But each time there was a reduction in one area those people went on to other super productive jobs. So you would leave the farm but now you drove a truck (replacing many horse and buggy drivers) and that truck held the huge gains from the farm. But this time around the guy who gets the boot from the farm will find that the truck is driverless as well. The math is that instead of people moving into different professions that might have evolved from the increase in productivity that this time their last job is gone but so is the theoretical one that they would have gone to.
I see this as one of the many negative emergent properties of MBA bottom line thinking. You get thinking that thinks that if you keep training an employee in general ways you will end up with your employee leaving and all your training then was to the benefit of another company. Whereas if your employees are under-qualified they will be terrorized into working as hard as they can every day for slave wages.
Another effect of this short term thinking can be seen in most universities. If you invest in a top notch football coach and lavish training and whatnot on the team then you will have near instant wins that you can take to the board of directors. But if you invest in STEM and buy the physics department a pile of cool stuff then maybe, just maybe you will have one of your people win a Nobel prize 30 years from now. Some universities have realized that having really smart students and encouraging them to do cool things can result in near instant wins (Stanford, MIT) but few universities are willing to play the long game (Harvard and Yale seem to be which is funny as they churn out the short term mentality MBAs).
So if you go to a university and want to cure cancer you might have an intellectually interesting time but I am willing to bet that the waterboy for the football team is having more fun. Then on top of that you have the post school job market situation. Again the waterboy will have better job prospects in sales with his BA in sociology than a PhD in Physics ever will. But the MBA or even BA in Business will blow everyone out of the water. Even the PhD who wants the bucks is well advised to jump into something like HFT.
In the past we used terms like rocket scientist and had idols like Einstein and Feynman. But now the best we can do are a few pop culture TV scientists. There is no moon program, there is no nuclear program, there are no blackbird cool skunkworks capturing the public imagination. But there are sports stars, there are hedge-funds, and their are actors and that is about it.
Being a nerd has never been the coolest thing in the world but right now it might be at its lowest ebb.
But back to bashing MBAs. I have been to many companies when I was doing consulting. Fewer and fewer companies are allowing their employees much room for original thought. I have met truck drivers who weren't allowed to change a brake light. I have met IT people who ran a local office yet weren't allowed to deal with the tsunami of malware infecting all the machines because that was not their job. These are systems that were rigidly designed in some central office for maximum "efficiency" that are obviously total BS. You won't get a job in that central office by being an awesome IT person; but if you get an EMBA then you are suddenly VP material.
If you watch the show Undercover Boss the theme is almost always the same. The top boss is surrounded by MBAs who have completely insulated him from the rest of the company. So by going out into the trenches he discovers that the primary effect of the Managerial Accounting that is thrown at him is that the halfwits at the very bottom of the company know that it is being badly run. Yet the reports he gets indicate that things are running at nearly 100% efficiency.
So in this culture of only thinking about next weeks metrics how could someone ever think that embarking on a life long learning endevour would result in progress. Instead a culture of us vs them is created resulting in people reveling in their non-sophistication. If anything self-betterment would be a betrayal of your tribe.
The key difference between this and previous technological revolutions is that many people will simply be replaced; whereas in previous revolutions the people's efforts were amplified. A great example would be farm technologies. A zillion years ago in the dawn of agriculture people used a stick to shove the earth around, which became an ox pulled plow, then a horse, then crappy tractors, and now huge combines. But at each point there was a person doing the plowing. But the final move will be a robot doing the plowing. In theory there will be someone to hit the plow with a hammer when it jambs but this will be a tiny number of people nationwide.
The other critical factor is that the guy who runs the combine isn't that much more skilled than the guy with the stick (In that it wasn't years of education) which will be typical of the job killed by various forms of automation. This means that it is not so much that fewer people can do more it is that a greater percentage of the population will be unable to work productively in that a robot will be the better option. If you talk to many people who earned a good living over the last 60 years with little education you will find that they worked in very few industries, mining, farming, fishing, and manufacturing. All these are becoming more and more automated. Personally I am surprised that mining isn't completely automated underground in that by eliminating the human factor a mine should become really cheap if you don't have to worry about keeping humans alive. Plus many mines are in bizarrely remote areas meaning that you not only have to keep the miners alive underground but you then have to build whole communities above ground including expensive things such as hospitals.
One thing that I worry about is not just this clear problem of the low skilled becoming generationally unemployed but that some cultures and governments are not biased toward solving this problem. Personally I think the solution will be a consumer focused socialism. My main worry is that some countries will punish the poor, reward the few extremely productive producers and end up in modern feudal system with freakish inequality becoming the norm.
Other countries I believe are well culturally disposed at aggressively making sure that the maximum number of humans benefit from the near utopian bounty that could be provided by this revolution.
I have long said that if you look at the history of search engines that they flame out really quickly unlike almost any other business in the world. I remember using AltaVista and was quite happy. Then someone told me about a new search engine (Yahoo, lycos, I don't remember) and then one blessed day a coworker told me about this new google search engine that didn't only bring up porn. (For those too young to have experienced pre google most search engines worked off of keywords so if a porn site had the words "Study Math" 200 times then they would potentially top the list for that search.) So google actually showed you something much closer to what you wanted. I might have typed my old favorite a few more times by accident but within the week the previous search engine was a forgotten dream.
So if tomorrow I tried watson and it never showed me another about.com or yellow pages type entry I would switch in a heartbeat. I wonder how many financial types understand that google could loose 50% or more of their search business in less than a month, or at most a few months. Plus that decline has almost no limit. They could be at 5% within the year if the new engine is just that much better. About the only thing they could hope for would be inertia. That is that people keep typing searches into their toolbars and not change that setting. But groups like firefox and safari would probably change the default search and that alone would be quite damaging.
The other thing to keep in mind for a company of google's nature is that they are almost certainly a growth only company. That decline is potentially nearly impossible from a financial stand point. Without a doubt their stock price is not only based upon present profits and cash reserves but also strongly weighted by their growth. That would hurt their stock price which would raise the cost of acquisitions.
This might all sound doom and gloomy but if you were to go to 1995 and say to IT people that Novell will be largely irrelevant by 2005 and a smudge by 2015, or to say in 1998 that Sun will be a ghost of itself by 2008, or in 1999 to say that Apple will sell more cellphones than Microsoft will sell anything. People would have said you were bonkers. But all of the above companies sold "stuff"; stuff that you couldn't dump in a heartbeat. A search engine you can, gmail not so much, adsense even less, and the other app engines, android, and other services would be quite hard. So while technically adsense is their cash cow, how would their finances look if the new search engine used a different ad system, or if it used theirs?
To me the question of this happening has always been when, but not if. But the when could be next week or next decade.
I read about Bennett Haselton and he seems to be a darling of the ACLU but then here he is preaching that people should throw themselves on the mercy of the police and their awesome ability to make intelligent decisions. He then cites guilty people who he thinks weren't stupid to talk to the police. So I give the example of Sergey Aleynikov who carefully explained his position to the FBI who then saw his explanation as a confession and threw him in jail. If he had kept his mouth shut and only talked to his lawyers I suspect we would never have heard of Sergey Aleynikov.
The key here is that the US court system is largely an adversarial system. For good or bad this means that you should be very wary about cooperating with "The other side". The justice system is not rewarded for ensuring your innocence. They are punished if they don't convict enough people though.
He then tries to poke holes in the guys arguments by taking his positions to their literal extremes. This would be like taking the very intelligent expression "Never catch a falling knife" to include when it is falling toward a baby.
They can listen but they can't play man in the middle like they can with any land based system. Minimally they could watch for VPN type connections with any land communications and then block them forcing you to use weak or no encryption. But with a sat phone they can just know that you are using it and be sad.
So assuming you are using a good encryption over the line (assuming the sat phone itself uses crappy encryption) then your connection should be good.
The key to the soviet system was the centrally planned economy. The reality was that a small group of people simply can't handle the logistics of huge numbers of people. Think about a city of 1 million. Just look at what goes into running the grocery stores. The typical grocery store can easily have 30,000 different products. But the producers are continuously trying new things (most of which fail) and the retailer has to find which of those work for their particular customers. Then you have to ship them, store them, transact them, protect them; all on a timely basis at maximum efficiency. Even if you get your model working well some new company will come along and try new models that may or may not crush yours.
But when you allow the government to control this stuff they don't like new models and can generally wave reality away by dictating a new reality; that is if something breaks they can pull all kinds of stats and stuff out of their asses that "Prove" that they did the best possible. But in business if one company persists in being stupid then a competitor will introduce them to a new reality called bankruptcy.
Plus then you get the some pigs are more equal than other pigs situation
So to me the only system that has a chance will be fairly simple. Whenever inequality rears up it will have to be trimmed; simple as that. Not absolute equality as any attempt at that will be stupid just that when one small group of people start to hoard wealth that the plug will simply be pulled on that.
he pattern is that if you aren't very bright and your skill set is basically manual labor you are hosed. If things do go as most predict there will be an entire class of people where any job they are able to do a robot will do it better in every way possible. But unlike previous mechanical revolutions they won't be running the machines. The machines will mostly run themselves. Historically it wasn't so much replacing people as it was increasing the efficiency of a single worker. Horse drawn plows to tractors, horse and buggy to car, wagon train to railroad, shovel to steamshovel, pick-axe to dynamite. But there were exceptions such as elevator operators.
Where the real problem is going to come is not so much the robots themselves but how our economy and government's interactions with the economy are structured. Presently production and productivity is king. A simple example is that governments love to measure GDP (Gross Domestic Product) the number governments hate is unemployment. Governments have bought into the MBA culture of the "Bottom Line" all kinds of excuses for their bad behavior come up like "The market dictates wages/prices/contracts/working conditions." But they forget the human element in the economic equation and that it is not production but consumption that drives society and the economy. If more and more people go into survival mode the economy will tank. With minimum wage in the US often below $10 there is no way for those people to consume much beyond the basics that marginally keep them alive. But even those crappy jobs are drying up do to automation. A very simple example of how misguided present policy is would be to look at the government's quantitative easing. The government is basically printing money and then buying stuff with it. Most people think that they have to buy certain things but the reality is that they can buy anything, jellybeans if they want. So who do they give this money to? The big banks; billions upon billions to the big banks. But they could just as easily give this money to anybody on the street. So instead of seeing that this money ends up in the pockets of consumers who would say, spend it. They give it to the banks to shore up their stock prices. Then the banks use it to buy up homes which they rent to people making as much money as possible for a very small group of people.
So with the above in mind what will happen when some companies are able to reap huge productivity gains without hardly hiring anyone and in all likelihood eliminating existing jobs? Without a cultural readjustment all I can see is a situation where more and more people are going to become generationally excluded from the economy and this won't end well. But those closer to the reigns of power will be raking in more and more money with fewer and fewer costs wondering why the government less and less functional.
But not all cultures see things this way. There will be some countries and cultures that will be stupid and just try and ban robots. But the simple solution is to make sure that the rewards of the robot revolution are more evenly spread; focusing on making sure that their populations have generally equal access to things like money, education, and other public resources. I am not saying out and out communism in the soviet style as that really doesn't work but a system that continually makes sure that inequality does not become a virtue. If I had to identify a single solution it will be the minimum basic income. Not minimum wage but something quite different and quite radical.
Nielsen must be freaking out as this is data that they can't get their hands on; as this data would include almost every form of viewing, pirate, hulu, Netlfix, traditional, etc.
But the data would not be terribly pure for two reasons. If a show like breaking bad(with a youngish audience) were to hire a team of social media gurus and create many incentives to blah blah about the show then they will generate far more buzz per viewer than say Murder She Wrote reruns will generate per viewer both due to the age of the viewers and assuming that Murder She Wrote isn't hiring a crack team of social media experts.
So where this will really blow up is when a crap show completely games social media and then drinks their own cool aid thinking their show is a social media hit. But I have never met an MBA who didn't like the taste of their own urine.
The key seems to be that nobody would say no to Lucas. Yesa sir Jar jar be a good character that peoples will loves. So has JJ Abrams reached that point where he is surrounded by Yes men? Or is there someone who will say, "That sucks." Not necessarily someone who can order him around but simply someone who isn't a simpering fool and has good taste.
I recently read about LucasArts and all the bizarre choices that were made there. Basically they jumped from whim to whim. Hopefully those people are left by the doorstep by Disney. I suspect that they will weasel their way into the "creative" process and ruin everything anyway.
His first mistake was to trust a bunch of MBAs. These are people who believe in things like: trickle down economics, exploiting people to the limits of their sanity, that outsourcing is ethical, sweatshops just make good sense, tapping into pension plans to pay out their bonuses, and even running their own companies into the ground for short term gains all make sense.
I really hope that there is a clause in the contest that basically says they can be disqualified even post win if their are undisclosed issues such as stealing the idea. I would smile to my core knowing that these guys not only didn't get the money but were then marked for their entire lives as untrustworthy thieves.
My WTF would be people posting Visual Basic to GitHub. Then another WTF for anyone posting cobol to Github. My next WTF would be where the WTF is directed. Is it directed at the code or away from the code. Also many might be directed at the language or even a specific implementation. So my regular WTF in Objective-C would be theInsanelyLongDefinedParametersThatAreUsedInTheNS library. But when it comes to much of my own past perl code I suspect I would comment WTF in that in my Perl days I could twist a regular expression into pretty much anything.
But when you are getting to a lower level as in C and C++ you are going to be running up against strangeness in libraries like OpenGL and might be writing a comment such as "WTF won't nVidia release a proper library for Linux?" Or "WTF is wrong with the Android NDK and getting GPS data in C++?"
Years ago I worked for a company that did a tiny bit of work for one of the big 3 US auto companies. Their VP of marketing told me that it was his dream to eliminate the dealer network. He basically blamed a huge amount of his company's woes on the dealers. His dream was that you could buy your car from a grocery store or by phone from a newspaper ad and maybe this whole new internet thing was just the key. It was his opinion that customers were growing to really hate the US car companies because the dealers were so sleazy. But it was his opinion that the car companies had grown to accommodate their sleaze. He thought that all the different models and features only served to confuse the customers.
So wherever that guy is I am pretty sure he is cheering Tesla on. Plus based on what he said, I suspect the other manufacturers are watching and hoping but keeping quiet about it.
I love the breathless way that they report things that all boil down to: "Utah scientists will have us in flying cars in 5 years.".
Slashdot has a habit of doing the same thing in a subtly different way: "Biofuel company producing diesel from trees." But when you read the article it is two guys and a tiny test tube of a precursor to a precursor to diesel that they produced at huge cost but "Plan on increasing efficiency."
Nearly every article that I read in PopSci had comments about: "I have been earning $74 per hour since I learned the secrets of web sales." but this is not limited to PopSci. New Scientist (which I respect much more except for their stance on climate change) almost always has comments along the lines of "Feynman and Einstein are both about to be proven wrong by scientists in Utah who have been testing viable zero point energy units."
I am not exaggerating the above comments. I felt dirtied by their comments in that they had no system to eliminate them. Just as long as they don't cram in some external system like Discus (which I hosts file blocked a long time ago).
Simple "report this" or voting would easily eliminate the worst. Just take a look at the -1 comments in this very post. There is one titled
"Walling Up The Wall" which I don't even understand. Why did someone waste their time typing that?
I switched to MariaDB but my database is the size of a microbe so the few quirks were of no difficulty; but there were quirks. MariaDB was not a plug in replacement. I love it and wouldn't go back but it did take a tiny bit of work. So if I had one zillion servers with crazy databases I would be taking my time on that one. I suspect that what you will see is new development experiments depending on MariaDB and slowly increasing the pressure until they just make the switch.
The other question is how many obscure features of MySQL features are they using? (Including custom code)
My brother once told me that when the geeks who run a technology company buy a sports team the company is then on a ballistic trajectory. From about 2006 to 2009 one of the founders futzed around buying a hockey team. I would think that buying/running a hockey team would be far more interesting than running a bloated tech company and definitely time consuming. Typically when you are running a large organization you need to be solving 100 problems at once all the time. So you have to pick the most significant problems and focus your time. With two large organizations you would simply have not enough time.
If you look at the stock history of BBRY you will see that it tanked (along with everyone else) in 2008 and started to come to life around 2009 which is when he got his hockey team; the stock then began its slide down down down.
I could make a list of the mistakes that BB has made over the years but I will point out an interesting one from around 2000. I downloaded their SDK for making applications that would run on their phones. Very cool, it was a pretty good SDK and I was very excited. But I couldn't really figure out how to get my application into the hands of all the MBAs out there using their BBs. The only route seemed to be to advertise in the backs of business magazines. This would have been an ideal time for them to have built an App Store. Every now and then some BB user would ask me for help to get some Expense management app or another onto their phones. It wasn't that easy. So as we all know now there was a huge demand for this sort of thing but I got the feeling that it was a very low priority for RIM.
I read the same thing just as Netscape (add that to my list) collapsed. They were laying off 5000 at a go. But from what I could tell it was around 5 core guys still doing the bulk of the development. I suspect there is a Nobel in economics if you can figure out why so many companies become so flabby. Another good story was WebVan going busto. The people who went into the auction were blown away by the waste. Stacks and stacks of high end Sun servers still in their boxes. Top of the line chairs, desktops, desks, etc I read a different story about a game company start-up that blew the bulk of their money on an office renovation. Another where the CEO gave a quitting speech instead of a keynote speech, describing how it had eaten up a huge amount of management's time picking between two shades of blue for the banner of their website.
Where I think the primary failure comes from is people can't judge how important their job is. So you have the core people doing their core things (let's say building laser guided toothbrushes) but you have marketing, accounting, QA, server admins, building security, human resources, and so on. All those people feel that without them the company would collapse; this is technically true in that if accounting stopped issuing paycheques the company would grind to a halt pretty fast. But if you have a core group of toothbrush engineers the whole laser guided thing might require a kick ass marketing department. Well those guys are going to think they are kings of the world if they break all sales records. But what if the marketing guy is always telling really ranchy jokes along with the head of engineering? The HR people don't care that much about sales, they and legal will care more about harassment lawsuits; this is due to the simple fact that they will wear it if they don't do anything. But if you looked at the big picture you would simply say, "The cost of our lawsuits will be far smaller than losing these two." But that is not what they will do. They will push to fire these two douches. These same people will come up with "Codes of conduct" that are so ridiculous that good engineers and sales people will never come. Then the QA department will double in size every time their is a bug. But the worst is when the CEO (former engineer) violates the "Code of conduct" and is forced out by the board to be replaced by the head of legal services. This guy is completely risk adverse and is 100% happy to pull their product off all store shelves every time their is an incident. Then the company outsources the whole "useless" engineering department resulting in such faulty products that result in a massive liability bankrupting the company. Then the former CEO, head of marketing, and engineering team buy up the few good patents from the liquidators to use in their hot new laser guided nose hair trimming company.
It was a rhetorical question. I know the answer. The answer is not good. It shows that they haven't learned a thing. The OS could be 8 times faster 5 times easier to program, and be twice as easy to use but still be a complete dud because they haven't fixed the fundamentals. I didn't even go into their huge quality control issues.
With the BB 10 and its new personal mode, can your IT department cripple any aspect of the personal mode? If so then the new OS is just as crappy as the old OS. The OS is not the problem. It was that people were given "Smart" phones (and BB phones have long been quite smart) that have been lobotomized. So you have super senior managers who control billion dollar budgets not allowed to go to facebook because some IT person says NO. Well guess what those senior managers will go out and buy their own phone and leave their BB in their desk and just hand out their personal phone number; or swap in the SIM card. So how can a company expect to sell phones when executives everywhere felt that the phone was a personal insult.
There is a great story where some BB exec was at a fortune 50 company and saw all these top execs getting a free BB and just not using it. But going out and buying their own $700 phone. This exec apparently went back to RIM and told the top top people there and they said BS. This was when the RIM share price was near its peak. They didn't understand that if people were tossing a free phone into their desk that their company was in big trouble.
So if BB wants to survive they have to bite the bullet and pull the plug on IT departments being able to cripple the phones. The IT people will scream and wail but they aren't the end users. The IT people will make all kinds of empty threats but it is those top execs who get together and pick a new Phone vendor.
Companies like Nortel, Sun, Word Perfect, Digital, etc have all done the multi thousand person cut with promises of trimming the fat and getting back into fighting form. But when a company has become this bloated it is because the MBAs took over the company years before. MBAs hate R&D and progress. They love to rework the old over and over, giving it new names and calling it the X initiative. So when they cut the "fat" they don't start with themselves they start with R&D and other things that are the only chances of the company surviving the experience. They are shocked when cutting 10s of millions off the payroll doesn't produce the results they are looking for; so in true MBA form they try again, and again. So what you see are these massive layoffs of 1000s at a time. If they company didn't need them then why did they hire them in the first place? Either these people were useless and the people who hired them or created those departments should be sacked first, or the people being fired are useful and thus stupid to lay off. Personally I would say to fire whomever picked QNX as the basis of the new OS. Then I would fire the people who came up with the idea of a touchscreen only BB, then I would fire whomever came up with the idea of 500 basically identical models, then I would fire whomever designed the BB App Store, then I would fire the person who came up with the BB Desktop system, but first I would fire everyone with an MBA. Fire all the MBAs and the company would be in the black in 30 days (maybe less).
The bar has been set by piracy. If you want to be successful you must beat piracy. The key attributes of piracy are: Worldwide release, no commercials, no FBI WARNING screens, doesn't promote crap that people don't want to watch but you want them to see, doesn't charge too much, simple interfaces, doesn't upsell upsell upsell, doesn't try to extract continuous marketing information, doesn't use your product to try and support your 20th century business model, make it as easy for me to use your product (basically make it available on every conceivable device).
Netflix basically matches or beats nearly every one of these attributes. Hulu does not.
The ad that pushed me into seeking out adblocking technology was an IBM ad where every 30 seconds or so it would make this very sudden and loud woosh smack noise of a golfball being hit. This was the ultimate in MBA crap, golf as a way to draw in programmers? Annoying people to get your point across? This was a double fail. One it drove me into the hands of adblockers, and two I never respected IBM since.
Then you get sites like Answers.com where if the adblocking software was working perfectly the site would almost be blank.
I have been in many places where they had a bunch of perfectly good programmers. Things work well and all seems good. But I have also been in places where a few guys were Fake rock stars. They would blow their own horns from one end of the room to the other. These people were usually very destructive. A common symptom was the whole not invented here. They would spend months (or more) reinventing the wheel. I am talking wheels such as network code to download a file from a website. These of course are areas where there are awesome libraries programmed by real rock stars.
But in those companies where there were real rock stars these people were often best used not in the day to day work but helping other people out of trouble and sometimes just left to their own devices. The result of helping other people would be to go into an area where a fifth server had just been added to handle the load of some part and, using some discrete math, would reduce the problem to a point where it became a light load for a single server. Also the true rock stars would show up on Monday with a new version of the company's product for this new Apple iOS thing that recently became available. Then they would pull the same stunt when this new Android thing came out.
With fake rock stars you often see them claiming seniority and other programmers hiding their projects from them. With the real ones you have other programmers wishing they had more access to them. Another way to detect the difference between the fake and the real rock stars is which programmers are quitting because of them. With the fake ones you lose the genuinely good programmers. They can't take the BS anymore and just leave. With the real ones you lose the bad programmers who are made to look bad when the rock star comes into their disaster project that is 6 months overdue and does it better in a week or two; for the third time.
Slashdot Mirror
But each time there was a reduction in one area those people went on to other super productive jobs. So you would leave the farm but now you drove a truck (replacing many horse and buggy drivers) and that truck held the huge gains from the farm. But this time around the guy who gets the boot from the farm will find that the truck is driverless as well. The math is that instead of people moving into different professions that might have evolved from the increase in productivity that this time their last job is gone but so is the theoretical one that they would have gone to.
I see this as one of the many negative emergent properties of MBA bottom line thinking. You get thinking that thinks that if you keep training an employee in general ways you will end up with your employee leaving and all your training then was to the benefit of another company. Whereas if your employees are under-qualified they will be terrorized into working as hard as they can every day for slave wages.
Another effect of this short term thinking can be seen in most universities. If you invest in a top notch football coach and lavish training and whatnot on the team then you will have near instant wins that you can take to the board of directors. But if you invest in STEM and buy the physics department a pile of cool stuff then maybe, just maybe you will have one of your people win a Nobel prize 30 years from now. Some universities have realized that having really smart students and encouraging them to do cool things can result in near instant wins (Stanford, MIT) but few universities are willing to play the long game (Harvard and Yale seem to be which is funny as they churn out the short term mentality MBAs).
So if you go to a university and want to cure cancer you might have an intellectually interesting time but I am willing to bet that the waterboy for the football team is having more fun. Then on top of that you have the post school job market situation. Again the waterboy will have better job prospects in sales with his BA in sociology than a PhD in Physics ever will. But the MBA or even BA in Business will blow everyone out of the water. Even the PhD who wants the bucks is well advised to jump into something like HFT.
In the past we used terms like rocket scientist and had idols like Einstein and Feynman. But now the best we can do are a few pop culture TV scientists. There is no moon program, there is no nuclear program, there are no blackbird cool skunkworks capturing the public imagination. But there are sports stars, there are hedge-funds, and their are actors and that is about it.
Being a nerd has never been the coolest thing in the world but right now it might be at its lowest ebb.
But back to bashing MBAs. I have been to many companies when I was doing consulting. Fewer and fewer companies are allowing their employees much room for original thought. I have met truck drivers who weren't allowed to change a brake light. I have met IT people who ran a local office yet weren't allowed to deal with the tsunami of malware infecting all the machines because that was not their job. These are systems that were rigidly designed in some central office for maximum "efficiency" that are obviously total BS. You won't get a job in that central office by being an awesome IT person; but if you get an EMBA then you are suddenly VP material.
If you watch the show Undercover Boss the theme is almost always the same. The top boss is surrounded by MBAs who have completely insulated him from the rest of the company. So by going out into the trenches he discovers that the primary effect of the Managerial Accounting that is thrown at him is that the halfwits at the very bottom of the company know that it is being badly run. Yet the reports he gets indicate that things are running at nearly 100% efficiency.
So in this culture of only thinking about next weeks metrics how could someone ever think that embarking on a life long learning endevour would result in progress. Instead a culture of us vs them is created resulting in people reveling in their non-sophistication. If anything self-betterment would be a betrayal of your tribe.
The key difference between this and previous technological revolutions is that many people will simply be replaced; whereas in previous revolutions the people's efforts were amplified. A great example would be farm technologies. A zillion years ago in the dawn of agriculture people used a stick to shove the earth around, which became an ox pulled plow, then a horse, then crappy tractors, and now huge combines. But at each point there was a person doing the plowing. But the final move will be a robot doing the plowing. In theory there will be someone to hit the plow with a hammer when it jambs but this will be a tiny number of people nationwide.
The other critical factor is that the guy who runs the combine isn't that much more skilled than the guy with the stick (In that it wasn't years of education) which will be typical of the job killed by various forms of automation. This means that it is not so much that fewer people can do more it is that a greater percentage of the population will be unable to work productively in that a robot will be the better option. If you talk to many people who earned a good living over the last 60 years with little education you will find that they worked in very few industries, mining, farming, fishing, and manufacturing. All these are becoming more and more automated. Personally I am surprised that mining isn't completely automated underground in that by eliminating the human factor a mine should become really cheap if you don't have to worry about keeping humans alive. Plus many mines are in bizarrely remote areas meaning that you not only have to keep the miners alive underground but you then have to build whole communities above ground including expensive things such as hospitals.
One thing that I worry about is not just this clear problem of the low skilled becoming generationally unemployed but that some cultures and governments are not biased toward solving this problem. Personally I think the solution will be a consumer focused socialism. My main worry is that some countries will punish the poor, reward the few extremely productive producers and end up in modern feudal system with freakish inequality becoming the norm.
Other countries I believe are well culturally disposed at aggressively making sure that the maximum number of humans benefit from the near utopian bounty that could be provided by this revolution.
I have long said that if you look at the history of search engines that they flame out really quickly unlike almost any other business in the world. I remember using AltaVista and was quite happy. Then someone told me about a new search engine (Yahoo, lycos, I don't remember) and then one blessed day a coworker told me about this new google search engine that didn't only bring up porn. (For those too young to have experienced pre google most search engines worked off of keywords so if a porn site had the words "Study Math" 200 times then they would potentially top the list for that search.) So google actually showed you something much closer to what you wanted. I might have typed my old favorite a few more times by accident but within the week the previous search engine was a forgotten dream.
So if tomorrow I tried watson and it never showed me another about.com or yellow pages type entry I would switch in a heartbeat. I wonder how many financial types understand that google could loose 50% or more of their search business in less than a month, or at most a few months. Plus that decline has almost no limit. They could be at 5% within the year if the new engine is just that much better. About the only thing they could hope for would be inertia. That is that people keep typing searches into their toolbars and not change that setting. But groups like firefox and safari would probably change the default search and that alone would be quite damaging.
The other thing to keep in mind for a company of google's nature is that they are almost certainly a growth only company. That decline is potentially nearly impossible from a financial stand point. Without a doubt their stock price is not only based upon present profits and cash reserves but also strongly weighted by their growth. That would hurt their stock price which would raise the cost of acquisitions.
This might all sound doom and gloomy but if you were to go to 1995 and say to IT people that Novell will be largely irrelevant by 2005 and a smudge by 2015, or to say in 1998 that Sun will be a ghost of itself by 2008, or in 1999 to say that Apple will sell more cellphones than Microsoft will sell anything. People would have said you were bonkers. But all of the above companies sold "stuff"; stuff that you couldn't dump in a heartbeat. A search engine you can, gmail not so much, adsense even less, and the other app engines, android, and other services would be quite hard. So while technically adsense is their cash cow, how would their finances look if the new search engine used a different ad system, or if it used theirs?
To me the question of this happening has always been when, but not if. But the when could be next week or next decade.
I read about Bennett Haselton and he seems to be a darling of the ACLU but then here he is preaching that people should throw themselves on the mercy of the police and their awesome ability to make intelligent decisions. He then cites guilty people who he thinks weren't stupid to talk to the police. So I give the example of Sergey Aleynikov who carefully explained his position to the FBI who then saw his explanation as a confession and threw him in jail. If he had kept his mouth shut and only talked to his lawyers I suspect we would never have heard of Sergey Aleynikov.
The key here is that the US court system is largely an adversarial system. For good or bad this means that you should be very wary about cooperating with "The other side". The justice system is not rewarded for ensuring your innocence. They are punished if they don't convict enough people though.
He then tries to poke holes in the guys arguments by taking his positions to their literal extremes. This would be like taking the very intelligent expression "Never catch a falling knife" to include when it is falling toward a baby.
They can listen but they can't play man in the middle like they can with any land based system. Minimally they could watch for VPN type connections with any land communications and then block them forcing you to use weak or no encryption. But with a sat phone they can just know that you are using it and be sad.
So assuming you are using a good encryption over the line (assuming the sat phone itself uses crappy encryption) then your connection should be good.
Sat phones
The key to the soviet system was the centrally planned economy. The reality was that a small group of people simply can't handle the logistics of huge numbers of people. Think about a city of 1 million. Just look at what goes into running the grocery stores. The typical grocery store can easily have 30,000 different products. But the producers are continuously trying new things (most of which fail) and the retailer has to find which of those work for their particular customers. Then you have to ship them, store them, transact them, protect them; all on a timely basis at maximum efficiency. Even if you get your model working well some new company will come along and try new models that may or may not crush yours.
But when you allow the government to control this stuff they don't like new models and can generally wave reality away by dictating a new reality; that is if something breaks they can pull all kinds of stats and stuff out of their asses that "Prove" that they did the best possible. But in business if one company persists in being stupid then a competitor will introduce them to a new reality called bankruptcy.
Plus then you get the some pigs are more equal than other pigs situation
So to me the only system that has a chance will be fairly simple. Whenever inequality rears up it will have to be trimmed; simple as that. Not absolute equality as any attempt at that will be stupid just that when one small group of people start to hoard wealth that the plug will simply be pulled on that.
he pattern is that if you aren't very bright and your skill set is basically manual labor you are hosed. If things do go as most predict there will be an entire class of people where any job they are able to do a robot will do it better in every way possible. But unlike previous mechanical revolutions they won't be running the machines. The machines will mostly run themselves. Historically it wasn't so much replacing people as it was increasing the efficiency of a single worker. Horse drawn plows to tractors, horse and buggy to car, wagon train to railroad, shovel to steamshovel, pick-axe to dynamite. But there were exceptions such as elevator operators.
Where the real problem is going to come is not so much the robots themselves but how our economy and government's interactions with the economy are structured. Presently production and productivity is king. A simple example is that governments love to measure GDP (Gross Domestic Product) the number governments hate is unemployment. Governments have bought into the MBA culture of the "Bottom Line" all kinds of excuses for their bad behavior come up like "The market dictates wages/prices/contracts/working conditions." But they forget the human element in the economic equation and that it is not production but consumption that drives society and the economy. If more and more people go into survival mode the economy will tank. With minimum wage in the US often below $10 there is no way for those people to consume much beyond the basics that marginally keep them alive. But even those crappy jobs are drying up do to automation. A very simple example of how misguided present policy is would be to look at the government's quantitative easing. The government is basically printing money and then buying stuff with it. Most people think that they have to buy certain things but the reality is that they can buy anything, jellybeans if they want. So who do they give this money to? The big banks; billions upon billions to the big banks. But they could just as easily give this money to anybody on the street. So instead of seeing that this money ends up in the pockets of consumers who would say, spend it. They give it to the banks to shore up their stock prices. Then the banks use it to buy up homes which they rent to people making as much money as possible for a very small group of people.
So with the above in mind what will happen when some companies are able to reap huge productivity gains without hardly hiring anyone and in all likelihood eliminating existing jobs? Without a cultural readjustment all I can see is a situation where more and more people are going to become generationally excluded from the economy and this won't end well. But those closer to the reigns of power will be raking in more and more money with fewer and fewer costs wondering why the government less and less functional.
But not all cultures see things this way. There will be some countries and cultures that will be stupid and just try and ban robots. But the simple solution is to make sure that the rewards of the robot revolution are more evenly spread; focusing on making sure that their populations have generally equal access to things like money, education, and other public resources. I am not saying out and out communism in the soviet style as that really doesn't work but a system that continually makes sure that inequality does not become a virtue. If I had to identify a single solution it will be the minimum basic income. Not minimum wage but something quite different and quite radical.
Nielsen must be freaking out as this is data that they can't get their hands on; as this data would include almost every form of viewing, pirate, hulu, Netlfix, traditional, etc.
But the data would not be terribly pure for two reasons. If a show like breaking bad(with a youngish audience) were to hire a team of social media gurus and create many incentives to blah blah about the show then they will generate far more buzz per viewer than say Murder She Wrote reruns will generate per viewer both due to the age of the viewers and assuming that Murder She Wrote isn't hiring a crack team of social media experts.
So where this will really blow up is when a crap show completely games social media and then drinks their own cool aid thinking their show is a social media hit. But I have never met an MBA who didn't like the taste of their own urine.
The key seems to be that nobody would say no to Lucas. Yesa sir Jar jar be a good character that peoples will loves. So has JJ Abrams reached that point where he is surrounded by Yes men? Or is there someone who will say, "That sucks." Not necessarily someone who can order him around but simply someone who isn't a simpering fool and has good taste.
I recently read about LucasArts and all the bizarre choices that were made there. Basically they jumped from whim to whim. Hopefully those people are left by the doorstep by Disney. I suspect that they will weasel their way into the "creative" process and ruin everything anyway.
His first mistake was to trust a bunch of MBAs. These are people who believe in things like: trickle down economics, exploiting people to the limits of their sanity, that outsourcing is ethical, sweatshops just make good sense, tapping into pension plans to pay out their bonuses, and even running their own companies into the ground for short term gains all make sense.
I really hope that there is a clause in the contest that basically says they can be disqualified even post win if their are undisclosed issues such as stealing the idea. I would smile to my core knowing that these guys not only didn't get the money but were then marked for their entire lives as untrustworthy thieves.
My WTF would be people posting Visual Basic to GitHub. Then another WTF for anyone posting cobol to Github. My next WTF would be where the WTF is directed. Is it directed at the code or away from the code. Also many might be directed at the language or even a specific implementation. So my regular WTF in Objective-C would be theInsanelyLongDefinedParametersThatAreUsedInTheNS library. But when it comes to much of my own past perl code I suspect I would comment WTF in that in my Perl days I could twist a regular expression into pretty much anything.
But when you are getting to a lower level as in C and C++ you are going to be running up against strangeness in libraries like OpenGL and might be writing a comment such as "WTF won't nVidia release a proper library for Linux?" Or "WTF is wrong with the Android NDK and getting GPS data in C++?"
Years ago I worked for a company that did a tiny bit of work for one of the big 3 US auto companies. Their VP of marketing told me that it was his dream to eliminate the dealer network. He basically blamed a huge amount of his company's woes on the dealers. His dream was that you could buy your car from a grocery store or by phone from a newspaper ad and maybe this whole new internet thing was just the key. It was his opinion that customers were growing to really hate the US car companies because the dealers were so sleazy. But it was his opinion that the car companies had grown to accommodate their sleaze. He thought that all the different models and features only served to confuse the customers.
So wherever that guy is I am pretty sure he is cheering Tesla on. Plus based on what he said, I suspect the other manufacturers are watching and hoping but keeping quiet about it.
I love the breathless way that they report things that all boil down to: "Utah scientists will have us in flying cars in 5 years.".
Slashdot has a habit of doing the same thing in a subtly different way: "Biofuel company producing diesel from trees." But when you read the article it is two guys and a tiny test tube of a precursor to a precursor to diesel that they produced at huge cost but "Plan on increasing efficiency."
Nearly every article that I read in PopSci had comments about: "I have been earning $74 per hour since I learned the secrets of web sales." but this is not limited to PopSci. New Scientist (which I respect much more except for their stance on climate change) almost always has comments along the lines of "Feynman and Einstein are both about to be proven wrong by scientists in Utah who have been testing viable zero point energy units."
I am not exaggerating the above comments. I felt dirtied by their comments in that they had no system to eliminate them. Just as long as they don't cram in some external system like Discus (which I hosts file blocked a long time ago).
Simple "report this" or voting would easily eliminate the worst. Just take a look at the -1 comments in this very post. There is one titled "Walling Up The Wall" which I don't even understand. Why did someone waste their time typing that?
I switched to MariaDB but my database is the size of a microbe so the few quirks were of no difficulty; but there were quirks. MariaDB was not a plug in replacement. I love it and wouldn't go back but it did take a tiny bit of work. So if I had one zillion servers with crazy databases I would be taking my time on that one. I suspect that what you will see is new development experiments depending on MariaDB and slowly increasing the pressure until they just make the switch.
The other question is how many obscure features of MySQL features are they using? (Including custom code)
My brother once told me that when the geeks who run a technology company buy a sports team the company is then on a ballistic trajectory. From about 2006 to 2009 one of the founders futzed around buying a hockey team. I would think that buying/running a hockey team would be far more interesting than running a bloated tech company and definitely time consuming. Typically when you are running a large organization you need to be solving 100 problems at once all the time. So you have to pick the most significant problems and focus your time. With two large organizations you would simply have not enough time.
If you look at the stock history of BBRY you will see that it tanked (along with everyone else) in 2008 and started to come to life around 2009 which is when he got his hockey team; the stock then began its slide down down down.
I could make a list of the mistakes that BB has made over the years but I will point out an interesting one from around 2000. I downloaded their SDK for making applications that would run on their phones. Very cool, it was a pretty good SDK and I was very excited. But I couldn't really figure out how to get my application into the hands of all the MBAs out there using their BBs. The only route seemed to be to advertise in the backs of business magazines. This would have been an ideal time for them to have built an App Store. Every now and then some BB user would ask me for help to get some Expense management app or another onto their phones. It wasn't that easy. So as we all know now there was a huge demand for this sort of thing but I got the feeling that it was a very low priority for RIM.
I read the same thing just as Netscape (add that to my list) collapsed. They were laying off 5000 at a go. But from what I could tell it was around 5 core guys still doing the bulk of the development. I suspect there is a Nobel in economics if you can figure out why so many companies become so flabby. Another good story was WebVan going busto. The people who went into the auction were blown away by the waste. Stacks and stacks of high end Sun servers still in their boxes. Top of the line chairs, desktops, desks, etc I read a different story about a game company start-up that blew the bulk of their money on an office renovation. Another where the CEO gave a quitting speech instead of a keynote speech, describing how it had eaten up a huge amount of management's time picking between two shades of blue for the banner of their website.
Where I think the primary failure comes from is people can't judge how important their job is. So you have the core people doing their core things (let's say building laser guided toothbrushes) but you have marketing, accounting, QA, server admins, building security, human resources, and so on. All those people feel that without them the company would collapse; this is technically true in that if accounting stopped issuing paycheques the company would grind to a halt pretty fast. But if you have a core group of toothbrush engineers the whole laser guided thing might require a kick ass marketing department. Well those guys are going to think they are kings of the world if they break all sales records. But what if the marketing guy is always telling really ranchy jokes along with the head of engineering? The HR people don't care that much about sales, they and legal will care more about harassment lawsuits; this is due to the simple fact that they will wear it if they don't do anything. But if you looked at the big picture you would simply say, "The cost of our lawsuits will be far smaller than losing these two." But that is not what they will do. They will push to fire these two douches. These same people will come up with "Codes of conduct" that are so ridiculous that good engineers and sales people will never come. Then the QA department will double in size every time their is a bug. But the worst is when the CEO (former engineer) violates the "Code of conduct" and is forced out by the board to be replaced by the head of legal services. This guy is completely risk adverse and is 100% happy to pull their product off all store shelves every time their is an incident. Then the company outsources the whole "useless" engineering department resulting in such faulty products that result in a massive liability bankrupting the company. Then the former CEO, head of marketing, and engineering team buy up the few good patents from the liquidators to use in their hot new laser guided nose hair trimming company.
It was a rhetorical question. I know the answer. The answer is not good. It shows that they haven't learned a thing. The OS could be 8 times faster 5 times easier to program, and be twice as easy to use but still be a complete dud because they haven't fixed the fundamentals. I didn't even go into their huge quality control issues.
With the BB 10 and its new personal mode, can your IT department cripple any aspect of the personal mode? If so then the new OS is just as crappy as the old OS. The OS is not the problem. It was that people were given "Smart" phones (and BB phones have long been quite smart) that have been lobotomized. So you have super senior managers who control billion dollar budgets not allowed to go to facebook because some IT person says NO. Well guess what those senior managers will go out and buy their own phone and leave their BB in their desk and just hand out their personal phone number; or swap in the SIM card. So how can a company expect to sell phones when executives everywhere felt that the phone was a personal insult.
There is a great story where some BB exec was at a fortune 50 company and saw all these top execs getting a free BB and just not using it. But going out and buying their own $700 phone. This exec apparently went back to RIM and told the top top people there and they said BS. This was when the RIM share price was near its peak. They didn't understand that if people were tossing a free phone into their desk that their company was in big trouble.
So if BB wants to survive they have to bite the bullet and pull the plug on IT departments being able to cripple the phones. The IT people will scream and wail but they aren't the end users. The IT people will make all kinds of empty threats but it is those top execs who get together and pick a new Phone vendor.
Companies like Nortel, Sun, Word Perfect, Digital, etc have all done the multi thousand person cut with promises of trimming the fat and getting back into fighting form. But when a company has become this bloated it is because the MBAs took over the company years before. MBAs hate R&D and progress. They love to rework the old over and over, giving it new names and calling it the X initiative. So when they cut the "fat" they don't start with themselves they start with R&D and other things that are the only chances of the company surviving the experience. They are shocked when cutting 10s of millions off the payroll doesn't produce the results they are looking for; so in true MBA form they try again, and again. So what you see are these massive layoffs of 1000s at a time. If they company didn't need them then why did they hire them in the first place? Either these people were useless and the people who hired them or created those departments should be sacked first, or the people being fired are useful and thus stupid to lay off. Personally I would say to fire whomever picked QNX as the basis of the new OS. Then I would fire the people who came up with the idea of a touchscreen only BB, then I would fire whomever came up with the idea of 500 basically identical models, then I would fire whomever designed the BB App Store, then I would fire the person who came up with the BB Desktop system, but first I would fire everyone with an MBA. Fire all the MBAs and the company would be in the black in 30 days (maybe less).
The bar has been set by piracy. If you want to be successful you must beat piracy. The key attributes of piracy are: Worldwide release, no commercials, no FBI WARNING screens, doesn't promote crap that people don't want to watch but you want them to see, doesn't charge too much, simple interfaces, doesn't upsell upsell upsell, doesn't try to extract continuous marketing information, doesn't use your product to try and support your 20th century business model, make it as easy for me to use your product (basically make it available on every conceivable device).
Netflix basically matches or beats nearly every one of these attributes. Hulu does not.
The ad that pushed me into seeking out adblocking technology was an IBM ad where every 30 seconds or so it would make this very sudden and loud woosh smack noise of a golfball being hit. This was the ultimate in MBA crap, golf as a way to draw in programmers? Annoying people to get your point across? This was a double fail. One it drove me into the hands of adblockers, and two I never respected IBM since.
Then you get sites like Answers.com where if the adblocking software was working perfectly the site would almost be blank.
I have been in many places where they had a bunch of perfectly good programmers. Things work well and all seems good. But I have also been in places where a few guys were Fake rock stars. They would blow their own horns from one end of the room to the other. These people were usually very destructive. A common symptom was the whole not invented here. They would spend months (or more) reinventing the wheel. I am talking wheels such as network code to download a file from a website. These of course are areas where there are awesome libraries programmed by real rock stars.
But in those companies where there were real rock stars these people were often best used not in the day to day work but helping other people out of trouble and sometimes just left to their own devices. The result of helping other people would be to go into an area where a fifth server had just been added to handle the load of some part and, using some discrete math, would reduce the problem to a point where it became a light load for a single server. Also the true rock stars would show up on Monday with a new version of the company's product for this new Apple iOS thing that recently became available. Then they would pull the same stunt when this new Android thing came out.
With fake rock stars you often see them claiming seniority and other programmers hiding their projects from them. With the real ones you have other programmers wishing they had more access to them. Another way to detect the difference between the fake and the real rock stars is which programmers are quitting because of them. With the fake ones you lose the genuinely good programmers. They can't take the BS anymore and just leave. With the real ones you lose the bad programmers who are made to look bad when the rock star comes into their disaster project that is 6 months overdue and does it better in a week or two; for the third time.