That's exactly what a meritocracy is. And it's about as fair as things get.
It's better than an aristocracy where there exists an arbitrarily-defined "ruling class". It's better than communism where people are punished for being better than their peers. It's better than a caste system where you're perpetually stuck in your position.
At the end of the day, meritocracy gives people incentive to be constructive by giving them a chance at social mobility. And that's all that's important in a functioning society.
You're talking about some concept of absolute, universal fairness. Lfie is not fair and that's all there is to it. The difference is whether the unfairness stems from the individual, or from society.
I would have loved to have seen Bin Laden's face the day Saudi Arabia erupts in protests and the royal family ends up either leaving or overthrown. The recent spate of revolutions in the Middle East really are affirmation that the ways of al Queda are useless, that violence only begets hatred and in turn more violence. On the other hand, peaceful protests still results in people dying, it actually can and does cause change. That they have been more effective in the past 4 months than al Queda had ever been is the ultimate insult and humiliation to Bin Laden and his followers.
Too bad one's not going the happen and the other's unlikely.
I would like to hear from those managers too. I'd like to compare and contrast them with Joel Spolsky's methods, the same way I compare and contrast Joel's methods with what I think is correct. It isn't to determine who's methods are better, but to have yet another alternate viewpoint from more people who are successful. I'd like to see if and how much they align, but I'd also like to see the differences, or even if there are any differences. Unfortunately, those people are not writing blogs about how they successfully managed their team, while Joel is. Whining about it isn't going to make them start writing either, nor does it diminish Joel's opinions. And having Joel's articles to read is better than having nothing to compare and contrast my own ideas and viewpoints with.
Yes, his company is small. And as such, he's managing a (relatively) small team of people. But he's still successful. He makes money. His company is still around. Maybe he doesn't know how to expand to other markets, or maybe he doesn't want to. Maybe he just wants to do one and only one thing really, really well. These things are extraneous to what he says about software development and managing developers.
In actuality, regardless of the size of a company, all development teams are comprised of a structure similar to what Joel bases his articles upon. No manager directly manages the whole team of 100 people. Managers deal with maybe 5 or 6 direct reports, who in turn may each manage up to 5 or 6 people, etc. So his columns are actually applicable to various degrees for any manager who manages software engineers and developers (obviously, it's more applicable for direct managers like project leads and such, rather than the big boss at the top).
Even though I don't use Office 2k7 much (I use 2k3 much more), I adapted to the ribbon interface pretty quickly. It's fairly easy to use and far more intuitive than the menu system of old, especially for things previously hidden by layers of menus and tabs but now brought to the forefront.
The biggest advantage of the ribbon is that previously, there were duplicates of everything; there was one in the toolbars, and one in the menus. Having only one (they were converging anyway, and it was only a matter of time before they became one) makes the interface much cleaner. I think they used the best of both worlds. On a macro level, features are organized by category, while they show up as widgets on a micro level.
The only complaint I have is that you can't really customize the ribbon in 2k7. I'd like to add some icons, move some around, and bring out some of the things in the sub-menus, but it seems that isn't possible.
Otherwise, I'm satisfied with it. There's nothing I have more trouble doing in 2k7 than 2k3, now that I know where most things are. And finding them don't require much effort (though occasionally, there is the occasional thing here and there that I'd end up spending several minutes searching for).
It's a personal anecdote, so it might not count for much, but they have at least one user who doesn't disagree with the change. I'd be interested in seeing the ribbon interface at work in Windows 8, as well as how they plan to transition developers (and existing software) to the ribbon interface. I'd also be interested in seeing what Microsoft does to reduce or streamline the cruft they introduced in late-XP, Vista, and 7.
There already are laws for breaking and entering into other people's computer systems. They're already ridiculous.
The problem is, these people probably aren't from the United States, and hence not subject to the laws of the United States. The internet transcends national boundaries. That means whatever it might be, the laws of any one country cannot apply to the whole of the internet. And that means there'll always be holes that people with an agenda can take advantage of.
So while places like Australia or China or the U.K. can enforce their own set of internet usage rules among their own citizens, they cannot do the same on citizens of other countries. The most they can do is cut those countries off from their own networks, but that'd require all the backbone ISPs servicing the country to cooperate (e.g. the Great Firewall). And there are still ways around it.
That's the beauty of the internet. And that's the major failing of people who've been trying to turn the internet "respectable." It's not and never will fully be, because the definition of legal ceases to hold meaning once you cross national borders. Doing business on the internet is dangerous, and acting douchy the way Sony's been doing is just asking to be noticed by everybody (Sony's douchbaggery is a special kind of stupid--instead of being douchy to just their customers in countries where they have legal recourse like what Amazon might do when it files an obvious patent, they did it to all of their users worldwide irrespective of local laws).
If this was the product of some Eastern European hit, Sony can do nothing short of paying those countries' governments off. But that might be more costly and less effective than if they were to shut down PSN entirely.
They think the same thing everyone else thinks: How do I make as much money as I possibly can while doing as little as I possibly can?
You know, Obama has his book deals and Hope and Change (tm) that he can rely on for a steady source of income, but normal lawmakers have to rely on lobbying jobs and consulting fees for big companies once they fail to get reelected.
Maybe those recent storms took out Sony's data center?
Anonymous as a force is likely not capable of such an act. Based on the duration and nature of the outage, it's not like a DDoS or some simple network issue but that there's some physical damage, somewhere between wiped or crashed drives to outright fried servers.
An individual with a vendetta I can see "infiltrating" into their server farm and taking it out, but Occam's Razor says that it's probably the weather.
Having two copies of the same truecrypt container, but one with subsequent changes, is a breach of security. The ability to do a binary diff presents an additional attack vector. This is especially true if the contents are mostly text.
You can't know if replacing your container over on the other side results in an overwrite, or in the creation of a completely separate version.
Enough copies given enough time, and your data, and possibly even your key may be picked out from it. Sure, it's probably still highly unlikely for the key to be outright compromised, and it's assuming NSA/CIA-level expertise working on your file, but it still means your data's not as secure as you may expect.
Software that automatically does strong encryption over a container (with random file order processing) would probably be more appropriate than a truecrypt container in this situation.
It's fairly common for non-IT folks to be in IT. They probably have no business being there, but since they're "good at computers" according to whomever hired them, they're there.
And this is why you constantly have IT fiascos like data leakage. Uninformed management not only creates faulty policies, but also hire inappropriate employees or contractors.
There are non-IT companies that are very strict about safeguarding certain data, but that's a result of the underlying corporate culture, not because management is particularly well informed (especially in other areas of IT), or was initially.
Suits are to be distrusted. But middle management plays an important role in a company. Too many layers is a problem, but upper management simply doesn't have the time to deal with the wants and needs of every productive employee. Middle management is meant to bridge that gap, to provide the attention needed to the individual worker bees, while filtering those same needs from upper management.
A good manager is one who's capable of understanding the technical (and hence the needs of the technical) and also good at communicating those needs to upper management in a way that the typically non-technical upper management can understand. It's not a common ability, which is why most managers are non-technical in nature, and thus projects get bungled, wrong decisions are made, employees become disgruntled, etc.
That's what happens in an engineering company. How many of those are out there these days? And DEC isn't exactly the best example out there of a successful company, though management types probably wouldn't know any bettter if you wrap the idea into a nice powerpoint. Not that they'd ever go for it...
Humans are humans. I don't think it matters whether the human is paid by a government or by a faceless CEO in a company.
Yeah, DoD, with their unlimited funding, might be able to build decent nuclear reactors. But that's only because of their unlimited funding. Even NASA cut corners when they built the space shuttle by using solid fuel instead of liquid, resulting in the Challenger disaster.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly what a meritocracy is. And it's about as fair as things get.
It's better than an aristocracy where there exists an arbitrarily-defined "ruling class". It's better than communism where people are punished for being better than their peers. It's better than a caste system where you're perpetually stuck in your position.
At the end of the day, meritocracy gives people incentive to be constructive by giving them a chance at social mobility. And that's all that's important in a functioning society.
You're talking about some concept of absolute, universal fairness. Lfie is not fair and that's all there is to it. The difference is whether the unfairness stems from the individual, or from society.
Emphasis mine:
There is no substitute for raw talent nurtured by a stimulating and engaging environment.
What do you suppose raw talent is? It sure as hell isn't in the "nuture" half of the spectrum.
If only you could be modded up even further...
It could be both. They wanted to rip a company off, and they just picked the one whose head was sticking up the highest from among the crowd.
After all, people keep breaking Sony's security in their products. They probably figured it'd give them a head start.
I would have loved to have seen Bin Laden's face the day Saudi Arabia erupts in protests and the royal family ends up either leaving or overthrown. The recent spate of revolutions in the Middle East really are affirmation that the ways of al Queda are useless, that violence only begets hatred and in turn more violence. On the other hand, peaceful protests still results in people dying, it actually can and does cause change. That they have been more effective in the past 4 months than al Queda had ever been is the ultimate insult and humiliation to Bin Laden and his followers.
Too bad one's not going the happen and the other's unlikely.
This event marks the birth of the deather movement.
I would like to hear from those managers too. I'd like to compare and contrast them with Joel Spolsky's methods, the same way I compare and contrast Joel's methods with what I think is correct. It isn't to determine who's methods are better, but to have yet another alternate viewpoint from more people who are successful. I'd like to see if and how much they align, but I'd also like to see the differences, or even if there are any differences. Unfortunately, those people are not writing blogs about how they successfully managed their team, while Joel is. Whining about it isn't going to make them start writing either, nor does it diminish Joel's opinions. And having Joel's articles to read is better than having nothing to compare and contrast my own ideas and viewpoints with.
Yes, his company is small. And as such, he's managing a (relatively) small team of people. But he's still successful. He makes money. His company is still around. Maybe he doesn't know how to expand to other markets, or maybe he doesn't want to. Maybe he just wants to do one and only one thing really, really well. These things are extraneous to what he says about software development and managing developers.
In actuality, regardless of the size of a company, all development teams are comprised of a structure similar to what Joel bases his articles upon. No manager directly manages the whole team of 100 people. Managers deal with maybe 5 or 6 direct reports, who in turn may each manage up to 5 or 6 people, etc. So his columns are actually applicable to various degrees for any manager who manages software engineers and developers (obviously, it's more applicable for direct managers like project leads and such, rather than the big boss at the top).
You mean they shut down the tubes and shit got clogged?
Even though I don't use Office 2k7 much (I use 2k3 much more), I adapted to the ribbon interface pretty quickly. It's fairly easy to use and far more intuitive than the menu system of old, especially for things previously hidden by layers of menus and tabs but now brought to the forefront.
The biggest advantage of the ribbon is that previously, there were duplicates of everything; there was one in the toolbars, and one in the menus. Having only one (they were converging anyway, and it was only a matter of time before they became one) makes the interface much cleaner. I think they used the best of both worlds. On a macro level, features are organized by category, while they show up as widgets on a micro level.
The only complaint I have is that you can't really customize the ribbon in 2k7. I'd like to add some icons, move some around, and bring out some of the things in the sub-menus, but it seems that isn't possible.
Otherwise, I'm satisfied with it. There's nothing I have more trouble doing in 2k7 than 2k3, now that I know where most things are. And finding them don't require much effort (though occasionally, there is the occasional thing here and there that I'd end up spending several minutes searching for).
It's a personal anecdote, so it might not count for much, but they have at least one user who doesn't disagree with the change. I'd be interested in seeing the ribbon interface at work in Windows 8, as well as how they plan to transition developers (and existing software) to the ribbon interface. I'd also be interested in seeing what Microsoft does to reduce or streamline the cruft they introduced in late-XP, Vista, and 7.
There already are laws for breaking and entering into other people's computer systems. They're already ridiculous.
The problem is, these people probably aren't from the United States, and hence not subject to the laws of the United States. The internet transcends national boundaries. That means whatever it might be, the laws of any one country cannot apply to the whole of the internet. And that means there'll always be holes that people with an agenda can take advantage of.
So while places like Australia or China or the U.K. can enforce their own set of internet usage rules among their own citizens, they cannot do the same on citizens of other countries. The most they can do is cut those countries off from their own networks, but that'd require all the backbone ISPs servicing the country to cooperate (e.g. the Great Firewall). And there are still ways around it.
That's the beauty of the internet. And that's the major failing of people who've been trying to turn the internet "respectable." It's not and never will fully be, because the definition of legal ceases to hold meaning once you cross national borders. Doing business on the internet is dangerous, and acting douchy the way Sony's been doing is just asking to be noticed by everybody (Sony's douchbaggery is a special kind of stupid--instead of being douchy to just their customers in countries where they have legal recourse like what Amazon might do when it files an obvious patent, they did it to all of their users worldwide irrespective of local laws).
If this was the product of some Eastern European hit, Sony can do nothing short of paying those countries' governments off. But that might be more costly and less effective than if they were to shut down PSN entirely.
The general mentality's more like: There's 1.3 billion people. What's the big deal if you lose a hundred million here or there.
Stage 6 sounds a lot like the golden rule.
There are entire cultures predicated on that rule, though few consistently follow it.
It's about time someone in the console industry started paying attention to their adult customers!
You didn't think the wiimote was designed to be shaped the way it is just because it looked nice, did you?
They think the same thing everyone else thinks: How do I make as much money as I possibly can while doing as little as I possibly can?
You know, Obama has his book deals and Hope and Change (tm) that he can rely on for a steady source of income, but normal lawmakers have to rely on lobbying jobs and consulting fees for big companies once they fail to get reelected.
And Linux users?
Just in time for Easter.
Christ wasn't resurrected in a day you know.
Maybe those recent storms took out Sony's data center?
Anonymous as a force is likely not capable of such an act. Based on the duration and nature of the outage, it's not like a DDoS or some simple network issue but that there's some physical damage, somewhere between wiped or crashed drives to outright fried servers.
An individual with a vendetta I can see "infiltrating" into their server farm and taking it out, but Occam's Razor says that it's probably the weather.
Unfortunately, metric vs. imperial is too similar to Linux adoption on the desktop vs. Windows or even OSX.
One is convenient, relatively intuitive, and commonplace, whereas the other one is built by engineers and scientists for ease of doing work.
The only difference is, Windows is used worldwide due to market forces, while metric is used worldwide due to government forces.
Whoops! There goes my Mars orbiter.
There's an another problem.
Having two copies of the same truecrypt container, but one with subsequent changes, is a breach of security. The ability to do a binary diff presents an additional attack vector. This is especially true if the contents are mostly text.
You can't know if replacing your container over on the other side results in an overwrite, or in the creation of a completely separate version.
Enough copies given enough time, and your data, and possibly even your key may be picked out from it. Sure, it's probably still highly unlikely for the key to be outright compromised, and it's assuming NSA/CIA-level expertise working on your file, but it still means your data's not as secure as you may expect.
Software that automatically does strong encryption over a container (with random file order processing) would probably be more appropriate than a truecrypt container in this situation.
Cloud is perfect for supplementing existing infrastructure, but never for replacing it.
Or not in IT at all.
It's fairly common for non-IT folks to be in IT. They probably have no business being there, but since they're "good at computers" according to whomever hired them, they're there.
And this is why you constantly have IT fiascos like data leakage. Uninformed management not only creates faulty policies, but also hire inappropriate employees or contractors.
There are non-IT companies that are very strict about safeguarding certain data, but that's a result of the underlying corporate culture, not because management is particularly well informed (especially in other areas of IT), or was initially.
Suits are to be distrusted. But middle management plays an important role in a company. Too many layers is a problem, but upper management simply doesn't have the time to deal with the wants and needs of every productive employee. Middle management is meant to bridge that gap, to provide the attention needed to the individual worker bees, while filtering those same needs from upper management.
A good manager is one who's capable of understanding the technical (and hence the needs of the technical) and also good at communicating those needs to upper management in a way that the typically non-technical upper management can understand. It's not a common ability, which is why most managers are non-technical in nature, and thus projects get bungled, wrong decisions are made, employees become disgruntled, etc.
That's what happens in an engineering company. How many of those are out there these days? And DEC isn't exactly the best example out there of a successful company, though management types probably wouldn't know any bettter if you wrap the idea into a nice powerpoint. Not that they'd ever go for it...
Humans are humans. I don't think it matters whether the human is paid by a government or by a faceless CEO in a company.
Yeah, DoD, with their unlimited funding, might be able to build decent nuclear reactors. But that's only because of their unlimited funding. Even NASA cut corners when they built the space shuttle by using solid fuel instead of liquid, resulting in the Challenger disaster.