fighting the lack of good ideas
A horrible comparison has been drawn in the following AP article about TimeWarner: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jwm8wu3jZWZLcKfIlycqFqFegknwD9126HN8A. “You’re used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?” There’s a problem with that statement: lots of cell phone users…
As with knowledge capture, so must any successful organization pursue training. Training need not be formal. It can be self-paced, on-the-job, as-you-go, or formal. I know that I have learned the most about the product I support not from formal training, but from actually supporting it. Part of that is because we have had a…
A few of my co-workers an I were chatting recently, and wondered what kind of economic (and physical) impact Google could have if they chose to just shut down for a day. There’s no Service Level Agreement between Google and the world that says they’ll be there, at least none that I’ve seen or heard…
I’m sure most Linux sys admins are familair with screen – it’s a virtual terminal multiplexer that allows single logins to be ‘detached’, then resumed later. This is fantastic because it means what you’re doing can survive connection failures, you can share it with other users, etc. Windows has a similar tool called ‘Remote Desktop’,…
Or at least, they were built for people who speak English. Evidence for my claim: the first electronic computers were built during WWII by the British and Americans for code breaking; the first programming languages were designed, written, and implemented by Americans and British; the transistor, which led to the IC, was developed by Americans;…
There was an article recently on Business Week (here) on how the US is not falling behind in math, science, and technology. In fact, we seem to be turning-out more technologists and engineers than we can use. I disagree. The problem seems to be that those technically-minded people that US schools are churning-out won’t work…
As I was walking to get my turkey pot pie today that was cooking in the microwave in our break room, I looked at the parking lot below and realized that parking lots are approximately perfect hash functions. Think about it: cars come in in some semi-random order; spaces are available in semi-random fashion; cars…