The example we talk about in business school is Ricardo Semler's 'Semco' company, in Brazil. Read "Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace", authored by Semler, R, ISBN 0446670553 (paperback). Semler is the poster child of MBA and Graduate Business schools worldwide. He's written other stuff on the topic, and there are other examples. Semco is a good start though.
Semco has a very open arrangement. A revolving board of directors, so each guy is only CEO for six months (focus on the position, not the man). The books are open, and the staff are given training courses in accounting, etc, so they can read and understand the books. Everyone knows what everyone earns, everyone chooses their own wages. The company openly supports private enterprise, and will support (financially as well) anyone who wants to take a Semco machine out and start his own business selling goods back to Semco. It sounds like a nice system.
The goal is to remove something that Max Weber called "The Iron Cage of Bureaucracy" - the restraints of industrialised society. It works, perhaps...
Once you've read Semler and you think that he's on to something, then read Barker, J. R. (1993). Tightening the iron cage: Concertive control in self-managing teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, p. p. p. 408. What you see from that is that so-called empowerment is worse than just being told what to do by a single boss. Workers in empowered self-managed work teams felt under more pressure than they did before. One guy said "before, it was just my boss watching me. Now, everyone is watching me".
Email me if you'd like help finding a copy of Barker.
Oh, also, David Boje has interesting things to say on the subject. Maybe 'empowerment' is now what the world needs! See: Boje, D. & Rosile, G.A. (2001). Where's the power in empowerment? Answers from Follett and Clegg. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 37, p. p. p. 90. (email me for help finding a copy)
Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.
Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
I've used Scribus on a bunch of projects lately, and I've been really impressed. It's a perfectly viable alternative to Adobe's pay layout tools for me.
Airbus keep coming up with crackpot schemes to make computers do more of the work, and people less. Most of them quietly dissapear, but its worrying nonetheless.
Ever since Air France's first Airbus A320 flew into the forest and the 'black boxes' (flourescent orange boxes?!) were 'dissapeared' in the boot of a car owned by Airbus people before the official investigators got their hands on them. The flight data recorder was out of official hands for some three days after the accident. I've never trusted Airbus FBW aircraft (any A320/A319/A321, A330, A340, A380, A350). That game with the flight data and cockpit voice recorders just makes things worse.
As a passenger, I book for myself, and I'm *very* careful to make sure that I don't fly on Airbus products. If there is a last minute aircraft substitution, I'll play difficult customer and baulk at the gate.
"If it's not Boeing, I'm not going".
Not sure how it goes with the TOS, but I wrote something like this myself a year or so ago. I wrote two scripts in perl:
The first checks a particular IMAP folder for messages and if there is anything there, it bundles them up and sends them off to spamcop as MIME attachments to a single email. (Spamcop can handle *lots* of individual spam items as attachments to a single message to the submission address. I don't know exactly how many, but I've sent upwards of fifty in a single pass, and spamcop has always accepted them, never complained).
The second does a cookie-login at spamcop, checks for any parsed spam waiting to be submitted, and walks through the submission process. My script unchecks the 'third party interested in spam' recipient, 'cos I've never been entirely sure about the motivations of that company).
Both of the scripts are called by cron at appropriate intervals
As for false positives, the only ways that things get into that particular IMAP folder are if they were addressed to one of a handful of known-bad (as in so inundated with spam that they never recieve anything else and I don't use them anymore) or I've personally identified the message as spam, and physically drag/dropped it into that particular folder for processing.
If anyone wans copies of my perl code, drop me an email. I'll clean it up and pass it on. Put [slashdot spamcop] in the email Subject: line.
Not sure how it goes with the TOS, but I wrote something like this myself a year or so ago. I wrote two scripts in perl:
The first checks a particular IMAP folder for messages and if there is anything there, it bundles them up and sends them off to spamcop as MIME attachments to a single email. (Spamcop can handle *lots* of individual spam items as attachments to a single message to the submission address. I don't know exactly how many, but I've sent upwards of fifty in a single pass, and spamcop has always accepted them, never complained).
The second does a cookie-login at spamcop, checks for any parsed spam waiting to be submitted, and walks through the submission process. My script unchecks the 'third party interested in spam' recipient, 'cos I've never been entirely sure about the motivations of that company).
Both of the scripts are called by cron at appropriate intervals
As for false positives, the only ways that things get into that particular IMAP folder are if they were addressed to one of a handful of known-bad (as in so inundated with spam that they never recieve anything else and I don't use them anymore) or I've personally identified the message as spam, and physically drag/dropped it into that particular folder for processing.
If anyone wans copies of my perl code, drop me an email. I'll clean it up and pass it on. Put [slashdot spamcop] in the email Subject: line.
The laptop I bought a month and a half ago came with google desktop & toolbar preinstalled.
I've no idea what comes pre-installed on Dell machines. The first thing I do when they arrive is boot a knoppix CD, snarf the Dell drivers directory, and fdisk/mkfs away all that juicy pre-installed badness!
I've got an RFID watch. So has a good part of the population of Hong Kong I imagine. HK's "Octopus" system is a stored value card thing that uses RFID chips in credit-card sized, well, cards! Most folks seem to use the cards, the watches are offered for sale for those who prefer it in a watch.
I only visit HK for about 2 weeks once a year, but I find the watch very convenient, in fact I find the whole octopus system very convenient. I wear the watch year-round - for two weeks it's a stored-value card that I use to access public transport, for the rest of the year, it's a watch!:-)
We have no idea what the long-term impact of these devices inside the human body could be.
Actually, I suggest that we do. We've been putting them in domestic cats and dogs for well over ten years now. I think that the impact of placing a small glass capsule inside a body (well technically just under the skin, not inside) is well understood by now.
I believe the answer is not so much "no", but rather, "hell fucking no."
AMEN! I agree 100% there. Don't get me wrong on the first part - just 'cos they're not physically harmfull doesn't mean they're anything other than pure unmitigated evil
Well, since the majority of the news on the Internet comes from the same companies that publish newspapers and run the TV stations... for all intents and purposes the Internet is almost exactly equally trustworthy as them.
For my money, the fact that I can get information from many different news sources simultaneously is what helps me to trust the news I get from the internet. Any single source is just as inaccurate and deserving of my contempt as it ever was, but when I can read news from half a dozen or so different sources, combine them together and make up my own mind about what really happened, then the Internet as a whole becomes a far more reliable source of news.
Journalists still lie, news corporations still tell the story with the slant they want me to believe, but access to many many sources helps me to be immune to the Journaliars' and the garbage that they, as individuals, spout.
Ok, so I didn't RTFA, but is that a verbatim quote?
Yes it is a cut/paste, but not from TFA, rather from the poster that I replied to. For some reason he got modded down. Beats me, I'd have modded him "+1 funneh" myself!
Why oh why must there be a requirement that you be 18 or older?
I suppose there might be some sort of legal thing happening - you can only employ minors at slave rates if you're (a) Nike, or (b) in the third world!
Even so, for something like SoC, cutting out the young folks is cutting out a lot of talent. I know that a substantial portion of my clue developed when I was well under 18yo, and I only had a Z80 and a dodgy BASIC interpreter to work with. Imagine what 13,14,15yo programmers could develop today, given the amazing tools we have access to now.
So maybe there's industrial/human-resource problems with hiring minors, fix it! I'm sure that a lot of under 18yo folks would take the CoS jobs, pay or no pay. It's invaluable experience.
No, ignore the lawyers and let the n00bs (that's n00b at life, not code!) in I say! To not do so is a double disservice - filtering talent from OSS projects that need it, and filtering experience from the folks who need it most!
If Yahoo! can matrix sticky niches and incentivize impactful interfaces it will surely optimize intuitive synergies amongst its users and global b2b partners. After that, they can scale next-generation systems and transition cross-platform deliverables.
OMG OMG PONIES!!! i'M AN VULTURE FUNDING GUY and OMG this is teh GREAT and OMG I want to throw cash! PLS tell me where to throw the CA$H!
Clearly Bittorrent is their worst nightmare already... Yahoo is one step behind on this one.
It's only their worse nightmare because all they have is nightmares. "Two left feet and ugly shoes" is where the entertainment industry is at right now!
Wake up media industry folks, we don't want your dead business model! Frankly, if Yahoo! is their second worst nightmare, then that's a pretty good start from where I'm sitting. More power to Yahoo! on this one!
It's an angle that I'm taking with my research projects. One view on certifications is that the commercial ones (Microsoft, Novell, Cisco, etc) are there to provide a ready army of devotees that will toe the company line when it comes to making decisions, reccomendations, etc.
My research into adoption of F/OSS into businesses looks, in part, at the part certifications play. Are people with commercial certs less likely to F/OSS friendly?
The beginning of my research is in the form of a survey. If you haven't taken it already, please do... URL in my.signature.
I imagine they just assumed the sharing is going on and are waiting for the univeristies to prove them wrong.
I tend to agree. That's certainly the approach that the BSA cartel has used in the past.
What's that old line? "a thief thinks that everybody steals".
As an interesting aside, one of the questions I ask in the survey (see my.sig) is about whether or not you agree with a statement about ISPs limiting bandwidth for filesharing, and every single respondant to date has been strongly against restricting filesharing. This smells to me to be more than ever about an ageing cartel ignoring the fact that their business model went into cardiac arrest years ago, and they're paying lawyers to keep the defibulator banging away at that long-dead horse anyway.
Re:If they do, it will all depend upon the license
on
Will Sun Open Source Java?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> "Open Source" covers a LOT of licenses.
Yes, you're right, it does cover a lot of licenses. In order to be allowed to use the trademarked term "Open Source" however, whatever license they choose must (a) comply with the Open Source Definition, and (b) be approved by the Open Source Initiative.
Sure, not all Open Source licenses are the ducks guts to all people, but there's pretty much an assurance of no evil in there. Even microsoft knows that!
About half of the students in the Business classes that I teach come from the Faculty of IT, and I must say, I'm concerned at times by the lack of computer literacy that they exhibit. Sure, you'd expect lesser computer skills from a Bachelor of Business student, but the IT students I see are third years - almost finished their degrees and... It's a concern. I've had conversations with individual students that revealed a passing knowledge of things like Java and SQL, but nothing that I'd call *programming* skills!
Slashdot Mirror
The example we talk about in business school is Ricardo Semler's 'Semco' company, in Brazil. Read "Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace", authored by Semler, R, ISBN 0446670553 (paperback). Semler is the poster child of MBA and Graduate Business schools worldwide. He's written other stuff on the topic, and there are other examples. Semco is a good start though.
Semco has a very open arrangement. A revolving board of directors, so each guy is only CEO for six months (focus on the position, not the man). The books are open, and the staff are given training courses in accounting, etc, so they can read and understand the books. Everyone knows what everyone earns, everyone chooses their own wages. The company openly supports private enterprise, and will support (financially as well) anyone who wants to take a Semco machine out and start his own business selling goods back to Semco. It sounds like a nice system.
The goal is to remove something that Max Weber called "The Iron Cage of Bureaucracy" - the restraints of industrialised society. It works, perhaps...
Once you've read Semler and you think that he's on to something, then read Barker, J. R. (1993). Tightening the iron cage: Concertive control in self-managing teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, p. p. p. 408. What you see from that is that so-called empowerment is worse than just being told what to do by a single boss. Workers in empowered self-managed work teams felt under more pressure than they did before. One guy said "before, it was just my boss watching me. Now, everyone is watching me".
Email me if you'd like help finding a copy of Barker.
Oh, also, David Boje has interesting things to say on the subject. Maybe 'empowerment' is now what the world needs! See: Boje, D. & Rosile, G.A. (2001). Where's the power in empowerment? Answers from Follett and Clegg. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 37, p. p. p. 90. (email me for help finding a copy)
Actually... "pay layout" was a typo, but somehow a strangely appropriate one!
Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.
Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
I've used Scribus on a bunch of projects lately, and I've been really impressed. It's a perfectly viable alternative to Adobe's pay layout tools for me.
Airbus keep coming up with crackpot schemes to make computers do more of the work, and people less. Most of them quietly dissapear, but its worrying nonetheless. Ever since Air France's first Airbus A320 flew into the forest and the 'black boxes' (flourescent orange boxes?!) were 'dissapeared' in the boot of a car owned by Airbus people before the official investigators got their hands on them. The flight data recorder was out of official hands for some three days after the accident. I've never trusted Airbus FBW aircraft (any A320/A319/A321, A330, A340, A380, A350). That game with the flight data and cockpit voice recorders just makes things worse. As a passenger, I book for myself, and I'm *very* careful to make sure that I don't fly on Airbus products. If there is a last minute aircraft substitution, I'll play difficult customer and baulk at the gate. "If it's not Boeing, I'm not going".
Not sure how it goes with the TOS, but I wrote something like this myself a year or so ago. I wrote two scripts in perl:
The first checks a particular IMAP folder for messages and if there is anything there, it bundles them up and sends them off to spamcop as MIME attachments to a single email. (Spamcop can handle *lots* of individual spam items as attachments to a single message to the submission address. I don't know exactly how many, but I've sent upwards of fifty in a single pass, and spamcop has always accepted them, never complained).
The second does a cookie-login at spamcop, checks for any parsed spam waiting to be submitted, and walks through the submission process. My script unchecks the 'third party interested in spam' recipient, 'cos I've never been entirely sure about the motivations of that company).
Both of the scripts are called by cron at appropriate intervals
As for false positives, the only ways that things get into that particular IMAP folder are if they were addressed to one of a handful of known-bad (as in so inundated with spam that they never recieve anything else and I don't use them anymore) or I've personally identified the message as spam, and physically drag/dropped it into that particular folder for processing.
If anyone wans copies of my perl code, drop me an email. I'll clean it up and pass it on. Put [slashdot spamcop] in the email Subject: line.
The first checks a particular IMAP folder for messages and if there is anything there, it bundles them up and sends them off to spamcop as MIME attachments to a single email. (Spamcop can handle *lots* of individual spam items as attachments to a single message to the submission address. I don't know exactly how many, but I've sent upwards of fifty in a single pass, and spamcop has always accepted them, never complained).
The second does a cookie-login at spamcop, checks for any parsed spam waiting to be submitted, and walks through the submission process. My script unchecks the 'third party interested in spam' recipient, 'cos I've never been entirely sure about the motivations of that company).
Both of the scripts are called by cron at appropriate intervals
As for false positives, the only ways that things get into that particular IMAP folder are if they were addressed to one of a handful of known-bad (as in so inundated with spam that they never recieve anything else and I don't use them anymore) or I've personally identified the message as spam, and physically drag/dropped it into that particular folder for processing.
If anyone wans copies of my perl code, drop me an email. I'll clean it up and pass it on. Put [slashdot spamcop] in the email Subject: line.
In Soviet Russia, Google Dells you!
I've no idea what comes pre-installed on Dell machines. The first thing I do when they arrive is boot a knoppix CD, snarf the Dell drivers directory, and fdisk/mkfs away all that juicy pre-installed badness!
On digg.com they have a function to mark a story 'bad link'. We need that here, since the link to TFA in this instance requires a login :-/
OMG! Smiley Goatse!
I've got an RFID watch. So has a good part of the population of Hong Kong I imagine. HK's "Octopus" system is a stored value card thing that uses RFID chips in credit-card sized, well, cards! Most folks seem to use the cards, the watches are offered for sale for those who prefer it in a watch.
I only visit HK for about 2 weeks once a year, but I find the watch very convenient, in fact I find the whole octopus system very convenient. I wear the watch year-round - for two weeks it's a stored-value card that I use to access public transport, for the rest of the year, it's a watch! :-)
Actually, I suggest that we do. We've been putting them in domestic cats and dogs for well over ten years now. I think that the impact of placing a small glass capsule inside a body (well technically just under the skin, not inside) is well understood by now.
I believe the answer is not so much "no", but rather, "hell fucking no."
AMEN! I agree 100% there. Don't get me wrong on the first part - just 'cos they're not physically harmfull doesn't mean they're anything other than pure unmitigated evil
For my money, the fact that I can get information from many different news sources simultaneously is what helps me to trust the news I get from the internet. Any single source is just as inaccurate and deserving of my contempt as it ever was, but when I can read news from half a dozen or so different sources, combine them together and make up my own mind about what really happened, then the Internet as a whole becomes a far more reliable source of news.
Journalists still lie, news corporations still tell the story with the slant they want me to believe, but access to many many sources helps me to be immune to the Journaliars' and the garbage that they, as individuals, spout.
Yes it is a cut/paste, but not from TFA, rather from the poster that I replied to. For some reason he got modded down. Beats me, I'd have modded him "+1 funneh" myself!
I suppose there might be some sort of legal thing happening - you can only employ minors at slave rates if you're (a) Nike, or (b) in the third world!
Even so, for something like SoC, cutting out the young folks is cutting out a lot of talent. I know that a substantial portion of my clue developed when I was well under 18yo, and I only had a Z80 and a dodgy BASIC interpreter to work with. Imagine what 13,14,15yo programmers could develop today, given the amazing tools we have access to now.
So maybe there's industrial/human-resource problems with hiring minors, fix it! I'm sure that a lot of under 18yo folks would take the CoS jobs, pay or no pay. It's invaluable experience.
No, ignore the lawyers and let the n00bs (that's n00b at life, not code!) in I say! To not do so is a double disservice - filtering talent from OSS projects that need it, and filtering experience from the folks who need it most!
OMG OMG PONIES!!! i'M AN VULTURE FUNDING GUY and OMG this is teh GREAT and OMG I want to throw cash! PLS tell me where to throw the CA$H!
It's only their worse nightmare because all they have is nightmares. "Two left feet and ugly shoes" is where the entertainment industry is at right now!
Wake up media industry folks, we don't want your dead business model! Frankly, if Yahoo! is their second worst nightmare, then that's a pretty good start from where I'm sitting. More power to Yahoo! on this one!
My research into adoption of F/OSS into businesses looks, in part, at the part certifications play. Are people with commercial certs less likely to F/OSS friendly?
The beginning of my research is in the form of a survey. If you haven't taken it already, please do... URL in my .signature.
I tend to agree. That's certainly the approach that the BSA cartel has used in the past.
What's that old line? "a thief thinks that everybody steals".
As an interesting aside, one of the questions I ask in the survey (see my .sig) is about whether or not you agree with a statement about ISPs limiting bandwidth for filesharing, and every single respondant to date has been strongly against restricting filesharing. This smells to me to be more than ever about an ageing cartel ignoring the fact that their business model went into cardiac arrest years ago, and they're paying lawyers to keep the defibulator banging away at that long-dead horse anyway.
Yes, you're right, it does cover a lot of licenses. In order to be allowed to use the trademarked term "Open Source" however, whatever license they choose must (a) comply with the Open Source Definition, and (b) be approved by the Open Source Initiative.
Sure, not all Open Source licenses are the ducks guts to all people, but there's pretty much an assurance of no evil in there. Even microsoft knows that!
> OMG!!! RMS PONIES!!! Well... it wouldn't be too hard to craft that hair into a mane I suppose!
OK, so I have a patch to contribute. Where do I upload the diff?
About half of the students in the Business classes that I teach come from the Faculty of IT, and I must say, I'm concerned at times by the lack of computer literacy that they exhibit. Sure, you'd expect lesser computer skills from a Bachelor of Business student, but the IT students I see are third years - almost finished their degrees and... It's a concern. I've had conversations with individual students that revealed a passing knowledge of things like Java and SQL, but nothing that I'd call *programming* skills!