I find most predictions like this extrapolate a technology and start solving problems that we don't have. Flying cars are a great example. What problem do they solve that is worth the effort vs. what problems they create?
So a great prognosticator would answer a much more interesting problem. Ten things that will make the mobile phone obsolete? And tell me this in the middle of a wave of cell phone innovation.
Keep in mind that the medium is the message. So while so many companies try to create ebooks with eInk you must ask yourself. Is it that people want electronic books with eInk or is that we want information available to us? (a book being the best storage solution until recently) I have an Sony PRS and it is fine for some things but for many books I much prefer an audiobook to paper or eInk. A map I want on my iPhone, some lectures I want in video others audio. But these preferences are being shaped by the technology; not some pre-existing desire to have audio books or whatnot. Audiobooks now fit nicely on my iPhone but reading a book on the iPhone is nearly useless. Quickly flipping through eInk is nearly impossible at this point and thinks like magazines are very flip friendly. But a slight change in eBooks or iPhones capability could wildly shape how I want my information. An ebook with limited video capability might be cool but beyond a few animations in science textbooks I would think it would be a deadend. People are demanding annotation capability for eBooks but when was the last time you annotated a Spy Thriller? Basically what I am trying to point out is that something as simple as the lowly book could end up heading in many directions with just the technology on today's table. I would be loathe to predict the book's future in even 5 years. The cellphone is a much more hydra technology than books so who knows where it could possibly go?
I agree that coders should not be sloppy. "Ah the user will never hit return more than once" but outside of a mission critical application nit picking is a great way to never get anything done. The most successful companies generally have the approach of "Let's put some lipstick on this pig and get it out of here." While not being the statement of a careful craftsman it is what gets the bills paid.
I agree if you have some complex math or a crazy business rule you could end up with paragraphs of comments explaining the functionality in detail. I would not expect the programmer behind me to understand a comment like//A modified Black Scholes. I would leave almost line by line comments showing how the whole thing was implemented with even greater comments as to why it was modified. The same with a crazy business rule. You might even go on and on about how the stupid shipping department used some crap system where they had to type stuff in and that this apparently bad design was to accommodate a bad business flow.
On the otherhand I hate code nazis who comment code like://FUNCTION: GetUserList//PARAM 1 an integer named group_id which identifies which group will be used to generate a user list//RETURNS: class userList; which is an array of user objects//This function takes the group ID for any given list of users and returns that group, if any members, and will return an empty array if there are no users. It will only take a single integer as a parameter.//Developed by Binky the Clown//Date modified Sept 09, 2007//Date created Aug 23, 2007//Last modified by Billy Bob
array GetUserList(int group_id){...}
Self commenting code rules. Comments should basically be the exception not the rule.
Oracle will throw money and love at MySQL until it is dead. If I were Oracle (and wanted MySQL dead) I would fund as many forks of MySQL as possible. Ideally I would fund the forks run by the biggest bozos with huge egos and who love to spend money marketing (My MySQL is better than yours). I would also allow each of the forks to call themselves the official MySQL fork so as to confuse everyone. On top of that I would create a byzantine approval process for these forks so that any I don't like would have to change its name from MySQL.
Then I could prove to the various anti-trust investigators how much I (Oracle) loved MySQL and that we did nothing but support a vibrant and competitive community. And if any of the forks begins to take off I would pull the rug out from underthem and give money to whomever was causing them the most problems. This might cost Oracle a few 10's of millions but I can't imaging the number in lost sales the MySQL has cost Oracle over the years. Billions?
If I can think of this in 5 minutes what can the Oracle marketing people come up with?
If I were an anti-trust government organization I would force Oracle to hand MySQL back to the original creators for a buck and let them carry on as they were.
If he believes this then what privacy violations will he do to users of his software. I can be certain that his software is now blacklisted from my company network. Who knows what self righteous use he might make of being behind my firewalls?
Most of the robo calls (all scams) that I get in Canada come from the US. I hope that this is not allowed. Also will they just move to India or whatnot and phone North America?
The best place to block these calls is at the Telco level. Have people dial a code when crap calls come in. Then after a handful of crap calls are noted the number is blocked for all people who opt into this system for all users of the Telco. This would not only block scams and whatnot but it would block all numbers that other people have indicated are obnoxious as all DNC lists seem to exclude political and charity calling. I don't want anyone calling me who isn't a friend or family. I didn't get the phone for any one else to phone me so any telco that will block all crap calls will win my business.
This might be the stupidest thing I have heard in a while. If my servers are eating a bunch of power then they are doing a bunch of work. If some bozo green policy turns my server down during a peak time then my business would suffer. I would then move my servers to another provider beginning the next day. Pricing my server's power might be one way get me to buy more efficient servers but that is as close some green crap that I would accept.
Quite simply this practice would go away if our telephone companies actually competed. I live in Halifax and we have excellent but still expensive internet via the cable company. Yet I have never seen an advertisement that really compared the differences between local cable and local dsl (huge around here). It is almost like they are afraid to compete. Prices haven't changed in years except to go up a tiny bit. Yet if the cost of bandwidth and equipment has plummeted why haven't prices plummeted? In a competitive environment this should be a huge opening for someone to come along and get a price war going. If my Cable internet company made any profit when I paid $40 a month ten years ago then their costs should now be a few dollars per month. Plus it seems that there is a huge opportunity to leap frog them with either wireless or fiber.
Ray Ozzie is your classic MBA type who will have Microsoft Chase every new buzzword until microsoft finally collapses from exhaustion. This is a sleazy but effective strategy for a startup trying to raise money but a disaster for a blue chip like microsoft. My guess is that Microsoft will have a twitter ready for 2011 and will recognize that Vista was crap by 2016. Has anyone told Ozzie baby about push technology yet? He should get right on that. Or Jabber. Jabber will be worth billions by 2002.
The new definition for Microsoft of "Killer app" will be which app will Ray Ozzie use to kill microsoft? I suspect he will mostly use powerpoint.
Cloud technology is so 2008.
Keep in mind that this craziness is coming from a minority government. Can you imagine what these Nazis will do to us if they were to ever get a majority?
DMCA - check.
Searches without warrant - check
No watchdog for the RCMP - check
Unaudited evoting -check
Unaudited spending - check
New prisons for all the new crimes - check
Internet censorship - check
Canada finally gets to declare war on someone - check
All of this would be to keep us and our children safe. This is a government that is sure that they know what is best for us. Also this is a government who have very fragile egos and the internet is not a place for people with fragile egos. If you think I am raving then think of what Harper would have done if he had been in power with a majority after 9/11. Would have Canada gone to Iraq? Yes or no?
The technological implications of all this will be an environment that tech companies flee from instead of one that encourages technology.
The question is more than drones vs hackers. There is a third group and that is artists. Often what the "cowboys" bring to the table is art. The invention of the web over Gopher was genius but then the Netscape boys insisted on adding pictures, then they crammed in Java and then Javascript just popped in there. Was netscape perfect? No. Any standards committee trying to enforce web standards in the mid 90s would have lost their minds or even worse succeeded. Darwin then selects the good cowboys from the bad. Now we have firefox.
But companies also tend to do boring internal programming and generally won't attract good artists. In my experience the corporate world needs not cowboy programmers but cowboy managers who manage the drones.
If you have drone managers managing drone workers all you get is a system that will meet the contractual obligations of the development company but will really really suck. This is what India is very good at producing; software that meets the contractual miminums. This is why they are so hung up on standards and certification.
Personally I am a unit test after coding person. This tends to result in a code review by default. Bad code would have trouble getting past this point in the process.
The City of Halifax (HRM) had their last election via telephone and paper ballot. There were a few articles questioning it before but none after. Nobody questioned the company doing it, their code, any audits, or the cost. The reasoning was that the voter turnout was low and this would increase it. I don't think that voter turnout is a valid goal; in that increasing the quality of the vote might be. So lowering security to increase turnout might very well be lowering the quality of the voting twice. Encouraging lazy people to vote and risking tampering.
My question is how to fight electronic voting. It is only a matter of time (if not already) that someone cheats and wins an electronically counted vote.
I once worked at a poll. The entire system was set up to audit audit audit with the assumption that people would either try to cheat or at least screw up. So like a real poll where represetatives of each party get to watch the count each party should be allowed access to the code and to audit the system live in action.
Minimally I would want a complete tap of the raw feed going into the computers so that I can play back the entire election into my own untampered computers.
VM Windows with their stupid client and use your normal OS for the rest. For completely secure internet access use a VPN service. There are VPN services that are a few dollars in a month(The Swiss are good that way). Then you can bounce your regular OS internet activity off your VM OS with the VPN client accessing the internet from outside the university. This way you have your cake and eat it too.
As far as your university would be concerned you would have the most boring OS in the world in that you basically do nothing but transmit encrypted crap back and fourth to your VPN.
But the lack of gore was one of the many problems the movie had. Until the girlfriend was "killed" there was basically no blood. Sad for a movie where a guy with a bad temper and knives for hands is the star. So I suspect that the creative control is not very centralized; thus any blanket statements about gore shows that each game is separate from all the others in decision making. Either that or they stole all the gore from the movie.
That is what I mean. Some licenses are great and some suck. But some software seems to have a great license but links to software that has a crappy one. Thus you may have just blessed your own product with the crappiest of the bunch. If you link to 100 MIT licensed libraries and 1 of those also links to a GPL licensed product, then you are screwed. Now that QT has gone LGPL I am a happy camper but that happiness goes away if I statically link to QT.
This is one of the two big bogeymen that I, as a developer, fear. Licenses like this and patents. If you develop anything on Linux do you have to give out your source code? Link to this maybe, link to that maybe; after enough maybes you can be sure that you have gone one library too far. There is a place for opensource and there is a place for proprietary; and I love them both.
Show these licenses (GPL, MIT, Apache, LGPL) to a lawyer and they will just say "stay the hell away from those".
The result is that many companies are pushed back into the warm embrace of Microsoft because at least you know where you stand with code compiled with VCPP and any other libraries you bought. It might cost more in the short term but if it means you get to keep the key IP asset of your company safe then it becomes worth it.
You might argue that one should just read the licenses but with dozens of developers potentially including libraries that may themselves include other libraries with their own licenses you can't easily be 100% sure.
What I want is a *88 or something that I can dial after I hang up on these bozos. Then the telco will note that I have blocked this number. Then if enough people block a number the telco would block the number for all people who have opted into the bozo block service. I suspect that this would defeat most scammers who ignore do not call lists. It would also get around all the exceptions such as charities and politicians who think that nobody wants to block their calls as well.
I went to another movie this weekend planning on holding off on ST until the craziness died down. But there was no long lineup of Klingons and Vulcans. It was a normal looking weekend crowd. I suspect that next weekend will potentially have more people go than the opening weekend which might be a record for a blockbuster movie.
Make part of the game hunting down the paid players and robbing them. Take away the profit motive using the ability for the real players to innovate. This is what happens in real life. People work their whole lives saving their money in retirement accounts and the banks swoop in and rob them.
Slashdot Mirror
After hundreds of hours of diagnostics I realized that my eyes were closed.
I find most predictions like this extrapolate a technology and start solving problems that we don't have. Flying cars are a great example. What problem do they solve that is worth the effort vs. what problems they create? So a great prognosticator would answer a much more interesting problem. Ten things that will make the mobile phone obsolete? And tell me this in the middle of a wave of cell phone innovation. Keep in mind that the medium is the message. So while so many companies try to create ebooks with eInk you must ask yourself. Is it that people want electronic books with eInk or is that we want information available to us? (a book being the best storage solution until recently) I have an Sony PRS and it is fine for some things but for many books I much prefer an audiobook to paper or eInk. A map I want on my iPhone, some lectures I want in video others audio. But these preferences are being shaped by the technology; not some pre-existing desire to have audio books or whatnot. Audiobooks now fit nicely on my iPhone but reading a book on the iPhone is nearly useless. Quickly flipping through eInk is nearly impossible at this point and thinks like magazines are very flip friendly. But a slight change in eBooks or iPhones capability could wildly shape how I want my information. An ebook with limited video capability might be cool but beyond a few animations in science textbooks I would think it would be a deadend. People are demanding annotation capability for eBooks but when was the last time you annotated a Spy Thriller? Basically what I am trying to point out is that something as simple as the lowly book could end up heading in many directions with just the technology on today's table. I would be loathe to predict the book's future in even 5 years. The cellphone is a much more hydra technology than books so who knows where it could possibly go?
I agree that coders should not be sloppy. "Ah the user will never hit return more than once" but outside of a mission critical application nit picking is a great way to never get anything done. The most successful companies generally have the approach of "Let's put some lipstick on this pig and get it out of here." While not being the statement of a careful craftsman it is what gets the bills paid.
I agree if you have some complex math or a crazy business rule you could end up with paragraphs of comments explaining the functionality in detail. I would not expect the programmer behind me to understand a comment like //A modified Black Scholes. I would leave almost line by line comments showing how the whole thing was implemented with even greater comments as to why it was modified. The same with a crazy business rule. You might even go on and on about how the stupid shipping department used some crap system where they had to type stuff in and that this apparently bad design was to accommodate a bad business flow.
On the otherhand I hate code nazis who comment code like: //FUNCTION: GetUserList //PARAM 1 an integer named group_id which identifies which group will be used to generate a user list //RETURNS: class userList; which is an array of user objects //This function takes the group ID for any given list of users and returns that group, if any members, and will return an empty array if there are no users. It will only take a single integer as a parameter. //Developed by Binky the Clown //Date modified Sept 09, 2007 //Date created Aug 23, 2007 //Last modified by Billy Bob
array GetUserList(int group_id){...}
Self commenting code rules. Comments should basically be the exception not the rule.
Oracle will throw money and love at MySQL until it is dead. If I were Oracle (and wanted MySQL dead) I would fund as many forks of MySQL as possible. Ideally I would fund the forks run by the biggest bozos with huge egos and who love to spend money marketing (My MySQL is better than yours). I would also allow each of the forks to call themselves the official MySQL fork so as to confuse everyone. On top of that I would create a byzantine approval process for these forks so that any I don't like would have to change its name from MySQL. Then I could prove to the various anti-trust investigators how much I (Oracle) loved MySQL and that we did nothing but support a vibrant and competitive community. And if any of the forks begins to take off I would pull the rug out from underthem and give money to whomever was causing them the most problems. This might cost Oracle a few 10's of millions but I can't imaging the number in lost sales the MySQL has cost Oracle over the years. Billions? If I can think of this in 5 minutes what can the Oracle marketing people come up with? If I were an anti-trust government organization I would force Oracle to hand MySQL back to the original creators for a buck and let them carry on as they were.
If he believes this then what privacy violations will he do to users of his software. I can be certain that his software is now blacklisted from my company network. Who knows what self righteous use he might make of being behind my firewalls?
Most of the robo calls (all scams) that I get in Canada come from the US. I hope that this is not allowed. Also will they just move to India or whatnot and phone North America? The best place to block these calls is at the Telco level. Have people dial a code when crap calls come in. Then after a handful of crap calls are noted the number is blocked for all people who opt into this system for all users of the Telco. This would not only block scams and whatnot but it would block all numbers that other people have indicated are obnoxious as all DNC lists seem to exclude political and charity calling. I don't want anyone calling me who isn't a friend or family. I didn't get the phone for any one else to phone me so any telco that will block all crap calls will win my business.
This might be the stupidest thing I have heard in a while. If my servers are eating a bunch of power then they are doing a bunch of work. If some bozo green policy turns my server down during a peak time then my business would suffer. I would then move my servers to another provider beginning the next day. Pricing my server's power might be one way get me to buy more efficient servers but that is as close some green crap that I would accept.
Quite simply this practice would go away if our telephone companies actually competed. I live in Halifax and we have excellent but still expensive internet via the cable company. Yet I have never seen an advertisement that really compared the differences between local cable and local dsl (huge around here). It is almost like they are afraid to compete. Prices haven't changed in years except to go up a tiny bit. Yet if the cost of bandwidth and equipment has plummeted why haven't prices plummeted? In a competitive environment this should be a huge opening for someone to come along and get a price war going. If my Cable internet company made any profit when I paid $40 a month ten years ago then their costs should now be a few dollars per month. Plus it seems that there is a huge opportunity to leap frog them with either wireless or fiber.
Ray Ozzie is your classic MBA type who will have Microsoft Chase every new buzzword until microsoft finally collapses from exhaustion. This is a sleazy but effective strategy for a startup trying to raise money but a disaster for a blue chip like microsoft. My guess is that Microsoft will have a twitter ready for 2011 and will recognize that Vista was crap by 2016. Has anyone told Ozzie baby about push technology yet? He should get right on that. Or Jabber. Jabber will be worth billions by 2002. The new definition for Microsoft of "Killer app" will be which app will Ray Ozzie use to kill microsoft? I suspect he will mostly use powerpoint. Cloud technology is so 2008.
I love how this guy discovers the obvious and then gets people to buy his books. What is it? His hair cut fools people into thinking he is smart?
Keep in mind that this craziness is coming from a minority government. Can you imagine what these Nazis will do to us if they were to ever get a majority? DMCA - check. Searches without warrant - check No watchdog for the RCMP - check Unaudited evoting -check Unaudited spending - check New prisons for all the new crimes - check Internet censorship - check Canada finally gets to declare war on someone - check All of this would be to keep us and our children safe. This is a government that is sure that they know what is best for us. Also this is a government who have very fragile egos and the internet is not a place for people with fragile egos. If you think I am raving then think of what Harper would have done if he had been in power with a majority after 9/11. Would have Canada gone to Iraq? Yes or no? The technological implications of all this will be an environment that tech companies flee from instead of one that encourages technology.
The question is more than drones vs hackers. There is a third group and that is artists. Often what the "cowboys" bring to the table is art. The invention of the web over Gopher was genius but then the Netscape boys insisted on adding pictures, then they crammed in Java and then Javascript just popped in there. Was netscape perfect? No. Any standards committee trying to enforce web standards in the mid 90s would have lost their minds or even worse succeeded. Darwin then selects the good cowboys from the bad. Now we have firefox. But companies also tend to do boring internal programming and generally won't attract good artists. In my experience the corporate world needs not cowboy programmers but cowboy managers who manage the drones. If you have drone managers managing drone workers all you get is a system that will meet the contractual obligations of the development company but will really really suck. This is what India is very good at producing; software that meets the contractual miminums. This is why they are so hung up on standards and certification.
I really hate the term Boffins. A word like that hardly encourages people to strive to engineer a better life for us all.
Personally I am a unit test after coding person. This tends to result in a code review by default. Bad code would have trouble getting past this point in the process.
The City of Halifax (HRM) had their last election via telephone and paper ballot. There were a few articles questioning it before but none after. Nobody questioned the company doing it, their code, any audits, or the cost. The reasoning was that the voter turnout was low and this would increase it. I don't think that voter turnout is a valid goal; in that increasing the quality of the vote might be. So lowering security to increase turnout might very well be lowering the quality of the voting twice. Encouraging lazy people to vote and risking tampering. My question is how to fight electronic voting. It is only a matter of time (if not already) that someone cheats and wins an electronically counted vote. I once worked at a poll. The entire system was set up to audit audit audit with the assumption that people would either try to cheat or at least screw up. So like a real poll where represetatives of each party get to watch the count each party should be allowed access to the code and to audit the system live in action. Minimally I would want a complete tap of the raw feed going into the computers so that I can play back the entire election into my own untampered computers.
VM Windows with their stupid client and use your normal OS for the rest. For completely secure internet access use a VPN service. There are VPN services that are a few dollars in a month(The Swiss are good that way). Then you can bounce your regular OS internet activity off your VM OS with the VPN client accessing the internet from outside the university. This way you have your cake and eat it too. As far as your university would be concerned you would have the most boring OS in the world in that you basically do nothing but transmit encrypted crap back and fourth to your VPN.
But the lack of gore was one of the many problems the movie had. Until the girlfriend was "killed" there was basically no blood. Sad for a movie where a guy with a bad temper and knives for hands is the star. So I suspect that the creative control is not very centralized; thus any blanket statements about gore shows that each game is separate from all the others in decision making. Either that or they stole all the gore from the movie.
That is what I mean. Some licenses are great and some suck. But some software seems to have a great license but links to software that has a crappy one. Thus you may have just blessed your own product with the crappiest of the bunch. If you link to 100 MIT licensed libraries and 1 of those also links to a GPL licensed product, then you are screwed. Now that QT has gone LGPL I am a happy camper but that happiness goes away if I statically link to QT.
This is one of the two big bogeymen that I, as a developer, fear. Licenses like this and patents. If you develop anything on Linux do you have to give out your source code? Link to this maybe, link to that maybe; after enough maybes you can be sure that you have gone one library too far. There is a place for opensource and there is a place for proprietary; and I love them both. Show these licenses (GPL, MIT, Apache, LGPL) to a lawyer and they will just say "stay the hell away from those". The result is that many companies are pushed back into the warm embrace of Microsoft because at least you know where you stand with code compiled with VCPP and any other libraries you bought. It might cost more in the short term but if it means you get to keep the key IP asset of your company safe then it becomes worth it. You might argue that one should just read the licenses but with dozens of developers potentially including libraries that may themselves include other libraries with their own licenses you can't easily be 100% sure.
Did you tell them that it was named Oliver?
What I want is a *88 or something that I can dial after I hang up on these bozos. Then the telco will note that I have blocked this number. Then if enough people block a number the telco would block the number for all people who have opted into the bozo block service. I suspect that this would defeat most scammers who ignore do not call lists. It would also get around all the exceptions such as charities and politicians who think that nobody wants to block their calls as well.
I went to another movie this weekend planning on holding off on ST until the craziness died down. But there was no long lineup of Klingons and Vulcans. It was a normal looking weekend crowd. I suspect that next weekend will potentially have more people go than the opening weekend which might be a record for a blockbuster movie.
They can serve them freshly squeezed horse piss.
Make part of the game hunting down the paid players and robbing them. Take away the profit motive using the ability for the real players to innovate. This is what happens in real life. People work their whole lives saving their money in retirement accounts and the banks swoop in and rob them.