This is from my, “Really abstract thoughts” file…
Often you try to recruit leaders internally, because they’re familiar with your existing procedures. On some level this is good. But “familiar with your existing procedures” also means that they see things with blinders on. Sometimes I think you have to bring in someone without any of that institutional knowledge, to shake things up and move you in a new direction.
For example, there’ve been a rash of thefts from the library. People will sit there working with their laptop, get up to go the bathroom, and their laptop is stolen. (Part of this, of course, is their own negligence.) I couldn’t possibly know the full story, but it looks to me like CP is content with just writing reports for each theft and letting insurance handle it.
Why not set up a “sting” in the library? Put a few plainclothes cops (we have several!) in the library, “studying.” Get someone to leave their laptop unattended. Wait for the thief, who clearly is comfortable stealing things in public. And then, arrest him.
Similarly, there were two crimes this week where they caught the suspect on video camera. (Neither was exactly a major crime, though.) In both cases, though, they say they can’t identify who it is, and that’s the end of it. Why not show it to a student, who may well recognize it? Or why not publish it? The school newspaper is always desperate for material. We’d love to run a few stills from the tapes.
Too many people seem to assume that you need to master all the ‘cruft’ that existing leaders have. I don’t know nearly as much as the police chief, so far be it from me to have ideas. And yet I’m fairly certain my ideas would work. The “sting” might be a little over the top, but it beats the status quo of doing nothing!
Oh, another example! My digital SLR camera is basically a film SLR with a digital sensor instead of film. I never quite understood why you needed things like a complex mirror array or a shutter. Couldn’t you just take them out, and just sample the sensor for whatever time period you needed for the exposure?
It turns out, yes. There are a few little “gotchas” I wasn’t aware of, but mostly, they’re holdovers from the film world. People designing the cameras just still have that leftover baggage of the film era, so they keep making cameras with shutters and mirrors. A tiny little bit of R&D could probably eliminate the problems with simply removing them, and you’d end up with something with increased reliability, the ability to take faster exposures, and added versatility. But it looks like it’s going to take an “outsider” to get this done.
Yes, you need some existing knowledge to keep you in reality. But people seem to averse to letting ‘new’ people have ideas. And in my experience, they’re the best ideas. Getting the record industry to distribute music over the Internet took Shawn Fanning and, finally, a failing computer company in California. Why didn’t the record industry, with a multi-billion-dollar budget, think of it? (And, even now that lots of evidence shows that it’s doing well, many record companies are still digging in their heels!) Organizations get too big, crufty, and narrow-minded, which causes them to think that only the biggest, cruftiest, and most narrow-minded of them should be allowed to try out ideas. Why?! Do people like the “stability” of their old ways — selling CDs and booing the Internet, using unnecessary moving parts in cameras, and not catching criminals — even when the old ways are clearly the worst possibly way to do things? Are they so bent on sticking with what they know that they’re willing to lose?
THere are a few things about Windows that bug me as well. Start up time is too slow but since I hardly ever reboot these days that’s not much of an issue. And Vista automatically defrags so fragmentation is not much of an issue. And frankly I have had some very fragmented disks without seeing a performance problem. I remove USB disks without doing anything but unplugging them all the time without a problem.
And I never seem to have to go to the command line. I saw a famous Linux supporter do a demo last week and he went to the command line several times to do things that I’m sure he does over and over again in a normal day. Why he’d put us with having to open a terminal emulator window to do it I just don’t understand.
And of course applications that I love just don’t run on Linux. Going to Open Office after getting used to Office 2007 would be like moving from prime steak to veggie burgers.
I remove USB disks without doing anything but unplugging them all the time without a problem.
But don’t you periodically get the “Unsafe device removal” grumblings?
I saw a famous Linux supporter do a demo last week and he went to the command line several times to do things that Iām sure he does over and over again in a normal day.
Honestly, I don’t *have* to use the command line for anything. There are a few reasons it’s still prevalent, though:
– You can do anything. Take my recent example about IP-blocking everyone who tried to deliver mail to a bizarre, non-existent mail address. Do *that* in a GUI.
– For many of us, it’s just quicker. I can pull up a shell and do something quick before you can even find what you’re looking for in the GUI. Of course the CLI isn’t always best: I much prefer a GUI for moving files around, for example. Or for graphics editing. š
– People complain that all the instructions on the web are command-line centric. I noticed this too, but someone finally explained it in a good way. It’s easy to say, “Paste this command in a terminal,” as opposed to navigating someone through a myriad of GUI menus and whatnot.
Going to Open Office after getting used to Office 2007 would be like moving from prime steak to veggie burgers.
You mean that it’s good for you? š
I actually know exactly what you mean. Open Office is a decent word processor, but I’m much more comfortable in Office 2007. But it doesn’t run in Linux, even under Wine. So I suck it up and use Open Office. Same thing for iTunes and Photoshop — I hate XMMS/Amarok, and I’m not really a fan of the GIMP. But the newest versions of iTunes and Photoshop haven’t been made to work under Linux yet, either.
Is it just me, or are these comments on the wrong post? :-p
The mirror in an SLR allows you to see through the lens. There have been plenty of digital cameras that have a “live” viewfinder — a tiny LCD screen — but it’s really hard to get the same resolution, not to mention battery life. The prism just flips the image coming from the mirror. And then there’s the AF sensors in there somewhere, too.
There have been cameras with a ‘half mirror’ (for lack of a better, technical term) that didn’t have to flip up (IIRC?), but you lost light (again, IIRC).
But the shutter could (should?) probably go.
Yes, but I wanted to reply in the same thread. š
Yeah, that’s the argument on keeping the mirror. Now that SLRs are having 3″+ LCDs on the back, a few have “LiveView” mode, and people are finding that they actually like it. (But I don’t EVER want a crappy little “Electronic Viewfinder” again!) And the mirror does have to do with the AF sensors, too, although that’s what I meant about working around it — you can make AF work without a mirror. I suppose battery life is a good point, but really, an elaborate system of mirrors is just asking for trouble.
All the shutter is there for is to break, it seems. Camera companies have recently made longer-life shutters, which again seems to be missing the point.
I can’t imagine using a heavy camera with just the LCD on the back. Your head provides some stability, as does keeping it close to your body. Perhaps removing the mirror and prism would eliminate enough weight that it would be tolerable — then again, making the camera lighter also means that it’s less of a counterweight for long, heavy lenses.
I don’t know, maybe I’m stuck in the same rut?