Doing things in ways others find dumb is the way to create a truly successful business.

Almost by definition, the only way to do things which is not tagged as dumb is the proven way, the way things are done by almost everybody and (lo-and-behold) the way countless well estabilished businesses do things now.

If you're starting a company that does things like everybody else, all you're going to be is a tiny player, with no real distinctive value offer (after all, you do it like everybody else), surrounded by large and well established competitors.

So the most successful business ideas that go from a glimer in somebody's eye to a full blown multi-million dollar business in less that a decade are the ones that involve doing "dumb" things. Things like providing for a customer need that everybody else though was not there or not worth the trouble (think Apple and iPhones), or approaching how to do something in a completely different way (thing how Google catalogs the web versus how Yahoo did it back then) or throwing out the assumptions that underpin an established business (look at the rise of free newspapers or how Apple sells technology as others sell fashion).

The only reason for a sovereign power to infiltrate an organisation made mostly of script-kiddy types that is mostly shaming private companies is to stop them.

Russians (and Chinese) almost certainly have their own info-espionage groups which are bound to be just as good as the best LulzSec types only much better funded and with access to things such as Windows source code, info on government mandated backdoors on software and hardware, custom hardware (think USB sticks with custom firmware or even PLAs for brute force hacking into WiFi networks), inside information obtained by good old field-work (think everything from physical violence & blackmail to pillow-talk) and even physical delivery of anything anywhere in the world (think dropping custom USB flash disks in the parking lot of a company you want to hack into).

The only reason this people might have to infiltrate the likes of LulzSec is to stop them from showing to the world some low-hanging-fruit-security-hole or other they might be exploiting to get access to some basic info.

I also work in IT in finance (investment banking, front-office) but I have a long background in working in other industries, including Software Products and Services.

I agree with what you say, having seen what you describe in multiple places (I'm a freelancer, so I change often enough).

I would say that an inability to bring in new blood is both a cause and a consequence of the inefficiency of IT in finance (in my estimation, about 3x more people are required in a finance environment that in an IT consultancy for the same kind of project).

The vast majority of people I see around me working IT in finance have made their career from the beginning inside that environment. They never saw or learned IT industry best practices and practice IT (from coding up to architecture and process management) like they see most people around them do it - the "finance-way". This applies to management also, where the same self-selection-for-finance-industry-old-hands also applies.

The end result is a lack strategical and tactical awareness: no sound development process, no management strategy, no design strategy, not even code-for-support practices, resulting in a lot of two-steps-forward-one-step-back coding, design and project management. This wastes (a lot of) time, in turn resulting in (as you point out) a lack of time to teach the business to any experienced software designers, developers or managers brought in from other industries.

With little or no new blood coming in, long-standing process flaws that were already solved in other industries remain and even when best practices are adopted, they're brought in for being fashionable in the industry (Agile just recently became the fashion du jour) rather than as well understood tools to solve a known problem (for example, properly done Agile would do wonders to aleviate the development issues that come from the fast changing requirements environment in investment banking front-office).

Since management all the way to the top is usually made up of industry old-hands, there is a lot of money sloshing around in finance (so the business is willing to spend a lot of money in hiring IT people), and most people in IT in finance believe that their top-pay must mean they're above average (they're not) this state of affairs persists.

I read his article.

DON'T DO WHAT HE DID!

Although his conclusion is sane, the way he went about to make it happen is overly complex.

In his specific scenario (running always the same SQL queries by primary key but with different parameters) he found out that CPU time spent in SQL parsing and Query cost estimation were resulting in CPU-bound throughtput for MySQL.

He then proceed to "fix" this by getting some library that allows direct access to MySQL's underlying database bypassing the SQL layer and rewritting his code to use this SQL-less way.

This is WAY too complex.

Simple solution: Use SQL Prepared Statements with bound parameters (i.e SELECT bla, bla2 FROM blatbl WHERE id=?). Prepared Statements only do SQL parsing and query cost estimation cost once, when the statement is created, thus using them would've removed the CPU cost without needing to add yet another layer to the software (which adds maintenance costs) or re-write it.

A lot (if not most) of performance issues with SQL databases that I have seen are issues of programmer ignorance rather than inherent problems of the DB engine or SQL itself.

And here I was thinking that Sony was giving serious, practical advice to buyers of their TV sets and to their film division ...

Thinking that "gamers" are just one market with one mind and one set of tastes show an incredible lack of business and consumer awareness.

Is somebody said "The recent explosion in take-away, fast-food outlets shows that restaurant-goers are not interested in sitting down and having a long meal in a pleasant environment. The likes of cheap takeaway sandwich sellers have changed the expectations of restaurant-goers. Since restaurant-goers are paying less money, there is less need to create nice-evening-meal-in-the-restaurant experiences because consumers no longer feel shortchanged" you would think them to be morons and yet that's what this "panel" said about games.

To put things bluntly:
- The production values of the cheap crap you can play on your own on your mobile when riding the subway to work have absolutely nothing to do with the expected production values for a game you play at home in the evening or during the weekend, on a dedicated game machine connected to a big screen, probably with friends, just like the quality of the food and service from the local sandwich vendor from where I pick-up my lunch when at work has absolutly nothing to do with the quality of the food and service I expect from a good restaurant where I go to in the evening or weekend with my friends, family or someone special.

They're different markets!

Actually free health care also saves money since:

1. People who have to pay for health care avoid going to the doctor in the early (cheap to cure) stages of a disease and instead end up in the emergency ward in later (costly to cure) stages of the disease.
2. A healthy population is more productive. Paid for healthcare means that people don't go to the doctor or cannot pay for medicine for low-key chronical ilnesses and thus are likelly to have lower productivity (due to things like frequent flare-ups of the disease, constant low level pain, physical or mental weakness and more). Also, as show by studies in Africa, some ilnesses, if not treated fast enough, can cause a lifetime reduction of IQ and/or physical strenght even after cured.
3. In a state-funded healthcare system, the state, as a major purchaser of medicines/medical-services/medical-systems has a huge negotiating power and can thus obtain those products and services for less than an equivalent collection of smaller buyers would.

In fact, the first two reasons were the main reasons why the National Health Service was created in the UK (and later copied all over the world).

Simple and secure way to generate a password:
- Grab a sentence that you know well and use the first letter of each word for your password.

For extra safety, if there are numbers in that sentence (or words that sound similar to numbers, like "to" for "2" use the number rather than the first letter. If there are any punctuation marks, use upper case for the following letter.

For example:
2bon2bTitq
(To be or not to be? That is the question)

Blocking access to a specific site on demand from a specific interest group just opens up a huge can of worms. You do it for one interest group and next you know, everybody and their cat is demanding you do the same for them.

After all, if one group can demand it in order to defend their business model, then certainly other owners of IP can too. For example if somebody reposts a post of mine (of which I automatically own the copyright) in part or in whole, they're breaking my copyright - I think I need to request that access is blocked to every proxy in the planet from Finand.

Then there's the whole "morality" groups - how about, say, muslim groups demanding that access to sites of newspapers critical of Islam is blocked, pro-democracy groups demanding blocking of critical sites, anti-democracy groups demanding blocking of pro-democracy sites, misguided animal-rights groups demanding blocking of access to bonsai-cats and more.
After all, as the argument would go, those sites facilitate the spread of defamatory posts and even posts that incite hatred on religious or political grounds (yes, there are places were this is against the law and said law is vaguelly enough written that pretty much everything fits until it comes in front of a court and is proven).

Any and all freedom fighters that took the honorable option of facing off man-to-man against the guys with lots of high-tech powerful weapons are already dead.

The truth is that in assymetrical warfare, most methods used by freedom fighters are the same as those used by the terrorists. Add that to the widespread use of the label "terrorist" to tarnish the image of those with real grievances who are the visible face of oppressed populations and you end up with a situation where the word "terrorist" just Goodwins a discussion.

In the middle of the recent fallout from the discovery of the abuses that happened during the credit bubble years (banker bonuses, press abuses, police corruption, cozy relations between politicians and the press), the Royal Household seems to be one of the few institutions that's coming out as squeaky clean.

So with a bit of luck, actions by the Queen might have a little more impact in public opinion than they would during the "time-of-excesses".

So even though I'm neither a royalist nor a british citizen, I welcome and applaud anything that might portray to kids the notion that technology is cool - they've been too long enthralled by dreams of being footballers or TV celebrities.

I don't really know where you are in the world or what industry you're in, so I can't really comment.

Where I am (Software Development, Finance, London, UK) freelancers (aka contractors) make about 2x as permanent employees. From what I've heard from people I know, the ratio is more or less the same in IT inside companies in other business domains.

In Holland, IT Contractors made about 3x as permanent employees.

As far as I know, certainly in IT, in Europe freelancers are always paid better than permanent employees. This is probably because freelancers have almost no rights, while permies get things like paid sick-leave and vacation days. Also, the "premium" that freelancers get seems to be related to how hard it is to fire a permanent employee (hence it was higher in Holland than it is in England). Lastly, going freelancer seems to be a natural career evolution path for those of us who are experienced, above average techies who don't want to move into management, so while it's hard to find really experienced people who are permies and willing to move, it's a lot easier to find those as contractors.

Personally, after having gone through the fallout of the end of the Internet bubble (number 1, we seem to be heading for a Web 2.0 bubble) I realised that job security was an illusion anyway and you're better off ditching illusionary job-security in exchange for a faster rate of filling-up your war-chest of savings so as to be ready for the next time the brown mater hits the rotary impeller ...

Everyday, real life is boring, there's a lot of nitty gritty, low value things we have to do in order to get to the trully pleasurable bits of it.

Quick example:
- Have you noticed that movies don't show in real time the travel time of the characters? Hands up anybody that wants to see in real time the 15h plane trip our action movie heroes take to go from their base to whatever hellhole they're supposed to be blasting stuff up in ...

This is why most games do NOT include the "repetitivelly move stuff around" bits in them - because it's not fun. Would, say, any of the Mario Brother's games be any fun if you had to shovel dirt around for 1/2h in between getting each coin or fighting each baddie?

Let me explain this little thing I learned from working a couple of years in Portugal (neverending crunch time), then Holland (8h a day and your manager tells you to go home if you're still in at 5:30 pm) and then England (overwork as norm).

Your total daily productivity working on a norm of 8h/day is significantly better than working on a norm of 10h/day - to put it simply, if you pace yourself and work fewer hours you deliver more.

This is because:
- Working more than 8h/day causes chronical tiredness
- Chronically tired people in intellectual professions make many more mistakes (that also includes managers, who will take the wrong decisions).
- The cost of fixing those mistakes far outweights the gains of working those extra hours.

To put things in software development terms:
- If you constantly work longer hours you're constantly tired. If you're constantly tired you make more bugs. Bug fixing consumes a lot more time than doing things right the first time around (often by a factor or 1000x if the bug ends up in Production), so the increase in bugs means a HUGE increase in time spent in bug-fixing. More time wasted in bug fixing means that the project starts to run late, which means clueless managers demanding even more overwork. In other words, a feed-back loop.

So how did I solved it:
- Well, in England if somebody tries to get me to overwork is say "No" (I will, however, do a little extra in the last couple of days before a release if needed).

Surprisingly (or maybe not if you read what I wrote above), by working just 8h/day I still manage to deliver more than any of my colleagues that overwork. At the end of the day, in the vast majority of places results are what counts, so managers still keep me around (and I'm a freelancer, so easy to get rid of) and I have almost universally good feedback from all managers I worked with.

It says that it can change from Portrait view to Landscape view or the other way around either from information read from the accelerometers of by command from the user using a finger gesture on a touch screen display. Furthermore, the user command causes the view to be locked in the chosen mode until another user command unlocks it.

It is essentially a patent on the combination of the following already patented or widelly used features of:
- Show Landscape or Portrait mode depending on information from one or more sensors.
- A user command can be used to override automated behaviour.
- A user command can be used to remove an override to automated behaviour.
- A user command can be given by means of a finger gesture on a touch screen.

The actual combination of features is not novel in that most experts of the field when asked "how would you implement display adjustment when the screen of a mobile device with a touch screen and an accelerometer is tilted" would come up with this solution.

This wouldn't be accepted by eiher the UK's or the EU's pattent office, but did in the US, since your system is thoroughly broken.