Great Hacker != Great Hire

Eric Sink discusses Paul Grahams Great Hackers essay in some detail. He argues that Great Hacker is not nesseserily great hire. His viewpoint comes from small but successfull ISV.

I must say I agree both with Eric Sink and Paul Graham. They are both right. Eric's idea of ISV is company that serves customers need in short term (basically makes features buy request). PG's idea is ISV that corrects customers behavior. Marketing term to latter is strategic IT consulting. If you see your firm as ISV you are paid buy lines of code and features you provide. If you are solution provider and consultant, you go into your customers prosesses and set them right.

Btw. Great Hackers can understand issues of customer satisfaction etc. They can build wery clean interfaces aroud all this ugly stuff. You can buy all this code slave stuff from others (small software firms aroud you).

One issue with software engineering is that if your fundamental design is flawed but your software deliveres first 1-10 years easily and it continues to grow organically with small increments buy not so great hackers, what you have is money machine. You can milk your customers decades and they have no other option than pay.

The moral of above chapter is this. Great software and great business don't nesseserily go well together. There is only so and so many Great Hackers, great software. If your businessplan depends on great desingn you are more likely to fail than if it's placed around ever changing "business standards" and temporary customer needs. Great graftmanship may see this as immoral thing and refuse to work.

I am myself sometimes a customer for Great Hackers Co. and this gives me secure feeling. My contractor in Creat Hacker company has helped me to make sound long term business descision. Great ISV:s are not only software jocks, they also contribute to strategic desicions. That can be called consulting.

Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war

In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

It's the XML Configuration File's Fault

Clinical Effects of Homoeopathy Are Placebo Effects

The Breaking Point By PETER MAASS

New York Times on peak oil.

The Filtered Future

China's bid to divide the Internet.
By Tim Wu

Entering a dark age of innovation

July 2005 NewScientist.com news service Robert Adler

Concludes Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California.

The global rate of innovation today, which is running at seven "important technological developments" per billion people per year, matches the rate in 1600. Despite far higher standards of education and massive R&D funding "it is more difficult now for people to develop new technology", Huebner says. .. he examined the number of patents granted in the US from 1790 to the present. When he plotted the number of US patents granted per decade divided by the country's population, he found the graph peaked in 1915.

...But why does he think this has happened? He likens the way technologies develop to a tree. "You have the trunk and major branches, covering major fields like transportation or the generation of energy," he says. "Right now we are filling out the minor branches and twigs and leaves. The major question is, are there any major branches left to discover? My feeling is we've discovered most of the major branches on the tree of technology."

... Innovation theorist Ilkka Tuomi at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies in Seville, Spain, says: "Exponential growth is very uncommon in the real world. It usually ends when it starts to matter." And it looks like it is starting to matter.

I belive here is something to this.

Why I'm Not An Architect by Matthew Heusser

Matthew Heusser has discovered it too. Software architect writing UML-diagrams instead code can be wery harmful thing.

"I haven't been doing much coding lately" says the former-developer with a wry grin in a strange tone of voice. Or perhaps he says "I haven't had time to code lately." However he says, whatever he says, the implication is clear: This guy has better things to do than to muck about coding....

... Listening to him describe his role, something really bugged me. He pointed out that he was just separating design from implementation, something done in construction for centuries. In fact, his title was taken directly from construction.

So I asked if he'd ever built a house or worked with an actual architect, and the answer was "no." I mentioned to him that if you want an analogy to borrow, construction is a terribly inefficient choice. I used to work in the McGraw-Hill Construction division, writing software for designers and architects. The finger pointing, needless delays, and confusion between architects and implementers is systemic. In fact, the newest trend in construction is called "Design/Build," where a single construction company is hired to perform both tasks ....

Today was the day of 2 great links!

http://www.daskeyboard.com/ and http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/voyager_agu.html in slashdot.

GATES VS. GOOGLE, Search and Destroy

Fred Vogelstein tells us what is the current state of fight between Microsoft and Google. Good article from Fortune. The article contains some amazing quotes from Bill Gates:

"There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," - Bill Gates, about Google

"At least they know to wear black"

Check this picture out!