ideasarehere

March 12, 2020

Inheritance

Filed under: business — Erik Dobberkau @ 07:08

Problems of an enterprise, and the problems of management (and managers) of an enterprise are distinct, however they are easily, and thus often, mixed up.

Enterprise problems and insufficiencies automatically and immediately become problems of management. It is up to managers to mitigate or, better, solve these problems they have inherited.

Management problems and insufficiencies, or even worse, managers’ problems and insufficiencies, are not automatically inherited by the enterprise. However, if they persist long enough, they will become an enterprise problem.

Consistency works, both ways, but rarely immediately.

October 26, 2019

Experience

Filed under: general — Erik Dobberkau @ 15:10

It sometimes seems to be not more than a euphemism for “outdated knowledge”.

April 2, 2017

Who cares about your thoughts?

Filed under: general,ideasarehere.net,personal — Erik Dobberkau @ 11:40

This post originally started a whole lot different. I was writing about the how and why writing has been so hard for me over the last four years (long story short, I was too busy with other stuff), but after a few lines I was asking myself: Who cares about your thoughts? I mean, really? Who is taking the time to follow someone else along their trail of thoughts? In the post-industrial western society, we’re so busy to find answers to all our questions, as we believe these questions to be the relevant ones, because there’s always a problem (or a chain thereof) to be solved, right? Time feels always short and getting even shorter. Which requires the person being asked to stay focused, on topic, to not get carried away, which is likely to happen if the question has or implies a higher level of complexity than “tea or coffee?” (and that’s already risky depending on your opposite). And please spare the questioner from telling them stuff they already think they know.

Now…what? Not sure yet. It was just a thought.

August 13, 2015

Because everyone does it

Filed under: business,creativity — Erik Dobberkau @ 10:39

Reading the excellent article on (well, against) the hamburger menu made me realise there is a huge trap (or emergency exit to some) in any discussion on design (or standards, rules, behaviour … pick your favourite) — one phrase will stop the flow of creativity and divert the focus from the original objective.

“Because everyone does it” is a cheap double-edged sword to underline your point in lack of a better (if any) argument.

“Because everyone does it”, when not ignored, is the simplest way without offending someone personally to bring  any discussion to a new level. Yet down, not up.

May 24, 2015

To KBO or not to KBO

Filed under: business,media,personal,politics — Erik Dobberkau @ 21:00

(KBO as in “keep buggering on”, like Churchill used to say)

 

Do you sometimes find yourself wishing you wouldn’t have read something? Today, I did, here.

And I really stopped dead in my tracks in every other sentence because of the utter preposterousness, (maybe due to the) lack of depth, and the crying urge to give all those people a high five. In the face. With a chair.

All in all, it’s a typical snapshot of the world situation. All the people we used to turn to in need of an answer now have no one to turn to themselves. BECAUSE they’ve been brought up by the system (and have largely benefitted from it) they’re now putting on trial. Only this time it’s colleges. Of course, they’re already through with kindergarten, elementary and high school, now they’ve nailed it, it’s colleges! And as much as I’d like to be totally ironic now, I’m so-not-gonna-be it. Because there is a serious problem at hand here, which is fear. Fear of change. Not mentioned in the article though. Not as such.

And there’s something else: The permeation speed of knowledge (=processed information) inside most companies is (at least) by an order of magnitude smaller than the (both inside and outside) emergence and transformation of new information — because there are insufficient connections (for a number of reasons, which I think are not necessary to explain, just look at what’s going on at your workplace). Also not mentioned in the article.

Sometime they’ll give a change and nobody will come — then change will come to you anyway. Those who do not actively seek change, who do not scrutinize their organisations and the processes therein in order to enable an evolution or revolution, will face the hardship of all too-rigid corporations. It’s puzzling a CEO can utter “It’s not the big devouring the small, it’s the quick devouring the slow!” without getting it himself. I mean, really getting it and acting accordingly.

Hence, what needs to be done? Employers must re-think their organisations and processes. Employees must be connected. The advantage of having knowledge your competition doesn’t yet have is useless when is hasn’t permeated the company. A team of specialists is superior to an equally-numbered team of generalists. Then the imperative is to create ways allowing specialists (preferrably the best in their field) to find their place in the team (Hint: Throwing them in cold water is a bad idea, you and they are here for a marathon, not a weekend ride). If you as an employer know the job requires a skill that is not being taught at school, this makes you responsible in the first place to teach it. Arguing this particular skill were an everyday skill which one could expect applicants to have nowadays, puts you on very thin ice, because your applicants may have other skills they consider as everyday, but you don’t have a clue.
Oh, and fire the lazy ones. No really. Even if it costs you a fortune. In the long run it saves you, and saves you money. Hint: You will identify them by the frog noises they make, it’s either “yeah-but” or “I-can’t”, or both, and have the IT 1st level support make a list with the five most frequent “my-printer-has-a-problem” and “the-internet’s-slow” callers. Sack them too (No, I’m still not being ironic here. I mean it).

Both students (i.e. future employees) and employees must understand that life-long self-motivated active learning is mandatory, not an option, but also not an entitlement for a promotion in whatever way. It’s a basis for future negotiation if and how your contract will be extended.

This applies for educators too, because after all, education is a business like any other. As an educator, you only must treat your clients (i.e. students) as if they were employees—connect them, enable high permeation speed of knowledge and skills. Hint: Nobody has ever aquired a skill just by watching an online video, every skill is a result of practice.

And media must really get a life. (Still not being ironic here.)


So here’s the irony: Once, the feudal superiors were happy when the peasants were as uneducated as possible. Then came industrialization, and a public education system was invented to turn peasant children into a workforce. Science only to advance the industry. This was further enhanced by two world wars who brought down the monarchs (as sovereigns), and consolidated the position of the industry. And then the industry got so industrious they forgot to model the education system for their future needs, because the industry as such got too diverse, allies turning into enemies, they could no more agree on what their ideal future peasant would be… I know of a possible answer, and it scares the hell out of me.

Using Avid Unity Media Network on OS X 10.8+

Filed under: IT,media,video,workflow — Erik Dobberkau @ 18:18

The last supported version of Mac OS X is 10.7.x with MN Client v5.5.5 (Mac only — the PC version 5.5.4 still works on Win7-64bit) — because 10.7.x is the last OS X version to support 32-bit extensions. You think! With the respective hack I already described for (now deprecated) versions of the ISIS client with OS X 10.9, you can take the equivalent steps to connect your Unity on OS X 10.8.x (haven’t tested with 10.9+, maybe this works, maybe it doesn’t), just pay attention that the Unity kexts and other files have slightly different names.

And another freebie.. even though Avid recommends using ATTO FC cards, this works with the original Mac FC cards (by LSI) too. The only drawback is the “limitation” to a 2Gb/s throughput, but that’s sufficient for most HD projects.

November 18, 2014

Envy, selfish and benign

Filed under: personal — Erik Dobberkau @ 21:14

Selfish people envy those who have more than they do.
Benign people envy those who need less than they do.

November 4, 2014

ProGlove / Intel Make It Wearable rant

Filed under: general — Erik Dobberkau @ 09:04

So there was a German team who came in third at Intel’s Make It Wearable contest. Their ProGlove is an RFID-based assisting system for assembly lines. But: German company sarissa has the same system being distributed for about 4 years now, only it’s based on ultrasonics, and technically more advanced, allowing for the integration of machine-driven data for QA. Go figure. Some had better done their homework.

November 3, 2014

Rise of the hacks (commodification vs. democratization)

Filed under: business,creativity,marketing,media — Erik Dobberkau @ 10:29

There is no such thing as democratization of technology. If you think about it, this is quite obvious. Everything being sold as democratization of technology is commodification with glitzy marketing sprinkled on top.

What happens at the development level is that saturation has been reached, a specific kind of technology itself has matured and the only thing that’s left to do is increase the level of integration. This, however, comes with a cost. One example that everybody (in the western world) experiences every day is computer (including smartphones). You see, back in the days of DOS (and, before the Apple historians start howling in protest, the Apple II), when there was no such thing as a Graphical User Interface, processing power, or rather the lack thereof, was a huge (or tight – sic!) bottleneck (as were memory and basically everything, but that’s not my point…), so programmers would have to work very hard to develop and optimize their code so it would execute as fast as possible. This was a paramount objective since the beginning of the PC era which lasted until the mid-90s when the 486 and Pentium came along. Back then, Michael Abrash, who worked for companies such as Microsoft and id software (at which he played an important role in developing the game-changing (sic!) Quake engine), wrote:

GUIs, reusable code, portable code written entirely in high-level languages, and object-oriented programming are all the rage now, and promise to remain so for the foreseeable future. The thrust of this technology is to enhance the software development process by offloading as much responsibility as possible to other programmers, and by writing all remaining code in modular, generic form. This modular code then becomes a black box to be reused endlessly without another thought about what actualy lies inside. GUIs also reduce development times by making many interface choices for you. That, in turn, makes it possible to create quickly and reliably programs that will be easy for new users to pick up, so software becomes easier to both produce and learn. This is, without question, a Good Thing.

The “black box” approach does not, however, necessarily cause the software itself to become faster, smaller, or more innovative; quite the opposite, I suspect. I’ll reserve judgement on whether that is a good thing or not, but I’ll make a prediction: In the short run, the aforementioned techniques will lead to noticeably larger, slower programs, as programmers understand less and less of what the key parts of their programs do and rely increasingly on general-purpose code written by other people. (In the long run, programs will be bigger and slower yet, but computers will be so fast and will have so much memory that no one will care.) Over time, PC programs will also come to be more similar to one another-and to programs running on other platforms, such as the Mac-as regards both user interface and performance.

Again, I am not saying that this is bad. It does, however, have major implications for the future nature of PC graphics programming, in ways that will directly affect the means by which many of you earn your livings. Not so very long from now, graphics programming-all programming, for that matter-will become mostly a matter of assembling in various ways components written by other people, and will cease to be the all-inclusively creative, mindbendingly complex pursuit it is today. (Using legally certified black boxes is, by the way, one direction in which the patent lawyers are leading us; legal considerations may be the final nail in the coffin of homegrown code.) For now, though, it’s still within your power, as a PC programmer, to understand and even control every single thing that happens on a computer if you so desire, to realize any vision you may have. Take advantage of this unique window of opportunity to create some magic!

Which has proven to be still holding true 15 years later. And we see this not only in software, but also in hardware, as I mentioned before. Likewise, a new generation of users pops up, which I refer to as hacks. A hack is not necessarily a bad person, but easily perceived as such by the established players in a given area of competition. You see, broadcast engineering used to be (and still is, when keeping a technical minimum standard) a very complex field, which is why it’s still engineering and not play-as-you-go. Nevertheless, there are companies which go the aforementioned way of integrating mature technology and bringing it to the market for a price “everyone” can afford. Which correlates to the frameworks Abrash talks about, it is not a bad thing. The bad thing is that people buying this technology think it keeps up with the standard, which it does on the paper, but it’s just not as reliable, durable and serviceable as “the proper stuff” is. Nevertheless its users enter into the competition with the established players, which in a market, which is largely driven by price, creates unreasonable expectations which in return lead to ludicrous pressure within companies who see their market share flounder.

This is largely because people, in general, know less about more, which is based on the assumption that you don’t have to know how something works, you just have to know how to use it, which ironically enough, is propagated by the aforementioned pressurized companies—expert knowledge is costly, and costs are to be driven down, not up. And so the cycle is completed, as there are now even more hacks competing with other hacks about price, while the customer acts as a catalyst to all of this.

The only solution, of course, is to step away from the idea that every battle must be won at any cost. And to step away from the assumption that your customer’s only decision factor is price. It is in many cases, but my experience is that customers always appreciate service over price. And in my area of work, you’re only able to offer good service if you’re competent, able to fix problems, being a professional.

Professionals are able to create magic time and time again, hacks are not, or only by accident.

August 16, 2014

Scope

Filed under: business,creativity,personal,workflow — Erik Dobberkau @ 15:54

Every decision we are about to make depends on our scope relevant to it. Which is why you get a variety of answers/solutions to exactly the same question/problem depending on whom you ask. Some answers/solutions encompass others, some are completely different, but none of them are wrong in their own scope.
This is overlooked very often, because it’s easier to assume a mutual implicit understanding and worldview, but that’s rarely the case.
Hence we must define the scope on which a certain decision will be judged, because if there is a divergence in the scopes of decision and evaluation, the oddities of judging any decision as wrong or bad go way up, which leads to wrong conclusions about the competence or even personality of the decision-maker.

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