From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
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Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2006 23:36:35 -0500
From: Marina Brown <marina@surferz.net>
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To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Subject: Re: [9fans] More 'Sam I am'
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	<43EC8C5C.50004@anvil.com> <43EC9D5C.3070509@village.com>
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Wes Kussmaul wrote:

> Dave Lukes wrote:
>
>> Aharon Robbins wrote:
>
>
>>  >     When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.
>>
>> Bogus analogy.  Complete the following "saw":
>>    When life hands you a bucket of stale pus, make ... ?
>
>
> ...a petri dish culture that you can study.
>
> It's easy to dismiss Aharon's observation, as it comes from the 
> Montaigne view of life:
>
> "The thing of it is, we must live with the living."
>
> The IT infrastructure has been designed and deployed by people with a 
> median IQ of 121.4 (trust me, I have all the data) because of course 
> it's developed by people smart enough to have a vague idea of what's 
> needed. Not smart enough to do it well, not smart enough to keep it 
> simple -- and not smart enough to understand that doing a job well 
> delivers more satisfaction than does fudding your way into a few extra 
> dollars or a bigger title.
>
> Not making any claims about being smart myself, I can make the 
> following observation: the people on this list are much smarter than 
> those who are responsible for today's pervasive common IT infrastructure.
>
> Smart people will usually be at the alienated right extreme of the 
> bell curve, praised for being smart but not actually listened to.
>
> But once in a while something happens that shows that it doesn't have 
> to be that way. Read _Action This Day_ about how WWII was really won 
> by the very smart folks at what is now Britain's GCHQ, including many 
> from allied countries. The thing is, somewhere there has to be a 
> Churchill directing people to be led by people who are smarter than 
> themselves.
>


Good observations ...  They are really to the point in my life here. I 
spent much of the
day installing windows XP on qemu to avoid using windows at all because 
my company
has a corporate web-app thing that has a combination of flash, 
javascript and activeX
that only seems to run on Internet explorer with the security levels zero'd.

When i complain that the application is poorly designed i often get flak 
from one of the
project managers who manages the team that maintains that mosterpiece.

---- Marina Brown