David Hamilton

Are You The Unreasonable Man?

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:43:01 +0100

Boris from The Next Web has posted a thought provoking article asking about the role of unreasonable behaviour in business.

It was still in the back of my mind while at Tai Chi class last night. Our instructor reminded us of the central role of Yin and Yang and the balance of opposites in Chinese martial arts and philosophy in general.

I was struck by the stark contrast with the Western approach (both in fighting and life in general): that imbalance (or unreasonableness) is pretty much key to our approach.

I was tempted to view the success of the West, both economically and culturally, as being a result of being downright unreasonable most of the time (unless forced to compromise).

That success may, however, only be temporary. I regard Western economics (based as they are on the unsustainable idea of perpetual growth) as a teenage phase of our development as a society: at some point we are going to grow up and have to learn to be more reasonable.

How much worse is “failed catastrophically” than...

Thu, 14 May 2009 10:51:02 +0100

How much worse is “failed catastrophically” than “failed”, or even “unrecoverable failure”?

Via adobegripes:

Quality of Life Plotted against Log Income

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:14:00 +0100

Quality of Life Plotted against Log Income

The Future - What Went Wrong?

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:12:34 +0100

The Future - What Went Wrong?

How VCs should not pitch to a startup

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:12:00 +0100

How VCs should not pitch to a startup:

It does seem odd that the VC’s focus is on differentiating them from other VCs, rather than being interested in what they’re likely to put their money in.

Like so many things nowadays, this is just doing a job by a fixed process - crank the handle and the ‘right’ result comes out.

Technologizer assesses Lauren and the 'Apple Tax'

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:15:00 +0100

Prompted by the Microsoft ‘Lauren’ advert, Technologizer’s Harry McCracken compares the 17” Mac Book Pro with equivalent models from Dell, HP, Lenovo & Sony. In short he finds that the ‘Apple Tax’ is the same as the ‘HP Tax’, less than the ‘Dell Tax’ more than the ‘Lenovo Tax’, and that the Sony machine belonged in a different category.

What interested me was a comment that asked “What about all the Laurens out there?”, referring to the much lower specification machine that Lauren apparently selects in the ad, and my immediate reaction was “Why get a shoddy laptop just to get a 17 inch screen?”.

Personally I don’t see the point of a 17” laptop - I have made the mistake in the past of buying an overly large laptop, forgetting that the key element of a laptop is portability! So to compromise all the other features to gain a large screen indicates either misguided buying priorities or specialised requirements (i.e. not travelling frequently with the ‘portable’!). Also, my step-daughter got given a Dell Vostro 1000 - a low-end laptop/Vista combination, and it is frankly horrible with a number of niggling issues, which reminded me exactly what those compromises actually are.

Are there a lot of Laurens in reality? Certainly there are a lot of computer purchasers with a misguided view of their priorities, and there is certainly an increasing demographic who buy laptops purely to use at home while slouching on the sofa (I confidently predict an epidemic of back and other posture-related problems in a few years time!).

Ultimately however, the real point of the ad was to find a pricing angle that ruled Apple out of the game. To require a 17” screen and < $1000 dollars was always going to be the best way for the Microsoft to do that. The Lauren character is a creation of the advertising copywriter and in reality the girl is an actress!

Metallica: Blackened - Microsoft Songsmith Version (via...

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:20:59 +0000

Metallica: Blackened - Microsoft Songsmith Version (via drphwoar)

Firefox Overtakes IE (on one site, at least)

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:13:10 +0000

Firefox Overtakes IE (on one site, at least):

The site for developers, W3Schools, has just published the browser statistics figures for January… and more people now use Firefox than all versions of IE put together (including IE8).

It has been coming for a while, but what is particularly interesting is that the numbers for IE7 have been dropping for the last 3 months (and the IE8 numbers nowhere near compensate for it).

adobegripes: Installer: Think this sums up the Adobe...

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:07:00 +0000

adobegripes:

Installer: Think this sums up the Adobe Installer brilliantly

Love it

Trading stopped for 15 minutes...

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:29:44 +0000

Trading stopped for 15 minutes...:

The article contains this little note right at the bottom:

“Paulo Sergio Silva, 36, a trader for the brokerage arm of the Brazilian banking giant Itaú, shot himself in the chest during the afternoon trading session of São Paulo’s commodities and futures exchange in an apparent suicide attempt in November. Trading stopped for about 15 minutes.”

Trading stopped for 15 minutes!!! Your colleague violently tries to commit suicide in the office, and you only stop work for 15 minutes.

And they say financial people have no soul…

Loaning of Shares

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:16:00 +0000

Loaning of Shares:

This article tries to absolve short selling of responsibility for the bank values crash a couple of weeks ago (it does look like institutions dumped their bank stock as soon as they found out that short-selling was being re-enabled).

But the interesting statistic in this article is that over 3 percent of Barclays shock was out on loan, even while short-selling was banned. Which begs a question:

Why would people or institutions want to borrow stock, if they are not using them to sell short?

Brilliant! Two handcuffed criminals trying to run away from the...

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 08:59:00 +0000

Brilliant! Two handcuffed criminals trying to run away from the police.

Microsoft's World of Pain

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:19:00 +0000

Microsoft's World of Pain:

I’ve known for a while about this guy’s trials with trying to create the ‘Shutdown’ menu for Windows Vista, but not read his actual blog.

The section on Microsoft’s source control system looks like a world of pain. How can any software company succeed when it take months for code changes to propagate from one team to another?

Continuous Integration this is not!

Merrill Lynch paid itself $4 BILLION in bonuses

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:43:00 +0000

Merrill Lynch paid itself $4 BILLION in bonuses:

Merrill Lynch paid itself $4 Billion in bonuses 3 days before the bankrupt company was taken over by Bank of America?!!!!

Three questions: Where was the oversight? Surely, once it was known that bailout money was going into the banks (and Merrill, or its rescuer was clearly going to be a recipient), a method of overseeing the financial management of these companies needed to be created? Or did the government just trust that they would do ‘the right thing’?

Secondly: What on earth was Bank of America doing? Didn’t they do any checks, or did they just assume that the government would cover all of the losses incurred?

Thirdly: How do we change corporate culture to get the definition of ‘bonus’ to return to be something that is paid for creating success, not just turning up every day?

bbum’s weblog-o-mat » What is good tequila?

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:23:53 +0100

bbum’s weblog-o-mat » What is good tequila?:

Not Cuervo Gold, apparently

Richard Dawkins & Darwinian Societies

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:07:00 +0000

Richard Dawkins & Darwinian Societies:

Very amusing description of PZ Myers being ejected from the preview of ‘Excluded’ - the new film on Intelligent Design. But that is not what interested me.

In the 11th paragraph Dawkins repeats his view from ‘The Selfish Gene’ that our origins in Darwinian evolution do not mean that we should structure our society in the same way. He argues that we should use our brains to combat the selfish gene and build societies that rise above pure selfishness.

I believe that this statement encapsulates probably the most important idea of his career - that Darwinism does not doom us to a dog-eat-dog society.

Awareness Test

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:54:00 +0000

Awareness Test

The Role of Powerpoint in the Colombia Disaster

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 13:41:17 +0000

The Role of Powerpoint in the Colombia Disaster:

It does seem odd that NASA’s engineers presented technical information in the form of Powerpoint slides. It suggests to me a culture focussed on ‘managing the managers’ rather than engineering problem solving.

Even MS boxes suffer from poor usability!

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:42:33 +0000

Even MS boxes suffer from poor usability!:

ROFLMAO! Thanks to John Gruber from pointing this one out.

On the subject of tattoos, finally seen Armstrong and Miller now...

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:41:11 +0000

On the subject of tattoos, finally seen Armstrong and Miller now that it is on analogue TV… this is brilliant!