As a webmaster I am not happy that Google sometimes shows its users my pages before they visit. So get the info they want and don't visit my site for real and get the ad I serve.
As a webmaster, I would never subject visitors to my site to advertisements of any sort.
It's stunning the social progress we've made, that in late 2011 a mans view is that a good looking women deemed a 'dimwit' has no option but to join the oldest profession. Well done. I bet some of your best friends are....'choose_your_bigotry'
For some reason a man in the same category is seldom relegated to making good money down the docks, doing favours for sailors, and telling stories just like his old mum.
Because like, everyone totally respects surfers, and people don't think they're like, dumb and stuff?
Protip, dipshit: I dislike the show because it's stupid, and promotes stupidity. Not because the hosts aren't physicists. I also dislike the idiots who praise the show for getting people interested in science because the show doesn't get people interested in science. Even if it did, it would be doing more harm than good as the show exhibit a terrible lack of scientific rigor.
No, I would not jump at the chance to be an idiot on TV, or even pretend to be one.
And yes, they had an Obama episode. They did the "burn ships with mirrors" myth for a third time because it was Obama's favorite. And they even got to meet him and have badly edited footage of their discussions afterward which clearly showed they didn't meet up a second time. You clearly haven't been paying attention if you didn't hear about that one. Or the Seth Rogen episode for the Green Hornet.
And all physical experiments demand a understanding of basic physics. They often test myths that are clearly true or false to anyone who understands newton's laws. They either do it and are actually ignorant, or do it and feign ignorance for the show. Either way it's insulting, and it is by no means encouraging people to be interested in science.
Yeah, that's right. The Cold War, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, the War on Terror, and almost a century of other miscellaneous bullshit still hasn't repaid you for those couple of times you protected your shipping lanes from the Germans.
The US won the Cold War. And the campaigns in Vietnam and Korean were successful, even though they were not military victories. (Protip: Find out why were fighting there, and then see what happened.)
Like Korea and Vietnam, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are not wars. Wars have battle lines, and opposing forces fighting over territory so they can advance to the next spot until they take over or purge the whole damn country and kill every single enemy. Or take or hold a symbolic point (such as the capitol) and force a surrender of the other side.
Afghanistan and Iraq are politically-motivated occupations. And I'm glad they're too costly to keep going indefinitely. Afghanistan was a war when it started, but everyone ran in a hole and hid so we didn't really have anyone to shoot at 99% of the time. GWB was a moron and sent in as many camera crews as troops, so we couldn't just blow everyone up, we had to wait until our troops were attacked before we could act on anything. After about a year we had killed off some actual terrorists, and orders were essentially "stand and wait". And then we got Bin Laden out of the blue one day.
Discs in the mail. Return in store and get in-store rentals. More discs in the mail. Return in store, along with last in-store rentals, and get more in-store rentals.
Spoken like a parent of two kids who has an "8-to-5" job! When my kids were infants, I was in sitting in a cubicle every morning and afternoon. (Now I telecommute.)
It's called: "baby asleep in the crib, Parents having nookie very quietly in the bed." Many many parents have done it.
Only during the evening. Or on weekends when I was actually home during the afternoon.
For all you know your wife and the mail man were having nookie in the bed every weekday. I doubt it was quiet, though.
"Professionals" was used with "scientific experiments. Therefore Professional would mean scientist/engineer doing either ballistics research or in Top gear's case, automotive/aerospace/mechanical engineering ( actually just about any kind of engineering sans civil lol).
Just need to chime in here. Civil engineering is "engineering" in the same way political science is "science". (It's not.)
One of the interns who are never visible on the mythbusters episodes probably did it. I think they just photoshop in Jamie and Adam on most episodes.
They're not called interns. They're called "researchers". As in "Our researchers have been able to find out that this actually happened once!". Or, more honestly, "We told Josh the intern to google this "myth" and he found the police report of when it happened 3 years ago but we're still going to do it anyway. Also we make Josh get us coffee and write with a silver sharpie on blue paper for all the stupid little diagrams. Kimberlee makes the same stupid high-contrast grids out of posterboard every week, but we don't even use them to measure speed since we already know the distance from the gun/cannon/thing to the target, and we know the framerate of the high speed camera. We just like to keep Kimberlee busy.".
That isn't "obvious" at all, unless you have some insider information. Sometimes, even if you take all precautions that seem necessary, shit happens. The fact that something went wrong is not in itself evidence of carelessness.
Here's some "inside information". The Mythbusters is all about blowing shit up now. It has been for at least 3 years. They exhibit a fundamental lack of understanding of basic physics in about 90% of the "myths" they test. And about 60% of the time I'd argue that they know they're doing something stupid and pointless, yet they pursue the obviously flawed course of action for ratings.
Even when they do something right, the last segment is always "OK, so that's busted/plausible/confirmed, but what if we use 10 times the explosives?".
The show has devolved into complete asshattery. Smashlab, in it's brief run, was far better because there were actual engineers involved doing actual thinking. But they weren't clowns so people didn't watch.
Anyone who watches Mythbusters and actually understood their high school physics class knows that the show puts zany antics first, safety second, and science fourth. Third is shitty promos for Obama and Seth Rogen's shitty movies.
They say the most Harley owners 'detune' their new bikes just to get the right sound out of the muffler. With the way that things might be going, I wonder if some won't miss their cars making engine sounds, not to mention blind people.
Most noise from a car comes not from the engine, but from the tires (unless you have specifically modified your vehicle to be loud, which is often illegal). Road noise is the main contributor to the overall loudness of a vehicle.
The problem is that the energy and even automotive manufacturing industry don't want the yoke taken off until the last minute. Why do you think there was such a push for ethanol and hyrdrogen fuel cells? Both of those still need you to fill up at a pump. Electric cars would be able to use a wide variety of energy sources as long as the end result was electric potential. This breaks your dependency on the industry for fuel, which they don't want.
I call patenting a system that lets you attach a generator to a bike, so you can ride the bike to charge a battery, and then plug the battery into your car to charge your car from the batter.
All the cyclists will love it. Drive up to your spot, bike around for an hour or two, then slap the battery into your car's charge hole. SUPER GREEN.
Added benefit: Cyclists will now drive somewhere else to bike, bike, and drive bike. Infinitely better than them clogging up the streets and ignoring traffic laws because they insist on biking to and from the place they're going to bike at. Or worse, when they decide to make the streets the place they bike at.
According to Seagate the Momentus XT will fail back to being a regular hard drive if flash failure is detected by the controller. All data in flash is also stored on the drive, the SSD part only caches a copy of already stored data for faster read performance.
That's obviously true for reads, but is it true for writes?
These hybrid devices typically have a battery (excuse me, "super capacitor") to flush any cached writes out to disk. But what if the OS thinks data was written (because it went to the SSD cache successfully), but flushing from cache to disk fails because something broke on the SSD side?
SSD controllers haven't been exactly stellar in terms of reliability so far.
For my money, I just got two 256 GB Crucial M4s, and I do daily full-image backups (excluding *.bt! and any steam games) to an external 2 TB drive.
Furthermore, coders, especially the "talented" ones, don't exactly fly the banner of allegiance. They'll leave at the first opportunity to make more money. If you don't let them take control of a project, they'll either do it their own way, or go somewhere else that lets them do it their own way. Have you heard of open source software? Nothing ever gets done because they keep "forking" things when they have their own ideas!
That's why The Fucking Article* says to invest in them by forming relationships, not by acquiring them as with traditional "human capital." The first project should be viewed as essentially forming that relationship, and any other value gained from it is superfluous. But after that, you let your team direct the company, not the other way around. Which makes sense really. If you have a product that looks and works like a really great shoe, then sell really great shoes. Don't throw it away because you wanted to sell hats. Likewise, if you have a team that can or does produce an awesome project that was outside of your initial scope, clearly your scope should be changed, not the project.**
This is pretty much what Apple did with the iPod, leveraging that into their phone, tablet, STB, and possibly upcoming TV. They've made plenty of missteps over the years, but jumping on the success of the iPod was not one of them, at least from a profitability standpoint.
* Thought I'd spell that one out for you too, just in case.
** Steve Jobs would probably say "Bullshit, micromanage your teams," but that's really only applicable if you're Steve Jobs, and then only if you believe he had more skill than luck in product design, and that his contributions in that respect were more important than his showmanship and marketing. In other words, don't do that.
And the article is wrong. How many startups failed miserably by betting everything on the up and coming celebrity developers? How many entrenched corporations crack the whip and get reliable results, minimal fuckups, and near-zero consequences for those fuckups?
We're long past the point where a corporation has to give a shit about its laborers. Corporations want control, measured output, and measured profits. They don't want to innovate because that's risky. Let someone else innovate, and then copy them or buy them out. You may not like it, but that's how it is and it's not going to change.
The latest corporate success stories are Google, Facebook, and Zynga. Everyone raved about how it's a dream job to work for those places and how they're so innovative. And now? Developers are on a leash, innovation is dead, and the whip is cracked, as usual.
1) Do something people like 2) Sell it 3) Profit 4) IPO / Get bought out 5) Forget about #1 just cut labor costs to maintain #3
No corporation in the history of the world has followed any other pattern after making it to step 3.
Furthermore, coders, especially the "talented" ones, don't exactly fly the banner of allegiance. They'll leave at the first opportunity to make more money.
Having repeatedly stayed on to try to deliver failing and late projects over the years in order to save a client's bacon, I find your comment not only insulting but dead wrong. I and many other people I work with actually have the integrity to do our level-headed best to get things done, even if management is pissed off because we couldn't get it done on their fantasy schedule or overly optimistic budgets.
Real coders are ethical people who work on the code as much out of love of getting things done and the satisfaction of happy users as they are people who want to make money. Let's face it -- if you're only into money, this is the wrong industry to be in with all the fierce competition from cheap overseas labour constantly undercutting the rates.
And by doing so you're seen as a mere laborer and you won't get management's respect, or money. If you got away and did something somewhere else, you're talented. If you stayed and did something successful, people will only notice how it was past the deadline, all the trouble getting there, etc. And they'll expect repeated success or better next time, for the same pay.
Another person who needs to look up tongue in cheek.
...A "talented" coder is like a UFO. Everyone talks about them. Some of them say the place in the other business park has one. But no one's really sure what one looks like, or how to tell if one's real when it comes time to interview people for a position.
You're just not looking in the right places. Once you've found one, you're certainly not going to tell the world about it. But, you're right that they can be difficult to control and even downright dangerous when spooked.
The problem is that by the time someone in HR learns of the "right places", they're no longer the right places. I remember when having a linkedin profile was considered the mark of a serious professional eager to make business contacts. Now it's just yet another site to check, like monster or dice.
The safest investment for corporations and individuals is corporations, as usual.
It's turtles all the way down?
At some point the value in these investments needs to either come from making things, or doing things. This is saying that the (current) best investment is in doing/making things that make it easier (or cheaper) for others to do/make things.
That would be a good point if our economy was founded on value. But it's not. It's founded on debt.
Even in a value-based economy, yes value comes from making things, but the corporations that use computers to make things have already know about outsourcing. It's already easy and cheap to make things.
The article talks about "talented" developers as if anyone wants talented developers. They don't - they want labor. Even the huge success stories (facebook, angry birds, iThing) that everyone wants to repeat aren't about talented coders, they're about talented marketers.
Well, then Forbes and Venkatesh Rao are idiots. The safest investment for corporations and individuals is corporations, as usual. They control everything and they're not going away.
Nobody wants talented coders. People want cheap, get-it-out-the-door coders. And those are in India. People will buy any old fucking thing you slap a lower case i in front of. Why bother trying? Why bother risking a talented coder coming along and doing stuff on their own? Why, they could get the sense that have some sort of control over, or input into, the project. If they leave before we ship, no one will know how to fix everything. It's best to keep monkeys doing the monkey work, and to pay a "project manager" to vaguely tell them what to do.
A "talented" coder is like a UFO. Everyone talks about them. Some of them say the place in the other business park has one. But no one's really sure what one looks like, or how to tell if one's real when it comes time to interview people for a position.
Furthermore, coders, especially the "talented" ones, don't exactly fly the banner of allegiance. They'll leave at the first opportunity to make more money. If you don't let them take control of a project, they'll either do it their own way, or go somewhere else that lets them do it their own way. Have you heard of open source software? Nothing ever gets done because they keep "forking" things when they have their own ideas!
If you give money and attention to talented coders, they'll think they're worth something, and then you'll have to compete for their work!
No, thank you. I'd much rather we all agree to keep treating them like shit, paying them shit, and not really understanding what they do.
Slashdot Mirror
As a webmaster I am not happy that Google sometimes shows its users my pages before they visit. So get the info they want and don't visit my site for real and get the ad I serve.
As a webmaster, I would never subject visitors to my site to advertisements of any sort.
It's stunning the social progress we've made, that in late 2011 a mans view is that a good looking women deemed a 'dimwit' has no option but to join the oldest profession. Well done.
I bet some of your best friends are....'choose_your_bigotry'
For some reason a man in the same category is seldom relegated to making good money down the docks, doing favours for sailors, and telling stories just like his old mum.
Because like, everyone totally respects surfers, and people don't think they're like, dumb and stuff?
Protip, dipshit: I dislike the show because it's stupid, and promotes stupidity. Not because the hosts aren't physicists.
I also dislike the idiots who praise the show for getting people interested in science because the show doesn't get people interested in science. Even if it did, it would be doing more harm than good as the show exhibit a terrible lack of scientific rigor.
No, I would not jump at the chance to be an idiot on TV, or even pretend to be one.
And yes, they had an Obama episode. They did the "burn ships with mirrors" myth for a third time because it was Obama's favorite.
And they even got to meet him and have badly edited footage of their discussions afterward which clearly showed they didn't meet up a second time.
You clearly haven't been paying attention if you didn't hear about that one. Or the Seth Rogen episode for the Green Hornet.
And all physical experiments demand a understanding of basic physics. They often test myths that are clearly true or false to anyone who understands newton's laws. They either do it and are actually ignorant, or do it and feign ignorance for the show. Either way it's insulting, and it is by no means encouraging people to be interested in science.
Yeah, that's right. The Cold War, Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, the War on Terror, and almost a century of other miscellaneous bullshit still hasn't repaid you for those couple of times you protected your shipping lanes from the Germans.
The US won the Cold War. And the campaigns in Vietnam and Korean were successful, even though they were not military victories. (Protip: Find out why were fighting there, and then see what happened.)
Like Korea and Vietnam, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are not wars. Wars have battle lines, and opposing forces fighting over territory so they can advance to the next spot until they take over or purge the whole damn country and kill every single enemy. Or take or hold a symbolic point (such as the capitol) and force a surrender of the other side.
Afghanistan and Iraq are politically-motivated occupations. And I'm glad they're too costly to keep going indefinitely. Afghanistan was a war when it started, but everyone ran in a hole and hid so we didn't really have anyone to shoot at 99% of the time. GWB was a moron and sent in as many camera crews as troops, so we couldn't just blow everyone up, we had to wait until our troops were attacked before we could act on anything. After about a year we had killed off some actual terrorists, and orders were essentially "stand and wait". And then we got Bin Laden out of the blue one day.
(Begin conspiracy discussion here.)
The correct choice is Blockbuster.
Discs in the mail.
Return in store and get in-store rentals.
More discs in the mail.
Return in store, along with last in-store rentals, and get more in-store rentals.
New releases on day 1, not day 29.
I think they do streaming now too.
Heh. Spoken by a true non-parent.
Spoken like a parent of two kids who has an "8-to-5" job! When my kids were infants, I was in sitting in a cubicle every morning and afternoon. (Now I telecommute.)
It's called: "baby asleep in the crib, Parents having nookie very quietly in the bed." Many many parents have done it.
Only during the evening. Or on weekends when I was actually home during the afternoon.
For all you know your wife and the mail man were having nookie in the bed every weekday.
I doubt it was quiet, though.
Actually... Savage and Hyneman have Doctorates in Science. So, yes, they're professional scientists.
They're PHDs in the same manner that Obama is a Nobel Prize recipient.
I would expect someone who works in special effects to have at least secondary expertise in the area of physics.
You can expect that all you want, yet here we are.
"Professionals" was used with "scientific experiments. Therefore Professional would mean scientist/engineer doing either ballistics research or in Top gear's case, automotive/aerospace/mechanical engineering ( actually just about any kind of engineering sans civil lol).
Just need to chime in here.
Civil engineering is "engineering" in the same way political science is "science".
(It's not.)
One of the interns who are never visible on the mythbusters episodes probably did it. I think they just photoshop in Jamie and Adam on most episodes.
They're not called interns. They're called "researchers".
As in "Our researchers have been able to find out that this actually happened once!". Or, more honestly, "We told Josh the intern to google this "myth" and he found the police report of when it happened 3 years ago but we're still going to do it anyway. Also we make Josh get us coffee and write with a silver sharpie on blue paper for all the stupid little diagrams. Kimberlee makes the same stupid high-contrast grids out of posterboard every week, but we don't even use them to measure speed since we already know the distance from the gun/cannon/thing to the target, and we know the framerate of the high speed camera. We just like to keep Kimberlee busy.".
No, obviously they didn't.
That isn't "obvious" at all, unless you have some insider information. Sometimes, even if you take all precautions that seem necessary, shit happens. The fact that something went wrong is not in itself evidence of carelessness.
Here's some "inside information". The Mythbusters is all about blowing shit up now. It has been for at least 3 years.
They exhibit a fundamental lack of understanding of basic physics in about 90% of the "myths" they test. And about 60% of the time I'd argue that they know they're doing something stupid and pointless, yet they pursue the obviously flawed course of action for ratings.
Even when they do something right, the last segment is always "OK, so that's busted/plausible/confirmed, but what if we use 10 times the explosives?".
The show has devolved into complete asshattery. Smashlab, in it's brief run, was far better because there were actual engineers involved doing actual thinking. But they weren't clowns so people didn't watch.
Anyone who watches Mythbusters and actually understood their high school physics class knows that the show puts zany antics first, safety second, and science fourth. Third is shitty promos for Obama and Seth Rogen's shitty movies.
Plus a lot of times theorists use rediculus...
Wow, and here I am thinking calculus was hard.
Calculus is hard. And if the dentist slips while scraping away at it? That's gonna be nasty.
Ahh, slashdot, where the obvious trolls are Insightful. Putting in the bit about Open Source was kind of overdoing it, don't you think?
Ahh, slashdot, where people get whooshed.
Let me get that for you...
WHOOSH
They say the most Harley owners 'detune' their new bikes just to get the right sound out of the muffler. With the way that things might be going, I wonder if some won't miss their cars making engine sounds, not to mention blind people.
Most noise from a car comes not from the engine, but from the tires (unless you have specifically modified your vehicle to be loud, which is often illegal).
Road noise is the main contributor to the overall loudness of a vehicle.
The problem is that the energy and even automotive manufacturing industry don't want the yoke taken off until the last minute. Why do you think there was such a push for ethanol and hyrdrogen fuel cells? Both of those still need you to fill up at a pump. Electric cars would be able to use a wide variety of energy sources as long as the end result was electric potential. This breaks your dependency on the industry for fuel, which they don't want.
I call patenting a system that lets you attach a generator to a bike, so you can ride the bike to charge a battery, and then plug the battery into your car to charge your car from the batter.
All the cyclists will love it. Drive up to your spot, bike around for an hour or two, then slap the battery into your car's charge hole.
SUPER GREEN.
Added benefit: Cyclists will now drive somewhere else to bike, bike, and drive bike. Infinitely better than them clogging up the streets and ignoring traffic laws because they insist on biking to and from the place they're going to bike at. Or worse, when they decide to make the streets the place they bike at.
According to Seagate the Momentus XT will fail back to being a regular hard drive if flash failure is detected by the controller. All data in flash is also stored on the drive, the SSD part only caches a copy of already stored data for faster read performance.
That's obviously true for reads, but is it true for writes?
These hybrid devices typically have a battery (excuse me, "super capacitor") to flush any cached writes out to disk.
But what if the OS thinks data was written (because it went to the SSD cache successfully), but flushing from cache to disk fails because something broke on the SSD side?
SSD controllers haven't been exactly stellar in terms of reliability so far.
For my money, I just got two 256 GB Crucial M4s, and I do daily full-image backups (excluding *.bt! and any steam games) to an external 2 TB drive.
You pay for 1 call, regardless of whether or not it's answered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_fountain
Space boner. Look at the picture and read the first paragraph. It's a space boner.
Furthermore, coders, especially the "talented" ones, don't exactly fly the banner of allegiance. They'll leave at the first opportunity to make more money. If you don't let them take control of a project, they'll either do it their own way, or go somewhere else that lets them do it their own way. Have you heard of open source software? Nothing ever gets done because they keep "forking" things when they have their own ideas!
That's why The Fucking Article* says to invest in them by forming relationships, not by acquiring them as with traditional "human capital." The first project should be viewed as essentially forming that relationship, and any other value gained from it is superfluous. But after that, you let your team direct the company, not the other way around. Which makes sense really. If you have a product that looks and works like a really great shoe, then sell really great shoes. Don't throw it away because you wanted to sell hats. Likewise, if you have a team that can or does produce an awesome project that was outside of your initial scope, clearly your scope should be changed, not the project.**
This is pretty much what Apple did with the iPod, leveraging that into their phone, tablet, STB, and possibly upcoming TV. They've made plenty of missteps over the years, but jumping on the success of the iPod was not one of them, at least from a profitability standpoint.
* Thought I'd spell that one out for you too, just in case.
** Steve Jobs would probably say "Bullshit, micromanage your teams," but that's really only applicable if you're Steve Jobs, and then only if you believe he had more skill than luck in product design, and that his contributions in that respect were more important than his showmanship and marketing. In other words, don't do that.
And the article is wrong.
How many startups failed miserably by betting everything on the up and coming celebrity developers?
How many entrenched corporations crack the whip and get reliable results, minimal fuckups, and near-zero consequences for those fuckups?
We're long past the point where a corporation has to give a shit about its laborers.
Corporations want control, measured output, and measured profits. They don't want to innovate because that's risky. Let someone else innovate, and then copy them or buy them out. You may not like it, but that's how it is and it's not going to change.
The latest corporate success stories are Google, Facebook, and Zynga. Everyone raved about how it's a dream job to work for those places and how they're so innovative. And now? Developers are on a leash, innovation is dead, and the whip is cracked, as usual.
1) Do something people like
2) Sell it
3) Profit
4) IPO / Get bought out
5) Forget about #1 just cut labor costs to maintain #3
No corporation in the history of the world has followed any other pattern after making it to step 3.
Having repeatedly stayed on to try to deliver failing and late projects over the years in order to save a client's bacon, I find your comment not only insulting but dead wrong. I and many other people I work with actually have the integrity to do our level-headed best to get things done, even if management is pissed off because we couldn't get it done on their fantasy schedule or overly optimistic budgets.
Real coders are ethical people who work on the code as much out of love of getting things done and the satisfaction of happy users as they are people who want to make money. Let's face it -- if you're only into money, this is the wrong industry to be in with all the fierce competition from cheap overseas labour constantly undercutting the rates.
And by doing so you're seen as a mere laborer and you won't get management's respect, or money.
If you got away and did something somewhere else, you're talented. If you stayed and did something successful, people will only notice how it was past the deadline, all the trouble getting there, etc. And they'll expect repeated success or better next time, for the same pay.
Another person who needs to look up tongue in cheek.
Have you heard of open source software? Nothing ever gets done because they keep "forking" things when they have their own ideas!
Disagree with this. Freedom in OSS lets you come up with innovation beyond deadlines, budgets, managers. Its not fast, but evolution wasn't either.
-- :wq
And from an HR / manager point of view, deadlines and budgets are more important than innovation.
Perhaps you need to look up tongue in cheek.
...A "talented" coder is like a UFO. Everyone talks about them. Some of them say the place in the other business park has one. But no one's really sure what one looks like, or how to tell if one's real when it comes time to interview people for a position.
You're just not looking in the right places. Once you've found one, you're certainly not going to tell the world about it. But, you're right that they can be difficult to control and even downright dangerous when spooked.
The problem is that by the time someone in HR learns of the "right places", they're no longer the right places.
I remember when having a linkedin profile was considered the mark of a serious professional eager to make business contacts. Now it's just yet another site to check, like monster or dice.
The safest investment for corporations and individuals is corporations, as usual.
It's turtles all the way down?
At some point the value in these investments needs to either come from making things, or doing things. This is saying that the (current) best investment is in doing/making things that make it easier (or cheaper) for others to do/make things.
That would be a good point if our economy was founded on value. But it's not. It's founded on debt.
Even in a value-based economy, yes value comes from making things, but the corporations that use computers to make things have already know about outsourcing. It's already easy and cheap to make things.
The article talks about "talented" developers as if anyone wants talented developers. They don't - they want labor. Even the huge success stories (facebook, angry birds, iThing) that everyone wants to repeat aren't about talented coders, they're about talented marketers.
Well, then Forbes and Venkatesh Rao are idiots.
The safest investment for corporations and individuals is corporations, as usual. They control everything and they're not going away.
Nobody wants talented coders. People want cheap, get-it-out-the-door coders. And those are in India.
People will buy any old fucking thing you slap a lower case i in front of. Why bother trying? Why bother risking a talented coder coming along and doing stuff on their own? Why, they could get the sense that have some sort of control over, or input into, the project. If they leave before we ship, no one will know how to fix everything. It's best to keep monkeys doing the monkey work, and to pay a "project manager" to vaguely tell them what to do.
A "talented" coder is like a UFO. Everyone talks about them. Some of them say the place in the other business park has one. But no one's really sure what one looks like, or how to tell if one's real when it comes time to interview people for a position.
Furthermore, coders, especially the "talented" ones, don't exactly fly the banner of allegiance. They'll leave at the first opportunity to make more money. If you don't let them take control of a project, they'll either do it their own way, or go somewhere else that lets them do it their own way. Have you heard of open source software? Nothing ever gets done because they keep "forking" things when they have their own ideas!
If you give money and attention to talented coders, they'll think they're worth something, and then you'll have to compete for their work!
No, thank you. I'd much rather we all agree to keep treating them like shit, paying them shit, and not really understanding what they do.