I experienced the stack-ranking method of subordinate evaluation during my two years at PricewaterhouseCoopers and had very serious reservations about it. Now, in just the past few days, I’ve learned that Microsoft has been using stack-ranking for its personnel since before Steve Balmer became CEO: The stack rank was harmful. It served as an incentive […]
Michael Swaine has been around, well, possibly even longer than I have, and has been far more prolific as an author and editor in both the programming and personal computer industries (many will remember him as an editor and author at Dr. Dobb’s Journal). Possibly inspired by recent events, he just coined the following twist […]
Harvey Kurtzman — to the extent he is remembered — is remembered for his iconic stories and drawing style from EC’s classic (and ultimately banned) horror comics, such as Tales from the Crypt. But, as this article by Matthew Gault over at War is Boring explains, Kurtzman pioneered a realistic, non-propagandist style of war comics […]
Over at IT World (via Slashdot) comes the news that Dell has stopped selling its Windows RT tablet without a keyboard (which had been priced at $299) and now only sells a Win RT tablet with a keyboard at $479: Dell made several changes to the RT offers on its website. By Friday evening it had […]
Matt Tabbi at Rolling Stone has a (deservedly) scathing article on the growing student loan bubble, something that Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit has been writing about for years. Tabbi takes some cheap shots at the Right, but he’s pretty scathing on Obama as well.: Obama had already set himself up as a great champion of […]
Today is the anniversary of the surrender of Japan to the United States. As it turns out, my father John Webster — as a 21-year-old US Navy radioman on Guam in August 1945 — was involved in sending the message from the US Navy to the Japanese Imperial Navy on how to reach them for […]
First, John Kirk over at TechPinions uses a great joke to explain why, in his opinion, the Surface is doomed: On a Saturday morning, three boys come down to the kitchen and sit around the breakfast table. Their mother asks the oldest boy what he’d like to eat. “I’ll have some firetruckin’ French toast,” he […]
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has an editorial in USA Today, talking about the barriers to making the US government work. As someone who lived in and around Washington DC for several years, his penultimate paragraph struck home: And that gets to what I think is the real problem lying behind all of this enthusiasm for […]
George Mellon over at the New York Sun writes: How does an investor react to the news that a propped-up and thus over-priced asset may lose its props? His natural urge is to sell, of course, and that urge will soon be reflected in a decline in the asset’s price. So it is with Treasury […]
When Sandra first had me listen to the DEA scam voicemail message last night, and before I went online to verify that it was in fact a scam, my immediate response was: we are not calling this person back; we will retain an attorney, who will do all the talking. The video below — taken […]
