Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user demiller on 2006-04-30
“The Predator State”:http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/05/predator_state.html via “American Samizdat.”:http://amsam.org/2006/04/predator-state.html This is simply the best political essay I have read in at least the past year. This editorial does a phenomenal job of describing the rise of a predatory economic class, beyond traditional capitalism, and how this class now infests the American government. This, in turn, makes all historical political remedies and approaches to the problem ineffective - since the very aim of the predatory government is to loot the institution to the _point to which it fails_.
The implications of what this essay is saying are deeply disturbing. Not only are we all being taking for a ride - possibly the biggest fleecing ever in the history of economics and government - but there is no way this can end but in a crash of the American governmental system. We are governed by a kleptocracy; what comes next isn’t pretty.
Technorati Tags: bush, constitution, democracy, dick+cheney, republican
“Curt Wehrley”:http://www.bellcurvescar.com/ does a great job summing up posts on the “Lance Dutson”:http://www.mainewebreport.com/ situation in “this post.”:http://www.bellcurvescar.com/2006/04/29/thickness-of-biz-skin-and-freedom-of-blogspeech/ From where I sit, this is a major black eye for both Warren Kremer Paino, the PR firm involved, and the State of Maine, which ought to be distancing itself from this fiasco as quickly as possible.
A number of other bloggers have expressed disbelief that a PR firm could be so clueless as to provoke bloggers this way. I have to say that many of my fellow bloggers evidently have a much higher opinion of the intelligence of the majority of PR than I do.
Technorati Tags: curt+wehrley
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user demiller on 2006-04-29
“E-paper devices for the commuter crowd.”:http://news.com.com/2300-1041_3-6066127-1.html?part=rss&tag=6066127&subj=news Some very interesting devices here. The concept of e-paper and e-ink has been a long time coming, but offers some exciting possibiities now that it’s here. The Rex device in particular looks appealing; I doubt I’d be interested in the technology at all if Sony was the only player though.
In the meantime, I’m finding my “Nokia 770 tablet”:http://www.nokiausa.com/770 with “FBReader”:http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/maemo/ is an excellent e-book and document reader in addition to be an excellent mobile web surfing device.
“Report reveals number of secret FBI subpoenas.”:http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/28/secret.subpoenas.ap/index.html?section=cnn_topstories 3501 - that’s the number of American citizens - not foreign nationals, but citizens, secretly surveilled last year by the FBI.
So fucking much for our rights, huh? Looks like those 3501 secret surveillance actions really have been a “great help in the War on Terror,”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060422/ap_on_go_ot/terror_attacks too.
Technorati Tags: bush, police+state, terrorism, republican
“Internal Clock.”:http://www.365tomorrows.com/04/28/internal-clock/ A great short-short story from “365 Tomorrows.”:http://www.365tomorrows.com/ I feel _exactly_ this way all the time, and that’s without any sort of implant…
Technorati Tags: science+fiction
“The Singularity Summit.”:http://sss.stanford.edu/ Doctorow, Drexler, Hofstadter, Kurzweil, Yudkowsky - man, I wish I could go!
Via “Boing Boing”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/boingboing/iBag?m=1017
My friend Curt writes about “Employee voice and the search for mission.”:http://www.bellcurvescar.com/2006/04/24/employee-voice-and-the-search-for-mission/
bq. There are an estimated 2,000 blogs operating by Microsoft employees. Robert Scoble’s blog is probably the most famous, but anonymous blogger Mini-Microsoft is close behind him, and fast becoming a symbol of how blogs have given today’s workforce a new voice.
bq. Mini usually delivers criticism of Microsoft’s ways. In fact, hundreds of employees anonymously air their frustration on his blog. And practically everyone at Microsoft is listening – Scoble has noted that it’s rare to find an employee who doesn’t read Mini.
Specifically, he’s talking about Microsoft, the voice blogs can give employees, and the response of Microsoft paid mouthpiece “Robert Scoble:”:http://scobelizer.wordpress.com/2006/04/24/how-microsoft-can-shut-down-mini-microsoft/
bq. This past weekend, after taking a self-imposed two-week-long break from blogging, Scoble has attempted to shift his fellow employees’ attentions from problems to solutions with How Microsoft can shut down Mini-Microsoft.
He then quotes Scoble:
bq. [W]e need a big dream. A moonshot. The kind of challenge that’ll keep [the minds of the next generation of college grads] engaged. That’ll give everyone in the company pride when it’s accomplished.
bq. I dream of a day where every Microsoft employee feels like they are part of a mission, a positive mission for the improvement of all humankind. Where they feel like they are being compensated fairly, and if they don’t feel it’s fair, that they at least see what behaviors will bring better compensation. Where Microsoft customers and shareholders feel excited by our vision, marketing, and service execution again…
bq. Give us all a mission we would get excited by.
And goes on to the following conclusion:
bq. There’s another lesson to consider from Scoble’s post. IMO, he is spot on with the dream/mission message. I think there’s a lot of disgruntled talent out there, looking for a cause to join more than a fatter paycheck. Too many folks are seeking pay increases to acquire sources of enjoyment and stimulation to fill the gap left by uninspiring workplaces. And word has it that the younger generation earning new college degrees over the next decade or so are much more mission-oriented than money-hungry.
I think that Curt is right that the new generation of workers is less money-hungry and more interested in making a difference - having just hired a number of engineers of this generation in our shop it seem to me that’s the case, though both our organization and hiring process bias us toward these types. Unfortunately, I don’t think any sort of dream/mission message can make any damn difference at Microsoft.
If the leadership at Microsoft wants to transform their organization they’re going to have to do the impossible - stop being Microsoft. MS is the GM of the technology industry, and more and more their future is looking just like GM’s - unable to innovate and bogged down by their own past.
From a technology standpoint, Microsoft has _never_ been innovative, so it just isn’t possible for them to recapture that. It’s also very disingenuous for them to claim much responsibility for the ubiquity of PC’s today by equating it with their marketing hype of “a computer should be on every desktop.” Microsoft gets full marks for being a marketing juggernaut and innovative in doing business deals that eliminated competition and acquired key technologies for them at critical times. Never forget, however, that Microsoft is the company that totally missed the importance of the Internet, that declared that “640K ought to be enough for anyone,” and that is today almost singlehandedly responsible for the atrocious security situation on the Internet because of the incredibly poorly engineered security model they are wedded to in their OS. That last situation exists for exactly the same reason that GM had it’s lunch handed to it by Japanese car companies in the ’70’s - both thought it easier and more profitable to cut quality and take shortcuts than do the right thing because they felt they could get away with abusing a captive customer.
Microsoft is at its heart and soul the product of Baby Boomers, and the dreams and desires of Baby Boomers aren’t the dreams of the workforce it seeks to employ here in the US anymore. The Gen X and Gen Y staff MS employs just don’t get the likes of Ballmer and Scoble, aren’t motivated by what motivates them, and aren’t interested in playing the game by their rules. The Microsoft leadership are dinosaurs, as fundamentally incapable of turning MS into the kind of company that will excite the “Mini-Microsoft’s” as a brontosaurus is of building the Wright Flyer. Painting their own history as somehow being technically innovative and not just a succession of marketing coups and ruthless business deals is, frankly, nothing more than another effort to spin the Microsoft story — this time apparently to an internal audience growing more and more disgruntled with the company’s inability to actually be the sort of place it claims to be. Remind me, when is Vista supposed to ship again?
Certainly Microsoft will remain a cash cow for years to come, but don’t be shocked when one day soon the company employs more staff in Mumbai than it does in Redmond, and that it has a smaller market share in what today are developing nations that its Open Source rivals do. Microsoft’s future is in using offshore labor to produce software for big American companies that are afraid to use anything else and for American consumers that don’t know any better. That _does_ sound a lot like GM, doesn’t it?
My advice for Mini-Microsoft and Robert Scoble is the same - better dust off those resumes and be ready to find someplace else to blog.
Technorati Tags: microsoft
“Mac Backup Harmful.”:http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/04/23/mac-backup-software-harmful/ An exhaustive comparison of Mac backup tools indicates most are problematic in producing a restorable volume. Only “SuperDuper!”:http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html performs as expected. I use SuperDuper! and can attest to it’s effectiveness; if you are concerned about Mac backup (and you should be if you use a Mac) you ought to be using this software.
via “Hivelogic”:http://hivelogic.com/links/128
Technorati Tags: backup
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