I can't give a whole answer but I when I had a flip phone I really felt like I was a train conductor in the 1800s pulling out my flip phone to check the time. I still feel that having this big lump in my pocket is fairly stupid. I do like the idea of a watch seeing that it was a convenient replacement for the pocket watch. But it has three failings that I haven't seen and can't think of how to solve and those are getting the sound into your ear, viewing a larger screen, and how to type text messages into your wrist.
People are blah blahing about google glasses and this solves two probems of getting sound into your ear and getting a larger screen but data entry is still a problem. I don't see voice commands as being something that will really work. In many places it would be funny to run up to people and yell "Google Glasses Open (insert most disgusting website you can think of here)" But there are too many quiet places where even mumbling to your glasses will not work. Plus wearing glasses when you don't need them is a bit of a pain.
So limiting my prediction to the near future I see people with a smart phone tucked away in a pack or deep in a pocket, a wrist interface that gives them limited interaction with their phone, and a Saul Goodman style earpiece when they need to talk. But I do foresee some ingenious texting interfaces for the wrist where you can dial up common responses to other people's texts. Maybe your phone will predict your top 10 probable responses and you can select on of those most of the time and dig the lump out of your pocket when you need to do something more advanced.
One big prediction that would even bet on is that for those people who don't maintain a home PC that they will be the people who get the ginormous screened phones. With a ginormous phone(borderline iPad mini sized) and a tiny watch thing you would be pretty well off for most media consumption and not be forced to hold a brick up to your ear.
I don't think that most people care about what OS they use as long as the OS they are presented with can run the critical programs that the individual needs. For most people the critical program probably boils down to a browser and the ability to view various document types such as PDFs. Other "critical" programs would include Netflix, an office suite (and many people do demand MS Office as that is what they are familiar with) some software to deal with pictures from their camera (or the camera on their phone) beyond that you are starting to get pretty specific with things like Photoshop. Gamers and programmers are oddities and while driving the high end of the market don't make up that much of a percentage.
My mother uses Linux and probably could not tell the difference between it, Mac OS X, and any version of Windows. Nor does she care. She is also running it on an 8 year old machine. Now can anyone possibly tell me why she would need to either switch OS's or upgrade her machine? Keep in mind that the machine can run HD Youtube videos at full screen with no problems.
But hypothetically lets go down to staples with a $900 budget and buy her an off the shelf machine(laptop desktop doesn't matter) and do the minimum required to hook her up. I might as well keep the phone handy for when Norton or whatever bloated bit of AV pops up and tells her that her machine is in peril. Then she will click on some pay music crap and maybe game center. Then I will tell her to google things but she won't find them because her default browser will have been set to something stupid, not to mention the crap toobar that was probably running.
Then a few months later she will call me and ask why Office has stopped working. I will tell her that she never bought office and that she was running a trial version and that it will be a nice stack of cash to get it working again.
Or she can spend nothing and keep her present machine, which in her opinion would be better than something brand new.
Windows 8 barely enters the equation. Now switch to my brother. He has bought tiny laptops for years. Paid a fortune for each one. He travels and writes. He also wore them out fairly quickly (none lasted 2 years). But now his laptop is a bit bigger and only comes out when he is parked in his final destination. In between his large screen phone serves many of his portable device needs. He can email, review writing, and do research. I suspect his laptop will last him much longer this time around.
Then take my other brother. He runs a large multinational business with a cellphone and an iPad. He has an awesome dataplan on his 3G iPad and I suspect he may never buy another PC-Type computer again in his life.
Again little of this is about Windows 8. If anything I would say that the mistake of windows 8 was even making it. They should have just kept updating Windows 7. I never used it much but it seemed fine. I doubt that it would have been that much of a pain to add multi-touch and anything else that Windows 8 has.
Don't worry a some point the flood of profits will scale back and Google will have to become more like a typical company. Although this is potentially a chicken and egg thing. If they become more of a typical company will that then cause their profits to fall? Will falling profits drive them to making the mistake of becoming like a typical company which then hurts more than helps? Or is what they do a fiction and if they were to become a more typical company now they would soar to even greater heights. When I see companies like Google I look back at history and see history repeating itself in that they are without a doubt doing some very innovative things driving success. But which bits of what they are doing are innovative. Much like the Japanese in the 1980s freaked all the US manufacturers out causing people to mimic many Japanese corporate features. Some of those features such as kaizen(continuous improvement) were awesome but others such as their management structures generally sucked or just didn't work with Western culture. A great example of kaizen taken way to far would be the common implementation of six sigma. In my opinion six sigma is one of the things that broke Motorola. Six sigma is basically the relentless perfection of your manufacturing. But if you have to rush your phone to market with a 6 month production run then you have to cut corners, perfection is just not a compatible thought. If you are making fasteners used to keep the wings on an airplane then perfection is rule one. But for some parts of motorola six sigma was probably awesome; that is those parts that made the same critical bit for years at a time.
So my long term (decade or two) prediction for Google is that you will see layoffs of 10,000 at a go just like most of the tech titans of the past Sun, Novell, Word Perfect, etc. But maybe everything they do is perfect and I am way wrong, I doubt it though. But even if I am right people will learn what they did right and use it well. At that point we will know well what they did wrong.
It is the one two punch of abusive bloatware, and people having many needs met through mobile that have knocked the PC to the ground and then the kick to the face that a 5 year old machine is fine for most people's needs.
Basically everyone who buys a nice machine from wherever boots it up and is presented with a pile of icons and popups that confuse/scare/annoy the crap out of them. Usually the browser is infested with "helpful" toolbars. The search engine has been redirected this way or that. And some crap like Norton pops up and tells them that they are going to die if they don't give them money. The Apple PC market is doing OK and I think that people are willing to pay the huge bucks because they turn the damn thing on and it works, no threats, no weirdness. I am not saying that the Mac is way better but that people would basically be just as happy turning on their Windows machine and being greeted with a default one icon for connecting to the internet unimpeded, no Asus Game world, Trial this or trial that.
Then there is the fact that most people are consumers not generators of content. Thus a tablet or larger screened smart phone will get them all the cat videos they can eat. These smartphones aren't cheap and thus will eat up many people's technology budget.
And lastly there is the point that many people who have a PC of some sort can keep it running and running. If they have a laptop their mobile phone might have reduced their porting it around and increased its lifespan even to the point where they don't care that the battery has 5 minutes of life when unplugged. If they have a desktop then the lifespan is even better seeing that most repairs (if any) should cost less than $100. My mother is using a desktop running Linux that is about 8 years old. She has a nice keyboard, nice mouse, nice B&W laser printer, and a nice monitor so she is quite happy. It runs gmail and can play youtube videos at full screen; an upgrade would be a foolish waste of money.
In the past people upgraded their computers because they had some application that really wouldn't run on their old computer. Now about the only non professional (Photoshop, IDE, etc) application that demands an upgrade is the OS itself. So if you need an OS that can run a browser and some sort of Office Suite then why would you upgrade your OS.
In the past I can remember getting Windows 95 and bouncing around when it booted up for the first time. It was such a vast improvement over 3.1.1. Then when I finally had a machine that could handle 2000 I was happy again. XP waited for a long time until some application or another wouldn't run and then I left the Microsoft embrace so got to largely avoid Vista on. Even with the Mac about the only reason I have upgraded my OS is that the latest versions of XCode wouldn't run on the slightly older versions of the Mac OS.
As for games I just about lost my mind when I finally got a 3DFX card. But if anything gaming is probably the last thing keeping people buying the latest and greatest in the PC market. Personally I have long given up making my PC game friendly. I have an XBox for that.
Personally if I were running MS beyond looking past a world where the OS and office suite drive the bus I would have a super research project where you create the killer app that requires that you have a PC with 100GB of ram and a crazy new processor.
But maybe this whole PC dying thing is missing the point. Way in the past an IBM PC "killed" my commodore 64. And apple seems to be racing, with other, to a smart watch goal. This will mean that your average person will have a computer on their wrist, a computer in their pocket, computers in their car, computers in their work, multiple computers hooked up to their TV, and maybe(or maybe not) a computer on a desk at home. Yet if we scroll back say 13 years to the dot com boom most people had at most 1 computer that they paid well over $1000 for and a home network was exotic.
I suspect that the vast majority of the carriers are only vaguely nervous about this, in that they have deluded themselves with pat on the back surveys that somehow manage to show that their customers have few complaints and are generally either loyal or not motivated to switch. The reality is that you would be hard pressed to find an area in North America that wouldn't leap onto a service like Google fiber if their local rates remained as they are.
No doubt there are a few in the cable/telco industry who are quaking in their boots not just because they realize the clear and present danger to their profits but that they know their own companies are bloated and that where a new upstart will be lean and profitable at much lower prices the old companies will have to cut to the bone to remain profitable.
My guess is that the big old companies are thinking that google can't be everywhere that quickly and that places like Kansas are just quirky experiments that Google will abandon. They might even have done calculations that show that what Google is doing is impossible.
A great example of this would be when Germany was allowing the free market to compete for long distance. The incumbent telco basically swore that long distance would go from the present $1 per minute to at least $2 or more per minute. Within 18 months it was down to around $0.05 per minute. I am not sure that the incumbent was actually lying; really wrong but from his position sitting on his old school business model was just so distorted that he lived in a whole other universe.
If Google Fiber comes to my town I am all over that in a second.
If they are all basically told to spend a good chunk of their working week on their own projects then the failure rate must be astronomical. If failure was not an option then they would have to be flogging their employees nearly all the time (or have an unlikely high success rate), in which case we would hear about how stupid this system is. Instead we hear how cool it is, even from ex-employees. Now when the larger projects flop I suspect that there might be some blowback.
I have read that this kid that Yahoo just hired for a bajillion dollars almost had nothting to do with the thing that they thought he did. While he is potentially set for life, I suspect that some Yahoo heads are going to roll right out the door. There is being daring and then there is being stupid.
Google is effectively a conglomerate, with its employees encouraged to expand that conglomerate into as many interesting and profitable business lines as is possible. Generally they try to stick to their strength of crazy big data but that encompasses a huge area of business. So nearly out of control innovation and expansion makes sense. Also google has the raw spare revenue to regularly screw up so they can play the odds that a certain small fraction of their experiments will pay off.
Most other businesses are constrained by a more focused core business (we make drill bits, or we sell wooden patio furniture) so right off the bat random explorations into whatever catches an employe's attention would just be weird. But more importantly most businesses are not experiencing a waterfall of money that they can risk on basically everything. Even if a company does have an R&D budget it is sufficiently tight that careful thought needs to be given before spending it.
That all said, most older companies seem to have huge institutional resistance to change, huge as in they are allergic to it. A common scenario that I have seen is where a new employee comes in and is bathed in stupid procedures or technologies that are potentially from the 70s. They will suggest a simple effective change and be told something like "Whoa there young'n, don't think you can come in here fresh out of diapers and start running the place. You need to earn some seniority and then it will be your turn (20-30 years from now)." This comes under the category of "Don't make me look bad."
Simple tech examples of this would be companies that I have seen where IT companies were using ISDN (256K) for 50+ employees when a home connection would be in the Mbs. Companies still buying Sun hardware when their own software provider had told them years before that all support for Sun was over and that their licence was portable to Linux where the upgrades were plentiful.
And my favorite where a large company was using a terminal based product management system that took employees weeks and weeks to master (RT for return to main menu, DTS 12147 for display sales of the 147th day of 2012). So one of the employees, on his own, time developed a web based system that interfaced with the termina system's API. A drunken monkey could use the new web based system, the company nearly fired him for "hacking" their system. So he sent off screenshots to the company who made the terminal based system and they bought(and hired) it from him and less than a year later the old company bought an amazing web based upgrade. Keep in mind this upgrade cost them a bloody fortune. One other fact was that it was well within the design of the system to interface other systems with it. For instance the POS system was separate and had been built to interface with the back end terminal system so developing a web interface to a published API was not even some kind of violation of the license. So in this example you have a company doing google style innovation for free and still rejecting it.
My last observation is that risk taking also requires the company know how to deal with failure. Many companies will set people on fire when there are failures. In these environments managers will keep a very very tight reign on their employees so that they stick to the plan. This significantly reduces risk but generally makes the employees unhappy and basically eliminates innovation. But from the manager's point of view everything will run smoothly and bonuses will be forthcoming. This would come under the general heading of "Don't rock the boat."
I don't debate that most are propaganda but reading through their criteria for a fake journal it basically says if it ain't crammed chock'a'block full of academics then it is fake. This sounds a bit like old media complaining about new media writers not being professional journalists who graduated and worked their way up from the bottom (read: aren't baby boomers).
So it is great that the corporate shills are being outed but I would prefer some actual analysis. Look at the articles, look at who funded them. Look for real connections between those who write and those who are publishing. A great example of a superb analysis was when Encyclopedia Britannica called out Wikipedia as basically a bunch of half assed crap while they were the bastions of excellence in research. So a group of people randomly selected a bunch of articles from both, then rigorously fact checked them with the result that at the time they were basically even with Wikipedia adding articles at a fantastic rate.
A simple question that I have about Wikipedia is, what qualification did Jimmy Wales have to start Wikipedia? To be specific his job prior to Wiki was running "a male-oriented web portal featuring entertainment and adult content" Another would be Matt Drudge (love him or hate him) of the drudge report who had "a job in the gift shop of CBS studios, eventually working his way up to manager" just prior to becoming one of the single largest forces in modern journalism.
These people were about as unqualified on paper to do what they did as is possible yet they were massive forces of change. Was slashdot created by a team of experts from the leading technical universities in the world?
Then there are the failings of the best journals themselves. Bad article do slip by. Big companies get their one-sided views in print. Yet right now there is a revolution going on where institutions are sick of paying crazy prices for access to the top journals who are having trouble justifying these prices except to their shareholders.
When I read the criteria to be a "bad" journal some it is quite reasonable such as how open the whole process is, but over and over it basically says, we academics know better and had better be the gatekeepers so that we can keep our jobs. To me a bunch of crap journals are a sign of good things being in the wind. Much like how social media is changing the world with great things that Twitter can bring us it brings us tweets like, "nothin on tv, so bord, YOLO!!!!"
At this point is all going to be a PR stunt to make everyone somehow go "Yeay they saved Lucasarts." and then they hope that we will all run out and buy their next SW game: Darth Vader and the lost princess.
Sorrry I was a bit wrong. The key is what happens if Bill is VP and the president becomes incapacitated? And yes nobody would run an obviously unqualified candidate it is just odd that you could.
My point was that the people who tend to make the most noise about censoring things also tend to be the people who thump both the bible and the constitution. Which is funny because of how the most important and first part is all about not censoring things. Feinstein is listening to these zellots on issues like this. My problem with her is that she is doing the classic political thing of finding issues that "resonate" with a vocal minority instead of dealing with big boring issues like trade and finances. The result is all kinds of laws that please these vocal minorities at great cost to the rest of us.
That is why I said, "generally available". Going way off topic but something that has interested me is that often what look like revolutionary weapons have some serious issue. For example people cooked up clip driven weapons long before they came into general use. One of the key reasons they were dead on arrival was that bullets were just not reliable enough. You needed the revolver technology so that you could keep pulling the trigger to skip the frequent duds. Another example was the early M-16 it was borderline viable upon its introduction. Great weapon in many ways but initially it was really finicky about being clean and the ammo being perfectly made and in perfect shape. The first models were also a real pain to clear when jammed. They largely fixed all that but if you look at the AK-47 it was designed around poor manufacturing and poor ammunition quality along with poor maintenance. But the AK hasn't got a whole lot better while the M-16 turned out to be a good start that has been wildly improved upon.
But when the people were cooking up the 2nd amendment they did not anticipate say remotely operated drones or guided munitions. What they did anticipate was that the federal government would grow aloof and potentially tyrannical; so they thought they would balance the equation by letting people have muskets and whatnot. At the time any generally popular engagement with the federal would have been fairly small scale, they probably saw a bunch of angry farmers march on Washington and chase the bums out, or a less supported revolution march toward Washington but get turned away. But now anyone talking of armed revolution to sort things out has rocks in their head. Just look at any of the various countries trying it (Syria) and ask if that is a good thing? So what is needed is something to balance the power of a central government; at this point the best weapon is information. Wikileaks should not be some little aberration it should be how all federal/local governments basically operate. I want to see the expenses, communications, etc of everyone from the president to my local dog-catcher. A great example of this would be in Britain someone leaked the images of a bunch of expenses turned by government leaders. One guy had filed a claim for his moat, others were claiming for residences where they hadn't been seen in years. Normally all this information was secret with this and that excuse given about privacy and the dangers of releasing it. Also they said that those expenses were "properly audited by highly qualified persons" but it took the press no time at all to find all kinds of fraud and waste. This was with one leak. Just think of how much clean up there would be if everything was exposed.
Set up a honeypot. If you see crap coming from that IP send it against a server that has a front that looks like yours but has nothing in it and nothing to do. That way they might tie up some bandwidth but they will waste the capacity of one useless server. You could probably set up the server on some old pile of junk seeing that nobody will actually care about its performance or reliability.
Also put the server in a bit of a DMZ so that if they do compromise it that they can't get any further. If you want to keep it extra interesting set up a few VMs on the machine with different OSs. One Linux, one BSD, One MS server, and if you are looking for a laugh something like QNX. The best part is if they ever cobble together some kind of report about how insecure you are you can point out that the "BSD" system they found is for the sole benefit of crappy hackers. For that purpose your honeypot should not be the same OS as your real servers; that way if their report makes no mention of your real OS you can say "I am 100% sure you didn't penetrate a real machine as we use OS X which you don't list in your report."
Keep in mind you won't be judged by technical people but by non-technical people. So if these security types ever make an accusation making them look like simpletons is a great defense.
Stupid rule now but it originated with the idea that they didn't want a ruler who was just some British lord (they had an at the time legitimate worry that the revolution could be unwound) and the natural born citizen has not been tested in court so nobody actually agrees what it really means. Another interesting untested oddity is that it may or may not be possible for say Bill Clinton to run again. It all depends on if they see the rule as two terms ever or just two consecutive terms. And then to make it completely bonkers nobody is sure if you can be prevented from running if you don't qualify. So a Canadian turned American might be able to run, win, but then not take office. It is interesting how many of these fundamental rules either were pretty wide open to interpretation (or at least endless arguing) or have become out of touch with modern times. Take the 2nd amendment. At the time one of the best weapons was a cannon, basically no repeating rifles, or revolvers were generally available. So they placed no real limits on the weapons. I doubt even the staunchest NRA member would think it a good idea that people have personal Nukes. But somewhere between Nukes and BB guns the line needs to be drawn. But many NRA people blah blah about home defense, yet the 2nd amendment wasn't about home defense it was about defense against out of control federal governments. At this point I'm not sure what you'd need to defend against the federal government but I suspect it would have to be pretty awesome weaponry. But there is another slashdot article that discusses a much better defense against a federal government and that is open access to government data. Information is power, far better power than from a handful of guns.
But what I would guess that the first amendment was put in place to make sure that out of touch Nanny State nutjobs like Feinstein can't tell people what to think.
It quite simply boils down to whomever controls the information has the power. In my area there is a fight to get the public bus systems GPS logs. They can look over the information and play with the numbers until they are able to say things like our buses are on-time 98% of the time. But what is their definition of on time. If an independent investigator has access they might find that the buses are on time 2% of the time if you make the parameters more reasonable. If the real information in this situation gets out then managers would look bad and might have to actually do something.
But these sort of situations aren't all bad. It is possible somebody might model the transit system and find simple ways to optimize the entire thing with few and cheap changes.
Then there are the outright lies. Also in my area the government has been running a steady deficit of around $250 million per year. This year looks like an election year so suddenly they have tabled a budget with a $16 million dollar surplus. From what I can tell one of the line items must be an anticipated lottery win because there is no way that they have been able to spend money like the way they have been and hope to pull this magic out of thin air. Now if the public had the details of what went into this and past budgets line by line and item by item I suspect that their shenanigans would instantly be exposed. Personally my hope is that this lie is so obscene that the voters toss this particular batch of bums out.
But the three arguments that I hear from government people is that some data will stigmatize someone (crime stats that say what everybody already knows), that they can't have outsiders second guessing everything as nothing will happen, and the last is that if internal documents are exposed that nobody in government can be honest with their opinions. This all boils down to they don't want people using facts to counter their stupidity and they don't want embarrassing facts interfering with their keeping their jobs.
This is one of the few topics where we should all be able to paste that classic animated gif of the guy beating the dead horse. I suspect these politicians don't actually give a crap about video games. They are just pandering to a noisy few people who pester them about it.
I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia where the municipal politicians have internationally humiliated themselves regularly every few years over proposed Cat bylaws. I asked one councilor why they would ever bring up the stupidest idea regularly every half decade or so and he told me that it was the number one thing that people whined at him about; not taxes (which are off the charts in Halifax), not potholes, not all the crime, the dirt, the lack of jobs, the money wasted, or any of the actual pressing matters but the thing that made people intercept him in the grocery store was cats crapping in their gardens. So he just proposed the stupid bylaw and weathered the storm of stupidity so that he could shut them up.
I suspect that these people who whine about Video Games are low IQ types who don't really understand the real issues facing the US but think they have wrapped their pea brains around an issue and then go off on their moral quest. Their parents were probably on about rap music and their grandparents had their knickers in a knot over satan's rock and roll.
The ironic thing is that these same people were probably all wound up about a tiny rule stating that the president has to be born in the US while ignoring the most important, and first, amendment in the constitution they claim to hold in nearly the same esteem as their bibles. What I think it all boils down to is that people that drive laws like this don't like people having fun that they don't understand.
Not much, some medical records. But even have things that need to be secret still have short time limits. It makes sense that an undercover agent/CI should not have his cover blown by an information request. But even that should have a couple of year time limit. Contract negotiations should be secret until the contract is signed or dead. The milltary should get a bit of leeway for specific technologies. But none of this proprietary contract crap, or the one that ticks me off, "If we had to have our discussions in the open nobody would express their honest opinion."
If the government has a magical 100% of information about our daily lives then the most diligently law abiding of us are still probably open to legal difficulties. Have you read all 36,000 pages of the tax code? Have you ever stepped off the curb just a moment after it said, "Don't walk"? Even if you only broke fairly minor laws here and there a overzealous prosecutor could line up the charges and ruin your life. That is if you don't cooperate with his request to do something you didn't want to do.
At this point in our over surveilled society it is still a goodly amount of work to assemble a case against the innocent. But with more and more information being gathered and more and more information processing capability it shouldn't be too long before a few clicks of a button show all your law breaking ways.
This might seem like slightly paranoid thinking and in most sensible parts of the western world government people have better things to do. Yet in various small towns you hear of the Sheriff bringing his police to bare against any opponent. I can imagine what kind of resources might be available to hunt down whistle-blowers, investigative reporters, and the people they care about. Or the police looking to discover who uploaded the next Rodney king video. If they had license plate scanning, facial recognition, cell phone records, and internet records then they are golden.
Then you get the false positives. Recently I read about a couple who had the police kick in their door because they were suspected of running a grow-op because of recent hydroponic purchases. They were law-abiding ex-CIA and were growing tomatos and such.
Now think about the power the American people suddenly had over the government when Watergate happened. Now think about how many resources were applied by the government to find out who leaked what? Think about how many resources were applied to the Pentagon papers? Now give the government access to today's/tomorrow's records and see how long Deep Throat remains secret?
My theory is quite simple. The second amendment needs its own amendment and that should read that the people should have near unlimited access to any government records and that the government should have extremely limited access the people's information. This way power will be in the correct hands for a democracy.
I have TTC courses, Coursera Courses, and iTunesU courses on my iPhone/iPad. So in my downtime I have learned discrete math/cryptography among others and am presently plowing through a great Coursera course in Computational Investing. I also have Algebra Touch on my iPhone and hand it to my younger daughter when we are stuck waiting. For both of my daughters I have TTC math on the iPad to hand to them when bored (some bribery involved).
So I would not say that Mobile devices are inherently bad but that many people use them to peruse the junk food isle. I go to the grocery store an my cart is devoid of palm oil or HFCS. Often I see other people's carts full of products containing both. We are shopping in the same store.
The differences between phones, signal strengths, antenna designs, usage patterns, frequencies, etc. are so vast that even if a connection to some disease is found it will probably not apply to the phones in use when the discovery is proven. Then to make it worse any phone technology that might have been harmful would generally cause the worst disease among seriously heavy cellphone users who tend to have the latest and greatest so when investigating a connection you will ask them which technologies they have used and they will probably reply "All of the above" assuming they knew the name of any technology they used.
So the study I would like would involve piles of mice blasted with every technology ever used in general use.
There are a few places where the cloud is great. If your machine is lightly loaded and it is doubtful that anyone really wants to steal your stuff. Then the cloud is great. If your load is all over the place but averages fairly low then again the flexibility of the cloud is great. If your customers are all over the place and distributing your stuff here and there is good then again the cloud is great. If you are risk taking fast moving startup then the cloud is for you.
But if security is off the scale critical (you are a bank, phone company, hedge fund, etc) then you must have physical control over your machines. Also if your machine uses a fairly steady load then your cloud costs will soon dwarf a dedicated machine. Then there are many other cases where the cloud is just stupid. If the main users are say within one building and any connectivity would stop most work then remote machines could pose a huge risk.
Then there is the third option which is you run your own cloud but control the machines physically.
So I would say that the future of the cloud is (to use a bad pun) murky. It is a great option for some a neutral option for others and for a few a terrible option. But where so many people have so many different needs catch all statements about the future of the cloud are nearly useless.
As one commenter said this is the same old crap new wrapped in todays newspaper. I just feel sorry for the IT people who work for some company where the MBA types are all "We've got to join the cloud before we get left behind."
A very common complaint that I hear from corporate types is that the IT department only has one answer and it is NO. I have always thought that this is due to the unbalanced pressure put on the typical IT department where their primary genuine performance review only comes when things blow up. It could have been 3 years of 100% up-time but a glitch during some critical sales presentation suddenly has the head of marketing calling for heads to roll in IT. You also get other negative feedback when the IT people "suddenly" need $100,000 worth of new servers (to replace the 10 year old existing ones that support 2,000 employees). The reason these are the performance reviews is that any traditional audits are simply incomprehensible to the non-technically minded management.
This then also results in the IT staff assiduously avoiding taking on any additional risk. So when a department says, "we want BYOD" IT usually loses their minds as they know that even if they stand on their heads while explaining that they can not only not support 8,000 different types of devices but that there is a good chance that any given device might not work at all (Say the iPads not working with the 6 year old flash based timecard system). As far as the rest of the company is concerned this is just another strike against IT.
At the same time I have experienced many IT people who become so risk adverse that this becomes a genuine risk to the company. Years ago I worked for a company that was switching from the drying up business of military contracting to large scale web based systems. Over 50 employees were sharing a pair of 256K ISDN lines and being forced to put a bizarrely set up Novell system on all our computers. The IT guy had a wall that was nearly completely covered with all his Novell certifications. My most glorious moment was when he ordered an awesome Dell server from hell and couldn't get Novell to install on it. He was on the speaker-phone with a senior Dell support guy when he told our IT guy that none of their best servers were compatible with Novell and this was a good thing as far as he was concerned.
This is a very complex problem but without going into endless detail I have seen very unusual and creative solutions where both IT and the company can end up being a whole lot happier.
Learning about how memory and whatnot works would be like learning metallurgy down to crystal formation as a first step when you are trying to learn how an engine works enroute to designing cars. Yes you will be a crap mechanical engineer if you don't know material science inside and out; but many many studies have shown that a far better way to learn is to jump in and get your hands dirty doing something on the macro scale that is generally fun and interesting where you will run into problems that are solved by micro bits of knowledge. These microbits have retention rates that are orders of magnitude better with the student having a far greater ability to apply the knowledge. That way you run up against things like how keeping things in L1 cache is better than when you start bouncing back and fourth into RAM, later studying how a floating point works in memory will suddenly make a while lot of sense of various oddities you would have already encountered.
If you skip straight into the structure of an executable with its data segments and whatnot then you will turn the students into test passing zombies. Whereas if you had a contest later on in the course where you had the students make the smallest executable that they can by stripping out all the extraneous crap needed then they would probably have an ah ha moment that would set the knowledge in stone.
I have been programming for a zillion years but wasn't solid on some of the innermost areas of modern CPUs and how they processed instructions. So I watched a lecture series from one of the better universities. While the students were mostly quite smart they frequently asked really really stupid questions. A frequent classic was about uninitialized variables and why they were so bad. I easily heard 10 variants of that question. This was a course where the nitty gritty explaining pretty much how registers are actually architected on the CPU yet the students still didn't grasp something so simple as uninitialized variables and their potentially wonky contents. I really felt bad for them having to basically memorize all this crap without having any feel for what they were learning. My guess is that even after they progressed on to more project related work that they would not necessarily connect the arcane knowledge that they had so diligently crammed into their heads with problems they will eventually encounter.
That about sums up my distaste for most CS teaching and most CS related textbooks. Nature of code is a wildly refreshing exception.
First these guys need to read The Nature of Code; full stop. I have never read a better book on coding. The language covered in that book is the obscure Processing (a C++ like syntax) but it doesn't matter. That guy explains everything you need from pretty well zero to Genetic Algorithms in ways that I have never seen done so simplistically. Most shelf computer books meander through the usual OOP stuff such as circle and square inheriting from the shape base class but without really explaining why the hell you would need any of that.
CS textbooks can't wait to show off the writer's math skills and while explaining one thing will throw in lambda calculus just for laughs. Also CS textbooks often contrive the need for something like a doubly linked list instead of leading the student up to where they hit a problem that is nicely solved by the topic. This is where you find the critical difference between obtaining knowledge to regurgitate on a test and building a skill set for life.
One of the keys to the nature of code is that the writer is almost always doing something graphical. The result is that you can get a feel for what your code is doing while at the same time having concrete goals. I am sick of textbooks where they will introduce a vector blah and then get you to sort and print the results. I doubt there is a person on earth who went into a CS course wanting to sort a list of names. But if you have a graphical bunch of rectangles and you put each rectangle in a vector and then have the student sort them that way and display them stacked, still useless but the student will probably get more satisfaction.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't give a whole answer but I when I had a flip phone I really felt like I was a train conductor in the 1800s pulling out my flip phone to check the time. I still feel that having this big lump in my pocket is fairly stupid. I do like the idea of a watch seeing that it was a convenient replacement for the pocket watch. But it has three failings that I haven't seen and can't think of how to solve and those are getting the sound into your ear, viewing a larger screen, and how to type text messages into your wrist.
People are blah blahing about google glasses and this solves two probems of getting sound into your ear and getting a larger screen but data entry is still a problem. I don't see voice commands as being something that will really work. In many places it would be funny to run up to people and yell "Google Glasses Open (insert most disgusting website you can think of here)" But there are too many quiet places where even mumbling to your glasses will not work. Plus wearing glasses when you don't need them is a bit of a pain.
So limiting my prediction to the near future I see people with a smart phone tucked away in a pack or deep in a pocket, a wrist interface that gives them limited interaction with their phone, and a Saul Goodman style earpiece when they need to talk. But I do foresee some ingenious texting interfaces for the wrist where you can dial up common responses to other people's texts. Maybe your phone will predict your top 10 probable responses and you can select on of those most of the time and dig the lump out of your pocket when you need to do something more advanced.
One big prediction that would even bet on is that for those people who don't maintain a home PC that they will be the people who get the ginormous screened phones. With a ginormous phone(borderline iPad mini sized) and a tiny watch thing you would be pretty well off for most media consumption and not be forced to hold a brick up to your ear.
I don't think that most people care about what OS they use as long as the OS they are presented with can run the critical programs that the individual needs. For most people the critical program probably boils down to a browser and the ability to view various document types such as PDFs. Other "critical" programs would include Netflix, an office suite (and many people do demand MS Office as that is what they are familiar with) some software to deal with pictures from their camera (or the camera on their phone) beyond that you are starting to get pretty specific with things like Photoshop. Gamers and programmers are oddities and while driving the high end of the market don't make up that much of a percentage.
My mother uses Linux and probably could not tell the difference between it, Mac OS X, and any version of Windows. Nor does she care. She is also running it on an 8 year old machine. Now can anyone possibly tell me why she would need to either switch OS's or upgrade her machine? Keep in mind that the machine can run HD Youtube videos at full screen with no problems.
But hypothetically lets go down to staples with a $900 budget and buy her an off the shelf machine(laptop desktop doesn't matter) and do the minimum required to hook her up. I might as well keep the phone handy for when Norton or whatever bloated bit of AV pops up and tells her that her machine is in peril. Then she will click on some pay music crap and maybe game center. Then I will tell her to google things but she won't find them because her default browser will have been set to something stupid, not to mention the crap toobar that was probably running.
Then a few months later she will call me and ask why Office has stopped working. I will tell her that she never bought office and that she was running a trial version and that it will be a nice stack of cash to get it working again.
Or she can spend nothing and keep her present machine, which in her opinion would be better than something brand new.
Windows 8 barely enters the equation. Now switch to my brother. He has bought tiny laptops for years. Paid a fortune for each one. He travels and writes. He also wore them out fairly quickly (none lasted 2 years). But now his laptop is a bit bigger and only comes out when he is parked in his final destination. In between his large screen phone serves many of his portable device needs. He can email, review writing, and do research. I suspect his laptop will last him much longer this time around.
Then take my other brother. He runs a large multinational business with a cellphone and an iPad. He has an awesome dataplan on his 3G iPad and I suspect he may never buy another PC-Type computer again in his life.
Again little of this is about Windows 8. If anything I would say that the mistake of windows 8 was even making it. They should have just kept updating Windows 7. I never used it much but it seemed fine. I doubt that it would have been that much of a pain to add multi-touch and anything else that Windows 8 has.
Don't worry a some point the flood of profits will scale back and Google will have to become more like a typical company. Although this is potentially a chicken and egg thing. If they become more of a typical company will that then cause their profits to fall? Will falling profits drive them to making the mistake of becoming like a typical company which then hurts more than helps? Or is what they do a fiction and if they were to become a more typical company now they would soar to even greater heights. When I see companies like Google I look back at history and see history repeating itself in that they are without a doubt doing some very innovative things driving success. But which bits of what they are doing are innovative. Much like the Japanese in the 1980s freaked all the US manufacturers out causing people to mimic many Japanese corporate features. Some of those features such as kaizen(continuous improvement) were awesome but others such as their management structures generally sucked or just didn't work with Western culture. A great example of kaizen taken way to far would be the common implementation of six sigma. In my opinion six sigma is one of the things that broke Motorola. Six sigma is basically the relentless perfection of your manufacturing. But if you have to rush your phone to market with a 6 month production run then you have to cut corners, perfection is just not a compatible thought. If you are making fasteners used to keep the wings on an airplane then perfection is rule one. But for some parts of motorola six sigma was probably awesome; that is those parts that made the same critical bit for years at a time.
So my long term (decade or two) prediction for Google is that you will see layoffs of 10,000 at a go just like most of the tech titans of the past Sun, Novell, Word Perfect, etc. But maybe everything they do is perfect and I am way wrong, I doubt it though. But even if I am right people will learn what they did right and use it well. At that point we will know well what they did wrong.
Yup, and they fought deregulation as hard as they could.
It is the one two punch of abusive bloatware, and people having many needs met through mobile that have knocked the PC to the ground and then the kick to the face that a 5 year old machine is fine for most people's needs.
Basically everyone who buys a nice machine from wherever boots it up and is presented with a pile of icons and popups that confuse/scare/annoy the crap out of them. Usually the browser is infested with "helpful" toolbars. The search engine has been redirected this way or that. And some crap like Norton pops up and tells them that they are going to die if they don't give them money. The Apple PC market is doing OK and I think that people are willing to pay the huge bucks because they turn the damn thing on and it works, no threats, no weirdness. I am not saying that the Mac is way better but that people would basically be just as happy turning on their Windows machine and being greeted with a default one icon for connecting to the internet unimpeded, no Asus Game world, Trial this or trial that.
Then there is the fact that most people are consumers not generators of content. Thus a tablet or larger screened smart phone will get them all the cat videos they can eat. These smartphones aren't cheap and thus will eat up many people's technology budget.
And lastly there is the point that many people who have a PC of some sort can keep it running and running. If they have a laptop their mobile phone might have reduced their porting it around and increased its lifespan even to the point where they don't care that the battery has 5 minutes of life when unplugged. If they have a desktop then the lifespan is even better seeing that most repairs (if any) should cost less than $100. My mother is using a desktop running Linux that is about 8 years old. She has a nice keyboard, nice mouse, nice B&W laser printer, and a nice monitor so she is quite happy. It runs gmail and can play youtube videos at full screen; an upgrade would be a foolish waste of money.
In the past people upgraded their computers because they had some application that really wouldn't run on their old computer. Now about the only non professional (Photoshop, IDE, etc) application that demands an upgrade is the OS itself. So if you need an OS that can run a browser and some sort of Office Suite then why would you upgrade your OS.
In the past I can remember getting Windows 95 and bouncing around when it booted up for the first time. It was such a vast improvement over 3.1.1. Then when I finally had a machine that could handle 2000 I was happy again. XP waited for a long time until some application or another wouldn't run and then I left the Microsoft embrace so got to largely avoid Vista on. Even with the Mac about the only reason I have upgraded my OS is that the latest versions of XCode wouldn't run on the slightly older versions of the Mac OS.
As for games I just about lost my mind when I finally got a 3DFX card. But if anything gaming is probably the last thing keeping people buying the latest and greatest in the PC market. Personally I have long given up making my PC game friendly. I have an XBox for that.
Personally if I were running MS beyond looking past a world where the OS and office suite drive the bus I would have a super research project where you create the killer app that requires that you have a PC with 100GB of ram and a crazy new processor.
But maybe this whole PC dying thing is missing the point. Way in the past an IBM PC "killed" my commodore 64. And apple seems to be racing, with other, to a smart watch goal. This will mean that your average person will have a computer on their wrist, a computer in their pocket, computers in their car, computers in their work, multiple computers hooked up to their TV, and maybe(or maybe not) a computer on a desk at home. Yet if we scroll back say 13 years to the dot com boom most people had at most 1 computer that they paid well over $1000 for and a home network was exotic.
I suspect that the vast majority of the carriers are only vaguely nervous about this, in that they have deluded themselves with pat on the back surveys that somehow manage to show that their customers have few complaints and are generally either loyal or not motivated to switch. The reality is that you would be hard pressed to find an area in North America that wouldn't leap onto a service like Google fiber if their local rates remained as they are.
No doubt there are a few in the cable/telco industry who are quaking in their boots not just because they realize the clear and present danger to their profits but that they know their own companies are bloated and that where a new upstart will be lean and profitable at much lower prices the old companies will have to cut to the bone to remain profitable.
My guess is that the big old companies are thinking that google can't be everywhere that quickly and that places like Kansas are just quirky experiments that Google will abandon. They might even have done calculations that show that what Google is doing is impossible.
A great example of this would be when Germany was allowing the free market to compete for long distance. The incumbent telco basically swore that long distance would go from the present $1 per minute to at least $2 or more per minute. Within 18 months it was down to around $0.05 per minute. I am not sure that the incumbent was actually lying; really wrong but from his position sitting on his old school business model was just so distorted that he lived in a whole other universe.
If Google Fiber comes to my town I am all over that in a second.
If they are all basically told to spend a good chunk of their working week on their own projects then the failure rate must be astronomical. If failure was not an option then they would have to be flogging their employees nearly all the time (or have an unlikely high success rate), in which case we would hear about how stupid this system is. Instead we hear how cool it is, even from ex-employees. Now when the larger projects flop I suspect that there might be some blowback.
I have read that this kid that Yahoo just hired for a bajillion dollars almost had nothting to do with the thing that they thought he did. While he is potentially set for life, I suspect that some Yahoo heads are going to roll right out the door. There is being daring and then there is being stupid.
Google is effectively a conglomerate, with its employees encouraged to expand that conglomerate into as many interesting and profitable business lines as is possible. Generally they try to stick to their strength of crazy big data but that encompasses a huge area of business. So nearly out of control innovation and expansion makes sense. Also google has the raw spare revenue to regularly screw up so they can play the odds that a certain small fraction of their experiments will pay off.
Most other businesses are constrained by a more focused core business (we make drill bits, or we sell wooden patio furniture) so right off the bat random explorations into whatever catches an employe's attention would just be weird. But more importantly most businesses are not experiencing a waterfall of money that they can risk on basically everything. Even if a company does have an R&D budget it is sufficiently tight that careful thought needs to be given before spending it.
That all said, most older companies seem to have huge institutional resistance to change, huge as in they are allergic to it. A common scenario that I have seen is where a new employee comes in and is bathed in stupid procedures or technologies that are potentially from the 70s. They will suggest a simple effective change and be told something like "Whoa there young'n, don't think you can come in here fresh out of diapers and start running the place. You need to earn some seniority and then it will be your turn (20-30 years from now)." This comes under the category of "Don't make me look bad."
Simple tech examples of this would be companies that I have seen where IT companies were using ISDN (256K) for 50+ employees when a home connection would be in the Mbs. Companies still buying Sun hardware when their own software provider had told them years before that all support for Sun was over and that their licence was portable to Linux where the upgrades were plentiful.
And my favorite where a large company was using a terminal based product management system that took employees weeks and weeks to master (RT for return to main menu, DTS 12147 for display sales of the 147th day of 2012). So one of the employees, on his own, time developed a web based system that interfaced with the termina system's API. A drunken monkey could use the new web based system, the company nearly fired him for "hacking" their system. So he sent off screenshots to the company who made the terminal based system and they bought(and hired) it from him and less than a year later the old company bought an amazing web based upgrade. Keep in mind this upgrade cost them a bloody fortune. One other fact was that it was well within the design of the system to interface other systems with it. For instance the POS system was separate and had been built to interface with the back end terminal system so developing a web interface to a published API was not even some kind of violation of the license. So in this example you have a company doing google style innovation for free and still rejecting it.
My last observation is that risk taking also requires the company know how to deal with failure. Many companies will set people on fire when there are failures. In these environments managers will keep a very very tight reign on their employees so that they stick to the plan. This significantly reduces risk but generally makes the employees unhappy and basically eliminates innovation. But from the manager's point of view everything will run smoothly and bonuses will be forthcoming. This would come under the general heading of "Don't rock the boat."
I don't debate that most are propaganda but reading through their criteria for a fake journal it basically says if it ain't crammed chock'a'block full of academics then it is fake. This sounds a bit like old media complaining about new media writers not being professional journalists who graduated and worked their way up from the bottom (read: aren't baby boomers).
So it is great that the corporate shills are being outed but I would prefer some actual analysis. Look at the articles, look at who funded them. Look for real connections between those who write and those who are publishing. A great example of a superb analysis was when Encyclopedia Britannica called out Wikipedia as basically a bunch of half assed crap while they were the bastions of excellence in research. So a group of people randomly selected a bunch of articles from both, then rigorously fact checked them with the result that at the time they were basically even with Wikipedia adding articles at a fantastic rate.
A simple question that I have about Wikipedia is, what qualification did Jimmy Wales have to start Wikipedia? To be specific his job prior to Wiki was running "a male-oriented web portal featuring entertainment and adult content" Another would be Matt Drudge (love him or hate him) of the drudge report who had "a job in the gift shop of CBS studios, eventually working his way up to manager" just prior to becoming one of the single largest forces in modern journalism.
These people were about as unqualified on paper to do what they did as is possible yet they were massive forces of change. Was slashdot created by a team of experts from the leading technical universities in the world?
Then there are the failings of the best journals themselves. Bad article do slip by. Big companies get their one-sided views in print. Yet right now there is a revolution going on where institutions are sick of paying crazy prices for access to the top journals who are having trouble justifying these prices except to their shareholders.
When I read the criteria to be a "bad" journal some it is quite reasonable such as how open the whole process is, but over and over it basically says, we academics know better and had better be the gatekeepers so that we can keep our jobs. To me a bunch of crap journals are a sign of good things being in the wind. Much like how social media is changing the world with great things that Twitter can bring us it brings us tweets like, "nothin on tv, so bord, YOLO!!!!"
At this point is all going to be a PR stunt to make everyone somehow go "Yeay they saved Lucasarts." and then they hope that we will all run out and buy their next SW game: Darth Vader and the lost princess.
Sorrry I was a bit wrong. The key is what happens if Bill is VP and the president becomes incapacitated? And yes nobody would run an obviously unqualified candidate it is just odd that you could.
My point was that the people who tend to make the most noise about censoring things also tend to be the people who thump both the bible and the constitution. Which is funny because of how the most important and first part is all about not censoring things. Feinstein is listening to these zellots on issues like this. My problem with her is that she is doing the classic political thing of finding issues that "resonate" with a vocal minority instead of dealing with big boring issues like trade and finances. The result is all kinds of laws that please these vocal minorities at great cost to the rest of us.
That is why I said, "generally available". Going way off topic but something that has interested me is that often what look like revolutionary weapons have some serious issue. For example people cooked up clip driven weapons long before they came into general use. One of the key reasons they were dead on arrival was that bullets were just not reliable enough. You needed the revolver technology so that you could keep pulling the trigger to skip the frequent duds. Another example was the early M-16 it was borderline viable upon its introduction. Great weapon in many ways but initially it was really finicky about being clean and the ammo being perfectly made and in perfect shape. The first models were also a real pain to clear when jammed. They largely fixed all that but if you look at the AK-47 it was designed around poor manufacturing and poor ammunition quality along with poor maintenance. But the AK hasn't got a whole lot better while the M-16 turned out to be a good start that has been wildly improved upon.
But when the people were cooking up the 2nd amendment they did not anticipate say remotely operated drones or guided munitions. What they did anticipate was that the federal government would grow aloof and potentially tyrannical; so they thought they would balance the equation by letting people have muskets and whatnot. At the time any generally popular engagement with the federal would have been fairly small scale, they probably saw a bunch of angry farmers march on Washington and chase the bums out, or a less supported revolution march toward Washington but get turned away. But now anyone talking of armed revolution to sort things out has rocks in their head. Just look at any of the various countries trying it (Syria) and ask if that is a good thing? So what is needed is something to balance the power of a central government; at this point the best weapon is information. Wikileaks should not be some little aberration it should be how all federal/local governments basically operate. I want to see the expenses, communications, etc of everyone from the president to my local dog-catcher. A great example of this would be in Britain someone leaked the images of a bunch of expenses turned by government leaders. One guy had filed a claim for his moat, others were claiming for residences where they hadn't been seen in years. Normally all this information was secret with this and that excuse given about privacy and the dangers of releasing it. Also they said that those expenses were "properly audited by highly qualified persons" but it took the press no time at all to find all kinds of fraud and waste. This was with one leak. Just think of how much clean up there would be if everything was exposed.
Set up a honeypot. If you see crap coming from that IP send it against a server that has a front that looks like yours but has nothing in it and nothing to do. That way they might tie up some bandwidth but they will waste the capacity of one useless server. You could probably set up the server on some old pile of junk seeing that nobody will actually care about its performance or reliability.
Also put the server in a bit of a DMZ so that if they do compromise it that they can't get any further. If you want to keep it extra interesting set up a few VMs on the machine with different OSs. One Linux, one BSD, One MS server, and if you are looking for a laugh something like QNX. The best part is if they ever cobble together some kind of report about how insecure you are you can point out that the "BSD" system they found is for the sole benefit of crappy hackers. For that purpose your honeypot should not be the same OS as your real servers; that way if their report makes no mention of your real OS you can say "I am 100% sure you didn't penetrate a real machine as we use OS X which you don't list in your report."
Keep in mind you won't be judged by technical people but by non-technical people. So if these security types ever make an accusation making them look like simpletons is a great defense.
Stupid rule now but it originated with the idea that they didn't want a ruler who was just some British lord (they had an at the time legitimate worry that the revolution could be unwound) and the natural born citizen has not been tested in court so nobody actually agrees what it really means. Another interesting untested oddity is that it may or may not be possible for say Bill Clinton to run again. It all depends on if they see the rule as two terms ever or just two consecutive terms. And then to make it completely bonkers nobody is sure if you can be prevented from running if you don't qualify. So a Canadian turned American might be able to run, win, but then not take office. It is interesting how many of these fundamental rules either were pretty wide open to interpretation (or at least endless arguing) or have become out of touch with modern times. Take the 2nd amendment. At the time one of the best weapons was a cannon, basically no repeating rifles, or revolvers were generally available. So they placed no real limits on the weapons. I doubt even the staunchest NRA member would think it a good idea that people have personal Nukes. But somewhere between Nukes and BB guns the line needs to be drawn. But many NRA people blah blah about home defense, yet the 2nd amendment wasn't about home defense it was about defense against out of control federal governments. At this point I'm not sure what you'd need to defend against the federal government but I suspect it would have to be pretty awesome weaponry. But there is another slashdot article that discusses a much better defense against a federal government and that is open access to government data. Information is power, far better power than from a handful of guns.
But what I would guess that the first amendment was put in place to make sure that out of touch Nanny State nutjobs like Feinstein can't tell people what to think.
It quite simply boils down to whomever controls the information has the power. In my area there is a fight to get the public bus systems GPS logs. They can look over the information and play with the numbers until they are able to say things like our buses are on-time 98% of the time. But what is their definition of on time. If an independent investigator has access they might find that the buses are on time 2% of the time if you make the parameters more reasonable. If the real information in this situation gets out then managers would look bad and might have to actually do something.
But these sort of situations aren't all bad. It is possible somebody might model the transit system and find simple ways to optimize the entire thing with few and cheap changes.
Then there are the outright lies. Also in my area the government has been running a steady deficit of around $250 million per year. This year looks like an election year so suddenly they have tabled a budget with a $16 million dollar surplus. From what I can tell one of the line items must be an anticipated lottery win because there is no way that they have been able to spend money like the way they have been and hope to pull this magic out of thin air. Now if the public had the details of what went into this and past budgets line by line and item by item I suspect that their shenanigans would instantly be exposed. Personally my hope is that this lie is so obscene that the voters toss this particular batch of bums out.
But the three arguments that I hear from government people is that some data will stigmatize someone (crime stats that say what everybody already knows), that they can't have outsiders second guessing everything as nothing will happen, and the last is that if internal documents are exposed that nobody in government can be honest with their opinions. This all boils down to they don't want people using facts to counter their stupidity and they don't want embarrassing facts interfering with their keeping their jobs.
This is one of the few topics where we should all be able to paste that classic animated gif of the guy beating the dead horse. I suspect these politicians don't actually give a crap about video games. They are just pandering to a noisy few people who pester them about it.
I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia where the municipal politicians have internationally humiliated themselves regularly every few years over proposed Cat bylaws. I asked one councilor why they would ever bring up the stupidest idea regularly every half decade or so and he told me that it was the number one thing that people whined at him about; not taxes (which are off the charts in Halifax), not potholes, not all the crime, the dirt, the lack of jobs, the money wasted, or any of the actual pressing matters but the thing that made people intercept him in the grocery store was cats crapping in their gardens. So he just proposed the stupid bylaw and weathered the storm of stupidity so that he could shut them up.
I suspect that these people who whine about Video Games are low IQ types who don't really understand the real issues facing the US but think they have wrapped their pea brains around an issue and then go off on their moral quest. Their parents were probably on about rap music and their grandparents had their knickers in a knot over satan's rock and roll.
The ironic thing is that these same people were probably all wound up about a tiny rule stating that the president has to be born in the US while ignoring the most important, and first, amendment in the constitution they claim to hold in nearly the same esteem as their bibles. What I think it all boils down to is that people that drive laws like this don't like people having fun that they don't understand.
Not much, some medical records. But even have things that need to be secret still have short time limits. It makes sense that an undercover agent/CI should not have his cover blown by an information request. But even that should have a couple of year time limit. Contract negotiations should be secret until the contract is signed or dead. The milltary should get a bit of leeway for specific technologies. But none of this proprietary contract crap, or the one that ticks me off, "If we had to have our discussions in the open nobody would express their honest opinion."
http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/3070242/
http://www.news-journal.com/news/police/panola-county-sheriff-arrested-charged-in-corruption-investigation/article_211e132a-57d9-5607-a1b5-c66ca3368304.html
http://www.wsoctv.com/news/news/local/chesterfield-co-sheriff-face-corruption-charges-fr/nWzyH/
and the best one:
http://www.copblock.org/15718/story-of-how-a-corrupt-sherrif-got-taken-down-by-a-20-year-old/
And this is just a tiny sample. Can you imagine these goons with automated access to well processed information?
If the government has a magical 100% of information about our daily lives then the most diligently law abiding of us are still probably open to legal difficulties. Have you read all 36,000 pages of the tax code? Have you ever stepped off the curb just a moment after it said, "Don't walk"? Even if you only broke fairly minor laws here and there a overzealous prosecutor could line up the charges and ruin your life. That is if you don't cooperate with his request to do something you didn't want to do.
At this point in our over surveilled society it is still a goodly amount of work to assemble a case against the innocent. But with more and more information being gathered and more and more information processing capability it shouldn't be too long before a few clicks of a button show all your law breaking ways.
This might seem like slightly paranoid thinking and in most sensible parts of the western world government people have better things to do. Yet in various small towns you hear of the Sheriff bringing his police to bare against any opponent. I can imagine what kind of resources might be available to hunt down whistle-blowers, investigative reporters, and the people they care about. Or the police looking to discover who uploaded the next Rodney king video. If they had license plate scanning, facial recognition, cell phone records, and internet records then they are golden.
Then you get the false positives. Recently I read about a couple who had the police kick in their door because they were suspected of running a grow-op because of recent hydroponic purchases. They were law-abiding ex-CIA and were growing tomatos and such.
Now think about the power the American people suddenly had over the government when Watergate happened. Now think about how many resources were applied by the government to find out who leaked what? Think about how many resources were applied to the Pentagon papers? Now give the government access to today's/tomorrow's records and see how long Deep Throat remains secret?
My theory is quite simple. The second amendment needs its own amendment and that should read that the people should have near unlimited access to any government records and that the government should have extremely limited access the people's information. This way power will be in the correct hands for a democracy.
I have TTC courses, Coursera Courses, and iTunesU courses on my iPhone/iPad. So in my downtime I have learned discrete math/cryptography among others and am presently plowing through a great Coursera course in Computational Investing. I also have Algebra Touch on my iPhone and hand it to my younger daughter when we are stuck waiting. For both of my daughters I have TTC math on the iPad to hand to them when bored (some bribery involved).
So I would not say that Mobile devices are inherently bad but that many people use them to peruse the junk food isle. I go to the grocery store an my cart is devoid of palm oil or HFCS. Often I see other people's carts full of products containing both. We are shopping in the same store.
The differences between phones, signal strengths, antenna designs, usage patterns, frequencies, etc. are so vast that even if a connection to some disease is found it will probably not apply to the phones in use when the discovery is proven. Then to make it worse any phone technology that might have been harmful would generally cause the worst disease among seriously heavy cellphone users who tend to have the latest and greatest so when investigating a connection you will ask them which technologies they have used and they will probably reply "All of the above" assuming they knew the name of any technology they used.
So the study I would like would involve piles of mice blasted with every technology ever used in general use.
There are a few places where the cloud is great. If your machine is lightly loaded and it is doubtful that anyone really wants to steal your stuff. Then the cloud is great. If your load is all over the place but averages fairly low then again the flexibility of the cloud is great. If your customers are all over the place and distributing your stuff here and there is good then again the cloud is great. If you are risk taking fast moving startup then the cloud is for you.
But if security is off the scale critical (you are a bank, phone company, hedge fund, etc) then you must have physical control over your machines. Also if your machine uses a fairly steady load then your cloud costs will soon dwarf a dedicated machine. Then there are many other cases where the cloud is just stupid. If the main users are say within one building and any connectivity would stop most work then remote machines could pose a huge risk.
Then there is the third option which is you run your own cloud but control the machines physically.
So I would say that the future of the cloud is (to use a bad pun) murky. It is a great option for some a neutral option for others and for a few a terrible option. But where so many people have so many different needs catch all statements about the future of the cloud are nearly useless.
As one commenter said this is the same old crap new wrapped in todays newspaper. I just feel sorry for the IT people who work for some company where the MBA types are all "We've got to join the cloud before we get left behind."
A very common complaint that I hear from corporate types is that the IT department only has one answer and it is NO. I have always thought that this is due to the unbalanced pressure put on the typical IT department where their primary genuine performance review only comes when things blow up. It could have been 3 years of 100% up-time but a glitch during some critical sales presentation suddenly has the head of marketing calling for heads to roll in IT. You also get other negative feedback when the IT people "suddenly" need $100,000 worth of new servers (to replace the 10 year old existing ones that support 2,000 employees). The reason these are the performance reviews is that any traditional audits are simply incomprehensible to the non-technically minded management.
This then also results in the IT staff assiduously avoiding taking on any additional risk. So when a department says, "we want BYOD" IT usually loses their minds as they know that even if they stand on their heads while explaining that they can not only not support 8,000 different types of devices but that there is a good chance that any given device might not work at all (Say the iPads not working with the 6 year old flash based timecard system). As far as the rest of the company is concerned this is just another strike against IT.
At the same time I have experienced many IT people who become so risk adverse that this becomes a genuine risk to the company. Years ago I worked for a company that was switching from the drying up business of military contracting to large scale web based systems. Over 50 employees were sharing a pair of 256K ISDN lines and being forced to put a bizarrely set up Novell system on all our computers. The IT guy had a wall that was nearly completely covered with all his Novell certifications. My most glorious moment was when he ordered an awesome Dell server from hell and couldn't get Novell to install on it. He was on the speaker-phone with a senior Dell support guy when he told our IT guy that none of their best servers were compatible with Novell and this was a good thing as far as he was concerned.
This is a very complex problem but without going into endless detail I have seen very unusual and creative solutions where both IT and the company can end up being a whole lot happier.
Learning about how memory and whatnot works would be like learning metallurgy down to crystal formation as a first step when you are trying to learn how an engine works enroute to designing cars. Yes you will be a crap mechanical engineer if you don't know material science inside and out; but many many studies have shown that a far better way to learn is to jump in and get your hands dirty doing something on the macro scale that is generally fun and interesting where you will run into problems that are solved by micro bits of knowledge. These microbits have retention rates that are orders of magnitude better with the student having a far greater ability to apply the knowledge. That way you run up against things like how keeping things in L1 cache is better than when you start bouncing back and fourth into RAM, later studying how a floating point works in memory will suddenly make a while lot of sense of various oddities you would have already encountered.
If you skip straight into the structure of an executable with its data segments and whatnot then you will turn the students into test passing zombies. Whereas if you had a contest later on in the course where you had the students make the smallest executable that they can by stripping out all the extraneous crap needed then they would probably have an ah ha moment that would set the knowledge in stone.
I have been programming for a zillion years but wasn't solid on some of the innermost areas of modern CPUs and how they processed instructions. So I watched a lecture series from one of the better universities. While the students were mostly quite smart they frequently asked really really stupid questions. A frequent classic was about uninitialized variables and why they were so bad. I easily heard 10 variants of that question. This was a course where the nitty gritty explaining pretty much how registers are actually architected on the CPU yet the students still didn't grasp something so simple as uninitialized variables and their potentially wonky contents. I really felt bad for them having to basically memorize all this crap without having any feel for what they were learning. My guess is that even after they progressed on to more project related work that they would not necessarily connect the arcane knowledge that they had so diligently crammed into their heads with problems they will eventually encounter.
That about sums up my distaste for most CS teaching and most CS related textbooks. Nature of code is a wildly refreshing exception.
First these guys need to read The Nature of Code; full stop. I have never read a better book on coding. The language covered in that book is the obscure Processing (a C++ like syntax) but it doesn't matter. That guy explains everything you need from pretty well zero to Genetic Algorithms in ways that I have never seen done so simplistically. Most shelf computer books meander through the usual OOP stuff such as circle and square inheriting from the shape base class but without really explaining why the hell you would need any of that.
CS textbooks can't wait to show off the writer's math skills and while explaining one thing will throw in lambda calculus just for laughs. Also CS textbooks often contrive the need for something like a doubly linked list instead of leading the student up to where they hit a problem that is nicely solved by the topic. This is where you find the critical difference between obtaining knowledge to regurgitate on a test and building a skill set for life.
One of the keys to the nature of code is that the writer is almost always doing something graphical. The result is that you can get a feel for what your code is doing while at the same time having concrete goals. I am sick of textbooks where they will introduce a vector blah and then get you to sort and print the results. I doubt there is a person on earth who went into a CS course wanting to sort a list of names. But if you have a graphical bunch of rectangles and you put each rectangle in a vector and then have the student sort them that way and display them stacked, still useless but the student will probably get more satisfaction.
Good luck with the book.