Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause
snopes.com
snopes.com
You tell the banquet manager of the hotel you are considering that the morning breakfast must include a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice for everyone of the attendees. It must be squeezed no more than two hours before the breakfast.
It is not possible to do so. Squeezing that much orange in much a short amount of time would be prohibitively expensive.
If the manager says yes he is either lying or incompetent and you'd better find someone else who will tell you it's not possible.
Definitely possible!
The problem with checks like this is that you need to be intimately aware of the capabilities of an organisation to know whether it's reasonable or not. As people who work with technology know, things that seem impossible to the uninitiated can be remarkably trivial. We should probably assume that others have similarly impressive capabilities in areas we don't understand.
The advantage of the Van Halen test over this is that it's simple for everyone. This seems needlessly "clever" and is as a result wrong...
https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developer...
Fabulous stuff. I wonder how often he has/gets to hang out with random parrots since this document became widely known. In my mind he is surrounded constantly by sandal-wearing acolytes wielding exotic birds of every variety.
If you have previously done streaming using some streaming service and you can't immediately name the format it uses, chances are it is unacceptable and I won't let you use it for my speech.
..This might seem unfair--if a ticket is lost, it could be my fault. But my income is not large, and I cannot afford to assume this risk myself if the event offers me no income. The frustration I feel when I suffer such a loss is excruciating. It is better for me to decline to travel to a certain place than to take such a risk.
..DON'T make a hotel reservation until we have fully explored other options. If there is anyone who wants to offer a spare couch, I would much rather stay there than in a hotel (provided I have a door I can close, in order to have some privacy)... ... If you have found a person for me to stay with, please forward this section and the two following sections to that person.
..find out what temperature it can actually lower a room to, during the relevant dates ..I like cats if they are friendly. ..Dogs that bark angrily and/or jump up on me frighten me .. .. find a host for me that has a friendly parrot.. ..DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling..
I do NOT use browsers, I use the SSH protocol.. .. If a hotel says "We have internet access.. .. What parameters does the user need to specify in order to talk with it?… … Don't rely on information from such a person--talk to someone who knows! .. their phone switchboard may not recognize the tones produced by modems..
When you need to tell me about a problem in a plan, please do not start with a long apology. That is unbearably boring. …If I am typing on my computer and it is time to do something else, please tell me. Don't wait for me to "finish working" first, because you would wait forever. I have to squeeze in answering mail at every possible opportunity, which includes whenever I have to wait. I wait by working. If instead of telling me there is no more need for me to wait, you wait for me to stop waiting for you, we will both wait forever -- or until I figure out what's happening. … Please don't try to pressure me to "relax" instead, and fall behind on my work
I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about ..what I will do breakfast. ..Please just do not bring it up .. If there is a chance to see folk dancing… … If you want to give me data about airplane tickets, please send that info as plain ASCII text
What a beautiful crazy person RMS is.
I think it’s pretty alright, actually.
Some of his demands have to do with his strong ethical views on software, and while I don’t agree completely with him on this, I certainly can respect him for being uncompromising on that.
He frequently emphasises the need to communicate. Decisions that affect both him and the host have to be decided together. He also shows quite some willingness to find alternate solutions if his preferred solution is somehow not possible, but emphasises the need to communicate about those changes.
All the rest may be slightly quirky, but it’s all not especially hard to do with some care and attention. Hey, he doesn’t even want super-accomodating hospitality.
(Also, hotel internet is the worst. Good on him for insisting that be properly checked. He needs it to work, after all.)
If you're going to host a talk from RMS, I'd presume you'd be aware that he has strong ethical views. I mean, that's one of the main reasons to get him to talk!
Not necessarily. Think about the White House Correspondents Dinner that invited Colbert as the host. Somehow they thought he'd pull his punches.
It's in expecting everyone involved to thoroughly read the 10,000 man page and make sure they follow everything. So, instead of calling up the hotel you always use, Lucy from event planning is presumably expected to test SSH on the hotel network and question the staff about air conditioning systems.
You probably won’t find many people who wouldn’t agree that the writing could be significantly tidied up (mostly to remove all the explanations and reasons – it’s ok to just have a list of demands and requirements without always explaining why something is this way or that way) and the document could be better structured.
However, the demands, while quirky, don’t seem to unreasonable to me.
"I burned the sheets." is the result in two instances with which I am familiar.
(Easily) arguably brilliant, important and (undeniably) quirky symbol of an interesting cultural and technological movement stays at your house for a day or two. Sends your wife a 14 page instruction manual for hosting him (enjoys parrots). Wears a hippy robe. Gets philosophically cranky at your kid's gameboy. Teaches your 9 year old daughter to emacs for email. Pulls out a creaky old laptop out at the dinner table. Your daughter now uses the web by emailing some program that fetches the relevant pages and emails them back. She installs GNU/Linux on her brother's gameboy. He cries.
Sounds like good story potential. Sheets are cheap.
RMS has been travelling and giving talks for decades, and is most likely thoroughly fed up with it. If he's making the effort to travel to give an unpaid talk, he wants the organisers to make sure the experience is not much more frustrating than just staying at home.
Wow, I would find that really weird. I hope everyone at his dinners get to read that notice beforehand.
FWIW, my hearing is excellent, and I have a headphone hobby. I definitely notice small details in music. I almost always wear earplugs at clubs / loud environments, and in general loud sounds seem to bother me a bit more than others, while my tolerance for extremely loud sounds is low (permanent hearing damage etc).
If that makes sense.
If I am quite sleepy, I would like two cans or small bottles of non-diet Pepsi. (I dislike the taste of coke, and of all diet soda; also, there is an international boycott of the Coca Cola company for killing union organizers in Colombia and Guatemala; see killercoke.org.) However, if I am not very sleepy, I won't want Pepsi, because it is better if I don't drink so much sugar."
Eccentric.
(Yes, I'm currently imagining wat it'd be like to have him over. I think we'd get along fine on the tea thing, but I hate unnecessary waste.)
It could basically be summarised as:
"Please provide tea making facilities: tea bags, milk, sugar and hot water. If possible a couple of cans of Pepsi (not diet or other brands please) would be appreciated."
Really, the person organising the speech doesn't really care how someone takes their tea or why they don't like Pepsi or what the conditions (which are totally out of their hands) are which will mean you do or don't choose to drink one drink over another. Given that he says he carries his own tea bags (and if he's using them he wouldn't want milk or sugar) the request could be: "Hot water and a cup for making tea - don't worry about providing tea bags, milk or sugar."
It's all quite sweet but really, the excess guff and explanations make it more likely someone will miss something.
Interesting to see that it doesn't work the same the other way.
> When you need to tell me about a problem in a plan, please do not start with a long apology. That is unbearably boring
He's basically giving his reasoning which under some circumstances is fine but on matters of beverages feels to me at least to be something you should file under unnecessary detail.
I guess it depends what he's trying to achieve with the document. As an aid to hosting Richard Stallman, it's too wordy. As a combination pollemic / Richard Stallman FAQ (though with some of these things frequently would seem to be stretching it) it's probably fine.
"Oh sorry, they don't serve Pepsi here."
Richard Stallman's way makes it clear that he does not want to support Coke. He does not want you to hand him a Coke by mistake. Since I assume that is his goal, he communicated it well.
His story helps you to notice, and remember, this seemingly trivial detail.
EDIT: Make it clearer by saying "Pepsi (absolutely not Coke or any other brand)" by all means but the person buying the drink wants to make sure you get what you want and then get on with their lives, they're really not interested in the why.
It feels to me that Stallman wants to use this - as with most of what he does - as something of a polemic about what he believes. That's fine but it does make the whole document less clear about the actual detail of what he wants.
"A few cans of Pepsi (NOT COCA COLA (http://example.com) and not any diet product please)" does have the advantage of being more check-list like, allowing people to hghlight / crossout the items they've done or not done yet.
The post-mortem of a kickstarter posted to HN yesterday, where someone managed to print and deliver a poster with a misspelling of the word "BROOKLYN" as "BROOKLYIN" has made me think about how people find and prevent errors.
HN isn't a good audience to ask that question because there are different ways to write code. There is only one way to write BROOKLYN.
>DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me. To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend many decades feeling..
This right here is why I can't stand RMS. He's putting together a rider for all his (borderline unreasonable) demands when he speaks. And even when he's adding irrelevant things, he still manages to be a condescending know-it-all who has to tell you why your decisions are wrong, and why the way he thinks is the correct way to see things.
http://www.theguardian.com/Columnists/Column/0,,305870,00.ht...
Tea needs to be made with _boiling_ not boiled water. The amount of places that present you with a cup of warm water and expect you to put a tea-bag into it, is upsetting*.
For reference, the correct way of making tea: http://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A61345
Oh, you meant that _other_ kind of tea.
Overall the rider seems pretty reasonable for someone who travels so much and asks so little for doing so.
He has codified his behavior expectations. If someone didn't know RMS was particular, they weren't paying attention.
They are no more demands than a request for him to speak somewhere is a demand.
Someone asks if he is willing to travel and speak to their audience, he says "yes though only if these conditions are met", and the someone then has a free choice of whether to continue or not.
A childish demand would be "we can't agree to X, but we expect you to come and talk anyway".
" Out of frustration with the long and seemingly useless chain of approvals required of component specifications during which no actual checking seemed to occur, an engineer at Signetics once created a specification for a write-only memory and included it with a bunch of other specifications to be approved. This inclusion came to the attention of Signetics management only when regular customers started calling and asking for pricing information. Signetics published a corrected edition of the data book and requested the return of the 'erroneous' literature."
We see it time and again when things go into production where the "brown M&Ms" haven't been looked into and we end up with things like enterprise class websites that cost millions of dollars to produce crumbling under the load of a dozen simultaneous users.
Sometimes these riders serve a purpose (Van Halen's case), sometimes they are indeed a caprice, or a joke. If I recall correctly it was Pearl Jam, who once demanded their M&M's to be segregated into jars, and each jar could only contain one color of a candy. There were photos floating around the net with the band members laughing and posing with that jars and the guy who felt into the trap. Oh, life of a rock star ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers#Other_av...
BTW: A group tried the IP over Avian Carrier: http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ The ping times were unimpressive.
edit: I actually refer to them as my "Brown M&M Clauses" too!
There is a legit requirement for us to be able to audit, but placing the other conditions on it makes it, at the very least, unreasonable but the "without notice" bit means that if they agree to it we have can disrupt their business at our leisure (since an audit requires their resources to conduct too).
another example is requesting infeasible levels of application logging, insane retention periods, and onerous evidence that they're acting on that information.
"Electrocution" is a portmanteau of "electrical execution", which not only implies that the person died, but that it was intentional and sanctioned. Lack of a better word has expanded usage to any death caused by electrical current.
injure or kill someone by electric shockIt's been misused so often that the non-fatal meaning is becoming a separate line item in the definition, but the parent comment is correct.
http://www.trcpodcast.com/trc-219-can-men-and-women-be-frien...
The people in charge catering and hospitality would not be expected to read the technical requests to do with electronic and sound systems, and vice versa.
The guy at the TRC podcast actually searched out their contracts, and the brown M&M clause isn't in the middle of technical requirements, but is in the hospitality section among requests of meals, beverages and dressing room requirements, and there's no mention that the concert would be cancelled if brown M&Ms were found.
So seems unlikely to be true, and just be the guy from Van Halen telling a fun story.
Either that or the no brown M&M's clause became so well known later on that it wasn't useful as a litmus test anymore.
That's how I knew she was lying about having read them and I had to escalate to the production editor.
It saved the book.
"there's 30 people the promoter's going to hire on our behalf ... but in only half of them did we require that they be sober"
Summary/spoiler: It was to ensure the contract was read thoroughly.
Of course, they could be faking that - but not sure why anyone would try.
Where the devs weren’t allowed access to the Production environment so would have to leave written instructions on how to deploy the software they’ve written. And convinced that IT Services weren’t reading their instructions they would write something really offensive in there and see if they complained
Possibly just a myth, but amusing all the same
Ugh. Thankfully we live in a world where multiple deployments per day is considered OK.
ETA: I realize this is a tangent. Methinks it's relevant.
Because unlike what you stated, the removal of brown M&Ms doesn't have much to do with comforting the high-value stars, but more like a "flag" that Van Halen looks for in order to determine whether or not the stage crew has read the contract properly. If they did read the contract, the crew would have removed the brown M&Ms. If not, then there is a high likelihood that they have not read the contract, and not only did they not remove then brown M&Ms, but they also probably omitted crucial elements in the set-up, possibly to a point it can be life threatening if omitted.
Interview with Eddy Van Halen, telling the story first hand. :)
Me: "So here are a set of instructions are programmers were asked to follow. Can you see anything wrong"
QA candidate: "Why yes. They forgot to remove the brown M&M's"
Me: "You start tomorrow."
Is there any notion of material breach, major vs minor breach, etc. in "tour contracts"?
Before I took a business law class, I figured everything in the contract had to be satisfied exactly. But that's not always how the law works.
I'm talking about U.S. contracts. How would the brown M&M play out in Japan?
But the M&Ms aren't used in isolation. They're used as a flag, where their presence suggests that the venue did not follow through on their technical demands. Once you know that, then you just look for problems (probably the demands immediately around the M&M line first). Once you found an actual problem, well then, there you go.
They made huge money from the concerts, nevermind the fans. They weren't looking for out-clauses
Nowadays the "big shows" employ teams of dozens of guys travelling and dozens of helpers employed locally, it would be severely negligent if checking of basic requirements would only be done only on the basis if the catering guys met the random demand for colour-sorted sweets.
I organize smaller events, but you wouldn't believe the number of f-ups a bad manager can produce left and right. Often, the "ground crew" isn't even at fault - e.g. I had events where the ground crew was briefed to a standard timetable layout, although we had provided a timetable usable for them beforehand, having them fix a lot of things on the fly.
Say you have a pile with five black or white marbles. You want them all to be black. So you check that the first marble in the pile is black (ie no brown m&m:s). Is it now more probable that the other four marbles also are black?
Because you are just checking one specific marble instead of sampling a number of randomly chosen marbles (which of course would increase the probability), I don't see how it can work.
It's more like a canary in the coal mine. If the canary dies, you should check on the air quality. If they went through the trouble of removing the brown m&ms you have a fairly strong indicator they actually read the document in the first place. And a strong indicator they have a good attention to detail.
Guess how well the typical top scorers in the class did on this one.
A well-written document would be a great illustration of Haskell-style lazy evaluation, though
The one I got was very explicit: Read the entire test first, and only after you've read all the questions and instructions are you to begin work.
Let's just say that I failed and I was pissed about it, without any particularly good basis or justification, other than being 12-ish years old.
Yes, that is the assumption. Many mathematical models make assumptions like that. It seems much more likely than the opposite assumption which is that they are independent.
Since you're attempting to model human behavior you are going to have to make assumptions that are ultimately incorrect. That's how humans process information. We join the dots and infer things in countless ways that mean we could be incorrect, but which none-the-less are better than wildly guessing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases). It would be probably better, if you are trying to model this, to think of it as a machine learning classifier. Brown M&Ms existing would be a prominent feature, not proof.
Second, let's imagine that M&M:s and safety is handled by the same people. Then brown M&M:s could easily be negatively correlated with equipment errors because a competent technician would spend more time double-checking equipment than full-filling bullshit demands.
If no-one comes back they know they need to give that venue more attention.