The Mysteries Of Consciousness

I recently gave a talk on operating systems, not from a technical perspective, but more around some of the softer issues with the purpose to raise some questions around practices in this market. The ones I decided to include are listed below with a few key questions and ideas on what each point is about.

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Most vendors will make it as easy as possible for you to get hold of the operating system, it is after all to their benefit. Think of the main operating systems suppliers out there, is the version you can get today, without needing to fork out money, the same production version you would receive if you ordered a copy from the vendor ? Think Sun Solaris, Redhat Enterprise Linux, Windows, IBM AIX, HP HP/UX.

Life cycle – Where do you live on the curve, fast changing hungry for new functionality or slow and deliberate with as few as possible changes ? Both these conditions actually exist in most organizations, do your operating system cater for this ?

Community – Is there a vibrant community around your operating system, from kernel developers to application developers and all the way to end-users ? Remember innovation happens elsewhere, if there is no open community around the operating system, possibility of innovation is limited to a small group of individuals.

Observability – How open, friendly and visible is the inner workings of the operating system ? If a problem arises, performance or otherwise, is it possible to peek deep inside the operating system to identify the problem or is guess and re-install the standard attempt at fixing issues ?

Momentum – Is the operating system on its way up or down in terms of momentum, are applications being ported to it or away from it ? Is the number of sites, blogs and discussions around it increasing or decreasing ?

Virtualization – Does the operating system natively provide the tools to virtualize workloads ? At what cost does this come, free and part of the operating system or at a per instance cost ?

Security – Is security a major focus of the operating system or an afterthought ? Are there masses of 3rd party software available to plug the holes that should never have existed in the first place ?

Integrity – Does the operating system provide built in mechanisms to verify that data stored is still the same data when it is read ? Does this come as an add-on or as part of the base operating system, is there cost involved ?

Compatibility - Are newer versions of the operating system compatible with past releases ? How painful and costly is it to move to the next release, does the vendor guarantee , not just verbally, that this compatibility exists ?

Barriers to Exit - What would it mean if I stopped paying support and maintenance to the operating system vendor ? Would you legally still be able to keep the operating system running or is the license to use the operating system tied to the maintenance contract ? What functionality in the operating system would not be legally available in this case ?

Popularity: 26%

Hein Featured, General, Open Source, Presentations AIX, HP/UX, RedHat, Solaris, Windows

I have seen many “presentation skills” courses arranged by large product centric corporates to assist their staff in gaining the skills and experience necessary to portray an offering in a compelling way. I have unfortunately not seen too many of these sessions bear any real fruit. If one take a few steps back, two intertwined reasons behind the ineffectiveness of these sessions become clear.
Firstly most of these sessions are facilitated by an external resource using material that bear no relation to the company and only covers the skills of putting together and presenting an effective message, not their message. But surely this should not hamper the success , the skill is surely transferable ? This gets us to the second portion, in most large corporates presentations are not prepared by the presenter, they are produced by a marketing or product department. Departments that rarely deliver the presentations themselves, they are tasked to create the presentations according to the standard corporate template and distribute to the rest of the individuals for actual delivery. Now we end up with a person that attends a presentation skills session, learning all the goodness of what the structure of a good presentation should be, only to land in the position where they have to attempt applying these skills to a sometimes poorly (actually this should say mostly, but we do not want to be rude)  constructed presentation.

So what would the solution be to this problem ? Simple, concentrate educational sessions on the individuals that create the presentations, not the individuals that inherit them for delivery. Both the creators and the presenters would be the ultimate goal but if you have to choose, choose the creator. The same applies to books on the subject, buy one for the original presentation authors before you spend money supplying the individual presenters.

Popularity: 34%

Hein Presentations education, marketing, Presentation Skills, product management

I first saw this presentation on the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) site a short while back. It must be one of the best examples of using passion for a subject, combined with simplicity, to deliver a message. This presentation by Bill Strickland was filmed during February 2002 but only recently uploaded at TED.

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Popularity: 13%

Hein General, Presentations Bill Strickland, Presentation

I spend an extra ordinate amount of time either giving or attending presentations all over the world on a wide range of subjects. The saying “death by powerpoint” is something I fully understand and have suffered through more than just a few times, possibly even contributed. Luckily a great array of information is available to help “Powerpoint killers” . Alexei Kapterev has created the excellent presentation below that brings a simple message across quite effectively, bad presentations normally suffer from a lack of :

• Significance
• Structure
• Simplicity
• Rehearsal

Popularity: 12%

Hein General, Presentations Powerpoint, Presentation