I have two guilty pleasures: Watching the show COPS, and programming in PHP.
I dream about getting away from PHP and occasionally dip my toes in other waters (Python, Java, and even C++) but always come back to PHP. I won't go to Ruby for as many websites start with Ruby and then abandon it for many other languages. People blah blah about MVC but often what I am doing is just too damn simple to need such added complexity. I might need a program that I occasionally run to view a list of spam flagged submissions; it is done in 10 minutes in PHP. I don't use any frameworks and am diligent enough to keep things running through prepared statements and whatnot. With opcode caching and memory caching of data PHP is very very fast.
It is not so much that PHP is the best at anything it is that it isn't really terrible at anything I care about. Almost every other language is terrible at at least one thing that I do care about.
Personally I think that PHP gets its bad rap because it is a very easy transition from HTML. So you have basically non programmers starting to sprinkle PHP into their HTML and oddly enough an untrained programmer's first efforts end up being crap. Then because PHP covers all the web server basics these programmers potentially never venture beyond PHP and there is nothing better for making a bad programmer than a one language programmer. (Not someone who primarily programs in one language but one who only ever learned the one language) So these same programmers keep expanding the scope of their terrible code.
So if anyone can suggest a programming language to replace PHP I would love to know (and all JVM languages are off my list).
My two comments are make it fun. Basically if you aren't teaching them to make games or something internet related then you are wasting your time. Teaching fundamentals such as linked lists to people who are fundamentally not interested (the vast majority) is just cruel. But if you get them making simple games that get more and more complex then you might have them. Also getting them to do mashups or something like accessing the API of whatever is cool that week (snapchat, etc) might win some hearts and minds.
Years ago I bought a book when learning SQL that blah blah blahed about genealogy. The guy was going to take you through building a genealogy database. So he starts off with a long boring genealogy tutorial teaching terms like matrilineal; boring. Why not keep it simple. Data goes in, data goes out. So keep the classes as fresh as possible. Even twitter APIs might be tool old at this point.
But the next thing is good luck. My daughters are in a pretty typical public school system and no matter how hard the schools try to "Join the computer age" they can barely break out of 1985. A simple example of their "Hot new tech" is that they now have a robodialer that bothers me with great long winded messages that are often not even grade relevant. Have they not heard of email?
So I can see a situation where you set up a bunch of students on Raspberry Pis that can be wiped (literally) in a flash and still end up with the school IT people saying that it isn't an approved OS, that you aren't running the approved software and that according to the rules you must teach the students the only approved language: Pascal.
So for anyone trying to spill a small sampling of the 21st century into their schools, just remember that the school board might be worried about the students sniffing the ether out of your ethernet.
What I am looking forward to laughing about is how robots will end the need for so many government inefficiencies yet the politicians will hang on to them for as long as possible. Until each government reaches an economic crisis and then finally the cuts will occur. Robot cars will vastly reduce the square footage of asphalt required and thus the amount of highway pork that can be handed out. On top of that the highway construction will also probably robotize which also takes away from the pork factor. In my area the contractors get multi-multi-million dollar contracts one after another then they hire a bunch of yokels; all of whom then make donations to the politicians in question. But the politicians in my area are so two bit that the donations make up a tiny fraction of the profits from the contracts. Not quite corruption but very shady. The same goes with appointments to traffic court judges, police chiefs, the people who make the road signs, etc.
All these things are good. But where I am going to cry is when relentless capitalism brutally takes over. A few companies will properly exploit robots and make gobs of money with very few employees. This cycle will get worse and worse, restaurants will have no cooks, waiters, cleaners etc. Grocery stores will be staffed with a few employees, farms a few, factories, a few, construction a few. It won't be the 1% people complain about it will be the 0.01% with the vast remainder unemployed.
My plan is quite simple. I am going to keep my eyes open for the country that appears to be focusing on the humans in its borders and not just the producers; then I will move there. My simple equation is which country will expand the size of their jails as they can cheaply automate them; and which countries will think that this is an absurd idea?
I can really see this. If all cars are programmed to rigidly obey traffic laws then policing should plummet (as they are not going to make any money never writing tickets; which is a whole other can of worms) so there will be a huge win for people who hack their car's computers to allow them to violate various rules such as going faster.
But this is somewhere that I think the emperor will regularly have no clothes. Many driving laws are sensible and fairly well based upon safety and road efficiency. But others are based upon curtain pulling ninnies who don't like other people having fun. Speed limits are a great example. If you are limited to around 100kph/60mph on a great highway with 3 lanes then that is just stupid. Then you often have these strange little slow zones on good country roads where some turd whined at a politician until they lowered the speed.
But with robot cars being able to have fantastic reaction times and no deficiencies such as falling asleep or driving drunk in theory they should be able to drive safely much nearer the limits of what the car can do. Also in theory a high end sports car should be allowed to drive far far faster than a low end Kia. But I suspect that not only will this not happen but the curtain pulling ninnies will realize that politicians can endlessly agree to their driving regulations as the cars can be regularly updated with maps of various speed zones and other regulations. In theory single mile of road could have hundreds of regulations to follow. (If you think this is stupid there is a great court case in Britain where a guy successfully defended a speeding ticket as the mile proceeding the speed change sign had 300 different traffic signs. With the next mile also having 300 signs.)
But when all is said and done it will be interesting to see how the government makes up for all the lost revenue when cars basically don't break traffic laws all the way down to parking violations. Right now they claim that the fines are all in the name of safety but when the money starts to dry up it will be interesting to see the panic in their eyes.
Basically the established grocery stores have followed a fairly simple business model. You buy large lots of marginal land at the very edge of town. Then town grows around your stores and you buy new large lots of marginal land at the new edge of town. This way when your customer wakes up on Saturday and looks into an empty fridge they go to "The" Grocery store. Once in a while some chain is run badly and the other chains feast on the corpse grabbing up plots of land that would otherwise be hard to get.
Think about where your local medium to large grocery store is located (preferably one that is 20 years old or more) and think about how hard it would be to start a new chain by buying a neighbouring location. Your financing costs would be prohibitive and doubtfully would withstand a sustained sale at the established local(and paid for) store.
Present delivery systems have larger vans or trucks that have a fairly good gap between order and delivery.
This has basically prevented upstarts in the tech world style. But now think about having automated delivery vans that leave a short time after you place your order and can be monitored over the web with a near to the second ETA. Now you can wake up Saturday look into an empty fridge and potentially fill it with goodies faster( and lazier) than you can by driving there yourself.
But best of all these centralized warehouses only need to have parking for their few employees and the delivery truck. No large parking lot. No convenient location. Not even a large space as you don't need wide isles and floor displays. It could even be in a horrible place or configuration for a traditional grocery store such as a basement or multi-floored.
Then at the next level you could even pick a worse location that can't even manage a tractor trailer delivery vehicle by having one out of town warehouse that gets the tractor trailers and then in smaller automated vehicles distributes the goodies to much smaller depots closer to their customers. Thus almost any crappy location downtown will do.
Basically this takes a huge market advantage that existing grocery chains have relied on for around 100 years and turns it into a liability. There will be a day when the old chains realized that it would be better for them to sell their prime real-estate to other developers. The question for them will be if they can adapt or will these sales happen post business collapse?
On a positive note I suspect that the tiny boutique store with highly knowledgeable staff will thrive after this.
Large Telcos dedicate way more hardware to billing for SMS than they do to making it work. The system is lossy due to the benign neglect. What is priceless is when they raise the per message rates. In my parts they are around.25 USD each unless you get a plan. I love it that the cost per byte is higher than the total cost per byte of the Hubble telescope including launch, hardware, ground control, and even a shuttle mission to fix it. So I call BS on SMS basically costing anything.
But this is all just a symptom of a larger problem. Most western governments haven't figured out how to best use this common property of spectrum. The bidding model is just stupid because it limits the players to the large oversized telcos. In Europe they have created a system of mostly incredible competition but the result is that few companies are willing to make the jump to more modern technologies which could result in the government just picking one which is great only if they get it right.
In Canada they hive of bits of spectrum for minor competitors which usually is made up of third rate frequencies that things like iPhones won't talk to. Then up until now they have let the major players abuse the crap out of the minor players until they are able to just buy up the minor players.
But all this only applies to G8 type countries. Some places like Hong Kong have rates around 8 bucks for 600 minutes or a prepaid rate of around 2 cents per minute.
So high SMS rates are a simple symptom of no effective competition. If there was real competition with the SMS costs being very close to zero there would be market entrants who would throw it in for free with their most basic packages and those packages would be also close to free. That company might not make a boatload of money and might even fail but it would be a sign of a healthy market. In my neck of the woods there were a bunch of pizza places really fighting it out then some pizza places burned down and a few companies took over the downtown market and prices almost exactly doubled per slice.
Actually it did via various access laws that give politicians very low rates for campaign advertising. The claim behind the laws was that a network has to provide equal time but the reality is that it lowered rates.
This will primarily be used to put out propaganda things post disaster. "Our hearts ache for the people of LowerDisasterWater. We shall stand together in our unwavering support for their re-emergence as a third rate backwater."
Or worse it will slowly degrade into a useless bunch of PSAs about emergency preparation, evacuation routes, weather warnings, etc. I love how politicians seem to think it is OK to vote for exemptions for themselves in laws that people want without exemptions. Nobody wants robocalling, nobody wants text spam, nobody wants corporate funding of political parties, nobody wants to be molested by the TSA; yet politicians seem to think that it is OK to exempt themselves from all of these things.
I am very very careful about who I give my number out to. The last person I would want to have my number would be a politician.
I made the switch and couldn't be happier. I haven't done an official speed comparison but it seems that MariaDB is much more responsive. That tiny little ms counter in Sequel Pro is showing much shorter times for routine tasks.
But the fulltext indexing is not available to the default table engine. That is my one complaint.
I would be curious to know what the insider thinking is at Oracle. I suspect they thought they had the free database crowd by the balls. No doubt they had all kinds of interesting long term strategies to switch companies over from MySQL to overpriced Oracle products. Now those strategies are going to fade into nothingness.
My personal experience with terrible IT heads was that they had no business sense. The worst IT people I have seen had certifications a mile long (All in Novell and they wouldn't leave Novell to save their or the company's life). I have seen terrible IT people with no certifications (One who used a faxed around list of IP Addresses with names beside them to assign IP addresses to around 200 employees. The IP addresses were then manually entered into the desktop systems. And this was at a large telco). I have seen a terrible IT person who could alter the Linux Kernel at whim to solve fairly minor problems that the rest of us might use a cron job for.
But the best IT people had a real business sense. They would look at a million dollar UPS and examine it as a complete business case. (How much downtime cost vs the whole cost of buying and maintaining the UPS) They would also look at new IT policies from a whole business perspective. They understood that stupid policies like making everyone change their password every 30 days had a much larger cost than "a few seconds of their time". So the best IT people that I have seen did have a fairly good technical prowess but generally not awesome. It was their business skills that set them apart. The key threshold was that they recognized that IT supported the business and that in an ideal world the business could do away with IT as it wasn't their core business. So when someone asked something of them they didn't just yell "NO" and then back up their ridiculousness with technobabble; but looked at the business case and came back with a price.
One of the key advantages any established grocery store has is its location. Often grocery stores were build on cheaper land that has now grown significantly in value. The result is that it is very hard for a new chain to acquire the huge prime tracts of land required for a modern grocery store chain. This is why most of the last 20-30 years has seen the most activity in "Power Centers" that are way outside of town. In some cases again town has reached out and surrounded these power centers but typically you must drive to these centers.
So for new radical entrants the price of admission is basically quite steep with the only realistic method of market entry being the take-over of an existing faltering chain with great locations. But with automated logistics combined with internet ubiquity grocery delivery is at the cusp of becoming mainstream. But I think the last piece of the puzzle will be roboticly driven delivery vehicles. Once that threshold is crossed then anyone who can raise the capital to buy some small warehouse along with a small fleet of delivery vehicles plus the initial marketing will be capable of taking on the big players turning their great location assets into liabilities.
So my prediction will be that the smart established players will jump into automated delivery and begin downsizing sooner but that most just won't see this coming and will ignore the upstarts mistakenly thinking that their unassailable awesome locations will see them through.
So even though these places seem very high-tech it will be even higher tech that will win the day.
This study sounds all radical and leading edge but was fundamentally done about 10 years ago by a Canadian researcher from Dalhousie University.
Talk about taking credit for someone else's work. Without going through the paywall I can't see if the much earlier work was properly cited but regardless they are making it sound like this is a groundbreaking discovery as opposed to confirming and probably increasing the detail of previous work.
If I had to make a list of reasons I don't like Windows it would be very short as it has been so long since I used it as my primary OS. But some of the reasons that I remember leaving for would be:
Microsoft almost always accusing my legitimate versions of windows of not being Genuine.
There being 800 different versions of the OS (Home, Cottage, Small business, Business, Cottage Pro, Professional Pro, Pro Ultimate, etc)
It crashing once or twice a day (I C++ program so my code was no doubt a contributing factor but it shouldn't bring down the OS, plus the same crappy code doesn't upset my present OS).
A virus a day keeps my sanity away. And then the required AV software was just as bad as the viruses they supposedly fought. Although I did like NOD32 just before I left.
All the coolest stuff worked better with other OS such as Linux, Mac, and BSD. Libraries such as OpenCV in its early days things like Python Libraries.
Plus all the cool kids were (and still are) using other OSs. By cool kids I don't mean people using computers as fashion accessories but people working in the best universities on things such as ML, Robotics, and computer vision.
But what flipped my switch away from MS was that I didn't need it anymore. All the software I usually ran was available elsewhere and the software I wanted to run and either couldn't or had trouble with was also elsewhere. So bye bye MS. I did miss Visual Studio somewhat.
So at this point let's assume that Windows is exactly as good as what I am using now. Why would I bother switch? I can certainly say that there is nothing that I have to have that is only available on Windows. I can say that Windows would slow down my development process. The very very few things that I need I run in an old copy of Windows XP that I have tucked away in a VM.
The last two bits of software that MS made that got me excited were Visual Studio 1.0 (bye bye Borland C++) and then the early days of.net were exciting. When was that 2000? So nothing in 13 years. Not one thing.
Your comment is so close to the present and future. Older organizations with ensconced programmers will "hold the line" with Java for years to come. But organizations where there isn't someone with "seniority" to tell the programmers what to do and how to do it they will go with what is hot just because it is exciting and fun. If they wanted boring they would get a job at the telephone company. People fell in love with Ruby and a zillion cool projects came out of it. Then these people ran into various performance walls and generally switched to other languages. The key is not if one language is better than another in that I personally have twisted various languages way past what they were good at but did the programmers feel free to do something cool and new. Even if Java were to be the best language ever it is surrounded by a fog of stodginess. It was the cool language in 2002. The practical language in 2009 and now it is the fogies language in 2013. Probably one of the biggest "cool kids" boosts Java has had in years was minecraft.
It is not that python is better or worse. It is that CS people are exiting without Java in their heads. Thus when they choose a language they are less likely to choose a language they don't know well or at all. In the past the CS grads did leave with quite a bit of Java and thus it would be high on their list when choosing the language for a new project. This is a simple numbers game. So those organizations that are presently using Java will generally keep using it. But in organizations starting projects from scratch or new organizations they may very well go in other language directions. You mention various JVM based systems. My guess is if you haven't touched Java you won't get involved with anything JVM voluntarily.
Fully agreed. If I were hiring Java programmers I would have fairly low standards and only worry a bit as good unit testing ought to weed out the worst. If I were hiring for a C++ project I would hire the best that I could get and worry quite a bit. C/C++ is so much better than Java in the right hands, not a little bit better but it lives in a whole different dimension better. But in the wrong hands it is pure toxic waste. But what I love about Java is that it seems to mop up mediocre programmers and confine them inside cubicals at the power company.
It is not that Python is a replacement (as good as or worst than Java) it is that CS departments have switched to teaching Python in their Intro courses and beyond. I am seeing Quants switching to Python, I am seeing bio and physics types switching too. I am not seeing large businesses switching and I don't anticipate them switching anytime soon. This means that huge numbers of CS students who in the past would have come out of school with some pretty sound Java skills are now coming out with potentially zero Java skills. That means that when they are scrolling through the list of languages in their heads for a new project Java won't be on that list. Whereas a CS student of say 2009 might have said, "Java? Yeah I can handle that."
A 2013 grad will say, "Java? Do I look like I work for a bank?"
Java lost me many years ago for various reasons. But not using Java was more of a gut feeling as opposed to a well thought out plan. But now between the this craziness and the non stop drip drip of security flaws I have now moved into the camp that anyone using Java on a new project is just drinking the kool-aid. With Oracle at the helm you just know they have a spreadsheet with a time-table for monetizing Java harder and harder as time moves forward.
My guess is that Oracle has seen the writing on the wall that many business organizations are solidly Java and can afford any "minor" fees involved. What they are missing is that many university CS departments are dumping Java in favor of Python as Python is becoming the defacto language of academia. My prediction is that Java will ever so slowly fade as it is ensconced in the business world and isn't going anywhere there. But that the cool kids will see it as their grandfather's language and actively avoid it. I am not suggesting that Python will replace Java just that with CS students not giving a crap about Java they won't choose it for new projects.
One thing that has long annoyed me about Java progammers is this whole, "Let's wrap every damn thing in a object." Then you end up with an architecture that looks like the traveling salesman problem done by someone on LSD.
If your boss is paying you $30,000 per year. I am willing to bet that he will have 3 fits when you leave. If you don't feel that you are going to get a good recommendation then leave them to stew in their own waste. Basically write down the passwords and leave. In the IT world you are in an abusive relationship. If there is a gap between your old job and your next one and they want you to come in with the "transition" then charge them a consultant's fee of $500-$1,000 per day. They will pay at least that much to have someone new come in and figure out what the heck is going on.
One bit I forgot to mention is the hysterics. There will be the anecdotal events where a car drives a family off a cliff or drives the Swedish commuter to Capri instead of Carpi. And people will go "tisk tisk, You won't get me into one of those deathtraps." Vested interests will play up these events. Won't work in the end but it may slow progress down.
I look forward to your book as this is a subject that truly excites me. (And scares me with the across the board job losses).
Everybody always talks about the obvious things that Robot cars will do such as better road safety. But I think what will the most interesting are the Secondary and Tertiary effects. Such as the eventual near elimination of road signs and many other traffic control structures such as one way streets as these things can be programmed into the cars from a database and other things such as one way streets or intersections can have cars negotiate with one another before crossing paths. Highways can basically all go one lane each way(if everyone is going exactly the speed limit there is no passing) and roads can become insanely narrow.
But other things such as taxis and car rentals will become blurred as what exactly is the difference when there is no driver. Parking lots can significantly shrink if your car can park 10 cars deep bumper to bumper and negotiate to get out when you call it. (assuming you don't just rent/taxi when you need one)
Commuting patterns change when cars can utilize the roads at near perfect efficiency and you can either doze or do work (behind the wheel). Plus my assumption is that an all robot filled road will allow cars to go insanely fast and convoy bumper to bumper slip-streaming each other. This then changes the distance that people are willing to regularly travel by car.
Then you get other changes such as an all robot road system would have an insignificant number of accidents rendering much of the in-car safety systems worthless. So you can then chop the weight of a car if it has no airbags, crumple zones, bumpers, etc. This also implies that old fashioned cars will have to be banned from the roadways unless augmented with a robotic system.
Other non-obvious changes would be that the entire car-insurance industry will be decimated. If cars basically stop crashing you don't need much in the way of adjusters, liability premiums, comprehensive premiums, etc. You will only need insurance for theft (presumably harder in a smart car) and things like trees falling on it. A car that crashes would mostly be due to a manufacturing defect.
Also the whole accident related industry would be smushed. This doesn't just include car repair and paint/parts manufacturing but towing, fire/rescue, and even a significant reduction in many hospital's emergency trauma wards.
Then you have the impact on the auto industry itself. They will have a boom from getting to replace nearly every non-robot car on the road and then with the onslaught of improvements that will follow they will get to replace the first few generations of cars quickly. But some manufacturers will miss the boat and get sidelined. Others will not realize that many sales are driven through destroyed cars and mess that up.
Then there is the quality of life issues. Old people will maintain their freedom much longer than before.
But the one that I am most looking forward to are the struggles that lawmakers will have. They will keep thinking in old ways such as stupid speed limits that have no safety purpose. Things like stop signs will be an oddity and then there is the fact that if all the cars are perfectly driven then nearly all fine revenue will drop to zero. Lawmakers love punishing the sinful and this will be a huge sin tax that will be lost. I suspect that even drinking and driving laws will be slow to change as it is my belief that they are driven as much by religious temperance types as by safety concerns. In this regard I would predict that an unlicensed driver or even empty car will be allowed on the roads before someone can be passed out drunk in the back seat while automatically being driven home.
Lastly this may very
Slow and steady innovation and improvement pretty well must come from the bottom up. The whole boots on the ground thing. Companies that are dictatorial about this are just leaving a huge amount of wasted potential untapped while annoying just about everybody. But often a company needs to make a big change. This sort of change is scary and can be painful. This is where a leader with "vision" is required. The later is where Steve Jobs and Apple seemed to have excelled. He had the vision and made it happen all the while having a zillion employees minding the details. Without Steve Jobs Apple products will probably continue to improve but will slowly miss the next wave of innovation.
I am fairly sure that the electric car is the next big thing in cars. For me a car with around 100 miles range would be great. There are few things in my life beyond that range. The Tesla with its 200 mile range is awesome and we can all assume that between batteries and other improvements the range will only get better. Yet the big automakers can't seem to understand that they need to make the leap. Things like the leaf are sub 100 miles and the Volt still had a piston engine in it. So this is a case where Tesla is now in the cycle of steady improvements of the next generation while most of the other car companies keep improving the past generation of fuel driven cars.
I am going to predict that this is going to be a devastating blow to their profits. Back when BlockBuster instituted "No Late Fees" I knew they were doomed. Basically they were profiting on bad luck and stupidity of which people are never short. So then BB had to profit from providing a quality service. Doomed!
How many people are suckered into overpaying in all kinds of creative ways. The locked phone for instance must keep many people from switching carriers. So I don't see the big three going bankrupt but I do see their profits taking a bigger hit than even they see coming in that they have probably fooled themselves into thinking that they are making profits in ways other than taking advantage of bad luck and stupidity.
They built a crappy laptop. What many people are missing is that the Raspberry pi is best for two groups of people. Underprivileged kids who will use the Pi as the basis of a scrounged together machine. Or for people needing a fairly decent machine for their embedded project (robot, car computer, etc).
To simply reinvent the laptop seems like a waste of a Pi.
Isn't this like how you can't copyright a map? You can protect your version of the map but if someone else makes a map of the same area they will end up with the same map. This is why map makers put little errors in their maps so as to prove that it is a copy of their effort and not just another map.
I hope the Dutch lose because this would set a terrible precedent in that nothing should get in the way of curing epidemics. If it is a truly bad epidemic hours can be the difference in a an order or orders of magnitude of deaths.
Slashdot Mirror
I have two guilty pleasures: Watching the show COPS, and programming in PHP.
I dream about getting away from PHP and occasionally dip my toes in other waters (Python, Java, and even C++) but always come back to PHP. I won't go to Ruby for as many websites start with Ruby and then abandon it for many other languages. People blah blah about MVC but often what I am doing is just too damn simple to need such added complexity. I might need a program that I occasionally run to view a list of spam flagged submissions; it is done in 10 minutes in PHP. I don't use any frameworks and am diligent enough to keep things running through prepared statements and whatnot. With opcode caching and memory caching of data PHP is very very fast.
It is not so much that PHP is the best at anything it is that it isn't really terrible at anything I care about. Almost every other language is terrible at at least one thing that I do care about.
Personally I think that PHP gets its bad rap because it is a very easy transition from HTML. So you have basically non programmers starting to sprinkle PHP into their HTML and oddly enough an untrained programmer's first efforts end up being crap. Then because PHP covers all the web server basics these programmers potentially never venture beyond PHP and there is nothing better for making a bad programmer than a one language programmer. (Not someone who primarily programs in one language but one who only ever learned the one language) So these same programmers keep expanding the scope of their terrible code.
So if anyone can suggest a programming language to replace PHP I would love to know (and all JVM languages are off my list).
My two comments are make it fun. Basically if you aren't teaching them to make games or something internet related then you are wasting your time. Teaching fundamentals such as linked lists to people who are fundamentally not interested (the vast majority) is just cruel. But if you get them making simple games that get more and more complex then you might have them. Also getting them to do mashups or something like accessing the API of whatever is cool that week (snapchat, etc) might win some hearts and minds.
Years ago I bought a book when learning SQL that blah blah blahed about genealogy. The guy was going to take you through building a genealogy database. So he starts off with a long boring genealogy tutorial teaching terms like matrilineal; boring. Why not keep it simple. Data goes in, data goes out. So keep the classes as fresh as possible. Even twitter APIs might be tool old at this point.
But the next thing is good luck. My daughters are in a pretty typical public school system and no matter how hard the schools try to "Join the computer age" they can barely break out of 1985. A simple example of their "Hot new tech" is that they now have a robodialer that bothers me with great long winded messages that are often not even grade relevant. Have they not heard of email?
So I can see a situation where you set up a bunch of students on Raspberry Pis that can be wiped (literally) in a flash and still end up with the school IT people saying that it isn't an approved OS, that you aren't running the approved software and that according to the rules you must teach the students the only approved language: Pascal.
So for anyone trying to spill a small sampling of the 21st century into their schools, just remember that the school board might be worried about the students sniffing the ether out of your ethernet.
What I am looking forward to laughing about is how robots will end the need for so many government inefficiencies yet the politicians will hang on to them for as long as possible. Until each government reaches an economic crisis and then finally the cuts will occur. Robot cars will vastly reduce the square footage of asphalt required and thus the amount of highway pork that can be handed out. On top of that the highway construction will also probably robotize which also takes away from the pork factor. In my area the contractors get multi-multi-million dollar contracts one after another then they hire a bunch of yokels; all of whom then make donations to the politicians in question. But the politicians in my area are so two bit that the donations make up a tiny fraction of the profits from the contracts. Not quite corruption but very shady. The same goes with appointments to traffic court judges, police chiefs, the people who make the road signs, etc.
All these things are good. But where I am going to cry is when relentless capitalism brutally takes over. A few companies will properly exploit robots and make gobs of money with very few employees. This cycle will get worse and worse, restaurants will have no cooks, waiters, cleaners etc. Grocery stores will be staffed with a few employees, farms a few, factories, a few, construction a few. It won't be the 1% people complain about it will be the 0.01% with the vast remainder unemployed.
My plan is quite simple. I am going to keep my eyes open for the country that appears to be focusing on the humans in its borders and not just the producers; then I will move there. My simple equation is which country will expand the size of their jails as they can cheaply automate them; and which countries will think that this is an absurd idea?
I can really see this. If all cars are programmed to rigidly obey traffic laws then policing should plummet (as they are not going to make any money never writing tickets; which is a whole other can of worms) so there will be a huge win for people who hack their car's computers to allow them to violate various rules such as going faster.
But this is somewhere that I think the emperor will regularly have no clothes. Many driving laws are sensible and fairly well based upon safety and road efficiency. But others are based upon curtain pulling ninnies who don't like other people having fun. Speed limits are a great example. If you are limited to around 100kph/60mph on a great highway with 3 lanes then that is just stupid. Then you often have these strange little slow zones on good country roads where some turd whined at a politician until they lowered the speed.
But with robot cars being able to have fantastic reaction times and no deficiencies such as falling asleep or driving drunk in theory they should be able to drive safely much nearer the limits of what the car can do. Also in theory a high end sports car should be allowed to drive far far faster than a low end Kia. But I suspect that not only will this not happen but the curtain pulling ninnies will realize that politicians can endlessly agree to their driving regulations as the cars can be regularly updated with maps of various speed zones and other regulations. In theory single mile of road could have hundreds of regulations to follow. (If you think this is stupid there is a great court case in Britain where a guy successfully defended a speeding ticket as the mile proceeding the speed change sign had 300 different traffic signs. With the next mile also having 300 signs.)
But when all is said and done it will be interesting to see how the government makes up for all the lost revenue when cars basically don't break traffic laws all the way down to parking violations. Right now they claim that the fines are all in the name of safety but when the money starts to dry up it will be interesting to see the panic in their eyes.
Basically the established grocery stores have followed a fairly simple business model. You buy large lots of marginal land at the very edge of town. Then town grows around your stores and you buy new large lots of marginal land at the new edge of town. This way when your customer wakes up on Saturday and looks into an empty fridge they go to "The" Grocery store. Once in a while some chain is run badly and the other chains feast on the corpse grabbing up plots of land that would otherwise be hard to get.
Think about where your local medium to large grocery store is located (preferably one that is 20 years old or more) and think about how hard it would be to start a new chain by buying a neighbouring location. Your financing costs would be prohibitive and doubtfully would withstand a sustained sale at the established local(and paid for) store.
Present delivery systems have larger vans or trucks that have a fairly good gap between order and delivery.
This has basically prevented upstarts in the tech world style. But now think about having automated delivery vans that leave a short time after you place your order and can be monitored over the web with a near to the second ETA. Now you can wake up Saturday look into an empty fridge and potentially fill it with goodies faster( and lazier) than you can by driving there yourself.
But best of all these centralized warehouses only need to have parking for their few employees and the delivery truck. No large parking lot. No convenient location. Not even a large space as you don't need wide isles and floor displays. It could even be in a horrible place or configuration for a traditional grocery store such as a basement or multi-floored.
Then at the next level you could even pick a worse location that can't even manage a tractor trailer delivery vehicle by having one out of town warehouse that gets the tractor trailers and then in smaller automated vehicles distributes the goodies to much smaller depots closer to their customers. Thus almost any crappy location downtown will do.
Basically this takes a huge market advantage that existing grocery chains have relied on for around 100 years and turns it into a liability. There will be a day when the old chains realized that it would be better for them to sell their prime real-estate to other developers. The question for them will be if they can adapt or will these sales happen post business collapse?
On a positive note I suspect that the tiny boutique store with highly knowledgeable staff will thrive after this.
Large Telcos dedicate way more hardware to billing for SMS than they do to making it work. The system is lossy due to the benign neglect. What is priceless is when they raise the per message rates. In my parts they are around .25 USD each unless you get a plan. I love it that the cost per byte is higher than the total cost per byte of the Hubble telescope including launch, hardware, ground control, and even a shuttle mission to fix it. So I call BS on SMS basically costing anything.
But this is all just a symptom of a larger problem. Most western governments haven't figured out how to best use this common property of spectrum. The bidding model is just stupid because it limits the players to the large oversized telcos. In Europe they have created a system of mostly incredible competition but the result is that few companies are willing to make the jump to more modern technologies which could result in the government just picking one which is great only if they get it right.
In Canada they hive of bits of spectrum for minor competitors which usually is made up of third rate frequencies that things like iPhones won't talk to. Then up until now they have let the major players abuse the crap out of the minor players until they are able to just buy up the minor players.
But all this only applies to G8 type countries. Some places like Hong Kong have rates around 8 bucks for 600 minutes or a prepaid rate of around 2 cents per minute.
So high SMS rates are a simple symptom of no effective competition. If there was real competition with the SMS costs being very close to zero there would be market entrants who would throw it in for free with their most basic packages and those packages would be also close to free. That company might not make a boatload of money and might even fail but it would be a sign of a healthy market. In my neck of the woods there were a bunch of pizza places really fighting it out then some pizza places burned down and a few companies took over the downtown market and prices almost exactly doubled per slice.
Actually it did via various access laws that give politicians very low rates for campaign advertising. The claim behind the laws was that a network has to provide equal time but the reality is that it lowered rates.
This will primarily be used to put out propaganda things post disaster. "Our hearts ache for the people of LowerDisasterWater. We shall stand together in our unwavering support for their re-emergence as a third rate backwater."
Or worse it will slowly degrade into a useless bunch of PSAs about emergency preparation, evacuation routes, weather warnings, etc. I love how politicians seem to think it is OK to vote for exemptions for themselves in laws that people want without exemptions. Nobody wants robocalling, nobody wants text spam, nobody wants corporate funding of political parties, nobody wants to be molested by the TSA; yet politicians seem to think that it is OK to exempt themselves from all of these things.
I am very very careful about who I give my number out to. The last person I would want to have my number would be a politician.
I made the switch and couldn't be happier. I haven't done an official speed comparison but it seems that MariaDB is much more responsive. That tiny little ms counter in Sequel Pro is showing much shorter times for routine tasks.
But the fulltext indexing is not available to the default table engine. That is my one complaint.
I would be curious to know what the insider thinking is at Oracle. I suspect they thought they had the free database crowd by the balls. No doubt they had all kinds of interesting long term strategies to switch companies over from MySQL to overpriced Oracle products. Now those strategies are going to fade into nothingness.
My personal experience with terrible IT heads was that they had no business sense. The worst IT people I have seen had certifications a mile long (All in Novell and they wouldn't leave Novell to save their or the company's life). I have seen terrible IT people with no certifications (One who used a faxed around list of IP Addresses with names beside them to assign IP addresses to around 200 employees. The IP addresses were then manually entered into the desktop systems. And this was at a large telco). I have seen a terrible IT person who could alter the Linux Kernel at whim to solve fairly minor problems that the rest of us might use a cron job for.
But the best IT people had a real business sense. They would look at a million dollar UPS and examine it as a complete business case. (How much downtime cost vs the whole cost of buying and maintaining the UPS) They would also look at new IT policies from a whole business perspective. They understood that stupid policies like making everyone change their password every 30 days had a much larger cost than "a few seconds of their time". So the best IT people that I have seen did have a fairly good technical prowess but generally not awesome. It was their business skills that set them apart. The key threshold was that they recognized that IT supported the business and that in an ideal world the business could do away with IT as it wasn't their core business. So when someone asked something of them they didn't just yell "NO" and then back up their ridiculousness with technobabble; but looked at the business case and came back with a price.
One of the key advantages any established grocery store has is its location. Often grocery stores were build on cheaper land that has now grown significantly in value. The result is that it is very hard for a new chain to acquire the huge prime tracts of land required for a modern grocery store chain. This is why most of the last 20-30 years has seen the most activity in "Power Centers" that are way outside of town. In some cases again town has reached out and surrounded these power centers but typically you must drive to these centers.
So for new radical entrants the price of admission is basically quite steep with the only realistic method of market entry being the take-over of an existing faltering chain with great locations. But with automated logistics combined with internet ubiquity grocery delivery is at the cusp of becoming mainstream. But I think the last piece of the puzzle will be roboticly driven delivery vehicles. Once that threshold is crossed then anyone who can raise the capital to buy some small warehouse along with a small fleet of delivery vehicles plus the initial marketing will be capable of taking on the big players turning their great location assets into liabilities.
So my prediction will be that the smart established players will jump into automated delivery and begin downsizing sooner but that most just won't see this coming and will ignore the upstarts mistakenly thinking that their unassailable awesome locations will see them through.
So even though these places seem very high-tech it will be even higher tech that will win the day.
This study sounds all radical and leading edge but was fundamentally done about 10 years ago by a Canadian researcher from Dalhousie University.
Talk about taking credit for someone else's work. Without going through the paywall I can't see if the much earlier work was properly cited but regardless they are making it sound like this is a groundbreaking discovery as opposed to confirming and probably increasing the detail of previous work.
If I had to make a list of reasons I don't like Windows it would be very short as it has been so long since I used it as my primary OS. But some of the reasons that I remember leaving for would be:
.net were exciting. When was that 2000? So nothing in 13 years. Not one thing.
Microsoft almost always accusing my legitimate versions of windows of not being Genuine.
There being 800 different versions of the OS (Home, Cottage, Small business, Business, Cottage Pro, Professional Pro, Pro Ultimate, etc)
It crashing once or twice a day (I C++ program so my code was no doubt a contributing factor but it shouldn't bring down the OS, plus the same crappy code doesn't upset my present OS).
A virus a day keeps my sanity away. And then the required AV software was just as bad as the viruses they supposedly fought. Although I did like NOD32 just before I left.
All the coolest stuff worked better with other OS such as Linux, Mac, and BSD. Libraries such as OpenCV in its early days things like Python Libraries.
Plus all the cool kids were (and still are) using other OSs. By cool kids I don't mean people using computers as fashion accessories but people working in the best universities on things such as ML, Robotics, and computer vision.
But what flipped my switch away from MS was that I didn't need it anymore. All the software I usually ran was available elsewhere and the software I wanted to run and either couldn't or had trouble with was also elsewhere. So bye bye MS. I did miss Visual Studio somewhat.
So at this point let's assume that Windows is exactly as good as what I am using now. Why would I bother switch? I can certainly say that there is nothing that I have to have that is only available on Windows. I can say that Windows would slow down my development process. The very very few things that I need I run in an old copy of Windows XP that I have tucked away in a VM.
The last two bits of software that MS made that got me excited were Visual Studio 1.0 (bye bye Borland C++) and then the early days of
Your comment is so close to the present and future. Older organizations with ensconced programmers will "hold the line" with Java for years to come. But organizations where there isn't someone with "seniority" to tell the programmers what to do and how to do it they will go with what is hot just because it is exciting and fun. If they wanted boring they would get a job at the telephone company. People fell in love with Ruby and a zillion cool projects came out of it. Then these people ran into various performance walls and generally switched to other languages. The key is not if one language is better than another in that I personally have twisted various languages way past what they were good at but did the programmers feel free to do something cool and new. Even if Java were to be the best language ever it is surrounded by a fog of stodginess. It was the cool language in 2002. The practical language in 2009 and now it is the fogies language in 2013. Probably one of the biggest "cool kids" boosts Java has had in years was minecraft.
It is not that python is better or worse. It is that CS people are exiting without Java in their heads. Thus when they choose a language they are less likely to choose a language they don't know well or at all. In the past the CS grads did leave with quite a bit of Java and thus it would be high on their list when choosing the language for a new project. This is a simple numbers game. So those organizations that are presently using Java will generally keep using it. But in organizations starting projects from scratch or new organizations they may very well go in other language directions. You mention various JVM based systems. My guess is if you haven't touched Java you won't get involved with anything JVM voluntarily.
Fully agreed. If I were hiring Java programmers I would have fairly low standards and only worry a bit as good unit testing ought to weed out the worst. If I were hiring for a C++ project I would hire the best that I could get and worry quite a bit. C/C++ is so much better than Java in the right hands, not a little bit better but it lives in a whole different dimension better. But in the wrong hands it is pure toxic waste. But what I love about Java is that it seems to mop up mediocre programmers and confine them inside cubicals at the power company.
It is not that Python is a replacement (as good as or worst than Java) it is that CS departments have switched to teaching Python in their Intro courses and beyond. I am seeing Quants switching to Python, I am seeing bio and physics types switching too. I am not seeing large businesses switching and I don't anticipate them switching anytime soon. This means that huge numbers of CS students who in the past would have come out of school with some pretty sound Java skills are now coming out with potentially zero Java skills. That means that when they are scrolling through the list of languages in their heads for a new project Java won't be on that list. Whereas a CS student of say 2009 might have said, "Java? Yeah I can handle that."
A 2013 grad will say, "Java? Do I look like I work for a bank?"
Java lost me many years ago for various reasons. But not using Java was more of a gut feeling as opposed to a well thought out plan. But now between the this craziness and the non stop drip drip of security flaws I have now moved into the camp that anyone using Java on a new project is just drinking the kool-aid. With Oracle at the helm you just know they have a spreadsheet with a time-table for monetizing Java harder and harder as time moves forward.
My guess is that Oracle has seen the writing on the wall that many business organizations are solidly Java and can afford any "minor" fees involved. What they are missing is that many university CS departments are dumping Java in favor of Python as Python is becoming the defacto language of academia. My prediction is that Java will ever so slowly fade as it is ensconced in the business world and isn't going anywhere there. But that the cool kids will see it as their grandfather's language and actively avoid it. I am not suggesting that Python will replace Java just that with CS students not giving a crap about Java they won't choose it for new projects.
One thing that has long annoyed me about Java progammers is this whole, "Let's wrap every damn thing in a object." Then you end up with an architecture that looks like the traveling salesman problem done by someone on LSD.
If your boss is paying you $30,000 per year. I am willing to bet that he will have 3 fits when you leave. If you don't feel that you are going to get a good recommendation then leave them to stew in their own waste. Basically write down the passwords and leave. In the IT world you are in an abusive relationship. If there is a gap between your old job and your next one and they want you to come in with the "transition" then charge them a consultant's fee of $500-$1,000 per day. They will pay at least that much to have someone new come in and figure out what the heck is going on.
One bit I forgot to mention is the hysterics. There will be the anecdotal events where a car drives a family off a cliff or drives the Swedish commuter to Capri instead of Carpi. And people will go "tisk tisk, You won't get me into one of those deathtraps." Vested interests will play up these events. Won't work in the end but it may slow progress down.
I look forward to your book as this is a subject that truly excites me. (And scares me with the across the board job losses).
Everybody always talks about the obvious things that Robot cars will do such as better road safety. But I think what will the most interesting are the Secondary and Tertiary effects. Such as the eventual near elimination of road signs and many other traffic control structures such as one way streets as these things can be programmed into the cars from a database and other things such as one way streets or intersections can have cars negotiate with one another before crossing paths. Highways can basically all go one lane each way(if everyone is going exactly the speed limit there is no passing) and roads can become insanely narrow.
But other things such as taxis and car rentals will become blurred as what exactly is the difference when there is no driver. Parking lots can significantly shrink if your car can park 10 cars deep bumper to bumper and negotiate to get out when you call it. (assuming you don't just rent/taxi when you need one)
Commuting patterns change when cars can utilize the roads at near perfect efficiency and you can either doze or do work (behind the wheel). Plus my assumption is that an all robot filled road will allow cars to go insanely fast and convoy bumper to bumper slip-streaming each other. This then changes the distance that people are willing to regularly travel by car.
Then you get other changes such as an all robot road system would have an insignificant number of accidents rendering much of the in-car safety systems worthless. So you can then chop the weight of a car if it has no airbags, crumple zones, bumpers, etc. This also implies that old fashioned cars will have to be banned from the roadways unless augmented with a robotic system.
Other non-obvious changes would be that the entire car-insurance industry will be decimated. If cars basically stop crashing you don't need much in the way of adjusters, liability premiums, comprehensive premiums, etc. You will only need insurance for theft (presumably harder in a smart car) and things like trees falling on it. A car that crashes would mostly be due to a manufacturing defect.
Also the whole accident related industry would be smushed. This doesn't just include car repair and paint/parts manufacturing but towing, fire/rescue, and even a significant reduction in many hospital's emergency trauma wards.
Then you have the impact on the auto industry itself. They will have a boom from getting to replace nearly every non-robot car on the road and then with the onslaught of improvements that will follow they will get to replace the first few generations of cars quickly. But some manufacturers will miss the boat and get sidelined. Others will not realize that many sales are driven through destroyed cars and mess that up.
Then there is the quality of life issues. Old people will maintain their freedom much longer than before.
But the one that I am most looking forward to are the struggles that lawmakers will have. They will keep thinking in old ways such as stupid speed limits that have no safety purpose. Things like stop signs will be an oddity and then there is the fact that if all the cars are perfectly driven then nearly all fine revenue will drop to zero. Lawmakers love punishing the sinful and this will be a huge sin tax that will be lost. I suspect that even drinking and driving laws will be slow to change as it is my belief that they are driven as much by religious temperance types as by safety concerns. In this regard I would predict that an unlicensed driver or even empty car will be allowed on the roads before someone can be passed out drunk in the back seat while automatically being driven home. Lastly this may very
Slow and steady innovation and improvement pretty well must come from the bottom up. The whole boots on the ground thing. Companies that are dictatorial about this are just leaving a huge amount of wasted potential untapped while annoying just about everybody. But often a company needs to make a big change. This sort of change is scary and can be painful. This is where a leader with "vision" is required. The later is where Steve Jobs and Apple seemed to have excelled. He had the vision and made it happen all the while having a zillion employees minding the details. Without Steve Jobs Apple products will probably continue to improve but will slowly miss the next wave of innovation.
I am fairly sure that the electric car is the next big thing in cars. For me a car with around 100 miles range would be great. There are few things in my life beyond that range. The Tesla with its 200 mile range is awesome and we can all assume that between batteries and other improvements the range will only get better. Yet the big automakers can't seem to understand that they need to make the leap. Things like the leaf are sub 100 miles and the Volt still had a piston engine in it. So this is a case where Tesla is now in the cycle of steady improvements of the next generation while most of the other car companies keep improving the past generation of fuel driven cars.
I am going to predict that this is going to be a devastating blow to their profits. Back when BlockBuster instituted "No Late Fees" I knew they were doomed. Basically they were profiting on bad luck and stupidity of which people are never short. So then BB had to profit from providing a quality service. Doomed!
How many people are suckered into overpaying in all kinds of creative ways. The locked phone for instance must keep many people from switching carriers. So I don't see the big three going bankrupt but I do see their profits taking a bigger hit than even they see coming in that they have probably fooled themselves into thinking that they are making profits in ways other than taking advantage of bad luck and stupidity.
They built a crappy laptop. What many people are missing is that the Raspberry pi is best for two groups of people. Underprivileged kids who will use the Pi as the basis of a scrounged together machine. Or for people needing a fairly decent machine for their embedded project (robot, car computer, etc).
To simply reinvent the laptop seems like a waste of a Pi.
Isn't this like how you can't copyright a map? You can protect your version of the map but if someone else makes a map of the same area they will end up with the same map. This is why map makers put little errors in their maps so as to prove that it is a copy of their effort and not just another map.
I hope the Dutch lose because this would set a terrible precedent in that nothing should get in the way of curing epidemics. If it is a truly bad epidemic hours can be the difference in a an order or orders of magnitude of deaths.