April 2009

Hollywood’s Distribution Model

April 19, 2009

Slate has an article on why we have not yet seen an online subscription-based service for movies: Couldn’t the studios just sign new deals that would give them the right to build an online service? Well, maybe—but their current deals are worth billions, and a new plan would mean sacrificing certain profits for an uncertain […]

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Telecommuting

April 17, 2009

Rands in Repose has a great article about the difficulties with telecommuting. It is pretty exhaustive in explaining what kinds of personalities and work cultures can make telecommuting work or not. I suppose many of the lessons can also be applied to outsourcing or any kind of distributed systems. Although Rands doesn’t use the term, […]

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Sundries

April 13, 2009

Or, translated from Australian, miscellaneous items, in this case, too small to write a long blog post on. And a bit too long for Twittering.  So here are a few of those thoughts: Most newspapers have fact checkers for their articles and reports. Newspapers are dying and being replaced by bloggers and other websites. Several […]

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Should Indian Outsourcing Be Banned?

April 11, 2009

James McGovern, of Enterprise Architecture, writes: So, if quality can be lower in enterprise in-house software, then that allows for lower-quality resources from Indian outsourcing firms to maintain it. Remember that good is good enough and it doesn’t make sense for architects to expend such energy churning on better ways of developing higher quality working […]

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Incentives Without Disincentives

April 9, 2009

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, of “The Black Swan” fame, writes: Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the […]

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Why They Killed Socrates

April 8, 2009

In his book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, Neil Postman wrote At the opening of Socrates’ defense, addressing a jury of five hundred, he apologizes for not having a well-prepared speech. He tells his Athenian brothers that he will falter, begs that they not interrupt him on that account, asks that they regard him as they […]

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A Twitter Novice on Why Twitter Matters

April 5, 2009

I created a login on Twitter user two years ago, but I would still classify myself as a novice user. I blame Twitter for this because the folks at Twitter themselves seem to have no clue what the point of Twitter is. Almost every sentence in the Twitter homepage is an advertisement for not using […]

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Best English Software Blogs by Malayalis

April 3, 2009

I am not entirely sure why I did it, but I spent a few hours going through every single blog in the Kerala Blog Roll maintained by Manoj Prabhakaran, Asst. Professor at the University of Illinois. Out of those, I looked at those public blogs related to software or technology written in English and updated […]

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Providing Negative Feedback to Your Boss

April 1, 2009

A friend, reading my last post about managers providing feedback to employees, asked about the reverse situation: how employees could provide feedback to managers. A counter-question is why is the question being asked at all. After all, if a person could have given a particular piece of feedback to a manager, he would have already […]

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