Yes I suspect that if Mr Smith were allowed to watch the Wolf of Wall Street before writing his book that he might have been a bit more specific as to what should be avoided in capitalism.
I found Atlas Shrugged boring; I stopped before I could even get enough info to solidly agree or disagree. To me she is like Malcolm Gladwell, pointing out the obvious and making it seem profound. Oooooh if you practice something obsessively since childhood you will become good at it. I never thought of that, I just thought that people just jumped down from the stands threw on a uniform and scored the winning goal.
It seemed that her point was that lefty governments will take away the hard work of smart people. It seems that the real problem with her work is that it was so bad that when governments are criticized for taking away the hard work of smart people that people attack them for being under the spell of Atlas Shrugged. Sometimes it is just bag government.
So in a weird way she twisted the thinking of some of those who love and some of those who hate her.
The only way I can fit in Coursera type courses is when I have regular blocks of time suddenly show up. Last year one of my daughters played Volleyball twice a week 3 hours each time. It was easier to drop her off, do some coursework, pick her up than to drive the long distance 4 times. So I knocked off 3 courses. Needless to say I signed up for many more and dropped all of them. Not because of any inherent problem with Coursera or the courses; just my schedule. So using my stats of completion/withdrawal would tell you almost nothing about the MOOCs and everything about my schedule.
You would think then that the unscheduled courses would fit my life better but there is something magical about deadlines and the knowledge that there are many other people working on the same things at the same time.
As for the quality of the courses they do vary with some great and some terrible. But the good to great seem to outnumber the terrible. But this is where it gets sort of interesting. Some of the best courses that are available are those from the Great Courses company. I have learned a ton from them but there is no satisfaction of completion with a nearly worthless certificate that I so look forward to receiving.
So my suspicion is that the courses of the future are going to be an interesting combination of those who teach and those who certify. If Stanford certifies that I know something do you really care where I learned it from? This would allow any jackass out there to put out a course which may or may not be great. Then through Darwinian selection (and marketing) the best will rise to the top. But it is basically impossible for any old jackass to make a certification that will be respected.
Of course this creates a "teach to the test" problem and certain areas of knowledge are very difficult to divorce from the teaching (creative writing, or art). But with many respected institutions potentially offering a certification you would have some competition among them to get it right.
A combination of respected certification and self learning could be a pretty heady combination.
I really love to watch programming by contract systems fall flat on their face. First they write a huge specification for what a bid will look like. Then in the bid they write a huge specification for the bid which is a bid to write a specification. Then when they start the project they write one last specification that lays out in extreme detail what they are going to build. This is then signed off on and finally they start to build something huge.
But the entire process is not focusing on sorting out the most critical problems, then figuring out the costs to solving them, then picking which problems would be solved. The entire process is all about getting the maximum "buy in" from the "stakeholders" who then lard up the project with any features that pop into their head. A key sign that all this has happened is when the front interface has a message from our leader front and center surrounded by links to all the crap that nobody wants. Buried deeply will be things that most people want and need.
A simple example would be my local schoolboard website. Parents want basic information like enrolling their kids in school, curriculum, and how to contact the school board. Not a single person gives a flying crap about who the schoolboard head is or any opinion she holds; zero. I am willing to bet that the schoolboard spent enough cash building the website to refurbish one of the junky gyms in the school system, or restock a lab, or provide instruments to a music program. Priorities that most people want; not a message from the leader or a bunch of crap about recycling at home.
My schoolboard example is small and a petty source of bad management but typical of even the biggest multi hundred million dollar disaster that you can find governments doing all over the world.
People on slashdot blah blah about opensource which is definitely where governments should be going with all projects but it is to open source the procurement process that would save the massive bucks. If we geeks had a few weeks to look over the various bids and proposals we could feed back some seriously creative and intelligent suggestions. If a project required a room full of servers and switches, an opened design phase would probably result in a huge rewiring/cost cutting/and solid capacity analysis. If proposed interfaces suck then all kinds of suggestions for improvement would flow. If bad software packages were selected then better ones would be proposed.
Personally I find that Facebook has too many features. It sort of reminds me of Microsoft Office with this endless parade of new tiny and mostly useless features.
I think that this is where the snapchats and twitters do so very well. With a very simple core feature set it is not hard to keep focused on what works. But with facebook it almost seems like they don't want to leave anything out just in case some competitor comes along and eats their lunch.
I think it all boils down to the question: what is Facebook? With the highly successful recent upstarts that is an easy thing to answer. But with facebook the question is actually quite complex. It is very difficult for facebook to be so much to so many.
To sum it up they have lost their 30 second elevator pitch. But maybe with this information Facebook will realize that their core audience aren't teenyboppers but adults and thus will focus their feature set in that direction.
After MS started this whole MSDN certified shop philosophy they realized that they could trap people into their ecosystem. Nearly every product they have come up with since has not been a very good product but another attempt to lock people in. Sharepoint would be a near perfect example. It seems to be designed to be a MS glue that where you needed MS SQL, MS Server, MS Office, MS Outlook, MS Explorer, and MS Windows to make it work. Take any bit away and no more sharepoint. There would be no slowly migrating away from that one. MS probably looked at how they killed WordPerfect and Novell and said, "We won't let anyone get a thin edge of a wedge into our ecosystem like we did to them."
But they let things stagnate so much that when mobile came along all they could think about was protecting their eco system. So instead of coming up with a lightweight tablet they made the surface that integrates with their eco system.
So basically it seems that MS has become a company that is entirely based upon fooling people into making bad decisions.
But this might seem like a good idea to keep customers from leaking away. The problem is that when they do leave they leave entirely and are never coming back unless their new system sucks even more. Where this is real problem is that the MS system can really suck without losing too many customers due to inertia. But as history has repeatedly shown people don't leave one stagnant tradition for a slightly better one, they leave for something completely new and often quite different.
An interesting example from history was the end of whale oil; it was around $1900 per barrel (today's prices) while crude oil was around $90 a barrel. This put more and more pressure for people to figure out how to extract useful replacements from crude. When they did still people kept on with Whale oil but then suddenly "petroleum" products wiped out the whale oil industry almost overnight. Once the trend started there was nothing the whale industry could do; it was over.
I would say that MS is in a very bad place. Customers who switch to mobile are entirely eliminating MS from their minds. Not out of hate or revenge but simply they don't see an use for MS products in their lives. Of course some people are still using MS office to type a bit and Excel to add up a few numbers but the vast majority would be perfectly happy with Office 97.
So as I say MS has a business model based upon people making bad decisions. But now many people aren't even seeing MS as one of their options.
The early adopters that the utilities are fighting now are few and far between and only nibbling at the edges of utility profits in most areas. Quite simply a good solar/wind setup is a bit of a pain in the ass. So by eliminating these few people it might even slow down development of better home energy technology a tiny bit. But quite simply solar continues to not only fall but the various flaws and other related technologies are getting better and better. The key technological lynchpin will be battery technology. But with today's solar/wind, LED lighting, and energy efficient appliances basically everyone is waiting on battery technology; if it were to get good enough, people won't have to worry about feed in tariffs they will just go off grid.
So what will happen is people will look at a one time up-front cost and just jump in and leave the power company behind. This is something that the utilities won't be able to stop. So instead of a stead decline it will be a shocking quarter by quarter disaster where the power companies will have problems making payroll.
This last will be a huge problem for those buildings that for various reasons can't go off grid.
If your website is advertising driven then one of the problems is to find area to put some adverts. On a 1900x1200 monitor it is not so hard to find some space but when someone's thumb can cover an ad then oh well. So from that perspective it just makes the effort seem not worth it.
Also mobile is a pain in the ass to design for. An iPhone 3GS is 320x480. But some of these newer phones are pushing into the same pixel count as a laptop monitor yet aren't that much bigger than the 3GS screen size. So a 14 pixel high font on a desktop isn't too bad. Is quite small on an iPhone and is basically a dot on a new phone. There are all kinds of games that you can play to solve this but the pain is very high and the compromises many. So the look and feel has a tendency to be driven by the needs of technology (and thus the programmers) instead of a professional web designer.
Your last point is probably the most important point in this whole patent debate. That a the legal profession is the main benefactor of this whole IP protection scheme. Some companies think they can be bullies with their IP such as the MPAA but as we have seen their attempts to suppress competition through legal assaults on their own customers has only blown up in their faces. But the lawyers involved are getting very fat encouraging their customers that they don't need to change their business model if they just see these lawsuits through.
But my key argument is that the entire patent and copyright system is almost entirely structured to benefit a very few. It also seems that the damage is far worse than the good it provides. But eliminating the patent system would be bad in that there are many cases where long hard risky efforts need to be rewarded. But stuff that you can conjure up in a 15 minute brainstorming session should not. So my key point is that the invention of the LED should be protected but the obvious idea that to put it into a flashlight should not be protected. If I tell you that I have discovered that you can make a tiny portable generator that runs on water and I patent only the generator itself, think of all the uses you can put that generator to. If you and your IP Lawyer are able to type quickly and live near the patent office then you will be able to patent all those ideas. So of course I will list all the probable uses of my impossible generator but if I miss one or something new like cell phones come along then you can potentially reap huge rewards. All you have to do is say in 1980, "I think these mobile phones might have a future" then run out and patent that use of the generator in mobile phones. This is not good because A parasitically gaining while not contributing to the greater good, and two you are actually harming the person who did by intercepting money that might have gone to the real inventor.
Absolutely but I would love to be around for a time when you have the greats of science calling BS on some new theory that very quickly becomes quite obviously the correct theory; then opening up a whole new field. I suspect that this is what excites string theorists. They really really must be dreaming of the day when someone comes up with a fairly clear and easy (read cheap) experiment that solidly is in line with a string theoretical prediction where all other theories either draw a blank or ideally predict something else.
Personally I am more of a technologist so what excites me the most is that stuff should come out of a fundamental discovery. The various discoveries at the dawn of electricity almost immediately resulted in things like the telegraph, electrical motors, light bulbs, generators. Then as electromagnetic theory was fleshed out you start getting wireless transmission, and eventually vacuum tube computers. But this all sort of matured and almost stagnated until the technological spawn of quantum mechanics such as solid state electronics.
So, for instance, the theory that entanglement is wormhole related is not just really cool sounding but might result in something that ends up in a gizmo which is, to me, very cool. The key being that without the solid mathematical and then experimentally tested theory that people might never suddenly go ah ha, I know something cool I can build.
Tuesdays are definitely Quantum. I often forget that they aren't a Monday and sometimes think that it is Wednesday but then am happy to find out that it is still Tuesday. So Tuesday must be a superstate of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday that collapses with the highest probability as being Tuesday.
I am sad to see that you got voted down; as your advice is solid. Over the years I have slowly been putting the math into my head to be able to finish "The Road to Reality"
My simple dream is that with my extensive computer programming knowledge I might be able to put that together with what I learn to generate something genuinely new.
I mostly drive American cars but have noticed that Euro cruise control has long been quite smooth. In my second last American car the cruise control was so twitchy that my wife would regularly ask what the hell I was doing. My last American car was still jerky. Typically the event that concerned her was the stupid car not gassing it enough on a hill climb and then stomping on the gas and dropping a gear to compensate for the great loss of speed. My other complaint was that for some stupid reason the cruise control would still leave a little gas on during the decent resulting in the car going way too fast. I see the RPMs still up a bit and then would turn the cruise off and see a 50% drop in the power. Lucky to not get a speeding ticket with that gem of a feature.
So while it is good ford is making it sound like they are leaping into the future, step one should be catching up with 12 year old Euro technology.
I have 3 problems with today's IP. Most IP is completely obvious; the one click patent is 100% crap. Any web developer with 3 months training would stumble upon that as completely obvious if they were building a large online sales site. Things like patents and trademarks should be reserved for something innovative. Monster suing people for using monster as a synonym of big or great should be punished with their losing the trademark. There is definitely room for some patents and trademarks such as Xerox (completely made up). And inventing the transistor. But if someone invents a new way to generate light, nobody should be able to patent putting that into a flashlight.
But even in music and books there should be much shorter limit on the copyright. It just seems bizarre that someone who came up with an innovative guitar riff 60 years ago should be able to go after some indy band who "re-invented" the same riff and worked it into their song. To me copyright should start wearing out in stages. The wholesale copying of say a song or book should have a fairly long lifespan. But works based upon it or derived from it should be fine even after 5 or 10 years.
If you are looking for a simple historical precedent just look at Hollywood. Basically one of the main reasons they went out into the wild west to make movies was that movie technology was new and the patents were controlled by a few capitalist robber barrons who ruled east coast movie making with an iron fist. So people went out west and made movies where the federal government had far less control to enforce the dictates of east coast judges. Not only did an industry boom but free of IP they innovated and innovated. Stole the latest ideas from each other and everyone got rich.
IP is not always bad but generally where the best IP is applied is when it protects the public. Is the drug you bought actually made by the original company? Is it even the drug you think you are buying? When I buy a HEAD tennis racket I don't want something crappy that is painted with the HEAD logo. But when IP only serves to protect the profits of the company such as MS being able to protect some obvious file system patent to keep Linux out of the market then it should be eliminated.
People blah blah about China stealing so much IP. But the reality is that they have thrived doing so and if anything are probably laughing at us stupid westerners who have shackled ourselves to a few parasitical lawyers. Think about it. If every computer or robot innovation is locked up for 20 years then this might explain why we read about things in the science journals and then it stagnates for 20 years. A simple example would be 3D printing; a handful of key patents run out this year and I suspect that we will see a genuine 3D printing revolution that starts the week they run out.
I have been on the edge of my seat waiting for something genuinely new. Something like when people were discovering that atoms were made up of even tinier bits. Or that quantum was not just a mathematical nicety but way cooler. Each of these fairly "academic" discoveries then opened up whole new trains of thought that led to lasers, solid state electronics, nuclear reactors, etc.
So what wonderful physics is hiding out there waiting to be discovered and open up a whole new world to us?
Personally my biggest recent letdown were the FTL neutrinos that turned out to be bogus. I was genuinely hoping that something cool revealing itself. But alas. My favorite today is that entanglement and wormholes might have some relationship. Minimally that will result in some cool sci-fi if not actual science.
Personally I don't mind if ultraspherical electrons shut down a bunch of pet theories. They didn't seem to be making much progress and thus the door has been opened to explore something new. Maybe there is some guy trying to get his doctorate showing that supersymmetry is a load of rubbish but hasn't been able to get much traction because the entire panel got their doctorates in supersymmetrical related ideas and in order to defend his thesis he has to first set fire to theirs.
The best part is that companies like Blockbuster didn't fight this at all. Whereas companies like Netflix fought and fought and fought for the rights of their customers (and of course themselves). I remember when Netflix lost one particular fight where they had to wait something like 30 days after BB got some new releases before they got their copies.
One of the results is that everyone I know hated BB, absolutely hated them. But nearly everyone I know is all "ooh ooh ooh you've got to get Netflix." (including me) this situation means that the customers will not support BB if they hit a rough patch. There is an independent Video store in my city that people love and it is still open. So it is not entirely the technology changing that killed BB. My happiest day in BB was a short while after they instituted the No Late Fees but as a stop gap had instituted a "Restocking Fee" if you were more than a week or two late. So I go in with a late late movie to find the owner working behind the counter (I had never seen him in the store ever just his peons) and he tries to charge me the Restocking fee. I tell him, "If it is a fee that you charge me when the movie is late then it is a late fee. And the sign with the 2 foot high letters outside says, No Late Fees." He then says that it is not a late fee but a restocking fee. So I repeat myself. This goes on for a minute or so with a lineup building up behind me and he says, "OK no late fee but get the f..k out of my store." I never went back, not out of some revenge but I just wasn't renting much anymore and this was an easy push to stop. That BB was closed a few months later, and torn down a year or two later.
I am willing to bet that around, say, 2002 the guy thought that he owned a license to print money and that he loved that it was his peons that did all the work.
But now so much of the copyright business world thought that they had the world by the balls with ever extending copyright laws. The state department in their pocket. Tax laws completely in their favor. They had locked down the cable channels, the radio frequencies, the satellites in space. It just didn't get any better. Then the Internet just started kicking them in the head. Now they are curled up in a little ball with the internet still kicking them in the head. They seem to think that DRM will be some sort of super armor against the internet that is not only going to keep kicking them in the head but getting bigger stronger and meaner the whole time. Every now and then they seem to think that if they can con some company like Microsoft to liquor up their technology with DRM then they can win. But it seems that any company that they sucker into doing that is another company that is getting screwed by progress as they are. Microsoft is very worried about linux on the desktop so they tried to lock down the bios "for our own protection" but the result is that they have just put another nail into the PC industry. Then they turn to Sony to turn up the DRM in Blueray since DVD is so badly broken which nearly then put even more pressure to make Blueray irrelevant before it had much of a chance. Their latest is to take the cable internet providers that they own and do an attack on Netflix bandwidth. The only result there is that people who can will flee to other ISPs and for those areas without a competing ISP they will have provided an opening for one to move in and compete with them when they are getting weaker.
To me this is like these people who live in beach houses on a retreating sandbar. They can take all kinds of measures to fight the ocean but eventually the ocean is going to win. They should have enjoyed the view while it lasted and then moved to safer ground in an orderly fashion for a different but equally excellent view.
I loved your books back in the 80's; my allowance went to buying them and then to the bits required to make things go beep. Money well spent.
What I loved with the handwritten style and the funky pictures was that they made the subject so accessible as opposed to the extremely dry material generally available. I was watching a video for an EE course the other day and they sucked every bit of fun out of the subject. So again thanks?
Any new books about Arduino (the 555 chip of 2013) or something 21st century?
Absolutely. Often the copies are better than the original. No FBI warning that you can't sit through, no trailers that are hard or impossible to skip through. The movie just plays. And the movie just works on more devices. Cost is not actually the best feature of a stolen product.
This is where Netflix type services seem to get it right. You select your product, and it plays.
I remember there was a burst of Technology books that came wrapped in plastic that was not to be removed in the store. Thus you couldn't browse the book in the store to see if it were any good. I suspect some MBA realized that their book actually sucked and this might increase sales. But what did they think people were doing? Running to the store with a tech question, looking it up, and leaving without buying the book?
If you invest in DRM for your product you are making two bets. That your DRM creators are some of the smartest people in the world. And that even when people do figure out how to crack the DRM that it will slow people down enough that impatience with the cracking process will cause them to give up an buy.
But it is highly unlikely that you have hired the best in the world. And any DRM process that is effective enough to slow people down consistently will probably also be a pain in the ass to manufacture.
I suspect that people who create and sell these DRM systems promise the world and get paid a fortune. But seeing that the code in this post kills the DVD DRM it certainly shows that very very very smart people are going to look upon any new DRM as a new birthday puzzle.
My mother(88) is using Linux. She has no idea that she is using Linux. My mother in law is getting a chromebook and will have no idea what she is using.
Interestingly both of their demands and security are being met quite well. My mother surfs a bit, she watches youtube a bit, but she mostly types documents to print(OpenOffice), and emails on gmail. So Linux is quite nice in that with a tiny bit of security her machine is well locked down from the predations of both the evils of the internet along with the destructiveness of various descendants.
My mother-in-law only gmails and that is it. So a chromebook is perfect. (Tablets are out due to the lack of keyboard or the fiddly keyboards) plus for the same price as an 8 inch tablet she gets an 11.6 inch screen.
But the dealbreaker for linux is often an iPhone. Yes you can hook up an iPhone to Linux but it is a pain in the ass along with things like the backups not being very good at all. iCloud can take care of quite a bit so that is becoming less important.
But for me the best bit with recommending Linux is that even the Raspberry Pi can run a fairly robust Linux. So old crap hardware can meet basic internet needs quite nicely.
But back to the original question. The security of a basic locked down linux set up is fairly good. With windows my problem was fixing all the stupid plugins and downloaders that various people would install. Now they can't install or alter much beyond things like bookmarks.
I read somewhere that salesforce did this years ago to allow people to track who actually read emails. I then renamed SalesForce to UsedCarSalesForce as that is a pure scumbag thing to do. I am a huge fan of some kind of privacy law where a company may not collect data that people haven't had clearly pointed out is being collected with the option to opt-in. You will notice opt-in as the operative word. Thus I don't even want my power company being able to sell my data even in aggregate and say that my neighbourhood uses more power than a different neighbourhood. When I see that "trusted-third-parties" thing it just ticks me off.
Absolutely, Canada is quite corrupt, and even worse the corruption is really pathetic. The most common form of corruption that I have seen is where a politician will get some minor help on their campaign, and then will lavish the helper with wildly disproportionate government love. This ranges from people who simply work on the campaign to advertising companies who do discount work on people's campaigns.
Then you get the traditional love that is lavished upon Quebec. Traditionally (pre-Harper and pre Bloc Quebec) Quebec voted as a fairly solid block(25%). The rest of Canada would generally be a random mix of Liberal and PC; so whomever won Quebec won Canada. The result was that the federal government firehosed any benefits they could in the direction of Quebec ranging from an excess of Quebec Cabinet ministers to ever federal government office being well staffed with people from Quebec to regulations that favor various industries in Quebec. Under Harper (not my favorite guy) this was significantly reduced. But in all likelihood Trudeau is going to be the next PM and the bad old days will return.
But back to India; I don't know a single business person who will deal with India in any way shape or form. I know one guy($80 million a year sales) who threw purchase orders from Indian companies into a draw reserved for countries he didn't trust (India, Nigeria, etc) and said that nobody in his industry would do business with India. (That said, he also wouldn't do business with his own state government as he considered it to be equally corrupt). His experience was that bank drafts were fake 100% of the time and the single time he did business with a "reputable" company he insisted that they wire the money to him first. He forgot about them until a few days later the $30,000 showed up in his bank account. So he duly shipped off the goods only to have the $30,000 disappear. He contacted the bank as wire transfers should not be reversible but it turned out the company had FedEx'd his bank a fake bank draft and the bank had deposited it making it look like a wire transfer. The cheque was even from a company called "Wire Trans." But as it was fake it bounced but only after he had shipped the goods. Needless to say he was unable to pursue this in the Indian justice system. The lucky thing was that a week later he was at a trade show where he told the story to dozens, many of whom were waiting for or had just received a similar "wire transfer".
As for saying to to preach, I will admit that corruption is rife here but so bad in India as to be crippling. Hence your Zero rupee note. The key difference is that reputable companies in Canada generally will not rip you off as the justice/court system will get them in the end. But we do have fly by night companies so we are not perfect.
A great study on useless organizations would be to find a charity that works to stop something that is then fixed/cured. I would love to watch them squirm to figure out how to justify their continued existence. An upcoming episode in this drama will be when driverless cars run over the purpose of MADD. I am not sure what even vaguely related cause they can convert to. If you cured some kind of cancer any related charities could simply move to another prevalent cancer. But drunk driving is a fairly focused and isolated topic. My guess is that they will convert to a temperance movement but that won't raise the big bucks and thus not protect their existence.
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Yes I suspect that if Mr Smith were allowed to watch the Wolf of Wall Street before writing his book that he might have been a bit more specific as to what should be avoided in capitalism.
I found Atlas Shrugged boring; I stopped before I could even get enough info to solidly agree or disagree. To me she is like Malcolm Gladwell, pointing out the obvious and making it seem profound. Oooooh if you practice something obsessively since childhood you will become good at it. I never thought of that, I just thought that people just jumped down from the stands threw on a uniform and scored the winning goal.
It seemed that her point was that lefty governments will take away the hard work of smart people. It seems that the real problem with her work is that it was so bad that when governments are criticized for taking away the hard work of smart people that people attack them for being under the spell of Atlas Shrugged. Sometimes it is just bag government.
So in a weird way she twisted the thinking of some of those who love and some of those who hate her.
The only way I can fit in Coursera type courses is when I have regular blocks of time suddenly show up. Last year one of my daughters played Volleyball twice a week 3 hours each time. It was easier to drop her off, do some coursework, pick her up than to drive the long distance 4 times. So I knocked off 3 courses. Needless to say I signed up for many more and dropped all of them. Not because of any inherent problem with Coursera or the courses; just my schedule. So using my stats of completion/withdrawal would tell you almost nothing about the MOOCs and everything about my schedule.
You would think then that the unscheduled courses would fit my life better but there is something magical about deadlines and the knowledge that there are many other people working on the same things at the same time.
As for the quality of the courses they do vary with some great and some terrible. But the good to great seem to outnumber the terrible. But this is where it gets sort of interesting. Some of the best courses that are available are those from the Great Courses company. I have learned a ton from them but there is no satisfaction of completion with a nearly worthless certificate that I so look forward to receiving.
So my suspicion is that the courses of the future are going to be an interesting combination of those who teach and those who certify. If Stanford certifies that I know something do you really care where I learned it from? This would allow any jackass out there to put out a course which may or may not be great. Then through Darwinian selection (and marketing) the best will rise to the top. But it is basically impossible for any old jackass to make a certification that will be respected.
Of course this creates a "teach to the test" problem and certain areas of knowledge are very difficult to divorce from the teaching (creative writing, or art). But with many respected institutions potentially offering a certification you would have some competition among them to get it right.
A combination of respected certification and self learning could be a pretty heady combination.
I really love to watch programming by contract systems fall flat on their face. First they write a huge specification for what a bid will look like. Then in the bid they write a huge specification for the bid which is a bid to write a specification. Then when they start the project they write one last specification that lays out in extreme detail what they are going to build. This is then signed off on and finally they start to build something huge.
But the entire process is not focusing on sorting out the most critical problems, then figuring out the costs to solving them, then picking which problems would be solved. The entire process is all about getting the maximum "buy in" from the "stakeholders" who then lard up the project with any features that pop into their head. A key sign that all this has happened is when the front interface has a message from our leader front and center surrounded by links to all the crap that nobody wants. Buried deeply will be things that most people want and need.
A simple example would be my local schoolboard website. Parents want basic information like enrolling their kids in school, curriculum, and how to contact the school board. Not a single person gives a flying crap about who the schoolboard head is or any opinion she holds; zero. I am willing to bet that the schoolboard spent enough cash building the website to refurbish one of the junky gyms in the school system, or restock a lab, or provide instruments to a music program. Priorities that most people want; not a message from the leader or a bunch of crap about recycling at home.
My schoolboard example is small and a petty source of bad management but typical of even the biggest multi hundred million dollar disaster that you can find governments doing all over the world.
People on slashdot blah blah about opensource which is definitely where governments should be going with all projects but it is to open source the procurement process that would save the massive bucks. If we geeks had a few weeks to look over the various bids and proposals we could feed back some seriously creative and intelligent suggestions. If a project required a room full of servers and switches, an opened design phase would probably result in a huge rewiring/cost cutting/and solid capacity analysis. If proposed interfaces suck then all kinds of suggestions for improvement would flow. If bad software packages were selected then better ones would be proposed.
Personally I find that Facebook has too many features. It sort of reminds me of Microsoft Office with this endless parade of new tiny and mostly useless features.
I think that this is where the snapchats and twitters do so very well. With a very simple core feature set it is not hard to keep focused on what works. But with facebook it almost seems like they don't want to leave anything out just in case some competitor comes along and eats their lunch.
I think it all boils down to the question: what is Facebook? With the highly successful recent upstarts that is an easy thing to answer. But with facebook the question is actually quite complex. It is very difficult for facebook to be so much to so many.
To sum it up they have lost their 30 second elevator pitch. But maybe with this information Facebook will realize that their core audience aren't teenyboppers but adults and thus will focus their feature set in that direction.
After MS started this whole MSDN certified shop philosophy they realized that they could trap people into their ecosystem. Nearly every product they have come up with since has not been a very good product but another attempt to lock people in. Sharepoint would be a near perfect example. It seems to be designed to be a MS glue that where you needed MS SQL, MS Server, MS Office, MS Outlook, MS Explorer, and MS Windows to make it work. Take any bit away and no more sharepoint. There would be no slowly migrating away from that one. MS probably looked at how they killed WordPerfect and Novell and said, "We won't let anyone get a thin edge of a wedge into our ecosystem like we did to them."
But they let things stagnate so much that when mobile came along all they could think about was protecting their eco system. So instead of coming up with a lightweight tablet they made the surface that integrates with their eco system.
So basically it seems that MS has become a company that is entirely based upon fooling people into making bad decisions.
But this might seem like a good idea to keep customers from leaking away. The problem is that when they do leave they leave entirely and are never coming back unless their new system sucks even more. Where this is real problem is that the MS system can really suck without losing too many customers due to inertia. But as history has repeatedly shown people don't leave one stagnant tradition for a slightly better one, they leave for something completely new and often quite different.
An interesting example from history was the end of whale oil; it was around $1900 per barrel (today's prices) while crude oil was around $90 a barrel. This put more and more pressure for people to figure out how to extract useful replacements from crude. When they did still people kept on with Whale oil but then suddenly "petroleum" products wiped out the whale oil industry almost overnight. Once the trend started there was nothing the whale industry could do; it was over.
I would say that MS is in a very bad place. Customers who switch to mobile are entirely eliminating MS from their minds. Not out of hate or revenge but simply they don't see an use for MS products in their lives. Of course some people are still using MS office to type a bit and Excel to add up a few numbers but the vast majority would be perfectly happy with Office 97.
So as I say MS has a business model based upon people making bad decisions. But now many people aren't even seeing MS as one of their options.
The early adopters that the utilities are fighting now are few and far between and only nibbling at the edges of utility profits in most areas. Quite simply a good solar/wind setup is a bit of a pain in the ass. So by eliminating these few people it might even slow down development of better home energy technology a tiny bit. But quite simply solar continues to not only fall but the various flaws and other related technologies are getting better and better. The key technological lynchpin will be battery technology. But with today's solar/wind, LED lighting, and energy efficient appliances basically everyone is waiting on battery technology; if it were to get good enough, people won't have to worry about feed in tariffs they will just go off grid.
So what will happen is people will look at a one time up-front cost and just jump in and leave the power company behind. This is something that the utilities won't be able to stop. So instead of a stead decline it will be a shocking quarter by quarter disaster where the power companies will have problems making payroll.
This last will be a huge problem for those buildings that for various reasons can't go off grid.
If your website is advertising driven then one of the problems is to find area to put some adverts. On a 1900x1200 monitor it is not so hard to find some space but when someone's thumb can cover an ad then oh well. So from that perspective it just makes the effort seem not worth it.
Also mobile is a pain in the ass to design for. An iPhone 3GS is 320x480. But some of these newer phones are pushing into the same pixel count as a laptop monitor yet aren't that much bigger than the 3GS screen size. So a 14 pixel high font on a desktop isn't too bad. Is quite small on an iPhone and is basically a dot on a new phone. There are all kinds of games that you can play to solve this but the pain is very high and the compromises many. So the look and feel has a tendency to be driven by the needs of technology (and thus the programmers) instead of a professional web designer.
Yes in my cars I probably could had used a stopwatch and pencil to figure out the simplistic algorithm.
Your last point is probably the most important point in this whole patent debate. That a the legal profession is the main benefactor of this whole IP protection scheme. Some companies think they can be bullies with their IP such as the MPAA but as we have seen their attempts to suppress competition through legal assaults on their own customers has only blown up in their faces. But the lawyers involved are getting very fat encouraging their customers that they don't need to change their business model if they just see these lawsuits through.
But my key argument is that the entire patent and copyright system is almost entirely structured to benefit a very few. It also seems that the damage is far worse than the good it provides. But eliminating the patent system would be bad in that there are many cases where long hard risky efforts need to be rewarded. But stuff that you can conjure up in a 15 minute brainstorming session should not. So my key point is that the invention of the LED should be protected but the obvious idea that to put it into a flashlight should not be protected. If I tell you that I have discovered that you can make a tiny portable generator that runs on water and I patent only the generator itself, think of all the uses you can put that generator to. If you and your IP Lawyer are able to type quickly and live near the patent office then you will be able to patent all those ideas. So of course I will list all the probable uses of my impossible generator but if I miss one or something new like cell phones come along then you can potentially reap huge rewards. All you have to do is say in 1980, "I think these mobile phones might have a future" then run out and patent that use of the generator in mobile phones. This is not good because A parasitically gaining while not contributing to the greater good, and two you are actually harming the person who did by intercepting money that might have gone to the real inventor.
Absolutely but I would love to be around for a time when you have the greats of science calling BS on some new theory that very quickly becomes quite obviously the correct theory; then opening up a whole new field. I suspect that this is what excites string theorists. They really really must be dreaming of the day when someone comes up with a fairly clear and easy (read cheap) experiment that solidly is in line with a string theoretical prediction where all other theories either draw a blank or ideally predict something else.
Personally I am more of a technologist so what excites me the most is that stuff should come out of a fundamental discovery. The various discoveries at the dawn of electricity almost immediately resulted in things like the telegraph, electrical motors, light bulbs, generators. Then as electromagnetic theory was fleshed out you start getting wireless transmission, and eventually vacuum tube computers. But this all sort of matured and almost stagnated until the technological spawn of quantum mechanics such as solid state electronics.
So, for instance, the theory that entanglement is wormhole related is not just really cool sounding but might result in something that ends up in a gizmo which is, to me, very cool. The key being that without the solid mathematical and then experimentally tested theory that people might never suddenly go ah ha, I know something cool I can build.
Tuesdays are definitely Quantum. I often forget that they aren't a Monday and sometimes think that it is Wednesday but then am happy to find out that it is still Tuesday. So Tuesday must be a superstate of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday that collapses with the highest probability as being Tuesday.
I am sad to see that you got voted down; as your advice is solid. Over the years I have slowly been putting the math into my head to be able to finish "The Road to Reality"
My simple dream is that with my extensive computer programming knowledge I might be able to put that together with what I learn to generate something genuinely new.
I mostly drive American cars but have noticed that Euro cruise control has long been quite smooth. In my second last American car the cruise control was so twitchy that my wife would regularly ask what the hell I was doing. My last American car was still jerky. Typically the event that concerned her was the stupid car not gassing it enough on a hill climb and then stomping on the gas and dropping a gear to compensate for the great loss of speed. My other complaint was that for some stupid reason the cruise control would still leave a little gas on during the decent resulting in the car going way too fast. I see the RPMs still up a bit and then would turn the cruise off and see a 50% drop in the power. Lucky to not get a speeding ticket with that gem of a feature.
So while it is good ford is making it sound like they are leaping into the future, step one should be catching up with 12 year old Euro technology.
I have 3 problems with today's IP. Most IP is completely obvious; the one click patent is 100% crap. Any web developer with 3 months training would stumble upon that as completely obvious if they were building a large online sales site. Things like patents and trademarks should be reserved for something innovative. Monster suing people for using monster as a synonym of big or great should be punished with their losing the trademark. There is definitely room for some patents and trademarks such as Xerox (completely made up). And inventing the transistor. But if someone invents a new way to generate light, nobody should be able to patent putting that into a flashlight.
But even in music and books there should be much shorter limit on the copyright. It just seems bizarre that someone who came up with an innovative guitar riff 60 years ago should be able to go after some indy band who "re-invented" the same riff and worked it into their song. To me copyright should start wearing out in stages. The wholesale copying of say a song or book should have a fairly long lifespan. But works based upon it or derived from it should be fine even after 5 or 10 years.
If you are looking for a simple historical precedent just look at Hollywood. Basically one of the main reasons they went out into the wild west to make movies was that movie technology was new and the patents were controlled by a few capitalist robber barrons who ruled east coast movie making with an iron fist. So people went out west and made movies where the federal government had far less control to enforce the dictates of east coast judges. Not only did an industry boom but free of IP they innovated and innovated. Stole the latest ideas from each other and everyone got rich.
IP is not always bad but generally where the best IP is applied is when it protects the public. Is the drug you bought actually made by the original company? Is it even the drug you think you are buying? When I buy a HEAD tennis racket I don't want something crappy that is painted with the HEAD logo. But when IP only serves to protect the profits of the company such as MS being able to protect some obvious file system patent to keep Linux out of the market then it should be eliminated.
People blah blah about China stealing so much IP. But the reality is that they have thrived doing so and if anything are probably laughing at us stupid westerners who have shackled ourselves to a few parasitical lawyers. Think about it. If every computer or robot innovation is locked up for 20 years then this might explain why we read about things in the science journals and then it stagnates for 20 years. A simple example would be 3D printing; a handful of key patents run out this year and I suspect that we will see a genuine 3D printing revolution that starts the week they run out.
I have been on the edge of my seat waiting for something genuinely new. Something like when people were discovering that atoms were made up of even tinier bits. Or that quantum was not just a mathematical nicety but way cooler. Each of these fairly "academic" discoveries then opened up whole new trains of thought that led to lasers, solid state electronics, nuclear reactors, etc.
So what wonderful physics is hiding out there waiting to be discovered and open up a whole new world to us?
Personally my biggest recent letdown were the FTL neutrinos that turned out to be bogus. I was genuinely hoping that something cool revealing itself. But alas. My favorite today is that entanglement and wormholes might have some relationship. Minimally that will result in some cool sci-fi if not actual science.
Personally I don't mind if ultraspherical electrons shut down a bunch of pet theories. They didn't seem to be making much progress and thus the door has been opened to explore something new. Maybe there is some guy trying to get his doctorate showing that supersymmetry is a load of rubbish but hasn't been able to get much traction because the entire panel got their doctorates in supersymmetrical related ideas and in order to defend his thesis he has to first set fire to theirs.
The best part is that companies like Blockbuster didn't fight this at all. Whereas companies like Netflix fought and fought and fought for the rights of their customers (and of course themselves). I remember when Netflix lost one particular fight where they had to wait something like 30 days after BB got some new releases before they got their copies.
One of the results is that everyone I know hated BB, absolutely hated them. But nearly everyone I know is all "ooh ooh ooh you've got to get Netflix." (including me) this situation means that the customers will not support BB if they hit a rough patch. There is an independent Video store in my city that people love and it is still open. So it is not entirely the technology changing that killed BB. My happiest day in BB was a short while after they instituted the No Late Fees but as a stop gap had instituted a "Restocking Fee" if you were more than a week or two late. So I go in with a late late movie to find the owner working behind the counter (I had never seen him in the store ever just his peons) and he tries to charge me the Restocking fee. I tell him, "If it is a fee that you charge me when the movie is late then it is a late fee. And the sign with the 2 foot high letters outside says, No Late Fees." He then says that it is not a late fee but a restocking fee. So I repeat myself. This goes on for a minute or so with a lineup building up behind me and he says, "OK no late fee but get the f..k out of my store." I never went back, not out of some revenge but I just wasn't renting much anymore and this was an easy push to stop. That BB was closed a few months later, and torn down a year or two later.
I am willing to bet that around, say, 2002 the guy thought that he owned a license to print money and that he loved that it was his peons that did all the work.
But now so much of the copyright business world thought that they had the world by the balls with ever extending copyright laws. The state department in their pocket. Tax laws completely in their favor. They had locked down the cable channels, the radio frequencies, the satellites in space. It just didn't get any better. Then the Internet just started kicking them in the head. Now they are curled up in a little ball with the internet still kicking them in the head. They seem to think that DRM will be some sort of super armor against the internet that is not only going to keep kicking them in the head but getting bigger stronger and meaner the whole time. Every now and then they seem to think that if they can con some company like Microsoft to liquor up their technology with DRM then they can win. But it seems that any company that they sucker into doing that is another company that is getting screwed by progress as they are. Microsoft is very worried about linux on the desktop so they tried to lock down the bios "for our own protection" but the result is that they have just put another nail into the PC industry. Then they turn to Sony to turn up the DRM in Blueray since DVD is so badly broken which nearly then put even more pressure to make Blueray irrelevant before it had much of a chance. Their latest is to take the cable internet providers that they own and do an attack on Netflix bandwidth. The only result there is that people who can will flee to other ISPs and for those areas without a competing ISP they will have provided an opening for one to move in and compete with them when they are getting weaker.
To me this is like these people who live in beach houses on a retreating sandbar. They can take all kinds of measures to fight the ocean but eventually the ocean is going to win. They should have enjoyed the view while it lasted and then moved to safer ground in an orderly fashion for a different but equally excellent view.
I loved your books back in the 80's; my allowance went to buying them and then to the bits required to make things go beep. Money well spent.
What I loved with the handwritten style and the funky pictures was that they made the subject so accessible as opposed to the extremely dry material generally available. I was watching a video for an EE course the other day and they sucked every bit of fun out of the subject. So again thanks?
Any new books about Arduino (the 555 chip of 2013) or something 21st century?
Absolutely. Often the copies are better than the original. No FBI warning that you can't sit through, no trailers that are hard or impossible to skip through. The movie just plays. And the movie just works on more devices. Cost is not actually the best feature of a stolen product.
This is where Netflix type services seem to get it right. You select your product, and it plays.
I remember there was a burst of Technology books that came wrapped in plastic that was not to be removed in the store. Thus you couldn't browse the book in the store to see if it were any good. I suspect some MBA realized that their book actually sucked and this might increase sales. But what did they think people were doing? Running to the store with a tech question, looking it up, and leaving without buying the book?
If you invest in DRM for your product you are making two bets. That your DRM creators are some of the smartest people in the world. And that even when people do figure out how to crack the DRM that it will slow people down enough that impatience with the cracking process will cause them to give up an buy.
But it is highly unlikely that you have hired the best in the world. And any DRM process that is effective enough to slow people down consistently will probably also be a pain in the ass to manufacture.
I suspect that people who create and sell these DRM systems promise the world and get paid a fortune. But seeing that the code in this post kills the DVD DRM it certainly shows that very very very smart people are going to look upon any new DRM as a new birthday puzzle.
s''$/=\2048;while(){G=29;R=142;if((@a=unqT="C*",_)[20]&48){D=89;_=unqb24,qT,@ b=map{ord qB8,unqb8,qT,_^$a[--D]}@INC;s/...$/1$&/;Q=unqV,qb25,_;H=73;O=$b[4]>8^(P=(E=255)&(Q>>12^Q>>4^Q/8^Q))>8^(E&(F=(S=O>>14&7^O) ^S*8^S>=8 )+=P+(~F&E))for@a[128..$#a]}print+qT,@a}';s/[D-HO-U_]/\$$&/g;s/q/pack+/g;eval
My mother(88) is using Linux. She has no idea that she is using Linux. My mother in law is getting a chromebook and will have no idea what she is using. Interestingly both of their demands and security are being met quite well. My mother surfs a bit, she watches youtube a bit, but she mostly types documents to print(OpenOffice), and emails on gmail. So Linux is quite nice in that with a tiny bit of security her machine is well locked down from the predations of both the evils of the internet along with the destructiveness of various descendants.
My mother-in-law only gmails and that is it. So a chromebook is perfect. (Tablets are out due to the lack of keyboard or the fiddly keyboards) plus for the same price as an 8 inch tablet she gets an 11.6 inch screen.
But the dealbreaker for linux is often an iPhone. Yes you can hook up an iPhone to Linux but it is a pain in the ass along with things like the backups not being very good at all. iCloud can take care of quite a bit so that is becoming less important.
But for me the best bit with recommending Linux is that even the Raspberry Pi can run a fairly robust Linux. So old crap hardware can meet basic internet needs quite nicely.
But back to the original question. The security of a basic locked down linux set up is fairly good. With windows my problem was fixing all the stupid plugins and downloaders that various people would install. Now they can't install or alter much beyond things like bookmarks.
I read somewhere that salesforce did this years ago to allow people to track who actually read emails. I then renamed SalesForce to UsedCarSalesForce as that is a pure scumbag thing to do. I am a huge fan of some kind of privacy law where a company may not collect data that people haven't had clearly pointed out is being collected with the option to opt-in. You will notice opt-in as the operative word. Thus I don't even want my power company being able to sell my data even in aggregate and say that my neighbourhood uses more power than a different neighbourhood. When I see that "trusted-third-parties" thing it just ticks me off.
Absolutely, Canada is quite corrupt, and even worse the corruption is really pathetic. The most common form of corruption that I have seen is where a politician will get some minor help on their campaign, and then will lavish the helper with wildly disproportionate government love. This ranges from people who simply work on the campaign to advertising companies who do discount work on people's campaigns.
Then you get the traditional love that is lavished upon Quebec. Traditionally (pre-Harper and pre Bloc Quebec) Quebec voted as a fairly solid block(25%). The rest of Canada would generally be a random mix of Liberal and PC; so whomever won Quebec won Canada. The result was that the federal government firehosed any benefits they could in the direction of Quebec ranging from an excess of Quebec Cabinet ministers to ever federal government office being well staffed with people from Quebec to regulations that favor various industries in Quebec. Under Harper (not my favorite guy) this was significantly reduced. But in all likelihood Trudeau is going to be the next PM and the bad old days will return.
But back to India; I don't know a single business person who will deal with India in any way shape or form. I know one guy($80 million a year sales) who threw purchase orders from Indian companies into a draw reserved for countries he didn't trust (India, Nigeria, etc) and said that nobody in his industry would do business with India. (That said, he also wouldn't do business with his own state government as he considered it to be equally corrupt). His experience was that bank drafts were fake 100% of the time and the single time he did business with a "reputable" company he insisted that they wire the money to him first. He forgot about them until a few days later the $30,000 showed up in his bank account. So he duly shipped off the goods only to have the $30,000 disappear. He contacted the bank as wire transfers should not be reversible but it turned out the company had FedEx'd his bank a fake bank draft and the bank had deposited it making it look like a wire transfer. The cheque was even from a company called "Wire Trans." But as it was fake it bounced but only after he had shipped the goods. Needless to say he was unable to pursue this in the Indian justice system. The lucky thing was that a week later he was at a trade show where he told the story to dozens, many of whom were waiting for or had just received a similar "wire transfer".
As for saying to to preach, I will admit that corruption is rife here but so bad in India as to be crippling. Hence your Zero rupee note. The key difference is that reputable companies in Canada generally will not rip you off as the justice/court system will get them in the end. But we do have fly by night companies so we are not perfect.
A great study on useless organizations would be to find a charity that works to stop something that is then fixed/cured. I would love to watch them squirm to figure out how to justify their continued existence. An upcoming episode in this drama will be when driverless cars run over the purpose of MADD. I am not sure what even vaguely related cause they can convert to. If you cured some kind of cancer any related charities could simply move to another prevalent cancer. But drunk driving is a fairly focused and isolated topic. My guess is that they will convert to a temperance movement but that won't raise the big bucks and thus not protect their existence.