The Tim May Question

[Ken Brown]

"A. Melon" wrote:

[...]

> I'm not sure if Reese was replying to one of my messages, but this
> obsession less productive posters have with Tim is peculiar.
> 
> Looked at as an engineering problem, one tends to look at the
> underperforming components.  Let's say you are running a steel mill,
> and the average uptime of your blast furnaces is 10%.  One is 95%.
> Nobody would spend their time trying to get the last 5% out of the
> best furnace.  Anybody would look at it and figure out how to get the
> other furnaces performing.

[...]

Which just goes to show that neither politics nor software are branches
of engineering.

If I was an Evil Exploitative Record Label and one artist was selling 
at ten times the rate of the other I'd put most of my marketing budget
behind the hits.

If I was a  publisher of fantasy fiction and I had Joanne Rowling or
Terry Pratchett on my list, and I was interested in nothing but making
lots of money, I'd push them rather than, say, John Crowley  or Tom Holt
(two of my favourite writers).

If I was managing a software development shop and one programmer was
producing better code faster than the others, I'd give them more jobs,
not less.

If I was interested in reading political comment I'd read the writer who
made most sense last time, not the ten who didn't.

Part of all this is rent. Part of it is that some people really are much
better at this stuff than others. Part of it is the mythical man-month.
And part of it is that some folk still just don't get it. I make no
comment about who gets it and who doesn't. Except that I deleted around
100 postings unread this morning & most of them came from entities
claiming names starting with "J".

Ken