of this. You might not get a return, audiences are fickle after all. But you might reach stardom too, become the next Savage Garden / Abba / Porcupine Tree or whatever genera, and you'll need that structure to keep the money from evaporating or going to the enemy. Do NOT sign *any* agreements without paying for a lawyer to read and explain just who gets what. In the legal and accounting professions, you do not want to go cheapest route, even if you did buy your first six-string at the five-and-dime.
When my lady and I bought a Mac LC in Tasmania a couple of years afterward, one of the system sounds available during the demo was a lovely "Quack!". We utterly pissed ourselves laughing in the showroom. Never explained why. Those crazy Yanks...
Woz was a genuine engineer, and in his spec all Apple ]['s were burned in over 4 days in a hot room (50 degrees C) before they were packaged and shipped to the stores. The ]['s were very well known for reliability, which along with excellent packaging (yep, not all Jobs' competence is Reality Distortion Field) very few were returned for any sort of quality issue.
The Apple /// was a slightly different issue -- there was a problem with a clock chip supplier that worked as an object lesson that you can outsource a lot of things, but responsibilty (if not actual testing) can't be one of them.
And due to pressures of IBM's release of the flawed but powerfully marketed brand-new 8086 based PCat that point, the first real competition in the business world put pressures on Apple that it hadn't encountered before, thus a decision to release what they had in bulk to gain market share and risk returns overrode the impulse to limit supply by running them through that hot room first. This was the first disjunct and marketing lesson (see Apple and "Black Friday" and "duck quack synthesizer" if you can find the reference) for a company that was learning about how to go from company to corporation in one huge lump. Apple grew from $0.5M to $0.5B in gross sales that year, in their defense, and that's a huge amount of change to absorb.
Money wasn't really a problem, learning to land the fish was.
Imagine -- if you have a job that moves dirt 1/2 ton at a time, you're fine buying a half-ton pickup to move it. You can even scale that up a few times. But if you're suddenly faced with moving a million tons of dirt, you have to find a more complex solution than simply buying a half-million trucks. Everything Apple suffered during that phase was a result of the huge success of the Apple ][. That kind of scale didn't bother IBM, but we had trouble finding places to put people and other concerns of gearing up.
Voodoo (or Vodou or a couple of other spellings) is an entirely different religion.
Stay away from the Voodoo, mon.
-- Church of the Holy Darkspear Faction
...minorities, women, veterans, and disadvantaged.
Come to Australia, man -- we can't afford to waste talent like that.
Poor little Bobby Tables, copping it on the chin again http://xkcd.com/327/
Now that *is* funny. I hereby award you one Pirate Point for that.
There's an element of the fifth about that post. (Hic)
It's easy to slag these efforts, yes they're flawed, but dammit **something** has to be done. Get out of the road if you can't lend a hand.
A friend of me says there's a pervasive attitude of "if a little is good, an enormous lot more must be better" when approaching the use of say, pesticides or other chemical intrusions into the local environment.
Classical education doesn't help this attitude much yet, but an excellent and well publicised example community might just make the difference.
There is no Half Life for Mac.
Whew! For a moment there I thought we were all doomed due to exposure to unstable isotopes in the Apple packaging. Or were we talking about a time series of Mac population diminished by the number of units that fail over time?
Ooohh that's a pretty interface! What is it?
Oh. What's Cherenkov radiation?