Joel Spolsky: Fixing Venture Capital. Great article. I also highly recommend the Charles Ferguson book that he recommends at the end. Everything I needed to know about venture capital I learned from that book and Phil Greenspun’s ArsDigita ordeal (which Joel also mentions in his article). I’ve worked at a number of venture funded companies, and none of them have had an outcome that I would consider optimal.
Via Tesugen.com, Robert X Cringely’s argument against refactoring and Martin Fowler’s response. Here’s how I use refactoring. When I have to go into a program that’s already written, I apply the things that I’ve learned to the code in a manner that generally resembles refactoring. If I can make the code simpler, or make it work better, or make it more like the other code in its family, then I do. The most important thing that Cringely misses is that refactoring is best practiced in environments where unit tests have been written for all code. If you can unit test your code before and after refactoring to insure that its expected behavior has not been changed during the refactoring process, then you need not worry about lowering the quality through the process. That said, I maintain very few pieces of code that come with comprehensive unit tests. ...
A post-hoc study by NASA indicates that we should have tried to save the astronauts on Columbia. What a shame.
Farhad Manjoo has a Salon piece today on the SCO Linux lawsuit. He does a good job of explaining what, exactly, SCO is suing for (even though the headline is completely wrong), and why it’s a load of crap.
It turns out that the public domain is as old as the oldest known book.
Zimran Ahmed has some thoughts on media diversity and the rule changes at the FCC. His ongoing commentary on media consolidation has been one of the key things that has kept me from opposing the ownership rule changes wholeheartedly.
The biggest recent political story that I haven’t bothered to talk about is media consolidation. I haven’t talked about it for two reasons, the first is that I knew that the FCC was going to drop its rules no matter what I did, and the second is that I’m not sure how I feel about it. The old rules seemed kind of arbitrary and bizarre to me, but at the same time, I’m not in love with the idea of News Corp, Viacom, Clear Channel., and Time Warner taking over ever larger chunks of the media landscape. I’m really not sure what the solution is here. In any case, the issue will now be taken to the legislature (who will certainly ignore it or make things worse) and the courts. ...
Peter Maass has discovered that unbeknownst to him at the time, Salam Pax was his interpreter while he was in Baghdad. Nick Denton has some inside scoop on this story as well.
The Guardian has tracked down Salam Pax and hired him to write dispatches that will be published online.
This month National Geographic has an incredibe article on the Hindu caste system. I can remember learning about the caste system in India as a junior high student, but it wasn’t until I read the article that I had a fuller realization of what its implications are for Indian society. In some ways, the Hindu caste system is the reductio ad absurdum case of discrimination. Discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, country of origin, or religion is stupid, but at least there are generally obvious physical or cultural differences that the small minded can fixate upon to rationalize their bigotry. In the caste system, it’s as though the members of various castes are randomly selected, or were randomly selected centuries ago, anyway. I don’t know what the origins of the caste system are, but if I had to guess I’d say that Hindu culture evolved to dictate that members of a certain economic class were impure and thus were never to rise above that class in the future. It’s a form of economic discrimination that provides for a permanent labor supply to do the jobs that most people don’t want. The full article isn’t available online, but I’d strongly suggest that people pick up a physical copy and read the article. The lessons about human nature, religion, and the willingness of people to simply do as they’re told are not to be missed. I can’t wait to see the reader letters about the article in a couple of months. ...