Microsoft has just settled yet another antitrust case out of court. This time it was with Be, the authors of BeOS, to which it paid $US23,250,000 without ever having to admit it was guilty of the 16 pages of complaints laid against it.
I’m a big fan of sci-fi books, particularly the genre sometimes called cyberpunk.
Why does the government source most of its consultants, and outsource a large portion of its software development and hardware purchases, from overseas companies?
Control and governance are becoming big issues in IT, but how does one control an extreme programming project? The problem is that XP is a complex adaptive system -- it relies on a small set of simple rules which encourage useful behaviour to emerge from potential chaos. Too few rules (or the wrong ones) and you have total chaos. Too many and you have a classical unagile command-and-control process.
It’d be really cool, like, if a bunch of inarticulate, computer-illiterate 30-something dweebs pretending to be teenagers could play 10-year-old games on a 2in square screen and pay $90 an hour to do so.