I love video games and think any kind of ban is just stupid. But they aren't without harm. I have seen people put their jobs in jeopardy repeatedly playing online games late into the night. I have read about people neglecting their kids to play farmville, I have even done a few nasty binges where I would swear to "stop by midnight" only to look outside and see that it was dawn.
I suspect that more than one life has effectively been thrown away to play video games. So while people might not be out there in droves pulling people from their cars after a few GTA sessions, I suspect that there are a number of kids who didn't go to collage, went to a crappier collage, or dropped out of collage, because of video game addictions.
I think it is telling that I have met a probably going to die alcoholic who was able to stay on the wagon primarily through his newfound addiction to video games.
I am a nobody in Canada and know someone who knows someone who regularly dines with the Queen. I am willing to bet though, that I could dig up a bushman who is 8 or more degrees from me. Also I suspect that Facebook is a bit distorted in that many of the people on Facebook are social vs most people not being terribly social. So being quickly connected to the queen is no huge surprise as she is the center of a vast social network. Her footman's kid is then 5 away from me. Her footman's kid's neighbour is probably the classic 6.
So where facebook statement is probably over generalized to the population is to forget that like the queen, many people on facebook are probably important nodes in the social fabric of western society. Thus many people know someone on facebook who is nearly 4 degrees from someone who that person knows who doesn't use facebook. Otherwise known as 6 degrees.
So a facebook made up of Clintons would be all two degrees, a facebook made up of Unibombers would all be 40 degrees.
I know quite a few MBAs and they are obsessed with their orgcharts. They are repulsed by things like flat organizations, holistic management, independent teams, etc.
When they see a tech company run successfully by the founders who barely run the developers who just get things done they know that there is no room for the dead weight of a bunch of MBAs. This is where the slightest hint of VC money or other "professional" money will cause the MBAs to insist on a "professional" management team. This will immediately result in what is happening at GitHub. Very soon there will be 5+ layers between a developer working on something and the person running the company. Nimble is not how one could describe such an organization. Sclerotic would be a much more apt term. What I love is when more and more of the company resources are spent on things that aren't core to actually getting things done and sold. But even better is when the MBAs begin to redistribute the rewards. Suddenly it goes from a few founders who keep a large chunk of the shares with the vast majority of the remaining shares distributed fairly liberally among the developers and even often support staff such as secretaries. Then the MBAs pretty much start issuing themselves all kinds of complicated rewards packages. Not just the usual shares but complicated contracts that translate to if the company is sold that they will get massive "retention" bonuses.
It even comes down to the day to day redistribution of resources. Before the MBAs the entire company would pretty much attend the key conferences and a few trade shows. They would all pile into coach and fly to where was needed, stay in a reasonable hotel a few to a room, and swamp the conference with people adoring them. Often they would come home with contacts, a few new employees, and have left many people impressed.
Now the MBAs will be the only ones flying anywhere and it will be business class, thank you very much. They need to arrive in fighting shape so that justifies the $3000 plane ticket along with the great hotel and one suite per employee. There is no need for the developers to stop work as they are behind on their carefully assigned tasks anyway. Plus they won't stay "on message".
But seeing that the end game went from being a great company to fooling some other rich company to buy out the company in short order, my prediction for GitHub is that it will be passed around from one hedgefund run company to another until it is Wordperfect. In not that many years it will be like hosting your website on Geocities. Too bad, I really liked Github. But I will eat my hat if it doesn't look like GoDaddy within 4 years. Just upsell upsell upsell.
Not so much/. getting the money so much as professional PR people manipulating accounts and votes to push/suppress things that they are paid big bucks to work on. How much do you think it would cost to create enough accounts to be able to get a story onto the main page? How many accounts would it take to suppress one?
With some nice automation, some solid VPN work; how many people would actually have to work at this?
My personal guess is a few thousand a month in VPN fees spread across some of the better and less detectable VPNs. One crappy server that keeps an eye out for keywords. A staff of one or two (time shifting). Plus the occasional update to the automation software.
Then the person would spend most of the day writing pretty useless vote-getting bandwagon comments that were spread across maybe 500-1000 accounts to keep them seemingly obvious. Then when a new PR article came in needing promotion it would be fed into the machine whereupon it would receive a steady stream of votes along with an assortment of non voting accounts writing praiseful comments.
On the flip side any negative comments on this or other "protected" issues would have a combination of downvoting accounts along with well crafted talking points.
Obviously it would be stupid to answer this but I suspect it would only take maybe 20-50 votes to get an issue front and center and even less to kill a topic that just popped up. Maybe 5.
The beauty of Slashdot's random karma issuing is that it would inherently disguise any group voting as there would have to be a large number of accounts so any group of accounts would be unlikely to show up as always voting on the same issues. Plus a good system would burn off any extra votes it had by some bandwagon jumping and voting up anything at a 4 and voting down anything at a 0.
If I were building such a system I would completely narrow it down to a much simpler interface where I would only see filtered comments and when I took actions they would be very simple. I would choose how many votes to go for or against any given comment, and I would choose the rate so emergencies would have the votes come in over a few seconds where others might take 10 or so minutes. Also the system would take care of such issues as more positive votes coming in at a later time also being shot down fairly quickly.
The same with any issue that I want to support. I would basically say, keep voting until this ends up on the front page.
Plus any comments that I just added would also have a level they should be voted to and maintained. Again the system would give various options such as replies coming from the original account or if they were to appear to be someone else piling in.
Again what I am describing wouldn't be brutally hard to build. The primary problem with such a system is that it would take a while for the accounts to age nicely. Ideally such a system would continue to accumulate accounts.
Then slashdot would not be the only target. Reddit to just name one other would be wildly susceptible to such a system. Thus a PR company could pretty much offer a professional level of sock-puppetry that would be extraordinary yet I can't see their per article costs being that high. The value to fortune 500 companies would be very high.
For an interesting hamfisted attempt at this you can look at what the Canadian Telcos did when Verizon was rumoured to be coming to Canada. An actual competitor scared the crap out of them so they instructed their employees to all go onto any internet commentary and blast their point of view. It was amazing. Newspaper commentaries would have maybe 20 comments that would run "Great, I can't wait to see what happens with actual competition." Then where these telco people were using some kind of collective hub to identify places to assault they would find that newspaper comment section and there would suddenly be 200 comments saying, "It would be un-Canadian to support a job eating monster. Where is your loyalty to the grandfathers who died for your freedom to have a Canadian Telephone company?"
I suspect that they were contacted by the various PR firms that do this "properly" and very quickly sold.
I am sick of these breathless reporting of products and services that have zero substance. I would say 90% of the stories with MIT in the title are after funding and the slashdot story is part of their social media campaign. The same goes with pretty much any product that relates to the Java market. New Mansanga on track to replace Hadoop 50% of fortune 500 companies this year. Hasume allows Java developers to deploy to over 30 mobile platforms.
And don't get me started on MS Surface. Those words should be spam banned from slashdot.
On the other-hand I haven't read a good story condemning a single product of a major chemical or pharmaceutical company in a few years. I wonder how they are suppressing those on Slashdot?
FTDI doesn't pay microsoft. Why would Microsoft then allow FTDI to screw Microsoft's actual customers? MS might, in theory, argue that IP should be protected, but that is really an issue between FTDI and the people using alternative products.
To me this is classic MBA thinking thus I actively hate FTDI and wish them every failure possible in the future. If someone does suffer harm from this and sues FTDI I wish those guys every success and I hope that some jury brings ruinous hell down on FTDI.
Maybe FTDI should get into the marking up drugs 100,000%. There is good business which is adding value to people's lives. Then there is exploitive business where these bozos were hoping to weasel their product in wherever there was a USB and they were hoping to charge a USB tax.
How many times will investors be fooled by people like this. When I see a company that has a "superstar" on the front page of everything, giving talks, giving interviews, always in the "top 40 under 40" I just know that this is someone who is not minding the store. If you look at companies that were massive successes in their start such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft. These were companies where the top people largely stayed out of the spotlight. Later after the companies had massive and real products the leaders might spend more time on something else. A full time self promotion tour has only one real goal, self promotion. Actually working on a product of this nature takes huge amounts of effort in the lab, and then huge amounts of effort in the regulatory department. There is no time left for strutting and preening. This is what marketing departments are for.
The other reality is that a product like this can pretty much sell itself. But my first indication of the product being crap was that I was suddenly seeing it mentioned everywhere. Here on/., reddit, local newspapers, international news, everywhere at once. Again this only happens when the product is something for everyone (erection drugs) or has a massive promotion campaign behind it. Except that, again, this product only needs to be promoted to labs, and it pretty much will sell itself if it works.
Thus all that promotion was aimed at investors. She was aimed at investors. This entire exercise was a combination of promoting her, and getting investor money into her pocket. Full stop. The science would pretty much have gotten in the way. Plus I can see someone like her actually resenting a star scientist who might actually end up with credit. I suspect that the scientists working for her were glorified coffee boys and pencil sharpeners.
I use a Pi in many projects where I need disposable. In projects where I need more power than a Pi I do one of two things. First is to just wire up (or wireless) an umbilical to the project so that a "real" computer can do its job. Or I don't do the project.
Yes, I can think of many projects where I would love far more power than a Pi can put out but let's say for a moment that I am working on a commercial project. What project is it that can have at is core such a costly unit? A roomba competitor, a security system, or what? Pretty much any system that is really valuable will deserve a far better computer than this, and an project that isn't valuable, "cat chasing robot" will not. These sort of mid-powered computers will find a small niche but I am willing to bet that they are going to have to give a zillion of these away before people find a valid use-case. Basically it will be "We were going to use a Pi but a bunch of these showed up for free so we were happy to use them."
The $5 Pi shows that the Raspberry people know where this whole IoT is going. The atom shows that Intel is hoping to recreate the heady days of Wintel.
I have long thought that two of the major things that caused yellowing were human dust, and sunlight. So in a cleanroom there probably isn't much of either. Those, plus cooler low humidity temperatures.
I did work for a newspaper chain around 1998. The guy was out buying one newspaper after another and what he wanted to do was to reduce his AP costs. The idea was that all the articles put into any one of his newspapers would be readily available to all the others; basically his own internal AP.
Without going into all the details what every one of his ideas were about was to fill the pages with crap for the lowest cost possible to pay back the huge money he had borrowed to buy up all these newspapers.
To a guy like this the whole idea of ethics in journalism and whatnot was complete crap. Also if the local news staff were to really mount a protest he could always shut down one newspaper as a warning to the others. Also since his company was a news machine it was no big deal to shut down the Metro Times and open up the Times Metro in the local business park.
One effect of this was that, while newspapers have often been beholden to certain interests, his newspapers became owned by many of them. His political views were the only political views, the real-estate and car sales advertisers wouldn't tolerate any investigative journalism into their practices. My favourite was that a local house inspector with an engineering degree and a reputation for being the best was not able to advertise in any of the traditional media. It was quite simple, take his tiny ad, lose our steady firehose of ads.
Then you get articles where the real-estate market is in freefall and the newspaper will have a near daily article saying that it is levelling out and that you are stupid if you don't buy now at the very bottom. Then the next month's numbers will come out and it is just worse, yet they will print the same advice.
Then there is this stream of news telling us what we should think. Often this is way way way to the left. I am not advocating Fox news (way way way to the right) but it is all the most PC crap imaginable. This whole new crap about micro aggressions. WTF.
So we now have this thing called the internet where we can choose our news sources. If we start to suspect they are shilling or lying then we move on to the 1 million other choices.
Personally, where I suspect this is going to end is that individual investigative journalists are going to realize that while there isn't enough money to run a newsroom, that if they are really good that there is enough money to keep them sustained as they do what they love. In the end I also suspect that someone is going to start to gather these individuals into a central repository so that any consumer will have a steady menu of interesting stories. I am not talking about a huffpo type crap where they keep all the cookies, but something more like an Uber for news. (yes I went with that one). I can just see its mission statement, "No opinions, just journalism."
I haven't the slightest clue of what it has. This was a really good whitebox machine in its day. Probably cost $2500+. Other than a fantastically reliable powersupply it is also in a fairly clean room environment, although it is in a tropical country. As one of the guys who works in that room pointed out; his 8 pack supply of air dusters has lasted him many years because they are primarily only needed when things go into that room.
What shocks me is that memory leaks and flaws in the operating system haven't just shut it down. Or leaks in my code.
The last time it was rebooted was late 2002. Redhat linux. The system is supported by a power backup system so crazy that it has one employee that only maintains that system. I will ssh into it every 6 or so months and just laugh at the "top".
It is the HD that worries me the most. What is ironic is that I have prepared a replacement system for it about 4 times. So it has an i7 with an SSD that has a mirrored copy of the data ready to go; maybe that backup system will be replaced soon as well. The CTO and I are just letting this one ride for as long as we can.
Often when I am designing a schema I leave out any features that are database specific. Some DBA type will show me all kinds of "optimizations" that will make it better. It doesn't matter what database it is when I say, "I want to make sure that we can switch databases in the future, so, no." they all get all butthurt that I am not treating their special flower with the respect they think it deserves. For relational MariaDB is my absolute favourite and I am 99% sure that any system I implement on it will end up staying on it but PostgreSQL is doing interesting things in mixing in NoSQL so...
But I also tend to do the same thing with programming code. I keep things so modular that it wouldn't be a massive amount of work to swap on block of functionality done in C++ with something done in Python. Not super easy, but not a situation where it wouldn't be worth it if the Python brought something cool to the table.
You say, "need to be able to have access to external support from another big company" why?
I have had "support" from the really big companies and it was worthless. Using google to search for solutions was a vastly better solution. When it comes to MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and most of the others the amount of support is bonkers. But with one extra magical bit. The open source aspect means that once in a blue moon some actual bug will be out to bite the user. That expert user will then solve the bug and post the code modification. Often this is something really small such as adding a few lines to kill a buffer overrun or a larger allocation of memory to just bandaid over a larger problem. Thus even the most insane problems in OSS have solutions lurking out there in the world. If the same bug bit me after paying a few tens of thousands (thus a nobody) the big DB companies aren't going to release some special patch for me to use. They are just going to tell me to stop doing whatever it is I am trying to do.
The only benefit of the large companies is that you can blame them when things blow up and say, "We went with the best" With OSS your argument has to be a bit more nuanced such as "We went with the actual best and it had a bug, like every other piece of software in the world."
First is that some people will end up scoring so high that the police will find themselves justified in just going after them then and there. Except that it will be a very slippery slope when they go to the judge and ask for a warrant saying that there is an 89% probability he has guns, 72% probability that he has drugs, 38% probability that there will be evidence of past crimes on his person, 47% that he will have evidence of a crime being planned, and a 24% chance that he will be harbouring a fugitive. The judge will grand the warrant even though not one shred of evidence will be presented.
The other is that if you use this to arrest a few hundred people in a bad neighbourhood it is in all likelihood that a few really nasty crimes will be discovered. They will be dissolving someone in acid or something gruesome. Except that when any news investigators ask for the records of all the innocent people rounded up, those records will be denied over "privacy issues."
But I work with ML and the horribly named big data. Often it can make interesting lists that are mostly good. Except that it will do things like suggest whoppers of terrible conclusions. On a list of major customers most likely to leave it will add a minor customer who used our company once. Why?, who knows. So my prediction is that this software will be ever more tuned to simply letting the police do what they really want to do and then be able to point to the software and say, "I was just following the computer's orders." Things like racial profiling, no knock warrants because the computer now labels everyone as basically a terrorist ready for a waco level shootout. I also suspect the police will all know how to game the system. For instance one data column might be how many times the police look the person up in the records. So they will look the person up 20 times and boom that will be enough to get a warrant.
Take drug dogs. It is part of the dog's training to "signal" when the handler wants them to. Thus any time the police want to search your car they will bring a drug dog and it will "signal" the only way it won't signal is if the handler is busy and wants to get back to his hooker girlfriend who likes dogs. Then the dog will not find anything even if the car is a mobile drug lab actively producing the final product as the dog walks around. The whole time around it is watching its handler for clues as to what to do and where to signal. If the police can create a magic legal system where a dog is used as a judge issuing search warrants, then a computer will be that much easier.
The first funny problem is when you are in NYC and you accidentally bum dial your LA car to come get you. You arrive back in LA to find your car "stolen" so you bring up you app to find that it is getting its kicks on route 66.
The other is when you move from NYC to LA but still haven't updated your contact list to say that "Home" is in LA not NYC. You drunkenly get into your car and say, "Home James" it then proceeds to take you to your old address in NYC. You are hung over so you don't wake until 2pm, 12 hours after leaving. It has been doing a fairly steady 70 for 12 hours, putting you over 800 miles from home. Also this translates to a 12 hour ride to return.
I really tried to love MongoDB but I realized that all the freedom they claimed was freedom to structure things exactly there way and only their way. I now hate MongoDB like it is leaking sewage pipe at an Ebola hospital.
I used oracle professionally for about 8 years until I realized that things like PL/SQL didn't exist to help me structure an N-Tier system better but to just lock me into their stupid database. Oracle as a database isn't terrible so much as their pricing, and even worse, their sales people are horror shows. Pretty much if I can't install my datastore using apt-get or yum then it isn't getting installed.
I would say the only thing worse than having to deal with either of the two above poxes upon humanity would be the people who evangelize these solutions. Someday they will realize the MongoDB isn't NoSQL but HUMONGOSql. Or that PL/SQL was just a huge joke designed to waste many billions of developer's hours while making them pay for the privilage.
Until then we will just continue to use our secret MariaDB and PostgreSQL handshakes and we will just smile as the Oracle and Mongo people keep struggling in the mire not knowing that there is a great jogging path a few feet away.
Many people blame internet diagnoses for bringing people into doctors offices certain that some pimple is cancer. Then what do all these drug ads do?
I have zero doubt that with things like Watson coming along that there will be a point where a noob using an AI app will be statistically better than a doctor only using their head.
Where it will get interesting is when a noob using an app is pretty much indistinguishable from a doctor using an app. For basic arithmetic I can certainly say that I would trust the results of a calculator than the results of any 10 mathematicians. Obviously if you go into ER with a ski-pole sticking out of your gut then professional help is going to win. But for the 8 zillion diseases that end up being treated by a pill or minimally end up with a referral to a specialist, I suspect the apps are going to take over.
Where I used to live they put a very low cap on frivolous car accident claims(something like $2,500). This basically shot a bunch of the big fancy law firms, around my city, right in the face. This completely took the lawyers off guard. This was because it turned out that most of these firms had their big lawyers and even the fairly junior lawyers doing the meet and greet client stuff along with the big fancy cases. But the sue-the-guy-who-rear-ended-another-guy lawsuits for around $10,000 a pop were being handled by a bunch of paralegals with a very junior lawyer rubber stamping them. These just vanished as the lawyer's take from $2,500 just wasn't enough and even the guy suing couldn't be bothered for his take of $2,500.
I am not joking when I say that BMW sales plummeted in the city for years after.
So the question is not how much of a lawyer's duties can be handled by an AI, but how much of a lawfirm's duties can be handled by an AI. My second story in this regard was that I know someone who was an articling lawyer for a firm that specialized in DUIs. She and the other super juniors would handle an easy 90% of what went on with those cases. When things got dicy then the big guns would step in. Or the big guns would gladhand the clients into thinking that everything was being handled personally by them, but the reality was that low experience nobodies were just going through a near checklist set of steps.
I suspect that a huge amount of law would be similar. Divorces between people with boring finances, traffic issues, injuries, workers compensation, etc. That one case in many would be interesting enough that any lawyer had to grind their braincells very hard.
To me where this could get interesting is not the job losses but what happens when everyone has a lawyer app ready to go? I know that I really want a doctor app in my phone. A lawyer app, that just sounds like it should be called, Pocket Asshole 2000-Everybody should have another asshole in their pants.
If something is made hard enough then only the most capable will survive the selection process. Can you imagine the quality of programmer that would exist if we only did everything in ASM? While the understanding that ASM programming might induce would be beneficial the reality is that maybe only 1 programmer in 20 would continue the process. Also productivity would be shot in the face.
For instance I really hate APIs where you have to have this huge pile of boilerplate with all kinds of factory classes pooping out this and that that you assemble into something that every other person using the API will do. Maybe it gives you a better peek into the internals but I would rather some kind of Init or Create function that gives me the end product that I and every other programmer wants. All that boilerplate might make my code look intimidating and keep the weak minded away but it didn't make me a better programmer by any amount to be worth the wasted time.
I make most of my calls with my PC. I either use skype, or I can get my apple to use my iPhone to make telco calls. I have a great headset so it is far more pleasant to use.
But I agree, the arduino can be pushed surprisingly hard but I use it as basically a really cool IO port for something with a bigger brain that is easier to program.
I am willing to bet that in Canada I would be impressed with someone who could get a single zero shipped to their door for much less than $30. ($22 USD). Then to top that off if you ship USP from the states there is a good chance of being hit with a $40 fee. Most of the Raspberry sellers use UPS. Thus the $5 zero could literally be over $70 delivered.
Yet if I order a Chinese Arduino, it will be delivered in 2-3 weeks for $2-3.
On an interesting note about their fighting. There is a saying in science, "Science proceeds one funeral at a time." With many situations where there is a single worshipped founder their complacency can bring all progress to a halt. I see this when I have posted videos of arduinos(Chinese) in use and people will comment, "Support arduino you asshole."
Well now we have this interesting situation where if either of the Arduino companies sit on their ass they will die. I love it. I hope they get the most lethargic inefficient, indecisive, judge in judicial history. Neither of them can just issue diktats that go against what people want sending the faithful into fits when they are disobeyed.
Now if someone would just redo the Arduino IDE in something other than Java.
I would say that there are two cynical approaches to this: One, the drug companies shut her down for cutting into their pie. Or two, she wanted a taste of the big pie and like the bank robbers once said, "That is where the money is."
I take many of my tech queues from my tech friends. I have seen exactly zero microsoft mobile devices in their hands. Zero, not few, not one, but zero. I even see the occasional blackberry simply because they just don't care and their company gave it to them. Quite simply it is not what the cool kids are using.
What I do see are about half Windows machines because that is what they use at work, a huge number of Macs because of their Unix flavour, and a goodly number of Linux based laptops. For mobile I see iPhones, Androids, and interesting things like the Oneplus.
Going back to the windows machines I pretty much only see Windows 7.
The next part is how cool is what they are working on; if it is AI, Robotics, or something hardcore then Linux, BSD, and Apple are the only products used
To boil this down, Microsoft is not what the cool kids want to use.
I think that in my 20+ years of technology that I have seen the same person over and over. They usually spend more time on the front covers of magazines than they do in the office. They woo investors that seem impressive because of their money but often these investors aren't usually in the business of investing in that type of business so their imprimatur isn't that impressive, landing them is but their backing it isn't.
Then there is the "revolutionary" aspect. But there is no mention of the scientists who actually did the work. None, nada, zip, no mention. Then there is usually a back story; dropping out of an ivy league school is seemingly impressive as they are hard to get into and dropping out of one makes the "leader" seem bold. Then there is always that type A ethic. Get by on a few hours sleep, into the office at 6am. Blah blah blah.
But the simple reality is that giving that many interviews, going to that many talks, raising all that money is a more than full time job. Thus it circles back around to the science. The only way that would happen would be with some damn impressive scientists. Yet at no point do I hear any real mention of science gods working quietly in the background working hand in hand with their business partner.
What pisses me off about these stories is that after this blows up in massive way it will continue to follow the same storyline. Some dupe will pay the big price while she will mostly skate. She will manage to walk away with some serious bucks and nothing criminal. Maybe she will lose a few lawsuits that might even sound serious but it will either end up as judgements against her company which will be a worthless shell by then, or paid out of some insurance policy.
But then she will write some vague book "Look before you leap" where she will manage to get a bizarre huge advance, and in a few years she will somehow be at it again. First she will end up on a few boards of directors, then she will weasel her way into a leadership position because she is the type who knows how to build a force behind her and shove someone who is actually spending time running the organization, out.
As I said, I have seen this story over and over. Often it is just a dumb local story where the scam artists make it into the local business magazine "Top 40 under 40." When I read those articles I basically now know of 40 local businesses that are going to flame out when the grants or investors dry up.
But when a profitless business is covering Forbes and becoming the darling of the national papers then the term Vapourware instantly springs to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I love video games and think any kind of ban is just stupid. But they aren't without harm. I have seen people put their jobs in jeopardy repeatedly playing online games late into the night. I have read about people neglecting their kids to play farmville, I have even done a few nasty binges where I would swear to "stop by midnight" only to look outside and see that it was dawn.
I suspect that more than one life has effectively been thrown away to play video games. So while people might not be out there in droves pulling people from their cars after a few GTA sessions, I suspect that there are a number of kids who didn't go to collage, went to a crappier collage, or dropped out of collage, because of video game addictions.
I think it is telling that I have met a probably going to die alcoholic who was able to stay on the wagon primarily through his newfound addiction to video games.
I am a nobody in Canada and know someone who knows someone who regularly dines with the Queen. I am willing to bet though, that I could dig up a bushman who is 8 or more degrees from me. Also I suspect that Facebook is a bit distorted in that many of the people on Facebook are social vs most people not being terribly social. So being quickly connected to the queen is no huge surprise as she is the center of a vast social network. Her footman's kid is then 5 away from me. Her footman's kid's neighbour is probably the classic 6.
So where facebook statement is probably over generalized to the population is to forget that like the queen, many people on facebook are probably important nodes in the social fabric of western society. Thus many people know someone on facebook who is nearly 4 degrees from someone who that person knows who doesn't use facebook. Otherwise known as 6 degrees.
So a facebook made up of Clintons would be all two degrees, a facebook made up of Unibombers would all be 40 degrees.
I know quite a few MBAs and they are obsessed with their orgcharts. They are repulsed by things like flat organizations, holistic management, independent teams, etc.
When they see a tech company run successfully by the founders who barely run the developers who just get things done they know that there is no room for the dead weight of a bunch of MBAs. This is where the slightest hint of VC money or other "professional" money will cause the MBAs to insist on a "professional" management team. This will immediately result in what is happening at GitHub. Very soon there will be 5+ layers between a developer working on something and the person running the company. Nimble is not how one could describe such an organization. Sclerotic would be a much more apt term. What I love is when more and more of the company resources are spent on things that aren't core to actually getting things done and sold. But even better is when the MBAs begin to redistribute the rewards. Suddenly it goes from a few founders who keep a large chunk of the shares with the vast majority of the remaining shares distributed fairly liberally among the developers and even often support staff such as secretaries. Then the MBAs pretty much start issuing themselves all kinds of complicated rewards packages. Not just the usual shares but complicated contracts that translate to if the company is sold that they will get massive "retention" bonuses.
It even comes down to the day to day redistribution of resources. Before the MBAs the entire company would pretty much attend the key conferences and a few trade shows. They would all pile into coach and fly to where was needed, stay in a reasonable hotel a few to a room, and swamp the conference with people adoring them. Often they would come home with contacts, a few new employees, and have left many people impressed.
Now the MBAs will be the only ones flying anywhere and it will be business class, thank you very much. They need to arrive in fighting shape so that justifies the $3000 plane ticket along with the great hotel and one suite per employee. There is no need for the developers to stop work as they are behind on their carefully assigned tasks anyway. Plus they won't stay "on message".
But seeing that the end game went from being a great company to fooling some other rich company to buy out the company in short order, my prediction for GitHub is that it will be passed around from one hedgefund run company to another until it is Wordperfect. In not that many years it will be like hosting your website on Geocities. Too bad, I really liked Github. But I will eat my hat if it doesn't look like GoDaddy within 4 years. Just upsell upsell upsell.
Not so much /. getting the money so much as professional PR people manipulating accounts and votes to push/suppress things that they are paid big bucks to work on. How much do you think it would cost to create enough accounts to be able to get a story onto the main page? How many accounts would it take to suppress one?
With some nice automation, some solid VPN work; how many people would actually have to work at this?
My personal guess is a few thousand a month in VPN fees spread across some of the better and less detectable VPNs. One crappy server that keeps an eye out for keywords. A staff of one or two (time shifting). Plus the occasional update to the automation software.
Then the person would spend most of the day writing pretty useless vote-getting bandwagon comments that were spread across maybe 500-1000 accounts to keep them seemingly obvious. Then when a new PR article came in needing promotion it would be fed into the machine whereupon it would receive a steady stream of votes along with an assortment of non voting accounts writing praiseful comments.
On the flip side any negative comments on this or other "protected" issues would have a combination of downvoting accounts along with well crafted talking points.
Obviously it would be stupid to answer this but I suspect it would only take maybe 20-50 votes to get an issue front and center and even less to kill a topic that just popped up. Maybe 5.
The beauty of Slashdot's random karma issuing is that it would inherently disguise any group voting as there would have to be a large number of accounts so any group of accounts would be unlikely to show up as always voting on the same issues. Plus a good system would burn off any extra votes it had by some bandwagon jumping and voting up anything at a 4 and voting down anything at a 0.
If I were building such a system I would completely narrow it down to a much simpler interface where I would only see filtered comments and when I took actions they would be very simple. I would choose how many votes to go for or against any given comment, and I would choose the rate so emergencies would have the votes come in over a few seconds where others might take 10 or so minutes. Also the system would take care of such issues as more positive votes coming in at a later time also being shot down fairly quickly.
The same with any issue that I want to support. I would basically say, keep voting until this ends up on the front page.
Plus any comments that I just added would also have a level they should be voted to and maintained. Again the system would give various options such as replies coming from the original account or if they were to appear to be someone else piling in.
Again what I am describing wouldn't be brutally hard to build. The primary problem with such a system is that it would take a while for the accounts to age nicely. Ideally such a system would continue to accumulate accounts.
Then slashdot would not be the only target. Reddit to just name one other would be wildly susceptible to such a system. Thus a PR company could pretty much offer a professional level of sock-puppetry that would be extraordinary yet I can't see their per article costs being that high. The value to fortune 500 companies would be very high.
For an interesting hamfisted attempt at this you can look at what the Canadian Telcos did when Verizon was rumoured to be coming to Canada. An actual competitor scared the crap out of them so they instructed their employees to all go onto any internet commentary and blast their point of view. It was amazing. Newspaper commentaries would have maybe 20 comments that would run "Great, I can't wait to see what happens with actual competition." Then where these telco people were using some kind of collective hub to identify places to assault they would find that newspaper comment section and there would suddenly be 200 comments saying, "It would be un-Canadian to support a job eating monster. Where is your loyalty to the grandfathers who died for your freedom to have a Canadian Telephone company?"
I suspect that they were contacted by the various PR firms that do this "properly" and very quickly sold.
I am sick of these breathless reporting of products and services that have zero substance. I would say 90% of the stories with MIT in the title are after funding and the slashdot story is part of their social media campaign. The same goes with pretty much any product that relates to the Java market. New Mansanga on track to replace Hadoop 50% of fortune 500 companies this year. Hasume allows Java developers to deploy to over 30 mobile platforms.
And don't get me started on MS Surface. Those words should be spam banned from slashdot.
On the other-hand I haven't read a good story condemning a single product of a major chemical or pharmaceutical company in a few years. I wonder how they are suppressing those on Slashdot?
FTDI doesn't pay microsoft. Why would Microsoft then allow FTDI to screw Microsoft's actual customers? MS might, in theory, argue that IP should be protected, but that is really an issue between FTDI and the people using alternative products.
To me this is classic MBA thinking thus I actively hate FTDI and wish them every failure possible in the future. If someone does suffer harm from this and sues FTDI I wish those guys every success and I hope that some jury brings ruinous hell down on FTDI.
Maybe FTDI should get into the marking up drugs 100,000%. There is good business which is adding value to people's lives. Then there is exploitive business where these bozos were hoping to weasel their product in wherever there was a USB and they were hoping to charge a USB tax.
How many times will investors be fooled by people like this. When I see a company that has a "superstar" on the front page of everything, giving talks, giving interviews, always in the "top 40 under 40" I just know that this is someone who is not minding the store. If you look at companies that were massive successes in their start such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft. These were companies where the top people largely stayed out of the spotlight. Later after the companies had massive and real products the leaders might spend more time on something else. A full time self promotion tour has only one real goal, self promotion. Actually working on a product of this nature takes huge amounts of effort in the lab, and then huge amounts of effort in the regulatory department. There is no time left for strutting and preening. This is what marketing departments are for.
/., reddit, local newspapers, international news, everywhere at once. Again this only happens when the product is something for everyone (erection drugs) or has a massive promotion campaign behind it. Except that, again, this product only needs to be promoted to labs, and it pretty much will sell itself if it works.
The other reality is that a product like this can pretty much sell itself. But my first indication of the product being crap was that I was suddenly seeing it mentioned everywhere. Here on
Thus all that promotion was aimed at investors. She was aimed at investors. This entire exercise was a combination of promoting her, and getting investor money into her pocket. Full stop. The science would pretty much have gotten in the way. Plus I can see someone like her actually resenting a star scientist who might actually end up with credit. I suspect that the scientists working for her were glorified coffee boys and pencil sharpeners.
I use a Pi in many projects where I need disposable. In projects where I need more power than a Pi I do one of two things. First is to just wire up (or wireless) an umbilical to the project so that a "real" computer can do its job. Or I don't do the project.
Yes, I can think of many projects where I would love far more power than a Pi can put out but let's say for a moment that I am working on a commercial project. What project is it that can have at is core such a costly unit? A roomba competitor, a security system, or what? Pretty much any system that is really valuable will deserve a far better computer than this, and an project that isn't valuable, "cat chasing robot" will not. These sort of mid-powered computers will find a small niche but I am willing to bet that they are going to have to give a zillion of these away before people find a valid use-case. Basically it will be "We were going to use a Pi but a bunch of these showed up for free so we were happy to use them."
The $5 Pi shows that the Raspberry people know where this whole IoT is going. The atom shows that Intel is hoping to recreate the heady days of Wintel.
I have long thought that two of the major things that caused yellowing were human dust, and sunlight. So in a cleanroom there probably isn't much of either. Those, plus cooler low humidity temperatures.
I did work for a newspaper chain around 1998. The guy was out buying one newspaper after another and what he wanted to do was to reduce his AP costs. The idea was that all the articles put into any one of his newspapers would be readily available to all the others; basically his own internal AP.
Without going into all the details what every one of his ideas were about was to fill the pages with crap for the lowest cost possible to pay back the huge money he had borrowed to buy up all these newspapers.
To a guy like this the whole idea of ethics in journalism and whatnot was complete crap. Also if the local news staff were to really mount a protest he could always shut down one newspaper as a warning to the others. Also since his company was a news machine it was no big deal to shut down the Metro Times and open up the Times Metro in the local business park.
One effect of this was that, while newspapers have often been beholden to certain interests, his newspapers became owned by many of them. His political views were the only political views, the real-estate and car sales advertisers wouldn't tolerate any investigative journalism into their practices. My favourite was that a local house inspector with an engineering degree and a reputation for being the best was not able to advertise in any of the traditional media. It was quite simple, take his tiny ad, lose our steady firehose of ads.
Then you get articles where the real-estate market is in freefall and the newspaper will have a near daily article saying that it is levelling out and that you are stupid if you don't buy now at the very bottom. Then the next month's numbers will come out and it is just worse, yet they will print the same advice.
Then there is this stream of news telling us what we should think. Often this is way way way to the left. I am not advocating Fox news (way way way to the right) but it is all the most PC crap imaginable. This whole new crap about micro aggressions. WTF.
So we now have this thing called the internet where we can choose our news sources. If we start to suspect they are shilling or lying then we move on to the 1 million other choices.
Personally, where I suspect this is going to end is that individual investigative journalists are going to realize that while there isn't enough money to run a newsroom, that if they are really good that there is enough money to keep them sustained as they do what they love. In the end I also suspect that someone is going to start to gather these individuals into a central repository so that any consumer will have a steady menu of interesting stories. I am not talking about a huffpo type crap where they keep all the cookies, but something more like an Uber for news. (yes I went with that one). I can just see its mission statement, "No opinions, just journalism."
I haven't the slightest clue of what it has. This was a really good whitebox machine in its day. Probably cost $2500+. Other than a fantastically reliable powersupply it is also in a fairly clean room environment, although it is in a tropical country. As one of the guys who works in that room pointed out; his 8 pack supply of air dusters has lasted him many years because they are primarily only needed when things go into that room.
What shocks me is that memory leaks and flaws in the operating system haven't just shut it down. Or leaks in my code.
The last time it was rebooted was late 2002. Redhat linux. The system is supported by a power backup system so crazy that it has one employee that only maintains that system. I will ssh into it every 6 or so months and just laugh at the "top".
It is the HD that worries me the most. What is ironic is that I have prepared a replacement system for it about 4 times. So it has an i7 with an SSD that has a mirrored copy of the data ready to go; maybe that backup system will be replaced soon as well. The CTO and I are just letting this one ride for as long as we can.
Often when I am designing a schema I leave out any features that are database specific. Some DBA type will show me all kinds of "optimizations" that will make it better. It doesn't matter what database it is when I say, "I want to make sure that we can switch databases in the future, so, no." they all get all butthurt that I am not treating their special flower with the respect they think it deserves. For relational MariaDB is my absolute favourite and I am 99% sure that any system I implement on it will end up staying on it but PostgreSQL is doing interesting things in mixing in NoSQL so...
But I also tend to do the same thing with programming code. I keep things so modular that it wouldn't be a massive amount of work to swap on block of functionality done in C++ with something done in Python. Not super easy, but not a situation where it wouldn't be worth it if the Python brought something cool to the table.
You say, "need to be able to have access to external support from another big company" why?
I have had "support" from the really big companies and it was worthless. Using google to search for solutions was a vastly better solution. When it comes to MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and most of the others the amount of support is bonkers. But with one extra magical bit. The open source aspect means that once in a blue moon some actual bug will be out to bite the user. That expert user will then solve the bug and post the code modification. Often this is something really small such as adding a few lines to kill a buffer overrun or a larger allocation of memory to just bandaid over a larger problem. Thus even the most insane problems in OSS have solutions lurking out there in the world. If the same bug bit me after paying a few tens of thousands (thus a nobody) the big DB companies aren't going to release some special patch for me to use. They are just going to tell me to stop doing whatever it is I am trying to do.
The only benefit of the large companies is that you can blame them when things blow up and say, "We went with the best" With OSS your argument has to be a bit more nuanced such as "We went with the actual best and it had a bug, like every other piece of software in the world."
First is that some people will end up scoring so high that the police will find themselves justified in just going after them then and there. Except that it will be a very slippery slope when they go to the judge and ask for a warrant saying that there is an 89% probability he has guns, 72% probability that he has drugs, 38% probability that there will be evidence of past crimes on his person, 47% that he will have evidence of a crime being planned, and a 24% chance that he will be harbouring a fugitive. The judge will grand the warrant even though not one shred of evidence will be presented.
The other is that if you use this to arrest a few hundred people in a bad neighbourhood it is in all likelihood that a few really nasty crimes will be discovered. They will be dissolving someone in acid or something gruesome. Except that when any news investigators ask for the records of all the innocent people rounded up, those records will be denied over "privacy issues."
But I work with ML and the horribly named big data. Often it can make interesting lists that are mostly good. Except that it will do things like suggest whoppers of terrible conclusions. On a list of major customers most likely to leave it will add a minor customer who used our company once. Why?, who knows. So my prediction is that this software will be ever more tuned to simply letting the police do what they really want to do and then be able to point to the software and say, "I was just following the computer's orders." Things like racial profiling, no knock warrants because the computer now labels everyone as basically a terrorist ready for a waco level shootout. I also suspect the police will all know how to game the system. For instance one data column might be how many times the police look the person up in the records. So they will look the person up 20 times and boom that will be enough to get a warrant.
Take drug dogs. It is part of the dog's training to "signal" when the handler wants them to. Thus any time the police want to search your car they will bring a drug dog and it will "signal" the only way it won't signal is if the handler is busy and wants to get back to his hooker girlfriend who likes dogs. Then the dog will not find anything even if the car is a mobile drug lab actively producing the final product as the dog walks around. The whole time around it is watching its handler for clues as to what to do and where to signal. If the police can create a magic legal system where a dog is used as a judge issuing search warrants, then a computer will be that much easier.
The first funny problem is when you are in NYC and you accidentally bum dial your LA car to come get you. You arrive back in LA to find your car "stolen" so you bring up you app to find that it is getting its kicks on route 66.
The other is when you move from NYC to LA but still haven't updated your contact list to say that "Home" is in LA not NYC. You drunkenly get into your car and say, "Home James" it then proceeds to take you to your old address in NYC. You are hung over so you don't wake until 2pm, 12 hours after leaving. It has been doing a fairly steady 70 for 12 hours, putting you over 800 miles from home. Also this translates to a 12 hour ride to return.
I really tried to love MongoDB but I realized that all the freedom they claimed was freedom to structure things exactly there way and only their way. I now hate MongoDB like it is leaking sewage pipe at an Ebola hospital.
I used oracle professionally for about 8 years until I realized that things like PL/SQL didn't exist to help me structure an N-Tier system better but to just lock me into their stupid database. Oracle as a database isn't terrible so much as their pricing, and even worse, their sales people are horror shows. Pretty much if I can't install my datastore using apt-get or yum then it isn't getting installed.
I would say the only thing worse than having to deal with either of the two above poxes upon humanity would be the people who evangelize these solutions. Someday they will realize the MongoDB isn't NoSQL but HUMONGOSql. Or that PL/SQL was just a huge joke designed to waste many billions of developer's hours while making them pay for the privilage.
Until then we will just continue to use our secret MariaDB and PostgreSQL handshakes and we will just smile as the Oracle and Mongo people keep struggling in the mire not knowing that there is a great jogging path a few feet away.
Many people blame internet diagnoses for bringing people into doctors offices certain that some pimple is cancer. Then what do all these drug ads do?
I have zero doubt that with things like Watson coming along that there will be a point where a noob using an AI app will be statistically better than a doctor only using their head.
Where it will get interesting is when a noob using an app is pretty much indistinguishable from a doctor using an app. For basic arithmetic I can certainly say that I would trust the results of a calculator than the results of any 10 mathematicians. Obviously if you go into ER with a ski-pole sticking out of your gut then professional help is going to win. But for the 8 zillion diseases that end up being treated by a pill or minimally end up with a referral to a specialist, I suspect the apps are going to take over.
Where I used to live they put a very low cap on frivolous car accident claims(something like $2,500). This basically shot a bunch of the big fancy law firms, around my city, right in the face. This completely took the lawyers off guard. This was because it turned out that most of these firms had their big lawyers and even the fairly junior lawyers doing the meet and greet client stuff along with the big fancy cases. But the sue-the-guy-who-rear-ended-another-guy lawsuits for around $10,000 a pop were being handled by a bunch of paralegals with a very junior lawyer rubber stamping them. These just vanished as the lawyer's take from $2,500 just wasn't enough and even the guy suing couldn't be bothered for his take of $2,500.
I am not joking when I say that BMW sales plummeted in the city for years after.
So the question is not how much of a lawyer's duties can be handled by an AI, but how much of a lawfirm's duties can be handled by an AI. My second story in this regard was that I know someone who was an articling lawyer for a firm that specialized in DUIs. She and the other super juniors would handle an easy 90% of what went on with those cases. When things got dicy then the big guns would step in. Or the big guns would gladhand the clients into thinking that everything was being handled personally by them, but the reality was that low experience nobodies were just going through a near checklist set of steps.
I suspect that a huge amount of law would be similar. Divorces between people with boring finances, traffic issues, injuries, workers compensation, etc. That one case in many would be interesting enough that any lawyer had to grind their braincells very hard.
To me where this could get interesting is not the job losses but what happens when everyone has a lawyer app ready to go? I know that I really want a doctor app in my phone. A lawyer app, that just sounds like it should be called, Pocket Asshole 2000-Everybody should have another asshole in their pants.
If something is made hard enough then only the most capable will survive the selection process. Can you imagine the quality of programmer that would exist if we only did everything in ASM? While the understanding that ASM programming might induce would be beneficial the reality is that maybe only 1 programmer in 20 would continue the process. Also productivity would be shot in the face.
For instance I really hate APIs where you have to have this huge pile of boilerplate with all kinds of factory classes pooping out this and that that you assemble into something that every other person using the API will do. Maybe it gives you a better peek into the internals but I would rather some kind of Init or Create function that gives me the end product that I and every other programmer wants. All that boilerplate might make my code look intimidating and keep the weak minded away but it didn't make me a better programmer by any amount to be worth the wasted time.
I make most of my calls with my PC. I either use skype, or I can get my apple to use my iPhone to make telco calls. I have a great headset so it is far more pleasant to use.
But I agree, the arduino can be pushed surprisingly hard but I use it as basically a really cool IO port for something with a bigger brain that is easier to program.
I am willing to bet that in Canada I would be impressed with someone who could get a single zero shipped to their door for much less than $30. ($22 USD). Then to top that off if you ship USP from the states there is a good chance of being hit with a $40 fee. Most of the Raspberry sellers use UPS. Thus the $5 zero could literally be over $70 delivered.
Yet if I order a Chinese Arduino, it will be delivered in 2-3 weeks for $2-3.
On an interesting note about their fighting. There is a saying in science, "Science proceeds one funeral at a time." With many situations where there is a single worshipped founder their complacency can bring all progress to a halt. I see this when I have posted videos of arduinos(Chinese) in use and people will comment, "Support arduino you asshole."
Well now we have this interesting situation where if either of the Arduino companies sit on their ass they will die. I love it. I hope they get the most lethargic inefficient, indecisive, judge in judicial history. Neither of them can just issue diktats that go against what people want sending the faithful into fits when they are disobeyed.
Now if someone would just redo the Arduino IDE in something other than Java.
I would say that there are two cynical approaches to this: One, the drug companies shut her down for cutting into their pie. Or two, she wanted a taste of the big pie and like the bank robbers once said, "That is where the money is."
I take many of my tech queues from my tech friends. I have seen exactly zero microsoft mobile devices in their hands. Zero, not few, not one, but zero. I even see the occasional blackberry simply because they just don't care and their company gave it to them. Quite simply it is not what the cool kids are using.
What I do see are about half Windows machines because that is what they use at work, a huge number of Macs because of their Unix flavour, and a goodly number of Linux based laptops. For mobile I see iPhones, Androids, and interesting things like the Oneplus.
Going back to the windows machines I pretty much only see Windows 7.
The next part is how cool is what they are working on; if it is AI, Robotics, or something hardcore then Linux, BSD, and Apple are the only products used To boil this down, Microsoft is not what the cool kids want to use.
I think that in my 20+ years of technology that I have seen the same person over and over. They usually spend more time on the front covers of magazines than they do in the office. They woo investors that seem impressive because of their money but often these investors aren't usually in the business of investing in that type of business so their imprimatur isn't that impressive, landing them is but their backing it isn't.
Then there is the "revolutionary" aspect. But there is no mention of the scientists who actually did the work. None, nada, zip, no mention. Then there is usually a back story; dropping out of an ivy league school is seemingly impressive as they are hard to get into and dropping out of one makes the "leader" seem bold. Then there is always that type A ethic. Get by on a few hours sleep, into the office at 6am. Blah blah blah.
But the simple reality is that giving that many interviews, going to that many talks, raising all that money is a more than full time job. Thus it circles back around to the science. The only way that would happen would be with some damn impressive scientists. Yet at no point do I hear any real mention of science gods working quietly in the background working hand in hand with their business partner.
What pisses me off about these stories is that after this blows up in massive way it will continue to follow the same storyline. Some dupe will pay the big price while she will mostly skate. She will manage to walk away with some serious bucks and nothing criminal. Maybe she will lose a few lawsuits that might even sound serious but it will either end up as judgements against her company which will be a worthless shell by then, or paid out of some insurance policy.
But then she will write some vague book "Look before you leap" where she will manage to get a bizarre huge advance, and in a few years she will somehow be at it again. First she will end up on a few boards of directors, then she will weasel her way into a leadership position because she is the type who knows how to build a force behind her and shove someone who is actually spending time running the organization, out.
As I said, I have seen this story over and over. Often it is just a dumb local story where the scam artists make it into the local business magazine "Top 40 under 40." When I read those articles I basically now know of 40 local businesses that are going to flame out when the grants or investors dry up.
But when a profitless business is covering Forbes and becoming the darling of the national papers then the term Vapourware instantly springs to mind.