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Comment Easy Solution (Score 1) 131

by dykmoby (#50618953) Attached to: Are Enterprise Architects the "Miltons" of Their Organizations?
In my current and past orgs, the EAs could easily be replaced by unpaid interns from a local community art college:

1) Disappear for months at a time talking high concepts

2) Make vary large, very colourful, completely incomprehensible pictures that get pinned up on walls that nobody looks at

3) Never update the pictures to reflect reality

4) Only show up when there is free food on the table

5) When asked a serious question requiring a solution, go away and come back with a completely unworkable answer four months after the project is due, if ever

With the unpaid art-school intern option, an organization could save high six, low seven figures a year!

Comment Lessons Learned (Score 1) 583

1) No political decision improved a technical solution

2) All decisions are political

3) Commitments made by you are set in stone. Commitments made by management are set in Jell-o. In a microwave.

4) Being wrong may get you fired eventually. Your boss being wrong and blaming you will get you fired sooner. Telling your boss they are wrong will get you fired right now.

5) Contrary to popular opinion, if you find something you love, only try to make a living at it if you can be your own boss. Doing it for someone else will wring every last drop of joy out of it.

I may be having a bad day...
Canada

Submission + - Canadian Court Rejects US Govt Demand for Full Access to Megaupload Servers (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Nearly one year ago, the U.S. government launched a global takedown of Megaupload.com, with arrests of the leading executives in New Zealand and the execution of search warrants in nine countries. Canada was among the list of participating countries as the action included seizure of Megaupload.com servers. Last week, a Canadian court rejected a request to send mirror-imaged copies of 32 computer servers to authorities in the U.S., indicating that a more refined order is needed. Megaupload successfully argued "that there is an enormous volume of information on the servers and that sending mirror image copies of all of this data would be overly broad, particularly in light of the scantiness of the evidence connecting these servers to the crimes alleged by the American prosecutors."
Businesses

Former Exec Says Electronic Arts "Is In the Wrong Business" 180

Posted by Soulskill from the inspiring-internet-outrage-is-a-bad-business-model dept.
Mitch Lasky was the executive vice president of Mobile and Online at Electronic Arts until leaving the publisher to work at an investment firm. He now has some harsh things to say about how EA has been run over the past several years, in particular criticizing the decisions of CEO John Riccitiello. Quoting: "EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again. ... by far the greatest failure of Riccitiello's strategy has been the EA Games division. JR bet his tenure on EA's ability to 'grow their way through the transition' to digital/online with hit packaged goods titles. They honestly believed that they had a decade to make this transition (I think it's more like 2-3 years). Since the recurring-revenue sports titles were already 'booked' (i.e., fully accounted for in the Wall Street estimates) it fell to EA Games to make hits that could move the needle. It's been a very ugly scene, indeed. From Spore, to Dead Space, to Mirror's Edge, to Need for Speed: Undercover, it's been one expensive commercial disappointment for EA Games after another. Not to mention the shut-down of Pandemic, half of the justification for EA's $850MM acquisition of Bioware-Pandemic. And don't think that Dante's Inferno, or Knights of the Old Republic, is going to make it all better. It's a bankrupt strategy."
Classic Games (Games)

New MechWarrior Announced, MechWarrior4 To Be Distributed Free 229

Posted by Soulskill from the as-in-beer dept.
Vamman writes "In light of the recent announcement of the new MechWarrior game, Smith and Tinker has granted our online dev team MekTek.net (which has been supporting MechWarrior for almost a decade now) permission to release MechWarrior 4 entirely for free using the same type of distribution model that id Games used for Quake3's free release.
Government

Timetable App Developer Gets Nastygram From Transit Sydney 378

Posted by timothy from the didn't-get-the-gift-horse-memo dept.
mikesd81 writes "ZDNet Australia writes that NSW state corporation RailCorp has threatened a Sydney software developer with legal action if he fails to withdraw a train timetable application that is currently the second-most-popular application in its category in Apple's App Store. Alvin Singh created Transit Sydney after he began teaching himself how to program in Cocoa Mobile. Within days of its Feb 18 release, Singh received a cease and desist notice from Rail Corporation NSW, the government body that administers Sydney's CityRail network. The email states: 'I advise that copyright in all CityRail timetables is owned by RailCorp. ... Any use of these timetables in a manner which breaches copyright by a third party can only occur through the grant of a suitable licence by RailCorp.'"
Games

EVE Devs Dissect, Explain Massive Economic Exploit 139

Posted by Soulskill from the this-is-how-you-deal-with-such-events dept.
In December we discussed news that a major exploit in EVE Online had just been widely discovered after being abused by a few players for up to four years, creating thousands of real-life dollars worth of unearned in-game currency. Representatives from CCP Games assured players that the matter would be investigated and dealt with; a familiar line in such situations for other multiplayer games, and often the final official word on the matter. Yesterday, CCP completed their investigation and posted an incredibly detailed account of how the exploit worked, what they did to fix it, how it affected the game's economy, and what happened to the players who abused it. Their report ranges from descriptions of the involved algorithms to graphs of the related economic markets to theatrically swooping through the game universe nuking the malfunctioning structures. It's quite comprehensible to non-EVE-players, and Massively has summarized the report nicely. It's an excellent example of transparency and openness in dealing with a situation most companies would be anxious to sweep under the rug.

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