There is exactly a zero percentage chance that I will ever use MongoDB in another project. On the surface it was great. I evangelized my friends about it and the whole NoSQL thing. But as time went by I realized that it wasn't made for people to use. Almost nothing was intuitive. For each new feature that I wanted I had to look up a tutorial and generally found a list of gotchas. If you design your project around MongoDB then it will work. But if you try to wrap MongoDB around your project then you are completely screwed.
Basically MongoDB halved the initial quarter of data storage design and programming. But as the project progressed the time spent screwing with Mongo went up exponentially until the project was shoved out the door and primary feature in version 2 was the complete removal of MongoDB.
I could make a mile long list of places the project stumbled. But a few key ones would be that there are no good data management tools for accessing a MongoDB. The second was that huge schema screwups were way too easy. It was very hard for programmers to get a mile high overview of how data being stored was being structured. That is a data layout was easy but putting the results into your head was really hard.
I am finding other NoSQL approaches are far superior. Things such as use of JSON, memcaches, MariaDB (or the excellent PostgreSQL) working together allows the project to dictate how things function instead of Mongo very quickly shaping the project architecture because of its marked strengths and weaknesses.
Redis is the environment presently being explored for version 4 and so far it is looking very interesting. But I am not joking when I say that at this point I would use access on windows as my backend datastore before I would use MongoDB.
Most of my computer friends write down the passwords but alter them in some pattern that works in their head.
So ShittyIceCream8456 is ChapmansIceCream5684
I learned Objective-C so that I could deploy on iOS and otherwise wouldn't have given the language a second look. Then I discovered Cocos-2d which makes C++ on iOS, Android, etc very easy so boom I happily made the leap back to C++ and haven't looked back. There is pretty much zero chance that I will write more than a few dozen lines of Objective-C again in my life. There is also pretty much zero posibility that I will write any swift and I certainly have dodged the Java bullet for Android.
About the only problems that I have encountered are some artificial ones where some API features are cut off from me without a tiny bit of Objective-C or Java. But those tiny bits get wrapped in a C++ class and forgotten.
Why would the festival cooperate? Basically they are saying to their customer that their privacy is of no value. Not only is this cruel but it also indicates that the festival will probably sell on any data they have gathered on the festival goers.
It is this callous disregard for privacy that screams for laws that clamp down on any organization, including the police, from being able to gather data. Quite simply I want a law that prevents any organization from gathering data that isn't crucial for the transaction and to not be able to share that data without a warrant. Thus I want this reaching the point where the power company can only gather the minimum amount of data to send me a bill and deliver my service. I don't even want them noting my gender. Then I pretty much want them not to be able to share that data with their own marketing department, let alone "trusted third parties".
I wonder how pissed off all the various countries of the world will be when they find out the details of what has been going on?
Can you imagine how pissed off some people like the French would be if it turned out the US meddled in a French election? Or stole technological secrets from one of their national darlings and handed it to US companies?
It is one thing to find out that there is a program called Operation French Fry that was to monitor French politics. But if it turns out that they did specific things on specific dates to specific people; then the gloves will come off.
The article cost problem is much like the computer book problem that I had in the days that I bought computer books. Nearly all computer books suck. Thus for every 20 computer books I bought maybe 1 really did it for me.
Thus I would much prefer sifting through stackoverflow at a small but steady burn instead of the probable rip off at a higher price. So while any given article might save me a pile of money most would be a waste of money.
Netflix is also a betterish model to compare to. Their cost to provide me Netflix is low. Thus they charge me far less than the stupid and dying networks/cable companies. I would be happy spending lots of little money instead of the occasional gouge.
The key problem is that I don't generally trust online payment systems. As a class I don't trust them to get it right, and I don't trust them to protect my data. Thus I would love a single system where I can trust it and then be able to dole money out from it in ways that I completely control.
In theory I just described paypal but the problem there is that they aren't really conducive to micropayments. They love their macro fees thought.
So the wall between me and anything like forrestor would be that even if I wanted the article I am loth to giving them my data more than giving them my money.
I also suspect that because of this barrier they have fewer customers and then have to charge more for each article.
I would be happy to pay stackoverflow a penny or so per use. But I won't pay them $2 per answer; even if that answer will save me a day's work.
I can't be that far off seeing how many people are willing to do in app purchases.
I recently read an article where blackberry's market share has stabilized. At 0.5%. While I would love to own a company with 0.5% market share of such a vast market that simply doesn't produce enough revenue to keep developing quality products.
So while all your arguments seem sound the simple fact is that the people have spoken. All the large organizations that I deal with that had mono-deals with BB for all their employees have abandoned those deals because their employees yelled that BB was basically employee abuse. Most of these companies will still give their employees a BB if they want one and there are the die hards who do.
But back to my main argument. An interesting factoid is that I have seen senior managers be issued a BB, take out the SIM and put it into a BB that they bought. This go get away from their IT department's disabling their phone.
The problem is that BB now probably almost 100% relies upon assholes for customers and to make a good phone they would have to screw that last 0.5% while waiting for some of the other 99% to realize that the phone wasn't abusive anymore.
I love the planitif bleating of the millionaires and billionaires who will complain that this is going to kill them and their "free" business models. The simple reality is that if I were offered a great micro payment system I would be happy to pay for quality websites. Not much but enough that the truly great websites would make money.
The crap SEO whores and whatnot of the type that have 50%+ advertising and sell my data wouldn't get a cent.
I will turn this feature on in a second and never look back.
From the moment I heard that they were going with QNX I knew that they were making a massive mistake. But when I said this all kinds of people jumped on me and got all buthurt defending QNX. I thought that Android was the way to go from the moment iPhone started to eat their lunch. My main problems with QNX were that the only person that I knew who loved it was a complete tool. Plus why not do effectively what Apple did when they adopted BSD as the core. Pick something that works and run with it. Apple had their old creaky OS, had just failed doing a deal with another OS company and then just jumped into BSD. That gave them magical powers such as being able to easily make the leap to Intel and ARM or whatever they want. Android would provide the same magic power of portability.
But I still think that BB doesn't know what their customers really want. They are still trying to please the IT departments, the telcos, and their enterprise customers. They should instead be trying to win over the individual even if that individual happens to be in the enterprise. So don't allow things like security profiles where the IT department can effectively trash the phone. Otherwise the modern executive will go buy an iPhone/Android and not put up with that crap.
Then there are other features that they should offer by default such as massive batteries. The BB users that I know would happily add a few mm to triple or more their battery life. I know there are addons but why not just make them a default option. BB people are on the road and can get fired or lose business if their phone goes dark. Plus screw all the touch screen BBs. People buy them for their keyboards. As long as the font is large enough for blind boomers the phone will sell in droves.
Most of us tinkerers with this sort of stuff can't afford $100 boards, especially if we are going to be leaving them behind in projects, or damaging them when our robotic submarine sinks, or our robotic plane flys over the horizon. Plus we might do nothing with them. Or we might ruin them while tinkering.
Thus offering a "better" board for only $20 more or $80 more is just stupid for the vast majority of those who are going to use the Pi. If anything the Pi is mostly going to be used as a really powerful Arduino.
Now I did read about one competitor who is planning on a $9 board that looked pretty competitive. But we'll see. The other thing that I think that people love about the Pi is that it is pretty damn open and boring. Some of the other boards just have a hint of trying to pull you into an ecosystem. Galileo would be a near perfect example of this. Instead of open and for everyone they played all kinds of games where they tried to get it into schools and other restrictions on the initial signups. I could just see some marketing person with their powerpoints behind that one.
I personally have exactly one complaint about the Raspberry Pi. All the main companies selling them use UPS to ship to Canada. UPS wildly rips Canadians off with crazy unannounced "brokerage fees" and often charges crap terriffs that I don't think exist. Because of this I would not be surprised if Raspberry Pi usage in Canada is unexpectedly low.
I hate when I look up a local business which does have a website but some SEO whoring website directory with a crap listing comes up instead. In the 90s if you searched for anything you got someone whoreing whores or whoring a casio. Google came along and ate everyone's lunch by not showing us crap. Now when you search you get SEO whores. I don't ever want another answers.com, ask.com, quora.com, experts-exchange.com(which doesn't seem to come up much anymore), huffpo, gawker anything, sourceforge, or any other SEO whoring content free sites.
My wife had a thing for work that needed the Java browser plugin. Her work had solidly banned it so she came to me and asked if I could get it to work. I tried to explain that she basically wanted me to have a dump into my machine. But I took a snapshot of an existing windows test VM, installed it, did her thing, and then reverted to the previous java free snapshot.
Do they not realize that this stuff is both continuously evolving and is also like water. When I was a kid people copied software by handing each other floppies. Each kid would amass as large a collection as they could afford floppies for in order to always have something that would interest others in a trade.
Then kids moved onto BBSs and in the very early 90s I could see kids stuffing those same floppies into machines connected to the internet. About the same time people would collect and share FTP sites some of which had over 100Mb of storage.
Since then it has been one technology after another ranging from Usenet, Kazaa, Mega, to Torrents. And those are just the sharing technologies. Then there is the data itself. It can be manipulated, streamed, encrypted, stenoed and so on. So while torrents seem to be a pretty good technology right now the only thing that having a government ban websites will do is to speed up the next evolution of the technology. In modern terms torrents are getting long in the tooth so, if anything, there are probably some superior contenders waiting in the wings right now.
But where this really stings is with legitimate traffic. For instance I had an old ISP that began "traffic shaping" to try and stop torrents. Except that a product I build used UDP streams which much have looked like torrents because suddenly they got very slow on my ISP. Plus I use a VPN for working from home and am not switching to the competitor (Bell Canada) because their leader just blah blahed about how evil VPNs are. If for some odd reason Canada banned VPNs I would literally have to move from the country.
Mac Pro 2013 Quad core dual AMD video 12 GB/512GB.
It's primary purpose has been applying genetic algorithms to financial data. Long live OpenCL.
Now that I have packaged up that blackbox solution I am looking for new and interesting things to do with it. But whomever my next financial client is will probably want ML algorithms applied to financial data instead of GA.
This article doesn't argue for curtailing the NSA to benefit US businesses but in promoting these crazy trade agreements to make it illegal for other countries to avoid the NSA. The idea being that if people can't just avoid US companies to avoid the NSA then these other countries will have no competitive advantage.
I generally hated the proposed trade agreements but now I despise them.
Plus I am seeing highly promoted links to this article all over the web. I saw multiple attempts to get this on reddit when finally their army of shill voters managed to get it to the front page.
I went to some pretty crappy schools and would have relished an opportunity for some actual education. Things like coursera are in their very earliest days but if they had been available when I was around 15 I would have jumped in with both feet. It was about that time that I was realizing that the education I was receiving was so shockingly sub par that it was basically a joke. Now at this point in time nobody can exactly say what a coursera certificate is worth but I am certain that I would have joined together with like-minded friends and blown through many of the computer and math related ones.
How this would have helped would be somewhat vague. But it would have done at least four things. One, it would have made up for the horrifically terrible edcation we were getting. Two it would have given us the confidence to say that we actually knew a few things and to strive for something such as aiming for top tier schools. Three it would have filled a huge gap that our schools were leaving that we crudely filled by teaching ourselves to program using the crap we could find in libraries. And finally it might have actually impressed someone enough in higher education that we could have all made the leap into good schools.
Now this doesn't necessarily translate to success for massive amounts of children in schools. We were fairly self-motivated so we could do things then and would have done more with access to the resources of today.
But for the average kid today with full access to Coursera and all the Khans etc the path still isn't very clear as to where it could take them. I don't think that many people have a clear idea as to where all this is leading. For instance if a teenager were to do very well with MITs offerings does that improve their ability to get into MIT one iota; or any other school for that matter?
Then there is the whole other matter of who is putting education into the schools themselves. That tends to be wildly corrupt companies that have massive sales forces with bizarrely incestuous relationships with the school systems administrators. So to look at any failure of those technologies is meaningless as success was never to be measured by actual educational outcomes. The success that was aimed with those systems was to embed themselves as financial parasites through proprietary data strangleholds and contractual lock-ins.
Therefore I go back to examples of Coursera which is the type of system that I see doing an end run around the entire school educational system. I envision a day when online organizations are able to offer a certificate that has a known value and is held in some regard. I then see some of the best and brightest from the public school system starting to get that certification and then moving on to higher education without the consent or blessing from the public school system. If anything I foresee resistance where the public school system will try to insist(and generally fail) that the higher education system reject these certifications and not accept kids who have struck out on their own.
At this point I can see a generation of kids going into higher education and slowly push for the best of breed education that they were exposed to in the online education system from their higher education institutions. Here the change will be slower and will be more of an incorporation rather than a revolution.
But the moment the online systems start to have any value is exactly when I see the facade of terrible public education finally being forced to reform. People call for all kinds of things such as standardized testing, killing the unions, charter schools, testing of teachers, performance based pay, etc. I then hear all kinds of arguments and counter arguments for these changes. But what is very clear is that regardless of any of them actually working that the school system will never allow them as it is. What all the calls for these changes makes clear is that there is a huge demand that the school system be fixed. Online educationa
I am a massive fan of flipping the bird to my local power company. Thus I would make huge sacrifices to go completely off grid. I have fewer and fewer devices that demand 110 or 220 so having 110 plugs all over the house is something I could live without. I am fairly certain that nearly every device that I have could happily have either 12v or 5v supplied and run just fine. There could be one common corridor in the house that provided 110 for those things that demanded it.
But in my ideal universe the fewer utilities that I could have the better. If there was a way to get around gas and water then I would be wildly happy.
I just have zero interest in giving a chunk of my money to a bunch of shareholders and overpaid executives ever month.
To me one of my pet peeves with patents is that often people are patenting the obvious even though patents are supposed to be non-obvious. So if say the em-drive were to be brought to market as a high efficiency thruster it makes sense to give a patent to the brilliant inventors. It doesn't make any sense to give a patent to the person who puts it into an airplane, or space-craft, or a toy, or anything that would obviously be made better by having a thrustless thruster in it.
To me the same roughly applies to music. When new genres of music come out and new musical technologies arrive If someone composes an entire piece then they should be granted some copywrite over their entire song. But a single riff or other short distinctive part should not be copywritten. And there are many examples of where one artist would manage to sue another because there was some underlying musical aspect that had been "copied".
But even at this point it makes no sense that people can't play games with early Beatles songs. Why can't the "transformative" aspect that is protecting that instagram rippoff artist apply to some rapper who wants to redo Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds?
But in the interm I have a suggestion. That only an original artist unencumbered by contract can own a copyright for real any length of time? That minimally we end the ability of a corporation to own a copyright pretty well indefinitely as they do now. Make it like patents.If a corporation owns a copyright then they get 20 year and then lose it.
The beauty of this would be that things like Star Wars and Star Trek would now be going public domain and that would be cool. Does anyone here have any genuine hope that Disney Star Wars is going to be anything but a mixture of eye-candy and pablum?
Slashdot Mirror
There is exactly a zero percentage chance that I will ever use MongoDB in another project. On the surface it was great. I evangelized my friends about it and the whole NoSQL thing. But as time went by I realized that it wasn't made for people to use. Almost nothing was intuitive. For each new feature that I wanted I had to look up a tutorial and generally found a list of gotchas. If you design your project around MongoDB then it will work. But if you try to wrap MongoDB around your project then you are completely screwed.
Basically MongoDB halved the initial quarter of data storage design and programming. But as the project progressed the time spent screwing with Mongo went up exponentially until the project was shoved out the door and primary feature in version 2 was the complete removal of MongoDB.
I could make a mile long list of places the project stumbled. But a few key ones would be that there are no good data management tools for accessing a MongoDB. The second was that huge schema screwups were way too easy. It was very hard for programmers to get a mile high overview of how data being stored was being structured. That is a data layout was easy but putting the results into your head was really hard.
I am finding other NoSQL approaches are far superior. Things such as use of JSON, memcaches, MariaDB (or the excellent PostgreSQL) working together allows the project to dictate how things function instead of Mongo very quickly shaping the project architecture because of its marked strengths and weaknesses.
Redis is the environment presently being explored for version 4 and so far it is looking very interesting. But I am not joking when I say that at this point I would use access on windows as my backend datastore before I would use MongoDB.
Most of my computer friends write down the passwords but alter them in some pattern that works in their head. So ShittyIceCream8456 is ChapmansIceCream5684
I learned Objective-C so that I could deploy on iOS and otherwise wouldn't have given the language a second look. Then I discovered Cocos-2d which makes C++ on iOS, Android, etc very easy so boom I happily made the leap back to C++ and haven't looked back. There is pretty much zero chance that I will write more than a few dozen lines of Objective-C again in my life. There is also pretty much zero posibility that I will write any swift and I certainly have dodged the Java bullet for Android.
About the only problems that I have encountered are some artificial ones where some API features are cut off from me without a tiny bit of Objective-C or Java. But those tiny bits get wrapped in a C++ class and forgotten.
I don't know how many people that I know who use one of these things that I say over and over, it is just too juicy a target to hack. Way too juicy.
Why would the festival cooperate? Basically they are saying to their customer that their privacy is of no value. Not only is this cruel but it also indicates that the festival will probably sell on any data they have gathered on the festival goers.
It is this callous disregard for privacy that screams for laws that clamp down on any organization, including the police, from being able to gather data. Quite simply I want a law that prevents any organization from gathering data that isn't crucial for the transaction and to not be able to share that data without a warrant. Thus I want this reaching the point where the power company can only gather the minimum amount of data to send me a bill and deliver my service. I don't even want them noting my gender. Then I pretty much want them not to be able to share that data with their own marketing department, let alone "trusted third parties".
Other's wrongs don't make this sort of thing right.
I wonder how pissed off all the various countries of the world will be when they find out the details of what has been going on?
Can you imagine how pissed off some people like the French would be if it turned out the US meddled in a French election? Or stole technological secrets from one of their national darlings and handed it to US companies?
It is one thing to find out that there is a program called Operation French Fry that was to monitor French politics. But if it turns out that they did specific things on specific dates to specific people; then the gloves will come off.
The article cost problem is much like the computer book problem that I had in the days that I bought computer books. Nearly all computer books suck. Thus for every 20 computer books I bought maybe 1 really did it for me.
Thus I would much prefer sifting through stackoverflow at a small but steady burn instead of the probable rip off at a higher price. So while any given article might save me a pile of money most would be a waste of money.
Netflix is also a betterish model to compare to. Their cost to provide me Netflix is low. Thus they charge me far less than the stupid and dying networks/cable companies. I would be happy spending lots of little money instead of the occasional gouge.
The key problem is that I don't generally trust online payment systems. As a class I don't trust them to get it right, and I don't trust them to protect my data. Thus I would love a single system where I can trust it and then be able to dole money out from it in ways that I completely control.
In theory I just described paypal but the problem there is that they aren't really conducive to micropayments. They love their macro fees thought.
So the wall between me and anything like forrestor would be that even if I wanted the article I am loth to giving them my data more than giving them my money.
I also suspect that because of this barrier they have fewer customers and then have to charge more for each article.
I would be happy to pay stackoverflow a penny or so per use. But I won't pay them $2 per answer; even if that answer will save me a day's work.
I can't be that far off seeing how many people are willing to do in app purchases.
I recently read an article where blackberry's market share has stabilized. At 0.5%. While I would love to own a company with 0.5% market share of such a vast market that simply doesn't produce enough revenue to keep developing quality products.
So while all your arguments seem sound the simple fact is that the people have spoken. All the large organizations that I deal with that had mono-deals with BB for all their employees have abandoned those deals because their employees yelled that BB was basically employee abuse. Most of these companies will still give their employees a BB if they want one and there are the die hards who do.
But back to my main argument. An interesting factoid is that I have seen senior managers be issued a BB, take out the SIM and put it into a BB that they bought. This go get away from their IT department's disabling their phone.
The problem is that BB now probably almost 100% relies upon assholes for customers and to make a good phone they would have to screw that last 0.5% while waiting for some of the other 99% to realize that the phone wasn't abusive anymore.
I love the planitif bleating of the millionaires and billionaires who will complain that this is going to kill them and their "free" business models. The simple reality is that if I were offered a great micro payment system I would be happy to pay for quality websites. Not much but enough that the truly great websites would make money.
The crap SEO whores and whatnot of the type that have 50%+ advertising and sell my data wouldn't get a cent.
I will turn this feature on in a second and never look back.
From the moment I heard that they were going with QNX I knew that they were making a massive mistake. But when I said this all kinds of people jumped on me and got all buthurt defending QNX. I thought that Android was the way to go from the moment iPhone started to eat their lunch. My main problems with QNX were that the only person that I knew who loved it was a complete tool. Plus why not do effectively what Apple did when they adopted BSD as the core. Pick something that works and run with it. Apple had their old creaky OS, had just failed doing a deal with another OS company and then just jumped into BSD. That gave them magical powers such as being able to easily make the leap to Intel and ARM or whatever they want. Android would provide the same magic power of portability.
But I still think that BB doesn't know what their customers really want. They are still trying to please the IT departments, the telcos, and their enterprise customers. They should instead be trying to win over the individual even if that individual happens to be in the enterprise. So don't allow things like security profiles where the IT department can effectively trash the phone. Otherwise the modern executive will go buy an iPhone/Android and not put up with that crap.
Then there are other features that they should offer by default such as massive batteries. The BB users that I know would happily add a few mm to triple or more their battery life. I know there are addons but why not just make them a default option. BB people are on the road and can get fired or lose business if their phone goes dark. Plus screw all the touch screen BBs. People buy them for their keyboards. As long as the font is large enough for blind boomers the phone will sell in droves.
Most of us tinkerers with this sort of stuff can't afford $100 boards, especially if we are going to be leaving them behind in projects, or damaging them when our robotic submarine sinks, or our robotic plane flys over the horizon. Plus we might do nothing with them. Or we might ruin them while tinkering.
Thus offering a "better" board for only $20 more or $80 more is just stupid for the vast majority of those who are going to use the Pi. If anything the Pi is mostly going to be used as a really powerful Arduino.
Now I did read about one competitor who is planning on a $9 board that looked pretty competitive. But we'll see. The other thing that I think that people love about the Pi is that it is pretty damn open and boring. Some of the other boards just have a hint of trying to pull you into an ecosystem. Galileo would be a near perfect example of this. Instead of open and for everyone they played all kinds of games where they tried to get it into schools and other restrictions on the initial signups. I could just see some marketing person with their powerpoints behind that one.
I personally have exactly one complaint about the Raspberry Pi. All the main companies selling them use UPS to ship to Canada. UPS wildly rips Canadians off with crazy unannounced "brokerage fees" and often charges crap terriffs that I don't think exist. Because of this I would not be surprised if Raspberry Pi usage in Canada is unexpectedly low.
+3 imaginary votes in the category "burned"
I hate when I look up a local business which does have a website but some SEO whoring website directory with a crap listing comes up instead. In the 90s if you searched for anything you got someone whoreing whores or whoring a casio. Google came along and ate everyone's lunch by not showing us crap. Now when you search you get SEO whores. I don't ever want another answers.com, ask.com, quora.com, experts-exchange.com(which doesn't seem to come up much anymore), huffpo, gawker anything, sourceforge, or any other SEO whoring content free sites.
So who is going to eat google's lunch?
My wife had a thing for work that needed the Java browser plugin. Her work had solidly banned it so she came to me and asked if I could get it to work. I tried to explain that she basically wanted me to have a dump into my machine. But I took a snapshot of an existing windows test VM, installed it, did her thing, and then reverted to the previous java free snapshot.
Countdown to frivolous attempt at face saving lawsuit 10....9.....8.....
Do they not realize that this stuff is both continuously evolving and is also like water. When I was a kid people copied software by handing each other floppies. Each kid would amass as large a collection as they could afford floppies for in order to always have something that would interest others in a trade.
Then kids moved onto BBSs and in the very early 90s I could see kids stuffing those same floppies into machines connected to the internet. About the same time people would collect and share FTP sites some of which had over 100Mb of storage.
Since then it has been one technology after another ranging from Usenet, Kazaa, Mega, to Torrents. And those are just the sharing technologies. Then there is the data itself. It can be manipulated, streamed, encrypted, stenoed and so on. So while torrents seem to be a pretty good technology right now the only thing that having a government ban websites will do is to speed up the next evolution of the technology. In modern terms torrents are getting long in the tooth so, if anything, there are probably some superior contenders waiting in the wings right now.
But where this really stings is with legitimate traffic. For instance I had an old ISP that began "traffic shaping" to try and stop torrents. Except that a product I build used UDP streams which much have looked like torrents because suddenly they got very slow on my ISP. Plus I use a VPN for working from home and am not switching to the competitor (Bell Canada) because their leader just blah blahed about how evil VPNs are. If for some odd reason Canada banned VPNs I would literally have to move from the country.
The moment I read 1541 I had the memory of the smell of a new box of 5.24 floppies.
Mac Pro 2013 Quad core dual AMD video 12 GB/512GB.
It's primary purpose has been applying genetic algorithms to financial data. Long live OpenCL.
Now that I have packaged up that blackbox solution I am looking for new and interesting things to do with it. But whomever my next financial client is will probably want ML algorithms applied to financial data instead of GA.
This article doesn't argue for curtailing the NSA to benefit US businesses but in promoting these crazy trade agreements to make it illegal for other countries to avoid the NSA. The idea being that if people can't just avoid US companies to avoid the NSA then these other countries will have no competitive advantage.
I generally hated the proposed trade agreements but now I despise them.
Plus I am seeing highly promoted links to this article all over the web. I saw multiple attempts to get this on reddit when finally their army of shill voters managed to get it to the front page.
I went to some pretty crappy schools and would have relished an opportunity for some actual education. Things like coursera are in their very earliest days but if they had been available when I was around 15 I would have jumped in with both feet. It was about that time that I was realizing that the education I was receiving was so shockingly sub par that it was basically a joke. Now at this point in time nobody can exactly say what a coursera certificate is worth but I am certain that I would have joined together with like-minded friends and blown through many of the computer and math related ones.
How this would have helped would be somewhat vague. But it would have done at least four things. One, it would have made up for the horrifically terrible edcation we were getting. Two it would have given us the confidence to say that we actually knew a few things and to strive for something such as aiming for top tier schools. Three it would have filled a huge gap that our schools were leaving that we crudely filled by teaching ourselves to program using the crap we could find in libraries. And finally it might have actually impressed someone enough in higher education that we could have all made the leap into good schools.
Now this doesn't necessarily translate to success for massive amounts of children in schools. We were fairly self-motivated so we could do things then and would have done more with access to the resources of today.
But for the average kid today with full access to Coursera and all the Khans etc the path still isn't very clear as to where it could take them. I don't think that many people have a clear idea as to where all this is leading. For instance if a teenager were to do very well with MITs offerings does that improve their ability to get into MIT one iota; or any other school for that matter?
Then there is the whole other matter of who is putting education into the schools themselves. That tends to be wildly corrupt companies that have massive sales forces with bizarrely incestuous relationships with the school systems administrators. So to look at any failure of those technologies is meaningless as success was never to be measured by actual educational outcomes. The success that was aimed with those systems was to embed themselves as financial parasites through proprietary data strangleholds and contractual lock-ins.
Therefore I go back to examples of Coursera which is the type of system that I see doing an end run around the entire school educational system. I envision a day when online organizations are able to offer a certificate that has a known value and is held in some regard. I then see some of the best and brightest from the public school system starting to get that certification and then moving on to higher education without the consent or blessing from the public school system. If anything I foresee resistance where the public school system will try to insist(and generally fail) that the higher education system reject these certifications and not accept kids who have struck out on their own.
At this point I can see a generation of kids going into higher education and slowly push for the best of breed education that they were exposed to in the online education system from their higher education institutions. Here the change will be slower and will be more of an incorporation rather than a revolution.
But the moment the online systems start to have any value is exactly when I see the facade of terrible public education finally being forced to reform. People call for all kinds of things such as standardized testing, killing the unions, charter schools, testing of teachers, performance based pay, etc. I then hear all kinds of arguments and counter arguments for these changes. But what is very clear is that regardless of any of them actually working that the school system will never allow them as it is. What all the calls for these changes makes clear is that there is a huge demand that the school system be fixed. Online educationa
I am a massive fan of flipping the bird to my local power company. Thus I would make huge sacrifices to go completely off grid. I have fewer and fewer devices that demand 110 or 220 so having 110 plugs all over the house is something I could live without. I am fairly certain that nearly every device that I have could happily have either 12v or 5v supplied and run just fine. There could be one common corridor in the house that provided 110 for those things that demanded it.
But in my ideal universe the fewer utilities that I could have the better. If there was a way to get around gas and water then I would be wildly happy.
I just have zero interest in giving a chunk of my money to a bunch of shareholders and overpaid executives ever month.
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
No
and a big fat No.
Does Netflix want a competitor to wipe them out? Cause this is how you get a competitor to wipe you out!
To me one of my pet peeves with patents is that often people are patenting the obvious even though patents are supposed to be non-obvious. So if say the em-drive were to be brought to market as a high efficiency thruster it makes sense to give a patent to the brilliant inventors. It doesn't make any sense to give a patent to the person who puts it into an airplane, or space-craft, or a toy, or anything that would obviously be made better by having a thrustless thruster in it.
To me the same roughly applies to music. When new genres of music come out and new musical technologies arrive If someone composes an entire piece then they should be granted some copywrite over their entire song. But a single riff or other short distinctive part should not be copywritten. And there are many examples of where one artist would manage to sue another because there was some underlying musical aspect that had been "copied".
But even at this point it makes no sense that people can't play games with early Beatles songs. Why can't the "transformative" aspect that is protecting that instagram rippoff artist apply to some rapper who wants to redo Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds?
But in the interm I have a suggestion. That only an original artist unencumbered by contract can own a copyright for real any length of time? That minimally we end the ability of a corporation to own a copyright pretty well indefinitely as they do now. Make it like patents.If a corporation owns a copyright then they get 20 year and then lose it.
The beauty of this would be that things like Star Wars and Star Trek would now be going public domain and that would be cool. Does anyone here have any genuine hope that Disney Star Wars is going to be anything but a mixture of eye-candy and pablum?