Those who know me will back me up on this; I evaluate things fairly. You will never hear me say $FOO is clearly superior than anything else, and there’s no reason for anyone to use anything else. That includes Linux and Linux distros. I calls them as I sees them, and I do not feel that Linux is always better in every situation for every user, nor is one distribution/brand of Linux clearly the best for all situations. And I’ve been using Linux since Red Hat 4.2 in 1997 (I still have the disks).
I recently installed Ubuntu Karmic (9.10), waiting a few months after release as I usually do so the major bugs are already fixed, and ran into many more problems than I expected. I find this unfortunate, because one of the main reasons I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu is no longer valid. Some of this post is about this release, and some is about the state of Linux in general.
Read on…
First, a little fun. I found this survey asking just that question, but in a humorous way. Here are the results, which were presented at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto. I also found (through LinkedIn) a post on Peter DeYoe’s blog with a humorous job posting for a Scrum Master.
Now for a real live case study. In my job hunting, I discovered this article by Damon Pool on Litle & Co. The reason I like this story so much is that not only did the push for Agile come from the top, but they started out that way. They didn’t adopt Agile, they were born with it. That eliminates a lot of problems that come along with trying to adopt Agile later on:
Read on…
But first, a rant about silver bullets. CEOs love them. Shareholders love them. Politicians love them. It’s too bad they are hardly ever real. The world has a way of keeping itself in balance by using opposing forces and feedback loops (you know, like our government used to). Sure, we find disruptive advancements in technology, math, and even anthropology, but even these usually have some sort of cost or downside. While you keep trying to make alchemy work, we’ll just keep on finding significant, but incremental, improvements, and we’ll see who wins.
Read on…
No, alcohol isn’t involved this time. These are military robots. Lots of ‘em. All different kinds. According to this article on Network World, the Marines are looking for, among other things, robots that weigh 10 pounds or less and can be litterally tossed into battle for reconnaissance or other support operations. They’re looking to other types of robots (some of which already exist as prototypes) to carry gear, assist with communications, and actually fight.
Read on…
I am now the proud owner of geekwith.me!
I have a huge collection of links to geek cuture, communities, blogs, and quick reference material (and some of my own material) on my private wiki. I was going to move it over to thekramers.net, but now I must put it on geekwith.me.
