From Risks Digest: 24.14, 2006-01-04
>Date: January 4, 2006 3:55:16 PM EST >From: mis@seiden.com >Subject: United airlines computer out/r/age (From Dave Farber's IP) > >What, in this day and age, would cause a complete more-than-5-hour outage of >an system mission critical for an airline?
Answer: Political power games internal to the company.
Law of Bureacracies: "Bureaucracies reward failure and punish success."
This is closely related to:
Golden Law of Software: "Bad software drives out good software, because
there's more money to be made from bad software."
Evidence for these laws seems abundant to me, but John DeLorean's
"On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors" first brought the unique
behavior of bureacracies to my attention. The "Dilbert" documentary
comic strip made it plain.
Microsoft has driven home the Golden Law of Software too many times
for me to ignore it.
(Robert A. Heinlein's novel "Friday" provides a glimpse of what the future
may hold as far as business and politics are concerned. It seems more
prescient in this respect with every passing year.)
"Every bureaucracy builds itself an empire by creating unnecessary
tasks and then finding people to carry them out." _The Science of
Discworld II: The Globe_ by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen,
ISBN: 0-091-88805-0
"I think Parkinson's Law came to me, or is based upon, experiencing the
armed forces," Parkinson says. "I was serving in a joint headquarters,
that is to say army and Royal Air Force [military intelligence, he
reluctantly admits], and the headquarters was headed by an air vice
marshal, who was assisted, or possibly impeded, by a colonel in the
army, who was impeded, or possibly assisted, by a wing commander in the
air force, and then all three of them were assisted (but definitely
assisted!) by me. I was then a major in the army, and we were all very
busy winning the war.
"But the day came when the air vice marshal went on leave. Shortly
afterwards, as it happened, the colonel fell sick. The wing commander
was attending a course, and I found I was the group. And I also found
that, while the work had lessened as each of my superiors had
disappeared, by the time it came to me, there was nothing to do at all.
There never had been anything to do. We'd been making work for each
other."
(C. Northcote Parkinson, the father of Parkinson's Law)
"If a politician fixes a problem then he loses it as a campaign issue.
But if he makes the problem worse while heroically fighting against it,
then he's golden." - Rex Tincher
- Probing assault.
"Ha, I laugh at your feeble <
click>
attemp...AAARRRGGGH! MY EYES!"
bdot.png - The raids on sanity continue.
"I kill you now." - viewer reaction.
- budugllydesign.com. The counterattack begins.
"You're next." - more viewer gratitude
Comment on the viewer reaction: "I think we need to make *some*
allowance for him having just looked at those sights (pun intended).
He's fortunate he can still see the keyboard to string two words
together, let alone punctuate correctly."
rotsnake.gif
- Justifiable Preemptive Retaliatory Strike. Hit
the bunkers! Now! Now! Now!
" Rotsnake is not too bad, you'd be OK with a standard slit trench and 18 inches of overhead protection."
"
Rollers.gif on the other hand..."
"And just like that, I've found my new wallpaper for the computer labs."
In case that pattern isn't approved, look at the
rest of the images there for alternatives.
Akiyoshi's illusion pages - Akiyoshi KITAOKA, Professor, Department
of Psychology, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan.
"Warning: This page contains some works of "anomalous motion illusion",
which might make sensitive observers dizzy or sick. Should you feel dizzy,
you had better leave this page immediately.
More"
"I appear to be bleeding from the eyes. Hmm."
"Likewise. I do believe they'll work nicely."
"Indeed. Is this the Langford Fractal Basilisk department of ritsumei.ac.jp?"
"The temptation to put that as a lockout screen is almost irresistable."
"I see some new desktop wallpaper for people that p*ss me off. Thanks for that <g>"
"I just spent a while looking at those web pages of pure evil and may I just say NNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHAAAIIIIEEEE."
"Perfect for tiling a root window."
"Try scaling it down by various integers before tiling; it becomes a
somewhat different sort of eye-molestation."
popple-e - We've got them on the run.
expcont6e
- Senseless Overkill.
At the top we have links to things like
motion11-e
...which caused me to curse out loud.
Buttoncreatures have a lot of military potential,
starting with Psychological Warfare.
http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/sarasotae.html
- Vision Sciences Society 2005 Annual Meeting in Sarasota, Florida,
USA. Apparently Professor KITAOKA attended. Nice pictures
of Sarasota. About half way down: "Is age related to the
peripheral drift illusion? An instant study."
Opera Web Browser - All previous versions of Opera are available from this site. Pick your operating system, then version, then language.
Opera v5.12 - This is the last version before bloat set in. It's small, fast, and stable on my laptop running a Pentium II at 300MHz. Before that it worked on a Thinkpad 360P with a 486DX2 chip running at 50MHz. 2.2MB download.
Has a button to toggle between document and user mode. User mode makes even the worst webpage legible. A minimum font size can also be set.
Opera v5.12 works well as a minimal web browser that still shows
images. The next step would be Lynx, a text-only web browser.
www.notgnu.org - NotGNU Emacs editor. A very small, fast and powerful free emacs editor for Windows. Not from GNU. No installation necessary, just unzip and go. 307kb download.
This webpage was written from scratch using NotGNU. (That's
not its fault.)
list91m.zip - LIST v9.1m at garbo.uwasa.fi. "Vernon Buerg's file browsing program, the definite must." Tiny and powerful DOS based text viewer. 102kb download, mostly documentation.
Great for reading books from text files. Just press the spacebar to page down. Combine with a laptop and read easily almost anywhere. I use version 9.0h from 1994: "Unregistered copy for private, non-business use only."
System requirements for List are laughably small:
NOTE: Yes, kilobytes, not megabytes.
www.buerg.com - List's home
page. "LIST is a general purpose file browsing and viewing
utility. Although it is DOS based, it performs well under all
versions of Windows and supports long file names."
www.info-zip.org/UnZip.html - Free command-line program for uncompressing zip files. Available for most operating systems.
The Info-Zip Home Page - "Info-ZIP is a diverse, Internet-based workgroup of about 20 primary authors and over one hundred beta-testers, formed in 1990 as a mailing list hosted by Keith Petersen on the original SimTel site at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico."
"Info-ZIP's purpose is to provide free, portable, high-quality
versions of the Zip and UnZip compressor-archiver utilities that are
compatible with the DOS-based PKZIP by PKWARE, Inc."
Info-ZIP's unzip utility is what I use to unzip the above when
necessary. Also for unzipping compressed files downloaded from
Project Gutenberg. (That saves Gutenberg's bandwidth.)
Blocking Unwanted Parasites with a Hosts File - "The best of the
best in Freeware."
More recent good free software can be found at
www.pricelesswarehome.org.
WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY - The Wikipedia disclaimer.
Yo! Sock Puppets! - Good discussion of Wikipedia on BurningBird.
The Wikipedia FAQK - by Lore Sjoberg in Wired News.
Sjoberg's
defense of his article.
Danny Kicks Eloquence (Erik Moeller) - "Let Eloquence/Erik Moeller
tell you all about it in his own words."
A false Wikipedia 'biography' - by John Siegenthaler.
With
friends
like
these who needs enemies?
The Great Failure of Wikipedia by
Jason Scott.
Transcript of a talk at Notacon 2006. Contains profanity and
the memorable phrase "untenable Katamari Damacy-like ball of sh*te that
rolls through the Internet." Jason gave another talk in December
2006 called
Mythapedia
Penny-Arcade - "As a model of how and where distributed intellect
fails, [Wikipedia] is almost shockingly comprehensive."
WikiWatch - "I really don't go out my way to find bad Wikipedia
articles, but sometimes that's all that Google offers me."
Neil Gaiman on Wikipedia - The discussion is about half way down
the page. One highlight:
Q. "You went from linking to 'wonderful articles' to calling it a
'hive mind'. What changed?"
A. "Mostly, I used it more."
Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence - Too funny
to omit.
UK Government learns
The Joy of Wikiality.
Wikipedia: Garbage in, Garbage out - By John Bambenek, Thursday, 04 January 2007.
Who owns your Wikipedia bio? - "Jimmy Wales has made many edits to his own entry without falling foul of the rules he helped devise. More than once he has removed a credit to Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger. Again, here and here."
My role in Wikipedia - by Larry Sanger. "To the best of my knowledge, I was first described as co-founder of Wikipedia back in September 2001 by The New York Times."
Jimbo Found Out - "Wikipedia has a sole founder and a disgruntled former employee building himself a nice career on this lie." - jwales
Jimbo Fired Up - "It is quite important that Wikipedia refrain from
EVER stating it...." - jwales
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