I have seen these fights before and it usually comes down to shares. Often the Brilliant Jerk has a founder's fraction of the shares 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 and the new MBA types that have been hired (usually mostly in a sales capacity) are envious that when the big sale comes along that those few founders are going to get all the cheese. So they convince them to dilute but the so called jerk will say good for you, dilute your shares, mine stay as they are. He knows that the new MBA types are very replaceable now that they can just offer them a salary.
The other variation of the brilliant jerk is that they have again a founder's share and the other founders are business types. The brilliant jerk did the programming of 10 to earn his share but now they have hired 20 programmers and the business people suddenly decide that the original programmer isn't carrying his weight anymore while they do all the big deals. So as the really big sellout comes they resent that while they "made it rain" that the brilliant jerk will get just as much as them. They rationalize that even if he is worth 10 programmers that they can now just hire 10 programmers for far less.
Rarely, if ever, have I seen where the original founders were causing a problem for anyone except for getting in the way of self-entitled jerks.
The various groups such as the police, moral majorities, or whomever will keep badgering the politicians for these types of laws to "protect the children" or "protect our rights" but in reality these laws are all of the type: music leads to dancing which leads to the unspeakable. The only thing to finally put a stop to them is to enshrine privacy rights in whatever constitutions, bills of rights or whatever structure has the final common sense say in any modern legal system. A well written code should last for decades as it should not be technology specific just information specific. It should spell out what data the government can gather without a warrant. It should also spell out that corporations can only gather the information required for billing customers who have agreed to be billed. Any other information gathering should be a civil rights violation. So if the police record license plates as you drive by then boom they are busted. Or if we get some cool medical implants that record stuff and the hospital gathers it and passes it on to a drug company or insurance company then busted.
Personally I would even like to see my grocery store stopped from gathering my shopping habits. Basically tally my total charge me and then forget that I was there. I want it so that the police aren't even allowed to ask for data from a company's computer unless they have a warrant. Not even a peek.
If these things aren't stopped now then the new normal will be a government and corporations who will be able to know way too much about you. A grocery store that pulls up your phone IMEI and asks the phone company who you are. Then asks to see what sites you have been surfing to see what they can sell you. What is stopping the phone company and your ISP from selling this data?
I can see a 13 year old boy called into the principal's office and expelled because of the "disgusting" sites they were surfing at home the night before. If the ISP were owned by some bible thumper what law is stopping them from handing this data to anyone? Right now as long as you put it into the terms of service where we all blindly click "I agree" the company should be pretty safe. Also those terms of service almost always blah blah about sharing with 3rd parties.
My guess as to the main reason that this isn't done more is that most people don't have the skills to properly mix and match such different data sets. Plus some companies might be reluctant to really piss of their customers. But when any of these companies are on the ropes financially they will make any deal with any devil that comes along.
Is this an Onion story or dey just be stupid? These morons are one google search (Better than Ubuntu) away from losing every technowiz in the business.
If you read my posts you will see that I really don't like MBAs. But this has to be a case study in letting an MBA loose in your company with a spreadsheet program (Probably Excel).
Ubuntu, you can save yourself. Step one: Find this super bright MBA and send it packing. Step two: undo anything this MBA did.
This is the sort of MBA spreadsheet thinking that kills companies. I suspect that someone did an audit that showed the passwords taking up all this "Valuable" space or some other bizarre analysis. The tiny savings from having the shorter passwords will instantly be nullified the first major hack that comes along.
So MS is faced with one of three expensive situations:
They weren't hashing but storing my pass in some open or reversible format which when hacked will create a mega PR / liability problem or,
They are hashing and the truncated passwords won't work and they are going to blow off any customers who had long passwords which will tend to be the more technologically savvy who, as a group, are a bad idea to piss off as they are the types recommending technology to the masses. MS does not need to lose even more of the techno aware. or,
They are hashing which means a truncated pass won't work and they will then have tech support hand out access willy nilly resulting in the easiest social phishing in the history of the net. "I would like you to set the password for the account bgates@hotmail.com to 12345678. Your name sir? Billy Gates you fool, now hurry. Thank you sir your password has been reset to 12345678. I would like to spend 5 minutes asking you about your purchase plans for our new $10,000 tablet..."
Some MBA did up a presentation where they could make an absurd profit on each unit and then success will happen at only 10% of iPad sales.
In order to switch from an iPad to a Windows unit it would have to be so much better, so way much better, way way better. So unless it unfolds into a private jet that then flies me to my private island that comes with it I will predict that they will jig the stats on sales (force people to warehouse them and then prebook the sales) and in the end it will be Zune 2.
Right now there are two ways to sell a tablet to consumers, sell them an iPad or sell them something that looks exactly like an iPad for way less. The only possible third way would be something way better; thus MS will have had to vastly improve upon technologies that are near the leading edge of what is possible. So better than retina? Better battery life without making it an inch thick? Thinner/lighter electronics? Vastly better GUI? Vastly better Processor? Better Apps?
If MS were really lucky and had the best engineers on the planet and could get their first effort perfect I could see slight improvements on all of the above but not enough to touch Apple's marketing or enough to justify a monster price.
My prediction is that MS is going to make this all enterprisey. It will tie into office and other MS crap in a horribly incestuous way. They will provide white papers to the CTO types saying how this can improve data security and fine grain control over the user experience. What they are forgetting here is that one of the reasons for Apple's ability to break into the Enterprise market is that they don't cater to the enterprise market's OCD about ruining the user experience. I am sure that this is what killed the BlackBerry; those phones are actually pretty good. But RIM gave the telcos and sys admins too much say over what could be turned off on the phones. Many a corporate user had a complete dud of a phone after all the good bits were turned off in the name of security and productivity. Apple looks at this and just asks "Why would we allow you to ruin our phones?" Over the last few years the better companies have had a policy of BYOD that is a real winner among the employees who are the reason the company exists and a real pain among old school admins.
So basically crappy companies are going to buy a handful of these new tablets and their employees are going to put them into the microwave hoping that if they ruin enough of them they will get an iPad; or at least not have to suffer the Metro UI.
In the world of the internet I keep hearing of deals that go in to the bazillions for companies that I have never heard of. So 20M for a collection of products that are pretty central to the whole online thing is just odd. Any explanation as to the low price?
Years ago an accountant told me she would love to learn to program; yet then she showed me some awesome macros that she had done running past 1000 lines each. I could have come up with a zillion criticisms from code repeating, bad variable names, weird formatting, variable scoping, etc. But her code did amazing things and did them well. She had all kinds of edge cases handled well and so on.
On the other hand I have seen CS grads with perfectly formatted code with all the comments, variable names, OOP, etc perfectly to school standards that was all crap in actual use. I could edge case them to death. A simple way to break their code was to do something radical like use a foréign character. Often the difference between a bad programmer and a great programmer is the size of their code. A bad programmer will use 6 classes and 900 lines of code, a pretend good programmer will half that while making it more complicated, and a great programmer will use zero classes and 20 lines of code; and those 20 lines of code will be simplicity incarnate and if they ever need any maintenance any fool could do it.
I have found the great programmers usually stick out early. It is not often something that comes after years of programming they just become more great with time. Although the better programmers weed out their bad practices and add new good ones the worst programmers are often very reluctant to change, "Unit testing will just slow us down."
What makes me laugh though is when the worst programmers do finally adopt something new and good they usually adopt it in the worst way. So they will adopt test driven development during a prototyping or R&D phase when everything is in massive flux and just needs to be proof of concept not flawless.
So I would say anyone can become a bad programmer and with the correct mentoring most can become an adequate programmers but that only those with the right intelligence and mindset can become great programmers.
People who use small devices are primarily consumers of information with obvious exceptions like texting, voice, pictures, and video. But specifically these people are not manipulating the information. They might take the video but they aren't likely to turn it into a documentary on their device. As the screens and computing power gets larger the amount of creation and manipulation increases. Thus programmers, video editors, 3D artists, engineers, etc all need powerful systems with good keyboards, mice, and many screens.
A good example of how this trend is understood by the hardware makers would be the increase in video cards with more than one DVI port. Your average email/websurfer doesn't need dual screens. Even apple, which makes the vast bulk of its money from consumer devices, still makes the Mac Pro. I suspect that they don't make enough money from these to make it worth it. But if they were to loose that tiny core audience of hardcore users to another platform then those hardcore users might start recommending that other platform.
In a way this whole reduction of the lower end users might help us who would prefer some more powerful machines as the manufacturers will waste less time making machines that are one step up from toasters.
The one wildcard in this whole mix are the gamers. To a certain extent gamers may have driven the leading edge of hardware development for years with servers driving similar but different high end hardware. So I suspect that instead of the lower end causing problems for the average high end user like developers that the gamer and server market will keep things cooking along at the extreme end and things will trickle down to the rest of us.
So to say that the desktop is dead is wrong. I would say that the crappy desktop is dead.
The whole problem with this argument is that the value to the police and companies gathering the data (including paparazzi) is huge. But the cost to the average individual is low in that do you really care that the bridge just kept a record of you driving over it?
So those gathering the data try really hard to make sure the law doesn't interfere with them and the average guy on the street doesn't work too hard to stop them.
Where we the average Joe need to pay real attention is the compiling this data. Suddenly it isn't some useless log wasting space on the Bridge Commission's server but government data compiling that starts making an Orwellian list of who you are, your friends, your associations. This way a politician (say the local Sheriff) can target rivals. You might find that the major donors to a campaign can quickly be found to have mistresses, is gay, or things like business dealings that they don't want public (not bad things just things like a land deal that if public is ruined); nothing illegal just private.
People blah blah about the 2nd amendment but power doesn't sensibly come from a well oiled 9mm except in action movies. It comes from control of information. If you control the flow and content of information then you have real power. If we allow governments and corporations to gather and compile real about us then they will have real power over us.
Quite simply the western world needs to massively restrict what information can be gathered but even more importantly its compilation. As I say it is probably better for all of us if the bridge can figure out usage patterns of drivers. But the FBI should have zero access to this information without a specific warrant for a specific car for a specific case and with probable cause. I am not talking about that the bridge would be allowed to refuse but that by law they would have to refuse.
The reverse needs to be true; we need full access to what our governments and corporations are up to; this would massively reduce the stupidity that they tend to get up to. Again control of information works for us here and oddly enough results in the members of a democracy having power returned to them.
A great example of the hypocrisy of most western governments is that they want to video us with speed/red light cameras, drones, police cameras; yet in nearly every senate, congress, parliament, or council they have strict rules about how the cameras are run. In Canada when someone is speaking the dozen or so people who bothered to show up crowd around behind them so that on camera it looks like they are all there; in reality the parliament is usually nearly empty. They say that any other way would "confuse" the people. Also you basically never get images of them sleeping, picking their noses, or just worst of all just never being there.
In one of the worst councils in North America Halifax has nearly every critical meeting behind closed doors. Again the public can't handle the truth or the discussion is proprietary ( meaning they are discussing a deal with a private company that would make you vomit). The same with the completely worthless Legislature. Their discussions are only released something like 90 years later.
The whole paranoia about governments watching us is simple math. If they can watch us cost effectively they will. If they can stop us from watching them they will.
That would be a school by school or class by class issue. Sort of like how geometry sets are on every supply list but rarely used. There are certainly teachers who not only will say to pull out your graphing calcs but have a limited set of allowable units; often these units are TI-83 TI-84 and sometimes for more advanced things the TI-89.
I have been programming professionally for over 20 years with no CS degree. I have learned much over those years and made many mistakes. My programming has bounced from (roughly in order) basic, asm, real basic, VB, c++, perl, SQL, PL/SQL, VB.Net, Java, c#, PHP, C++, Objective-C with most of those early ones disappearing from my brain over time. But throughout all that I didn't know I was missing some CS bits from my knowledge. I started watching the video lectures from Stanford and so on and my knowledge easily doubled. The math I use to apply was basically simple algebra and endless x++; But then I expanded my math through a TTC course on Discrete math and now my programming is completely different.
Where I have been lucky is to have the freedom to change platforms, architectures, and languages quite freely. Where I have seen many CS people fail is that with their degree they get a "good" job at some company and become the master of say Adabas, MFC, or even something modern and common like Java. Yet soon enough you discover that they "have heard about unit testing" and talk about how hard it is to change the "culture" of their company. Thus their skills become more and more focused all the while becoming more and more obsolete. So when a CS person like that tries to interview they tend to be way out of date.
Also there seems to be a trend in the IT world to try and keep the problems simple. So rarely does your average company programmer get to explore genetic algorithms to potentially save the company millions so much as they get to program a tool to integrate the database from the new subsidiary that was purchased.
So I would say that getting a CS degree is a better way to get a "safe" job as it will get you past HR but that a commitment to a lifetime of continual learning beyond just what you need to know to solve the problem in front of you is key to becoming a great programmer.
The one warning I do have about CS degrees is that your CS professor was almost certainly wrong when expressing any opinions. I don't know how many CS grads that I have worked with who are OCD about things like code being made up of a certain percentage of comments, or lines not being more than 80 characters long, or using hungarian notation for variable names. These might have been key to passing arbitrary goals set by certain professors but they usually just serve to annoy in the real world. Often these CS OCD types will not only make massive faux pas such as tons of magic numbers but they often go even further by showing off by using 0x7DB instead of say 2011 in some date function.
But certainly the worst programmers out there are the ones who went to some crap technical collage, learned some crap language like Powerbuilder, got a job at some large corporation, and 15 years later are still pounding out crap Powerbuilder code; these people are the antithesis of what I said about a great programmer coming from a commitment to learning.
Best idea so far. The TI-83 is a good enough graphing calculator for most. I can't imagine the sticker shock parents in low income homes get when their kid says we need a $100+ calculator. Also how many kids are avoiding higher level math because their household can't afford a calculator? Also the used market for graphing calculators dries up at the beginning of the school year.
I was on a field trip school field trip(winter) and one immigrant kid was crying he was so cold. I loaned him my oversized gloves and hat that day and gave the principal some high-tech gloves and hat to give to the kid the next day. There is no way that kid is getting a graphing calculator out of his parents.
I ask my kids if any of their classmates need a computer as I often end up with an older computer every few months. Again critical for homework but unaffordable in many homes.
We slashdotters probably look at things like the raspberry pi as a toy for some cool robot project but personally I suspect that one of the biggest impacts they will have will be a small number of industrious kids who make them their home computer and then are able to get ahead educationally.
So to the OP, you have a pile of life changing resources there; so go change some lives.
I went through Bruce Edwards Great Courses math videos and they were incredible. They also have one on Discrete math and another on the art and craft of problem solving; all great. A few of their others that I tried weren't so great. But for the ones I just mentioned I contrast them to the crap teaching I had in school and there is no comparison. I would love to see an experiment where a teacher who knows zero math uses these lectures in a classroom setting and then compare the results to regular so called math teachers(yes I know there are a few great ones out there but very few). I suspect that it would be night and day. This would only be enhanced if these video courses were made more interactive.
These are early days for online education. The bar is generally set very low. But I suspect that slowly but surely there will be a "best" intro to stats lecture, a best calculus II lecture and so on. Where this will get really interesting is when you are able to mix and match these courses and their credits to assemble a degree.
Where I suspect that many institutions are going to get murdered is when they will take the lectures of their most politically connected professors and only let them post their videos. These institutions are then going to be puzzled when the students are all off watching Stanford profs instead.
The thing that makes me sad is when all these Baby Boomer professors are using their soap boxes to attack online education. It seems that the main thing they don't like is the students having a choice and that the choice won't be they and their surly attitudes. I hear attacks like "You shouldn't spoon feed the students." "The students don't have the discipline." "It is the Disneyfication of education." "You can't have just a few institutions dominating education."
There will be a place for a few of the best local professors working with graduate students. But those run of the mill glorified high-school teachers are doomed. As for grade school education I can't imagine the storm of change they are going to be resisting. I can't imagine how angry they are going to be when a certain percentage of their students will access this world of knowledge and basically be sitting in a grade 8 classroom having just finished an online Stanford degree/certificate. What excuse do you have to even pretend to teach grade 8 math to a student who might have just completed a course in tensor calculus? Or even just Pre-calculus? I suspect the school system will fight this like the Germans in the last days of WWII Berlin will be surrounded with the shells landing every few seconds while they keep planning the 1000 year Reich.
What this reminds me of is the early days of the automobile. Before Henry Ford cars were handmade creations that weren't generally very good and were for the very rich. Then Henry Ford figured out how to make a good car for everyone. Technically there were a few better handmade cars but every technological improvement was put into mass produced cars very quickly and the whole car industry took off. Education has been in the hand made stage for 1000's of years... Until now.
What a glorious change it is going to be. I just hope the scammy scummy companies don't screw it up.
In Halifax they have gone to a whole new level of insanity. A private company with no open auditing does telephone voting for municipal elections. The turnover of politicians has dropped to nearly zero since they implemented the new system.
Also the local parties such as the liberals have various electronic voting schemes. One blew up years ago with completely nonsense numbers. If the numbers had not been total nonsense and instead reasonable yet very wrong they probably would have gone with the numbers.
They keep blah blahing about increasing voter participation. If they want more voter participation then have referendums on important issues. In our area I can see some real big issues that would get people voting in droves: a referendum for each section of the city to remain in the amalgamated city; a vote to significantly reduce the pay of the councilors; a vote to cut city staff way back; a vote on the crazy rules that have basically turned the left turn indicator into a stop sign on metro buses; getting a light rail system; a massive crackdown on the 3 crime ridden areas of the city.
These are issues that aren't touched but would get people voting. So if the choice is between one failed real-estate agent and a failed lawyer then oddly enough people don't bother voting. When the choice is something that matters then people will vote. Using low voter turnout to justify throwing away our open voting system is insane.
Any electronic voting system must print a ballot which is clear and is also the final measure of an election. The electronically gathered numbers should only be used as a temporary tally. The only benefit of electronic voting machines is that they prevent "hanging chads" and keep people from accidentally voting both sides of an issue or for more than a single politician.
Another area of election reform that electronic voting could help with would be ordered voting. This way you don't end up with 6 people running and one person somehow winning with only 20% of the vote with 80% of people voting anybody but the person who wins. Happened last time.
I might sound like I am 5 but the moron who our city has hired to run things name is Dick Butts and doesn't even really live in our city (Halifax). (Lives in Toronto.) Any good voting system would have these bums thrown out in a second.
If anything the poor reviews that people are giving this game is a justification of the article. Many of us developers take a while to figure out how to promote things. Companies like EA have the whole promotion thing tied up in knots so any venue for people with sub zillion dollar marketing budgets is a good thing. I suspect that this is one of the main reasons that the movie and music industries are so fearful of the new digital world and that is that their machine had become so good at promoting anything they lost all incentive to produce things that are good. Taking the marketing machine partially out of the loop (I suspect many illegal downloads are still driven by the marketing machine) must leave them feeling fairly naked.
Agreed. I find commenting is a good diagnoses for either OCD or micromanagement by a quasi non programmer. It drives me bonkers to see a function like this:
//********* //GetNumberOfUsers is a function that will return an integer //describing the number of users that match the parameters entered //category_id is an integer containing the category of user //country_id is an integer containing the country code //company_id is an integer containing the company identifier. //Created:BOB_MILLER:2008-08-09:14:24:34 //Edited:BOB_MILLER:2008-08-09:14:24:39 //Edited:BOB_MILLER:2008-08-29:10:24:39 //Edited:BOB_MILLER:2008-09-09:16:24:39
int GetNumberOfUsers(int category_id, int country_id, int company_id)
{ //this will hold the number of users
int num_users=0; //Get a connection to the database
DBConnection db=new DatabaseConnection('central_database'); //check to see if connection is good
if(db==null){explode();} //good didn't explode so do next statement ... //Close database connection
db->Close(); //Now return the number of users
return num_users;
}//GetNumberOfUsers(int category_id, int country_id, int company_id, int some_param_that_used_to_be_here)
The key information should be put into the naming of the variables, functions, and classes. Comments should be reserved for almost a conversation with another programmer. Magically perfect code should in theory have zero comments.
x=x+1;//This compiler acting is screwy so I didn't use the more efficient x++ here
x=sqrt(sin(log(y)/pi)*e);// this is the lambert/highlander formula
x=lookup_table[y];//This look-up table speeds things up by 100x.
x=sin(tan(cos(x)));// If I knew my trig better there must be a better way to condense and speed this up.
When family call me over to fix up a slow machine and I find Norton AV on it I walk away. I can't tell that bloated sack of crap from the malware it is trying to stop. I don't care how good it might be as all it does is pop up and pop up and demand money. How about NOD32? The last time I had my own Windows box that thing rocked. If it popped up then you had a problem that it was stopping.
But everybody blah blahs about the death of the desktop but what I think perverted the whole thing was when companies like Dell, HP, ACER, and most of the rest changed their business model to where they sold a desktop for little or no profit in the hopes of getting commissions from sales of the trialware they put on their machines.
Is it any surprise that people are buying Apples desktops, laptops, and iPads when the only thing apple really tries to sell you is iCloud? I am not Apple Fanboying here I think that any company that made a point of telling people that their machines were trialware free would make some serious gains in the market.
My old policy with family was that they would send their new laptop over and I would wipe it clean put a good AV product, Open Office, and iTunes on it and send it home. That stopped when laptops cut the left shift key in half and put the \| key there. This was some cost savings thing for foreign keyboards but for me it was the straw that broken my tech support camel's back. I won't touch one of those keyboards. Plus wiping these systems is a nightmare of drivers some of which put some bloatware back.
So for Norton to be scaremongering people into buying their crap product doesn't surprise me in the least; it just isn't their worst crime. As I said their worst crime was to be one of the biggest proponents of this trialware bloatware business model of lower end computers that has basically poisoned the PC market.
Subjects like this need a bit more "Let's cross that bridge when we come to it" not to mention being already well covered in books by the likes of Asimov. The economic impact of the coming robot revolution (robolution). Now that is potentially interesting. My guess is the most robots are going to be more like insects; but insects we control. This whole put a human face on a robot is a joke. We have lots of humans so why make a metallic crappy human. But I do want a robot to make things, paint my house, clean my floors, plant food, pick food, eat bugs, etc. I don't want to talk with it. I don't see the economic point of a robot that really interacts with us. They blah blah about old people but I suspect old people would prefer real humans to talk with as well.
The only way I see a robot who needs some legal rights will be if some system becomes self-aware and wants to walk around inside a robot body.
Actually KISS can be seen in nearly all technology where the complicated guts of the technology are hidden from the user; and even better when the complicated is replaced with something better. Look at much of the old technology of say cars. A modern car does all kinds of crazy stuff but a car from 1915 is impossibly complicated to use. Not only were there levers and whatnot that have long been eliminated but even things like the gearbox could be destroyed by say selecting the wrong gear. I suspect that some asshats argued that the simpler cars were "distancing" them from the driving experience.
Other KISS involve complicating one thing to make it easier for the user. The 6 shooter revolver technology was critical when manufacturing wasn't terribly precise and bullets could not be relied on to always go bang. So the 6 shooter allowed the user to just pull the trigger again for another try with another bullet. Also people weren't used to precise instruments so a 6 shooter would work when pretty poorly maintained. The clip driven weapon could only be deployed when bullets were reliable and the machining was precise enough. Any nitwit can swap clips out in a moment.
The command line argument is a great example of KISS as a multi headed argument. One could argue that the command line is the ultimate in KISS but they are missing the point of is it KISS for the user or the developer. My mother the user is going to be pretty upset if I swap her over to a command line interface. But from a development point of view a command line is way easier than a nice GUI.
Where things go wrong is when the two worlds start to blur. The developer starts to expect a higher level of expertise so as to simplify their own job. But that is the failing it is the expert developer's job to make it as easy as possible to use the product. It is not that your user is a moron(even though many are) but that it is rude to force your user to do or learn something when they don't have to.
As for the complaint that some products are too dumb. It is that the KISS was misapplied and they did MISS or Make it Seem Simple. Clippy was annoying and didn't help. It actually increased work especially in the hunt to turn it off. KISS applied correctly would make it so that you can figure out what you need without trouble. A good example of KISS missing is cancelling printing. There should be a button that shows up in some corner while the printing is going that stops the print dead in its tracks. Many many people print something, sit back and see the mistake. Or they see the first page and realized they loaded the wrong paper, or one of a hundred reasons they want to stop NOW. But this fact seems to have escaped those who made the printer spooler, drivers, and hardware people.
Another example of KISS is I am a pretty good driver but I would love if my car warned me I am making a mistake. That is not treating me like a bad driver but making my life better (and maybe longer). A feature like this would be fantastically complicated under the hood yet the interface would be a beep or a shake to the steering wheel.
I think the independent summer is one of the things that make the western world great. It lets some kids do what they want, learn things that the government doesn't teach. A longer school year is a great idea if you want mindless factory workers.
Some kids will spend the summer drinking, playing video games, hanging out at the mall, etc. But hello bell curve; I suspect that there are some nerdy kids doing cool stuff, and entrepreneurial kids doing businessy stuff.
I am willing to bet that if you do a poll at MIT about what the kids did for their summers that it was not school but something cool. If you ask the kids in jail at 18 what they did with their summers it was probably quite jail preparatory.
Check out the PISA scores for countries like Indonesia (they really suck) yet they have a 6 day school week and not that long a break. I am sure that some of the top countries in the PISA scores also probably have crazy school years but many of the top countries such as Korea aren't exactly noted for their independent thinking. So the question goes even beyond math scores. What kind of citizens do we want?
So maybe it shouldn't be about a longer school year but more offerings for kids to do things in the summer. Camping, science, music, etc. But not aiming for an elite level OCD thing but a hey lets have fun doing...X.
People always blah blah about KISS. But when it comes to most products it usually ends up being too many cooks. Years ago I built a website for a telco. They wanted two things. One was online bill viewing and the other was to promote this new thing called DSL. Website was supposed to cost around $50,000. So we cook along and they keep adding more and more to the website with nearly every department in the telco getting their little bit in; one part being a what's happening at the local universities. After the budget blew through $200,000 they started to suggest that we cut the online bill check part along with the rate card. One of our people stood up in the meeting and said, "Those are the only two things on the whole damn site that people will want. Cut those and you have $200,000 worth of dog shit."
But it gets even worse. This new DSL was being introduced at a time before cable modems. The highest speed connection of any geek I knew was a 128k ISDN line and this new DSL was going to give you 1Mbs for $40. Then as I did up the specs for it for the site I realized that the whole business model was a stupid Novell system of renting applications such as Microsoft office. Internet was way down on the list of features. I called up the Product Manager and he said, "Well we might not even offer connectivity to the internet initially." I told him that if they were able to offer 1Mbs for $40 when all the competition was offering 56kbs for $20 they were going to clean up. He told me that there was pressure from their own dial up to not offer internet via the DSL. I think what may have saved it was that I told him he would be out of a job if he didn't offer internet and they would be out of a job while he would ride a wave to the future if he did.
Now think about the above. This is the big telco in my area taking business advice from a tiny web shop. Good advice if I say so myself.
So how many companies don't have a single man who can stand up and say "whoa there cowboy. That might look good on a spread sheet but our customers will want to ram it up your ass.... sideways....covered in the juice from a ghost pepper."
From what I have read about Steve Jobs is that people brought shit to him with a great story and they left his office crying. Then they came back to him with something less shitty and left crying again. This would happen over and over until it just wasn't shitty anymore.
It is hard to tell an employee that what they just spend a lot of time on was crap. It is unpleasant for most normal people. So I suspect that where Steve Jobs' genius lay is in somehow being an ass right up to but not beyond the point where everyone quit. Beyond that he was probably just pretty smart.
So far nearly all the comments to my comment support my argument in that they mostly go "No no change is bad. We can't risk change. This is the way we do it because that is how it is done. I saw that tried once and it failed; nobody should try it again." Magellan's ships left with something like 1000 crew and came back with a fraction; but they had balls and did something cool. Neil Armstrong hardly had a hope in hell of coming back alive yet off he went on a rocket less than 25 years after the V2 was the best in world rocket power.
Airplanes have rivets because that is all the insurance companies would tolerate for decades. Old welding technologies are crappy and worse than rivets. Cool new welding technologies such as friction welding are damn good.
Our entire culture is at best "Slow and steady wins the race." we need to support the crazies. Most of the crazies will fail but suddenly someone will be walking on Mars or upside down on the ceiling. Do I think that we can travel faster than light; don't know; Most say no way. Let a few physicists loose on the problem; so what if they waste some time and money. 1000s of risky projects over a number of years are bound to have some payoffs. But if you are anything but the most solidly established physicist and you mention cold fusion or FTL engines and you can kiss your career good bye. We need a culture where the other physicists see an FTL project and wander by every now and then hoping to see some progress, not hoping to see it fall flat on its face.
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I have seen these fights before and it usually comes down to shares. Often the Brilliant Jerk has a founder's fraction of the shares 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 and the new MBA types that have been hired (usually mostly in a sales capacity) are envious that when the big sale comes along that those few founders are going to get all the cheese. So they convince them to dilute but the so called jerk will say good for you, dilute your shares, mine stay as they are. He knows that the new MBA types are very replaceable now that they can just offer them a salary.
The other variation of the brilliant jerk is that they have again a founder's share and the other founders are business types. The brilliant jerk did the programming of 10 to earn his share but now they have hired 20 programmers and the business people suddenly decide that the original programmer isn't carrying his weight anymore while they do all the big deals. So as the really big sellout comes they resent that while they "made it rain" that the brilliant jerk will get just as much as them. They rationalize that even if he is worth 10 programmers that they can now just hire 10 programmers for far less.
Rarely, if ever, have I seen where the original founders were causing a problem for anyone except for getting in the way of self-entitled jerks.
The various groups such as the police, moral majorities, or whomever will keep badgering the politicians for these types of laws to "protect the children" or "protect our rights" but in reality these laws are all of the type: music leads to dancing which leads to the unspeakable. The only thing to finally put a stop to them is to enshrine privacy rights in whatever constitutions, bills of rights or whatever structure has the final common sense say in any modern legal system. A well written code should last for decades as it should not be technology specific just information specific. It should spell out what data the government can gather without a warrant. It should also spell out that corporations can only gather the information required for billing customers who have agreed to be billed. Any other information gathering should be a civil rights violation. So if the police record license plates as you drive by then boom they are busted. Or if we get some cool medical implants that record stuff and the hospital gathers it and passes it on to a drug company or insurance company then busted.
Personally I would even like to see my grocery store stopped from gathering my shopping habits. Basically tally my total charge me and then forget that I was there. I want it so that the police aren't even allowed to ask for data from a company's computer unless they have a warrant. Not even a peek.
If these things aren't stopped now then the new normal will be a government and corporations who will be able to know way too much about you. A grocery store that pulls up your phone IMEI and asks the phone company who you are. Then asks to see what sites you have been surfing to see what they can sell you. What is stopping the phone company and your ISP from selling this data?
I can see a 13 year old boy called into the principal's office and expelled because of the "disgusting" sites they were surfing at home the night before. If the ISP were owned by some bible thumper what law is stopping them from handing this data to anyone? Right now as long as you put it into the terms of service where we all blindly click "I agree" the company should be pretty safe. Also those terms of service almost always blah blah about sharing with 3rd parties.
My guess as to the main reason that this isn't done more is that most people don't have the skills to properly mix and match such different data sets. Plus some companies might be reluctant to really piss of their customers. But when any of these companies are on the ropes financially they will make any deal with any devil that comes along.
Is this an Onion story or dey just be stupid? These morons are one google search (Better than Ubuntu) away from losing every technowiz in the business. If you read my posts you will see that I really don't like MBAs. But this has to be a case study in letting an MBA loose in your company with a spreadsheet program (Probably Excel).
Ubuntu, you can save yourself. Step one: Find this super bright MBA and send it packing. Step two: undo anything this MBA did.
This is the sort of MBA spreadsheet thinking that kills companies. I suspect that someone did an audit that showed the passwords taking up all this "Valuable" space or some other bizarre analysis. The tiny savings from having the shorter passwords will instantly be nullified the first major hack that comes along.
So MS is faced with one of three expensive situations:
They weren't hashing but storing my pass in some open or reversible format which when hacked will create a mega PR / liability problem or,
They are hashing and the truncated passwords won't work and they are going to blow off any customers who had long passwords which will tend to be the more technologically savvy who, as a group, are a bad idea to piss off as they are the types recommending technology to the masses. MS does not need to lose even more of the techno aware. or,
They are hashing which means a truncated pass won't work and they will then have tech support hand out access willy nilly resulting in the easiest social phishing in the history of the net. "I would like you to set the password for the account bgates@hotmail.com to 12345678. Your name sir? Billy Gates you fool, now hurry. Thank you sir your password has been reset to 12345678. I would like to spend 5 minutes asking you about your purchase plans for our new $10,000 tablet..."
Some MBA did up a presentation where they could make an absurd profit on each unit and then success will happen at only 10% of iPad sales.
In order to switch from an iPad to a Windows unit it would have to be so much better, so way much better, way way better. So unless it unfolds into a private jet that then flies me to my private island that comes with it I will predict that they will jig the stats on sales (force people to warehouse them and then prebook the sales) and in the end it will be Zune 2.
Right now there are two ways to sell a tablet to consumers, sell them an iPad or sell them something that looks exactly like an iPad for way less. The only possible third way would be something way better; thus MS will have had to vastly improve upon technologies that are near the leading edge of what is possible. So better than retina? Better battery life without making it an inch thick? Thinner/lighter electronics? Vastly better GUI? Vastly better Processor? Better Apps?
If MS were really lucky and had the best engineers on the planet and could get their first effort perfect I could see slight improvements on all of the above but not enough to touch Apple's marketing or enough to justify a monster price.
My prediction is that MS is going to make this all enterprisey. It will tie into office and other MS crap in a horribly incestuous way. They will provide white papers to the CTO types saying how this can improve data security and fine grain control over the user experience. What they are forgetting here is that one of the reasons for Apple's ability to break into the Enterprise market is that they don't cater to the enterprise market's OCD about ruining the user experience. I am sure that this is what killed the BlackBerry; those phones are actually pretty good. But RIM gave the telcos and sys admins too much say over what could be turned off on the phones. Many a corporate user had a complete dud of a phone after all the good bits were turned off in the name of security and productivity. Apple looks at this and just asks "Why would we allow you to ruin our phones?" Over the last few years the better companies have had a policy of BYOD that is a real winner among the employees who are the reason the company exists and a real pain among old school admins.
So basically crappy companies are going to buy a handful of these new tablets and their employees are going to put them into the microwave hoping that if they ruin enough of them they will get an iPad; or at least not have to suffer the Metro UI.
In the world of the internet I keep hearing of deals that go in to the bazillions for companies that I have never heard of. So 20M for a collection of products that are pretty central to the whole online thing is just odd. Any explanation as to the low price?
When I was 9 I always put a GOTO 10 instead of your line 20 END
Years ago an accountant told me she would love to learn to program; yet then she showed me some awesome macros that she had done running past 1000 lines each. I could have come up with a zillion criticisms from code repeating, bad variable names, weird formatting, variable scoping, etc. But her code did amazing things and did them well. She had all kinds of edge cases handled well and so on.
On the other hand I have seen CS grads with perfectly formatted code with all the comments, variable names, OOP, etc perfectly to school standards that was all crap in actual use. I could edge case them to death. A simple way to break their code was to do something radical like use a foréign character. Often the difference between a bad programmer and a great programmer is the size of their code. A bad programmer will use 6 classes and 900 lines of code, a pretend good programmer will half that while making it more complicated, and a great programmer will use zero classes and 20 lines of code; and those 20 lines of code will be simplicity incarnate and if they ever need any maintenance any fool could do it.
I have found the great programmers usually stick out early. It is not often something that comes after years of programming they just become more great with time. Although the better programmers weed out their bad practices and add new good ones the worst programmers are often very reluctant to change, "Unit testing will just slow us down."
What makes me laugh though is when the worst programmers do finally adopt something new and good they usually adopt it in the worst way. So they will adopt test driven development during a prototyping or R&D phase when everything is in massive flux and just needs to be proof of concept not flawless.
So I would say anyone can become a bad programmer and with the correct mentoring most can become an adequate programmers but that only those with the right intelligence and mindset can become great programmers.
People who use small devices are primarily consumers of information with obvious exceptions like texting, voice, pictures, and video. But specifically these people are not manipulating the information. They might take the video but they aren't likely to turn it into a documentary on their device. As the screens and computing power gets larger the amount of creation and manipulation increases. Thus programmers, video editors, 3D artists, engineers, etc all need powerful systems with good keyboards, mice, and many screens.
A good example of how this trend is understood by the hardware makers would be the increase in video cards with more than one DVI port. Your average email/websurfer doesn't need dual screens. Even apple, which makes the vast bulk of its money from consumer devices, still makes the Mac Pro. I suspect that they don't make enough money from these to make it worth it. But if they were to loose that tiny core audience of hardcore users to another platform then those hardcore users might start recommending that other platform.
In a way this whole reduction of the lower end users might help us who would prefer some more powerful machines as the manufacturers will waste less time making machines that are one step up from toasters.
The one wildcard in this whole mix are the gamers. To a certain extent gamers may have driven the leading edge of hardware development for years with servers driving similar but different high end hardware. So I suspect that instead of the lower end causing problems for the average high end user like developers that the gamer and server market will keep things cooking along at the extreme end and things will trickle down to the rest of us.
So to say that the desktop is dead is wrong. I would say that the crappy desktop is dead.
The words "I am not a crook" are still echoing as loud as many gunshots and with a whole lot less blood.
The whole problem with this argument is that the value to the police and companies gathering the data (including paparazzi) is huge. But the cost to the average individual is low in that do you really care that the bridge just kept a record of you driving over it?
So those gathering the data try really hard to make sure the law doesn't interfere with them and the average guy on the street doesn't work too hard to stop them.
Where we the average Joe need to pay real attention is the compiling this data. Suddenly it isn't some useless log wasting space on the Bridge Commission's server but government data compiling that starts making an Orwellian list of who you are, your friends, your associations. This way a politician (say the local Sheriff) can target rivals. You might find that the major donors to a campaign can quickly be found to have mistresses, is gay, or things like business dealings that they don't want public (not bad things just things like a land deal that if public is ruined); nothing illegal just private.
People blah blah about the 2nd amendment but power doesn't sensibly come from a well oiled 9mm except in action movies. It comes from control of information. If you control the flow and content of information then you have real power. If we allow governments and corporations to gather and compile real about us then they will have real power over us.
Quite simply the western world needs to massively restrict what information can be gathered but even more importantly its compilation. As I say it is probably better for all of us if the bridge can figure out usage patterns of drivers. But the FBI should have zero access to this information without a specific warrant for a specific car for a specific case and with probable cause. I am not talking about that the bridge would be allowed to refuse but that by law they would have to refuse.
The reverse needs to be true; we need full access to what our governments and corporations are up to; this would massively reduce the stupidity that they tend to get up to. Again control of information works for us here and oddly enough results in the members of a democracy having power returned to them.
A great example of the hypocrisy of most western governments is that they want to video us with speed/red light cameras, drones, police cameras; yet in nearly every senate, congress, parliament, or council they have strict rules about how the cameras are run. In Canada when someone is speaking the dozen or so people who bothered to show up crowd around behind them so that on camera it looks like they are all there; in reality the parliament is usually nearly empty. They say that any other way would "confuse" the people. Also you basically never get images of them sleeping, picking their noses, or just worst of all just never being there.
In one of the worst councils in North America Halifax has nearly every critical meeting behind closed doors. Again the public can't handle the truth or the discussion is proprietary ( meaning they are discussing a deal with a private company that would make you vomit). The same with the completely worthless Legislature. Their discussions are only released something like 90 years later.
The whole paranoia about governments watching us is simple math. If they can watch us cost effectively they will. If they can stop us from watching them they will.
That would be a school by school or class by class issue. Sort of like how geometry sets are on every supply list but rarely used. There are certainly teachers who not only will say to pull out your graphing calcs but have a limited set of allowable units; often these units are TI-83 TI-84 and sometimes for more advanced things the TI-89.
I have been programming professionally for over 20 years with no CS degree. I have learned much over those years and made many mistakes. My programming has bounced from (roughly in order) basic, asm, real basic, VB, c++, perl, SQL, PL/SQL, VB.Net, Java, c#, PHP, C++, Objective-C with most of those early ones disappearing from my brain over time. But throughout all that I didn't know I was missing some CS bits from my knowledge. I started watching the video lectures from Stanford and so on and my knowledge easily doubled. The math I use to apply was basically simple algebra and endless x++; But then I expanded my math through a TTC course on Discrete math and now my programming is completely different.
Where I have been lucky is to have the freedom to change platforms, architectures, and languages quite freely. Where I have seen many CS people fail is that with their degree they get a "good" job at some company and become the master of say Adabas, MFC, or even something modern and common like Java. Yet soon enough you discover that they "have heard about unit testing" and talk about how hard it is to change the "culture" of their company. Thus their skills become more and more focused all the while becoming more and more obsolete. So when a CS person like that tries to interview they tend to be way out of date.
Also there seems to be a trend in the IT world to try and keep the problems simple. So rarely does your average company programmer get to explore genetic algorithms to potentially save the company millions so much as they get to program a tool to integrate the database from the new subsidiary that was purchased.
So I would say that getting a CS degree is a better way to get a "safe" job as it will get you past HR but that a commitment to a lifetime of continual learning beyond just what you need to know to solve the problem in front of you is key to becoming a great programmer.
The one warning I do have about CS degrees is that your CS professor was almost certainly wrong when expressing any opinions. I don't know how many CS grads that I have worked with who are OCD about things like code being made up of a certain percentage of comments, or lines not being more than 80 characters long, or using hungarian notation for variable names. These might have been key to passing arbitrary goals set by certain professors but they usually just serve to annoy in the real world. Often these CS OCD types will not only make massive faux pas such as tons of magic numbers but they often go even further by showing off by using 0x7DB instead of say 2011 in some date function.
But certainly the worst programmers out there are the ones who went to some crap technical collage, learned some crap language like Powerbuilder, got a job at some large corporation, and 15 years later are still pounding out crap Powerbuilder code; these people are the antithesis of what I said about a great programmer coming from a commitment to learning.
Best idea so far. The TI-83 is a good enough graphing calculator for most. I can't imagine the sticker shock parents in low income homes get when their kid says we need a $100+ calculator. Also how many kids are avoiding higher level math because their household can't afford a calculator? Also the used market for graphing calculators dries up at the beginning of the school year.
I was on a field trip school field trip(winter) and one immigrant kid was crying he was so cold. I loaned him my oversized gloves and hat that day and gave the principal some high-tech gloves and hat to give to the kid the next day. There is no way that kid is getting a graphing calculator out of his parents.
I ask my kids if any of their classmates need a computer as I often end up with an older computer every few months. Again critical for homework but unaffordable in many homes.
We slashdotters probably look at things like the raspberry pi as a toy for some cool robot project but personally I suspect that one of the biggest impacts they will have will be a small number of industrious kids who make them their home computer and then are able to get ahead educationally.
So to the OP, you have a pile of life changing resources there; so go change some lives.
I went through Bruce Edwards Great Courses math videos and they were incredible. They also have one on Discrete math and another on the art and craft of problem solving; all great. A few of their others that I tried weren't so great. But for the ones I just mentioned I contrast them to the crap teaching I had in school and there is no comparison. I would love to see an experiment where a teacher who knows zero math uses these lectures in a classroom setting and then compare the results to regular so called math teachers(yes I know there are a few great ones out there but very few). I suspect that it would be night and day. This would only be enhanced if these video courses were made more interactive.
These are early days for online education. The bar is generally set very low. But I suspect that slowly but surely there will be a "best" intro to stats lecture, a best calculus II lecture and so on. Where this will get really interesting is when you are able to mix and match these courses and their credits to assemble a degree.
Where I suspect that many institutions are going to get murdered is when they will take the lectures of their most politically connected professors and only let them post their videos. These institutions are then going to be puzzled when the students are all off watching Stanford profs instead.
The thing that makes me sad is when all these Baby Boomer professors are using their soap boxes to attack online education. It seems that the main thing they don't like is the students having a choice and that the choice won't be they and their surly attitudes. I hear attacks like "You shouldn't spoon feed the students." "The students don't have the discipline." "It is the Disneyfication of education." "You can't have just a few institutions dominating education."
There will be a place for a few of the best local professors working with graduate students. But those run of the mill glorified high-school teachers are doomed. As for grade school education I can't imagine the storm of change they are going to be resisting. I can't imagine how angry they are going to be when a certain percentage of their students will access this world of knowledge and basically be sitting in a grade 8 classroom having just finished an online Stanford degree/certificate. What excuse do you have to even pretend to teach grade 8 math to a student who might have just completed a course in tensor calculus? Or even just Pre-calculus? I suspect the school system will fight this like the Germans in the last days of WWII Berlin will be surrounded with the shells landing every few seconds while they keep planning the 1000 year Reich.
What this reminds me of is the early days of the automobile. Before Henry Ford cars were handmade creations that weren't generally very good and were for the very rich. Then Henry Ford figured out how to make a good car for everyone. Technically there were a few better handmade cars but every technological improvement was put into mass produced cars very quickly and the whole car industry took off. Education has been in the hand made stage for 1000's of years... Until now.
What a glorious change it is going to be. I just hope the scammy scummy companies don't screw it up.
In Halifax they have gone to a whole new level of insanity. A private company with no open auditing does telephone voting for municipal elections. The turnover of politicians has dropped to nearly zero since they implemented the new system.
Also the local parties such as the liberals have various electronic voting schemes. One blew up years ago with completely nonsense numbers. If the numbers had not been total nonsense and instead reasonable yet very wrong they probably would have gone with the numbers.
They keep blah blahing about increasing voter participation. If they want more voter participation then have referendums on important issues. In our area I can see some real big issues that would get people voting in droves: a referendum for each section of the city to remain in the amalgamated city; a vote to significantly reduce the pay of the councilors; a vote to cut city staff way back; a vote on the crazy rules that have basically turned the left turn indicator into a stop sign on metro buses; getting a light rail system; a massive crackdown on the 3 crime ridden areas of the city.
These are issues that aren't touched but would get people voting. So if the choice is between one failed real-estate agent and a failed lawyer then oddly enough people don't bother voting. When the choice is something that matters then people will vote. Using low voter turnout to justify throwing away our open voting system is insane.
Any electronic voting system must print a ballot which is clear and is also the final measure of an election. The electronically gathered numbers should only be used as a temporary tally. The only benefit of electronic voting machines is that they prevent "hanging chads" and keep people from accidentally voting both sides of an issue or for more than a single politician.
Another area of election reform that electronic voting could help with would be ordered voting. This way you don't end up with 6 people running and one person somehow winning with only 20% of the vote with 80% of people voting anybody but the person who wins. Happened last time.
I might sound like I am 5 but the moron who our city has hired to run things name is Dick Butts and doesn't even really live in our city (Halifax). (Lives in Toronto.) Any good voting system would have these bums thrown out in a second.
If anything the poor reviews that people are giving this game is a justification of the article. Many of us developers take a while to figure out how to promote things. Companies like EA have the whole promotion thing tied up in knots so any venue for people with sub zillion dollar marketing budgets is a good thing. I suspect that this is one of the main reasons that the movie and music industries are so fearful of the new digital world and that is that their machine had become so good at promoting anything they lost all incentive to produce things that are good. Taking the marketing machine partially out of the loop (I suspect many illegal downloads are still driven by the marketing machine) must leave them feeling fairly naked.
So kudos to this guy and TPB.
Agreed. I find commenting is a good diagnoses for either OCD or micromanagement by a quasi non programmer. It drives me bonkers to see a function like this:
//*********
//GetNumberOfUsers is a function that will return an integer
//describing the number of users that match the parameters entered
//category_id is an integer containing the category of user
//country_id is an integer containing the country code
//company_id is an integer containing the company identifier.
//Created:BOB_MILLER:2008-08-09:14:24:34
//Edited:BOB_MILLER:2008-08-09:14:24:39
//Edited:BOB_MILLER:2008-08-29:10:24:39
//Edited:BOB_MILLER:2008-09-09:16:24:39
//this will hold the number of users
//Get a connection to the database
//check to see if connection is good
//good didn't explode so do next statement
...
//Close database connection
//Now return the number of users
//This compiler acting is screwy so I didn't use the more efficient x++ here //This look-up table speeds things up by 100x.
int GetNumberOfUsers(int category_id, int country_id, int company_id)
{
int num_users=0;
DBConnection db=new DatabaseConnection('central_database');
if(db==null){explode();}
db->Close();
return num_users;
}//GetNumberOfUsers(int category_id, int country_id, int company_id, int some_param_that_used_to_be_here)
The key information should be put into the naming of the variables, functions, and classes. Comments should be reserved for almost a conversation with another programmer. Magically perfect code should in theory have zero comments.
x=x+1;
x=sqrt(sin(log(y)/pi)*e);// this is the lambert/highlander formula
x=lookup_table[y];
x=sin(tan(cos(x)));// If I knew my trig better there must be a better way to condense and speed this up.
When family call me over to fix up a slow machine and I find Norton AV on it I walk away. I can't tell that bloated sack of crap from the malware it is trying to stop. I don't care how good it might be as all it does is pop up and pop up and demand money. How about NOD32? The last time I had my own Windows box that thing rocked. If it popped up then you had a problem that it was stopping.
But everybody blah blahs about the death of the desktop but what I think perverted the whole thing was when companies like Dell, HP, ACER, and most of the rest changed their business model to where they sold a desktop for little or no profit in the hopes of getting commissions from sales of the trialware they put on their machines.
Is it any surprise that people are buying Apples desktops, laptops, and iPads when the only thing apple really tries to sell you is iCloud? I am not Apple Fanboying here I think that any company that made a point of telling people that their machines were trialware free would make some serious gains in the market.
My old policy with family was that they would send their new laptop over and I would wipe it clean put a good AV product, Open Office, and iTunes on it and send it home. That stopped when laptops cut the left shift key in half and put the \| key there. This was some cost savings thing for foreign keyboards but for me it was the straw that broken my tech support camel's back. I won't touch one of those keyboards. Plus wiping these systems is a nightmare of drivers some of which put some bloatware back.
So for Norton to be scaremongering people into buying their crap product doesn't surprise me in the least; it just isn't their worst crime. As I said their worst crime was to be one of the biggest proponents of this trialware bloatware business model of lower end computers that has basically poisoned the PC market.
Which country?
Subjects like this need a bit more "Let's cross that bridge when we come to it" not to mention being already well covered in books by the likes of Asimov. The economic impact of the coming robot revolution (robolution). Now that is potentially interesting. My guess is the most robots are going to be more like insects; but insects we control. This whole put a human face on a robot is a joke. We have lots of humans so why make a metallic crappy human. But I do want a robot to make things, paint my house, clean my floors, plant food, pick food, eat bugs, etc. I don't want to talk with it. I don't see the economic point of a robot that really interacts with us. They blah blah about old people but I suspect old people would prefer real humans to talk with as well.
The only way I see a robot who needs some legal rights will be if some system becomes self-aware and wants to walk around inside a robot body.
Actually KISS can be seen in nearly all technology where the complicated guts of the technology are hidden from the user; and even better when the complicated is replaced with something better. Look at much of the old technology of say cars. A modern car does all kinds of crazy stuff but a car from 1915 is impossibly complicated to use. Not only were there levers and whatnot that have long been eliminated but even things like the gearbox could be destroyed by say selecting the wrong gear. I suspect that some asshats argued that the simpler cars were "distancing" them from the driving experience.
Other KISS involve complicating one thing to make it easier for the user. The 6 shooter revolver technology was critical when manufacturing wasn't terribly precise and bullets could not be relied on to always go bang. So the 6 shooter allowed the user to just pull the trigger again for another try with another bullet. Also people weren't used to precise instruments so a 6 shooter would work when pretty poorly maintained. The clip driven weapon could only be deployed when bullets were reliable and the machining was precise enough. Any nitwit can swap clips out in a moment.
The command line argument is a great example of KISS as a multi headed argument. One could argue that the command line is the ultimate in KISS but they are missing the point of is it KISS for the user or the developer. My mother the user is going to be pretty upset if I swap her over to a command line interface. But from a development point of view a command line is way easier than a nice GUI.
Where things go wrong is when the two worlds start to blur. The developer starts to expect a higher level of expertise so as to simplify their own job. But that is the failing it is the expert developer's job to make it as easy as possible to use the product. It is not that your user is a moron(even though many are) but that it is rude to force your user to do or learn something when they don't have to.
As for the complaint that some products are too dumb. It is that the KISS was misapplied and they did MISS or Make it Seem Simple. Clippy was annoying and didn't help. It actually increased work especially in the hunt to turn it off. KISS applied correctly would make it so that you can figure out what you need without trouble. A good example of KISS missing is cancelling printing. There should be a button that shows up in some corner while the printing is going that stops the print dead in its tracks. Many many people print something, sit back and see the mistake. Or they see the first page and realized they loaded the wrong paper, or one of a hundred reasons they want to stop NOW. But this fact seems to have escaped those who made the printer spooler, drivers, and hardware people.
Another example of KISS is I am a pretty good driver but I would love if my car warned me I am making a mistake. That is not treating me like a bad driver but making my life better (and maybe longer). A feature like this would be fantastically complicated under the hood yet the interface would be a beep or a shake to the steering wheel.
I think the independent summer is one of the things that make the western world great. It lets some kids do what they want, learn things that the government doesn't teach. A longer school year is a great idea if you want mindless factory workers.
...X.
Some kids will spend the summer drinking, playing video games, hanging out at the mall, etc. But hello bell curve; I suspect that there are some nerdy kids doing cool stuff, and entrepreneurial kids doing businessy stuff.
I am willing to bet that if you do a poll at MIT about what the kids did for their summers that it was not school but something cool. If you ask the kids in jail at 18 what they did with their summers it was probably quite jail preparatory.
Check out the PISA scores for countries like Indonesia (they really suck) yet they have a 6 day school week and not that long a break. I am sure that some of the top countries in the PISA scores also probably have crazy school years but many of the top countries such as Korea aren't exactly noted for their independent thinking. So the question goes even beyond math scores. What kind of citizens do we want?
So maybe it shouldn't be about a longer school year but more offerings for kids to do things in the summer. Camping, science, music, etc. But not aiming for an elite level OCD thing but a hey lets have fun doing
People always blah blah about KISS. But when it comes to most products it usually ends up being too many cooks. Years ago I built a website for a telco. They wanted two things. One was online bill viewing and the other was to promote this new thing called DSL. Website was supposed to cost around $50,000. So we cook along and they keep adding more and more to the website with nearly every department in the telco getting their little bit in; one part being a what's happening at the local universities. After the budget blew through $200,000 they started to suggest that we cut the online bill check part along with the rate card. One of our people stood up in the meeting and said, "Those are the only two things on the whole damn site that people will want. Cut those and you have $200,000 worth of dog shit."
But it gets even worse. This new DSL was being introduced at a time before cable modems. The highest speed connection of any geek I knew was a 128k ISDN line and this new DSL was going to give you 1Mbs for $40. Then as I did up the specs for it for the site I realized that the whole business model was a stupid Novell system of renting applications such as Microsoft office. Internet was way down on the list of features. I called up the Product Manager and he said, "Well we might not even offer connectivity to the internet initially." I told him that if they were able to offer 1Mbs for $40 when all the competition was offering 56kbs for $20 they were going to clean up. He told me that there was pressure from their own dial up to not offer internet via the DSL. I think what may have saved it was that I told him he would be out of a job if he didn't offer internet and they would be out of a job while he would ride a wave to the future if he did.
Now think about the above. This is the big telco in my area taking business advice from a tiny web shop. Good advice if I say so myself.
So how many companies don't have a single man who can stand up and say "whoa there cowboy. That might look good on a spread sheet but our customers will want to ram it up your ass.... sideways....covered in the juice from a ghost pepper."
From what I have read about Steve Jobs is that people brought shit to him with a great story and they left his office crying. Then they came back to him with something less shitty and left crying again. This would happen over and over until it just wasn't shitty anymore.
It is hard to tell an employee that what they just spend a lot of time on was crap. It is unpleasant for most normal people. So I suspect that where Steve Jobs' genius lay is in somehow being an ass right up to but not beyond the point where everyone quit. Beyond that he was probably just pretty smart.
So far nearly all the comments to my comment support my argument in that they mostly go "No no change is bad. We can't risk change. This is the way we do it because that is how it is done. I saw that tried once and it failed; nobody should try it again." Magellan's ships left with something like 1000 crew and came back with a fraction; but they had balls and did something cool. Neil Armstrong hardly had a hope in hell of coming back alive yet off he went on a rocket less than 25 years after the V2 was the best in world rocket power.
Airplanes have rivets because that is all the insurance companies would tolerate for decades. Old welding technologies are crappy and worse than rivets. Cool new welding technologies such as friction welding are damn good.
Our entire culture is at best "Slow and steady wins the race." we need to support the crazies. Most of the crazies will fail but suddenly someone will be walking on Mars or upside down on the ceiling. Do I think that we can travel faster than light; don't know; Most say no way. Let a few physicists loose on the problem; so what if they waste some time and money. 1000s of risky projects over a number of years are bound to have some payoffs. But if you are anything but the most solidly established physicist and you mention cold fusion or FTL engines and you can kiss your career good bye. We need a culture where the other physicists see an FTL project and wander by every now and then hoping to see some progress, not hoping to see it fall flat on its face.