drakaal

Jump to 57.10

However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.

Vikram Chandra makes a lot of great points. He definitely is not a "hack first" kind of guy. I am of the opinion you build, then you re-build to be supportable, then you rebuild to be sustainable.

That doesn't always go over well, but if you keep code modular upfront it doesn't add much overhead, and gives you a good blend of Build once, or Build Fast.

The main thing is this ""We hold that when employees must use their personal cell phones for work-related calls, Labor Code section 2802 requires the employer to reimburse them. Whether the employees have cell phone plans with unlimited minutes or limited minutes, the reimbursement owed is a reasonable percentage of their cell phone bills." Even if the employee has purchased a personal cell phone plan that provides the employee with "unlimited" minutes and the employee does not incur any additional expense for his/her work-related calls, the employer must still provide a reasonable reimbursement to the employee."

Doesn't say about Data, which could be the bigger issue, but one would think that would be similar.

The author takes the analogy beyond the logical conclusion.

The saying is simply meant to say "there are things that you can't make happen faster than one person can do them".

There are corollaries that we used at Microsoft. "And you can't assign the baby to a man" and "She can't have it all on her own."

Taking the analogy farther than one should... Conception is typically a two person activity. But assuming you have a Fertile woman, you can take that 15% that they talk about and up it significantly by trying with 3 different men a day, every day of the month.

So you can "have the baby in 10 months" with enough planning and since you only need each guy for about 5 minutes, you only added 450 Minutes (about 8 man hours) to the process. Less if you stick to 20 days conception can happen.

Bringing that back to Startups/Products: Let's say you have a startup and you are going to build a Server Farm to support it. It used to be you had to order the servers and Dell would take a month to ship them. You can't speed that up. It is a fixed part of the timeline.

Let's say you want to build a new Electric car, the government testing for crash and safety takes a fixed amount of time you can't speed that up.

The analogy is not just about can you speed something up by putting more people on it, it is meant as a lesson that some processes are beyond your control.

It is also used as a "build vs. buy" argument. "Apple just released a Feature that we don't have" "Oh, no How long will it take us to build?" "9 months" "That's too long we need this out by end of quarter". How do you do that? You buy someone with that feature and you integrate for 45 days. Just like if your rich uncle announces he has a week to live, and each Grand Nephew (I think that is the kid of your Niece or Nephew) will inherit an equal split of his Billion Dollars, so you need a baby tomorrow. You can't try to get your girlfriend pregnant, that won't work in a week. Your only option is to buy or steal a baby.

May not, not does not.

Correlation and causation can be implied if you have a control. Or if you can rule out external factors. Saying it does not is not accurate.

The parrot wakes and sleeps with the sunrise and sunset. Does the Parrot Cause the sunrise? No. This happened BEFORE the parrot was born. Does the sunset cause the sleep? Throw a blanket over it's cage it goes to sleep. TADA! Causation!

When you have two things which you can't control, and that have been going on longer than you can observe it gets to be harder. Proving the Moon phase causes the Tides, not the Tides cause the moon phase. That's a bit trickier. Not in today's age, but at one point. There is a reason we thought the Earth was flat, and that you could throw a stone in to a pond and get a Turtle.

RPG has a significantly lower install base, and I would say it is mostly dead.

There is still great pay if you are an AS/400 guru. About 3 years ago I interviewed for a job where I would be maintaining code which was running on an AS/400 running in System 36 emulation mode. The code had been certified by the government for a 50 year contract. The 3 previous employees had all died. Which didn't make me anxious to take the job, but the pay was $450k a year. And with job security through 2030 it had some appeal. But what do you do after?

"I have experience with 50 year old software" is kind of like the resumes people send me saying they know Office XP and Word Perfect.

Sure if you can fix the things nobody else can you can charge top dollar, but eventually the last of those things come out of service.

OR not AND? Man I guess if I have to choose I'll choose to use it as a key, and pick my room via my laptop.

Now if you could use the smartphone to do both, You might be able to choose the room to have keys to, even if that room was not yours.

Ok, more serious. I like the idea of this. I have several AirBnB properties, and this could make my life a lot easier. Though at the same time my Girlfriend always finishes the night with her iPhone completely dead, so it could also make things a lot more complicated.

All in all I like the convenience, and fear the security.

Baidu will have to go from copy cat to innovator to make this work.

Right now Baidu is missing a differentiatior that shows how it is better. Unlike T-Shirts that you can find a market for knock-offs search engines are free to the end user so you have to compete on quality, or on "default install". Baidu is missing both of those.