Colby Hoke

113 points
User profile image.
Raleigh, NC

Hi there!
I'm a video editor for Red Hat and have proudly spent most of my life as a geek. Or maybe it's a nerd. Either way, I know what I like and I like it a lot.
I'm from a tiny little town in western North Carolina. You know, the kind where everything shuts down around 7pm. I play the guitar and all things percussion and I'm an N.C. State graduate - started in Computer Science and ended up in Film Studies.
When I'm not staring at computer monitors, I like to play sports, shoot pool with my league teams, and make people laugh.
What I like (a list):
sharing, Creative Commons, billiards, deep discussions, collaborating, football (both kinds), choices, strong handshakes, Digg, film, photography, video editing, rollergirls, Samsung products (I'm strangely loyal), basketball, first-person shooters, chalk, good beer, Acuras, freedom, arguing, taking a stance (and knowing why you did), all kinds of food, being honest and (sometimes extremely) frank
What I don't like:
Marmite (and Vegemite), people who don't listen, stubbornness (though I am), people who give up, violence, failure

Authored Content

Authored Comments

I'm all for it. I like WikiLeaks and what they're doing. I'm going to be broad and say I NEVER know what this government is doing, especially when it comes to our military. This gives me a little more insight into what I see as a problem.

Maybe we don't get to see directly into WikiLeaks' operation. I'm okay with that as long as it shakes things up and gets people to look around and wonder what else they don't know. I'm not talking conspiracy. I'm just talking about the huge disconnect between the government, military, and what sorry excuses we have for "news" today.

WikiLeaks fills a gap for me. I trust them more that anyone with a military rank in front of their name.

That their business is informal. I've heard it a lot. I've heard a lot about less hierarchy in relationships and all that. I don't know that a large business will ever actually be informal. It may seem that way, but there are closed-door meetings that will always suggest otherwise. There's online tools where you see your ranking in the entire company. Or, someone sees it.

It feels flat while you're standing, but try to move a little and you'll notice hills. Big ones.

Control is the name of the game. It's a title. People want titles. It's money. People want money. As long as you're in a world that values these things, you have formalities and control.

So, while the higher-ups want less complexity, all that means is that someone just below them is keeping track of all the little things, doing performance reviews, ranking people on a number scale, planning strategic moves, typing every minute of every day into a spreadsheet, and checking the boxes.

Look at the cloud. People build tools for the one "in control" - the user. These tools make it look simple- less complex. It's not and never will be. There's still tons of work being done. Machines provisioned, quotas set, applications with specific preferences running, fail-safes, migrations, conflicts, clusters, nodes, and kernel panics. It's illusion, but it's what you want and it looks like it's less formal.