The McDonald's Theory of Bad Ideas

Maybe it hasn't amounted to as much as you think.

In addition to a great deal of general information substantially duplicating what you already could have found on the internet (much of Wikipedia is actually scraped/aggregated from elsewhere, which is the real use of crowdsourcing here), it's also jammed full of trivialities and utterly biased, misleading, politicized articles guarded jealously by special interest groups. All those interest groups together form one giant defensive cabal which rejects criticism of Wikipedia and is constantly begging for money to sustain itself. Because it's democratic, you see, and not dominated by those egghead academic experts (but rather by Wikipedia experts, who established their tenure by making an account and writing rarely-verified information to Wikipedia in a way that complied with the politics of Wikipedia incumbents).

Wikipedia could have put effort into seriously verifying incoming information, but that would have made it an elitist affair like academia. Or it could have seriously taken everything democratically, which would have made it a total populist mess. Instead it created its own insular oligarchy to tell everyone what is true or not. And the appointments of this oligarchy are utterly opaque, but they definitely aren't based on any combination of merit and democracy.

Article doesn't work in Opera Mini =(

NASA has spaceflight designs, and there are a lot of variables at play, so you can never really find "the best" mission.

So they create a reference mission, and then compare candidates to that. Something doesn't have to be strictly better (if there were something strictly better they probably would have found it), but you then understand the trade-offs you are making from it.

There's never really anything new in IT. Looking at past revolutions of the eternal IT wheel the next article will be about Fred Brook's "second system effect" where a simple 1st choice like McDonalds for lunch inevitably leads to a ridiculously overengineered second solution in reaction, like a $300/plate steakhouse or perhaps a strange ethnic restaurant for lunch 90 miles away.

This article is basically a rehash of Fred Brooks "pilot system" concept where regardless of if they admit it or not, the first system design will be a throwaway which the team uses to gel their ideas around. Often the second system ends up like the above paragraph.

As far as I know Brooks was the first turn of this eternal IT wheel, and he wrote this in the mid 70s about his experiences in the 60s. I'm still young enough that I suspect most of what Brooks invented in the 70s will be rediscovered many more times before I retire. As far as I know Brooks was not rehashing someone previous to him, I'd be interested to learn if anyone has older references.

Its still a reasonably well written article, even if there's nothing new in it. Brooks's original writing is also pretty good, if you want to see the future of software development, what will be claimed to be "invented" over and over in future decades, you could do worse than "the mythical man month". The re-release is better than the original but not immensely so, so don't freak if your local library only has the first edition.

There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.