How to herd cats

The Good Soldier Skat is a great essay in which I found much to sympathise with. In it Richard Hillesley contrasts a traditional regulated bureaucratic business with the freedom of open source projects. It's not so much a case for open source software as the idea of trusting and freeing your workers. Companies really should look to successful open source projects to see how to organise and motivate their own teams. It means letting go of some control, which is a risk, but the benefits could be much greater.

Via programming.reddit

See also The Success of Open Source and Innovation Happens Elsewhere

The Pyramids are crap

The Pyramids are crap. Egyptians should be embarrassed by these massive monuments to stupidity. They're a constant reminder of how utterly useless the ancient Egyptians were at architecture. What's the very simplest way to build a tall structure that won't fall over? Pile the bricks on top of each other. And that's essentially what the pyramids are. Big piles of bricks.

The only thing you should be impressed by is the fact that the Pharaohs had such resources and power at their command that they could be so wasteful with them. I'm sure the slaves worked as hard as any man can, and the pyramid building operation was run as fast as it possibly could be. All that hard work. What a waste. It only goes to show that hard work doesn't pay off.

I'm not going to build any pyramids.

Movie title fun

[From The Jay]

Looks like the Web 2.0 meme has drifted into the movie business. Surely this is the first movie with a minor version number? A good move in my view, much easier to keep track of than all re-remasterings and directors cuts of directors cuts.