In Nova Scotia (famous for fish and watery stuff) one guy has bought nearly all the licences where licences can be bought enmass. In Halifax two companies own nearly all the cab licences. In Canada our milk costs a fortune because there are crazy dairy quotas, our chicken costs a fortune because of strange laws preventing it from moving around Canada. Our cheese/yogurt costs a fortune because you will only get approved to make cheese/yogurt for the country if your company is located in Quebec.
All of these laws are to protect the little guy and have only ended up protecting the boss hogs.
The cab companies/cabbies are mostly scared of one main thing. They invested a massive amount of money to by their exploitation licence. The main regulation that they are concerned with is this quota. The rest of the regulations are generally nonsense or exist to prevent gross fraud. If Uber is given the green light these exploitation licences become valueless. In some municipalities these licences have traditionally sold for the million dollar zone. There are even banks that specialized in loaning money for the this market. Thus the cabbies will be on the hook for a licence that is worthless while competing on price with an Uber driver who wasn't stupid enough to put that yoke around his neck. Then the pricing regulation was there to largely protect their ability to pay off that loan. Thus there are two groups here, one is those who have paid off the loan who love the huge amount of money that comes from exploiting Londoners with this monopoly, and the other group are those who must have that monopoly pricing in order to pay the loan. Then when the cabbie retires they could sell the licence for a fortune.
But I don't ever remember signing an agreement saying that cabbies could rape my wallet.
Their PR arguments also hold no water. Let's assume that all their arguments about safety, quality, crime, and so on are all true. Why should we not have the choice anyway to pick who drives us? I am happy driving a friend to a location, they are happy to drive me, people drive themselves, yet somehow cabbies have twisted this into licensed uber drivers as being the best way to get yourself killed. So the regulations that largely exist for all drivers such as not being drunk, having insurance, having a safe car, having a licence, all make sense for normal drivers; so why don't they make sense for Uber drivers. Does the uber app somehow make them worse drivers?
But again; even if uber is terrible and dangerous, why should we be treated like infants and not allowed to make up our own minds? Also continuing with the uber is a death trap; then other companies could come along in a free market and offer safer drives. People would probably choose them instead. Free market. Just like all the other vendors in London who don't have quotas. Restaurants, lawyers, dentists, clothing stores. All of those businesses would probably love a quota eliminating new competition. But it wouldn't serve the public at all.
If you want to see a wonderful example of something that is this taken to its extreme: try and get something notarized in Italy. Something like 1,000 Euros. I think a Notary in Canada or the US will run you around $50.
But if this monopoly had never been set up and competition had always been allowed we would not be having this discussion and Uber would be having trouble making any headway in London, it would simply be one more competitor in a competitive market.
What I have read in the independant studies is that Uber drivers with their little GPS systems are just as good cost wise and in most cases drivewise as a full on London Cabbie who has studied "The Knowledge". The key is that while on some journeys the cabbie will be more proficient the extra cost more than evens it out with Uber. Except that because the Uber navigation system is getting better and better even that gap is narrowing. Also most journeys are pretty straightforward. You go out to main road A drive until near the destination, and then pull off main road A to the destination.
Then Uber brings the whole modern technology to bear. The app, the information feedback, etc. So about the only real thing left for the cabbies is to defend their monopoly seeing that they have potentially no natural advantage and thus no defence moored in reality. The problem with bending the rules of reality is that eventually they snap and the further and longer you bend them the worse the recoil will be. So at this point they might be able to modernize, take the hit on their monopoly value, take a hit on their wages and survive. But if they hold uber at bay for a number of years the flood will come in and will wash them away. Quite simply the harder they push back the harder reality will try to find away around. For instance a new batch of politicians might sweep into office with the promise of eliminating their monopoly. Thus on Monday they are safe and on Tuesday there is pretty much only Uber standing.
But the key argument that is used is that because the government granted them this monopoly it is the governments problem if they are ruined by taking it away. This holds no moral water; they thought that they were buying a licence to be able to ruthlessly exploit the people of London. They thought wrong. I have zero pity for what comes next.
I didn't say, "Wish upon a magic star as to what you will find in my fridge." I effectively said, "From the selection that is presented upon opening my fridge choose any number of drinkable items that will satiate your thirst. If the options presented are not sufficient or do not meet your taste requirements then keep your pie hole shut as I don't want to hear it."
I am willing to bet that this engineering project was pulled of with a stunningly tiny cast of characters and a minimum of paperwork; which will make for an interesting contrast with the bureaucratic effort that would have been required to create such a "feature" through the regular channels.
If anything VW should learn from this how to efficiently engineer their cars into the future. But alas they will fire anyone who not only cheated but even worse didn't follow the practices and procedures laid out by people who had nothing better to do with their time than to layout and enforce practices and procedures.
I hate when I am grabbing a snack and it comes with a "free" drink and that drink turns out to be pop. So yes I pretty much see it as getting a free "gift" with some purchase and it turns out to be cigarettes. I am insulted when people on the street ask if I have a cigarette, and I am insulted when I tell guests to grab anything they want out of my fridge and they then ask if I have pop. I have to restrain myself from saying, "Do I look like an idiot?"
So while I never thought about it pop is sort of the new cigarette, except that I don't care if other people in the theater/plane/street/etc are drinking it. In that way, to each their own.
Needless to say we all encounter the occasional mentally disturbed person, asshole, way competitive coworker, etc and they are going to give us crap reviews. Real bear false witness type crap. So some people might think that the solution is to hire people on Fiverr to give us an overwhelming positive set of review to drown out the negative reviews.
But the reality is that most people can smell a shill review from a mile away so most people look at reviews and quickly go to the negative reviews to see if they make sense and were written by at least semi literate semi coherent human beings. So drowning out negative reviews with positive ones isn't perfect.
What is perfect is to drown out negative reviews with more negative reviews. Thus if many people go out to their friends and all cross review each other with the worst possible reviews ranging from the vaguely sensible to the , "Used to run with a gang in 12th century Asia, left many piles of heads." or "Hung out with a big guy and kept saying Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women. Then he acted on it repeatedly. Levelled many villages. We did have to sort him out so that he didn't rape the fields and pillage the women, though."
I hope that someone who has a huge following such as Howard Stern tells his minions to go out and review everyone they know in the worst way possible. This would then make the data completely worthless.
Another poison pill for their data would be to add countless versions yourself. Is that spelt Steinburg, Steinburg, Stienberg, or Steinberg? And which one? The one at 2342 Main the one at 2432 Main, the one at 2342A Main, or the one who is 23 or the one who is 27, who graduated from Citadel High or Citedal High?
So if we all put a bit of effort this terrible product can be sent to the hell it belongs in.
The key is that many of the distros over the years often had some cool feature that may have been adopted by the main distros. Maybe a better installer, or package manager. Many were just a huge waste of time for all involved. So how do you calculate the value of some group putting together an entire and innovative distro but the only thing remaining of it today might be a slightly better installer in the main distros?
Yet all of today's main distros were some obscure distro in their distant pasts.
My first distro was one called Slackware. I remember the extreme pain in getting that thing to work. But when it did I pretty much danced around the room having my own Unix system. To me that was something only huge companies and universities had at the time.
Except in this case I suspect that unlike paid programmers who eventually have to submit even if it is sort of crappy but works, the non paid Linux programmers might create their new marvel but realize that it is crap and the world never hears about it.
Also, unlike in a large company with assignments, there are probably 20 programmers working right now on some cool feature or bug. But only one of them will get their submission in or the code will be submitted and then replaced by any solutions better than it that soon follow.
The costs also need to consider all the dead ends and bad decisions. How much code was built that was never injected into the system. I suspect that many Linux developers have conjured up some really long and interesting code that they then never submitted. They threw it out and started again.
Then there is the quality of the programmers. The few programmers that I have met who contributed to the Linux codebase were pretty damn kickass. Thus hiring them would not only be expensive but really hard. Most of them wouldn't work for most companies as they know they are the elite of the elite and can pick and choose their surroundings.
Also Linux contributions are often a resume builder. Thus many junior but very very good programmers will do some Linux contributions which then makes them look cool. The reality is that they don't want to work on Linux but want some other job, such as the games industry. This is a double problem. Some company hiring for their 5 billion dollar project would never have hired them because they had crap resumes, and these kids didn't want to work on Linux and thus wouldn't accept a job working for a big boring company building an OS.
Then there is the urgency factor. Many critical tiny bits of Linux were built by people with a specific problem. They didn't have a Linux driver for their 10,000 machines with the L257B Arcnet card. Thus they dove in and modified the driver for the L256A arcnet card just enough to make it work. But where would that kind of bug/feature have been prioritized by a corporation? Plus again the person doing this brought a skillset that was obviously very good for that problem but otherwise might have been a terrible hire for the project.
Then there are the various OS distributions that compete. Not all Linux decisions have been good ones. Thus different distributions follow different paths resulting in winners and losers for various aspects of the system. Over time the winners end up spreading across the distributions and the losers just sort of fade away. Even the classic Gnome vs KDE has resulted in each becoming better. So one must count the costs of developing both Gnome and KDE.
This last one even extends out to other Open Source OS projects such as BSD in that code from that project end up in Linux as well as providing competition.
Then there is the whole build the wrong thing problem. Linux has evolved steadily to meet the demand of its users. But a corporation would build a product that would meet the demands of its marketing department. Thus any corporation building Linux wouldn't build Linux. They would typically build something like Windows or OS/2; Operating systems that were designed to create an ecosystem for selling other crap made by that company and locking their customers in.
So while it is interesting to say such a huge number, I personally think that the number would be far far larger as to put together such a talent pool would probably be a mega project in itself over and above the actual paying of that pool and the other development costs.
I have a very simple question. Is the selection in any way race based. Or is it that the merit based results end up segregated. If a critical step involves interviews or some such where otherwise high performing blacks are eliminated then this is very very bad. But if even slightly race identifying aspects such as name and school are anonymised during the selection process then I am 100% fine with whatever outcome results. The key is that they don't ruin the superior nature of the school by artificially promoting kids who are not ready. The key is to identify the poorer performing schools and improve them to the point where every kid in the school system has an equal opportunity to perform to the limits of their natural ability and then let the cards fall where they may.
If they force these kids into the program then the entire program's purpose will have changed from finding the best of the best to making pseudo intellectuals feel better about themselves.
I have worked on some fairly massive systems and not once I have I met an EA who brought value to the endeavour. Almost without exception anyone who called themselves an EA had a single tool in their toolchest and was damned determined to make sure that only their tool was chosen. Often the EA either directly worked for the company that made the tool or they had certifications for that tool up the ying yang. The result of having a pure EA do a huge project was failure. I never saw any other outcome. It either was killed after it wasn't finished, or it was killed after it was deployed because it didn't work. Usually there was some huge hole that simply couldn't be filled. A huge pile of systems would be ordered from some company at way too much cost, and then when the CFO was handed the highly propriatary software licence purchase order to sign he would lose his mind at the cost screaming, "This software is double the budget for this entire system. Didn't you used to work for this company?"
Where I have met people who successfully Architected Enterprise systems. In this case the person was much more of a project manager who worked with many people who brought many different experiences to the table. The key difference between the usually monolithic systems that EAs tend to design is that a group system tends to be smaller, flexible, and far more nuanced. Things like the mobile units will use a funky battery technology because many of them will be used in -20 weather. Something that a typical EA would miss if it weren't handed to him on a sliver specsheet platter.
To me it is like when you go to a growing company and one of the founders now has the title "Evangelist" usually they were the tool with the business degree who found 2 investors and has since proven themselves to be useless. Their only skill is using BS business lingo to impress unsophisticated investors. People who call themselves Enterprise Architects tend to be crap project managers who use BS technical lingo to impress technically unsophisticated executives.
All I need to do is to look to see where a project lay in the realm of my experience and knowledge. I can tell you that if you want me to make hello world in a language I know well on a platform that I know well that it should be under 5 minutes from beginning to end. But if you want me to program an image recongintion system that can tell if a sparrow is content or agitated on a VAX/VMS. Then I will give you an estimate of maybe 5 years before I can even give you a proper estimate having gathered up the experts on sparrows, VAX, and image recognition.
All other projects generally lay on a line between infinite and 5 minutes.
But much more importantly my real estimates on real projects will largely not depend upon the projects, the code, the specs, or pretty much anything technological but will have a multiplier based upon the company and its culture. If the company is clearly prepared to play games with the contract then the project will slow way down to make sure that every damn checkbox is checked and arguable in court. If the company has a civil war going on and the project is going to be a pawn then the multiplier goes way up. If their is no clear manager of the project and the bosses wife becomes involved with turning a project to make a point of sale system into a dietary recommendation system for her stupid diet beliefs then the project may, again, have hit infinite time.
Where most projects that I have seen blew up was when there was a failure to properly investigate the real project. Maybe someone asked to build a medical system that would do 100 features but failed to identify 1000 other critical features that made the 100 feature system completely useless. Or even worse 1000 features were ladled on after it began and the people running the project were too wimpy to resist.
Also projects can become bogged down in stupid minutia. One project I was working on was a massive invoice system where one marketing guy kept changing the look of the invoice by pixels. Day after day after day he would move things tiny amounts. The project couldn't proceed without his approval and it turned into a demoralizing nightmare. Then to put icing on the cake the problem was that the PDF samples he was printing were coming out differently on the various printers he was using. Thus the changes requested were only possible to achieve if he consistently used the same printer.
Thus this last one was a failure to create some contractual mechanism to prevent this stupidity not a failure in the original estimates which were generous in their margins.
Then you get projects that have entirely outside forces. The project was never meant to succeed. This could be on the part of political desire of the client. Or it could be fraudulent hearts in the consultants. All together many projects are doomed before the contract is drawn up so the only viable estimate would be one written in blood using magical symbols.
But to wholesale say, estimating is bad is wrong. Bad estimating is bad. But too many people get caught up in functionality points and whatnot and miss the fact that they are about to throw their entire project into a war zone. But that with a careful analysis the war zone can be calculated into a multiplier and the risks mitigated.
It is probably a mixture of both, plus some. The guy asking for the data believes this, the guy collecting the data doesn't, and the guy approving it is smart enough to think it through if he could be bothered.
My typo. And yes it is hard to imagine a time when I couldn't just pull it out to see the weather etc. I can somehow envision myself with my VIC-20 circa 1984 and an iPhone in my pocket. The iPhone minus 7.
Nearly every IT department that I have ever encountered treated the other employees like children. Bring your own device, how about no. Remove the spyware installed by IT, fired. Want to access your email on your mobile device, sorry you are going to have to wait until the 22nd century for us to catch up to that.
But the key problem is that nearly every IT department is set up the same way; they often report directly to the very top. But the very top is populated but technologically incapable people. So when the IT people point to a manager's request and say, "If we do that we run the risk of being the next Sony Pictures." when all the manager wanted to do was to use an iPhone instead of a 4 year old blackberry.
But the people who typically populate the upper management of most companies might not be techno-wizes but they know when they have encountered an obstacle and their jobs are to go around those obstacles. So they find an IT department they can control. Something outsourced can be outsourced again if the first outsourcing company doesn't play ball. So when they say I want a pink website then the IT people won't be able to say no. There will be a pink website.
But this sort of competition and knowledge that they will be replaced in an instant suddenly has the computers being upgraded from windows 95 to something less than a year old. Suddenly the software that wasn't allowed on the old system is everywhere. The blackberries are in the dumpster along with all the Novell install floppies.
Most IT people see themselves as unsung heroes coming in at 2am to prevent the lastes DDOS from taking down the network. Most people outside of IT see them as Captain NO. As in NO you can't do that, or NO we won't do that.
When someone threatens you not to do something it is because that is exactly what scares them the most.
They fear that a company with enough cash to simply go out and buy most car companies, a brand that many people love and all have heard of, and a car market that is about to go into driverless and maybe electrical spasms will step in and push them clean out of the way.
All car companies know that it will be dangerous times as they will all make missteps with driverless, and will all make missteps with electric. They also know that in 1997 the idea of Apple entering the mobile phone market was a joke. The incumbants could list off reasons as to why apple would fail as long as your arm, no deals with telcos, our engineers have 20 year experience with this, haven't done this before, who wants a musical phone, stick to your knitting, way too expensive, etc.
I even read that when the major mobile manufactures saw the phone they laughed and thought it was an unworkable pile of junk. They thought there was no room for a battery and thus would have an hour or less of useful life. Then they got them and basically wept.
Do these guys not know about information theory or do they simply not care? Give a good demographer a few tiny tidbits (IP Address is often enough) and they have all the personally identifiable information they need. Maybe not enough to convict someone but well enough to be very very sure as to who it is.
People keep talking about utilities such as ad block and VPNs as being about cleaning up the browser and running torrents but these tools are also about cutting off the marketing and demographics folks from our private lives.
So when the MBAs at Lenovo think that we won't mind, they are wrong, not only wrong that I won't buy their products but that as a computer person I will strongly recommend that no company I work for get them or any person that I know.
So they pull this stunt, for what, a few extra dollars for some marketing sleazebags? This won't stop everyone from buying their computers but by this point I doubt that few/. users will be buying their products. Even this tiny fraction of their customer base must be worth more than whatever tiny gains they made.
This is a classic example of spreadsheet thinking combined with a stovepiped company structure. The people who implemented this probably made their tiny corner of Lenovo look good on a spreadsheet while not really caring about the big picture because that wasn't their job in their little stovepipe. Even now as the company takes a hit they are probably fighting any attempts to cut them off from this information and potentially this tiny revenue stream.
He isn't an academic and thus he can't win this prize. There is no way a panel composed of University Academics is going to pick some guy who has held the title AI Guru at a game company. "He just isn't our sort of people." So no doctorate and no position at a "Leading" university thus no prize for him.
They will keep holding this contest until someone proper from MIT, Oxford, Stanford, etc has a winning entry.
Then there will be breathless press releases issued about an AI breakthrough with all this crap about how we will all be interacting with AIs like this in 10 years. They had might as well put propellers on it and front cover of Popular Mechanics it.
Over and over I see MIT and those sorts having "breakthroughs" that I read about years earlier done by people outside of academia.
They say that science progresses one funeral at a time; and I don't wonder why.
I the city that I left (due to government corruption, a failing economy, and did I mention a collapsing economy) hired the brother of the premier to run the polygraphs for the fire and police departments. But it wasn't corruption at that level of simplicity, police chiefs and what not all had their fingers in the pie. I don't think if any of them care if the things work all they care about is getting their contracts and feathering their beds.
I suspect that if you go to the FBI they have whole divisions that have been build upon the foundation of polygraph technology. They not only would suddenly have to actually be FBI agents but they all would have just spent the bulk of their careers basically interpreting goose livers. But even worse they would not be able to go out on consulting gigs where they can be the "FBI Polygraph Expert" this would be a total disaster.
Lastly I suspect there is a bit of powertripping among their numbers. You can point to some squiggles on a line and say, "His answers were weak, here, here and here." and you have just ruined a career or sent a person to jail.
So it doesn't really matter how many times the FBI is shown to be using science at the level of a cave man witchdoctor they have a massive PR machine plus their argument trumps your argument because they carry guns and can lock you in a cage for disagreeing.
It seemed to me that I already read an analysis of the purity of the graphite used in a buffer wasn't high enough and thus was more of a blocker than a buffer. The result was that the failed experiment then diverted the Nazis from an efficient path down a far harder path. That the Manhattan project was effectively based on the same experiment but done at ever higher purities of graphite until it worked and confirmed what they thought about neutrons.
I am going into my nearby church later today and I am going to put up a poster for a different church of a very different sect that is just down the road. I wonder how that is going to go?
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In Nova Scotia (famous for fish and watery stuff) one guy has bought nearly all the licences where licences can be bought enmass. In Halifax two companies own nearly all the cab licences. In Canada our milk costs a fortune because there are crazy dairy quotas, our chicken costs a fortune because of strange laws preventing it from moving around Canada. Our cheese/yogurt costs a fortune because you will only get approved to make cheese/yogurt for the country if your company is located in Quebec.
All of these laws are to protect the little guy and have only ended up protecting the boss hogs.
The cab companies/cabbies are mostly scared of one main thing. They invested a massive amount of money to by their exploitation licence. The main regulation that they are concerned with is this quota. The rest of the regulations are generally nonsense or exist to prevent gross fraud. If Uber is given the green light these exploitation licences become valueless. In some municipalities these licences have traditionally sold for the million dollar zone. There are even banks that specialized in loaning money for the this market. Thus the cabbies will be on the hook for a licence that is worthless while competing on price with an Uber driver who wasn't stupid enough to put that yoke around his neck. Then the pricing regulation was there to largely protect their ability to pay off that loan. Thus there are two groups here, one is those who have paid off the loan who love the huge amount of money that comes from exploiting Londoners with this monopoly, and the other group are those who must have that monopoly pricing in order to pay the loan. Then when the cabbie retires they could sell the licence for a fortune.
But I don't ever remember signing an agreement saying that cabbies could rape my wallet.
Their PR arguments also hold no water. Let's assume that all their arguments about safety, quality, crime, and so on are all true. Why should we not have the choice anyway to pick who drives us? I am happy driving a friend to a location, they are happy to drive me, people drive themselves, yet somehow cabbies have twisted this into licensed uber drivers as being the best way to get yourself killed. So the regulations that largely exist for all drivers such as not being drunk, having insurance, having a safe car, having a licence, all make sense for normal drivers; so why don't they make sense for Uber drivers. Does the uber app somehow make them worse drivers?
But again; even if uber is terrible and dangerous, why should we be treated like infants and not allowed to make up our own minds? Also continuing with the uber is a death trap; then other companies could come along in a free market and offer safer drives. People would probably choose them instead. Free market. Just like all the other vendors in London who don't have quotas. Restaurants, lawyers, dentists, clothing stores. All of those businesses would probably love a quota eliminating new competition. But it wouldn't serve the public at all.
If you want to see a wonderful example of something that is this taken to its extreme: try and get something notarized in Italy. Something like 1,000 Euros. I think a Notary in Canada or the US will run you around $50.
But if this monopoly had never been set up and competition had always been allowed we would not be having this discussion and Uber would be having trouble making any headway in London, it would simply be one more competitor in a competitive market.
What I have read in the independant studies is that Uber drivers with their little GPS systems are just as good cost wise and in most cases drivewise as a full on London Cabbie who has studied "The Knowledge". The key is that while on some journeys the cabbie will be more proficient the extra cost more than evens it out with Uber. Except that because the Uber navigation system is getting better and better even that gap is narrowing. Also most journeys are pretty straightforward. You go out to main road A drive until near the destination, and then pull off main road A to the destination.
Then Uber brings the whole modern technology to bear. The app, the information feedback, etc. So about the only real thing left for the cabbies is to defend their monopoly seeing that they have potentially no natural advantage and thus no defence moored in reality. The problem with bending the rules of reality is that eventually they snap and the further and longer you bend them the worse the recoil will be. So at this point they might be able to modernize, take the hit on their monopoly value, take a hit on their wages and survive. But if they hold uber at bay for a number of years the flood will come in and will wash them away. Quite simply the harder they push back the harder reality will try to find away around. For instance a new batch of politicians might sweep into office with the promise of eliminating their monopoly. Thus on Monday they are safe and on Tuesday there is pretty much only Uber standing.
But the key argument that is used is that because the government granted them this monopoly it is the governments problem if they are ruined by taking it away. This holds no moral water; they thought that they were buying a licence to be able to ruthlessly exploit the people of London. They thought wrong. I have zero pity for what comes next.
I didn't say, "Wish upon a magic star as to what you will find in my fridge." I effectively said, "From the selection that is presented upon opening my fridge choose any number of drinkable items that will satiate your thirst. If the options presented are not sufficient or do not meet your taste requirements then keep your pie hole shut as I don't want to hear it."
I am willing to bet that this engineering project was pulled of with a stunningly tiny cast of characters and a minimum of paperwork; which will make for an interesting contrast with the bureaucratic effort that would have been required to create such a "feature" through the regular channels.
If anything VW should learn from this how to efficiently engineer their cars into the future. But alas they will fire anyone who not only cheated but even worse didn't follow the practices and procedures laid out by people who had nothing better to do with their time than to layout and enforce practices and procedures.
I hate when I am grabbing a snack and it comes with a "free" drink and that drink turns out to be pop. So yes I pretty much see it as getting a free "gift" with some purchase and it turns out to be cigarettes. I am insulted when people on the street ask if I have a cigarette, and I am insulted when I tell guests to grab anything they want out of my fridge and they then ask if I have pop. I have to restrain myself from saying, "Do I look like an idiot?"
So while I never thought about it pop is sort of the new cigarette, except that I don't care if other people in the theater/plane/street/etc are drinking it. In that way, to each their own.
Even many female pilots wouldn't weigh that little? I would suspect that as a pilot went below 136 that they would also be too short to fly the plane.
Needless to say we all encounter the occasional mentally disturbed person, asshole, way competitive coworker, etc and they are going to give us crap reviews. Real bear false witness type crap. So some people might think that the solution is to hire people on Fiverr to give us an overwhelming positive set of review to drown out the negative reviews.
But the reality is that most people can smell a shill review from a mile away so most people look at reviews and quickly go to the negative reviews to see if they make sense and were written by at least semi literate semi coherent human beings. So drowning out negative reviews with positive ones isn't perfect.
What is perfect is to drown out negative reviews with more negative reviews. Thus if many people go out to their friends and all cross review each other with the worst possible reviews ranging from the vaguely sensible to the , "Used to run with a gang in 12th century Asia, left many piles of heads." or "Hung out with a big guy and kept saying Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women. Then he acted on it repeatedly. Levelled many villages. We did have to sort him out so that he didn't rape the fields and pillage the women, though."
I hope that someone who has a huge following such as Howard Stern tells his minions to go out and review everyone they know in the worst way possible. This would then make the data completely worthless.
Another poison pill for their data would be to add countless versions yourself. Is that spelt Steinburg, Steinburg, Stienberg, or Steinberg? And which one? The one at 2342 Main the one at 2432 Main, the one at 2342A Main, or the one who is 23 or the one who is 27, who graduated from Citadel High or Citedal High?
So if we all put a bit of effort this terrible product can be sent to the hell it belongs in.
The key is that many of the distros over the years often had some cool feature that may have been adopted by the main distros. Maybe a better installer, or package manager. Many were just a huge waste of time for all involved. So how do you calculate the value of some group putting together an entire and innovative distro but the only thing remaining of it today might be a slightly better installer in the main distros?
Yet all of today's main distros were some obscure distro in their distant pasts.
My first distro was one called Slackware. I remember the extreme pain in getting that thing to work. But when it did I pretty much danced around the room having my own Unix system. To me that was something only huge companies and universities had at the time.
Except in this case I suspect that unlike paid programmers who eventually have to submit even if it is sort of crappy but works, the non paid Linux programmers might create their new marvel but realize that it is crap and the world never hears about it.
Also, unlike in a large company with assignments, there are probably 20 programmers working right now on some cool feature or bug. But only one of them will get their submission in or the code will be submitted and then replaced by any solutions better than it that soon follow.
Then, by that standard, KDE may have learned what not to do. An important lesson that I have taught myself many times.
The costs also need to consider all the dead ends and bad decisions. How much code was built that was never injected into the system. I suspect that many Linux developers have conjured up some really long and interesting code that they then never submitted. They threw it out and started again.
Then there is the quality of the programmers. The few programmers that I have met who contributed to the Linux codebase were pretty damn kickass. Thus hiring them would not only be expensive but really hard. Most of them wouldn't work for most companies as they know they are the elite of the elite and can pick and choose their surroundings.
Also Linux contributions are often a resume builder. Thus many junior but very very good programmers will do some Linux contributions which then makes them look cool. The reality is that they don't want to work on Linux but want some other job, such as the games industry. This is a double problem. Some company hiring for their 5 billion dollar project would never have hired them because they had crap resumes, and these kids didn't want to work on Linux and thus wouldn't accept a job working for a big boring company building an OS.
Then there is the urgency factor. Many critical tiny bits of Linux were built by people with a specific problem. They didn't have a Linux driver for their 10,000 machines with the L257B Arcnet card. Thus they dove in and modified the driver for the L256A arcnet card just enough to make it work. But where would that kind of bug/feature have been prioritized by a corporation? Plus again the person doing this brought a skillset that was obviously very good for that problem but otherwise might have been a terrible hire for the project.
Then there are the various OS distributions that compete. Not all Linux decisions have been good ones. Thus different distributions follow different paths resulting in winners and losers for various aspects of the system. Over time the winners end up spreading across the distributions and the losers just sort of fade away. Even the classic Gnome vs KDE has resulted in each becoming better. So one must count the costs of developing both Gnome and KDE.
This last one even extends out to other Open Source OS projects such as BSD in that code from that project end up in Linux as well as providing competition.
Then there is the whole build the wrong thing problem. Linux has evolved steadily to meet the demand of its users. But a corporation would build a product that would meet the demands of its marketing department. Thus any corporation building Linux wouldn't build Linux. They would typically build something like Windows or OS/2; Operating systems that were designed to create an ecosystem for selling other crap made by that company and locking their customers in.
So while it is interesting to say such a huge number, I personally think that the number would be far far larger as to put together such a talent pool would probably be a mega project in itself over and above the actual paying of that pool and the other development costs.
I have a very simple question. Is the selection in any way race based. Or is it that the merit based results end up segregated. If a critical step involves interviews or some such where otherwise high performing blacks are eliminated then this is very very bad. But if even slightly race identifying aspects such as name and school are anonymised during the selection process then I am 100% fine with whatever outcome results. The key is that they don't ruin the superior nature of the school by artificially promoting kids who are not ready. The key is to identify the poorer performing schools and improve them to the point where every kid in the school system has an equal opportunity to perform to the limits of their natural ability and then let the cards fall where they may.
If they force these kids into the program then the entire program's purpose will have changed from finding the best of the best to making pseudo intellectuals feel better about themselves.
I have worked on some fairly massive systems and not once I have I met an EA who brought value to the endeavour. Almost without exception anyone who called themselves an EA had a single tool in their toolchest and was damned determined to make sure that only their tool was chosen. Often the EA either directly worked for the company that made the tool or they had certifications for that tool up the ying yang. The result of having a pure EA do a huge project was failure. I never saw any other outcome. It either was killed after it wasn't finished, or it was killed after it was deployed because it didn't work. Usually there was some huge hole that simply couldn't be filled. A huge pile of systems would be ordered from some company at way too much cost, and then when the CFO was handed the highly propriatary software licence purchase order to sign he would lose his mind at the cost screaming, "This software is double the budget for this entire system. Didn't you used to work for this company?"
Where I have met people who successfully Architected Enterprise systems. In this case the person was much more of a project manager who worked with many people who brought many different experiences to the table. The key difference between the usually monolithic systems that EAs tend to design is that a group system tends to be smaller, flexible, and far more nuanced. Things like the mobile units will use a funky battery technology because many of them will be used in -20 weather. Something that a typical EA would miss if it weren't handed to him on a sliver specsheet platter.
To me it is like when you go to a growing company and one of the founders now has the title "Evangelist" usually they were the tool with the business degree who found 2 investors and has since proven themselves to be useless. Their only skill is using BS business lingo to impress unsophisticated investors. People who call themselves Enterprise Architects tend to be crap project managers who use BS technical lingo to impress technically unsophisticated executives.
Who keeps winning their contest.
All I need to do is to look to see where a project lay in the realm of my experience and knowledge. I can tell you that if you want me to make hello world in a language I know well on a platform that I know well that it should be under 5 minutes from beginning to end. But if you want me to program an image recongintion system that can tell if a sparrow is content or agitated on a VAX/VMS. Then I will give you an estimate of maybe 5 years before I can even give you a proper estimate having gathered up the experts on sparrows, VAX, and image recognition.
All other projects generally lay on a line between infinite and 5 minutes.
But much more importantly my real estimates on real projects will largely not depend upon the projects, the code, the specs, or pretty much anything technological but will have a multiplier based upon the company and its culture. If the company is clearly prepared to play games with the contract then the project will slow way down to make sure that every damn checkbox is checked and arguable in court. If the company has a civil war going on and the project is going to be a pawn then the multiplier goes way up. If their is no clear manager of the project and the bosses wife becomes involved with turning a project to make a point of sale system into a dietary recommendation system for her stupid diet beliefs then the project may, again, have hit infinite time.
Where most projects that I have seen blew up was when there was a failure to properly investigate the real project. Maybe someone asked to build a medical system that would do 100 features but failed to identify 1000 other critical features that made the 100 feature system completely useless. Or even worse 1000 features were ladled on after it began and the people running the project were too wimpy to resist.
Also projects can become bogged down in stupid minutia. One project I was working on was a massive invoice system where one marketing guy kept changing the look of the invoice by pixels. Day after day after day he would move things tiny amounts. The project couldn't proceed without his approval and it turned into a demoralizing nightmare. Then to put icing on the cake the problem was that the PDF samples he was printing were coming out differently on the various printers he was using. Thus the changes requested were only possible to achieve if he consistently used the same printer.
Thus this last one was a failure to create some contractual mechanism to prevent this stupidity not a failure in the original estimates which were generous in their margins.
Then you get projects that have entirely outside forces. The project was never meant to succeed. This could be on the part of political desire of the client. Or it could be fraudulent hearts in the consultants. All together many projects are doomed before the contract is drawn up so the only viable estimate would be one written in blood using magical symbols.
But to wholesale say, estimating is bad is wrong. Bad estimating is bad. But too many people get caught up in functionality points and whatnot and miss the fact that they are about to throw their entire project into a war zone. But that with a careful analysis the war zone can be calculated into a multiplier and the risks mitigated.
It is probably a mixture of both, plus some. The guy asking for the data believes this, the guy collecting the data doesn't, and the guy approving it is smart enough to think it through if he could be bothered.
My typo. And yes it is hard to imagine a time when I couldn't just pull it out to see the weather etc. I can somehow envision myself with my VIC-20 circa 1984 and an iPhone in my pocket. The iPhone minus 7.
Nearly every IT department that I have ever encountered treated the other employees like children. Bring your own device, how about no. Remove the spyware installed by IT, fired. Want to access your email on your mobile device, sorry you are going to have to wait until the 22nd century for us to catch up to that.
But the key problem is that nearly every IT department is set up the same way; they often report directly to the very top. But the very top is populated but technologically incapable people. So when the IT people point to a manager's request and say, "If we do that we run the risk of being the next Sony Pictures." when all the manager wanted to do was to use an iPhone instead of a 4 year old blackberry.
But the people who typically populate the upper management of most companies might not be techno-wizes but they know when they have encountered an obstacle and their jobs are to go around those obstacles. So they find an IT department they can control. Something outsourced can be outsourced again if the first outsourcing company doesn't play ball. So when they say I want a pink website then the IT people won't be able to say no. There will be a pink website.
But this sort of competition and knowledge that they will be replaced in an instant suddenly has the computers being upgraded from windows 95 to something less than a year old. Suddenly the software that wasn't allowed on the old system is everywhere. The blackberries are in the dumpster along with all the Novell install floppies.
Most IT people see themselves as unsung heroes coming in at 2am to prevent the lastes DDOS from taking down the network. Most people outside of IT see them as Captain NO. As in NO you can't do that, or NO we won't do that.
When someone threatens you not to do something it is because that is exactly what scares them the most.
They fear that a company with enough cash to simply go out and buy most car companies, a brand that many people love and all have heard of, and a car market that is about to go into driverless and maybe electrical spasms will step in and push them clean out of the way.
All car companies know that it will be dangerous times as they will all make missteps with driverless, and will all make missteps with electric. They also know that in 1997 the idea of Apple entering the mobile phone market was a joke. The incumbants could list off reasons as to why apple would fail as long as your arm, no deals with telcos, our engineers have 20 year experience with this, haven't done this before, who wants a musical phone, stick to your knitting, way too expensive, etc.
I even read that when the major mobile manufactures saw the phone they laughed and thought it was an unworkable pile of junk. They thought there was no room for a battery and thus would have an hour or less of useful life. Then they got them and basically wept.
Do these guys not know about information theory or do they simply not care? Give a good demographer a few tiny tidbits (IP Address is often enough) and they have all the personally identifiable information they need. Maybe not enough to convict someone but well enough to be very very sure as to who it is.
/. users will be buying their products. Even this tiny fraction of their customer base must be worth more than whatever tiny gains they made.
People keep talking about utilities such as ad block and VPNs as being about cleaning up the browser and running torrents but these tools are also about cutting off the marketing and demographics folks from our private lives.
So when the MBAs at Lenovo think that we won't mind, they are wrong, not only wrong that I won't buy their products but that as a computer person I will strongly recommend that no company I work for get them or any person that I know.
So they pull this stunt, for what, a few extra dollars for some marketing sleazebags? This won't stop everyone from buying their computers but by this point I doubt that few
This is a classic example of spreadsheet thinking combined with a stovepiped company structure. The people who implemented this probably made their tiny corner of Lenovo look good on a spreadsheet while not really caring about the big picture because that wasn't their job in their little stovepipe. Even now as the company takes a hit they are probably fighting any attempts to cut them off from this information and potentially this tiny revenue stream.
He isn't an academic and thus he can't win this prize. There is no way a panel composed of University Academics is going to pick some guy who has held the title AI Guru at a game company. "He just isn't our sort of people." So no doctorate and no position at a "Leading" university thus no prize for him.
They will keep holding this contest until someone proper from MIT, Oxford, Stanford, etc has a winning entry.
Then there will be breathless press releases issued about an AI breakthrough with all this crap about how we will all be interacting with AIs like this in 10 years. They had might as well put propellers on it and front cover of Popular Mechanics it.
Over and over I see MIT and those sorts having "breakthroughs" that I read about years earlier done by people outside of academia.
They say that science progresses one funeral at a time; and I don't wonder why.
I the city that I left (due to government corruption, a failing economy, and did I mention a collapsing economy) hired the brother of the premier to run the polygraphs for the fire and police departments. But it wasn't corruption at that level of simplicity, police chiefs and what not all had their fingers in the pie. I don't think if any of them care if the things work all they care about is getting their contracts and feathering their beds.
I suspect that if you go to the FBI they have whole divisions that have been build upon the foundation of polygraph technology. They not only would suddenly have to actually be FBI agents but they all would have just spent the bulk of their careers basically interpreting goose livers. But even worse they would not be able to go out on consulting gigs where they can be the "FBI Polygraph Expert" this would be a total disaster.
Lastly I suspect there is a bit of powertripping among their numbers. You can point to some squiggles on a line and say, "His answers were weak, here, here and here." and you have just ruined a career or sent a person to jail.
So it doesn't really matter how many times the FBI is shown to be using science at the level of a cave man witchdoctor they have a massive PR machine plus their argument trumps your argument because they carry guns and can lock you in a cage for disagreeing.
It seemed to me that I already read an analysis of the purity of the graphite used in a buffer wasn't high enough and thus was more of a blocker than a buffer. The result was that the failed experiment then diverted the Nazis from an efficient path down a far harder path. That the Manhattan project was effectively based on the same experiment but done at ever higher purities of graphite until it worked and confirmed what they thought about neutrons.
I am going into my nearby church later today and I am going to put up a poster for a different church of a very different sect that is just down the road. I wonder how that is going to go?