A year ago I argued that the whole "Big Data" thing was just a buzzword to make DBAs feel better about themselves. Basically big data is when you use statistics 101 and some halfway decent modern computers to do what you should have been doing all along. Some Big Data sales blowhards would use terms like ML which usually turned out to be just statistics 201.
But after saying this I had a bunch of people jump all over me screaming that I didn't have a clue. About the only intelligent comment was someone asking what a DBA was.
For the average user XP is generally good enough. They want a browser, maybe an older copy of Word, and the ability to print. That is about it. So if you have something that works and is good enough then why would anyone change. I know people will apples who have asked me which version of Windows they are running and people with Windows who ask me to "install apple". So explaining to these people the nuanced differences between XP, Vista, 7, 8, or 8.1 (or even Mac OS X) is nearly impossible.
Also these people typically will budget 100% of the technology budget to getting a better mobile device. So they aren't upgrading their hardware which is often a 6 year old laptop with a battery good for 5 minutes and they are happy with it.
I recently upgraded my Mac OS X to Mavericks only because I needed the latest copy of XCode and it wouldn't run on my two version behind OS and I am a programmer. I won't argue that Mavericks isn't better than its predecessors but if a fairly hard core user such as myself can't be bothered to upgrade unless forced how on earth can you convince Granny?
A great example of just how odd people's priorities can be would be with my mother. I switched her from an Old Ubuntu to the latest and her number one gripe was that her icons moved a bit; she didn't not appreciate any of the many benefits of the far newer OS such as stability or speed. Apple does have the upgrade system set up to be fairly painless with a low chance of changing things like the positioning of icons so that shows some awareness of the consumer.
But where I am leading with all this is that if MS wants people to upgrade they need to make a more compelling case. Most people would be happy with Word 97 and Windows XP (except when they got.docx files sent to them) so what killer feature does a newer OS have? Generally the only killer feature is that older applications are starting to not work with XP and thus it is a new meaning to killer feature but that is just abusive to the consumer not a positive reason. I can sort of see why MS tried Metro in that they were trying to make something new. The reality is that the new operating systems don't do anything new. They have these huge CPUs and massive GPUs and all they do is slightly slicker movements of the same old interfaces. How about some AI. How about an AI word processor that you give it 5 samples plus your new content and it coughs together a damn good document that might need one quick sanity check? That would set sales records.
I remember back in the early 90s when most C++ programmers used Borland. Everyone wanted to get into Windows programming but even Hello World was a pain in the ass. Borland had this stupid OWL system. Then a new thing Visual Studio 1.0 came out with a few templates and then this MFC thing that made you look like a programming superstar. Within a year I didn't know a single person still using Borland C++. That was a compelling feature. The same with Word Perfect. Word was an interesting product but it wasn't until you really needed Wysiwyg for laser printers(and other new not dotmatrix printers) that everyone made the leap into Windows and Word. Almost overnight Word Perfect for DOS just wasn't the cool thing.
So where I made the switch to Mac was because it was BSD based and very similar to the linux environment where I deploy my applications. Plus for iOS app development there is no other choice. Those are compelling reasons. What positive compelling reason does anyone have to switch from XP that doesn't require a technically nuanced discussion?
Moving to Python
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The New PHP
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· Score: 4, Informative
I have build some very large PHP based web systems(over the last 10 years) and recently dipped my toes into the Python pond. My python skills might be a tiny fraction of my PHP or C++ skills and I doubt that I am using Python anywhere near its potential, yet my productivity is already much higher and getting faster. I am waiting for there to be a catch but so far I haven't found one.
It is shaping up to be one of these things where my only regret is not switching sooner.
I was a huge defender of PHP for a long time but that time is over. There are interesting things like HHVM that are another bandaid for PHP but I am sick of making PHP work. I am sick of typing all those stupid dollar signs. I'll just say what so many have said before, "Python is like typing pseudo code, except you are actually coding." I don't look at my python and shudder.
PHP reminds me of some of my own projects where I changed course many times leaving strange little architectures and changes in philosophy. The longer the project goes on and the more it changes direction the more debris it leaves behind. It is not necessarily broken just sort of all just off.
Where Python is a tiny problem with the web is that setting up a development environment took me a tiny bit more work than the usual LAMP setup. This might make it harder for beginners but maybe that is a good thing. I don't mind leaving the beginners back in PHP land.
Why not publish many of the specifications so that hackers can cobble together a mission control and then make something happen? I suspect that if you put out an application that you would get 1,000,000 engineers who would drop what they are doing to help out for free. Literally you would get 1,000,000 engineers.
The Mars missions absolutely do not use QNX, they use vxWorks; a completely different OS. Plus I don't think that QNX or Apple is going to be used for brakes, just the in car stuff.
Keep in mind that as cars go driverless the car will become people's livingrooms; I want an Apple in my livingroom not a playbook.
I would think that they largely wouldn't in that few people would try to hook up their phone on a test drive. But if they did then they would find it hard. But that wasn't the worst. It was that the system would offer to hook up to emergency services. I presume that it would phone 911 if you crashed. But I don't like crappy cars making phone calls. The last thing I want happening is that I back into a lamp post and it calls 911 in some area known for its jackbooted thugs.
So you think, no problem I just say no to that option; except that every time you start the car it would speak up and remind you that you hadn't selected that option.
I am not an audiophile and am generally happy with any working radio in a car. But if for some reason I was forced to have a Ford I would spend whatever it took to get that piece of crap out of the car even if it just meant no radio at all. But I am willing to bet that the worst pile of crap with bluetooth from the bottom shelf of Walmart would be a dozen times better.
So to answer your question about a test drive, I suspect that most people would at best turn on the radio and ask, does it have bluetooth, and be happy that it did. I am a tech person and still can't figure out most car systems on the first go. To set my mother's clock the up and down is the station selection nob. But other up/down options are chosen with different buttons; most cars systems suck but Sync took it to a whole new level of bad.
Ford goes from Microsoft's sync (which most people call MS Stink) and signs up with the zombie corpse of a phone company blackberry. I wonder which genius company (who's shares are about to get another boost) will team up with Apple? Tesla maybe? Fiat? Ford having Blackberry will probably cause exactly 3 customers to pick ford. But Apple will attract hoards of people not only can they put an apple in their pocket but they can get into the pocket of an apple.
This sounds not like it will protect your data but will keep crypto researchers from finding that the NSA has put a back door into the product. Quite simply if it comes from the US, Canada, Australia, or the UK the product is not to be trusted. Which is sad as I am a Canadian and would love to make crypto products but at this point wouldn't trust even a company that had US citizens working for it let along based in the US.
This might be the most solid argument against these spy agencies, whatever "attacks" they are preventing, and whatever manipulations they are doing do not possibly equal the damage they have and are doing to the tech industries in our countries. I am willing to bet that the damage done to Cisco, google, IBM, and others will easily total the financial damage done in 9/11. Plus in all likelihood the plans for the next 9/11 will work just fine as they fully know not to trust any US comm technology.
This mega tool will make a prediction. Right now I think it is around 3 years from major design to deployment in the car industry. So let's say 1 year of fighting with QNX and BB, a portion of a year of thinking they are going to fix it and then QNX is taken behind the Ford woodshed and Old Yeller'd. So if somewhere around 18-24 months post deployment Ford wants QNX gone it will be at most 3 years before they have flushed it from their cars.
So I will make you a bet that roughly around 4 years after the first Ford has QNX that the same model car will not have QNX.
But I have a more logical reason for this. As cars become more automated and cruise control starts to take control (at least in straight lines on the highway) then the whole car as living room will become critical. But even before that the car companies will be thinking these thoughts about cars a few years down the road. QNX just won't have the apps and programming base that will make it an interesting platform (seeing that you can't get Netflix on a Playbook; and flix doesn't count) this sort of thing alone will push Ford to at least Android. I suspect that some cool car company will manage to partner with Apple to squeeze a super slick apple interface into their car at some point; but for now you can't have a car computer system as an important feature that is blown out of the water by someone's late model iPad. This is important as then people will not see an in car computer as a feature but as a waste of money and will spend their commute using their iPad to shop for their next non-Ford car.
Bureaucrat the world round fear being found out as being the useless tools they usually are. Spending lots of other people's money is fun. So the ITER is a dream come true. With a 20 year plus delay before they hit the on switch an established technocrat can basically turn a project such as the ITER into a MBA amusement park. With a budget that bit, nobody should notice all the conferences that are attended, officials wined and dined, and other expense account shenanigans that are possible.
But maybe my ravings are just that. But they are a hypothesis that can be tested. The worst thing that could happen to ITER would be that someone else cooks up a working fusion reactor using jukebox parts or for under a billion dollars. The second worst thing would be that some low-life engineer or physicist publishes a paper basically saying that ITER is about as likely to create viable fusion as Deloreans are to travel through time. So my test would be to see how much effort has been expended over the years to shut down viable projects and to silence critics.
The key is that if I am a genuine scientist then I want to see working fusion and I would applaud anyone who beat me by 20 years. But if all I care about is my little empire then it is the last thing.
My key complaint (of many years) of ITER is that it didn't have any significant fusiony milestones for a very long time as in a career finishing long time.
Then you have the simple sense of power that must have come with managing that project. You would have grant money by the truckload; so think of the best and the brightest grovelling at your feet hoping you will throw them (and their institutions) a few crumbs. I have been in many a scientist's lab which might have had a few hundred thousand in hardware an a few graduate students working for peanuts while those scientists desperately fought to keep the trickle of grants coming in. A blessing from the gods of ITER would be something potentially very corrupting.
If I were the Emperor Of Science, I would sell the ITER for scrap and disperse its budget to 10,000 different fusion projects with any that showed actual physical progress qualifying for further rounds of funding.
I am certainly not a physicist but I have worked on projects that smelled like ITER with distant nebulous goals and people who use big numbers to impress. But the reality is that these projects often get caught in catch-22 engineering (which is why they use big numbers to distract from the fundamental problems). Something like any material that is strong enough to take the pressure will melt and any material that won't melt can't take the pressure. The reality is that no amount of engineering bandaids and ducktape will solve the problem, the fundamental solution is flawed.
I can remember one data communications project. Basically they eliminated any kind of error correction from the transmission to enable crazy high speed bursts of data. But it only worked over a distance of about 5 feet. After that the noise started to start knocking off bits. At 1000 feet the data was untrustworthy. At around 1500 feet the data was clearly useless. This system needed to communicate over a huge distance. The simple problem was that they had promised to fit more data than such a low frequency could handle at that narrow a band for that short a time. There had to be error correction and it was going to eat bandwidth. But they had promised X data in Y time and X/2 in Y time was unacceptable. Then to top it off the people wiring it all together sucked.
I think that project lasted around 8 years; 7 of which were just basically trying to put a gallon of milk in a pint container.
I'm not joking when I say that I don't like QNX because a guy I worked with who was a mega tool loved it so much. Basically he was exactly wrong about everything. His entire life is a logical not.
To give an example, Nortel hired him so I told people who were invested in Nortel that they needed to sell their shares immediately (which all but one did, also not insider information as he posted this on his personal website). Any hiring process that didn't screen out this living parasite of oxygen was a deeply flawed process. Within maybe 3 months Nortel was in serious trouble. This guy later became a blackberry server expert; a sure sign that blackberry (riding high at the time) was in serious trouble.
So it might seem petty of me to not even look at QNX but it just that this guy is has a near superpower for getting involved with the exact wrong solution just before it explodes or is just always has been wrong.
But to be more analytical, Blackberry has always made fairly good technological things but they seem to focus on the wrong things. Their products, for instance, seem to have been built to please the telcos and big companies. This might seem like good business on the surface but the reality is that they are now selling well under 1% in the US. Without focusing on the consumer they were damaged by the first company that really did (Apple) and then finished off by all the subsequent companies(Samsung, HTC, etc) that realized that apple's customer focus was a good idea worth emulating. So I can envision a Ford computer system that when demonstrated will potentially rock our boats and the press will write things like "redefines the car computer interface." but once the reviewers get their own hands on it the lines will be more like "Takes the worst aspects of the iDrive and mixes in the worst aspects of Tuberculous."
On top of all that will Ford be able to keep Blackberry from taking one more kick at the can and somehow favour Blackberry phones as it seemed the early Sync system favoured Microsoft phones?
A great measure of the Playbook's true rating (in that people are still religeous about their RIM crap) is that one group found that almost zero people switch from a modern tablet to the playbook and those who did went back. And that everyone who switches from the playbook to another tablet stays away from RIM. The same with BB phones. This is well evidenced by their market share. I suspect that there will be a goodly number of diehards who will have to have their BBs pried from their dead cold hands but why would Ford think that such a tarnished brand is something they should associate themselves with?
Sync was so bad that I wouldn't buy a Ford. I rented a handful of 2013 model Fords with the Sync system. I had an iPhone 3GS and an iPhone 4. The stupid Sync system was a huge battle. Syncing just wasn't a clean process. It did work but smooth as silk is not how I would describe it. But then it got worse. It asked if I would like to set up the emergency something. I presume this was an automated 911 call if I crashed. Well actually no I don't want the computer calling the police; I'll make phone calls of that nature thank you very much. And in today's world it is unlikely that if I were to crash that there aren't 200 people with cellphones that will call anyway. But lastly the system was so crappy I doubt that it would call 911 but would call 912 or 999 thinking that we were in the UK.
But you are probably thinking no big deal opt out and you are fine. But nope after opting out, every time the stupid car started a woman's voice would blah blah about the emergency system not being activated. I looked in the manual and found no solution, so I went on the net and found no solution. So there is no way on earth that I would buy a Ford. Plus my sister had minor damage (but enough to partially disable the car) in a recent model fusion hybrid that took nearly 5 months to get the parts in. So she was out a near new car for 5 months; the whole point of buying a new car vs nursing a 10 year old car along is that the new car saves you the stress of breakdowns and any maintenance issues that cost anything or at least are hard.
But now Ford is leaving the abusive relationship they no doubt enjoyed with Microsoft and now they are getting into bed with the $2 whore that they found in a Ottawa brothel. I couldn't think of a technology company (after leaving microsoft) that I would rather partner with less than Blackberry. I fought with their stupid Playbook tablet and I have watched people fight with their stupid new QNX phones. I know people who are long term BB customers (often via work) who deeply resent the latest models. So why would you pick a company that is on the rocks and that people respect less than the aforementioned $2 whore?
But oddly enough the main reason that I think that QNX is a complete bowl of stupid is that I have known exactly one programmer who loved QNX and he was a useless tool. Actually worse than a useless tool; he was one of those developers that management thinks is a rocket surgeon but all he does is make things way worse. So if he tells you to cut the blue wire, not only should you not cut the blue wire but you should assume that cutting any wires is probably the exact wrong thing to do. So keep in mind that this tool probably thinks that QNX in a Ford is a cool idea.
With all the wonderful NSA revelations coming out, it has become clear that there is a growing, and eventually huge, market for non US communications hardware. Nokia is completely blowing this buy getting into bed with Microsoft. They should buy out Blackberry and make a line of uber encryption phones and then not cave into any government demands to weaken the encryption.
With Qt Nokia dipped their toes into the open source waters and thus should be able to understand that they could publish their security code which would then make people even happier to use their phones to keep the nosy out of their business.
But there are so many better things to crap on them about. They aren't quite Rob Ford laughably bad but they are close; why just today this whole Lumina phone leaking data to Microsoft and even fighting with regulators over it. This is leaking people's text messages to MS; that is just bonkers anti-customer behavior.
I have been developing for around 25 years (Half using MS products) and probably know or knowish 500 developers. So at least locally this is a pretty damn good sample. I used the word "serious" to differentiate people who are programmers and people who program for their job. Typical government/bank programmers that I have met had nearly zero passion (as defined by ever programming for fun, ever) and they were happily using MS products or even worse, things like PowerBuilder.
But people doing the cooler stuff such as robotics, machine learning, or running servers that were core to generating piles of dough were swimming in the Open Source ocean.
So maybe I live in some kind of Open Source Mecca, but I doubt it.
I even know teenagers who are hard core gamers with the typical glowing tricked out gaming PCs who are dying to make the switch to Linux. They dream of the day when all of Steam is Linux Linux Linux. That sample is admittedly much smaller.
Under certain circumstances I would even recommend MS. But it is my experience that the bulk of people who develop web or server based services using MS technologies are typically people who went to some tech type "collage" and are certified in their technology of choice. Often this is the only technology that they know. So actually I would say it a little different if you have one clue you may or may not use MS products; but if you have two clues (i.e. have been exposed to something else) then you typically don't.
The few exceptions to this rule would be people who are forced to use MS products by a client as the client has firmly declared "We are a Microsoft shop around here."
A very simple test of this rule would be that I have never seen a developer with more than two years professional experience switch from Open Source to Microsoft. But I have seen a huge number of people with any amount of MS first experience make the leap. But with all these tech schools churning out MS only trainees MS does not need to worry..... much.
I don't think that I know a single person who has mentioned the MS antitrust issue in maybe 5-10 years, except to mention that it might be happening to Google next. Tech people that I know generally hate MS for just abusing the crap out of their customers. Things like pushing out new operating systems to replace perfectly good operating systems. Things like rehashing Microsoft office over and over with their only "innovations" being things like the ribbon bar.
But if anything it would be the cost of licensing and the licenses themselves. I separate those two because just managing the licenses is a pain. The general consensus is that they make it a pain so that you get the all encompassing licenses that are "easier" so that now you just pay MS a tax on being in business.
Nearly 100% of the people that I know who are serious programmers have entirely moved their deployed products to OS solutions such as Linux and MariaDB and their development is generally done on an Apple or Linux PC as those most resemble the deployment platform.
I don't actually hate Microsoft and at one point was using Windows and Visual Studio to program.net desktop/web applications that used IIS and MSSQL. But then slowly but surely I migrated product by product to something Open Source until I realized that I was only using Windows XP because of inertia so I then dumped even that.
But for me the Open Source switch wasn't out of some religeous love of Open Source but that each one of the products was just way better than the MS equivalent for my use. Clients were perfectly happy to pay for any license issues so money wasn't even an issue, just a huge bonus. So it wasn't just that Open Source was better but that MS was actively becoming worse. Things like.net were bloating as they tried to tie every stupid MS product together in an attempt to trap me in their high priced eco system.
So I don't hate Microsoft (except for when they lie cheat and steal to prevent opensource from giving them the boot in large customers environment) I just don't have any interest in using any of their products. So even if all MS products were completely free and they stopped being bastards when places like Munich make the switch to OSS, I still wouldn't use them. In the same way that I wouldn't switch to a diet of low quality food even if it were free.
Some programmers are also terrible and I don't listen to them on matters involving programming let alone linguistics. I have always thought of learning another language and learning another programming languages as similar experiences. At first you try to tie the words almost one for one from one language to another. But once you become fluent you just start doing things differently. But just like anyone going from no language to their first language, they must first learn the basic concepts. But with human languages you do know that there will be a word for car, bus, airplane etc. But a language used by a primitive culture might have one word for airplanes, while, say, English has many many words, (biplane, monoplane, fighter jet, prop plane, etc) the same is in many programming languages. R focuses on concepts while matlab focuses on others as I suspect that people from a pearl diving culture would have shockingly nuanced words for things relating to underwater.
Then you get other nuances such as not using a programming language for long enough generally results in that language becoming rustier and rustier until it is gone. Yet you generally can relearn a forgotten language fairly quickly. An interesting experience would be to see if people even activate the same brain areas relearning a forgotten programming language as those used relearning a forgotten spoken language.
But even within a single spoken language you have cultural differences. People in LA don't generally small talk about the weather, but will go on and on about the traffic during their commute. But in the North East people can talk endlessly about the weather, and in my area the joke goes, "If you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes." The same with programming languages, using C/C++ as an example you have embedded programmers who obsess over the limitations of their environment and can pack a data-structure with bit for bit perfection; while someone working on a desktop might obsess with making their application installation friendly; and a mobile developer might obsess over screen resolution/sizes. Needless to say while the vast majority of their vocabulary is similar their use of the language can be wildly different yet mutually comprehensible.
Now there might be one tiny catch. A programming language is combination of creativity and some mathematics. Thus the best brain comparison might be to someone doing poetry, someone writing a wordy financial report, and programming.
So my question to any programmer who doubts that spoken languages and programming languages are not hugely overlapping in the brain is: "What part of the brain do you suggest we are using to program? The brain parts that control our bowels?"
The worst one will be politically connected neighborhoods that presently have tons of traffic because these people built their houses in a high traffic area. So they will demand (and get) that the government mandate that driverless cars detour around their precious streets.
Also this will be another opportunity for the narcissistic egomaniacs that run government to have us serfs part like the red sea when they are driving by.
This will happen, and it will make national/international news, and there will be a bunch of asswipes all going, "I told you so, these automated cars were going to be the death of us all." But this will be in the face of driverless cars killing so few people that it might be single digits nationwide.
Oh and I forgot to mention all the "experts" they will get on the news who will try to turn driverless car safety into an issue; when in fact any changes that they propose will probably kill even more people.
The simple problem is that information is power. The typical psychopath who runs for political office or backstabs their way into top civil servant positions know this in their very cores. They want this power and they don't want us to have this power. This is why freedom of information requests can be the end of governments and many civil servants jobs and this is why they do their damnedest to fight them or exempt data from them.
A great example of this would be when the receipts for UK ministers got leaked that it instantly resulted in political career loss, criminal charges, and probably helped with a change in government. Obviously this was powerful data that when leaked resulted in a massive positive for society. Yet the government claims that this data is dangerous to have public; yet they can't show any damage that came from the one time it was made public. Plus the only claim with any real basis (account numbers and potentially credit card info) is nonsense as those could be blacked out with little loss to the public. But there has been no move to make this data public and an investigation into who leaked the data. If they did catch the person I suspect that they would end up facing penalties greater than those who were caught stealing from the government.
My personal view is that nothing that government does should be kept secret with the single exception of personal medical records. That basically if you work for or interact with the government that it should be 100% open. Some records could be sealed for a year or so such as undercover operations but that should require a special judge to approve and even then should have a time limit.
I see this as no different than if I owned a company and one of my employees told me that I couldn't see a contract they were negotiating for my company. If any employee said no to any information request I made then I would say, "No problem sorry to bother you." And then with security I would have them thrown out of the office while IT changed every password they might know and a forensic investigator would be pouring over their records before the day was over. Plus I would criminally charge them with the slightest wrong doing found. Whereas if an employee came to me saying they screwed up I would be quite forgiving and work with them through the problem.
Keeping things in the light is always the best policy. But too many government officials seem to think that we can't handle the truth. The reality is that the violent reaction they get when leaks do happen is that we are usually more annoyed with the coverup than the actual events. Benghazi would be perfect: it was layers of lying that brought about those events, events in a violent country where violence should be expected, and then the cover-up after. Few people would have been surprised that strange things happened in Libya, so covering them up was just stupid.
So no, this whole government getting more information is a terrible terrible thing. These people have long proven themselves to be 100% untrustworthy and quite hostile to our wellbeing. What has kept them from doing their worst was a combination of their having bad information combined with leaks that gave us great information. But now they can look at any "dissident" who by definition will be anyone questioning their behavior including normal political opposition, and not only figure out their entire network of supporters but as any mathematician will tell you with a network is that there are a few key nodes. Thus they will be able to effectively destroy any opposition not through routing out every little dissident but by highly selective targeting of very few people causing the network to disintegrate. To use the American revolution as an example I suspect that the British would have loved to find the few financially key supporters and throw them into the Boston harbor. If they had the lists of supporters that we now know as founding fathers the revolution could have been ended with one afternoon of hangings. And I am talking pre-teaparty; by reading their correspondence they could have seen trouble brewing, and with a few trumped up charges kept the ink off the declaration of independence.
Quite simply the absolute control should not be handed over to the computer. Basically doing something like pulling on the handbrake should basically physically cut the throttle. Or stomping on the brakes should activate a simple solenoid that cuts the throttle. This mechanism should be 100% separate from the computer and override most computer outputs.
I see this as critical in a driverless car. There needs to be a way for people to pull the plug and there needs to be a way for people to phone in an emergency. So if someone is lying in a pothole being run over by car after car, or the bridge is failing, there needs to be a way for 911 to say that a stretch of road is now cut off. The key is that this cannot be ab abusable by officials. I do not want my car grinding to a halt because the police are looking for some runaway or a bank was robbed.
Quite simply the CEO controls the bulk of the information flowing to and from any groups such as the board of directors, the shareholders, the "executive compensation committee". etc.
Basically you have two factoids at play: One is that the CEO and those immediately surrounding them often even control such things as the candidates for board of directors election and those on the executive compensation committee. So there you have quite a bit of bias. Then after that you have literally nobody above the CEO. In theory board of directors answer to the shareholders and the CEO answers to the board but if the shareholders don't pick who is nominated for the board and the board is owned by the CEO then the CEO pay is limited to just how greedy he thinks he can be; not limited by other factors such as actually deserving his pay.
So when you are being so foolish as to try and find a correlation between CEO pay and their performance then you are wasting your time. The only correlation should be between their pay and a combination of their level of narcissism and their level of psychopathy.
What this quite simply calls for is that shareholders need to have vastly more influence on who is nominated to a corporate board. Another thing that this screams for is a relationship between the typical pay within a company and the top executive pay. Quite simply the higher this ratio then the higher the taxes should be on the top executives. This way you can exploit the greed of the top executives in that they will rationalize paying the typical employee much more so as to lower their personal tax burden.
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A year ago I argued that the whole "Big Data" thing was just a buzzword to make DBAs feel better about themselves. Basically big data is when you use statistics 101 and some halfway decent modern computers to do what you should have been doing all along. Some Big Data sales blowhards would use terms like ML which usually turned out to be just statistics 201.
But after saying this I had a bunch of people jump all over me screaming that I didn't have a clue. About the only intelligent comment was someone asking what a DBA was.
For the average user XP is generally good enough. They want a browser, maybe an older copy of Word, and the ability to print. That is about it. So if you have something that works and is good enough then why would anyone change. I know people will apples who have asked me which version of Windows they are running and people with Windows who ask me to "install apple". So explaining to these people the nuanced differences between XP, Vista, 7, 8, or 8.1 (or even Mac OS X) is nearly impossible.
.docx files sent to them) so what killer feature does a newer OS have? Generally the only killer feature is that older applications are starting to not work with XP and thus it is a new meaning to killer feature but that is just abusive to the consumer not a positive reason. I can sort of see why MS tried Metro in that they were trying to make something new. The reality is that the new operating systems don't do anything new. They have these huge CPUs and massive GPUs and all they do is slightly slicker movements of the same old interfaces. How about some AI. How about an AI word processor that you give it 5 samples plus your new content and it coughs together a damn good document that might need one quick sanity check? That would set sales records.
Also these people typically will budget 100% of the technology budget to getting a better mobile device. So they aren't upgrading their hardware which is often a 6 year old laptop with a battery good for 5 minutes and they are happy with it.
I recently upgraded my Mac OS X to Mavericks only because I needed the latest copy of XCode and it wouldn't run on my two version behind OS and I am a programmer. I won't argue that Mavericks isn't better than its predecessors but if a fairly hard core user such as myself can't be bothered to upgrade unless forced how on earth can you convince Granny?
A great example of just how odd people's priorities can be would be with my mother. I switched her from an Old Ubuntu to the latest and her number one gripe was that her icons moved a bit; she didn't not appreciate any of the many benefits of the far newer OS such as stability or speed. Apple does have the upgrade system set up to be fairly painless with a low chance of changing things like the positioning of icons so that shows some awareness of the consumer.
But where I am leading with all this is that if MS wants people to upgrade they need to make a more compelling case. Most people would be happy with Word 97 and Windows XP (except when they got
I remember back in the early 90s when most C++ programmers used Borland. Everyone wanted to get into Windows programming but even Hello World was a pain in the ass. Borland had this stupid OWL system. Then a new thing Visual Studio 1.0 came out with a few templates and then this MFC thing that made you look like a programming superstar. Within a year I didn't know a single person still using Borland C++. That was a compelling feature. The same with Word Perfect. Word was an interesting product but it wasn't until you really needed Wysiwyg for laser printers(and other new not dotmatrix printers) that everyone made the leap into Windows and Word. Almost overnight Word Perfect for DOS just wasn't the cool thing.
So where I made the switch to Mac was because it was BSD based and very similar to the linux environment where I deploy my applications. Plus for iOS app development there is no other choice. Those are compelling reasons. What positive compelling reason does anyone have to switch from XP that doesn't require a technically nuanced discussion?
I have build some very large PHP based web systems(over the last 10 years) and recently dipped my toes into the Python pond. My python skills might be a tiny fraction of my PHP or C++ skills and I doubt that I am using Python anywhere near its potential, yet my productivity is already much higher and getting faster. I am waiting for there to be a catch but so far I haven't found one.
It is shaping up to be one of these things where my only regret is not switching sooner.
I was a huge defender of PHP for a long time but that time is over. There are interesting things like HHVM that are another bandaid for PHP but I am sick of making PHP work. I am sick of typing all those stupid dollar signs. I'll just say what so many have said before, "Python is like typing pseudo code, except you are actually coding." I don't look at my python and shudder.
PHP reminds me of some of my own projects where I changed course many times leaving strange little architectures and changes in philosophy. The longer the project goes on and the more it changes direction the more debris it leaves behind. It is not necessarily broken just sort of all just off.
Where Python is a tiny problem with the web is that setting up a development environment took me a tiny bit more work than the usual LAMP setup. This might make it harder for beginners but maybe that is a good thing. I don't mind leaving the beginners back in PHP land.
I was mentally including the engineering types such as ham radio nuts who, might not have a degree, have serious skills in antennas and whatnot.
Why not publish many of the specifications so that hackers can cobble together a mission control and then make something happen? I suspect that if you put out an application that you would get 1,000,000 engineers who would drop what they are doing to help out for free. Literally you would get 1,000,000 engineers.
The Mars missions absolutely do not use QNX, they use vxWorks; a completely different OS. Plus I don't think that QNX or Apple is going to be used for brakes, just the in car stuff. Keep in mind that as cars go driverless the car will become people's livingrooms; I want an Apple in my livingroom not a playbook.
I agree. I suspect that the same people who made ActiveX made this.
I would think that they largely wouldn't in that few people would try to hook up their phone on a test drive. But if they did then they would find it hard. But that wasn't the worst. It was that the system would offer to hook up to emergency services. I presume that it would phone 911 if you crashed. But I don't like crappy cars making phone calls. The last thing I want happening is that I back into a lamp post and it calls 911 in some area known for its jackbooted thugs.
So you think, no problem I just say no to that option; except that every time you start the car it would speak up and remind you that you hadn't selected that option.
I am not an audiophile and am generally happy with any working radio in a car. But if for some reason I was forced to have a Ford I would spend whatever it took to get that piece of crap out of the car even if it just meant no radio at all. But I am willing to bet that the worst pile of crap with bluetooth from the bottom shelf of Walmart would be a dozen times better.
So to answer your question about a test drive, I suspect that most people would at best turn on the radio and ask, does it have bluetooth, and be happy that it did. I am a tech person and still can't figure out most car systems on the first go. To set my mother's clock the up and down is the station selection nob. But other up/down options are chosen with different buttons; most cars systems suck but Sync took it to a whole new level of bad.
Ford goes from Microsoft's sync (which most people call MS Stink) and signs up with the zombie corpse of a phone company blackberry. I wonder which genius company (who's shares are about to get another boost) will team up with Apple? Tesla maybe? Fiat? Ford having Blackberry will probably cause exactly 3 customers to pick ford. But Apple will attract hoards of people not only can they put an apple in their pocket but they can get into the pocket of an apple.
This sounds not like it will protect your data but will keep crypto researchers from finding that the NSA has put a back door into the product. Quite simply if it comes from the US, Canada, Australia, or the UK the product is not to be trusted. Which is sad as I am a Canadian and would love to make crypto products but at this point wouldn't trust even a company that had US citizens working for it let along based in the US.
This might be the most solid argument against these spy agencies, whatever "attacks" they are preventing, and whatever manipulations they are doing do not possibly equal the damage they have and are doing to the tech industries in our countries. I am willing to bet that the damage done to Cisco, google, IBM, and others will easily total the financial damage done in 9/11. Plus in all likelihood the plans for the next 9/11 will work just fine as they fully know not to trust any US comm technology.
This mega tool will make a prediction. Right now I think it is around 3 years from major design to deployment in the car industry. So let's say 1 year of fighting with QNX and BB, a portion of a year of thinking they are going to fix it and then QNX is taken behind the Ford woodshed and Old Yeller'd. So if somewhere around 18-24 months post deployment Ford wants QNX gone it will be at most 3 years before they have flushed it from their cars.
So I will make you a bet that roughly around 4 years after the first Ford has QNX that the same model car will not have QNX.
But I have a more logical reason for this. As cars become more automated and cruise control starts to take control (at least in straight lines on the highway) then the whole car as living room will become critical. But even before that the car companies will be thinking these thoughts about cars a few years down the road. QNX just won't have the apps and programming base that will make it an interesting platform (seeing that you can't get Netflix on a Playbook; and flix doesn't count) this sort of thing alone will push Ford to at least Android. I suspect that some cool car company will manage to partner with Apple to squeeze a super slick apple interface into their car at some point; but for now you can't have a car computer system as an important feature that is blown out of the water by someone's late model iPad. This is important as then people will not see an in car computer as a feature but as a waste of money and will spend their commute using their iPad to shop for their next non-Ford car.
Bureaucrat the world round fear being found out as being the useless tools they usually are. Spending lots of other people's money is fun. So the ITER is a dream come true. With a 20 year plus delay before they hit the on switch an established technocrat can basically turn a project such as the ITER into a MBA amusement park. With a budget that bit, nobody should notice all the conferences that are attended, officials wined and dined, and other expense account shenanigans that are possible.
But maybe my ravings are just that. But they are a hypothesis that can be tested. The worst thing that could happen to ITER would be that someone else cooks up a working fusion reactor using jukebox parts or for under a billion dollars. The second worst thing would be that some low-life engineer or physicist publishes a paper basically saying that ITER is about as likely to create viable fusion as Deloreans are to travel through time. So my test would be to see how much effort has been expended over the years to shut down viable projects and to silence critics.
The key is that if I am a genuine scientist then I want to see working fusion and I would applaud anyone who beat me by 20 years. But if all I care about is my little empire then it is the last thing.
My key complaint (of many years) of ITER is that it didn't have any significant fusiony milestones for a very long time as in a career finishing long time.
Then you have the simple sense of power that must have come with managing that project. You would have grant money by the truckload; so think of the best and the brightest grovelling at your feet hoping you will throw them (and their institutions) a few crumbs. I have been in many a scientist's lab which might have had a few hundred thousand in hardware an a few graduate students working for peanuts while those scientists desperately fought to keep the trickle of grants coming in. A blessing from the gods of ITER would be something potentially very corrupting.
If I were the Emperor Of Science, I would sell the ITER for scrap and disperse its budget to 10,000 different fusion projects with any that showed actual physical progress qualifying for further rounds of funding.
I am certainly not a physicist but I have worked on projects that smelled like ITER with distant nebulous goals and people who use big numbers to impress. But the reality is that these projects often get caught in catch-22 engineering (which is why they use big numbers to distract from the fundamental problems). Something like any material that is strong enough to take the pressure will melt and any material that won't melt can't take the pressure. The reality is that no amount of engineering bandaids and ducktape will solve the problem, the fundamental solution is flawed.
I can remember one data communications project. Basically they eliminated any kind of error correction from the transmission to enable crazy high speed bursts of data. But it only worked over a distance of about 5 feet. After that the noise started to start knocking off bits. At 1000 feet the data was untrustworthy. At around 1500 feet the data was clearly useless. This system needed to communicate over a huge distance. The simple problem was that they had promised to fit more data than such a low frequency could handle at that narrow a band for that short a time. There had to be error correction and it was going to eat bandwidth. But they had promised X data in Y time and X/2 in Y time was unacceptable. Then to top it off the people wiring it all together sucked.
I think that project lasted around 8 years; 7 of which were just basically trying to put a gallon of milk in a pint container.
I'm not joking when I say that I don't like QNX because a guy I worked with who was a mega tool loved it so much. Basically he was exactly wrong about everything. His entire life is a logical not.
To give an example, Nortel hired him so I told people who were invested in Nortel that they needed to sell their shares immediately (which all but one did, also not insider information as he posted this on his personal website). Any hiring process that didn't screen out this living parasite of oxygen was a deeply flawed process. Within maybe 3 months Nortel was in serious trouble. This guy later became a blackberry server expert; a sure sign that blackberry (riding high at the time) was in serious trouble.
So it might seem petty of me to not even look at QNX but it just that this guy is has a near superpower for getting involved with the exact wrong solution just before it explodes or is just always has been wrong.
But to be more analytical, Blackberry has always made fairly good technological things but they seem to focus on the wrong things. Their products, for instance, seem to have been built to please the telcos and big companies. This might seem like good business on the surface but the reality is that they are now selling well under 1% in the US. Without focusing on the consumer they were damaged by the first company that really did (Apple) and then finished off by all the subsequent companies(Samsung, HTC, etc) that realized that apple's customer focus was a good idea worth emulating. So I can envision a Ford computer system that when demonstrated will potentially rock our boats and the press will write things like "redefines the car computer interface." but once the reviewers get their own hands on it the lines will be more like "Takes the worst aspects of the iDrive and mixes in the worst aspects of Tuberculous."
On top of all that will Ford be able to keep Blackberry from taking one more kick at the can and somehow favour Blackberry phones as it seemed the early Sync system favoured Microsoft phones?
A great measure of the Playbook's true rating (in that people are still religeous about their RIM crap) is that one group found that almost zero people switch from a modern tablet to the playbook and those who did went back. And that everyone who switches from the playbook to another tablet stays away from RIM. The same with BB phones. This is well evidenced by their market share. I suspect that there will be a goodly number of diehards who will have to have their BBs pried from their dead cold hands but why would Ford think that such a tarnished brand is something they should associate themselves with?
Sync was so bad that I wouldn't buy a Ford. I rented a handful of 2013 model Fords with the Sync system. I had an iPhone 3GS and an iPhone 4. The stupid Sync system was a huge battle. Syncing just wasn't a clean process. It did work but smooth as silk is not how I would describe it. But then it got worse. It asked if I would like to set up the emergency something. I presume this was an automated 911 call if I crashed. Well actually no I don't want the computer calling the police; I'll make phone calls of that nature thank you very much. And in today's world it is unlikely that if I were to crash that there aren't 200 people with cellphones that will call anyway. But lastly the system was so crappy I doubt that it would call 911 but would call 912 or 999 thinking that we were in the UK.
But you are probably thinking no big deal opt out and you are fine. But nope after opting out, every time the stupid car started a woman's voice would blah blah about the emergency system not being activated. I looked in the manual and found no solution, so I went on the net and found no solution. So there is no way on earth that I would buy a Ford. Plus my sister had minor damage (but enough to partially disable the car) in a recent model fusion hybrid that took nearly 5 months to get the parts in. So she was out a near new car for 5 months; the whole point of buying a new car vs nursing a 10 year old car along is that the new car saves you the stress of breakdowns and any maintenance issues that cost anything or at least are hard.
But now Ford is leaving the abusive relationship they no doubt enjoyed with Microsoft and now they are getting into bed with the $2 whore that they found in a Ottawa brothel. I couldn't think of a technology company (after leaving microsoft) that I would rather partner with less than Blackberry. I fought with their stupid Playbook tablet and I have watched people fight with their stupid new QNX phones. I know people who are long term BB customers (often via work) who deeply resent the latest models. So why would you pick a company that is on the rocks and that people respect less than the aforementioned $2 whore?
But oddly enough the main reason that I think that QNX is a complete bowl of stupid is that I have known exactly one programmer who loved QNX and he was a useless tool. Actually worse than a useless tool; he was one of those developers that management thinks is a rocket surgeon but all he does is make things way worse. So if he tells you to cut the blue wire, not only should you not cut the blue wire but you should assume that cutting any wires is probably the exact wrong thing to do. So keep in mind that this tool probably thinks that QNX in a Ford is a cool idea.
With all the wonderful NSA revelations coming out, it has become clear that there is a growing, and eventually huge, market for non US communications hardware. Nokia is completely blowing this buy getting into bed with Microsoft. They should buy out Blackberry and make a line of uber encryption phones and then not cave into any government demands to weaken the encryption.
With Qt Nokia dipped their toes into the open source waters and thus should be able to understand that they could publish their security code which would then make people even happier to use their phones to keep the nosy out of their business.
But there are so many better things to crap on them about. They aren't quite Rob Ford laughably bad but they are close; why just today this whole Lumina phone leaking data to Microsoft and even fighting with regulators over it. This is leaking people's text messages to MS; that is just bonkers anti-customer behavior.
I have been developing for around 25 years (Half using MS products) and probably know or knowish 500 developers. So at least locally this is a pretty damn good sample. I used the word "serious" to differentiate people who are programmers and people who program for their job. Typical government/bank programmers that I have met had nearly zero passion (as defined by ever programming for fun, ever) and they were happily using MS products or even worse, things like PowerBuilder.
But people doing the cooler stuff such as robotics, machine learning, or running servers that were core to generating piles of dough were swimming in the Open Source ocean.
So maybe I live in some kind of Open Source Mecca, but I doubt it.
I even know teenagers who are hard core gamers with the typical glowing tricked out gaming PCs who are dying to make the switch to Linux. They dream of the day when all of Steam is Linux Linux Linux. That sample is admittedly much smaller.
Under certain circumstances I would even recommend MS. But it is my experience that the bulk of people who develop web or server based services using MS technologies are typically people who went to some tech type "collage" and are certified in their technology of choice. Often this is the only technology that they know. So actually I would say it a little different if you have one clue you may or may not use MS products; but if you have two clues (i.e. have been exposed to something else) then you typically don't.
The few exceptions to this rule would be people who are forced to use MS products by a client as the client has firmly declared "We are a Microsoft shop around here."
A very simple test of this rule would be that I have never seen a developer with more than two years professional experience switch from Open Source to Microsoft. But I have seen a huge number of people with any amount of MS first experience make the leap. But with all these tech schools churning out MS only trainees MS does not need to worry..... much.
I don't think that I know a single person who has mentioned the MS antitrust issue in maybe 5-10 years, except to mention that it might be happening to Google next. Tech people that I know generally hate MS for just abusing the crap out of their customers. Things like pushing out new operating systems to replace perfectly good operating systems. Things like rehashing Microsoft office over and over with their only "innovations" being things like the ribbon bar.
.net desktop/web applications that used IIS and MSSQL. But then slowly but surely I migrated product by product to something Open Source until I realized that I was only using Windows XP because of inertia so I then dumped even that.
.net were bloating as they tried to tie every stupid MS product together in an attempt to trap me in their high priced eco system.
But if anything it would be the cost of licensing and the licenses themselves. I separate those two because just managing the licenses is a pain. The general consensus is that they make it a pain so that you get the all encompassing licenses that are "easier" so that now you just pay MS a tax on being in business.
Nearly 100% of the people that I know who are serious programmers have entirely moved their deployed products to OS solutions such as Linux and MariaDB and their development is generally done on an Apple or Linux PC as those most resemble the deployment platform.
I don't actually hate Microsoft and at one point was using Windows and Visual Studio to program
But for me the Open Source switch wasn't out of some religeous love of Open Source but that each one of the products was just way better than the MS equivalent for my use. Clients were perfectly happy to pay for any license issues so money wasn't even an issue, just a huge bonus. So it wasn't just that Open Source was better but that MS was actively becoming worse. Things like
So I don't hate Microsoft (except for when they lie cheat and steal to prevent opensource from giving them the boot in large customers environment) I just don't have any interest in using any of their products. So even if all MS products were completely free and they stopped being bastards when places like Munich make the switch to OSS, I still wouldn't use them. In the same way that I wouldn't switch to a diet of low quality food even if it were free.
Some programmers are also terrible and I don't listen to them on matters involving programming let alone linguistics. I have always thought of learning another language and learning another programming languages as similar experiences. At first you try to tie the words almost one for one from one language to another. But once you become fluent you just start doing things differently. But just like anyone going from no language to their first language, they must first learn the basic concepts. But with human languages you do know that there will be a word for car, bus, airplane etc. But a language used by a primitive culture might have one word for airplanes, while, say, English has many many words, (biplane, monoplane, fighter jet, prop plane, etc) the same is in many programming languages. R focuses on concepts while matlab focuses on others as I suspect that people from a pearl diving culture would have shockingly nuanced words for things relating to underwater.
Then you get other nuances such as not using a programming language for long enough generally results in that language becoming rustier and rustier until it is gone. Yet you generally can relearn a forgotten language fairly quickly. An interesting experience would be to see if people even activate the same brain areas relearning a forgotten programming language as those used relearning a forgotten spoken language.
But even within a single spoken language you have cultural differences. People in LA don't generally small talk about the weather, but will go on and on about the traffic during their commute. But in the North East people can talk endlessly about the weather, and in my area the joke goes, "If you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes." The same with programming languages, using C/C++ as an example you have embedded programmers who obsess over the limitations of their environment and can pack a data-structure with bit for bit perfection; while someone working on a desktop might obsess with making their application installation friendly; and a mobile developer might obsess over screen resolution/sizes. Needless to say while the vast majority of their vocabulary is similar their use of the language can be wildly different yet mutually comprehensible.
Now there might be one tiny catch. A programming language is combination of creativity and some mathematics. Thus the best brain comparison might be to someone doing poetry, someone writing a wordy financial report, and programming.
So my question to any programmer who doubts that spoken languages and programming languages are not hugely overlapping in the brain is: "What part of the brain do you suggest we are using to program? The brain parts that control our bowels?"
The worst one will be politically connected neighborhoods that presently have tons of traffic because these people built their houses in a high traffic area. So they will demand (and get) that the government mandate that driverless cars detour around their precious streets.
Also this will be another opportunity for the narcissistic egomaniacs that run government to have us serfs part like the red sea when they are driving by.
This will happen, and it will make national/international news, and there will be a bunch of asswipes all going, "I told you so, these automated cars were going to be the death of us all." But this will be in the face of driverless cars killing so few people that it might be single digits nationwide.
Oh and I forgot to mention all the "experts" they will get on the news who will try to turn driverless car safety into an issue; when in fact any changes that they propose will probably kill even more people.
The simple problem is that information is power. The typical psychopath who runs for political office or backstabs their way into top civil servant positions know this in their very cores. They want this power and they don't want us to have this power. This is why freedom of information requests can be the end of governments and many civil servants jobs and this is why they do their damnedest to fight them or exempt data from them.
A great example of this would be when the receipts for UK ministers got leaked that it instantly resulted in political career loss, criminal charges, and probably helped with a change in government. Obviously this was powerful data that when leaked resulted in a massive positive for society. Yet the government claims that this data is dangerous to have public; yet they can't show any damage that came from the one time it was made public. Plus the only claim with any real basis (account numbers and potentially credit card info) is nonsense as those could be blacked out with little loss to the public. But there has been no move to make this data public and an investigation into who leaked the data. If they did catch the person I suspect that they would end up facing penalties greater than those who were caught stealing from the government.
My personal view is that nothing that government does should be kept secret with the single exception of personal medical records. That basically if you work for or interact with the government that it should be 100% open. Some records could be sealed for a year or so such as undercover operations but that should require a special judge to approve and even then should have a time limit.
I see this as no different than if I owned a company and one of my employees told me that I couldn't see a contract they were negotiating for my company. If any employee said no to any information request I made then I would say, "No problem sorry to bother you." And then with security I would have them thrown out of the office while IT changed every password they might know and a forensic investigator would be pouring over their records before the day was over. Plus I would criminally charge them with the slightest wrong doing found. Whereas if an employee came to me saying they screwed up I would be quite forgiving and work with them through the problem.
Keeping things in the light is always the best policy. But too many government officials seem to think that we can't handle the truth. The reality is that the violent reaction they get when leaks do happen is that we are usually more annoyed with the coverup than the actual events. Benghazi would be perfect: it was layers of lying that brought about those events, events in a violent country where violence should be expected, and then the cover-up after. Few people would have been surprised that strange things happened in Libya, so covering them up was just stupid.
So no, this whole government getting more information is a terrible terrible thing. These people have long proven themselves to be 100% untrustworthy and quite hostile to our wellbeing. What has kept them from doing their worst was a combination of their having bad information combined with leaks that gave us great information. But now they can look at any "dissident" who by definition will be anyone questioning their behavior including normal political opposition, and not only figure out their entire network of supporters but as any mathematician will tell you with a network is that there are a few key nodes. Thus they will be able to effectively destroy any opposition not through routing out every little dissident but by highly selective targeting of very few people causing the network to disintegrate. To use the American revolution as an example I suspect that the British would have loved to find the few financially key supporters and throw them into the Boston harbor. If they had the lists of supporters that we now know as founding fathers the revolution could have been ended with one afternoon of hangings. And I am talking pre-teaparty; by reading their correspondence they could have seen trouble brewing, and with a few trumped up charges kept the ink off the declaration of independence.
Quite simply the absolute control should not be handed over to the computer. Basically doing something like pulling on the handbrake should basically physically cut the throttle. Or stomping on the brakes should activate a simple solenoid that cuts the throttle. This mechanism should be 100% separate from the computer and override most computer outputs.
I see this as critical in a driverless car. There needs to be a way for people to pull the plug and there needs to be a way for people to phone in an emergency. So if someone is lying in a pothole being run over by car after car, or the bridge is failing, there needs to be a way for 911 to say that a stretch of road is now cut off. The key is that this cannot be ab abusable by officials. I do not want my car grinding to a halt because the police are looking for some runaway or a bank was robbed.
Quite simply the CEO controls the bulk of the information flowing to and from any groups such as the board of directors, the shareholders, the "executive compensation committee". etc.
Basically you have two factoids at play: One is that the CEO and those immediately surrounding them often even control such things as the candidates for board of directors election and those on the executive compensation committee. So there you have quite a bit of bias. Then after that you have literally nobody above the CEO. In theory board of directors answer to the shareholders and the CEO answers to the board but if the shareholders don't pick who is nominated for the board and the board is owned by the CEO then the CEO pay is limited to just how greedy he thinks he can be; not limited by other factors such as actually deserving his pay.
So when you are being so foolish as to try and find a correlation between CEO pay and their performance then you are wasting your time. The only correlation should be between their pay and a combination of their level of narcissism and their level of psychopathy.
What this quite simply calls for is that shareholders need to have vastly more influence on who is nominated to a corporate board. Another thing that this screams for is a relationship between the typical pay within a company and the top executive pay. Quite simply the higher this ratio then the higher the taxes should be on the top executives. This way you can exploit the greed of the top executives in that they will rationalize paying the typical employee much more so as to lower their personal tax burden.