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• Only one man can play Zuckerberg: Jon Heder, in all his "Napoleon Dynamite" glory!! I bet $50 that the real Zuckerberg owns a liger... In reply to: "Facebook movie pinning down director, cast"

  June 24, 2009

  0 replies

• How dare the "Congo Resources" blog use the name "Congo" in its title! What a complete rape of the Congolese culture. When will we as a society learn that we must completely forego mentioning the name -- indeed, we must completely deny the existence out of sympathy and solidarity - of any oppressed peoples, nation, or species? (standing on soapbox, doggedly wagging finger in direction of PC blogger...)
  
  It's times like this when I wish Jonathan Swift were still around to blog... In reply to: "AMD, Congo, and the perils of code names"

  June 18, 2009

  0 replies

• To the man's point, have you ever looked at the nameplate inside the box on your iPod? "Designed by Apple in Calfornia"... ah, yes... the magical, wonderful land of California... where everyone lives in a utopia of technological bliss, where everyone is slightly better than everyone else, and lifestyles are attunely balanced with the earthquakes, mudslides, choking fires and race riots.
  
  Tongue firmly out of cheek, yes, California (and specifically, the Valley) has created some awesome technologies that are vital to what we do and how we live, and many of these technologies have nothing to do with "me-monkey" Web 2.0 stuff.
  
  However, as an east-coast tech entrepreneur, I can say that our opinion of our free-sprited tech cousins in the west is that for every one good instance of a technology, product, or company, about 1,000 pieces of utterly self-indulgent crap are generated alongside it. Much of California tech is all talk, with precious little substance to show for it. Moreover, everyone wants to cast themselves as a "technology visionary / entrpreneur" -- the problem is, very few of them have money, corporate leadership experience, or even a decent understanding of technology. That kinda belies the goal.
  
  I heard a good definition of Valley people once: "They all talk like hippies, and act like gangsters." In reply to: "London Times adds to hate for the Web (and California)"

  May 17, 2009

  1 reply

• In many ways, the problem is the dysfunctionality within IT organizations themselves. Having been an "outsider" (i.e. consultant) to several Fortune 500-sized IT departments, it's clear that IT people -- more than employees in other disciplines, such as marketing, accounting, or operations - tend to apply a "feifdom" mentality around the organization's assets that they are charged with managing. DBA's, developers, and sys/netadmins wind up in a vicious circle of assuming that everybody else in IT doesn't understand enough of what they do to touch their data/systems/networks, and everybody in IT winds up despising everyone else as "stupid" or an "idiot" (and especially users). Once the silo mentality takes hold, it's difficult to break, even by an accomplished CIO -- that's likely why the CIO's interviewed for the article state that they don't have a good understanding of their assets and processes.
  
  One way I've seen this successfully broken is with technologies that, by their nature, extend across the enterprise: the best example I can think of is security. Once a CIO empowers a CISO (or, even better, the CISO is not in the CIO's reporting chain of command and unilaterally does what needs to be done by enforcing processes, governance structures, and technical controls), these silos breakdown quickly. Once everyone realizes that security controls such as monitoring, alerting, anti-malware, and performance metrics are going to be enforced, must will jump on the "we're all in this together" bandwagon. Those that still obstinantly refuse to play or opt to sandbag usually get replaced -- problem solved. In reply to: "New survey shows IT spending up...or does it?"

  May 11, 2009

  0 replies

• I'm not a Mac person, but good for them. It's comforting to know that somebody understands how to properly market products and meet revenue expectations, even in a down economy. Dell needs to pick up a trick or two from Cupertino. In reply to: "Apple soars during economic gloom"

  April 22, 2009

  2 replies

• "given their [Microsoft's] uneducated, skint [sic] lowly-paid customer base."
  
  Speaking of uneducated, it's "Redmond", not "Redmont".
  
  Nice ad hominem. You know why McDonald's is successful? Great marketing and product consistency. You can ***** about the lowest-common denominator all you like, but it won't change the fact that companies like Microsoft and McDonalds will continue to utterly dominate their respective market spaces as long as competitors take an Ivory Tower approach to their competitive marketing activities.
  
  It's the same reason Ubuntu is kicking the ass of Debian -- Ubuntu's marketing presents a meme that is friendly, helpful, and easy to use. Debian presents a marketing meme that is based around standards conformance, GPL compliance, and a social contract. News flash: most OS customers don't give a damn about the GPL, establishing a Rousseau-like social contract, or asolute conformance to open standards. They just want to use good, easy-to-download-and-install software, and that's why Ubuntu will win the Linux desktop.
  
  And for what it's worth, I'm a PC user with a M.Sc. from Johns Hopkins and an outrageously large salary. And I'm not nearly as well-educated or financially endowed as many of the PC users I know... In reply to: "Microsoft to open source: Please don't compete on price!"

  April 20, 2009

  0 replies

• OSS has a significant, well-earned place in the world of IT, regardless of whether the organization employing it is commercial, non-profit, or government.
  
  However, it's really quite silly to think that any of these types of organizations ultimately would place more value in on the "creativity of the IT administrator working with the software", rather than the clearly more tangible value of "her ability to negotiate a 20 percent discount on costly, cumbersome software 'solutions' from Proprietary Vendor X." **Of course** the organization is going to place more value on the latter! Why would a business manager *want* an IT administrator to increase their level of proprietary knowledge -- knowledge that would cost a fortune to replace?
  
  For the business world, OSS is not about cheaper software, "openness", or holier-than-thou RMS-isms; it's about flexibility and spreading risk.
  
  This is why OSS gets the reputation for being annoying (in a manner similar to Apple); it's not the concept of the product itself that people find irritating, but rather the pie-in-the-sky irrationality of it's most vocal proponents. In reply to: "IT spending to plummet--just what we need?"

  April 1, 2009

  1 reply

• Except that RMS would insist that ABC GPL the episode, spend most of his time correcting his dancing partner's vernacular and pronunciation ("it's guh-noo slash Linux!!!"), and then claim that the GNU Foundation actually created all forms of dance, and therefore they should always be predicated with "GNU/" in both speech and the written word.
  
  ESR would be more fun -- at least he'd come onto the show packing some heat, and then read some of his really bad neo-romantic poetry. In reply to: "Dancing with the Woz: 'A Teletubby going mad'"

  March 10, 2009

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• So it looks like the real culprit in Mitchell's argument is... a decent marketing team?!?
  
  To paraphrase: "We libertarian-minded folks in the OSS community refuse to pander to the lowest common denominator of user... until, of course, those proletarians don't adopt our products, in which case we'll insist on government intervention to *force* them to look at our software! In reply to: "Mozilla: Sometimes govt. is answer to Microsoft"

  February 19, 2009

  2 replies

• As a rational human being and a Mac user, there's nothing that brings a smile to my face more than sitting down with a cup of good coffee in the morning, reading any CNET article that includes the words "Apple" or "Steve Jobs", and then watching the Apple fanboys froth up at the mouth as they rant and rail. Classic! In reply to: "Steve Jobs' health now a public matter"

  January 6, 2009

  0 replies