It's amazing that no-one has used the obvious metaphor involving "deckchairs" and "The Titanic"
The root of the problem is the Novell board, and the obsession with Management By Objectives. This guarantees that only ideas and innovation come from the top, and clear opportunities for revenue growth are deliberately ignored because they do not form part of a manager's objectives.
A former manager remarked to me that every first week in a quarter was taken up by the "QBR" (Quarterly Business Review). This was where the managers tried to find excuses for not fulfilling the targets of the previous quarter, while at the same time not running the business because they're doing the QBR.
QBRs and other shibboleths of MBO including all sorts of metrics that crush innovation and longterm planning in favor of targets. This produces an extreme CYA mentality. The guy at the top therefore receives good news and not bad, and cannot correct imbalances and problems because everyone to trying to not have the finger of blame upon them.
Unless Hovsapien starts challenging that mindset, preferably by getting everyone to read W Edwards Deming, then the result will be inevitable and yet another CEO will get stabbed in the back, rather than the Novell Board actually accepting responsibility and resigning.
In case this is too highbrow for Slashdot: Novell is FUCKED.
It's always a good idea to assume that a management and development technique that works well (or not) for creating a general encyclopedia should be equally well-suited to the construction of a complex, manufactured, physical artifact. Have you ever had the following conversation at the hardware store--and if not, why not?
"This is a terrible hammer! It does an awful job installing screws!"
Then let me turn the metaphor right back to you. Just because you can hold a hammer does not mean you should be involved in the design or construction of buildings. You get experts. You check their bona fides.
But with factual information and data for some reason, any anonymous idiot's point of view will do. The funny thing is that you don't have to believe what it says, but the law of averages will produce someone who will.
And--I hate to break it to you--he was right to say so. I know of professors who will fail a student for citing any encyclopedia article in a reference, even if the information cited is factually correct.
The point was that the information in Wikipedia was wrong - they were being dinged because of that, not because they cited Wikipedia.
Incidentally, Wikipedia articles tend to be better about providing citations to primary sources; Britannica seldom does so.
You're obviously reading a different website to the one I'm reading. Not only are more sources missing (because largely they don't exist in the first place) but some of the citations are wrong or incomplete or of dubious provenance. Britannica produces reams of source citations. The worst thing of course is that an interesting article may be half finished or missing critical information which means
[This post is a stub. You can help Slashdot by completing this post]
If an aeroplane crashes, you die. If you're letting an encyclopedia have potentially life-threatening effects on you, there's something wrong with you.
You don't have to have to let it personally. You just have to be in the line of fire of someone who does.
Look, saying that "Wikipedia is bad because it contains inaccuracies and vandalism" is like saying that "the internet is dangerous because it contains phishers, pedophiles, and madmen". Both statements are true, but neither is a reason to not use the respective resource
This is a remarkable statement to equate Wikipedia with the content of the Internet. The content of the Internet is pretty uneven, but there are some excellent websites that go to great lengths to produce properly researched factual information. The fault is not the medium, the fault is in the production of content.
There are dangerous people, thieves, murderers and rapists who drive on the roads. It's still no good reason why Ford or GM should produce a car made by idiots.
So you'd like to exclude any and all encyclopedias that may be made out of date when/if the definition of "planet" is changed? How about all those written around the turn of last century which included racial reasoning for various abilities? Or the textbooks which until the last part of the 20th century claimed that Christopher Columbus was the first European to "discover" the Western Hemisphere?
No, I'd like some slashdotters to stop excusing the stink emanating from Wikipedia, by claiming that all encyclopedias smell, just some are an acquired taste.
Encyclopedias don't stay still which is why they are constantly checked and republished on a regular basis, and I'd look forward to an online encyclopedia that is updated in near Internet time, but not at the expense of historical and factual accuracy.
Here's my challenge to you: let me see you get on a wiki-aeroplane, where it's all been built by an army of non-experts from around the world, and watched over by non-engineer overseers to protect from regular vandalism by people who'd like to see people crash and burn, and hopefully by the time it leaves the runway the vandalism will be minor.
Besides Boeing and other professional aerospace companies also have a motto of
"Strive to improve, but realise that it's impossible to hit it right every last time"
Just in case you think I'm being facetious, Jimbo Wales has recently cheerfully admitted that he get 10 e-mails a week from students who complain that they got an F because they cited Wikipedia and the citation turned out to be wrong. And Jimbo says "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia"
The other remarkable thing about Slashdot is that this army of nerds who will mark down this post, would never accept a wikipedia model for writing software where anyone anywhere can write, edit, delete code at any time.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, just so long as the dictionary definition includes
"contains statements which may be false, sources which may not exist or be authoritative, figures which may not be correct, written by people who almost certainly have no expertise in the subjects written about, which contains no original research, edited by people who almost certainly do no fact-checking"
No, that's not what I said. I said that that Chinese way of business was irrational and racist. I did not say that Lenovo's decision was racist.
In any case, Lenovo have made a decision against their own interests which will backfire.
Lenovo is making its own decisions...
on
Lenovo To Shun Linux
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Anyone who has actually dealt with the New Brave Chinese Economy knows fine well that its basically irrational, and not to put to fine a point on it: racist.
So it's made it's business decision to ignore a small, growing market and go with the dominant worldwide brand. That's fine. It's made a brave corporate decision.
We'll just see some of its customer base inherited from IBM go somewhere else. Especially as its not trying to reassure its customers that it wants what its customers want.
I won't be buying Lenovo and nor will I recommend buying them to anyone else.
...for many reasons. Principally so he can lay waste to the most incompetent fucknozzles ever to wear a suit.
Internal slogan:
"Novell: The leading provider of useless managers"
Sharpen that axe Larry and call me for I have a little list....
Talking to the chief PC support guy at the University I'm consulting for, they're absolutely delighted that Vista won't ship until next year. It seems that they just don't want the hassle of yet another OS upgrade for no good reason.
It seems to be a common reaction. For some reason Microsoft have lost control of the agenda in most people's minds.
Microsoft needs to go to incremental upgrades, because these "big-bang" ones are seen as disruptive to most organizations rather than helpful.
This is Novell we're talking about, not some semi-competent software company that knows how to sell, market or capitalize on good software. Novell has a long history of fucking up, and NLD10 will be yet another failure.
Why? Because Novell always produces badly debugged half finished alpha software. Then it produces a service pack which completes the bits left hanging because it needed meet a deadline artificially set by the morons in charge.
Then it produces a second service pack to fix the problems caused by the first service pack and the original release.
Then a third service pack which starts to look good, but for real functionality you need to wait for the next version. The fourth service pack is for nerds only and usually involves some esoteric security problem that nobody cares about. The fifth service pack is usually rocksolid stable, but nobody cares because the next latest and greatest release is just around the corner, and you're already two full versions behind in the Linux kernel.
Nobody bothers after that because if you stick with Novell, your user memory is filled with patches for the things that didn't work, and someone's just discovered that Ubuntu does the same thing only miles quicker.
20 GOTO 10
Remember kids: Nobody ever got fired for dumping Novell.
The reason why goldfarming exists is simple. It's no fun doing the same repetitive things over and over just so you can gain experience points to play the same game as the rest. It's also by design made so you have to spend hours every day for months to get up to a decent level.
People don't have time for shit like that, hence goldfarming. Why was CounterStrike so popular? Because you could enter at any time, and the only criterion for whether you lived or died was teamwork and/or skill. If you were a quick learner then a few hours or days would be enough.
In WoW, quick learning and skills mean a lot less than actual time developing RSI and butt callouses playing this game. WoW may be a lovely game, but I have a full time job and a family, hence there's no way I'm going to enjoy WoW.
...and its been downhill from there. The determination to integrate MS Word with Excel, Powerpoint, Access and Outlook is the reason why MS Office 2003 is so incredibly slow and buggy.
And it's also the reason why OO is similarly slow and buggy as well. Open Office 3.0 should break away from the fat monster eating up my disk space and memory and become modular and properly programmable.
It strikes me that OO is facing a similar crisis of quality that caused MS to re-engineer Vista - beyond a certain size, programming it in bits without a narrow gateway of quality code and a stable, secure foundation is producing Open Source's version of bloatware.
Somebody further up suggested that OO become modular and the user decide what's needed and what isn't. What a revelation! The user in control of his/her environment! Isn't that the point of Linux and Open Source?
One: clouds go pretty high. The telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii are situated at ~14,000 feet. They get clouded out relatively frequently, roughly 20% of the time.
That means its still 300 days per year of viewing. That's not "relatively frequently" unless you compare it to the telescopes situated in the Atacama desert in Chile. It's above the inversion layer and so doesn't get "clouded out" that often. That's why the site is so important in astronomy.
Two: Contrails form in the atmosphere. The atmosphere moves. Therefore contrails move, and can affect locations where there aren't any flightpaths.
Yes and when the contrails move they disperse. The quicker the movement, the quicker the dispersal.
And your point is?
You didn't address the point made that the air in the lower troposphere is getting cleaner, nor that more cloudiness would act as a negative feedback on warming.
Oh and to the anonymous cowards who modded my reply down: a big FUCK YOU.
...that I'm a 3rd Dan Black belt in origami. What I can do to you will just a sheet of copier paper can make your eyes water. Remember, that a thousand paper cuts can really hurt!
Fifty years ago, we had fogs in London that persisted for weeks. Now we don't
What are the causes of this sudden problem with telescopes according this overqualified idiot?
1. Global warming/climate change (the cause of all the world's ills, apparently) which is making it cloudier...but wait! Making it cloudier will reflect more energy back into space, making it cooler. WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!
2. Cheap airflight. Apparently cheap airflight means more planes which means more contrails, which as you know persist for ages. That's why environmentalists always go first class so that they're paying for their own pollution when they reach the destination of the next conference on climate change to protest about how much fossil fuels are being used for Mr and Mrs Q. Public going to Miami for a week.
And this blocks out the light needed for ground based telescopes that are a) situated ABOVE the clouds and b) are not on flightpaths.
But hey! The BBC got another ridiculous scary story out and another PhD climbed onto the gravy train.
Slashdot Mirror
I posted this as anonymous by mistake:-
It's amazing that no-one has used the obvious metaphor involving "deckchairs" and "The Titanic"
The root of the problem is the Novell board, and the obsession with Management By Objectives. This guarantees that only ideas and innovation come from the top, and clear opportunities for revenue growth are deliberately ignored because they do not form part of a manager's objectives.
A former manager remarked to me that every first week in a quarter was taken up by the "QBR" (Quarterly Business Review). This was where the managers tried to find excuses for not fulfilling the targets of the previous quarter, while at the same time not running the business because they're doing the QBR.
QBRs and other shibboleths of MBO including all sorts of metrics that crush innovation and longterm planning in favor of targets. This produces an extreme CYA mentality. The guy at the top therefore receives good news and not bad, and cannot correct imbalances and problems because everyone to trying to not have the finger of blame upon them.
Unless Hovsapien starts challenging that mindset, preferably by getting everyone to read W Edwards Deming, then the result will be inevitable and yet another CEO will get stabbed in the back, rather than the Novell Board actually accepting responsibility and resigning.
In case this is too highbrow for Slashdot: Novell is FUCKED.
And you can tell us all where I ever said or advocated banning anything.
It's always a good idea to assume that a management and development technique that works well (or not) for creating a general encyclopedia should be equally well-suited to the construction of a complex, manufactured, physical artifact. Have you ever had the following conversation at the hardware store--and if not, why not?
"This is a terrible hammer! It does an awful job installing screws!"
Then let me turn the metaphor right back to you. Just because you can hold a hammer does not mean you should be involved in the design or construction of buildings. You get experts. You check their bona fides.
But with factual information and data for some reason, any anonymous idiot's point of view will do. The funny thing is that you don't have to believe what it says, but the law of averages will produce someone who will.
And--I hate to break it to you--he was right to say so. I know of professors who will fail a student for citing any encyclopedia article in a reference, even if the information cited is factually correct.
The point was that the information in Wikipedia was wrong - they were being dinged because of that, not because they cited Wikipedia.
Incidentally, Wikipedia articles tend to be better about providing citations to primary sources; Britannica seldom does so.
You're obviously reading a different website to the one I'm reading. Not only are more sources missing (because largely they don't exist in the first place) but some of the citations are wrong or incomplete or of dubious provenance. Britannica produces reams of source citations. The worst thing of course is that an interesting article may be half finished or missing critical information which means
[This post is a stub. You can help Slashdot by completing this post]
If an aeroplane crashes, you die.
If you're letting an encyclopedia have potentially life-threatening effects on you, there's something wrong with you.
You don't have to have to let it personally. You just have to be in the line of fire of someone who does.
Look, saying that "Wikipedia is bad because it contains inaccuracies and vandalism" is like saying that "the internet is dangerous because it contains phishers, pedophiles, and madmen". Both statements are true, but neither is a reason to not use the respective resource
This is a remarkable statement to equate Wikipedia with the content of the Internet. The content of the Internet is pretty uneven, but there are some excellent websites that go to great lengths to produce properly researched factual information. The fault is not the medium, the fault is in the production of content.
There are dangerous people, thieves, murderers and rapists who drive on the roads. It's still no good reason why Ford or GM should produce a car made by idiots.
Comparing an encyclopedia to an airplane in this manner is silly
It's a metaphor. Look it up. Preferably not in Wikipedia where it might have badgers in it.
So you'd like to exclude any and all encyclopedias that may be made out of date when/if the definition of "planet" is changed? How about all those written around the turn of last century which included racial reasoning for various abilities? Or the textbooks which until the last part of the 20th century claimed that Christopher Columbus was the first European to "discover" the Western Hemisphere?
No, I'd like some slashdotters to stop excusing the stink emanating from Wikipedia, by claiming that all encyclopedias smell, just some are an acquired taste.
Encyclopedias don't stay still which is why they are constantly checked and republished on a regular basis, and I'd look forward to an online encyclopedia that is updated in near Internet time, but not at the expense of historical and factual accuracy.
And just to show that some Slashdotters are jerks - it gets marked as flamebait with no reply.
Here's my challenge to you: let me see you get on a wiki-aeroplane, where it's all been built by an army of non-experts from around the world, and watched over by non-engineer overseers to protect from regular vandalism by people who'd like to see people crash and burn, and hopefully by the time it leaves the runway the vandalism will be minor.
Besides Boeing and other professional aerospace companies also have a motto of
"Strive to improve, but realise that it's impossible to hit it right every last time"
Just in case you think I'm being facetious, Jimbo Wales has recently cheerfully admitted that he get 10 e-mails a week from students who complain that they got an F because they cited Wikipedia and the citation turned out to be wrong. And Jimbo says "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia"
The other remarkable thing about Slashdot is that this army of nerds who will mark down this post, would never accept a wikipedia model for writing software where anyone anywhere can write, edit, delete code at any time.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, just so long as the dictionary definition includes
"contains statements which may be false, sources which may not exist or be authoritative, figures which may not be correct, written by people who almost certainly have no expertise in the subjects written about, which contains no original research, edited by people who almost certainly do no fact-checking"
...it smells of lawyers and broken contracts. Will Novell's SuSE Desktop really be that groundbreaking?
I think not.
WTF does 2.5 times more powerful mean? Can they quantify "power" of a graphics processor to one place of decimals?
No, that's not what I said. I said that that Chinese way of business was irrational and racist. I did not say that Lenovo's decision was racist.
In any case, Lenovo have made a decision against their own interests which will backfire.
Anyone who has actually dealt with the New Brave Chinese Economy knows fine well that its basically irrational, and not to put to fine a point on it: racist. So it's made it's business decision to ignore a small, growing market and go with the dominant worldwide brand. That's fine. It's made a brave corporate decision. We'll just see some of its customer base inherited from IBM go somewhere else. Especially as its not trying to reassure its customers that it wants what its customers want. I won't be buying Lenovo and nor will I recommend buying them to anyone else.
Don't they have space for him?
They mean "hundreds of miles" laterally not depth.
...for many reasons. Principally so he can lay waste to the most incompetent fucknozzles ever to wear a suit. Internal slogan: "Novell: The leading provider of useless managers" Sharpen that axe Larry and call me for I have a little list....
Talking to the chief PC support guy at the University I'm consulting for, they're absolutely delighted that Vista won't ship until next year. It seems that they just don't want the hassle of yet another OS upgrade for no good reason.
It seems to be a common reaction. For some reason Microsoft have lost control of the agenda in most people's minds.
Microsoft needs to go to incremental upgrades, because these "big-bang" ones are seen as disruptive to most organizations rather than helpful.
The answer is NO.
This is Novell we're talking about, not some semi-competent software company that knows how to sell, market or capitalize on good software. Novell has a long history of fucking up, and NLD10 will be yet another failure.
Why? Because Novell always produces badly debugged half finished alpha software. Then it produces a service pack which completes the bits left hanging because it needed meet a deadline artificially set by the morons in charge.
Then it produces a second service pack to fix the problems caused by the first service pack and the original release.
Then a third service pack which starts to look good, but for real functionality you need to wait for the next version. The fourth service pack is for nerds only and usually involves some esoteric security problem that nobody cares about. The fifth service pack is usually rocksolid stable, but nobody cares because the next latest and greatest release is just around the corner, and you're already two full versions behind in the Linux kernel.
Nobody bothers after that because if you stick with Novell, your user memory is filled with patches for the things that didn't work, and someone's just discovered that Ubuntu does the same thing only miles quicker.
20 GOTO 10
Remember kids: Nobody ever got fired for dumping Novell.
The reason why goldfarming exists is simple. It's no fun doing the same repetitive things over and over just so you can gain experience points to play the same game as the rest. It's also by design made so you have to spend hours every day for months to get up to a decent level.
People don't have time for shit like that, hence goldfarming. Why was CounterStrike so popular? Because you could enter at any time, and the only criterion for whether you lived or died was teamwork and/or skill. If you were a quick learner then a few hours or days would be enough.
In WoW, quick learning and skills mean a lot less than actual time developing RSI and butt callouses playing this game. WoW may be a lovely game, but I have a full time job and a family, hence there's no way I'm going to enjoy WoW.
...and its been downhill from there. The determination to integrate MS Word with Excel, Powerpoint, Access and Outlook is the reason why MS Office 2003 is so incredibly slow and buggy.
And it's also the reason why OO is similarly slow and buggy as well. Open Office 3.0 should break away from the fat monster eating up my disk space and memory and become modular and properly programmable.
It strikes me that OO is facing a similar crisis of quality that caused MS to re-engineer Vista - beyond a certain size, programming it in bits without a narrow gateway of quality code and a stable, secure foundation is producing Open Source's version of bloatware.
Somebody further up suggested that OO become modular and the user decide what's needed and what isn't. What a revelation! The user in control of his/her environment! Isn't that the point of Linux and Open Source?
One: clouds go pretty high. The telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii are situated at ~14,000 feet. They get clouded out relatively frequently, roughly 20% of the time.
That means its still 300 days per year of viewing. That's not "relatively frequently" unless you compare it to the telescopes situated in the Atacama desert in Chile. It's above the inversion layer and so doesn't get "clouded out" that often. That's why the site is so important in astronomy.
Two: Contrails form in the atmosphere. The atmosphere moves. Therefore contrails move, and can affect locations where there aren't any flightpaths.
Yes and when the contrails move they disperse. The quicker the movement, the quicker the dispersal.
And your point is?
You didn't address the point made that the air in the lower troposphere is getting cleaner, nor that more cloudiness would act as a negative feedback on warming.
Oh and to the anonymous cowards who modded my reply down: a big FUCK YOU.
What you can't answer with facts, you mod down.
...that I'm a 3rd Dan Black belt in origami. What I can do to you will just a sheet of copier paper can make your eyes water. Remember, that a thousand paper cuts can really hurt!
...by someone who should know better.
Fifty years ago, we had fogs in London that persisted for weeks. Now we don't
What are the causes of this sudden problem with telescopes according this overqualified idiot?
1. Global warming/climate change (the cause of all the world's ills, apparently) which is making it cloudier...but wait! Making it cloudier will reflect more energy back into space, making it cooler. WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!
2. Cheap airflight. Apparently cheap airflight means more planes which means more contrails, which as you know persist for ages. That's why environmentalists always go first class so that they're paying for their own pollution when they reach the destination of the next conference on climate change to protest about how much fossil fuels are being used for Mr and Mrs Q. Public going to Miami for a week.
And this blocks out the light needed for ground based telescopes that are a) situated ABOVE the clouds and b) are not on flightpaths.
But hey! The BBC got another ridiculous scary story out and another PhD climbed onto the gravy train.
Never mind the facts, feel the sincerity.
I knew her at school. Lovely girl.
Not even Wikipedia is that stupid as to apply it to MediaWiki. We should try it with Slashdot:
Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that badger badger badger
[This website is a stub. You can help Slashdot by adding to it]