the tweney review

Former Oracle business analyst Mei Lin Fung reflects on a bit of Oracle’s sales history, circa 1990.

“After five to eight years — with the benefit of distance, hindsight and detachment — it eventually worked its way to my consciousness that we had changed the way things worked in one part of the system. We had not realized, however, that if you expand the pipe dramatically in one section (sales) you have to make sure that you expand the pipe in the upstream AND downstream sections to accommodate the increase.”

Some Features you may Need on your Computer.

The Onion: FAA Considering Passenger Ban. “In every single breach of security in recent years, whether it was an act of terrorism or some other form of crime, it was a passenger who subverted the safety systems on board the aircraft or in the terminal,” FAA administrator Marion Blakey said. … “We realize that these new regulations would, for many air travelers, be a major inconvenience,” Blakey said. “But we feel strongly that it’s a small price to pay to ensure the safety of our skies.”

Webloggers are discovering the subtleties of journalistic ethics, bit by bit. First lesson: Disclosure. If Microsoft pays your way to attend a product preview in Redmond, you might want to disclose that fact before raving about their products in your weblog.

Last night I watched the video release of Startup Dot Com, last year’s documentary about the rise and fall of GovWorks, a New York-based dot com. Interestingly, the founders, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, have gone on to start a new company specializing in helping other companies wind up business, declare bankruptcy, or find buyers. Cofounder Herman has a note with some interesting links at the old govworks.com site.

Steve Gillmor: “LAST NIGHT I HAD a strange dream. The DRMocrats have just been re-elected, sweeping all three houses of government in a virtual landslide.”

Dan Gillmor notes that personal computing pioneer Doug Engelbart will be visiting a group of federal government IT executives this week, on a mission to raise their collective intelligence. Gillmor also posts a Howard Rheingold essay on Engelbart.

Lots of bloggers covered the DigitalID World conference in Denver last week, posting live transcripts, notes, and reports from the front of what turned out to be a very exciting conference. However, Jon Udell’s post is the first one that really boils down the conference and extracts some interesting thoughts I could get my head around.

His essay this morning is a learned and imaginative discussion of the limits of “intellectual property” — and how sharing of information might actually generate more economic value than its protection. He also gives some serious thought to the notion that computers might not be very good at negotiating the fine gradations of sharing, secrecy, revelation, and concealment that human beings deal with every day. Udell quotes David Weinberger in conversation: “That’s the problem with DRM. Computers are too stupid to look the other way.”

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (1994).

Susan gave me this book a few years ago and I just reread it in preparation for Nanowrimo. It’s amazing. Lamott manages to be inspiring, funny, wise, practical, entertaining, and encouraging all at once. And she writes with such apparent ease, such deceptive effortlessness, that you’re almost fooled into thinking you can write just as well, just as easily.

Most practical advice: Focus on the short assignment — the one-inch-square picture frame. And embrace the shitty first draft.
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Thomas Macaulay’s 1841 speech to Parliament covers the topic of copyright in exhaustive depth, but Weinberger says it’s eloquent and spot-on.