Some inert, some explosive. So it’s not that stakeholders don’t believe in quantum dynamics, they just prefer to play with chemicals:
So there are two issues: what people believe about how projects work, and what deals people negotiate with each other. I believe that the adversarial negotiation games do contribute to fixed schedules, I agree with that. But I think it’s often evidence of stake holders who have embraced Theory P, not the opposite.
Complexity, not the root of evil after all. Let’s leverage our synergetic complexities:
This idea of “using” complexity creatively is very useful, I think, because it gets at what it really is that programmers actually do all day. The old joke that IT is the business of building new and improved problems works because it’s acknowledges the simple, awful truth that the end result of technology is usually the replacement of one kind of complexity with another kind of complexity (if not the wholesale manufacture of more complexity).
Live free or buy more of the same. Mark Pilgrim doesn’t “understand this continuing obsession with buying things that you need to break before they do what you want.” Counter culture within a counter culture?
My current theory is that it’s some twisted form of wish fulfillment. “I wish this company understood the value of openness, but they don’t, so I’m going to keep buying their closed, crippled shit until they get it.” Yeah, let me know how that works out for you.
I would say the same, typing this on my Linux notebook, but I don’t think that’s the root cause.
Don’t underestimate the strong cognitive dissonance that happens when people fight for open source and open standard, to free data and media, only to shell their hard earned cash for amazing products that unfortunately stand in contrast to all those principles. Those apps are highly effective, just not for the problems they claim to solve.
Open, when we say it is. Giles Bowkett on the problem that is the Rails trademark (and similar open source projects).
No distractions. Taking the browser in a different direction, distraction-free Webapps using WebRunner. And to get you started, the Google essentials, and 32 ToDo/GTD apps.