Making IT work since 1974.
By bfwebster on Jan 30, 2009 in Complex systems, Development, Main, Management, Product development | 2 Comments
I have written about the thermocline of truth, a phenomenon I have witnessed several times in large IT projects where the true status of the project (usually not good) gets blocked at a certain layer of management, slowly moving up the management chain and usually reaching the top just weeks before the scheduled release date. [...]
By bfwebster on Jan 7, 2009 in Complex systems, Main, Surviving Complexity | 0 Comments
Ray Kurzweil is a very well-known techno-futurist whose main focus has been the coming of artificial sentience. His 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, contains a series of chapters prediction computer technology in successive decades (2009, 2019, etc.). Well, we’re now entering 2009, and it’s worth looking at his 2009 predictions (hat tip to [...]
By bfwebster on Dec 29, 2008 in Competition, Complex systems, Development, Main, Surviving Complexity | 1 Comment
Over at Futurismic (one of my daily science blog reads) is this post about the ULTra light transit system. The system is quite clever and takes a demand-based (vs. a schedule-based) approach to transit. But as you watch the accompanying video, ask yourself: why will the ULTra system likely never grow beyond small, custom installations [...]