Posts by bbsimonbb

Who really gives a toss if it's agile or not?

Re: Limits of pragmatism

I actually don't have strong feelings about Brexit, despite being affected personally (Going to have to apply for a 3rd nationality. Let's hope Marine Le Pen doesn't get up.) I wanted to talk about cultural reasons for the success and failure of IT projects. If you don't think there are any, or if you can't see that agile is a caricature of anglo cultural values, then really you need to get out more. From the replies, it's not clear anyone's considered that IT is also practised in non-English speaking countries.

Limits of pragmatism

Yup, here you're up against the limits of your culture, anglophone. Agile sometimes seems like just a cliché of english speaking pragmatism and philosophobia. It's been a big success in speeding up and freeing up software creation, but it never promised to give you a unifying vision. At some point, bottom up needs to meet top down, and for that you're going to need a continental. Watch how they do it - GSM, Amadeus, www, the EU. You've got to see a long way into the future, come up with an attractive, credible, vision, accomodate but subtly redirect existing actors/projects, then stick with the vision even when it appears not to be working machin machin. In France "naviguer à vue" is pejorative. Face it. You can't see past your nose. The vision thing has never been your strong point, and now you're on your own brexiter.

A single typo may have tipped US election Trump's way

I'm not at all convinced, and I would have liked more scepticism on your part. I'm inclined to listen to Assange, who says it was a DNC insider, or to Craig Murray, who takes an eminently Reg approach when he asks "Can you seriously imagine kremlin hackers calling themselves Cozy Bear?"

All websites experience attacks from all over the place. All inboxes are phished. The Russian thing was a lie to get out of a tight spot before the election, that has become a campaign of not accepting the result since the election. And we were calling Trump demagogic, irresponsible. I cannot believe that a former secretary of state is juggling with world peace like this, frankly whether the Russians did it or not.

Huawei Nova: A pleasant surprise in a 5-inch phone

I just bought a Huawei Honor. It came with a little sticker "Honor - For the brave". They're still not teaching irony in Chinese marketing schools.

EU wants open science publication by 2020

Egregious Scam Ending ?

Academic journal pricing is a long running egregious scam that tells you everything you needed to know about the sincerity, and the worth, of the founding tenets of our crappy thatcherist era. If it was ever about improving competitivity, would we ever have seen develop such a horrendous drag on a vital function in a modern economy? It was always about delivering fat wads of unearned (mostly public) booty into already well-stuffed pockets, and this the academic journals have done marvelously. And the biggest suckers are the clever hard-working researchers, who accept to do all their peer reviewing for free. You couldn't make it up.