Pragmatic Dictator

That’s right I’m stupid, I must be cos I learn something new and significant every day.

And I’m not talking about some API detail or some new framework I mean I’m changing my thinking, I’m changing me, I’m seeing a bigger picture. I want topsight^[1], not nitty gritty detail. Detail is easy to cope with if you can see the higher view, how things fit and interact.

If I were clever, there’d be nothing more to learn and I’d have answers to all questions. Knowledge is all very fine but it comes through learning and that comes through experiencing things and that’s what makes you smarter. Having a big brain isn’t enough.

[1] Topsight – a term used by Gelernter in MirrorWorlds, meaning the ability to view the whole system rather than small details.

Urgh, they’re threatening to deploy the Land Warrior System in spite of the reservations of the men in the firing line.

The problems with Land Warrior are seemingly obvious:

1. Having every soldier trackable individually is simply going to overload the command and control system. We have our armies broken down into units under a hierarchical structure for a reason which is to strike a balance between overload and oversight.
2. Being able to peer around a corner without exposing oneself (because of the “clever” camera on your gun) is all very fine but consider this: your enemy is smart enough to hide until you and your buddies do expose yourselves allowing for a more effective ambush.
3. Advanced signalling breaks – hand signals are by far the best way of directing people under these extreme conditions.
4. Soldiers won’t have time to gaze at their heads up display to check on where everyone in their unit is positioned before taking action. Put simply, the enemy is not going to sit still whilst you plan out the perfect attack ["No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" - Moltke]

Perhaps more worrying is that the US military has had warnings about their excessive focus on technology previously.

This whole debacle is a classic example of what happens when those not at the sharp end invent things they think are a good idea and foist them on the hapless individuals they intend to “help”. It is a mistake repeated daily in IT projects around the world. For the enterprise this is merely serious, on the battlefield it’s quite possibly lethal.

Technorati Tags: military, technology

CCTV just got an “upgrade”

One more example of the utter inability of our society to grasp a fundamental issue – the law in all its forms including CCTV is merely a deterrent. You can scare away the amateurs from committing petty crimes like littering but it does nothing in the more serious cases:

“Yes ma’am I appreciate that your husband was stabbed to death in a horribly violent attack but don’t worry we’ve got it all on CCTV”

Too late! The attackers get thirty years at most whilst the husband loses maybe 50 years of his life and a wife and children suffer similarly. Justice is retrospective and it fails us in these moments. CCTV does nothing to deliver significant improvement because like so much else it doesn’t tackle the hard issues – why do we continually waste money on these largely pointless pieces of technology? Time to get real, please.

Technorati Tags: society, technology

Many a techie spends too much time looking inwardly at their favoured technologies without reference to what goes on elsewhere. This inhibits growth in a number of directions:

1. Frameworks don’t evolve significantly, we just polish them a little more
2. There are no genuine technology paradigm shifts
3. …..

Interesting then to watch how some of the “web crowd” are picking up on this. Can’t wait to see what happens next…….

Technorati Tags: web, technology evangelism learning

Update: A related post from Cote

Patrick has noticed the parallels as has Werner Vogels.

There’s an awful lot of stuff to be learnt about building distributed systems from the human body including how control isn’t centralized, how reliability is achieved and how the constant replacement of cells contributes to overall health.

A couple of books worth a read:

• Imitation of Life: How Biology is inspiring computing
• Creation: Life and How to Make It

Technorati Tags: distributed systems, biology, technology