Awesome Stuff I Read
Turns out I'm fascinated by these articles enough to want to share them with my 2.5 readers, but not fascinated enough to actually write a huge amount about them. Besides, the original articles say enough already, there's almost nothing I could add to make them better:
Vista Does Things Right but Very Wrong
http://drplokta.livejournal.com/109267.html
Turns out Windows Vista fully implements RFC3484: Default Address Selection for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), which I guess is cool. However, part of that spec has been backported to IPv4, and it changes the way multiple A records on a DNS query are handled. Wreaks havoc on the traditional round-robin DNS method.
Let Employees Make Decisions
http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/03/employees-should-be-masters-of-their.html
Eric Ries, co-founder and CTO of IMVU, talks about one of the better decisions they made: giving employees absolutely every bit of information possible and letting them use best judgement when making any decisions. What this means is that when people argued about the "best" way to do something, they shared their data and assumptions, and situations where one person is just making empty assertions became painfully obvious.
Key quotes:
[...] telling knowledge workers what to do is one of the biggest causes of mistakes, waste, and general low morale that I've ever seen.
[...] every person in the company has this job description: in any situation it is your responsibility, using your best judgement, to do what you think is in the best interests of the company.
If you know something isn't going to work, it's your 100% responsibility to speak up and prevent it from happening. That may lead to a lot of arguments, but that's what you want.
This one's a winner in my book.