Systems software technology and business
Chris Lanfear from VDC systems asks
FSMLabs has the product line, but lacks the market presence and awareness that other companies have invested in with venture-backed capital. We believe the company has largely bootstrapped itself over the years and while this conservative approach has a number of benefits, it is difficult to achieve the market presence [...]
In a previous note I objected to venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki’s requests (demands) for shallow and glib sales pitches in PowerPoint, but Professor Edward Tufte is also asking for sales pitches, just ones with more sober disguise. When you read “My other models for NASA are Feynman’s lectures on physics, and the A3 page [...]
The Sony DRM fiasco is due to a common failure of requirements management logic. If an engineered system relies on certain properties, whenever you add a new requirement, you need to check consistency. You have a boat that has EnoughCargoSpace and ReasonableEnergyCost and you decide to add the requirement CantLeak. So you encase the entire [...]
In American English, you can say that something is not too difficut by saying “it’s not rocket science.” We don’t have a good idiom for saying the opposite – that something is hard to understand, not bullet-pointable. Edward Tufte dislikes PowerPoint because it can be used in a way that obscures critical data under a [...]
Holloway [22] points out that the typical argument in favor of formal methods (that software is bad, unique, and discontinuous; that testing is inadequate; and that formal methods are essential to avoid design flaws) is logically flawed, and unnecessarily complex (in logical terms). He proposes a simpler argument, which is both simple and logically valid: [...]