Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 19 January 2007, 4:25 PM
Ten Commandments for IT
If Sarbanes-Oxley can make randomly stupid rules for IT such as 'all updates must be charged for', then so can I. Here are ten to be getting on with.
1. No Microsoft employee to be allowed to use “Super” as an adverb. I don't care if you are super-excited at marketing Vista's super-extended feature set to super-adopters. Unless you're talking about Clark Kent, shut up.
2. For one week a month, let's remember that Apple is a toymaker producing entirely dispensible objects costing more than a billion people each have to live on per year. And Jobs used to sign his name Steven P Jobs while wearing a bow-tie. Change is possible.
3. All network operators and internet service providers to repeat three times every morning: “Customers are people. Customers are people. They don't have to send us their money and we don't have the right to take it by any means possible, because customers are people.”
4. All network operators and internet service providers to then meditate on the words “operators”, “service” and “provide”. If necessary, check in a dictionary beforehand.
5. You don't need a new iPod just because the old one's full
6. The correct answer to a forum posting saying “I can't get my video driver to work under Linux” is not “Stupid n00b – why do you hate freedom?”
7. Selling very expensive digital devices is easier if you don't stop them doing what the customers. If your thousand pound media centre does less than a 1980s VCR, you've got it wrong.
8. If you make very expensive digital devices, pass number 7 on to your friends in the entertainment industry. Use nails and a hammer, if necessary
9. If a news item on a website makes you really upset, check whether the journalist is reporting something somebody else said before accusing said hack of being in the pay of Microsoft, Big Oil, the Guvmint, the Conspiracy, or whoever. PRs get paid far more than we get for that sort of thing, and it rankles.
10. Just because someone's spent five billion dollars on something, you don't have to buy it.
1. No Microsoft employee to be allowed to use “Super” as an adverb. I don't care if you are super-excited at marketing Vista's super-extended feature set to super-adopters. Unless you're talking about Clark Kent, shut up.
2. For one week a month, let's remember that Apple is a toymaker producing entirely dispensible objects costing more than a billion people each have to live on per year. And Jobs used to sign his name Steven P Jobs while wearing a bow-tie. Change is possible.
3. All network operators and internet service providers to repeat three times every morning: “Customers are people. Customers are people. They don't have to send us their money and we don't have the right to take it by any means possible, because customers are people.”
4. All network operators and internet service providers to then meditate on the words “operators”, “service” and “provide”. If necessary, check in a dictionary beforehand.
5. You don't need a new iPod just because the old one's full
6. The correct answer to a forum posting saying “I can't get my video driver to work under Linux” is not “Stupid n00b – why do you hate freedom?”
7. Selling very expensive digital devices is easier if you don't stop them doing what the customers. If your thousand pound media centre does less than a 1980s VCR, you've got it wrong.
8. If you make very expensive digital devices, pass number 7 on to your friends in the entertainment industry. Use nails and a hammer, if necessary
9. If a news item on a website makes you really upset, check whether the journalist is reporting something somebody else said before accusing said hack of being in the pay of Microsoft, Big Oil, the Guvmint, the Conspiracy, or whoever. PRs get paid far more than we get for that sort of thing, and it rankles.
10. Just because someone's spent five billion dollars on something, you don't have to buy it.
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