I find it interesting that he refuses to wear wireless headphones while podcasting because he can't tolerate the latency. But he's perfectly fine with it when watching a movie? Lip synch latency drives me crazy once I notice it.
1,602 karma · joined March 6, 2011
With that said, the synchronized playback has never been really what I would call great. It is roughly in synch so you can go form room to room and hear the same stuff, but when you get to an area where you can hear two devices at once there is definitely a disconcerting delay on one of them. Maybe that's because I've got one hard wired and one on wifi, but I thought it was supposed to correct for these differences.
The problem is that this is a theoretical scenario which rarely comes up in reality. The developers operating at the skill and maturity level where tracking their individual productivity and quality can be done well, generally are not the developers who really need these types of measures, and they usually aren't left grinding on the same domain for the years required to have enough data to do anything useful with it.
It is kind of a catch 22. The situations where tracking and gaining insight from KLOCs would help (mature/skilled devs working on the same thing over and over for years...doesn't happen much), are not the situations where it is most needed (projects with hundreds of relatively inexperienced/immature developers and managers)
The result is it is applied to disastrous effect in situations where immature managers glom onto it as a silver bullet for managing the unmanageable.
But in the context of social media, what does spam mean? It isn't email. And an awful lot of it is simply self-promotion or commercial promotion.
And many FB groups and the like are permissive when it comes to posts that are really advertisements, or are just one person's definition of "off topic." And there are mechanisms for reporting content as "spam", but what does that even mean when it isn't an email?
I've found that many people have redefined the term "spam" as repetitive content, not unwanted/unsolicited content. I guess this comes from gamer/chat culture where there is talk of "spamming the jump button" or "spamming the chat" where it isn't the content that is remarkable, it is the repetition. You can kind of see where it comes from as most email spammers are quite repetitive and indiscriminate. But a spam email can be just one, and that definition doesn't seem to fly in the inherently noisy social media context.
I was just struck by this evolution of the term spam when I tried reporting some (unwanted by me) commercial self-promotion on social media, only to be told that it wasn't spam at all because the poster only posted it once. I guess a lot of it comes down to how territorial and defensive people are about their email inbox vs. social media feed.
I understand some would do something highly profitable but morally questionable and then donate the profits to a more socially productive firm. Is that what you are thinking? The end justifies the means?
Do people keep a private offline contacts list, or a clean phone just for this?
Or do folks just not care about giving away the mobile phone numbers (and addresses? email addresses? birthdays? other notes on the contact about kids names, etc.?) to an app?
Am I behind the times and everyone just knows none of this stuff is private anyways due to leaks etc.? Even if that is your attitude, it seems you are feeding more links to the graph someone else is maintaining. Did you get consent from every one of your contacts to do so?
I feel like I must be missing something here. Am I over-reacting or paranoid?
First you need to join the Apple Developer Program. Why? I'm not developing an app.
To join the Apple developer program you need an Apple device that will do two factor auth. So I go buy an iPhone 6 with a cracked screen solely for this purpose.
Then you need Apple to approve your DUNS number. I am one of the minority who already had one, so I didn't have to go through the whole process with Dun & Bradstreet to get one, but Apple would not accept it for several weeks until suddenly they did, with no change to the number or other company info.
And then, you need to schedule a phone interview! This is the point I'm at right now, so I can't tell you how many more hurdles there are to clear. I haven't had luck yet with the Apple "click here and your phone will ring any moment with a call from us" button on their website. Phone never rings.
And I haven't even got to the part where I pay $100 before accepting any payments, which Stripe and PayPal sure don't require.
You have to endure a lot of friction to eliminate payment friction for your customers.
It was the third time the company tried to implement SAP's products. I think I may have been one of the very few people who worked on all three attempts. The winning recipe was having a business owner who threw up his hands at the failed efforts to get a larger scoped company-wide project underway and "selfishly" declared that the finance dept would do it for its own benefits. And he tooks his best people out of their day jobs, put them on the project team, and made them move offices to sit in the same open plan war-rooms as the IT staff (which took some doing...Microsoft was pretty much all unshared private offices at that time) I think we reduced the time it took to "close the books" each month from something like 3 weeks to under one week.
And we absolutely changed the business to meet the way the software worked, that's one of the key success factors for implementing any ERP software. Your "unique requirements" for fixed assets accounting and accounts payable processes are not what makes your company successful, but they are what will tank your ERP implementation if you let them.
It was a fascinating project. I especially enjoyed some of the travel to implement it in the subsidiaries, where the really big business wins were. Most of the subs didn't even have a "purchase order" process (they just paid invoices, and had no idea of their outstanding commitments) or any automation around things like employee expense reports. And we got to come up with some decent creative solutions to things like Brazil's requirements for hyperinflationary accounting, without breaking the software.
Fun fact, Concur's expense reporting business was borne out of the Microsoft R/3 implementation -- some of the best consultants and developers took what they built for Microsoft's internal expense reporting and turned it into Concur's expense reporting product.
And yet, a cursory review indicates they are barely out of high school and has never worked on software in a commercial environment. Not casting stones (I agree with some of what they say too, and what I agree with I find insightful. How's that for confirmation bias?), just observing that this is in fact not based on much experience at all.
I got this insight from the end chapters of the book "Ghettoside", where the author describes US social security payments to those who are "disabled" as the closest the US has today to a non-universal basic income. Coal miners who are no longer able to work because the coal mine shut down and they have no other skills get this "disability" income, and in Ghettoside the author describes former gang members also qualifying under the rationale that they are unsuited to the formal workforce and are therefore "disabled" as well. But what it can serve to do is break the cycle of criminal behavior: when the former drug dealer gets out of jail, absent other opportunities or a safety net source of funding to cover life's basics, they quickly fall into the path of least resistance and return to their criminal behavior. The social security disability payments give them another option to turn things around. Now, if they transform themselves into a legal entrepreneur or productive employee, they sure don't seem disabled any longer, which is part of the problem with this being a non-universal BI. It is akin to the downsides of a negative income tax: it gives only to some, and when you do that you have opportunities to abuse the system, and you have more process costs/friction and barriers to entry which keep some who should get it from getting it.
Social security disability is an abused program, with attorneys advertising their ability to get you qualified, which is the irksome aspect of this being a non-universal basic income: it is only available to the savvy or those willing to engage an unscrupulous attorney to qualify. So it is a flawed comparison to UBI, but I think the social benefits described in Ghettoside deserve more attention.
I was aware of these vulnerabilities and generally am protective of handing out PII, especially information others have entrusted to me. So I didn't give it access to hundreds of business and personal contacts spanning decades of work and life.
How do others deal with this who perhaps don't have the choice to just say "I'm going to text you instead for the 4 days we are going to have a need to communicate"? Do you keep a full set of contact data outside your phone's contacts for information you don't want shared? Private and public contacts?