Slashdot Mirror

Bob Cringely has been saying that IBM is poised to sell off or lay off the majority of its North American workforce.
http://www.cringely.com/2012/04/by-2015-IBM-will-look-like-oracle/

So do that mean the mayor's staff will be semi-anonymous call center employees in some other country?

It's also been a pet peeve of Robert X. Cringely for a while now. In his 2011 tech predictions he said bufferbloat would come to be percieved as a growing problem and steps would have to be taken to deal with it.

Cingely has been writing about this all year. He cites Jim Gettys too. See: http://www.cringely.com/tag/bufferbloat/

"And did I mention that getting a writing credit for a film opening in theaters finally qualifies me for group health insurance through the Writers Guild of America? I haven't been eligible for group health insurance since 1994."

http://www.cringely.com/2011/11/seeking-a-final-resolution/

Cringely explains why on his blog: Seeking a final resolution

Also, he talks about technical bits about the digitization.

To quote from somewhere in the middle (and I almost feel I should shout SPOILER ALERT! first):

What should that new frontier be? It almost doesn't matter as long as it is big enough to capture the fancy of hundreds of millions of people. Your ideas are just as good or better than mine. But since I have a couple favorites I'll throw them on the table. I think our next frontier should be a combination of additive manufacturing and autonomous flight.

The rest of the article does give one something to think about, if only to wonder what he's been smoking lately.

cheers...ank

To quote from somewhere in the middle (and I almost feel I should shout SPOILER ALERT! first):

What should that new frontier be? It almost doesn't matter as long as it is big enough to capture the fancy of hundreds of millions of people. Your ideas are just as good or better than mine. But since I have a couple favorites I'll throw them on the table. I think our next frontier should be a combination of additive manufacturing and autonomous flight.

The rest of the article does give one something to think about, if only to wonder what he's been smoking lately.

cheers...ank

the theory i heard was that netflix thinks DVD's is eventually destined to fail, and that the future is streaming, and so they wanted to spin of Qwikster to make it easier for them to remove themselves from the DVD business with the eventual goal of selling it off or shutting it down without it hurting their core business (streaming) too much. and supposedly netflix always had wanted to be streaming only (hence the name netflix), however they realized previously that the internet infrastructure just wasn't ready yet at the time.

much of my theory comes from this

You didn't have to call it that way. Here was my version, I think with a bit more compassion:

Bill McGonigle says:
January 18, 2011 at 2:09 pm

Steve Jobs is gone for good.

Based on previous mis-representations, itâ(TM)s clear that Apple canâ(TM)t be trusted to be straight with Jobsâ(TM) story. Do they risk a shareholder suit this way? Sure, but the damages are going to be lower than announcing, âoeSteve Jobs has resigned as CEO.â Instead, theyâ(TM)ll show four strong quarters under Cook before having to come clean. This is the strongest argument for Cook as CEO â" switching horses is going to kill shareholder value.

Based on his previous medical history and the timing relative to the Verizon iPhone deal, heâ(TM)s done. Heâ(TM)s succeeded in integrating easy-to-use computers into daily life, with the user as the penultimate beneficiary. I suspect weâ(TM)ll see the real fruits of this with the Verizon LTE iPhone (i.e. data-only, portable plans).

Mission accomplished. Now heâ(TM)ll spend his remaining time with those he loves, and where he wants to be. He deserves it. Namaste, Jobs.
Reply

I admit, I thought he'd last a quarter longer. But, neither then or now was/is the time for vitriol. I'll save the Jobs-had-Michael-Jackson-killed stuff for later. ;)

If there are any parts left to auction by the time she gets moved into her corner office.

Leo must have seen this one coming. In many companies, its common practice to have a security guard escort employees on their way out to make sure they don't sabotage something. Why not in this case?

Someone in a previous article mentioned that Cringely predicted these events back in February:

http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/why-leo-apotheker-will-be-fired-from-hewlett-packard/

He said "Meg can knock back brewskies as well as any man and will probably fill those CEO shoes even better than Apotheker."

She will probably put the reins on the death spiral that Apotheker only accelerated.

Cringely saw this one coming a long time away... ok, maybe 7 months isn't so long:

http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/why-leo-apotheker-will-be-fired-from-hewlett-packard/

Comcast is a monopoly in most places, and monopolies tend to purposely restrict supply in order to justify raising prices. A giant influx of customers that would force it to pile money onto building more infrastructure would be a good thing.

http://www.cringely.com/2011/07/bandwidth-caps-are-rate-hikes/ is a good article with numbers that shows how Telcos are purposely raising prices and restricting access even as their own costs go way down.

Well, the internet probably does need more bandwidth to support Netflix.

And I'm not a fan of QoS to get better streaming video either. But is Cerf giving up on fixing the problems with streaming (and any realtime internet work) that we know about, bufferbloat? I heard about that from Jim Gettys (thanks to a tweet from John Carmack). Here's a two-page intro in IEEE magazine or a (more interesting IMHO) PDF slide presentation with nice graphs and there is other advice and documents and code on that bufferbloat website.

See, the problem with streaming isn't just bandwidth, it's latency, and the variability thereof. We always measure and marketers talk about bandwidth, but only rarely if ever about latency. Thus ISPs don't optimize for it as a rule. The result? You get these occassional 6-second lags and other phenomena and little economic incentive to track them or fix them. (And certain data ISPs are at least mildly incented to look the other way since it protects their VOIP/PSTN revenues).

How about ISPs actually implement ECN to deal with it? How about router manufacturers design for this (or we all switch to OpenWRT?) How about we techies develop tools to help consumers monitor line quality latency (ping times) over time? How about consumers actually learn to care about latency or we educate them? It's not "too complicated" for consumers to understand; consumers can differentiate between velocity ("what's your car's fastest speed?") and acceleration ("how quickly can it go from 0 to 60?") so I'm sure we could get them to understand bandwidth versus latency. It's just not well measured/monitored right now. (I think we need a better phrase/metric that captures the notion of latency like the "0 to 60" one for cars.)

If you want to help develop measures of latency, use Bismark (or vote for it in the FCC open apps competition) or come up with an open source ping-until-quit tool that logs timestamps for long time periods and displays the results graphically and/or competitively. Better yet, make a phone app that does this and hooks it to google/whoever's maps and shares the data so fellow consumers can see which areas of the phone company networks really suck. (I'm open to hearing about other tools. I used to use a freeware one but it went payware and the best tools I know of are DSLReports's SmokePing and their other tools.)

100x greater bandwidth may make recorded video faster, but it won't solve core problems with realtime (streaming or video conferencing) video faster, nor web conferencing, nor necessarily online gaming. I sure as hell don't want the internet's quality to become as lousy as cell phones and that's what'll happen over time if we don't keep ISPs we pay the big bucks to focused on fixing the problems.

    --LP

I thought the 2009 stimulus package had $30 Billion which was to be paid to hospitals to update their systems? The only backup I have for this is an I, Cringley article I read over the weekend but I'd feel he'd of all IT writers would be a reasonably reliable and impartial source. Definitely a far more reliable source than the average Slashdot submission.

If history has any lesion for us it is that when a company decides to build a statement building it frequently coincides with the decline of the company. Mr. Cringley talked about this few months back
http://www.cringely.com/2010/12/edifice-complex/

Cringley had a post on this today as well:
http://www.cringely.com/2011/06/iclouds-real-purpose-is-to-kill-windows/

He looks at it as an intentional strategy to harm Microsoft, and he has a good point about the business aspects of the announcement.

Though i do think Cringely is a bit of a crackpot at times, and often broadly off the mark, he did have a point when he said Sony can try PayPal or something similar: http://www.cringely.com/tag/paypal/

This would be disruptive to the Credit Card companies, something sorely needed.

Actually, a truck could roll up and drop a nuclear power station.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

The Toshiba 4S is a small nuclear reactor in a box. Self contained.
Perhaps the old models of big nuclear reactors took years to develop, but the new small ones roll off the factory assembly line and can be trucked into place.
It seem that newer Nuclear reactors could be brought up to speed rather quickly. The main issues seem to be insurance related.

Cringely had an excellent blurb about them.
http://www.cringely.com/2011/03/is-anything-nuclear-ever-really-super-safe-small-and-simple/

The big sticking point with nuclear is always safety. And every disaster reminds us of just how unsafe nuclear can be. A 40 mile diameter section where people can't live in Japan is a major chunk of real estate. If this happened near any of our major cities it would cause significant problems.

Renewables could be brought up to date in the matter of a decade with a concerted effort. The right tax incentives could retrofit most every building in America with solar.

As to the ignorance of the public including myself, I want NO reactor anywhere near where I live simply because I like to live here and want my kids and grandkids to be able to live here safely.

This fear of nuclear contamination is not because of TV and shit websites since my understanding of nuclear issues comes mostly from magazine pieces from the last several decades and predates the internet.

Nuclear power is not "safe".... the best that can be said is that it is only "safe for now" and even then "sometimes safe". There are plenty of instances of problems with reactors and nuclear contamination of soil and water around them. No reactor has proven totally "safe" since the entire cycle of the reactors and their byproducts is hundreds or thousands of years down the road. What will happen after the reactors are taken offline and have to sit for many hundreds of years with radioactive materials in holding tanks or whatever seems to me the jury is still out as to whether this will remain "safe". I don't think humans have a particularly great track record maintaining things for the longer term since we think in relatively short term ways.

So I don't think that concerns by people about nuclear are unwarranted nor ignorant. Ignorance is actually from those who ignore nuclear dangers and say we should be flinging up nuclear plants everywhere. There isn't even enough nuclear substrate to power our planet over the long term. It is still a finite resource, so at best it is only a band-aid solution so we can keep doing what we are doing now.

Just as the drill baby drill crowd thinks we can magically produce increasing amounts of oil by drilling more when we have already passed the peak oil on our planet. Drilling more and using more will just accelerate the decline in the amount of oil we have long term and not address our more fundamental energy requirements. Not to mention it just runs us out of our worlds precious readily available industrial hydrocarbon pool by lighting them up to make us move. Pretty lame use of this finite resource in my estimation.

Certainly, nuclear plays a role, but we must be wise in our application of its use and realize that reducing the power we need is a better solution for the long term viability of our civilization. Our long term energy needs will not be met by coal, oil, or nuclear power. So I think it is pretty silly and greedy to say that our generation is more meritorious of these resources in our planetary bank than humans several generations from now. It only show how short sighted and self absorbed we are with our own needs.

I am not opposed to nuclear per se, but I don't think being cavalier about it is what a smart race of entities would do. I guess we will see if we are smart entities or are the type of entities which crap in our own food dish.

Maybe you could have just checked the site the article is on. Then you would have found this: http://www.cringely.com/about/

Here is one idea: http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/attack-of-the-minis

Cringely talks about this in this column: http://www.cringely.com/2011/01/2011-prediction-4-bufferbloat-may-be-terrible-but-your-cable-isp-wont-fix-it/ I have comcast at home and whevever I try to use youtube it always seems like I'm waiting and waiting (on my mac and over wifi on my iphone). At work I don't seem to have this delay...

Mark Stephens and InfoWorld parted ways acrimoniously, and one of the results of that is that they both still use the Robert X. Cringely name. The InfoWorld Cringely is NOT the same author as this one.

Another perspective: http://www.cringely.com/2011/01/2011-predictions-one-word-bufferbloat-or-is-that-two-words/

http://www.cringely.com/2011/01/2011-predictions-one-word-bufferbloat-or-is-that-two-words/

I'm not sure if he's still at PBS. Thought he (the current user of the name) moved to http://www.cringely.com/ a few months ago.

I, Cringely, has a post saying it that this was a calculated Apple PR stunt. The only way to prove this would be if the engineer gets fired or Apple files charges against one or more parties.

That's only half funny to me (no offense intended here), because, as Cringely put it - it's very logical and it is very likely that it could happen.

See here: http://www.cringely.com/2010/04/why-twitter-is-worth-more-than-facebook-at-least-to-me/

Cringely was on about this a year ago - Oracle needs Sun hardware to scale.

Go go ahead and GPL ZFS, guys.

I’ve read some postings by engineers with the Ares project that suggest it’s something of a boondoggle. They claim important engineering decisions were made according to some political agenda. What congressional districts benefit the most from NASA projects? The cynic in me thinks that certain congressmen, senators or bureaucrats have fallen out of favor with the White House. My point is: money is power in Washington. There is more to this decision than lack of vision. Money has stopped flowing, the result: some politico is less likely to be reelected/reappointed/promoted. I wonder who? There’s an interesting story in there somewhere.

Linky linky

This will be a somewhat general statement, but I'm an American and the endless flood of stories like this is quite disheartening. I've left the USA now, because it seems to be in decline, but more importantly because no one seems to give a damn. Just today I read the article about China (where I currently live) leapfrogging the West in renewable energy products (which is clearly happening, despite the West's complaints), as well as an article on Cringely's blog about upcoming cuts to NASA (which is probably the single most important government agency for the future of humanity).

Then, I go over to facebook, and all I see are status messages from politically-minded friends, essentially acting like children watching a football game "Go Democrats! Fuck Republicans!" "Go Republicans! Fuck Democrats!", and no one seems to give a flying fuck about actually making changes that position the country for the future.

Take China as an example. Like every other country, they injected a huge financial stimulus into their economy, but they are doing it with purpose. They're building new highways to serve parts of the country presently unserved; they're building bullet trains faster than those in Japan, Korea and France; they're upgrading their power grid to technologies surpassing that of any other country. When all is said and done, they will have used the downturn as an opportunity to improve their country's efficiency.

Meanwhile, in the USA, they bailed out the oligarchy that runs the banking system, and then gave money to a bunch of aimless projects that just put band-aids on current infrastructure. There was no national call to action (for example..."we're going to put unemployed auto workers to work building an all-new high-speed rail system to link our urban areas" or "we're going to use this opportunity to completely replace our power grid, because we lose such a high percentage of power to inefficiency of the lines") that would have solidly improved the country for the long-term, improve its ability to transact business.

Anyone to this site ought to understand that networks are important. The Internet, power grid, airports, train system, highway system...all networks, that allow society to function. In the USA, only the Internet and highways actually work well (the power grid is antiquated and incredibly inefficient, the air traffic control system is a dinosaur and most U.S. airports are shitholes comparatively speaking to the many other countries, and although highways work well, they depend on a resource that is finite and running out). When will Americans wake up and start pushing the country to actually upgrade the country's networked infrastructure; prepare the country for the future?

I know this seems to be out of place here, but the fact that the USA is doing essentially nothing on the renewable energy front is just another example. After a while, it gets pretty disheartening.

http://www.cringely.com/2010/01/apple-tablet-twit/

From Chrome and Chrome, What is Chrome?: "The most interesting part for me will be Microsoft's response. This strikes at the very heart of Redmond's business success and Microsoft will not take it lying down. Expect thermonuclear warfare."

No Joy in Mudville: "What does it say, then, when the architect of LEAN is arrested for alleged insider trading?...Moffat is guilty or he's stupid, neither of which says much for IBM."

All you have to do is become friends with this guy.

Apparently, he decides on who gets to be one and determines the global quota of "Cybersecurity Experts".
You may have to hurry though, as he might just decide that 640 "cybersecurity experts" should be enough for everyone.
And he already knows at least six.

All you have to do is become friends with this guy.

Apparently, he decides on who gets to be one and determines the global quota of "Cybersecurity Experts".
You may have to hurry though, as he might just decide that 640 "cybersecurity experts" should be enough for everyone.
And he already knows at least six.

It's not open source, but for $0.01, you can buy Robert X. Cringely's wonderful though dated Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date. Not only does Bob give you first-hand accounts of the people who pioneered computer hardware, software, and operating systems, he's also pretty damn funny. You could also point your students to his free sites: the current site or the old site.

He's not always right, but he's usually knows what he's talking about and he's frequently entertaining.

So I will choose to disagree with you that a Moblin beta release is a minor thing. I hope that we get more choices and not fewer. Something needs to do it for the sake of freedom.

Robert X. Cringely has a tale about Neokast which turned down a nice offer many moons ago. Just something to ponder over:
Cringely.com

I think a partial core meltdown is a pretty serious. The only reason it didn't blow up was because the concrete reactor containment was better than average, as this blog by Robert Cringely explains.
That article was linked to a slashdot story from a couple of weeks back.

Why would I want to monitor usage on a single plug? If I could have the same thing monitor my entire house and update twitter, email, widget, mobile phone app, etc. it would be very compelling. Having a view in the aggregate would encourage people to disconnect devices using power in stand-by mode, etc. And power usage tracking would become a competition between peers. Google to the rescue? http://www.cringely.com/2009/02/power-to-the-people/

http://www.cringely.com/2009/02/wheres-steve/

Cringely's new block has post claiming Steve has dropped off the internet.

Read what you want into that or take it with a grain of salt.

This is a little OT, but Cringley has a blog post/podcast entitled "Bob the Impaler" where he discusses Microsoft's profitability, and how they've developed a structure of hiding profit to fly low on the radar of the Federal Trade Commission. I have a feeling that these unprofitable up/down grades are somewhere in that fat...

Cringely's home page it's about 2/3 down the page.

-Runz

Have Yahoo buy MSN?

It seems to me that anything to deal with anti-trust and Microsoft is just a calculated facade designed to maintain the status quo.

Bob Cringely wrote an interesting article (covered in Slashdot)explaining the economics of these anti-trust suits and how Micro$oft actually benefits.

And since these companies don't pay taxes or get tax breaks from Republicans, these suits are a sort of different way for the people in Washinton to get paid. Except this time, the trial lawyers get paid too!

So, the lawyer$ sue Micro$oft so that they can take a huge cut of the money they are going to hand over to the politician$. With class-action lawsuits, they have private lawyers (read expensive lawyers) representing individual claimants, most of whom don't care if they ever get the $20 rebate good toward more Microsoft products (because that's probably all they'll get.) This is a calculated public payoff to those in power (lawyers and politicians) by Microsoft to maintain they're monopoly.

Government: Freeze Microsoft!
Microsoft: What do you want? We're busy screwing the marketplace and raping consumers!
Government: This is a shakedown! Give us what we want and we'll let you go about your business.
Microsoft: Here take it! Now get it out here!

So, why doesn't Microsoft just roll over that easy? Cause they're just trying to talk down the car dealer. It's the same reason parents shouldn't get their kids everything they want, because then they'll just become spoiled and want more and more. They guys just fight over how much to they agree to be extorted for, throw in some free software for schools and libraries (cause that's a good campaign story) allowing the violator of the law to further entrench himself on his gang-land turf.

(Mods: you know you really can't moderate this as "Offtopic", "Flamebait" or a "Troll". If you're going to mod this down, use "Unfunny," and damn you all to hell.)

I, for one, consider happenings on the market of interest, and well worthy of slashdot.org's attention. Not only have the Web and tech stocks become the darling of Wall Street, the Web and tek is refashioning the culture and business' image of itself. Thus, if, hypothetically, a fall in stocks is hung, unjustifiably, on the necks of "new business entrepeneurs", that could well affect me, and many of us.

Even now, there are important dissenting opinions as to how good it is for the culture that the Web and computing is Center Stage, with a good dose of worry dashed in that computing may get a bad name. There is, after all, a tradition of this in the computing industry: Expert systems, strong typing, and the DoD's Ada all promised lots more than they could possibly deliver and never recovered from the Public Disappointment.

OTOH, there is a really interesting analysis by Bob Cringely about how ridiculous some of the pricing of the stock market is, and how remarkably inefficient it seems to be, despite the claims of, for instance, the Chicago school and monetarists. (I might add, at risk of introducing extraneous detail and incurring the Wrath of Moderation, that one needs, uh, patience going to the latter two sites.)