Management Books Vijay Gill's Blog I came across “The 12 Simple Secrets of Microsoft Management: How to Think and Act Like a Microsoft Manager and Take Your Company to the Top.” Reading it now in 2010, I can’t help but chuckle at the wide-eyed fanboy writing. Then I saw “The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management as We Know It” and it cemented my opinion that whenever a book endorses any particular “way” of management with the benefit of hindsight and makes a point that all it would take for your company to be similarly successful is follow the bromides in the book, it is a clear sign that the person writing the book has no clue what they are going on about. This is what the people think matters: This is actually what matters: Like this: Like Loading...
The Democrats Are Doomed, or How A Big Tent Can Be Too Big OkTrends Time and again in American politics, Republicans have voted as a unit to frustrate our disorganized Democratic majority. No matter what's on the table, a few Democrats will peel away from the party core; meanwhile, all Republicans will somehow manage to stay on-message. Thus, they caucus block us. Articles noting this phenomenon anecdotally appear all the time, and despite the recent hopeful spate of Democratic victories, it's undeniable that the Republicans form an exceptionally effective opposition party. I should start off by pointing out that the Left/Right political framework we're usually handed is insufficient for a real discussion, because political identity isn't one-dimensional. There are many methods of looking at the political spectrum, but the best way I've come across is to hold social politics and economic politics separate, and measure a person's views on each in terms of permissiveness vs. restrictiveness on a 2-dimensional plane. The Implication of Our Two-Party System
Beautiful Soup: We called him Tortoise because he taught us. [ Download | Documentation | Hall of Fame | For enterprise | Source | Changelog | Discussion group | Zine ] You didn't write that awful page. You're just trying to get some data out of it. Beautiful Soup is here to help. Since 2004, it's been saving programmers hours or days of work on quick-turnaround screen scraping projects. Beautiful Soup is a Python library designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping. Beautiful Soup provides a few simple methods and Pythonic idioms for navigating, searching, and modifying a parse tree: a toolkit for dissecting a document and extracting what you need. Beautiful Soup parses anything you give it, and does the tree traversal stuff for you. Valuable data that was once locked up in poorly-designed websites is now within your reach. Interested? Getting and giving support If you have questions, send them to the discussion group. If you use Beautiful Soup as part of your work, please consider a Tidelift subscription. Download Beautiful Soup
Less Wrong: Guessing the Teacher's Password Followup to: Fake Explanations When I was young, I read popular physics books such as Richard Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. I knew that light was waves, sound was waves, matter was waves. I took pride in my scientific literacy, when I was nine years old. When I was older, and I began to read the Feynman Lectures on Physics, I ran across a gem called "the wave equation". There is an instinctive tendency to think that if a physicist says "light is made of waves", and the teacher says "What is light made of?" Which is one more bad habit to unlearn from school. And this leads into an even worse habit. This is not a hypothesis about the metal plate. Even visualizing the symbols of the diffusion equation (the math governing heat conduction) doesn't mean you've formed a hypothesis about the metal plate. In the school system, it's all about verbal behavior, whether written on paper or spoken aloud. Does this seem too harsh? "Heat conduction?" Next post: "Science as Attire"
suckless.org Dedicated to software that sucks less Physics For Entertaiment : Perelman Innovation and Outsourcing Vijay Gill's Blog Risk: The CEO of Air New Zealand had this to say on their supplier: “We were left high and dry and this is simply unacceptable. My expectations of IBM were far higher than the amateur results that were delivered yesterday, and I have been left with no option but to ask the IT team to review the full range of options available to us to ensure we have an IT supplier whom we have confidence in and one who understands and is fully committed to our business and the needs of our customers.” Reward: Fake Steve Jobs had this to say: See, those outsourcing deals always sounded so good: Why do you want to run a messy old data center anyway? If you are outsourcing, your cost advantage is lost, and not only is your cost advantage going to go away, there are some things that you are never going to be able to do. People define core competencies far too narrowly. Edit: Benjamin Black added clarification Like this: Like Loading...
draft-baker-behave-ivi-01 - IVI Update to SIIT and NAT-PT [Docs] [txt|pdf|xml|html] [Tracker] [Email] [Diff1] [Diff2] [Nits] Versions: 00 01 Behave X. Li Internet-Draft C. Bao Updates: 2765, 2766 CERNET Center/Tsinghua University (if approved) F. Baker Intended status: Standards Track K. Yin Expires: March 20, 2009 Cisco Systems September 16, 2008 Status of this Memo By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is aware have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she becomes aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of BCP 79. Internet-Draft IVI Update to SIIT and NAT-PT September 2008 the stateless service is essentially the SIIT with a different address format, and because the DNS Application Layer Gateway and the stateful translator have significant similarities to NAT-PT. Internet-Draft IVI Update to SIIT and NAT-PT September 2008 1. 2. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. Internet-Draft IVI Update to SIIT and NAT-PT September 2008 2.4. 2.5. 2.5.1. 2.5.2. 2.6.
1 Billion Spammers Served | Deep Insights into Spam Our 1 Billionth Spam Message On Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 06:20 (GMT) Project Honey Pot received its billionth email spam message. The message, a picture of which is displayed below, was a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phishing scam. The spam email was sent by a bot running on a compromised machine in India (122.167.68.1). Every time Project Honey Pot receives a message we estimate that another 125,000 are sent to real victims. At this milestone, we wanted to take a second to report some of our findings. Who Are These Spammers? Several organizations publish regular reports on the source countries for spam. Rather than sending spam directly, spammers primarily use "bot" machines in order to effectively launder their identities. On the other hand, they can help provide insight into a country's security policies because they give evidence on the number of bots operating within a country's borders. How Do They Operate? Whom Do They Target? The Future of Spam
Blog Archive Interview with an Adware Author Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for allegedly surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.) S: You wrote adware. M: [sheepishly] Yes, I did. S: Let’s back up a second. M: I was utterly and grindingly broke for a little while. It was funny. S: Did you feel this was the gently sloping path to Hell? M: Oh yeah! S: What was Direct Revenue’s business model? M: Their business model was that they would buy a screensaver from somebody, or develop it themselves. S: What did they call it? M: The good distributors would say, ‘This is ad-supported software.” S: Your company’s not one of those that would leverage exploits in order to get software on people’s computers? M: We didn’t, no. The thing that I had a real problem with was the persistence work that I was doing. S: Can you tell me more about your strategies for persistence? M: Yes.
packet-o-matic : the real time packet processor