B

Posted on by george jeffry

Babbage, Charles

  1. b.1791 d. 1871, a complicated man for a simple time.
  2. Failed Computer Programmer (but I repeat myself)
  3. Failed mechanical engineer.

Having died, never acheiving a working “difference engine” in his lifetime, and having spent all his father’s money in the attempt, Charles Babbage became the first computer programmer to go over budget and fail to deliver on time; thereby setting the standard to which all other programmers aspire.

Best Practice:

  1. Throwing the ball where the wide receiver will be when the ball arrives, rather than where he is when the ball is thrown.
  2. Doing those things again that worked last time and changing those things that didn’t.
  3. Learning from others’ mistakes and incorporating others’ experience.
  4. The thing we don’t have time to do.
  5. Regardless of reality, how we describe our approach at the point we decide to find a VC or sell the company.

Big Data

  1. Data that’s as bad as all the other data, but bigger.
  2. Assembling all the data with the erroneous presumption that enough data will mask the inherent error in all data, smooth the innate variability of data and collection methods, and increase accuracy even with the accompanying loss of precision, when all it really does it occupy storage.
  3. Data sets so large that traditional methods of analysis collapse under the burden, but new methods cannot be validated because the certified methods are inadequate for comparison.

Too Data to fail.

Binary:

  1. How machines really think of the world.
  2. The difference between realists and romantics.

Bitcoin

  1. A medium of exchange based on the exchange of the medium.
  2. Not so much as store of value as a store of popularity.
  3. Bit? Yes. Coin? No.

Packaging a 21st century Pet Rock in digital technojumbo and selling it using the same techniques that pranksters use to get whole crowds to stare up at a skyscraper for no apparent reason; by pretending there’s something worth staring at and waiting for the idea to catch on.

Budget:

  1. In newspaper publishing, the space allotted to writers for the presentation of actionable liable or other misdeed.
  2. In software development, the space allotted to programmers for the invention of software and other misdeeds.
  3. The single-most important requirement in any project. It supersedes time, capability, resources, need, definitions, analyses, platform and topology.
  4. Expendable resources supplied by the client in support of the latest hot project for the executives or board.
  5. Under-representation of the real cost of any technical project; provided as benchmark solely for comparison between competing contractors for a contract.
  6. A moving target pinned to the ability of the project manager to lose at golf.
  7. The unbounded and independent variable in the multi-variable equation.

“You may have your project On-Time, In-Budget, or Correct,” the astute project manager offered. “Now which two of these would you like?”

Business Domain:

  1. Analytical tool capable of reducing several terabytes of business data into the black, inky stuff found inside a Magic 8-Ball ©.
  2. The corporate talent necessary to interpret the output of the Magic 8-Ball ©.
  3. The process that consumes a cube of data and produces the Corporate Direction Statement.
  4. In Caesar’s day, the talent necessary to determine the future by probing the entrails of a chicken. Not much has changed in 2,000 years.
  5. The setup for the punch-line during Chapter 7 hearings.

Business Model:

  1. Any complex business, reduced to simple plastic stand-ins, designated with decals, and abstracted sufficiently so that programmers can understand.
  2. Any overly-detailed representation of a complex enterprise where the overly-simplified representations of humans are only included for scale.
  3. A Business Model if it is shown to be successful. A Risky Scheme if shown otherwise:

Wal-Mart uses a business model
Social Security is a risky scheme.

Business Object:

  1. Code mimicking the plastic abstraction used to get a programmer to understand business.
  2. Often consumes multiple entities and multiple resources while undermining the programmer’s will to live.
  3. The single name for the multiple-personality psychopathic entity in every project.

Buzzword:

  1. Audible Pavlovian stimulus that triggers euphoria in executives, managers, and human relations professionals.
  2. Any term that, by numbing repetition, loses all meaning, allowing the audience to substitute any pleasing and desirable meaning for its real definition.
  3. Any word or group of words that can generate a subconscious hum — a sonorous and hypnotizing frequency — from a meeting room or board room where these words are used.


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