Microsoft is rebranding Nokia as "Microsoft Lumia". Meanwhile, Google has launched "Inbox by Gmail", a tacit admission that Gmail is a failure (the debate, really, is where exactly the failure is; is it interface, data harvesting, something else?).
My humble suggestion: Microsoft should buy Inbox, then combine it with Outlook and rebrand it as 'Outbox'.
Look at this shit. Revolution Analytics broke the way that their site redirects to the new packages location, so some enterprising soul, as a workaround, suggests replacing the systematic way of determining package location with a hardcoded path to the new repository location in R's system configuration. Ugly, sure, but whatever works in the short term, but then, note the comment posted two weeks later by an actual RA employee who "helpfully" suggests another URL for people using a different version of R, instead of, i dunno, begging forgiveness for their incompetent site administration and promising to fix it.
This was posted three months ago. FUCK YOU, FIX IT.
So i emailed their support address, noting the brokenness, and asked for an official diagnosis and solution. The support droid officially responds to my report by copying and pasting the above workaround. When i asked when they expected to fix the broken redirects, they said, "no ETA." (lagniappe: the support droid's email signature includes "Visit our Support Portal at http:\\support.revolutionanalytics.com" NICE BACKSLASHES DUDE)
So let me get this straight; your software's ability to install packages from your own repository is broken, you offer me a hardcoded workaround that will break by your next release, and you have no clue when you will fix your fucking site?
FUCK
YOUUUUUUUUUU
You know what else? One of their installation scripts wants to know where the hadoop and hbase executables are on your filesystem. So if you don't pass along their location with the HADOOP_HOME and HBASE_HOME environment variables, or on the command line, it looks for them by running find / -type d -name hadoop and then find / -type d -name hbase. YOU ARE OUT OF YOUR TINY FUCKING LITTLE MINDS.
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.This little nugget has been floating around the Internet long enough and it's time for me to step on its neck. This cheeky morsel of wit is emblematic of why using the Web is so fucking awful, why sites will push out some flashy garbage and hope that it somehow infects its luserbase like shoveling out junk RNA and hoping it turns into a retrovirus. It's pretending that making Internet-based products is just another facet of the creative process, while at the same time playing the other end and calling it "engineering", when the truth is closer to it being the result of people coding features nobody but Product wants instead of fixing the features that everybody uses, all while under pressure from the VC-ridden board or the crony-ridden major stockholders and yet, somehow, something not entirely offensive emerges, because there's someone who deeply and personally cares, at least until they burn out and move on.
— Reid Hoffman
Hoffman's quote is the bizarro version of "Perfect is the enemy of good." It is a deep exercise in bullshitting oneself and everyone around. If you ship something embarrassing, you've set your standard. That's who you are. Don't laugh it off, and for fuck's sake don't spin it as an inspirational quote. Have some fucking dignity.
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To take something that was functional and became broken, cover it with something glossy and glitzy, and somehow pass it off as something even more desirable than before... suddenly i understand how the Web Economy thrives. |
Big Data is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a lot of porn sitting on your laptop, but that's that's just peanuts to Big Data.
The more i learn about Hadoop, the more stunning it is that billion-dollar companies have entrusted their production data to this jury-rigged, half-assed, immature technology. Desperation is never pretty.
So Chris Jones brought this smug little tip list to my attention and, lo, did my gorge rise. Find here my response:
Gene Kim is a guy who's accomplished a lot more in his career than i have. I kinda-sorta met him in passing at an LSPE Meetup and he seemed like a nice guy. But his recent writeup, "Why We Need DevOps Now", which title i agree with, is just not good at all (i used the word "terrible" on Twitter, which someone called me on, so maybe i'll try to dial back the hyperbole).
As my friend John Willis told me after I dismissed DevOps as just another marketing fad, “DevOps is the best chance at relevance that IT Operations has had in thirty years.” I immediately realized that he was right.Is that really all it took?
A good business avails itself of forward-looking approaches in order to contend with the firehose of change that is our industry's lifeblood. But we cannot mistake these approaches for anything other than a tool.
BOSS: "We're going to try something called agile programming. That means no more planning and no more documentation. Just start writing code and complaining." WALLY: "I'm glad it has a name." BOSS: "That was your training."
Act I begins with IT Operations, where we’re supporting a large, complex revenue generating application. The problem is that everyone knows that the application and supporting infrastructure is... fragile.I smell a setup. The scenario described is clearly the result of bad management, who failed to see this sort of undesirable performance down the road and act upon it to preclude the fragility, and it has been that way every time i've encountered it in my career. It is not, as implied, a result of traditional IT operations.
In Act 2, our life gets worse when the business starts making even bigger commitments to Wall Street, often dreamed up by art or creative writing majorsI have no idea what he's talking about here. In my experience, publicly-traded businesses (which would be the ones who make a commitment to shareholders, not Wall Street) don't usually have art or creative writing majors making major business commitments; the more likely case is that those positions are staffed with MBAs. Privately held businesses, on the other hand, tend to be beholden to venture capital firms, whose presence can become far more unwelcome and meddlesome than that of your typical shareholder.
We all know that there must be better way, right? DevOps is the proof that it’s possible to break the core, chronic conflict, so we can deliver a fast flow of features without causing chaos and disruption to the production environment.YOU NEED MANAGEMENT BUY-IN. YOU NEED THE SUPPORT OF THE PEOPLE WHO CONTROL THE MONEY TO HIRE THE RIGHT PEOPLE AND PURCHASE THE RIGHT EQUIPMENT, THE PEOPLE WHO SET THE COMPANY'S EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL STRATEGIES, THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE YOUR BACK WHEN YOU TELL THE COMPANY, "THIS WILL HURT, BUT IN 12 MONTHS, WE WILL NO LONGER LIMP." Painting DevOps as a panacæa does all of us who believe in DevOps and work in DevOps a tremendous disservice. To unfuck a fucked company, you need to fix the culture. This is why Netflix is a shining example — not because of their use of DevOps, but because their culture enabled them to use their talent in a massively constructive and creative fashion.
"Before you can solve a complex problem, you must first have empathy for the other stakeholders."Before you can solve a complex problem, you must first understand it. One of the important factors in understanding it is empathizing with the other parties. It is not, however, the first thing to do.
Strike one: it's TechCrunch.
Strike two: it's an "online financial advisor."
Strike three:
3 percent of the universe of venture capital firms – generate 95 percent of the industry’s returns... Those premier venture firms succeed because they have proprietary knowledge of the characteristics of winning companies.BULL-FUCKING-SHIT. These "premier" venture firms succeed because they sit on a ton of capital through early lucky strikes, which lets them absorb failures while at the same time being far more attractive to new startups because, hey, they're "premier". It would be far more revealing to show what each "premier" VC's success rate is, but that's probably "proprietary" information, too. It's nothing more than a just-so story about why a "premier" VC is "premier". If they actually knew what the characteristics of winning companies were, they wouldn't be funding them; they would be founding them.
So Om Malik wrote this thing about what impelled Facebook to buy Instagram. First off, i can't get past Malik's assertion of "Facebook's achilles heel"[sic] being "mobile photo sharing". Seriously? Mobile photo sharing is a hard-driving revenue stream for anyone in this world? Is there any evidence that this was considered a weakness by anyone at Facebook? I can lean on my experience and tell you that sharing photos from my Android phone is stone easy to Facebook, because my phone came with the Facebook app installed. I couldn't've done it on Instagram at all until very recently. Facebook was worried about Instagram's mobile photo sharing mojo? I call bullshit.
And calling Instagram "a platform built on emotion"... what the hell is that about? I wonder if he's an advance Facebook stock share owner, because it sure as hell sounds like he's trying to talk himself into the deal, which is no less than ludicrous. Who drops $1B, even if most of it is fake money, on an emotion-based platform? Emotion fades.
Some are comparing it to Google buying YouTube, but others are comparing it to eBay buying Skype. I think that it's far more likely to be closer to the latter, except worse. Bottom line: even if, somehow, this turns out to be a good deal for Facebook, it won't be because of them addressing their supposed "Achilles heel", or because of the strength of Instagram's "emotion".
Bonus cluebie: some "business leader" thinks that Twitter "F$($#@ UP in somehow letting Instagram ended up inside of Facebook"[sic], because nothing says "mobile business advisor" than someone playing with ginned-up valuation numbers.
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