exmicrosoldier

it's easier to have less total derailments, but higher numbers of cars derailed.

Put every train car in the country on one train and derail it. Now 100% of the capacity was derailed, but it's an incredible success, because the number of train derailments shrank from 1056 to 1!

So much safety!

I work in SaaS. Availability is a key feature.

A service with more features that I can't use is less valuable than one with less features that I can use whenever I want.

I would appreciate any pointers at good news sources you recommend.

Thank you for the first legitimate critique of the Black Lives Matter organization that I've seen.

I don't think it invalidates all of the points of the platform of BLM, but it does make me question the sanity and legitimacy of the organization's leadership.

The first battle of the Second american civil war has happened. Every tech company has to choose a side.

Instead of a war over slavery, this is a war over shared reality or personal echo chambers, and most of the tech companies have been fighting against shared reality.

Please choose wisely and soon. Unified reality or seperate ones.

People are planning to overthrow the government of the country you live in, "in your house".

It does not seem implausible that supporters of a group that participates in rampant types of voter supression, gerrymandering, throwing away ballots, & sueing to prevent votes being counted would be afraid of lying to nosy strangers.

The first, hardest duopoly to fix in the United States is the two party system.

This seems like "noble virtue signaling" for software executives.

It isn't taking a five why's approach to the problem of ethical failures in the industry. It won't fix root cause problems.

We don't need a Hippocratic oath for Software Engineers. We need laws and regulations around some things. And then the government needs to penalize C-level execs, the board, and major shareholders for violating them.

The problem is that laws apply to individual without significant financial resources, sporadically to the truly wealthy, almost never to corporations, and never to the shareholders.

Trying to fix a broken system with a "Hippocratic oath" for software developers is like trying to fix school shootings by making sure the doctors will save the school shooters as much as the victims.

Microsoft could still be profitable and fix way more bugs in the software than they do - they choose the higher profit margin over "the good of humanity" all day every day, and it is the executives and major shareholders that make that own that decision.

Kavanaugh has been a controversial person his entire career.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-judicial-jihad-a...

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/08/20/oral...

In the context of most supreme court nominees, combined with the amount of contoversy surrounding his appointment yes.

Every tier one tech company I ever worked for would not hire someone that caused that much ill will, from a culture perspective. The brand of the supreme court is seen as a wise, impartial, authorative, servant of the people.

An imperious, rabidly partisan, agressive, evasive, offended, entitled boy damages that brand.

A nonpartisan, considered, empathetic, distinguished man does not.

This was a problem with people. Specifically, people who force people to commit to a known deadline on something they dont know how to do.

Someone got promoted for delivering business value, and they were smart, they left before it all blew up.

Get 'er done without context and fire them for failure is bad management.

The EU has a nuclear option for google. Ireland and the netherlands are both in the EU. If google loses its incorporation in those companies, it might have to pay US taxes on repatriated US holdings.

Ireland and the Netherlands subcompanies are essential part of US Corporate tax evasion. (Double Irish with a Dutch sandwich).

Too many value extracting rentier owners and valueless executives skimming off the top of projects done for the common good.

I find zero explanation of how to solve performance with a relational model.

As I understand the article, it seems to say...just because all the existing databases you have seen suck at performance when normalized doesn't mean normalization can't be fast.

Until it is the CEO..CTO..and vc that is standing under the bridge...nothing will change.

In my opinion, maximizing a new business model is what made it HUGELY successful, and not finding a new business model is what is keeping it flat.

I believe that it will have a very hard time transitioning to the "device and services" model with it's current corporate culture, as I understand it, which includes stack ranking.

Regarding business models: MSFT had a variety of web services before Google; it had mobile before apple. It popularized the term "smartphone".

Sure Google search was better, but the fundamental thing that made google fly as a business was adwords, a different business model than banner ads and paid placement on top.

Apple did have a better device than anyone expected, but it made that device price competitive with a huge subsidy from AT&T.

XBox choked out Sony Playstation's profit margin by imitating it's business model (lose money on hardware, make it back selling quality games via licenses per cd/hdrom/dvd), and then innovating with XBox Live, which included a new software services you can charge for business model, just not one that scales to dozens of billions a year like Office.

If my experiences at Microsoft late 90s, half of the 2000's are still valid, then the currently proposed buisness model will fail.

In good software architecture the design choices you make need to match the forces you have affecting your architecture.

The business model: "a devices and services company." will require seamless co-operation across a whole company. I didn't see that in my time there. Exchange and SQL Server, two nearly billion dollar businesses, spent non trivial time trying to ally with other teams and kill each other "and take the mandate" rather than try to deliver great software. I had friends who worked in Exchange and SQL, and the ones in SQL were actively trying to make SQL Server do what Exchange does. I don't know if both businesses are merged now or not, but that was one of MANY places I heard about "killing and eating another team", before it happened to two teams I was part of, twice in a 6 year career.

When a team is "killed and eaten" by another team, the eating team gets to distribute the dead team's 4.0's, and have more 4.0's for their team.

Also, at MSFT at the time, there was a tremendous amount of lack of respect for other teams. "Those VB programmers at MSN don't know how to write scalable software." "Those jokers in...X...aren't really technical". I was in a visual studio building in a meeting, and a windows server group had the chutzpah to convince us that they had reserved our room and kick us out of our own meeting. As we left, one of the people in the meeting to heckle us with a derogatory comment of "We're the people who make all the money around here, we're more important."

Stack ranking, plus the only Type A's filter, plus the seperate businesses with seperate P&L, and VPs that are stack ranked versus each other will not lead to seamless integration between diverse services and a great user experience.

The way you pay, the way you measure, the persistent theme of "us versus them", and the filter for people that came in the door all contribute to a poisonous work environment for maybe 60% of the people.

It wasn't poisonous everywhere, 2/3rds of my time there I wouldn't have traded for the world, but it was incredibly refreshing when I left to work for a place where the enemy was outside the building versus inside.