powdermonkey

US Tax Dollars at Work & Wasted

incredible, when will people be fired?

 “In addition, GSA told
Devis at its debriefing that contractor risk was not a determining
factor in the award decision, despite the fact that a majority of the
evaluation panel found the Symplicity proposal to be

 “unacceptable” and
offering “little confidence” of successful performance,” he added.

wow fully insane, why have technical committees if you are just going to give them to dumb companies

Randy Pausch last lecture

worthwhile watching, Randy Pausch last lecture, he is dying of pancreatic cancer:

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

his web page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/

GOSCON 2007 in Portland, OR next week

This is a reminder that GOSCON 2007 is next week!

I can't make it, should be as good as last year!!

Register Now!!!!

This year's keynotes include:

Andrea DiMaio, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner Research
Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, Linux Foundation
Skip McGaughey, Director of Eclipse Ecosystem, Eclipse Foundation
Plus our special Executive Panel on Open Document Standards, closing the conference with a page right out of today's industry headlines.


The conference begins on Monday October 15 and goes through Tuesday afternoon, October 16th

and is being held at the Downtown Hilton Executive Tower in Portland, Oregon.

For more information or to register please visit us at www.goscon.org

Engineering Complex Systems is a Crock

I've just been digging into the design of engineering systems which when those systems when viewed from a distance are very complex. Digging into the research papers i keep coming across terms like 'complexity and engineering' or 'complexity engineering.'

No sane engineer sits down to design systems where they can't predict the outcome. Further the term comes up that the system will spawn emergent behavior we can't understand. That's the last thing you want with an engineered system, things not happening.

we want complex ecosystems not complexity engineering. True complexity and emergence only occurs when you add people, not more machines.