I like to carry a laptop or subnotebook in my hands while I walk and work with it, and that's what I did last time I went to a zoo park: Writing code while lemurs and rabbits were jumping all around me (but you have to take care as lemurs sometimes have the tendency to jump on your head!). I had fun playing with the lemurs AND more fun writing code. The last thing I want is a PDA police telling me how to have fun, and if they came to me I'd tell them it's not a PDA:)
There are many ways to test people, some tests work others do not. Automated tests in the style of a questionnaire are worthless (however, even this is better than demanding a degree and randomly asking irrelevant questions in interviews). The best way to test is to have the associate perform as they would in their daily work, ie have them actually do some work, either for a virtual project or even a real one. In their daily work, programmers don't remember everything by heart, they look up bits of information in reference manuals and online. So, I see no reason to demand a wanna-be employee or associate to know anything by heart. The way to test a programmer is very simple: just sit them on an Internet-connected PC, give them a few reference manuals, and ask them to write an application or other bits of code which you know they cannot copy from the Internet. For example, make them aware of a few bugs in a free/open-source program and ask them to fix the bugs in front of you (this has the added benefit of ensuring a new source of bug fixes for open source projects!). They may not be familiar with the source code, but this is good for the test because the programmer won't be familiar with your source code either, so you need to measure their ability to quickly grasp unfamiliar code quickly. From the moment you find that a candidate can really produce useful work, and you think they can fit in your team, there is no reason to demand degrees or even years of experience. Also note, that when I'm talking about autodidacts I talk about above-average people with real talent, ie hackers (not crackers!), and many times this kind of people find university and formal examinations extremely boring so it is likely that many of the best hackers around have no formal qualifications, but it is exactly this pool of people that every software employer should seek to work with (if you can offer them a suitable work environment, of course, for example wanting to hire hackers and demanding them to work in a hierarchical bureaucracy makes no sense, companies wanting to reap the benefits of working with real hackers instead of talentless degree holders with no real interest in programming should have an open work environment or embrace telecommuting).
They do have a right to track me while being *inside* their shop, but not outside in the street or nearby shops, and also they do not have the right to use my tracking data for financial or marketing benefit without paying me.
A shortage in degree holders does not imply a shortage in people able to contribute in scientific or engineering teams. I bet there are many autodidacts and amateurs around with no degree, but who have all or most of the knowledge necessary to undertake scientific or engineering work, or in many cases they may even possess more knowledge than the degree holders. Perhaps a shortage in degree holders will force lazy companies to start thinking of more effective ways of hiring talent. I think employers should stop taking pieces of paper seriously and start actually testing the real skills of wanna-be employees or associates. Prospective members of staff should be *tested* instead of being hired solely on them possessing stupid pieces of papers and answering stupid irrelevant questions during interviews. If you want to hire a programmer, have the candidate actually write down a program instead of asking for a piece of paper. If a candidate can program, there is no need for the paper (except if your clients demand degree-holding staff or if you need degree holders for marketing purposes). Some employers think degrees equip candidates with skills necessary to survive in a bureaucracy, but that's not true because school already provides such skills, like meeting deadlines etc, and in any way you can always get rid of unproductive employees easily (except if you are incorporated in a socialist or European country, where employment at will is seen as too radical).
Everyone thinks of this story in terms of privacy but no one thinks of it in financial terms: My shop usage data have great financial value (otherwise the shops wouldn't pay to install surveillance systems) and the shop's surveillance is involuntary - I am not given a choice whether to allow them track me or not, except if I avoid transmitting wireless signals while near their shop. As the data collection is not voluntary and my shop usage data have financial value, I demand payment from shops using this system. I want a share of my shop usage data's financial value.
Your organisation appears to adhere to a "shared information repository" culture. Email was not designed with this culture in mind. You use the wrong tool for the wrong purpose. With email, every person and/or every role within the organisation should have a unique email address (eg john@example.com or sales@example.com, the second being just a forwarding address). If more than any person (save for the admin) has access to someone else's email then the system is broken.
Wikis can fit in your culture quite well. Essentially a wiki is a repository of information divided in pages that can be accessed and edited by anyone. Certain wiki packages also allow you to control who can edit which pages (DokuWiki has ACL support, MediaWiki also has some restriction features).
So what I suggest is to keep emails strictly tied to specific persons or roles, and use an internal wiki for coordinating your work. If you want to share an email with a colleague just forward it. If you need to share an email with everyone, just copy it into the wiki (or set up a system where forwarding the email to a specific address will have it posted on the wiki automatically).
In short, use email for communicating with a specific individual, and use the wiki for communicating with the whole team.
Disclaimer: As a consultant I set up wiki systems for enterprises (albeit for the moment I am nearly fully busy with other projects).
I'm an independent developer too and I prefer widescreen both for coding and reading because it allows me to put two or three windows in X side by side. Even in text mode, widescreen means I can write and see very long lines without wrapping or horixontal scrolling (for the same reason I prefer widescreens for reading logs as I hate wrapped lines, and I can even see two logs at the same time on a single monitor). In graphics mode, widescreen allows me to put all the icons I need on a single toolbar, and still have part of the screen devoted to instant communication with clients, documentation, RSS, and other tasks. When widescreen first appeared in laptops I also was a bit critical of it, but when I realised that multitasking and prevention of horizontal scrolling is more important than vertical space, I became enthusiastic about them and now all my laptops and my desktop screens are widescreen. Since converting to widescreen, my productivity has increased.
Smart experts go on to become self-employed, those who suck a little become employees with better employers, and those who suck big time remain loyal to their first employer and after some years of service they are promoted to management. It is not a surprise that the balance sheet then goes downwards.
Specialist work cannot be trusted to employees as they are more likely technology newbies rather than experts. Companies that focus on hiring the best employees won't find any, resulting in them being filled with non-professional incompetent drones (and if your company is in the EU, you can't easily get rid of them). So, managers must stop thinking in lines of finding talent for hire (as employees) and begin looking for meaningful business-to-business relationships with professional consultants.
the fact that most employers in said industry want a college degree?
I suspect that in many cases one of the reasons they require it must be for limiting the social mobility of those who cannot afford one, ie blacks with no wealth.
I work a lot with laptops outdoors, and I have laptops with both glare and matte screens. My finding is that glare and matte are different things and one does not replace the other. Glare is good when you go outdoors in a sunny day, as the screen is still readable while matte is impossible to read because of the light. Matte, on the other hand, has better colour reproduction than glare (even compared to expensive glare models), so when you have to work on something which is colour-critical, by all means prefer a matte screen. So, if you buy lots of laptops, buy both glares and mattes as they can do different things. If you want to buy just one laptop, touch, the choice should be guided by whether you work outdoors a lot or not: If you go outside, you may find the glare screen readable under conditions which would render any matte screen unreadable. Take care, though, as if your work environment is one where you are not able to change the viewing angle or position of your laptop screen then the glare option may yield difficulties.
Widescreens are good for two things: movies and (some) games. They're no good for web browsing or viewing documents
I actually have found 16:10 or 16:9 widescreen to be better than 4:3 or 5:4 for both Web browsing and viewing documents, especially when you multi-task with lots of windows on the screen: One window goes to the right, the other window to the left, or you can have three windows with one in the middle. But even when you don't multi-task, wide screens are still better because they ensure that you will never have to scroll horizontally, which is much more annoying than vertical scrolling. Even for GNU/Linux text terminal work, wide screens are better because they allow more text to be read without changing lines. Some people, however, may have difficulty reading long lines and for them it may be advisable to not use maximised windows.
It has to be said, however, that a display of the same vertical inch size isn't the same between 4:3, 5:4, 16:9, or 16:10 models: You must compare resolutions, not inches. So, if your 4:3 screen is 1024x768, what you need is a wide screen with at least 768 pixels on the vertical dimension. Generally this means that for getting the same vertical dimension in wide screens compared to your square display, you have to look for much higher inch sizes, which sometimes may be difficult to find or too pricey.
In 99% of the cases, professors do not teach anything original or new in the class. Whatever they say is usually already included in scientific papers or books. When taking lecture notes you do not need to record everything the professor says, you only need to capture their references to concepts, ideas, discoveries, research, studies, or other identifiable things so that you can know what your professor wants you to know. You then just open your books or search the academic literature and learn what you need to know (and at a much higher level than your classmates, I would say). For example, if during the lecture the professor refers to the OSI model, you write down in your notes "OSI" and then you open Andrew S. Tanenbaum's "Computer Networks" book at your home and find the relevant pages either by memory (if you had previously read the whole book) or the index (under the term OSI, it's actually pages 37-48 in the 4th edition). As simple as that!
First, computer and software experts are professionals and not "staff" or "workers" (as long as they know what they are doing). The best way to please a professional is to let them work at home or at their office and carry the work in any way they want at any time they want (as long as this is possible depending on the nature of the work). However, working as an employee means you have to go to a specific place for no apparent reason (teleworking could work just as well) and do the work according to rules prescribed by the employer rather than you - the professional (even though the work could be done more efficiently if you were allowed to use the tools of your choice: for example it's just silly to see employers allowing only MSIE on their PCs for no reason when there are better browsers around). It's just plain impossible to be happy as an employee unless you have no other option. It's no surprise to me that the majority of high-calibre professionals (and natural-born entrepreneurs) become consultants and start their own company, never to return to the job market again (just like what I did), if they ever passed from it in the first place. With this in mind, it can be understood that for a company to succeed it should prefer to work with consultants in long-term projects rather than with employees. Simply put, the pool of people who send CVs asking to become employees does not have the same quality as the pool of people who accept contracts as freelance consultants or independent businesses. In the eyes of a manager the consultants may seem expensive, but in reality they cost less than employees when you take into account the greater quality of the resulting work and all the complexity and inflexibility of hiring and firing employees (even for at-will employment the employer may be held liable for wrongful dismissal or discrimination - but companies working with independents do not have such risks): Accounted for the long-term, companies primarily working with independent professionals end up creating more value for their customers and thus able to extract greater profits from their transactions.
For my standards, Wikipedia is way too much centralised and easy to censor. There is a central not-for-profit foundation and a master database. That's wrong. There should be absolutely no organisation and the database should be replaced by a P2P-like system. I especially pay attention to the need to have no identifiable legal entity associated with Wikipedia. Some might say an organisation is needed to handle donations and payments for servers. I don't believe that, a community of people sharing a common culture can do the same much more efficiently. Centralisation creates targets for attack by enemies.
the EU Parliament does have huge influence in the G8
EU is controlled by two big parties: the people and the governments. The people are represented in Europarl (European Parliament). The governments of European Union members are represented in the European Commission. The people get to vote for Europarl, but not for the Commission, albeit people can vote for their national governments which later decide who will get into the Commission (but not the Europarl, which is elected by the people). In practice, the Commission has more political power than the Europarl. This is called a democratic deficit in the EU. Europarl doesn't have so much real political power in the EU itself, so I don't think it has much power in G8 either. If you think about it, G8 is a club of governments, not a club of their subjects, so I would expect Europarl's views to have less weight in G8 meetings.
That's why we have to focus on freedom as RMS teaches. If the only reason we use GNU is for the technology or nerdiness, at some point someone working against the community will release a product which will encompass the various technical advantages of it, and at that point many of those who use GNU merely for the technology will find themselves enslaved to proprietary software again. We should use GNU because we want to be free, not only for its superior technology. By focusing on freedom, we make sure that no one will ever be able to attack our community.
Closed source software should have never existed. It's a mentality of the past, before people had the Internet and the possibilities to collaborate so efficiently through it. Not only that, but closed source software also harms the market for free software.
The best tech to take with you is a homebuilt mod (it's not that difficult to make) to let you run your PDA, phone, camera, or whatever using standard AA batteries that can be bought at any kiosk or supermarket. Trust me, when you travel, even if you carry 4-5 or more batteries for each device with you, at some point you will find yourself with no power for your device and no power socket to recharge it.
Bah. The correct way to recruit, for any position not just CIOs, is to look around and identify top talent, then *invite* them to your company. Posting an ad and then trying to decipher resumes is really not an intelligent way to hire anyone, let alone CIOs. You should, of course, post an ad and have a brief look at resumes in case there's some talent out there who has no connections to you or is invisible, so that they have a chance to reach you. But in general, most good talent is visible in some way, so you can watch them from a distance, identify their weaknesses and strengths, and then invite them when you need them (this of course doesn't guarantee that they will come, but it is for this reason that you should always keep a list of multiple potential CIOs that you could invite rather than just 1).
As for the article... it suggests CIOs who change company too often might be bad. That's not an indicator of anything. That's not even a good heuristic. They may change employers for a great number of reasons, only some of them having even the slightest to do with their own performance, and many times the performance of a person is contingent on their environment. A resume cannot tell you anything about a person or their future performance. Academic degrees, even from top tier schools, mean nothing, and you cannot even trust references as you never know how and why a person recommends another, and basing your decisions on past employment record is not useful if you can't know what they were doing while being employed there (they could be playing chess all day thanks to them being the son of the company's president, etc).
There is only one way to know whether a person will perform well: you have a set of requirements, and the person in front of you claims they can satisfy them. The way to know rather than guess their future performance is to *test* them, in real or near-real environments.
How to test a CIO? You first have to identify what a CIO has to do within your company. Oftentimes, CIOs design processes and rules for information sharing, protection, and processing. So, if in your company you find that your CIO will likely spend their time coming up with improved processes and monitoring them, then why not get them do exactly that during the interview instead of trying to guess the unguessable from a resume or asking stupid interview questions with no meaning? One thing you could do is to have them manage a small team composed of employees in your company for 15 mins or half an hour or so, asking the wannabe CIO to devise rules that would enable the team to finish a simple virtual job quickly over the company's LAN, then simply hire the CIO who were able to make the team work faster during these 15 mins. This may cost some money, though, so you could build a computer simulation to do the same: the simulation would model some essential business processes, and the wannabe CIO would have to think of ways to let the simulated business components share information in the most effective way, then you would configure the simulator to run the policies the CIO suggested (or chosen from a multiple choice menu), and you would keep the time. Assuming the simulator was built in an intelligent way to capture the essential parameters of reality (which isn't an easy task, of course, which is why I recommend using real human teams for testing if you can spare some time), the CIO who thought of a policy that led the simulation finish faster would get hired. This doesn't even need to be done during the interview, it can be done remotely, eg over a Web-administered pre-hiring test, so you would need to invest absolutely no time and money in testing wannabe CIOs from the moment you build the test. One word of warning, though: the test must be built as to encompass emergent characteristics and complex noninear behaviours, just like real life, so that no one can predict the simulator's run time from the initial parameters.
And another word of warning: Some talent dislikes being tested too much, which is why you shouldn't ask them to be tested for more than 15-30mins at a maximum, and only once.
There's no magic pot of free money to create cool stuff
There's love, however. Love isn't a magic pot of free money, but it can help people work for free as long as they can keep themselves alive. If you love hacking, you will work on your free/opensource software pet project even if you are hungry, because it keeps you happy.
Telephone companies have been doing this for decades and getting away with it because the amount of telephone calls we make has not significantly increased, i.e. not be orders of magnitude. So their estimates for required capacity has held up. No such luck with the internet.
Banks also do it: they get deposits by clients and then keep only a small fraction of them, giving the rest away in loans and investments to generate profit. But when a rank run happens, banks find that they are unable to give clients their money back.
I have also problems with signal in certain locations. In the city it's usually besides high buildings. In other areas it's near rivers or forests (because of the altitude difference and the trees/wetness) or besides high mountains. The black spot locations aren't fixed as they change every few months. So, whenever I chat with a person over the Internet, I always tell them I'm on cellular access so that they know why I get offline and online so often. Most times a chat conversation is like:
Hi, blah blah blah
Oh sorry I was besides a hill. Are you there? ok.
blah blah blah
Oh sorry I was besides a high building. Are you there? ok
Blah blah blah
Oh sorry I was inside a tunnel. Are you there? ok
Blah blah blah
Sorry I was in the open sea far away from any nearby island with cellular towers. are you there? ok
blah blah blah
You get the picture. It sounds more dramatic than it is, though. Most people I chat with also have cellular and know how to deal with it. And the interruptions are balanced by the other huge time savings and flexibility brought by cellular access (I can work in the sea as long as the ship stays near islands with towers). It also has health benefits: When I had no cellular I had some backpain but after I started working outside or while travelling through cellular broadband (and while standing thanks to a subnotebook that supports such usage), I never had any problem again.
Slashdot Mirror
I like to carry a laptop or subnotebook in my hands while I walk and work with it, and that's what I did last time I went to a zoo park: Writing code while lemurs and rabbits were jumping all around me (but you have to take care as lemurs sometimes have the tendency to jump on your head!). I had fun playing with the lemurs AND more fun writing code. The last thing I want is a PDA police telling me how to have fun, and if they came to me I'd tell them it's not a PDA :)
There are many ways to test people, some tests work others do not. Automated tests in the style of a questionnaire are worthless (however, even this is better than demanding a degree and randomly asking irrelevant questions in interviews). The best way to test is to have the associate perform as they would in their daily work, ie have them actually do some work, either for a virtual project or even a real one. In their daily work, programmers don't remember everything by heart, they look up bits of information in reference manuals and online. So, I see no reason to demand a wanna-be employee or associate to know anything by heart. The way to test a programmer is very simple: just sit them on an Internet-connected PC, give them a few reference manuals, and ask them to write an application or other bits of code which you know they cannot copy from the Internet. For example, make them aware of a few bugs in a free/open-source program and ask them to fix the bugs in front of you (this has the added benefit of ensuring a new source of bug fixes for open source projects!). They may not be familiar with the source code, but this is good for the test because the programmer won't be familiar with your source code either, so you need to measure their ability to quickly grasp unfamiliar code quickly. From the moment you find that a candidate can really produce useful work, and you think they can fit in your team, there is no reason to demand degrees or even years of experience. Also note, that when I'm talking about autodidacts I talk about above-average people with real talent, ie hackers (not crackers!), and many times this kind of people find university and formal examinations extremely boring so it is likely that many of the best hackers around have no formal qualifications, but it is exactly this pool of people that every software employer should seek to work with (if you can offer them a suitable work environment, of course, for example wanting to hire hackers and demanding them to work in a hierarchical bureaucracy makes no sense, companies wanting to reap the benefits of working with real hackers instead of talentless degree holders with no real interest in programming should have an open work environment or embrace telecommuting).
What you need is RONJA, a free space optics link, with the technology being under your control (open source).
Now if the first neutrino message we get contains the word CULT, the aliens will need to face the Public Order Act.
They do have a right to track me while being *inside* their shop, but not outside in the street or nearby shops, and also they do not have the right to use my tracking data for financial or marketing benefit without paying me.
A shortage in degree holders does not imply a shortage in people able to contribute in scientific or engineering teams. I bet there are many autodidacts and amateurs around with no degree, but who have all or most of the knowledge necessary to undertake scientific or engineering work, or in many cases they may even possess more knowledge than the degree holders. Perhaps a shortage in degree holders will force lazy companies to start thinking of more effective ways of hiring talent. I think employers should stop taking pieces of paper seriously and start actually testing the real skills of wanna-be employees or associates. Prospective members of staff should be *tested* instead of being hired solely on them possessing stupid pieces of papers and answering stupid irrelevant questions during interviews. If you want to hire a programmer, have the candidate actually write down a program instead of asking for a piece of paper. If a candidate can program, there is no need for the paper (except if your clients demand degree-holding staff or if you need degree holders for marketing purposes). Some employers think degrees equip candidates with skills necessary to survive in a bureaucracy, but that's not true because school already provides such skills, like meeting deadlines etc, and in any way you can always get rid of unproductive employees easily (except if you are incorporated in a socialist or European country, where employment at will is seen as too radical).
Everyone thinks of this story in terms of privacy but no one thinks of it in financial terms: My shop usage data have great financial value (otherwise the shops wouldn't pay to install surveillance systems) and the shop's surveillance is involuntary - I am not given a choice whether to allow them track me or not, except if I avoid transmitting wireless signals while near their shop. As the data collection is not voluntary and my shop usage data have financial value, I demand payment from shops using this system. I want a share of my shop usage data's financial value.
Use a wiki.
Your organisation appears to adhere to a "shared information repository" culture. Email was not designed with this culture in mind. You use the wrong tool for the wrong purpose. With email, every person and/or every role within the organisation should have a unique email address (eg john@example.com or sales@example.com, the second being just a forwarding address). If more than any person (save for the admin) has access to someone else's email then the system is broken.
Wikis can fit in your culture quite well. Essentially a wiki is a repository of information divided in pages that can be accessed and edited by anyone. Certain wiki packages also allow you to control who can edit which pages (DokuWiki has ACL support, MediaWiki also has some restriction features).
So what I suggest is to keep emails strictly tied to specific persons or roles, and use an internal wiki for coordinating your work. If you want to share an email with a colleague just forward it. If you need to share an email with everyone, just copy it into the wiki (or set up a system where forwarding the email to a specific address will have it posted on the wiki automatically).
In short, use email for communicating with a specific individual, and use the wiki for communicating with the whole team.
Disclaimer: As a consultant I set up wiki systems for enterprises (albeit for the moment I am nearly fully busy with other projects).
I'm an independent developer too and I prefer widescreen both for coding and reading because it allows me to put two or three windows in X side by side. Even in text mode, widescreen means I can write and see very long lines without wrapping or horixontal scrolling (for the same reason I prefer widescreens for reading logs as I hate wrapped lines, and I can even see two logs at the same time on a single monitor). In graphics mode, widescreen allows me to put all the icons I need on a single toolbar, and still have part of the screen devoted to instant communication with clients, documentation, RSS, and other tasks. When widescreen first appeared in laptops I also was a bit critical of it, but when I realised that multitasking and prevention of horizontal scrolling is more important than vertical space, I became enthusiastic about them and now all my laptops and my desktop screens are widescreen. Since converting to widescreen, my productivity has increased.
Smart experts go on to become self-employed, those who suck a little become employees with better employers, and those who suck big time remain loyal to their first employer and after some years of service they are promoted to management. It is not a surprise that the balance sheet then goes downwards.
Specialist work cannot be trusted to employees as they are more likely technology newbies rather than experts. Companies that focus on hiring the best employees won't find any, resulting in them being filled with non-professional incompetent drones (and if your company is in the EU, you can't easily get rid of them). So, managers must stop thinking in lines of finding talent for hire (as employees) and begin looking for meaningful business-to-business relationships with professional consultants.
(disclaimer: I am such a man)
I suspect that in many cases one of the reasons they require it must be for limiting the social mobility of those who cannot afford one, ie blacks with no wealth.
I work a lot with laptops outdoors, and I have laptops with both glare and matte screens. My finding is that glare and matte are different things and one does not replace the other. Glare is good when you go outdoors in a sunny day, as the screen is still readable while matte is impossible to read because of the light. Matte, on the other hand, has better colour reproduction than glare (even compared to expensive glare models), so when you have to work on something which is colour-critical, by all means prefer a matte screen. So, if you buy lots of laptops, buy both glares and mattes as they can do different things. If you want to buy just one laptop, touch, the choice should be guided by whether you work outdoors a lot or not: If you go outside, you may find the glare screen readable under conditions which would render any matte screen unreadable. Take care, though, as if your work environment is one where you are not able to change the viewing angle or position of your laptop screen then the glare option may yield difficulties.
I actually have found 16:10 or 16:9 widescreen to be better than 4:3 or 5:4 for both Web browsing and viewing documents, especially when you multi-task with lots of windows on the screen: One window goes to the right, the other window to the left, or you can have three windows with one in the middle. But even when you don't multi-task, wide screens are still better because they ensure that you will never have to scroll horizontally, which is much more annoying than vertical scrolling. Even for GNU/Linux text terminal work, wide screens are better because they allow more text to be read without changing lines. Some people, however, may have difficulty reading long lines and for them it may be advisable to not use maximised windows.
It has to be said, however, that a display of the same vertical inch size isn't the same between 4:3, 5:4, 16:9, or 16:10 models: You must compare resolutions, not inches. So, if your 4:3 screen is 1024x768, what you need is a wide screen with at least 768 pixels on the vertical dimension. Generally this means that for getting the same vertical dimension in wide screens compared to your square display, you have to look for much higher inch sizes, which sometimes may be difficult to find or too pricey.
In 99% of the cases, professors do not teach anything original or new in the class. Whatever they say is usually already included in scientific papers or books. When taking lecture notes you do not need to record everything the professor says, you only need to capture their references to concepts, ideas, discoveries, research, studies, or other identifiable things so that you can know what your professor wants you to know. You then just open your books or search the academic literature and learn what you need to know (and at a much higher level than your classmates, I would say). For example, if during the lecture the professor refers to the OSI model, you write down in your notes "OSI" and then you open Andrew S. Tanenbaum's "Computer Networks" book at your home and find the relevant pages either by memory (if you had previously read the whole book) or the index (under the term OSI, it's actually pages 37-48 in the 4th edition). As simple as that!
First, computer and software experts are professionals and not "staff" or "workers" (as long as they know what they are doing). The best way to please a professional is to let them work at home or at their office and carry the work in any way they want at any time they want (as long as this is possible depending on the nature of the work). However, working as an employee means you have to go to a specific place for no apparent reason (teleworking could work just as well) and do the work according to rules prescribed by the employer rather than you - the professional (even though the work could be done more efficiently if you were allowed to use the tools of your choice: for example it's just silly to see employers allowing only MSIE on their PCs for no reason when there are better browsers around). It's just plain impossible to be happy as an employee unless you have no other option. It's no surprise to me that the majority of high-calibre professionals (and natural-born entrepreneurs) become consultants and start their own company, never to return to the job market again (just like what I did), if they ever passed from it in the first place. With this in mind, it can be understood that for a company to succeed it should prefer to work with consultants in long-term projects rather than with employees. Simply put, the pool of people who send CVs asking to become employees does not have the same quality as the pool of people who accept contracts as freelance consultants or independent businesses. In the eyes of a manager the consultants may seem expensive, but in reality they cost less than employees when you take into account the greater quality of the resulting work and all the complexity and inflexibility of hiring and firing employees (even for at-will employment the employer may be held liable for wrongful dismissal or discrimination - but companies working with independents do not have such risks): Accounted for the long-term, companies primarily working with independent professionals end up creating more value for their customers and thus able to extract greater profits from their transactions.
For my standards, Wikipedia is way too much centralised and easy to censor. There is a central not-for-profit foundation and a master database. That's wrong. There should be absolutely no organisation and the database should be replaced by a P2P-like system. I especially pay attention to the need to have no identifiable legal entity associated with Wikipedia. Some might say an organisation is needed to handle donations and payments for servers. I don't believe that, a community of people sharing a common culture can do the same much more efficiently. Centralisation creates targets for attack by enemies.
EU is controlled by two big parties: the people and the governments. The people are represented in Europarl (European Parliament). The governments of European Union members are represented in the European Commission. The people get to vote for Europarl, but not for the Commission, albeit people can vote for their national governments which later decide who will get into the Commission (but not the Europarl, which is elected by the people). In practice, the Commission has more political power than the Europarl. This is called a democratic deficit in the EU. Europarl doesn't have so much real political power in the EU itself, so I don't think it has much power in G8 either. If you think about it, G8 is a club of governments, not a club of their subjects, so I would expect Europarl's views to have less weight in G8 meetings.
That's why we have to focus on freedom as RMS teaches. If the only reason we use GNU is for the technology or nerdiness, at some point someone working against the community will release a product which will encompass the various technical advantages of it, and at that point many of those who use GNU merely for the technology will find themselves enslaved to proprietary software again. We should use GNU because we want to be free, not only for its superior technology. By focusing on freedom, we make sure that no one will ever be able to attack our community.
Closed source software should have never existed. It's a mentality of the past, before people had the Internet and the possibilities to collaborate so efficiently through it. Not only that, but closed source software also harms the market for free software.
So we need a Tivo for ads!
The best tech to take with you is a homebuilt mod (it's not that difficult to make) to let you run your PDA, phone, camera, or whatever using standard AA batteries that can be bought at any kiosk or supermarket. Trust me, when you travel, even if you carry 4-5 or more batteries for each device with you, at some point you will find yourself with no power for your device and no power socket to recharge it.
Bah. The correct way to recruit, for any position not just CIOs, is to look around and identify top talent, then *invite* them to your company. Posting an ad and then trying to decipher resumes is really not an intelligent way to hire anyone, let alone CIOs. You should, of course, post an ad and have a brief look at resumes in case there's some talent out there who has no connections to you or is invisible, so that they have a chance to reach you. But in general, most good talent is visible in some way, so you can watch them from a distance, identify their weaknesses and strengths, and then invite them when you need them (this of course doesn't guarantee that they will come, but it is for this reason that you should always keep a list of multiple potential CIOs that you could invite rather than just 1).
As for the article... it suggests CIOs who change company too often might be bad. That's not an indicator of anything. That's not even a good heuristic. They may change employers for a great number of reasons, only some of them having even the slightest to do with their own performance, and many times the performance of a person is contingent on their environment. A resume cannot tell you anything about a person or their future performance. Academic degrees, even from top tier schools, mean nothing, and you cannot even trust references as you never know how and why a person recommends another, and basing your decisions on past employment record is not useful if you can't know what they were doing while being employed there (they could be playing chess all day thanks to them being the son of the company's president, etc).
There is only one way to know whether a person will perform well: you have a set of requirements, and the person in front of you claims they can satisfy them. The way to know rather than guess their future performance is to *test* them, in real or near-real environments.
How to test a CIO? You first have to identify what a CIO has to do within your company. Oftentimes, CIOs design processes and rules for information sharing, protection, and processing. So, if in your company you find that your CIO will likely spend their time coming up with improved processes and monitoring them, then why not get them do exactly that during the interview instead of trying to guess the unguessable from a resume or asking stupid interview questions with no meaning? One thing you could do is to have them manage a small team composed of employees in your company for 15 mins or half an hour or so, asking the wannabe CIO to devise rules that would enable the team to finish a simple virtual job quickly over the company's LAN, then simply hire the CIO who were able to make the team work faster during these 15 mins. This may cost some money, though, so you could build a computer simulation to do the same: the simulation would model some essential business processes, and the wannabe CIO would have to think of ways to let the simulated business components share information in the most effective way, then you would configure the simulator to run the policies the CIO suggested (or chosen from a multiple choice menu), and you would keep the time. Assuming the simulator was built in an intelligent way to capture the essential parameters of reality (which isn't an easy task, of course, which is why I recommend using real human teams for testing if you can spare some time), the CIO who thought of a policy that led the simulation finish faster would get hired. This doesn't even need to be done during the interview, it can be done remotely, eg over a Web-administered pre-hiring test, so you would need to invest absolutely no time and money in testing wannabe CIOs from the moment you build the test. One word of warning, though: the test must be built as to encompass emergent characteristics and complex noninear behaviours, just like real life, so that no one can predict the simulator's run time from the initial parameters.
And another word of warning: Some talent dislikes being tested too much, which is why you shouldn't ask them to be tested for more than 15-30mins at a maximum, and only once.
There's love, however. Love isn't a magic pot of free money, but it can help people work for free as long as they can keep themselves alive. If you love hacking, you will work on your free/opensource software pet project even if you are hungry, because it keeps you happy.
Banks also do it: they get deposits by clients and then keep only a small fraction of them, giving the rest away in loans and investments to generate profit. But when a rank run happens, banks find that they are unable to give clients their money back.
I have also problems with signal in certain locations. In the city it's usually besides high buildings. In other areas it's near rivers or forests (because of the altitude difference and the trees/wetness) or besides high mountains. The black spot locations aren't fixed as they change every few months. So, whenever I chat with a person over the Internet, I always tell them I'm on cellular access so that they know why I get offline and online so often. Most times a chat conversation is like:
You get the picture. It sounds more dramatic than it is, though. Most people I chat with also have cellular and know how to deal with it. And the interruptions are balanced by the other huge time savings and flexibility brought by cellular access (I can work in the sea as long as the ship stays near islands with towers). It also has health benefits: When I had no cellular I had some backpain but after I started working outside or while travelling through cellular broadband (and while standing thanks to a subnotebook that supports such usage), I never had any problem again.