Prior Warning Can Sometimes Help

The Great Firewall Of China

Interesting infographic from InformationIsBeautiful.net...

Spectrum Development in Pictures

Rick Dickinson was an industrial designer at Sinclair Research and was involved with some of Sinclair's most popular early home computers including the ZX Spctrum. He has posted a wonderful collection of Sinclair Spectrum Development Photos over at Flickr. Heres a glimpse...


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

The History & Future of Computing

This is an excellent video about the history & future of computing and the information explosion...

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Everything is going to be OK. I'm an MBA

No its not.
I've thought about this long and hard. And I'm finally going to say this, even at the risk of displeasing some friends and colleagues. I've never read any references that directly led me to this fact, nor seen any research findings whatsoever that establish a corelation, and nor do I attribute this to a pre-conceived notion arising out of professional jealousy. Yet it is more than a gut feeling, verified consistently throughout a period of the last 18 years. I'm going to say it, for the simple reason that it should be heard, discussed, criticized, thought about, and above all, ... out in the open.
Here it goes...

"An MBA graduate is undeniably an idiot"

That's it. There, I said it first. Doesn't matter where you got you're degree from. Doesn't matter if its a one or two year course, part-time or full-time. Doesn't matter if you're employed with a top firm and minting money as a result. Doesn't matter what you specialized in. Doesn't matter if you traveled abroad to do it. Doesn't matter if you consider you're lifestyle a notch above the rest and a flying success. Now before you get really cross with what I've just said, I'd like to point out that there are exceptions to every rule and fact - in this case however, the exceptions are far and few. Therefore, if you have an MBA credential, and think you are one of the exceptions, then you're probably wrong.

Then how do you determine whether you are not an idiot even though you have an MBA degree? If you were performing a role at your workplace, and realized that there were certain skills that you needed in order to effectively complete your assignment and those skills were something that was taught in B-schools, and this prompted you to upgrade your skills and seek new methodologies, then you are possibly an exception. If you did your MBA before it was fashionable to do so (I'm talking pre-90's here) then you're quite possibly an exception too. If you decided on an MBA credential for any other reason and in the past decade, then I'm afraid you're not.

I'm not going to try and provide all the reasons in a single post. Neither am I going to be unfair and mention that because President George W. Bush also has an MBA from Harvard, my statement is a simple corollary. Its suffice to say that the separation of personal ethics from professional ethics is what lies at the crux of the matter. If a B-School curriculum justifies that separation whether by imbibing or implying it, then there are definitely going to be more Enrons and Exxons for the world to expose.

If you disagree with this fact, its okay to let me know. If you agree with this I would really like you to drop me a comment - it would be relieving for me to know that there is hope.

As an end-note, lets play spot the MBA...

Person 1 says: The glass is half full
Person 2 says: The glass is half empty
Person 3 says: The glass is twice as large as it should be

Update: It has been widely rumored that the title of this blog post were the exact words uttered by Satyam's ex-chairmain minutes before he walked into his prison cell. Ramalinga Raju has an MBA from Ohio University, and is an alumnus of the Harvard Business School.

Another update: Found an interesting paper the other day - The End of Business Schools - Less Success Than Meets the Eye by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Christina T. Fong. Worth a read.

Software errors: A crash course

Just how much damage can a small software error do?

The costliest software error till date was the explosion of the unmanned Ariane 5 rocket about 37 seconds after lift-off on the morning of June 4, 1996.

This was its maiden flight, and the rocket was carrying 4 uninsured payloads worth about US$370 million. The mission critical Ariane 5 project itself took 10 years to develop at the cost of a whopping US$7 billion.

Apparently, it was blind software reuse that caused the problem, and sticking to the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" syndrome. An excerpt from a study on evolutionary design by the US Department of Homeland Security explains it well.

"The Ariane 5’s flight control software reused design specifications and code from its highly successful predecessor, the Ariane 4 launch vehicle. In particular, one of the on-board modules, the Inertial Reference System, performed a data conversion of a 64-bit floating point value related to the horizontal velocity of the rocket and attempted to place the result into a 16-bit signed integer variable. This computation had never caused a problem with the Ariane 4, but the more aggressive flight path and much faster acceleration of the Ariane 5 produced a higher horizontal velocity and a corresponding data value that was too large for the 16-bit signed integer variable, causing an arithmetic overflow. A redundant backup process used the same software and failed in the same manner. The Inertial Reference System then generated some diagnostic output that was incorrectly interpreted as flight control data by other portions of the flight control system. Based on this faulty interpretation, the flight control system took actions that led to the self-destruction of the rocket."

Wired has a list of 'History's worst software bugs' here.