Having come from Microsoft not too long ago, I really think that "warring city-states" is a much better description of how Microsoft internal politics works than the typical Microsoft-as-monolith metaphors.
585 karma · joined October 25, 2009
Sometimes it's worth stepping back and asking, "Does it actually make sense to put all children below a certain age in a big building for the majority of the day, where they spend all their time with other children of the same age, taking classes from teachers who serve as their only consistent contact with the adult world outside their own home?" Very few concepts of "education reform" are radical enough to ask that question.
Maybe it would be better if children spent more of their time in the company of adults in the real world, rather than in the company of each other in a kind of greenhouse-for-children artificially designed to raise them in a certain way.
Or maybe not; maybe after taking a step back and thinking big thoughts, we take a step right forward again and decide that schools as currently understood are what we're sticking with and any problems just mean we need better schools. But it's best to make that decision on the basis of a rational plan, rather than saying that Kids Belong In Schools because that's what the conventional wisdom was last year and we can't think of anything else.
The U.S. unemployment number does not count: 1. "Discouraged workers" - people who are no longer looking for a job because they figure they can't get one anyway. 2. Workers underemployed by time - people who work part-time but want a full-time job 3. Workers underemployed by skill - people who have qualifications and experience for a more difficult job than the one they are currently working, i.e. a chemist who stocks shelves at Wal-Mart because the local chemical plant shut down and there's nowhere else to go
So even with an unemployment number of 20% (considered disastrously high for most purposes), that doesn't necessarily mean the economy is sweetness and light for the other 80%, either.
This is the kind of game I would recommend to hackers - it definitely supports the mind set of figuring out the rules in a system, then exploiting them to build something incredible.
For example, I remember discovering that if you build your dwarf fortress in certain freezing climates, it was possible to take water from a flowing source underground, then release it aboveground, whereupon it would flash-freeze into solid walls that dwarves could stand on, tunnel through, or build on top of. That immediately led to Operation: Build An Enormous Ice Palace, a plan to create an aboveground megaplex by making dwarves haul unfrozen water bucket by bucket and pour it, like concrete, into a planned mold. (I was exploiting the loophole that water carried in a bucket does not freeze until dropped from the bucket.)
It was ridiculous, arbitrary, and destructive of my free time - but most games are anyway... so why not take a game that also challenges your hacking mindset?
The Mafia was a successful, profitable large institution for a long time. People still thought they were crooks, because, well, they were.
You can argue that Goldman Sachs is not comprised of a bunch of lying con men who made all of their money by cheating it from gullible rich old ladies. But "look how much money they made!" isn't a convincing reason in that argument. Maybe they're just very good at lying, cheating, and bribing their way to wealth! The people at the top of the pyramid scheme actually do make money, after all; it's everyone at the bottom who loses out.
Wow... I've long been aware of trolls, and of websites frequently visited by trolls, and of subjects that only really serve to attract trolls, but I had never thought of the wheels-within-wheels situation of trolls creating a website on a trollbait topic specifically for the purpose of trolling it themselves.
Truly, the Internet is a monument to human perversity.
The point of the 20% products for Google is to give the company startup-style flexibility. It works the other way, too - if you take a product from whiteboard doodling all the way to an official Google product, well, a startup is like that, except 100% of the time, on your own bank account, and with no admins/middle managers to take care of the business side for you.
1. Astroturf. This comes from the fake grass installed in a large covered sports stadium in Houston, Texas. The stadium was the home of a sports team called the Houston Astros, so the fake grassy turf was called astroturf.
2. Grassroots. In politics, "grassroots support" refers to support from individuals and/or small, independent groups. The analogy is that you get scattered support from the bottom up from small groups, like grass growing all around, rather than the support of a single large group like a big tree.
So you combine these phrases to get "astroturfing" - fake grass, like astroturf, that is meant to give the appearance of widespread "grassroots" support. The term can be used more generally outside of politics to mean artificially creating the appearance that a person/thing is more popular with the general public than it really is.
For example, I once read that during the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Microsoft over Internet Explorer, Microsoft hired a PR firm that proposed to send letters to newspapers across the country under different names, each letter written in support of Microsoft's position. This would give the appearance of widespread support and popularity for Microsoft, even though all the letters would actually come from a PR firm. That's astroturfing.
Really, though, that's just as true for the other options. What does an Environmentalist Barbie look like? Does she come with a Prius covered in political bumper stickers? etc.
I'm pretty sure that Barbie has gone through all the occupations that have easily-recognized uniforms and/or props, like a white coat and stethoscope for Doctor Barbie. Indeed, the fact that Computer Engineer is a choice even though it isn't a natural fit for creating a doll with colorful uniform and/or props is probably the most interesting part of the contest.
What kind of Barbie children will and/or should have to play with is probably the more important half of this equation, but I also think it's anthropologically interesting that a company is trying to make toys that earn more cultural respect from critics of the company's previous work.
Not to be confused with "v dash", which refers to a contract employee from a vendor. In the Microsoft email system, contractors have an email that begins with "v-" and temps/interns have an email that begins with "t-", and just as employees are sometimes referred to by their abbreviated email aliases, contractors and interns as a group are referred to as "v dash" or "t dash".
Now you know... although I doubt you'll ever need to know :)
As a separate issue from the quality (or more precisely, lack thereof) of studiobriefing.net's content, I do think it's reasonable for studiobriefing.net to want to know what, exactly, they have done that is against the terms of service. Yes, you are in theory supposed to pay close attention to all of the terms of service, understand completely how your web site complies with said obligations, etc. But in practice, people don't always know what the problem is, or understand the legal and/or technical issues involved.
So even if Google is 100% justified in cutting off studiobriefing.net, I think that as a matter of courtesy, Google should be willing to state specifically what studiobriefing.net did to get cut off, i.e. the enumerated paragraph/sentence in the terms of service that governs the issue.
Of course, that is assuming that the studiobriefing.net account is an accurate report of the communications from Google.
It doesn't matter whether or not you plan to do predatory lawsuits. The current nature of patent law means that the incentive is to get away with as much as you can, as soon as you can - or else somebody else will get away with it and earn a chance to sue YOU.
Plus, his points ring very true. I care about technical merit, not who is paying Don's salary - which means that if Don is right about a Google product being better in some way, I don't care if he's drawing a Google salary at the time he says it.
I suppose I'm thinking of it more along the lines of, say, the person in the next cubicle/department over who knows about such software and wonders what to do about it.
Contacting the FBI and asking the professionals what to do is the most obviously correct path. It's just a matter of curiosity that I wonder what they would say, and whether the advice would work.
I don't mean "how" in terms of "how do I know the right thing to do", more a question of what, exactly, is the best way to do the ethical thing without getting burned.
Is it better to take the hush money and pretend to be satisfied, then whistle-blow to the FBI once your corrupt boss thinks you're happy? What kind of evidence would you need in order to convince an FBI agent, in a phone conversation, that you are calling in a real crime and not just a prank? If your law-enforcement contact asks you to wear a wire to work and have a leading conversation with your boss, should you do it? What kind of corporate espionage do you perform to make sure a corrupt business does not shred or cover up evidence?
Maybe I've been seeing too many spy movies recently, but I find myself fascinated by questions like that.
There's lots of hacker literature about what to do when you're an employee in the middle of an unsuccessful company, and some about what to do when you are attempting to catch a cracker or other computer saboteur on your network, but I don't think I've ever seen a story or essay on the subject of what to do when your company is not merely clueless but literally criminal.
Apple is very competent at making things for consumers, and not particularly good at working with developers or corporate IT.
I tend to agree that the App Store is being used by Apple as a tool to market more iPhones and not as a way for the iPhone to become a successful software platform for developers. But I think that's more because Apple is flailing to figure out how exactly the App Store should work; remember that it wasn't originally planned to exist at all. Companies need practice at managing developer ecosystems in the same way that individuals need practice at any other skill.
I feel that Apple made the App Store without really predicting or understanding how it would work out. When it turned out to be a great marketing tool for the iPhone but not a very good platform, Apple used the "There's an app for that" slogan. Making the hardware attractive to consumers was the App Store's strongest feature... naturally enough, for a system built by a company that earns alls its money by making hardware attractive to consumers.
When all you have is a hammer, only the nail-shaped parts of your product ever really get done. The rest becomes secondary by fait accompli, not necessarily as part of a master plan.
The $99/yr is meant to be a nominal fee to keep out the riff-raff, basically (my metaphor, not Joel's). SO will charge the hiring companies a much larger amount to get the opportunity to search the database.
It seems like this was actually designed more from the perspective of the person who is HIRING, not the person being hired. Joel mentions the frustrations of sorting through a zillion resumes, many of them from people who are wildly out of their league, and the reality that even a good resume doesn't really prove that the person is a good coder. Two people with identical backgrounds might have wildly different qualities as developers. Looking at resumes isn't enough.
So the $99/yr is a deliberate barrier to entry to reduce spam, and your Stack Overflow rep/answers are a second way to distinguish the quality of developers.
The grand unifying theory that makes it work (if it does work) is that developers want to work for the kind of company that takes enough care to look at SO answers in order to distinguish great devs from mediocre ones. That's why you would want to pay the $99 bucks just to have your resume searchable there. In theory.
Also, as a deliberate, specific method to prevent recruiters from using the database, you're required to give the name of the company that is hiring in order to search the database. Recruiters won't do this since the dev could skip the recruiter and go straight to the company, in which case the recruiter can't get their commission.
It's also worth remembering that "student" does not always mean "child currently undergoing mandatory education". I would think that adults who return to complete their diplomas/degrees or add a graduate-level program on top of the undergraduate one are comparatively more likely to choose to maximize knowledge rather than just grades. It's mostly commonly expressed as "now that I'm personally paying for it, I want to get my money's worth".
I would take Code Complete as a good example. There are sections on methodology that run along the lines of "Company A tried this method and got a B% reduction in defects compared to the first version of the product. Company X also used it and only got a Y% improvement compared to the previous year, but that's still worth using." Studies don't have to be totally conclusive in order to provide meaningful back-up to anecdotal reports and subjective experience.
In other words, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and good evidentiary metrics may be achievable even if perfect ones aren't.