Bank sees February or March timeline if Israel strikes
Warning that investors might be "in for a shock," a major investment bank has told the financial community that a preemptive strike by Israel with American backing could hit Iran’s nuclear program, RAW STORY has learned.
The banking division of ING Group released a memo on Jan. 9 entitled "Attacking Iran: The market impact of a surprise Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities."
ING is a global financial services company of Dutch origin that includes banking, insurance, and other divisions. The report was authored by Charles Robinson, the Chief Economist for Emerging Europe, Middle East, and Africa. He also authored an update in ING’s daily update Prophet that further underscored the bank’s perception of the risks of an attack.
ING’s Robertson admitted that an attack on Iran was "high impact, if low probability," but explained some of the reasons why a strike might go forward. The Jan. 9 dispatch, describes Israel as "not prepared to accept the same doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ that kept the peace during the Cold War…
Robertson suggests a February-March 2007 timeline for several reasons…
Well right now we are advising our clients to put all they can into canned food and shotguns…
THE WALT DISNEY CO.’S FAILURE to suppress access to controversial audio files from its ABC Radio affiliate KSFO is a textbook example of the impossibility of controlling the marketplace of ideas in the digital age.
Like a swarm of tiny locusts overwhelming a massive mouse, it was fascinating to watch the blogosphere unite in defense of the online media critic Spocko last weekend. Disney had sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Web site Spocko’s Brain and its ISP, 1&1, after the online muckraker taped segments of KSFO’s morning talk show, posted them on his site, and invited the station’s advertisers to listen.
What they heard was drive-time hosts endorse torture, insult Muslims and enact the execution of journalists. When some advertisers fled, the Disney legal department briefly killed the messenger with a cease-and-desist order, alleging copyright violation.
But less than 48 hours after Spocko’s case was brought to light on the progressive news blog "The Daily Kos," several new Web hosts, including YouTube, Blogintegrity and Firedoglake, stepped up to provide access to audio files from KSFO. Instead of one ISP to threaten, there were now many–basically challenging MouseCorp to sue all of them.
………………..
Disney is now left with the option of playing a virtual game of "Whack A Mole," as the Rodent Empire’s lawyers will need to slap citations against a series of sites as swiftly as they pop up. Plus, it may only be a matter of time before the mainstream media rides the story for at least one new cycle. That’s got to be Disney’s worst nightmare: 24 hours where "Disney" and "Hate Speech" are both part of the topic line.
The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. –John Gilmore
Via The Christian Science Monitor…this from Peter Akinola, who it’s a safe bet fancies himself the Archbishop of the new church he’s busy carving out of the Anglican one. It’s really entertaining when they don’t know enough to keep their goddamned mouths shut…
Best known for his vocal opposition to homosexuality, Akinola has found support among US Anglicans, or Episcopalians, who opposed the 2003 consecration of a gay bishop and the church’s move to allow dioceses to bless same-sex unions.
Last month, two of America’s oldest Episcopalian churches – both in Virginia – voted to break with the US branch of Anglicanism over the issue and concerns about church leaders’ adherence to biblical authority. These churches, and several other smaller churches, joined the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, which is connected to Akinola.
"Homosexuality seeks to destroy marriage as we know it, unity as we know it, family life as we know it, so how can we endorse that?" asks Akinola. "That is completely outside what God planned for humanity. When God created man, he saw man was alone and added a female mate for him. Why didn’t he pick one of the baboons, one of the lions to make his partner? He could have done so. He didn’t,"
[Emphasis mine] Say…weren’t they saying the same thing about mixed race marriages not all that long ago in Virginia…?
David Brooks says Nanci Pelosi is some kind of hereditary plutocrat, like George W. Bush:
A snit in first class – Opinion – International Herald Tribune: I have a dream that [Nancy] Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child…. I dream of a great harmonic convergence among the obscenely rich…. [But] I know that both Bush and Pelosi are part of an upper-income whirlwind of strife….
This week, witness Pelosi going on her all-about-me inauguration tour, which is designed to rebrand her as a regular Catholic grandma from Baltimore. Members of the middle classes never have to mount campaign swings to prove how regular they are, but these upper-bracket types can’t help themselves, and they always lay it on too thick…
Here is a photo of Nancy Pelosi’s childhood home in Baltimore:
Nancy Pelosi grew up at the far end of this block of Albemarle Street in Baltimore. San Francisco Chronicle photo by Michael Macor.
Here’s a photo of the Bushes’ summer house on Walker Point:
Daughters of ethnic Democratic mayors in the 1950s did get driven to school. But hereditary plutocrats they were not.
I live not far from where Pelosi grew up and I can attest to the fact that this is not a neighborhood full of "obscenely rich" people. It is Baltimore’s little Italy…thoroughly Baltimore working class. People live in the usual Baltimore row houses there, and yes, some of those row houses are very nice, but there are nothing near the palatial splendor you see in the Walker Point photo. Pelosi got driven to school because she was the mayor’s daughter, not because their family was filthy rich like the Bush clan.
But Brooks, without a doubt, knows this. What he’s counting on is that you don’t. He can just say…oh…she was chauffeured to school as a child, just like the silver spoon brat in the White House now. My next door neighbors drive their boy to the Friend’s School here in Baltimore every day and they live in the same working class Baltimore rowhouse neighborhood I do. Maybe Brooks thinks that gives them the same childhood George Bush had too. Maybe Brooks thinks that makes us all Obscenely Rich here in Medfield. On the other hand, maybe Brooks is just pulling the same kind of fast one that the book that made him famous, Bobos In Paradise is full of.
As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home.“On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, ‘slippery beef pot pie,’ or whatever—I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee’s,” he wrote. “I’d scan the menu and realize that I’d been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and ‘seafood delight’ trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it.”
Taking Brooks’s cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The “Steak and Lobster” combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. “Most of our checks are over $20,” said Becka, my waitress. “There are a lot of ways to spend over $20.”
The easiest way to spend more than $20 on a meal in Franklin County is to visit the Mercersburg Inn, which boasts “turn-of-the-century elegance.” I had a $50 prix-fixe dinner, with an entrée of veal medallions, served with a lump-crab and artichoke tower, wild-rice pilaf and a sage-caper-cream sauce. Afterward, I asked the inn’s proprietors, Walt and Sandy Filkowski, if they had seen Brooks’s article. They laughed.
I called Brooks to see if I was misreading his work. I told him about my trip to Franklin County, and the ease with which I was able to spend $20 on a meal. He laughed. “I didn’t see it when I was there, but it’s true, you can get a nice meal at the Mercersburg Inn,” he said. I said it was just as easy at Red Lobster. “That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end?” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”
Let’s be civil here: David Brooks is a goddamned liar. He does it for money. Perhaps he believes in the republican party cause. Perhaps he has his own emotional stake in the American Kultar Kampf. But the first thing to remember about him, is that he lies for money. Really…that’s all you need to know about him.
Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he’d take his oath of office on the Koran — especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values.
Yet the holy book at tomorrow’s ceremony has an unassailably all-American provenance. We’ve learned that the new congressman — in a savvy bit of political symbolism — will hold the personal copy once owned by Thomas Jefferson.
"He wanted to use a Koran that was special," said Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress, who was contacted by the Minnesota Dem early in December. Dimunation, who grew up in Ellison’s 5th District, was happy to help.
Jefferson’s copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s; it survived the 1851 fire that destroyed most of Jefferson’s collection and has his customary initialing on the pages. This isn’t the first historic book used for swearing-in ceremonies — the Library has allowed VIPs to use rare Bibles for inaugurations and other special occasions.
Goode represents Jefferson’s birthplace, Albemarle County Virginia. Though I’m sure they’d lend him one, you have to suppose a Jefferson Bible wouldn’t be good enough for Goode to put his hand on while taking an oath. Or…maybe I have that backwards…
Thomas Jefferson believed that the ethical system of Jesus was the finest the world has ever seen. In compiling what has come to be called "The Jefferson Bible," he sought to separate those ethical teachings from the religious dogma and other supernatural elements that are intermixed in the account provided by the four Gospels. He presented these teachings, along with the essential events of the life of Jesus, in one continuous narrative.
This presentation of The Jefferson Bible offers the text as selected and arranged by Jefferson in two separate editions: one edition uses a revised King James Version of the biblical texts, corrected in accordance with the findings of modern scholarship; the second edition uses the original unrevised KJV. The actual verses of the Bible used for both editions are those chosen by Jefferson. Visitors should find the revised KJV text much easier to read and understand. Those seeking the precise English version Mr. Jefferson used when making his compilation can click on "Unrevised KJV text."
He may be on the conservative movement’s shit list these days, but Andrew Sullivan is still its useful idiot…
I doubt whether Massachusetts will forgo the honor of being the first state to grant gay couples legal equality with their straight peers. But there’s one way to find out. Let’s debate and campaign. The national gay groups, whose record on marriage has been spotty at best, need to make this the first priority of the national movement. Winning a democratic vote on marriage is a huge opportunity – and well within our grasp. We have the arguments. We have the evidence. Now let’s have the vote.
We have the arguments do we? Well…one argument we won’t have I guess is that no civilized nation puts the human rights of minorities up for popular vote. Can someone tell me when reason ever made a dent in the mindset of bigots? It wasn’t the voters who swept away the segregation laws in America, it was the hated Warren Court.
The Conservative Soul is it? Well of course. Conservatives never were very big on the concept of liberty and justice for all were they…
A bill, of course, they wouldn’t even consider when they were in the majority.
There is something profoundly sickening about watching the party that made race baiting and fag bashing into political art forms bellyaching about minority rights.
The Washington Monthly: REDEFINING FAILURE…. Frances Fragos Townsend, assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, was on CNN yesterday discussing the war in Iraq, Saddam’s pending execution, and the Middle East, but CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry had the temerity to ask about the terrorist behind 9/11.
Officials from this White House are known for some bizarre comments, but Townsend’s response has to go in the Hall of Fame. (via)
HENRY: You know, going back to September 2001, the president said, dead or alive, we’re going to get him. Still don’t have him. I know you are saying there’s successes on the war on terror, and there have been. That’s a failure.
TOWNSEND: Well, I’m not sure — it’s a success that hasn’t occurred yet. I don’t know that I view that as a failure.
A "success that hasn’t occurred yet"? By that logic, practically nothing could ever be characterized as failure. Indeed, I’m not sure why the Bush gang hasn’t thought of this sooner.
"Budget deficits are just surpluses that haven’t occurred yet."
"Global warming is just global cooling that hasn’t occurred yet."
"Stagnant wages are just raises that haven’t occurred yet."
"The civil war in Iraq is just peace that hasn’t occurred yet."
It’d be amusing if it weren’t so sad.
My lottery Jackpot is a fortune that just hasn’t occurred yet. It’s big too. Huge. I could pay off the national debt with it.
A renewal deal between Time Warner Cable and Viacom will include expansion of cities showing Viacom’s LOGO, a network targeting homosexual viewers. The president of an organization that monitors the influence of homosexuality in the culture, and the head of another that observes cultural trends in media, both say it is really just a natural development of what is already being done on other cable and satellite channels.
Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth says it is significant — but not surprising — that the all-homosexual channel LOGO is expanding outside of New York City, its only availability location on cable thus far.
As Pam points out, Logo has been available outside NYC for quite sometime now. But…never mind cable. Seriously.
Pst… Pete… Hey…jackass… Anyone anywhere with a good line-of-sight to the DirectTV satellites can get Logo. And it’s not a premium or pay-per-play channel either. Ask me how I know. They’re watching Queer As Folk and Round Trip Ticket right now everywhere in the bible belt Pete. And if they’ve got Sirius satellite radio, they’re probably listening to OutQ too. And Sirius subscribers can get OutQ in a stream feed to their PC too. That’s how I listen to it when I’m not in the car.
In the comments on this post on the Unfunny Duck, Tukla In Iowa notes:
We’re having some fun with this over at Comics Curmudgeon because it happened to hit the news the same day one of his cartoons complained about alcohol-free eggnog:
It’s a hoot…go read it. It’s over at the Comics Curmudgeon, who says…
Now, I don’t usually — or ever, really — comment on Mallard Fillmore on this blog. Partly it’s because it inspires the sort of pointless vitriol amongst commentors that will get folks banished to the Cockpit. Partly it’s because I already have an outlet for my political commentary. But mostly it’s because my comments would just be as foaming, angry, and unfunny as Mallard Fillmore itself. Not only do I disagree with pretty much every political opinion expressed therein, but the strip itself is a sham of a comic strip. There are plenty of conservative-themed strips (Prickly City and the online Day By Day come to mind) that actually have sequential action in panels and recurring characters; Mallard Fillmore is just a standard-issue editorial cartoon that happens to be drawn in a box that’s the same dimensions as a comic strip so that it can be printed on the comics pages.
See, I’m doing it already.
I know the feeling pal. And…he’s right about the Unfunny Duck. It isn’t the political point of view, it’s that the strip simply reeks of being cranked out without any feeling whatever for the medium itself. And for that matter, any passion whatever for the political statements he’s trying to make. It isn’t funny, it has no feeling or passion, it’s just…there. It’s not good as a political cartoon, and it’s not good as a comic strip. I figure it’s being bought by newspaper editors who feel like they need to have something…anything…to "balance" Doonesbury.
But…Mallard Fillmore keeps me working hard in my own cartooning efforts. If a political cartoon I am working on starts getting as vapid and the expression in it as deathlessly rote as a Mallord Fillmore strip, I trash it.
NEW YORK – Edward Bruce Tinsley, 48, creator of the comic strip Mallard Fillmore — known for its conservative edge — was arrested in Columbus, Indiana, on Dec. 4 and charged with operating a vehicle under the influence, the Indianapolis Star reports today. He posted a $755 bond.
It was his second alcohol-related arrest in less that four months, according to the Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department. His previous arrest was Aug. 26.
The comic appear in almost 400 papers in the U.S., including the Star.
Tinsley lives in Columbus. He a blood-alcohol level of 0.14 — almost twice the level at which an Indiana driver is considered intoxicated.
You know…I used to get myself royally blitzed nearly every fucking weekend back when I was a younger guy, and I still do every now and then to the degree my middle aged body will occasionally allow, and I have never once, never once, gotten behind the wheel of a car while doing it. My body, to my secret pleasure, reacts strongly to all kinds of things that never faze most other people. Where my friends can down one drink after another, I can only take one and I am unfit to drive. Two, and my head is on the ceiling. I can smoke a good cigar and I am unfit to drive. Yes, enough nicotine will do that to some of us. A nice back massage can release enough endorphins into my body that I am massively unfit to drive, even sometimes, just to stand up. So I don’t drive. I am always careful to put myself in a situation where I do not need to drive Before I decide to get my head all zoned out. It isn’t that hard. All it takes is to use your goddamned head and think about others, before you start making yourself all high and wobbly.
But then…I am one of those goddamned bleeding heart liberals, which means I give a good goddamn about my neighbors and peace and love and not hurting people and all the bleeding heart liberal stuff that conservatives like Tinsely think is a dirty joke. Hey pal…you ever hear of something called taxicabs?
AREN’T YOU PROUD of us? For most of this past week, as an overwhelmingly successful, lightning-quick Anglo-American military assault liberated Iraq’s capital city, and ordinary Baghdadis poured into the streets to kiss our GIs and stomp on pictures of Saddam Hussein, THE SCRAPBOOK has remained the soul of magnanimity and restraint.
Here in our office there’s this giant archive of newsclips, transcripts, and Internet postings we collected in the months preceding the war, wherein a world community of jackasses confidently predicted that the events lately unfolding on our television screens could not and would not ever take place. And you can imagine the temptation, we’re sure: A lesser SCRAPBOOK would throw open the file boxes and run through the streets with treasures like these, laughing hysterically.
"This invasion of Iraq, if it goes off, will join the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Desert One, Beirut, and Somalia in the history of military catastrophe. What will set it apart, distinguishing it for all time, is the immense–and transparent–political stupidity."
–Chris Matthews, San Francisco Chronicle, August 25, 2002
"Iraqis hate the United States government even more than they hate Saddam, and they are even more distrustful of America’s intentions than Saddam’s. . . . [I]f President Bush thinks our invasion and occupation will go smoothly because Iraqis will welcome us, then [he] is deluding himself."
–New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, October 4, 2002
ut being the soul of magnanimity and restraint, we’re not going to do any such thing. Instead, THE SCRAPBOOK is going to run through the streets, laughing hysterically at all the people who were so blinded by hatred of President Bush–or general anti-Americanism, or their own sheer foolishness–that they continued to prophesy doom even after the war had begun and was already being won. People like a certain former U.N. weapons inspector turned Baath party apologist turned peace-movement celebrity:
"The United States is going to leave Iraq with its tail between its legs, defeated….We do not have the military means to take over Baghdad and for this reason I believe the defeat of the United States in this war is inevitable. . . . [W]e will not be able to win this war, which in my opinion is already lost."
–Scott Ritter, on a South African radio station, March 25, 2003
t takes all kinds, of course. You’ve got your late-career journalist gasbag, phoning it in from the dinner-party front lines:
"With every passing day, it is more evident that the allies made . . . gross military misjudgments. . . . The very term ‘shock and awe’ has a swagger to it, no doubt because it was intended to discourage Mr. Hussein and his circle. But it rings hollow now."
–New York Times "news analyst" R.W. Apple Jr., March 30, 2003
You’ve got your war novelist, phoning it in from his experiences in Vietnam, 30 years ago:
"Visions of cheering throngs welcoming them as liberators have vanished in the wake of a bloody engagement whose full casualties are still unknown. . . . Welcome to hell. Many of us lived it in another era. And don’t expect it to get any better for a while."
–James Webb, in the New York Times, March 30, 2003
And you’ve got your usefully idiotic, broadcast-media war correspondent, phoning it in from wherever his Baath party minders want him to:
"The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. . . . Clearly the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces. And I personally do not understand how that happened, because I’ve been here many times and in my commentaries on television I would tell the Americans about the determination of the Iraqi forces. . . . But me, and others who felt the same way, were not listened to by the Bush administration."
–Peter Arnett on Iraqi state television, March 30, 2003
How stupid those dirty anti-war hippies all were…
Do you see it there, in that Weekly Standard article? The bar stool swagger? The ritual chest thumping? The loutish bragging about how they were right and everyone else was wrong? It’s tempting for some folks to wonder why so many people misjudged the measure of George Bush. They didn’t. They had his measure exactly. He was their boy…full of the same toxic mix of cheapshit conceits and resentments they were. Imagine any one of these bloviating cretins in the White House instead of George Bush, ask yourself if it would make any difference whatever in the outcome, and you have the picture. They’re all cut from the same cloth. That’s why they supported him back in 2000. That’s why they still support him. He achieved the fantasy they’ve all dreamed of…being the one everyone has to take orders from, the one everyone has to listen to, the one nobody can ever contradict, because their word is law. The decider. If Junior fails now, then what does that make them?
The problem with brick brain louts like this is that you can rub their noses in their own shit forever and they’ll never admit it stinks. They’ll just dig in their heels and whine that they’re not to blame for anything, because it’s always, always, everyone else’s fault. Atrios is right. As long as Junior is in the White House, we’re not leaving Iraq, no matter how many American soldiers die, no matter how many innocent Iraqis die, no matter how many back doors the Wise Men Of Washington give him. Remember this?
"There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again."
He can’t end this war, any more then he could physically make himself say the words, "shame on me".
Green mush isn’t high on my list of appealing things to eat. But if you’re going to sell green mush to people, you should at least give them the sort of green mush they think they’re buying…
Peanut butter is made from peanuts, tomato paste is made from tomatoes, and guacamole is made from avocados, right?
Wrong. The guacamole sold by Kraft Foods Inc., one of the bestselling avocado dips in the nation, includes modified food starch, hefty amounts of coconut and soybean oils, and a dose of food coloring. The dip contains precious little avocado, but many customers mistake it for wholly guacamole.
On Wednesday, a Los Angeles woman sued the Northfield, Ill.-based food company, alleging that it committed fraud by calling its dip "guacamole." Her lawyer says suits against other purveyors of "fake guacamole" could be filed soon.
I’ve been carefully parsing the lables on food ever since the early 70s when I took my first bite of something I thought was a slice of cheese, but upon more careful inspection turned out to be merely something called "cheese food". By the time they came out with Country Time Lemonade Drink I wasn’t being fooled anymore. Lemonade Drink, is it? I know what lemonade is, and I know what a drink is, but a "lemonade drink" is probably lemonade like "cheese food" is cheese.
But the Kraft product, near as I can tell, was simply labeled "Guacamole Dip". So I guess the argument here is how much guacamole does a guacamole dip have to have in it before you need to start calling it something else. Like…guacamole food flavored dip by-product, or something…
Learning to carefully parse the syntax on product packaging when I was still a kid may be one reason I eventually became a software engineer. It’s sure as hell why I subscribe to Consumer Reports…
At a recent White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia’s newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn’t long before Bush found him.
"How’s your boy?" Bush asked, referring to Webb’s son, a Marine serving in Iraq.
"I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.
"That’s not what I asked you," Bush said. "How’s your boy?"
"That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President," Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House…
That crap used to get you a slap on the back and a drink at the frat house didn’t it Junior? Well…those days are over now…
Where’s The Off Switch? Where’s The Goddamned Off Switch…?!?!
First…check out this article from Joel Spolsky on how pointlessly complicated the Vista shut down menu apparently became…
Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I’m guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I’m not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to.
…Then go to this guy’s blog (he’s an ex-Microsoftie who actually worked on the shut down menu) for an explanation of why it turned out that way…
My team’s raison d’etre was: improve the experience for users on laptops, notebooks and ultra-mobile PCs. Noble enough. Of course the Windows Shell team, whose code I needed to muck about in to accomplish my tiny piece of this, had a charter of their own which may or may not have intersected ours.
My team had a very talented UI designer and my particular feature had a good, headstrong program manager with strong ideas about user experience. We had a Mac that we looked to as a paragon of clean UI. Of course the Shell team also had some great UI designers and numerous good, headstrong PMs who valued (I can only assume) simplicity and so on. Perhaps they had a Mac too.
In addition to our excellent UI designer and good headstrong program manager, we had a user-assistance expert, a team of testers, a few layers of management, and me, writing code.
So just on my team, these are the people who came to every single planning meeting about this feature:
1 program manager
1 developer
1 developer lead
2 testers
1 test lead
1 UI designer
1 user experience expert
—
8 people total
These planning meetings happened every week, for the entire year I worked on Windows.
In addition to the above, we had dependencies on the shell team (the guys who wrote, designed and tested the rest of the Start menu), and on the kernel team (who promised to deliver functionality to make our shutdown UI as clean and simple as we wanted it). The relevant part of the shell team was about the same size as our team, as was the relevant part of kernel team.
So that nets us a conservative estimate of 24 people involved in this feature. Also each team of 8 was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let’s add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 17 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team — after a year — there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work.
And this, especially…
In small programming projects, there’s a central repository of code. Builds are produced, generally daily, from this central repository. Programmers add their changes to this central repository as they go, so the daily build is a pretty good snapshot of the current state of the product.
In Windows, this model breaks down simply because there are far too many developers to access one central repository — among other problems, the infrastructure just won’t support it. So Windows has a tree of repositories: developers check in to the nodes, and periodically the changes in the nodes are integrated up one level in the hierarchy. At a different periodicity, changes are integrated down the tree from the root to the nodes. In Windows, the node I was working on was 4 levels removed from the root. The periodicity of integration decayed exponentially and unpredictably as you approached the root so it ended up that it took between 1 and 3 months for my code to get to the root node, and some multiple of that for it to reach the other nodes. It should be noted too that the only common ancestor that my team, the shell team, and the kernel team shared was the root.
So in addition to the above problems with decision-making, each team had no idea what the other team was actually doing until it had been done for weeks.
Wow. Just…wow. Check out the comments section on moblog (Moishe Lettvin). There are a few other former and current Microsofties in there sharing his complaints and wondering where it’s all leading for Microsoft (and a few who think Joel Spolsky is full of it). It’s interesting to read them comparing what Microsoft is doing with what Apple and the Open Source community are doing.
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