Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Damn straight.
The death of the 600 was due to a communications screw up. The commander got his orders and set about to do it, and the men did their job.
What if it had been the proper thing to do? The cavalry attacks the line and forces a pivot to face them. The line is poorly trained or led and overdoes the pivot. This allows the battalion to attack the weak end of the emplacement and capture the line. Now the defenders have a huge hole where their vaunted cannon battery used to be and a full brigade pouring in the gap.
Sacrifice a company to rout the enemy? Yes. That's how it's done, and it does not require the company commander to know the big picture. It requires people on the scene who know how to work together and achieve the targets given, even at the expense of their life. Such is war.
You can't wait until you line up your ducks. The ducks are trying to kill you!
The problem is managers that use simple metrics like lines of code written per day to determine a developer's value.
Hear hear! For all the "Management Science" out there, what actually does work? The Waterfall method is hugely limited in software development, and upper management without a clear view is crippling. I was once part of a project where six teams had each developed their own printer drivers for their modules because management neither thought of it or noticed the duplication. Team isolation prevented sharing as well, so six freshly re-invented wheels.
What is it they are crunching on anyway? Did somebody's new skin break the display engine? Did fixing a wall error crump edge detection or LOS calculations? Did a weapons tweak make the ballistics engine puke? Was there a pent-up demand for crawling ants lighting on a display instead of just a glow? Where are the edges of accountability for these things, and which manager is (not) paying for their miscues?
Granted, starting with a well behaved engine or other project module is always going to be risky when you push it to do new or different things. The upper echelons should be aware of this in their design plans. But flogging the oarsmen when you're completely off course is the wrong way to go -- fix the navigator!
This passes the wife test - 3 years and counting so far
We both have iPhones so she even uses the remote to turn on specific speakers when she walks into a particular room.
Unbelievably simple (though a tad pricey) setup. Always works.
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have acknowledged that the rolling-boulder booby trap in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark was inspired by the 1954 Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge adventure "The Seven Cities of Cibola" (Uncle Scrooge #7). Lucas and Spielberg have also said that some of Barks's stories about space travel and the depiction of aliens had an influence on them.[3] Lucas wrote the foreword to the 1982 Uncle Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times. In it he calls Barks's stories "cinematic" and "a priceless part of our literary heritage".
those comics were of a remarkable quality! they expanded both my knowledge of history (Greeks, Romans, Vikings, etc) and vocabulary immensely. it was also through Barks' stories i learned English (painfully translating word-by-word with a dictionary). it's sad that those characters and stories got so over-simplified for the "Ducktales" cartoon.
for more info on Barks works, check out:
inducks.org
BarksBase
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion