Egpyt’s Mubarak fined for Internet cut-off

Archive for May, 2011

Egpyt’s Mubarak fined for Internet cut-off

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

Interesting.

In February, President Hosni Mubarak disconnected the Egyptian people from the wider Internet at the peak of the protests.

In March, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi followed suit. Libya, too, went dark on the ‘net.

Both Egypt and Libya came back online. But lest we think this is a third-world government thinking, note the US congress was debating the “Internet kill switch” bill during this time.

Hopefully clearer heads will prevail. That seems to be the case in Egypt, anyways, as today news broke that the government is fining Mubarak for the Internet cut.

Mark Twain on jury duty

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

Mark Twain: “We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don’t know anything and can’t read.”

Everything includes training

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

True story. I worked with a guy maybe a decade ago. We’ve kept in touch. He sees an article on Slashdot and thinks, “wow, that sounds like Wolfgang. I should send him the link.” He clicks the link, only to find that I am in the piece. The guy called me laughing this morning and said he can’t get away from my ideas on training.

Anyways, if you have worked with me, worked for me, or worked within ear shot of me, you’ve heard me say one or more of the following many, many times:

  • In IT, you don’t hire people for what they know. You hire people for what they can learn and what they do.
  • Everything includes a training component. Train during every initiative, every implementation, and every project.
  • Technology is like sports: most of the work is training before the game. High performing teams and high performing techies spend 20% of the time training.
  • Skimping on spending for training because of retention concerns is like saying: “I’m concerned that if people know what they’re doing, they’ll leave. And if they don’t know what they’re doing, they’ll stay.”
  • IT management is a Chinese finger puzzle. You pull too hard, and you can’t get out. You put in too many hours, you get diminishing returns.

Lisa Vaas at Software Quality Connection puts it all into perspective in “I Like My IT Budget Tight and My Developers Stupid”.