WebSitesOfNote

Former Soviet Dissident Warns For EU Dictatorship.

Sound like a crazy premise? Wait. It gets better. Vladimir Bukovsky, a leading dissident of the Soviet era whom was invited to testify at the Russian government’s inquiry into whether the Soviet Communist Party had been a criminal institution. got to see more of the KGB’s secret reports to its masters than perhaps anyone else since the old Soviet Union fell. He says:

In 1992 I had unprecedented access to Politburo and Central Committee secret documents which have been classified, and still are even now, for 30 years. These documents show very clearly that the whole idea of turning the European common market into a federal state was agreed between the left-wing parties of Europe and Moscow as a joint project […] the structures of the European Union were initially built with the purpose of fitting into the Soviet structure.

That’s right. The European Left cooperated with a Soviet project to make Europe amenable to totalitarian control from Moscow, and not way back in the 1950s, either; the key agreements were made around 1985! Read the whole article; I can’t do justice to Bukovsky’s report in a summary.

Are stationary bandits better?: "I once wrote: Some time ago, [Mancur] Olson started work on the fruitful distinction between a stationary and a roving bandit. A stationary bandit has some incentive to invest in improvements, because he will reap some return from those improvements. A roving bandit will confiscate wealth with little regard for the future. Olson then used this distinction to help explain the evolution of dictatorship in the twentieth century, and going back some bit in time, the rise of Western capitalism. I have never found this approach fully convincing. Is the stationary bandit really so much better than the roving bandit? Much of Olson's argument assumes that the stationary bandit is akin to a profit-maximizer. In reality, stationary bandits, such as Stalin and Mao, may have been maximizing personal power or perhaps something even more idiosyncratic. Second, the stationary bandit might be keener to keep control over the population, given how much is at stake. He may oppose liberalization more vehemently, for fear that a wealthier and freer society will overthrow him. Here is more.  I had forgotten I had written that review, so I must thank Arnold Kling for the pointer."

VMware's Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge: "Natales writes 'VMware has announced that they will be supplying $200,000 in prizes for what they call The Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge. Big industry names such as Tim O'Reilly and Mark Shuttleworth are among the judges.' From the article: 'Using open source or freely distributable components and/or your own code, create the most inventive and useful virtual appliance and win the $100,000 first prize! The Challenge is open to anyone worldwide and will be judged by a panel of industry experts with input from the community.'"

Weaving and Bobbing: "The real art of the start, to steal a phrase from Guy Kawasaki, is the 'weave and bob'. Dick Costolo of Feedburner says, 'it's about realizing you are going down a dead end before the other guys do'. Matt Blumberg of ReturnPath has a post up on his personal weblog about the original ReturnPath business plan, email change of address. Matt and his team weaved and bobbed a lot over the past five years and have built a business that includes a lot more than ECOA. That's how you have to do it.  I cannot think of many startups that are still executing their original business plan. "

Once more, but slowly: "How much of what you're transmitting is actually getting through? Of course you're listening. You're the one that's sharing such valuable insight with the universe. You're busy talking about your product or your new book or your organization. You walk into a meeting and there are four impatient people sitting around the table, urging you on, faster faster faster don't waste our time. So you assume that they're getting it the first time. They're not. Odds are, your very clear, very useful ideas are getting garbled in translation. I'll do a post on a topic, and people will trackback to it, announcing that I've said something quite different. I double check my riff to be sure I said what I meant to say, and yes, I did. But they didn't hear me. It's so tempting to compress your ideas into the smallest possible space and assume that the text or the images or the design will carry the day. But we know that repetition is essential. The paradox is that the long stuff gets skipped. The long stuff gets ignored. Short books sell better, short commercials get more viewers. So repetition becomes essential. It'll bore your biggest fans, but you can do that (a little). Sticking to (and building on) your story works if you do it over time."

Summers' Resignation and Organization Theory--Posner: "The 'case' against Summers made by his faculty critics is a four-legged stool: he had the temerity to challenge the absenteeism of a prominent faculty member, Cornel West, who as a result resigned in a huff; he is peremptory, perhaps even rude, in his dealings with faculty; he refuses to consult faculty on administrative matters, such as the expansion of the campus into Alston, across the Charles River from the traditional campus; and, most notoriously, he challenged the conventional left-liberal view that any underrepresentation of a group in a prestigious activity (e.g., women on the science faculties of Harvard) must be due to discrimination rather than to preferences or capabilities.

"To appreciate the sheer strangeness of the situation, imagine the reaction of the CEO of a business firm, and his board of directors, if after the CEO criticized one of the firm’s executives for absenteeism, ascribed the underrepresentation of women in the firm's executive ranks to preferences rather than discrimination, dealt in peremptory fashion with the firm's employees, and refused to share decision-making powers with them, was threatened with a vote of no confidence by the employees. He and his board would tell them to go jump in the lake. But of course there would be no danger that the employees would stage a vote of no confidence, because every employee would take for granted that a CEO can be brusque, can chew out underperforming employees, can delegate as much or as little authority to his subordinates as he deems good for the firm, and can deny accusations of discrimination.

"If, however, for employees we substitute shareholders, the situation changes drastically. The shareholders are the owners, the principals; the CEO is their agent. He is deferential to them. Evidently the members of the Harvard faculty consider themselves the owners of the institution.

Bob Lefsetz - Please Get A Blog!: "A friend of mine in the music business turned me on to Bob Lefsetz' email newsletter. It's a great read if you care about the goings on in the music business. Here are some gems from the recent newsletters: On Amazon's new music service: If rental were such a good deal, if the public found it so appealing,why is Blockbuster on the verge of disaster?  Why are people BUYING somany DVDs when they can rent them so cheaply?  America has an ownershipculture.  Sure, in the future there might be a migration to service, but not TODAY!  Not until a much younger set comes of age. Let's see how you sell this.  For fifteen bucks a month you can haveaccess to ALL the music.  Well, not the Beatles or Led Zeppelin.  Andnot every track on every album...  And, if you don't keep paying, youlose IT ALL!  Shit, sounds more like radio than conventional musicpurchasing. And what are the odds that independent company Amazon can create asystem that actually works, when its Seattle counterpart Microsoft hasbeen unable to do this?  I mean maybe if Google moved into the sphere Imight be impressed.  Then again, Google Video is a disaster, and ratherthan deliver a quality product without glitches, Google just labels allits efforts 'beta', so you'll forgive them.  That's what we n"

How to Prevent a Bozo Explosion: " It's depressing to watch a mean, lean, fighting machine of a company deteriorate into mediocracy. In Silicon Valley we call this process the “bozo explosion.” This downward slide seems inevitable after a company achieves success--often during the years immediately following an IPO. The purpose of this article is to prevent, or at least postpone, this process in your company. The first step is to determine whether a bozo explosion is happening. Here are the top ten signs of bozosity to help you decide. 1. The two most popular words in your company are “partner” and “strategic.” In addition, “partner” has become a verb, and “strategic” is used to describe decisions and activities that don't make sense. 2. Management has two-day offsites at places like the Ritz Carlton to foster communication and to craft a company mission statement. 3. The aforementioned company mission statement contains more than twenty words--two of which are “partner” and “strategic.” 4. Your CEO's admin has an admin. 5. Your parking lot's “biorhythm” looks like this: 8:00 am - 10:00 am--Japanese cars exceed German cars 10:00 am - 5:00 pm--German cars exceed Japanese cars 5:00 pm - 10:00 pm--Japanese cars exceed German cars 6. Your HR department requires an MBA degre"

Advisory Capital – Comments, Discussion, and the Wikipedia Entry:
My definition is drawn directly from Stowe’s post since his was the first use of the term I’ve ever heard: “Advisory Capital is an investment of experience, expertise, social capital, and public authority into a company in return for some form of equity in the company.” Of course, you or any one else are free to edit the definition or any other part of the wikipedia article.


A couple of comments on my post hone in on my suggestion that advisor capitalists (hereafter ACs) be paid in restricted stock. Both Charlie Chrystal and Scott Lawton point out that options are simpler to manage. Charlie, by the way, IS very happy with the advisory board for his company.


During the dotcom bubble, outside board members were compensated mostly or exclusively with options. Both Mary and I agreed to serve on boards of non-public companies where options were our sole compensation. When the bubble burst and it became clear that the valuations used at the time the options were issued were unlikely to be reached again by the companies in their present forms, turned out we had been working as volunteers. OK, fair enough; we gambled; we lost; we wouldn’t have complained if we won. Or you might be even more harsh and say we obviously didn’t add much value if the companies’ valuations were headed south.


Trouble is, from the companies’ point of view, that left us with no alternatives but to resign or stay on as unpaid advisors – which we both did longer than we should have but eventually we did resign. These companies were not dead; they did need significant restructuring or to be sold. Whatever happened, whether recapitalization or sale, would clearly be at prices lower than the strike price of our options. So, if we had stuck around for a year to work out these deals, we would clearly be doing it for no compensation. The VCs on the boards were taking a haircut on their investments but had a clear interest in staying on to salvage as much as possible. The executives had also lost the value of their options but they did draw salaries; traditional consultants got cash. We were volunteers.


The reason for dragging up this ancient history isn’t to complain about the time we spent or the money we didn’t make – wasn’t the first and won’t be the last bad investment we make. But an outside board member who is NOT an investor is the closest existing role I know to Stowe’s proposed AC. It may well be that ACs are most effective when they are board members just as VCs would be since this is really a horizontal slice from the VC package.


The company needs to help both in bad times and good. Options are great for compensating help in good times. But, if options are the only compensation, then the help isn’t incented to stay around when the going gets really rough and the important question is how much value can be salvaged rather than how do we resurrect the original dream. Your VCs will be with you then – in fact, they’ll be all over you – and I think you want your ACs on board, too.


Moreover, we don’t always live in bubbles and not every startup is an instant success. Suppose your company “only” grows its value at 15%/year but it does that steadily. With compounding, that ain’t bad. But you’d have to give an AC too much of a share for a 15% annual increase to be interesting. If the AC gets a relatively small amount of real equity in the company, the potential dilution from AC compensation is LESS than what would be required if the AC were to be paid purely in options. As Scott Lawton also suggest, this can be in the form of shadow stock or stock appreciation rates if restricted stock is too complex for your capital structure.

In Praise of Code Reviews:Code Reviews
For many types of work it is standard practice to have one's work checked by another before the work product is put into service. Authors have editors; engineers have inspectors and so on. But in software development it is common for code to flow directly from the programmer's fingertips into the hands of the end users without ever having been seen by another pair of eyes.

This is despite there being a large body of empirical evidence establishing the effectiveness of code review techniques as a device for defect prevention. Since the early history of programming, a number of different techniques for reviewing code have been identified and assessed.
A code walkthrough is any meeting in which two or more developers review a body of code for errors. A code walkthrough can find anywhere between 30 and 70 percent of the errors in a program.
Code reading is a more formal process in which printed copies of a body of code are distributed to two or more reviewers for independent review. Code reading has been found to detect about twice as many defects as testing.
Most formal of all is the code inspection, which is like a code walkthrough where participants play pre-defined roles such as moderator, scribe or reviewer. Participants receive training prior to the inspection. Code inspections are extremely effective, having been found to detect between 60 and 90 percent of defects. Defect prevention leads to measurably shorter project schedules. For instance, code inspections have been found to give schedule savings of between 10 and 30 percent.

If we can save time and improve quality with code reviews, why aren't the other 75 percent of projects doing them?

The essential problems are short-term thinking, force of habit and hubris.

Cool items... science, innovation move on...:
Quote" If you introduce a new challenge like chemical contraception, initially it devastates the population. But some individuals are resistant to it. Perhaps because of religious or philosophical reasons, perhaps because they just love kids and long for a big family. Anyway, even though the contraceptives are there, they chose not to use them.
End result: If any of that choice is heritable then these trends will be accentuated in the next generation. In time resistance of one form or another to contraception will emerge. There is no difference here between contraception and the effects of a new insecticide or antibiotic. In time you will get resistance." (I mentioned this years ago, and fairly recently on this blog.) http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2006/02/selection_at_work.php

PBS | I, Cringely . February 23, 2006 - Rules of the Road

RULES OF THE ROAD: INTERNET GROWTH IS SLOWING, SO WE INSTINCTIVELY SEEK NEW WAYS OF GROWING AND NEW RULES TO MAKE IT HAPPEN
By Robert X. Cringely

Internet use in American homes is still growing, but the pace of that growth is slowing according to a study released this week by Parks Associates, a market research firm from Dallas, Texas. Based on a sample of 1,000 U.S, households, the survey concluded that 42 percent of U.S. homes have broadband, 22 percent use dial-up, but that 29 percent have no computers at all, thus placing a firm upper limit on potential Internet penetration. Not to put too much faith in a single study, this Parks report generally supports a similar Pew report from last year. This has to be a kick in the head to pundits who have seen Internet access quickly becoming as ubiquitous as electric power, telephone, televisions, or indoor plumbing. It also does a lot to explain much of the current Internet hype that emphasizes non-PC applications. By applying a couple Cringely rules of thumb, we can take these study results far beyond the Parks analysis and figure out where things are really headed and why.

There are two ways to build market share for a major new technology:
1) by attracting early adopters followed by normal consumers, and
2) through a generational change where non-users literally die-out to be replaced by a whole new generation of consumers who are comfortable with the technology. An innovation can generally reach about two-thirds of the market through the first method, but to reach near 100 percent market share you need the latter. And that's the way it always is, even though we choose to forget that fact when it is more convenient to do so.

That's why electricity and telephones, both of which have been with us for over a century, have almost 100 percent market share. People aren't born today who can imagine being without a telephone or electricity, so of course they have both. The only communication product class to buck this inter-generational trend is broadcast television, which grew to 97 percent market penetration in less than 30 years, but that probably confirms my feeling that television was really perceived by the consumer as an extension of radio, which would given it a much longer effective adoption cycle.

Today Internet use and cable television use in the U.S. are roughly comparable at just under 70 percent market penetration. That means the commercial Internet, which effectively dates from the late 1980s, has grown at about three times the rate of cable TV, which began in the late 1940s and took until 1976 to reach 15 percent penetration. In fact, cable TV market penetration stood at 50 percent in 1987, about the time the commercial Internet came into being.

So the Internet has grown a lot faster than these earlier communication technologies, but then the Internet is technically dependent, for the most part, on some other host network. At the very least you need to first be a telephone customer to then become an Internet customer. That makes cable TV, even for its slower growth rate, actually the more impressive act, since its numbers are truly ab initio.

Yet it seems obvious to me that while a generation shift will make Internet access almost universal in another 20 years, the same probably won't be said for cable TV, which may well peak and decline before then simply because there will be other ways to get television. That's the distruptive nature of the Internet, which threatens telephone companies, cable companies, and TV broadcasters, alike.

The result is that each of these industries is trying to poach the others. As such, cable TV is the very heart of the U.S. broadband industry even though broadband is what will probably end up eating cable's lunch. Telephone companies like the Internet, too, just as they are also trying to find ways to enter the television business while their voice business is being savaged by VoIP. While waiting for the inter-generational boom or bust that is inevitable, each industry is building-out to maximize the revenue from its existing subscriber base. Cable TV companies do this by hawking pay-per-view, digital cable, and video-on-demand. Telephone companies are starting to do the same. But Internet companies have a slightly different task, and that's finding ways to connect more devices and more device types to their networks. That's because, as a stupid network that offers nothing more than bandwidth and a gleaming smile to its users, the value of the Internet is increased solely by the number of connections to it. So if you have already maxed-out your PC connections, it is logical to start connecting non-PC devices.

And that's the motivation -- the real motivation -- for all these TV shows and movies suddenly being made available over the Internet. It is to get more types of devices connected to the net to, in turn, increase the business value of that network to its nominal owners, which unfortunately would not be you or me.

This is just the simple motion of tectonic plates -- slow but inevitable, and also irresistible. Against this glacial scene of course there is still a subtext of local politics and short term business advantage, but the trends are clear, and here they are:

1. All networks will eventually be subsumed into the Internet, because only as a single network can their value be maximized. Thisis kind of a cock-eyed interpretation of Metcalfe's Law, which says the value of a network is the square of its number of nodes. I think using a square function was Bob Metcalfe going a bit far, and the real value here is to acknowledge that network unification is a primal technical urge and -- whatever the actual value achieved =-will drive all the existing networks into a single technology with wired and wireless varieties.

2. If all networks are eventually to merge, then all the whining from this special interest or that is just whining. When SBC (now AT&T) or BellSouth complain about having to carry Yahoo or Google bits for free, they are just trying to fool us into paying even more than we already are for the same network services they would give us for free if they had to. Sharing the increased value of the larger network is worth more to these companies than the incremental revenue of bleeding Yahoo. Either they don't get this, which is very possible, or they are lying, which is equally possible.

3. This is a stretch, but it makes sense to me: If the prime derective here is simply to grow the Net as big and as fast as possible, then the best way to do that is through the balancing of data loads as much as possible across the Net. This is contrary to the client-server model that has dominated the Internet for most of its existence. Put differently, the major impediment to eventual Internet hegemony is the problem of scaling client-server applications. How big a data center do you need before you realize that no data center is big enough for some applications? Only a server-server or peer-to-peer architecture makes sense in the long run.

Here we have what might be three new laws to guide future growth of the Internet. And they tell us a lot about where things are headed. It is logical to assume that all devices will eventually be networked but we will start with devices that are either already intelligent (computers) or are very important to us (televisions). Any political or business obstacles in the path of this transition are most likely temporary. And the only way for the network to maximize its value is through server-to-server or peer-to-peer networking.

So if your ISP doesn't want you to share or re-sell your Internet connection, it is just because they don't yet realize that such sharing is really to their advantage. In time they will come to see it or they will die. If your ISP doesn't like all that Bit Torrent traffic, it is just because they haven't yet figured out that it is the long term key to their success as a business.

For the transition of television to the Net, then, heavily data center-based ventures are unlikely to be successful in the long-term. Google and its distributed shipping containers might be right for this moment or next, but they can do the math and that math tells them that pumping tens of millions of simultaneous HDTV unicasts from a Google server is no way to make money. It is much better to use Google servers to seed video content, which is then shared by many peers. This is pretty much the only way the system can scale high enough to functionally replace and then improve on today's TV.

The poster child for television 2.0, it seems to me, is a company like Grid Networks, which might be a new name to you. Like Bit Torrent, Grid has built a peer-to-peer distribution system. Like Mike Homer's Kontiki, Grid has married Digital Rights Management and a business model of sorts to its Torrent-like distribution system. But unlike most of the others, Grid (no, I am not an investor but thanks for asking) most approximates what my Mom thinks of as TV.

Kontiki has been around for a long time, and are definitely first mover in the market. They adopted a subscription model (RSS+P2P=Video), but for that the videos have to be downloaded in entirety, and there really is no "browse, click, watch" functionality in their system (at least yet). It is certainly better than waiting 2 days for NetFlix at the mail box, but it's just not quite user friendly enough in my opinion.

Grid's system, on the other hand, accomplishes two things from the end-user perspective: it is point, click and watch; and it is very very high quality. Using p2p, they can afford to send 1.5Mbps - 2Mbps video over their network because it costs the same as sending 150Kbps-200Kbps video. I was shocked by the video quality, watching a DVD-quality movie at Starbucks on my notebook computer with virtually no waiting.

But a successful commercial system can't count on anarchy, so Grid has a full Content Management System built into the network (called Media Vaults) that allows for media uploaded to a media vault to be monetized and then syndicated with XML to as many vending websites you as the content owner wants. Mix that with a ubiquitous platform player and, well, you get the point.

Apple is selling one-hour TV shows on iTunes for $1.99 with 67 percent of that revenue going to the content owner ($1.33), and a cost of 25 cents for the network delivery leaves them $0.41 for marketing and operations per video -- very thin margins. Reducing the cost of the video delivery to as low as five cents while raising the bit rate would seem to be a no-brainer.

Right now, Grid only has about 100,000 clients installed, but that's enough for 80 percent lower prices for instant-on video. A new multi-platform client is on its way; the company will become 95 percent "grid efficient" with as few as 1,000 downloaded clients. This isn't rocket science, and there may be other, even better, solutions to the same problem, but it works, it is available now, and it could change television forever.

A DRM compromise?: "This is just a tentative idea, not a manifesto. Current DRM technology is “read-act”: every device that sees the DRM data has to act upon it for the DRM to work. Can I propose a “read-only” alternative? In this world, it would be illegal to modify author or copyright licensing data associated with the work. As with laws such as the DMCA or EUCD, distribution of tools or software that does such things is verboten. To be outlawed, it must be a contraption with a UI specificially tailored for tinkering with the metadata — we’re not outlawing the proverbial hacker 5V battery and piece of wire. You can still distribute the file itself, do things that the license disallows. You can augment it, re-mix it. Whatever. Ideally, we’d have rules and standards that would allow us to “mark up” content with rich meta-data. “This sample from 0:46 to 0:48 was ripped from this source, which in turn has this meta-data.” You can downsample to another format that doesn’t permit metadata — we’re not asking for the technically impossible. The advantages of this scheme are several. Firstly, it is morally and technically defensible. It’s just a variant on droit d’auteur rights that have long existed in many jurisdictions. The incentives line up: there’s little point in messing w"

Why Your Schedule Is No Good - And How To Fix It: "I've already said my piece on estimating software projects, so now I'd like to offer a word on the flip side of estimating - scheduling a project.  Estimating and scheduling are not the same.  Estimating is the practice of figuring out how many man-hours of labor something will take.  Scheduling is deciding when those man-hours of labor will take place.  For purposes of this article, suppose we're planning a project for a 3-person team.  We've estimated the project at about 3000 hours, which is roughly the equivalent of 6 work-months for a 3-person team. Many folks would say 'Great!  Today is February 23, so 6 months means we'll be ready to implement around August 23!  Let's get started!' and then be bitterly disappointed when August 23 rolls around and they find themselves with a late project and an angry client. The problem is in the way most people schedule projects.  They give dates that haven't been thought out very well in order to avoid upsetting the client, but the client ends up upset anyway because the project goes off track.  I prefer to make my clients upset at the START of the project, that way I know exactly how much time I have to win them back over - the length of the project (that was a joke).  Also, upset clients te"

If there is only one book you are ever going to buy ...: "A few years back I was put in charge of a $1M+ project with a team that at it's peak was 12 developers spread across three sites. A lot of this team were quite junior and had a minimum amount of development experience. The work that we were doing was a ground up rewrite of an existing system that our customer could no longer maintain.One of our main goals was to breathe some maintainability into the code base, which meant that we needed to have a consistent output across the whole team. A week or so in, what really became evident that the junior team members had very little knowledge about good code structure, code layout or commenting and they used very poor design techniques.I gave one of the team members, who seemed to really be struggling at producing a quality output, the following piece of advice. 'Go and buy a copy of Steve McConnell's Code Complete, and read it cover to cover. If you are only going to buy one book in your entire career this is the one to buy.'Code complete has been updated since then and is now in it's second edition. It covers a lot of the fundamentals, and hygiene factors that are really important, which, most new developers just don't seem to understand, or think are important.Two years after I dispensed that initial advice, I received a phone call from t"

Web 2.0 in the Enterprise - Round 2: "Stephen Bryant lists Five Reasons Web 2.0 and Enterprises Don't Mix (hat tip: Espen Antonsen).  He cites his personal experience of having worked in an innovative small software company that could not close deals with the slow enterprise behemoths. “What we needed was a shorter sales cycle, a very, very big salesforce, or some combination of the two” One of the key changes we’re experiencing today is that the traditional big salesforce becomes obsolete.  At the recent Web2.0 In the Enterprise event (references here, here, and here)  Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext described his bottom-up grassroots approach: first a small team, typically a department, or an ad-hoc project team starts using the hosted wiki … then some other teams within the same organization … eventually Ross walks in to close a corporate level deal, but by the time it’s a fait accompli.  (more in the Wiki Effect).

One of Ross’s competitors, Joe Kraus of JotSpot said: “for the bottom-up effect to work, the price has to be expensable, not approvable”

Dark Matter: "I am not an expert in international finance but I am going to agree with Brad DeLong on this one: The late Rudi Dornbusch said that one of the infallible warning signs that we are near the collapse of an overvalued currency associated with an unsustainable trade deficit is when highly intelligent and respected economists begin evolving plausible theories that--this time--the trade deficit is sustainable."

GetterEradicator: " GetterEradicator design 22 February 2006 You can tell them by the twitch in the left hand side of the mouth when they see a getter method, there's swift pull on their battleaxe and a satisfied cry as another getter is hewn unmercifully from a class which immediately swoons in an ecstasy of gratefulness at the manly Getter Eradictor's feet. Alright, maybe my return to English beer is affecting me a bit too much, but Chris's gentle tweak struck a pet peevlet of mine. I've often come accross people who tell you to avoid having getting methods on classes, treating such things as a violation of encapsulation, Allen Holub's article is one of the best known. The general justification is that getters violate encapsulation. If I've got a bowler class with fields for overs, runs and wickets, then adding getters (getOvers, getRuns, getWickets) is little better than just making the fields public. There's some sense to this argument, and I certainly suggest that you shouldn't write accessors until you really need them, but it also brings in the danger of missing the point of encapsulation. For me, the point of encapsulation isn't really about hiding the data, but in hiding design decisions, particularly in areas where those decisions may have to change. The internal data representation is one example of this, but not the only one and not always the best one"

Cognitive biases in culture wars: "I've one reaction to the culture clash between the west and Islam - include me out. This is big think. And big thinking is bad thinking. The first problem is that glib generalization leads us to think that there are clearly defined and demarcated cultures.Put it this way. Both my dad and grandad had convictions for handling stolen goods. Does this mean fencing is part of my culture? If not, why not?  What proportion of people must believe or do something (and how strongly and how closely to me) before it becomes part of my culture? And over what group of people do we define a culture? Why does it make sense to say that I am part 'western culture' rather than 'economists' culture' or 'Leicester culture'?These vaguenesses mean we take a pick-n-mix approach to defining culture. For most of you reading this (and me), I guess, 'western culture' means liberalism more than it does imperialism and slavery.  But is this just a self-serving bias?Another bias in the clash of cultures is the group attribution error. Anong 'us', bad people are exceptions. Among 'them', wrong 'uns are representative of the general group. So, to westerners, the soldiers who beat up Iraqis are exceptions. To Muslims, they are typical. To 'us', suicide bombers are representative, whereas to Muslims, the"

: "Follow-up, that was an adware site which I got to through Google. Actually makes it even worse. Google behaves more and more like a spammer. And trust has value too. Microsoft tried to get us to use Passport after they had been caught killing Netscape. No one would trust them after they became an outlaw company. So when you push the limits of the trust of your users, eventually it does cost your shareholders. Something for Google's board to think about."

Markets in everything: "Describe your soul and rent it out.  Here are the available souls, for only $25 for three months, yes they use PayPal.  Thanks to Eva for the pointer. Addendum: Do read Eszter on the ebay exchange point in Zurich; maybe that would work better than PayPal."

IBM DB2 Express-C: " IBM sets DB2 database free: This slipped under the radar about a week ago: there’s now a free version of DB2. DB2 Express-C is the same database as IBM’s commercial offerings but the company places limits on what kind of hardware it can run on. It can be deployed on systems with two processor cores or up to two dual-core chips on Advanced Micro Devices- or Intel-based servers. The memory limit is 4GB but there are no limits on the size of database or number of users. So now all three big database companies have a free offering: Oracle 10G Express Edition Microsoft SQL Server Express IBM DB2 Express-C Microsoft’s offering seems like the crappiest one here since it’s the only one directly limited. When that product gets over a certain number of concurrent connections, it delays itself a few milliseconds. The others are fully functional and without restrictions except for the hardware they run on. And they’re both run on pretty decent hardware — certainly equivalent to anything I’m running MySQL on now. (Question: is 1GB enough for a database server these days?) "

Freedom of Speech: "In Austria a man was just sentenced to three years in jail for writing a book denying the Holocaust.  That’s wrong.  Doesn’t matter that he’s wrong.  Doesn’t matter that he’s an anti-Semite.  Doesn’t matter that, as a Jew, I find this offensive.  He has a right to freedom of speech.  If he doesn’t have the right to deny the Holocaust, then the mullahs are right: no one should have a right to offend them either. The right of free speech, ironically, extends to criticizing free speech.  Muslims have a right to demonstrate peacefully against both the fact that the West allows publication of cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed and/or against the cartoons themselves (not the same thing).  Everyone has a right to try to convince someone else NOT to say something; everyone has a right to object to what someone else says; what no one has a right to do is to stop someone else from saying what they want to say (with certain obvious exceptions like intentional libel, yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, and perjury). Many years ago there was a controversy over flag burning in the US.  We were at a Guy Fawkes bonfire on a beach (in the US).  Some jerk (my point of view) put an American flag on the fire.  I left "

Creating Passionate Users: Subvert from Within: a user-focused employee guide

It's one thing to talk about--and _execute_--a user-focused approach when you're a small company or an independent contractor. But what if you are, in fact, a fish in a sea as vast as, say, Microsoft? Can you hope to make a difference? Or does working at the "DarkStar" suck the soul from any employee with a passionate users bent?

I spent yesterday at Microsoft. And yes, it was on a "passionate users" mission -- something even my teenage daughter found hilarious given the Microsoft we all know and love to hate. But the day was a string of surprises and challenged assumptions (starting with finding in my workshop (someone I'd never met but long admired), and ending with meeting some amazing MS guys including , , and Lou (whose-last-name-I-forgot)).

It's so tempting to say that anyone who really cares that much about users ought to get the hell out of the big company. I know, having done my time at Sun. But I'd forgotten how to see Microsoft as something other than a Big Company. I'd forgotten (or never recognized) that it's a collection of individual _people_, and no matter how entrenched the company's views, policies, practices, values, bureaucracy, etc. are, there are motivated, smart, caring, creative _people_ who work there.

And _these_ folks have a chance to make a Difference (capital "D") on a scale that most of us will never touch. When (inventor of the Wiki, key player in extreme programming, etc.) went to work for Microsoft, much of the software engineering world was horrified that he'd even _consider_ it. But he kept insisting that where _better_ to produce positive change than going straight into the heart of one of the biggest sources of trouble for both users and developers in the software ecosystem?

But let's say you're _not_ a Ward Cunningham or any other _famous_, visible, already influential industry player. You're an engineer, or maybe a program manager. In that case, you do what many of us did at Sun... SUBVERT FROM WITHIN.

Here's my little unofficial guide to creating passionate users for those working in Big Companies. Most is from things a maverick (but cleverly disguised as _compliant_) group of us did at Sun, while we could. Only _one_ of our original disruption team remains a badged Sun employee, but our legacy persists today in areas that won't make us famous, but _do_ make a substantial difference in the experience that users get within the sphere we influenced.

In no particular order, here's a collection of tools used by our formerly underground User Liberation Army:
LANGUAGE _MATTERS_. FRAME _EVERYTHING_ IN TERMS OF THE USER\'S EXPERIENCE.

In meetings, phrase _everything_ in terms of the user's personal experience rather than the product. Keep asking, no matter _what_, "So, how does this help the user kick ass?" and "How does this help the user do what he really wants to do?" Don't focus on what the user will think about the _product_, focus everyone around you on what the user will think about _himself_ as a result of interacting with it. Study for tips on using language to shift perceptions.
BE ANNOYINGLY PERSISTENT.

If you're relentless in the previous step--always asking the question, "how does this help the user kick ass?", it won't take that long before the people you interact with will anticipate that you're going to ask it, and that at least forces them to _think_ about it for a moment. Over time, and over a large number of people, those moments can start to add up.
CAPTURE USER STORIES.

Keep a notebook or with you _always_ and whenever another employee, blogger, (or user) tells you something good or bad about a _real_user's experience, write it down. Build up a collection, and make sure these stories are spread. Be the user's advocate in your group and keep putting _real_ users in front of employees (especially managers). Imagine that you are the designated representative (like the public defender) of specific users, and represent them. Speak for them.
SPEAK FOR _REAL_ USERS... NOT FAKE ABSTRACT "PROFILES".

Represent _real_ people, not the abstract notion of "users". Rather than saying, "what users really want is...", refer to your collection of specific user stories and talk about _real_ people. When you bring up users, talk about specific people with real names and experiences. Too many companies use fake "profile" characters as a way to think about real users (e.g. "The typical user is a thirty-five year old sales manager with a four-year degree and two kids who uses a computer for..."). While that's better than not thinking of users at _all_, it still puts both a physical and emotional distance between the company and _real_ users. After all, it's impossible to truly care about pissing off the "fake" 35-year old sales manager (even if you give the profile character a name, like "John"), but almost everyone starts to squirm when they think about a _real_ person becoming upset with them.

When those around you talk about the abstract concept of "users" or "customers", try to bring up specific real people whenever possible.
BE AFRAID OF SIX SIGMA. BE VERY AFRAID. DITTO FOR MOST OTHER "QUALITY PROGRAMS".

Just as using fake user profiles creates and maintains a separation between company and users, anything that treats users as statistics and abstract numbers on graphs is a problem. To treat a poor user experience as some kind of "defect per million" is just crazy. This doesn't mean Six Sigma and other quality programs aren't important and effective... but people are not widgets. When widget A does not fit properly in widget B, that's a defect. When user Barry Porter cannot figure out how to do the basic thing he bought the software for, and he's _frustrated_ and his job is at risk, that should provoke a more visceral reaction. Again, people aren't widgets. Make sure those around you keep being reminded of that.
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF PAPER.

Print out little signs that say things like, "How does this help the user kick ass?" and leave them lying on the copier, or the fax machine, or taped on a bulletin board and your cube/office wall. Keep changing them! (Remember, once your brain expects to see it, it stops being effective.)
GET YOUR HANDS ON A VIDEO CAMERA, AND RECORD SOME USERS.

This is one of the single best things we ever did at Sun... recording _real_ users talking about the bad--and _good_--things they experience as a result of using the product or service. They don't need slick editing. Just simple videos that you can send around the intranet and show at meetings. Having the _user_ advocate for himself -- in his own words -- is more powerful than when _you_ speak on his behalf. It's _very_ hard for people to think of users as abstract numbers and line items when they have to actually see a _real_ living breathing one with a face and a name and an eye color.
START A SUBVERSIVE CLUB. RIGHT THERE ON CAMPUS, RECRUIT AND ORGANIZE YOUR FELLOW ULA GUERILLAS.

But... just don't call it that. At Sun, we called it a "Knowledge Design Book Study Group", and held meetings where we picked a particular book and then met to brainstorm on "what are the implications of that book for what we do with our users?" Our first book for our study group was Richard Saul Wurman's (second edition). I don't care _what_ your product is or who your users are, if they're human, they're almost certainly dealing with Information Anxiety.
PUT PICTURES OF REAL USERS ON YOUR WALLS. ACT LIKE THEY\'RE AS IMPORTANT TO YOU AS PICTURES OF FAMILY MEMBERS AND PETS.

YOU create the culture of caring about individual user experiences by demonstrating that it matters _this_ much to you. WHEN PRODUCT FEATURES ARE DISCUSSED _WITHOUT_ TAKING INTO ACCOUNT HOW IT HELPS (OR HINDERS) THE USER KICKING ASS, ADOPT A SLIGHTLY CONFUSED, MILDLY ANNOYED LOOK...

Act like it's really weird and inappropriate that the person never brought up the user. As though they left for work without putting on a clean shirt or brushing their teeth. It's just something you _do_. Over time, those around you should start to become uncomfortable when products are discussed without the concept of the user at the center. This is _especially_ effective when there is more than one of you, so that you can -- as a group -- ALL act confused and annoyed. You want it to appear that EVERYONE thinks the way you do, and that _not_speaking up about the user is just...weird and wrong.
BLOG ABOUT IT

People are listening.
CHALLENGE USER-UNFRIENDLY ASSUMPTIONS EVERY DAY.

When someone says, "We can't do that" or "We must do it _this_ way" question it. Every time. Don't let anything go unchallenged. And when the answer is "because customers don't like it that way" or "customers want..." or something like that, always ask, "How do we know this?" (just act curious). It might be that the data on which that assumption is based is too old or was never well formed in the first place. You'll never know until you dig deep into the thinking that's driving the assumption.
GATHER FACTS. BUILD A RATIONAL, LOGICAL CASE THAT MAPS A USER-CENTRIC APPROACH TO REAL BUSINESS ISSUES.
You don't want to get into an opinion war. You want facts and stats on your side. If you can point to a specific plan for a feature change, for example, and say, "Well, when we did something similar over here in _this_ area, we had a complaint ratio of..." The more "emotional" and touchy-feely someone perceives the emphasis on users to be, the less likely they are to take it seriously as a business case. There are always going to be a lot of people in the company who refuse to _care_ about the real people, but they _will_ care about numbers, so you should always be trying to prove that the user-kicks-ass approach has a compelling benefit for the business (beyond the obvious one that _you_ and any other system thinker would see). We learned the hard way that we should never take it for granted that other people in the company will even _think_ about this idea of the user being passionate and in flow.
LOOK FOR FIRST-PERSON LANGUAGE FROM USERS ABOUT THEIR OWN EXPERIENCE. CHALLENGE OTHERS TO SOLICIT FIRST-PERSON, USER-AS-SUBJECT LANGUAGE.

Do everything you can to get user feedback phrased in first-person terms. Rather than feedback that talks about what the user thinks should be in the product, try to solicit feedback that gets the user talking about _himself_. Users tend to want to tell you what you should add/subtract from the product, but what you need is feedback where the user tells you about _himself_ in relation to the product, even if it's negative.

Useful: "I tried to use the XYZ feature, and I couldn't figure out how to make it work."

Not useful: "The XYZ feature doesn't work properly."

Useful: "I was able to make a really cool image as a result of your app."

Not useful: "The app does a great job of image processing."

Set it up as a challenge for yourself and others you work with to figure out ways to generate first-person feedback where users talk about themselves. Make it a game or a contest to see who can get the user to use the "I" word the most often. What kind of questions could you ask that would lead to the user talking about himself rather than YOU or your PRODUCT?
DON\'T GIVE UP.

If you do, then quit at the earliest possible moment. But if you're relentless and you slowly recruit others to your cause, you _can_ change a culture... one small group at a time. If you succeed, even in a small way, and help shift the supertanker just one degree... that one degree eventually means a profoundly different trajectory down the road. Even if your chance to make a difference is slimmer than for those of us in smaller groups (or lone wolf operations), you have a chance to make a WAY bigger impact, touching far more people's lives.

I must say that I won't ever feel the same way about Microsoft now that I've interacted with these folks. And while you might not have heard much about (the guy responsible for bringing me in to do the workshop at Microsoft), that's going to be changing. I have friends at Sun, and now I have friends at Microsoft. It's hard to refer to something your friends belong to as "evil". And even if corporate Microsoft WERE truly evil, I reckon if my friends are there fighting the good fight from within to produce change, that's something I can feel good about.

[Be warned, though, that I was asked or rather _urged_ to leave Sun as a result of some of what's in here so... I wouldn't be taking advice from me if I were you ; ) I finally got the "you're not a team player" warning and put on probation (and eventually asked to leave), but my response was, "Oh, I AM a team player. It's just that I'm on the _user's_ team." (I left out the part about, "Since clearly nobody ELSE around here is...") ]

Posted by Kathy Sierra on September 23, 2005 |

shut up and get your checkbook out: " Congratulations to PR maven Steve Rubel on his new job. At another large New York PR agency, no less. A marketing professional just sent me the following note: Something I've noticed about the newest class of PR/marketing bloggers- most of them are in the bowels of big agencies and their writing and point of view show it. It's a lot of 'Here's how to use blogs as tools for our wonderful PR programs', and not at all about what blogging IS. Agencythink in new clothes; that's all it is. Rubel can't ever truly be Rubel until he's on his own- going from one overlord to another means more of the same commentary on business as usual. The sad thing is I don't think he realizes that.Well, I don't think Steve Rubel is a hack [No worse than me, anyway]. And not everybody suits being on their own. Some people like working for big companies. Different strokes et. Then again, my nameless friend makes a good point about some of the business blogs I've been seeing around. I suppose any hardcore professional blog evangelist will invariably end up with the same pitch, like it or not: 'Blogs will disrupt and transform everything about your business. Except for the part where you pay me lots of money'.Nice work if you can get it. "

Proof that Employees Don't Care About Security: "Does anyone think that this experiment would turn out any differently? An experiment carried out within London's square mile has revealed that employees in some of the City's best known financial services companies don't care about basic security policy. CDs were handed out to commuters as they entered the City by employees of IT skills specialist The Training Camp and recipients were told the disks contained a special Valentine's Day promotion. However, the CDs contained nothing more than code which informed The Training Camp how many of the recipients had tried to open the CD. Among those who were duped were employees of a major retail bank and two global insurers. The CD packaging even contained a clear warning about installing third-party software and acting in breach of company acceptable-use policies -- but that didn't deter many individuals who showed little regard for the security of their PC and their company. This was a benign stunt, but it could have been much more serious. A CD-ROM carried into the office and run on a computer bypasses the company's network security systems. You could easily imagine a criminal ring using this technique to deliver a malicious program into a corporate network -- and it would work. But concluding that employees don't care about security is a bit naive. Employees care about security; they just d"

A Creative NASCAR Incentive: "Our new “Freakonomics” column, appearing in today’s New York Times Magazine, takes a look at NASCAR’s recent record of crashing and fatalities. Not surprisingly, the Times’s sports section is full of NASCAR articles, since today is the running of the 2006 Daytona 500 (which marks 5 years since the death of Dale Earnhardt). One of these articles, by Viv Bernstein, is about the amazing record compiled over the past several years by Jack Roush’s team, which last year put five drivers in the Chase for the Nextel Cup, NASCAR’s version of a post-season playoff. One interesting point of this article is the response by the rival Hendrick Motorsports team. Team owner Rick Hendrick is offering a $1,248,525 bonus to his staffers if all four of his team’s drivers make the Chase this year. The article doesn’t stipulate who, exactly, are the staffers who get the money, but $1.2 million split among a bunch of people who probably make pretty good money is probably not the prime incentive here; rather, as is often the case with group incentives versus individual ones, the fear of being the guy who holds back the rest of the group is probably a stronger motivation than anything. The economist Roland Fryer tested this idea not long ago among New York City schoolchildren. He was giving out rewards to kid"

The Problem with Single Sign-In Systems: "One of the more thankless jobs at MSN Windows Live is to work on the Passport team. Many of the product teams that are customers of the service tend to view it as a burden, myself included. One of the primary reasons for this is that instead of simply being the username/password service for MSN Windows Live it is actually a single-sign in system which encompasses a large number of sites besides those owned by Microsoft. For example, you can use the same username and password to access your email, travel plans or medical information. Trevin Chow of the Passport team has written a blog post entitled Why does Passport sign-in suck? where he addresses one of the pain points its customers face due to its legacy as a single sign-in system. He writes Q: Why do you keep asking me to sign in over and over again even though I've checked 'automatically sign me in'?  What don't you understand about 'automatic'?!   One of the biggest problems with see in the network of MSN, Windows Live and Microsoft sites is that Passport sign-in is seen way too often by users.  It appears as if we are disregarding your choice of 'automatically sign me in' and randomly asking you to sign in when we want with no rhyme or reason...   Passport sign-in 101 Passport sign in"

Password Gorilla: " Password Gorilla: One of the problems we have around Blend is tracking login credentials. We have three people and probably 300 sets of credentials we have to manage, so it gets complicated. On our Linux boxes, we have a snazzy PKI system, but for everything else, we just have to track usernames and passwords. Complicating this is the fact that we’re on three separate platforms: Windows, Mac, and Linux. So how do you store all these credentials? On some Web-based system? Um, no. This tool is handy, and cross-platform. The Password Gorilla helps you manage your logins. It stores all your user names and passwords, along with login information and other notes, in a securely encrypted file. A single “master password” is used to protect the file. This way, you only need to remember the single master password, instead of the many logins that you use. It’s free and it has a neat feature whereby you never have to see the password. If you right-click on an entry you can “Copy password to clipboard,” so it’s never visible. It gets wiped off the clipboard after a set number of seconds. "

So where exactly are all the world's reserves going?: "We don't yet formally know the BEA's estimate for the end of the year current account deficit, but we have a pretty good idea.  We also now have a lot of data about how the US financed its current account deficit (try selling debt to foreign investors).  One thing is already clear.  There is going to be a big fall off in recorded central bank flows to the US.  A really big fall off.     In 2004, central banks provided the US with close to $400 billion in financing -- something the President's Council of Economic Advisors somehow forget to mention in their report.   The 2005 TIC data shows that central banks bought only about $115b billion in long-term securities, down from $236b in 2004.   Add in the fact that in 2005 central banks seem to have reduced their holdings of short-term treasuries by $43 billion and it seems, in net, central bank holdings of US securities increased by only $71-72 billion (v. $324 billion or so in 2004). Foreign central bank's 'onshore' dollar deposits are up by 19.2 billion in the first three quarters 2005 - so a reasonable estimate for the full year total is $26.6 billion (v $70b in 2004).  That would put total recorded central bank financing of the US - if "

A Story that Warms My Heart, by Bryan Caplan: "Think firemen provide a public good? At least in rural areas, think again: MINNEAPOLIS – Carl Berg failed to pay a $25 annual fee for rural fire protection and, as a result, firefighters let his house burn to the ground last month near International Falls, Minn. Along with his daughter and a grandson, Berg escaped the fire. 'I lost everything else,' he said. 'Stand and watch it burn was all I could do. . . . They should have put the thing out, but they didn't.' Some area residents are expressing outrage about a system that can let that happen – and about a dispute involving the International Falls Fire Department, Koochiching County and the Rural Fire Protection Association, which collects annual fees and pays the city for each fire it fights outside city limits. 'You either buy it or you don't have it,' said Don Billig, the association's secretary. One puzzle is why the fire department didn't offer to put it out for an 'emergency fee.' That way, you could either pay your $25 annual fee, or wait for a fire and pay $10,000. Don't have $10,000? You could give new meaning to the phrase 'fire sale' and sell the fire department your house while it's still worth something. I wonder if that would hold up in court. I think not."

Taking responsibility: "One of the best ways to enrage a customer is to duck responsibility. Airlines do it, accountants do it, lawyers do it. Doctors, too. Frontline service workers are always in the awkward position of having to deal with angry customers about something that's not their fault. Often, the very act of evasion is what the customer is angry about. All we want is someone to look us in the eye and take responsibility. Here's a note someone sent, enraged about a Valentine's Day order gone wrong: Here is an email that I received when I came home on Tuesday Feb 14th.  Itis from a company named Shari's Berries.  I saw their product on GoodMorning America last week and decided to order some chocolate coveredstrawberries for a gift.  Their web-site guaranteed Valentine's Daydelivery.  I must tell you the price was not cheap.  I ordered a giftselection and with delivery it was over $65.00. -------------------------------------------------------- Dear XXXXXXXXXXXXX, We are writing to inform you that your order for delivery February 14th wasnot shipped yesterday as requested.  We are prepared to ship your order on February 14th for arrival on the 15th..  Alternatively, you do have the option of canceling your order, but we'drather you did not. We regret that your order did not ship as requested and in consideration oft"

Software Security: The Badness-ometer: "Here is another excerpt from my new book, Software Security: Building Security In. Application Security Tools: Good or Bad? Application security testing products are being sold as a solution to the problem of insecure software. Unfortunately, these first-generation solutions are not all they are cracked up to be. They may help us diagnose, describe, and demonstrate the problem, but they do little to help us fix it. Today’s application security products treat software applications as “black boxes” that are prone to misbehave and must be probed and prodded to prevent security disaster. Unfortunately, this approach is too simple. Software testing requires planning and should be based on software requirements and the architecture of the code under test. You can’t “test quality in” by painstakingly finding and removing bugs once the code is done. The same goes for security; running a handful of canned tests that “simulate malicious hackers” by sending malformed input streams to a program will not work. Real attackers don’t simply “fuzz” a program with input to find problems. Attackers take software apart, determine how it works, and make it misbehave by doing what users are not supposed to do. The essence of the disconnect is that black box testing approaches, including application security testing tools, only"

Security and Conference Badges: "Bruce Schneier writes about the RSA Conference's new method of dealing with badge fraud: Last year, the RSA Conference tried to further limit these types of fraud by putting people's photographs on their badges. Clever idea, but difficult to implement. For this to work, though, guards need to match photographs with faces. This means that either 1) you need a lot more guards at entrance points, or 2) the lines will move a lot slower. Actually, far more likely is 3) no one will check the photographs. And it was an expensive solution for the RSA Conference. They needed the equipment to put the photos on the badges. Registration was much slower. And pro-privacy people objected to the conference keeping their photographs on file. This year, the RSA Conference solved the problem through economics: If you lose your badge and/or badge holder, you will be required to purchase a new one for a fee of $1,895.00. Look how clever this is. Instead of trying to solve this particular badge fraud problem through security, they simply moved the problem from the conference to the attendee. The badges still have that $1,895 value, but now if it's stolen and used by someone else, it's the attendee who's out the money. As far as the RSA Conference is concerned, the security risk is an externality. Bruce's point about i"

journeyman vs. master: " Martin over at Easyweb makes an interesting point about 'The Three Ages Of Slavery'. I'd love to draw parallels with the old Guild levels of Apprentice, Journeyman and Master, but I feel I'm still Journeying.Yeah, I know the feeling all too well. Which is probably why I try to avoid consulting gigs like the plague. The thing about consulting I hate is, you just get paid by the billable hour. So the minute you stop tapdancing, you're dead. A Journeyman gets paid while he works. A Master gets paid while he sleeps. [Bonus Link:] From Kathy Sierra: 'Where there is passion, there are stories.'"

Randian Valentine's day rhetoric: " 'You treat me like property.' ...If I treated her as if she were my property, after all, it means that I would take care of her, protect her, and treat her well above all things not in my possession. Suddenly, I realized the look on her face did not reflect the combusting happiness within me. Then, I realized my error. We are all self owners, she as much as I. But let's say I were treating her like property. That raises the extremely important issue: 'Do you mean public or private property?'"

Lemons for Valentine's Day, by Bryan Caplan: "Match Point, yet another Woody Allen movie about adultery, reminds me of a question I've often wondered about: Why hasn't the lemons problem killed adultery? To be more specific, why would any women want to steal a man who lies to, cheats on, and then dumps his wife? This is particularly clear in Match Point - the mistress angrily insists that her boyfriend leave his wife, even though he's shown her in a hundred ways that he's a lying, cheating parasite. In the actual market for used cars, of course, the markets has largely solved the lemons problems using reputation, inspection, and warrantees. You don't want to sell low-quality products if it will ruin your firm's reputation, if they have to pass inspection first, or if a dissatisfied customer can return the product and get his money back. But it's hard to see that mistresses can rely on any of these mechanisms. Few adulterers build up a reputation for standing by their mistresses. Most adulterers wouldn't pass inspection. And I've never heard of an adulterer giving a credible money-back guarantee ('If I don't leave my wife within a year, you get a full year of your life back!'). One solution to this puzzle is to challenge the deny that mistresses want to marry the men they're cheating with. Maybe both are in it for the short-term. But this hardly se"

Goodmail and Extortion: "Various people in various fora have accused Goodmail Systems of attempting to extort payments out of senders, saying 'That's a nice little email you've got there. You wouldn't want it to get hurt, would you?' That's not how it works; not at all. Traditionally, a protection racket is a subset of extortion. The nominal protector is actually the one who would create the harm in absence of a payment. The exortionist threatens to harm the property owner or his property in exchange for a payment. Of course, this only works if there is no other threat to the property; e.g. another extortionist. Typically, though, the extortionist has eliminated any other extortionists, otherwise the payment would quickly go to zero. So, first, Goodmail doesn't have a monopoly. Sure, they have first-mover status, but there's no reason why they couldn't be out-competed in the marketplace of email certification. Second of all, Goodmail doesn't own the resources used to create and maintain the mailbox. So if they were the extortionist, then the mailbox provider would be complicit in the extortion. In this view, the sender is the victim, and the provider and Goodmail are acting in concert as the extortionist. The problem with this view is that folks like AOL and Yahoo have never needed Goodmail to extract payments. They have always had the ability to take a sender aside"

New Phones Coming Soon For WiFi/VoIP/Cellular: "ABC News has a report about the new Nokia and Motorola phones that will handle VoIP and Cellular. It's all part of the Fixed Mobile Convergence world."

The new Nokia 6136 and Motorola A910 handsets introduced at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona can connect to the Internet via WiFi, rather than Bluetooth, to make cut-price calls from the home, office or public hotspot.

The New York Press, New Partisan, And The Danish C...: "The New York Press, New Partisan, And The Danish Cartoons It’s been a fairly big story in the blogosphere that Harry Siegel and the rest of the staff of the New York Press resigned as a group when the paper’s owner ordered Siegel, the Editor, to kill a story that was going to print the infamous Danish caricatures of Mohammed. I’ve mentioned Harry Siegel here before, in his capacity as Editor of the on line journal New Partisan, which he left to become Editor of the Press. Due to the connection between the two journals, New Partisan then ran the editorial and the pieces that were pulled from the Press. (Full disclosure: I’m a contributor at New Partisan and have a couple of items in the hopper there at the moment.) I’m impressed by the thoughtfulness of the material that the Press killed. Take this piece by Scott Indrisek: [T]he cartoons themselves are objectionable on certain grounds. They’re badly drawn and not terribly insightful, for starters—which makes the American media’s reluctance to display them all the more appalling. CNN chose “not to show the cartoons out of respect for Islam,” which is an ironically gentlemanly response to an outbreak of global violence and protest. Gawker recently posted a Flickr link to many of t"

Comparing writing specifications to writing code: "My colleague who manages to pack his entire office into a single box recently made the switch from program management to programming. I teased him, 'So what's it like using an editor without a 'boldface' button?' His response was actually rather insightful. 'Writing specifications is like writing a novel. Writing code is like writing poetry.' When you're writing a specification, you need to start by setting the scene so people understand the problem you're trying to solve. You then explore the world you've created, elaborating on the details necessary to convey your intent, considering all the possibilities and addressing each one. When you're writing code, you are focused on conciseness. Like a poet, you are thrilled when you find a single expression that covers all the nuances you're trying to convey. You are intent on writing only what is necessary, no more. Beauty is in the small. I guess this explains why I was never good at long-form writing. "

Shifting from program management to programming also affects your social life: "My colleague who switched from program management to programming has this to say about unintended consequences: My wife says that I am much more pleasant to be around. My social skills appear to have become a lot better, which is really counter-intuitive to the standard image of a developer. My take on this is that I developed through the needs of my job as a lead program manager the ability to talk to anyone at any time to get a particular issue dealt with, but that I didn't necessarily want to do this or enjoy the process. After work or on the weekends, my wife was hard pressed to get me to see other people. Now, there is no such issue. The reduction in forced human interaction is such that I am no longer overstretching my ability to interact with people, thus rendering me able to undertake those interactions and actually enjoy it. Of course, this doesn't necessarily work for lifelong programmers, since they may not ever have developed these social skills to begin with! "

Area775 - Free US Telephone Number Links Mobile and VoIP Worlds: "Imagine having one telephone number that will ring your PC at home or work, mobile phone or land line. Answering the call is easy at whatever location is most convenient and the caller has no idea where you're answering the call - maybe in your car, maybe"

VC Cliché of the Week: "It's a competitive world out there. Entrepreneurs competing with other entrepreneurs, VCs competing with other VCs, companies competing with each other for the hearts and minds of consumers and businesses. I often think that simple games like poker, bridge, chess, etc are great analogies for life in the competitive world.  And one game that I often think of in business is Risk.  I play Risk with my kids and although they love it, it can get superheated at times.  When one person starts to get on a roll, amassing territories and armies, everyone else gets annoyed. And that's when the enemy of your enemy is your friend. If there is a player who starts threatening everyone else, its gang up time. And so it is with business.  There may be a company out there that you regard as a very worthy competitor, who you cannot imagine cozying up to for a nanosecond, and then another company makes a move that threatens both of your businesses in some way.  The CEO of that first company calls you and all of sudden you are best friends.  Because the enemy of your enemy is your friend. These 'friendships' can last days, months, or forever.  They are often temporary and based on bonds that will not last.  But every so often, they can develop into long term strategic partnerships. Because its easier to g"

New Labour's fake health egalitarianism:
Greater social equality, that's what. There's good evidence that social inequalities - not just income inequalities - cause health inequalities.

2. This paper shows that men aged over 50 were 1.54 times more likely to die in 1995-2001 if they were in social class V in 1971 than if they were in social class I in that year. This inequality applied even to those who escaped their class:

Those who improved their social class between 1971 and 1991 reduced their risk of death somewhat relative to their class of origin but retained a higher risk than others in the class of destination.

3. Actors and actresses who win Oscars live longer than those who are merely nominated (though, oddly, the opposite is true of screenwriters (pdf)).

Lower social status - independently of income - is associated with anxiety, insecurity and stress, all of which contribute to illness and death. Improving health, he says, requires a cut in status inequality - for example, by increasing workplace democracy.

What are phones used for?
OPINION://See you there!: "I’ve got a bit of a running gag with my little brother. (OK, he’s taller than me, and officially old, but still my little brother.) We both spend a lot of time in airports. Airports are boring. Cell minutes are cheap. Often one of us will get a call from ‘tother, which always begins: “You’ll never guess where I am”. The answer is, 80% of the time, just off the corridor in the domestic lounges at Heathrow Terminal 1. Incidentally, growing up two miles from Heathrow gives you a totally distorted view of the world. Your isochrone map looks different to everyone else’s. Twelve hours’ journey from your front door lets you visit half of humanity, give or take. Allow me a day, and where in the world did you say you wanted to meet? (OK, it took 30 hours to here, and two weeks’ walk to there, but you get the idea.) I can only imagine folk who grew up in other “crossroads of the world” like Dubai or New York quite understanding what I’m on about, and what a shock it is to have to get one of these strange “connecting flight” thingies. (Seriously, I’d been flying for two decades before experiencing one.) Anyhow, one day a few years back my brother was picking me up at LHR. Arrangements were deliberately fuzzy — I think I was in f"

The Art of Creating a Community: " I admit it: I’m user-group junkie. I got my first taste of user groups when I worked for Apple—speaking at their meetings was one of my great pleasures. Their members were unpaid, raging, inexorable thunderlizard evangelists for Macintosh and Apple II. These folks sustained Apple by supporting its customers when it couldn’t—or didn’t want to—support them itself. Now that Apple is the homecoming queen again, there are lots of people receiving, taking, and claiming credit for its success. The Apple user-group community deserves a high-five tribute too. Now that I gotten that off my chest; now I can move on to the topic of this entry: how to create a kick-ass community. I anticipate many comments to this entry, so I am warning you in advance that I am going to frequently modify and supplement this entry. RSS readers beware! :-) Create something worth building a community around. This is a repeated theme in my writing: the key to evangelism, sales, demoing, and building a community is a great product. Frankly, if you create a great product, you may not be able to stop a community from forming even if you tried. By contrast, it’s hard to build a community around crappy, mundane, and mediocre crap no matter how hard you try. Identify and recruit your thunderlizards—immediately! "

VC Disruption? Part One.:
Second, the one term I'm not going to use or define is 'disruption'. Any VC has seen that word sufficiently abused to cynically interpret it as 'bu****it'. If it's not backed up with some analysis of the mechanism of change, and who will benefit and how, its use can be discrediting. Let's try something else.

Ask Not. . . The other day I went looking for the ...: "Ask Not. . .The other day I went looking for the correct text that had Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you” apostrophe in his inaugural address, and when I found the full version, I was simply astonished at what it contains. It’s enough for a digression. Here are some passages, but the whole thing is remarkable almost 50 years later: To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required--not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. . . . In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe. Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejo"

An unexpected Freakonomics lesson: "Walter Park, an associate professor at American University in Washington, DC sends along the following story: I’m using your book as a required reading in my principles microeconomics class (of 300 students). The students enjoy the book and are better appreciating the course as a result. Interestingly, as I gave a lecture on “Price Discrimination”, using an example of the demand for textbooks (relatively inelastic) vs. novels (relatively elastic), the students pointed out that in our campus textbook store, “Freakonomics” is on sale at the regular price in the textbook section (1st floor) and at a 30% discount in the General Reading Section (2nd floor). Same college. Same store. Same hardback. Just a floor apart. I don’t know how long before the textbook store manager realizes this. At least the students got to observe some economics principles at work. When we set out to right a book about economics that would be relevant to everyday life, we didn’t actually expect that the lessons would be this literal."

iTunes fact of the day: "I had thought classical music was flailing on-line, but perhaps I was wrong: ...classical music comprises twelve percent of sales on that site [iTunes]. Back in October I linked to a piece by Marc Shulgold in which Mark Berry of Naxos asserted that classical music accounted for six percent of all Internet downloads. We've been told for some years that classical music makes up only three or four percent of record sales overall. Something's happening here, and Time, Newsweek, and Entertainment Weekly (to name three magazines that have dropped all classical-music coverage) don't know what it is. For more, read Anastasia Tsioulcas in Billboard and Scott Timberg in the LA Times. Read more here.  I suspect many people don't want classical music to succeed on the Internet.  That would mean change.  Shorter pieces?  More celebrity-driven?  More pieces that can withstand poor sound quality?  More fusion and crossover?  Listeners who reassemble symphony movements to form their own medleys?  What is classical music anyway?  By the way, here are the classical grammy winners.  Nelson Freire playing Chopin deserved to win Best Instrumentalist."

Mind Control Parasites in Half of All Humans: "iiii writes 'According to a Yahoo News story, half of the world's human population is infected with Toxoplasma, a parasite shown to alter the brain function of rats, inducing them into behavior that benefits the parasite but is suicidal for the rat. So what affect does it have on humans? Article comes complete with Heinlein 'Puppet Masters' reference. I call dibs on using Toxoplasma as a name for my rock band.'"

Videogaming Keeps the Brain From Aging: "Ant wrote to mention a Globe and Mail article stating that videogames keep the mind young and help in quick focusing on different tasks. 'A body of research suggests that playing video games provides benefits similar to bilingualism in exercising the mind. Just as people fluent in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly switch attention between different tasks. A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable.'"

Cartoons: "Last week there was controversy over a cartoon which was NOT of the Prophet Mohammad.  The cartoon shows a US soldier in a hospital who is a quadruple amputee.  Its point is that Donald Rumsfeld is glossing over the damage done to the US armed forces by the continued wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff felt that the cartoon was in bad taste (so do I) and wrote an unusual joint letter of objection to the Washington Post which had published the cartoon. CNN ran a story on the Joint Chief’s letter.  During the entire story, the cartoon was on the screen.  It should have been; that’s what the controversy was about. If you want to scrutinize the cartoon, click the thumbnail below. But CNN feels differently about the pictures of the Prophet Mohammed: “CNN is not showing the negative caricatures of the likeness of the Prophet Mohammed because the network believes its role is to cover the events surrounding the publication of the cartoons while not unnecessarily adding fuel to the controversy itself.” This is a slight change from CNN’s earlier statement that they didn’t want to offend Muslims by showing any picture of Mohammed.  They have discovered in the interim that you can buy postcards of the Prophet in Tehran and that his likeness is in bas relief in "

SkypeWeb is now available: "SkypeWeb is now officially available. It is supported in the latest release of Skype for Windows. To activate SkypeWeb, you need to turn it on. You can get your own Skype button here. SkypeWeb in short means that you can have a fancy button for your e-mail or web page which goes something like this: One bit of feedback we’ve had is that there’s currently no “dropdown-style” button available in the Skype button builder. People are asking what’s up with it and why did we take it away? Short answer — we just didn’t make it in time to remake it to the new style with status. It’s coming back. Soon. Really. Keep checking the page."

The Art of Rainmaking: " I'll get lots of flak for saying this, but since I'm accustomed to flak from my Apple days, I'll say it anyway: Sales fixes everything. As long as you have sales, cash will flow, and as long as cash flows, (a) you will have the time to fix your team, your technology, and your marketing; (b) the press won't be able to say much because customers are pouring money into your coffers; and (c) your investors will leave you alone because (i) they will focus on companies with weaker sales and (ii) they won't want to jinx your success. You can blow all the smoke that you like about brand awareness, corporate image, and feedback from early adopters, but you either make it rain or you don't. To help you become a legend in annals of salesmanship, here is the art of rainmaking. “Let a hundred flowers blossom.” I stole this from Chairman Mao although I'm not sure how he implemented it. In the context of capitalism (Chairman Mao must be turning over in his grave), the dictum means that you sow seeds in many markets, see what takes root, and harvest what blooms. Many companies freak out when unintended customers buy their product. Many companies also freak out when intended customers buy their product but use it in unintended ways. Don't be proud. Take the money. The guy who invented Brillo sold pots and pans; he"

GMail for Domains?: " GMail code hints at coming domain feature: These guys did some snooping around in the huge JavaScript code libraries for GMail and found some code that leads them to some cool conclusions. Their next big move will likely be GMail for domains — a powerful way for anybody who owns a domain to utilize GMail as a mail server, not just a client. Yahoo has their own small business mail product which does precisely this, and now evidence suggests Google is planning the same. You gotta be careful what you put in your JavaScript files. "

Cohn on charging for e-mail: "Cindy Cohn doesn't like the AOL/Yahoo pay-to-send e-mail scheme: The justification is that if people have to pay to send email, they won't send junk email. Apparently AOL and Yahoo believe that if we 'tax' speech then only desirable speech happens. We all know how well that works for postal mail -- that's why no one gets any 'free' AOL starter disks, right? I don't think this argument actually holds up that well. The volume of junk paper mail that most people get is far less than the volume of spam people get. So, while it's true that people get a lot of junk paper mail, it also seems true that the fact that there's some cost associated with it substantially reduces the amount you get. And note that I don't get any pornographic paper junk mail--unless you count the Victoria's Secret catalog. Now, you can say this is because the sender is identified and the USPS can track them down, but at least the identified part would be true in a pay-for-service system too. If email senders bear a burden, who gains? Not Yahoo and AOL customers, whose email boxes are being sold off. It will presumably be harder for even desired email to reach them. This is obviously a real concern that I raised in my original message. But, then, as Kevin Dick observes, if the market is competitive, then people can switch"

Merging police forces: lessons from companies: "Is it a good idea to merge police forces? There's a lot of lessons Charles Clarke could learn from company mergers. Here are six:1. Many mergers are disappointing. Folk wisdom used to be that most mergers fail. This great paper (pdf) by Robert Bruner shows that this is too pessimistic, but even he says: Most transactions are associated with results that are hardly consistent with optimistic expectations. Synergies, efficiencies and value-creating growth seem hard to obtain. 2. Mergers can be undertaken for bad motives - to flatter the CEO's ego or boost his pay. Richard Roll famously pointed out (pdf) that they can also be motivated by over-confidence; bosses over-estimate their ability to manage bigger companies and reap economies of scale.3. Cost savings are easier to achieve than revenue growth. Some of the biggest M&A failures - AOL-Time Warner is the standard example - came because CEOs saw them as a way to boost sales. A more likely way to succeed is just to cut out overheads or improve efficiency. This shouldn't be too hard. As the man says, '80% of my time is wasted.' This suggests police mergers are more likely to work if they concentrate on doing existing functions cheaper, rather than more functions better. It's worrying, then, that Clarke seems to think otherwise. 4. Watch for diseconomies"

DEMO-ID Vault: "For fifty dollars or less, wikth idVault you can secure your passwords and logons for all kinds of web sites, financial services and more. It's a guard against identity theft and has a place in everyone's life."

People skills: why they matter: "The Association of Graduate Recruiters reckons soft skills are important: The AGR said as well as academic achievement employers want good team-workers who can communicate properly and have cultural awareness...The association's chief executive, Carl Gilleard, said: 'Employers are likely to be looking to graduates who can demonstrate softer skills such as team-working, cultural awareness, leadership and communication skills, as well as academic achievement.' I've said that this might be a barrier to social mobility. These guys reckon increased demand for soft skills explains the narrowing in the gender pay gap since the 1970s, although they say the process is now slowing. But why are soft skills increasingly important?One possibility is that they are technologically necessary, as they are for sales occupations. But there's another possibility . What employers really want are workers they can trust - workers who have internalized capitalist disciplines into their very personalities and so don't need external supervision, the cost of which has increased since the demise of old-fashioned mass production.  Soft skills are correlated with these personal traits, being euphemisms for 'middle-class'. This classic paper (pdf) explains."

How much is the Internet worth?: " For some goods, the main cost of buying the product is not the price but rather the time it takes to use them. Only about 0.2% of consumer spending in the U.S., for example, went for Internet access in 2004 yet time use data indicates that people spend around 10% of their entire leisure time going online....we calculate that consumer surplus from the Internet may be around 2% of full-income, or several thousand dollars per user. This is an order of magnitude larger than what one obtains from a back-of-the-envelope calculation using data from expenditures. Here is the paper.  I call it a good start, but let us not forget the Internet also brings price closer to marginal cost in many markets.  Your on-line searching has external benefits for others.  Or how about another paper: 'What is the iPod worth?'  TiVo?  The more we are changing the use of your time, the less we can trust real income statistics."

Christopher Phillips: all outta virgins: "What gets me is the way those promoting the violence are encouraging the mob to believe that their beloved prophet has been treated in a manner far worse than the the west treats founders of any other religion.Yes, the cartoons first published in Jyllands-Posten were somewhat on the insensitive side - but to my eyes no more so than anything Monty Python said about Roman Catholics thirty years ago. The whole issue has been blown completely out of proportion by extremists looking for an excuse. Rasberries to any media outlets that go on about it without publishing the cartoons themselves (preferably alongside equally blasphemous cartoons about Christianity :).My sympathy to any Danes feeling threatened by current extremist reactions. Tea anyone?"

AOL's Spam Bribery Campaign: " AOL to charge fee as way to cut spam: Marketers can now pay America Online to ensure their messages are delivered and not flagged as spam. How is this not bribery? The certified e-mail system would require advertisers to pay $2 to $3 per 1,000 messages. The plan is optional, though AOL and its tech partner, Goodmail Systems, cannot guarantee that all non-certified e-mail with Web links and images will be delivered. Nothing has changed except: AOL is making money hand over fist. Marketers have a nice, handy way around spam filters at AOL. This will do nothing to dissaude hardcore spammers. Zero. Nada. Zilch. They’re no worse off than they were before, so why should they change? The economics of spam are the same for them. This just means there’s a new class of spammer: those that have paid AOL for the right to bypass the filters. This is crap. "

The Art of Partnering: " When I went through the security line at San Francisco International Airport this morning, I noticed this laptop with an Apple sticker pasted over its Dell logo (click to enlarge the photo if you don't believe me). I thought this was very funny, so I asked its owner why he did this. He explained that he was tired of explaining why he had a Dell. I told him that I'd never heard of an Apple owner pasting a Dell sticker over the Apple logo, and he agreed that this was unlikely to happen. (At that point, he noticed my PowerBook's Tony Hawk autograph, but I digress...) This got me to thinking about how companies form partnerships--pasting each other's logos on products and services and ending up with crap. The fallacy of partnerships--and how “partner” became a verb--is rooted in the dot.com days of 1998-2000. During these years, most startups didn't have a business model, so they blew smoke about having “partnered” with big firms. Surely if a company partnered with Microsoft or IBM, it would be successful. To this day, whenever an entrepreneur uses “partner” used as a verb, it bothers me because I hear, “Bull-shitake relationship that isn't going to increase revenue.” However, I am not an angry little man, so in the spirit of improving what has become a flawed process, I offer The Art "