The Great Confusicator (Obsfucator?) has spent a lot of time stumping for Tort Reform this week. His primary example has been firms hit by Asbestos lawsuits.
I wonder if this is because Halliburton subsidiary KBR ended up going into Chapter 11 fighting an Asbestos lawsuit? (More here and here)
Wonder why no one is talking about this…or does the Washington press corps have a short memory?
I stand corrected — CBS MarketWatch does mention Halliburton in an Asbestos story. Right at the very bottom.
Samantha and I hail from Victoria, BC, on Vancouver Island, the largest island off the Pacific Coast of North America. It is blessed with a mild mediterranean climate, year-round.
Apparently they are having a winter storm that has dumped more snow on the area than we have seen in Massachusetts this year.
Have fun!
Dan Gillmor mulls over the thought of whether the NY Times will charge for its online service.
My answer is: NO.
I am increasingly angered by newspapers that make their sites more and more irrelevant to me by hiding behind subscriptions and registrations. Do they need my marketing information?
If they will only make their online content available to subscribers, why have a dead-tree edition? Or vice-versa?
Online news is how the majority of my generation and younger get their information. Lead, follow, or get offline.
Jeremy has one final swing at the termination of his employment.
My take is that the response of HSC is very typical of any large firm who has been caught in a very public and almost untenable situation. And that they chose to discuss a personnel issue at all makes me see them in a very bad light. HR should know about the confidentiality rules in Canada.
The response of former employees also is typical of the response of full-time, politically-tenured employees to contractors in all organizations. I have seen this in almost all work cultures — "How dare he smear our company’s name; and he was just a contractor anyway".
Glad Jeremy has moved on; I will now drop the topic.
Added two new features to the GrabPERF system this morning.
These are attached to each individual test screen.
Have fun!
In this interview, Chris Anderson (of the Long Tail fame) speaks to Jeff Bezos of Amazon about that very topic.
In writing the last post, I was thinking about what factors go into making the Web performance of a site “excellent”. What defines in the minds of the sites users/customers/visitors/critics/competitors that the performance of a Web site is excellent?
These are usually judged by the standard factors:
But within the company itself, how is the performance of their Web site judged to be excellent?
Right now, most people use the external metrics mentioned above to determine excellence. However, it must be remembered that there are two other critical factors that need to be considered when managing a large IT infrastructure.
When this two critical internal factors are combined with the raw external data that can be collected, collated and analyzed, some other ideas come to the forefront as KPIs in Web Performance Excellence:
The creation of new Web performance excellence metrics is crucial if companies truly want to succeed in the e-business arena. Business management has to demand that IT management become more accountable to the entire business, using metrics that clearly display the true cost of doing business on the Web.
I found a great example of a Heavy-Tailed Frequency distribution in my performance data today.
This clearly shows how data in the wild can be distributed in a non-normal fashion. In this case, there is a very heavy weight on the end of the tail, not simply a few straggling outliers.
It has become very unusual to find sites that exihibit this degree of heavy-tailed behaviour over the last year. When I started in this industry, this was more the norm than the exception.
A good read on evolving excellence through simplicity.
The concepts that apply in the manufacturing process also apply in Web performance. Simplicity makes Web performance excellence easier to achieve.
What does your Web performance process look like?
Jeremy has added more on his firing (here).
I am going to burn my bridges with more than a few potential Canadian employers by saying that this does not surprise me at all from the Canadian management mentality. In some ways, it is still stuck in the Victorian era: paternalistic and vindictive. My interviews with Canadian companies have always left me going, “I don’t want to work for them!”.
Why? Because the HR Teams at Canadian companies are designed to remove critical thinkers and free spirits. I have yet to find a Canadian company of any size where innovative thought and inventive concepts were allowed to flourish.
I would name some examples, but that would get me into even more hot water.
Corporate Canada — and Corporate America, for that matter — has to accept that people talk about companies: to friends; colleagues; and the world. Blogging just makes that more global.
As Jeremy states, companies need to understand that blogger and companies have to agree where the line is, and soon.
Hmmm…more than a few hits on this article from HSC, Jeremy’s former employer.
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