Facebook deserves to be defunded, but as I have little faith in the wisdom of markets and investors, surly to annoy Libertarians and other rabid Captalists, maybe even that most obvious sociopath, Marrk Zuckerberg himself, the stock price is as high as it has ever been, stupid idiots, so much for Milton Freeman who never deserved a Nobel Prize, and economics does not deserve to be a Nobel Prize catigory. But I digress!
The irony of all is that the blue on glaring white default style was inpsired by Zuck's own COLOR BLINDNESS according to a NetTuts+ discussion of the UI. and Social Fixer was an attenpt to fix defficiencies in the default style. It made FB accessable for me, a low vision user who could use a big colored font on a dark background. It still doesn't go far enough in using the screen real estate in an efficient and responsive way. I would like to see someone take the UI away from Facebook's engineers, do this locally on the browser with a CSS reset and use of a local DOM parser like jQuery, and thumb its nose at Face Book engineering by hiding the right pane of the grid, the challenge is to hack the javascript from Face Book on your browser and either thwarting FB control or providing an allowed secondary app to post from. Fact is, that if ONE disabled Federal worker has to use FB in his work and struggles with the limitations of FB's UI, FB can be sued to provide accmmmodation under the ADA, and for that they should embrace Social Fixer, not screw with it.
Facebook needs to be taken down for its arrogance. What I hope, against hope, is that investors wise up and take their money out of the corporation and cause it to fail. At that point the decent parts of the social media experiment can be reconstituted by unbundling the CMS fron the UI and the global friends list. The three parts could be separate business entities and the model Facebook users, a Big Data control for the benefit of its business partners at the expense of the user experience can end. As it happens I leve a couple of miles from FB's HQ, in fact worked in those buildings when it was Sun Microsystems, but that is only incidental, as I think that a bit of code running on my browser can fix the mess and screw FB's business model. It is time to hack FB, and with their help, because their SDK is the keys to the kingdom and if one can build an app outside the browser that does something they support for mobile use. It can be used against them and punish them for not being kind to their users.
This is why I just hate business people and would love to close down every business school i Could because financializng everything is a big cop out used to conceal sociopathy. I'd make CEOc and CFOs commit sepiku in their headquarters lobby when their business models fail.
It is not a nit that unless stratigraphers are able to decipher daily weather reports from fossils and the horizons they are found on, that you are talking about climate.
Because of the problems of getting absolute dates and their precision being low, there is always the danger that causes get confused when the error bars of dates overlap or, worse, when gradual changes get telescoped into seeming catastrophies. So, there is persistant change in climate from late Pliocene on that stresses mammalian communities the world over, and there are sudden events that interceed, such as the glacials and interglacials and the arrival of Mankind, to confuse matters.
This is not unlike the debate over the robustness of dinosaur populations before the K/T event. Few doubt that a big event ended the Cretaceous, but we now know that the diversity of the fauna was very much in decline for several million years prior. Even though it is common to call the K/T event a catastrophic mass extinction event, we have the terrestrial predator birds and all the modern birds to attest that these things are usually matters of degree, If there had been no asteroid or massive trapps eruptions in India, the decimation of the large fauna may have still happened. It might have been less total and taken a longer time, but the fact that the terror birds and the rest of modern birds made it through may simply be a demonstration of degree and not kind. This is more of a statistical process.
Clarification of who you are. You are a mediocre to below mediocre programmer with an inferiority complex.
Wow, you're a sad, bitter asshole, aren't you? Either that, or you just turned thirteen, you are out for some of teh lulz, and you forgot to check the "Post Anonymously" box.
Which raises the question, would you talk like this to a 13-year-old, really? I'd call it child abuse if so. So at least you must regard what you don't know about the person on the other end of the conversation. I dont have anything to say about the assumptions in the top of the thread. It may confirm my belief that there is an inverse relation between self-promotion and competence.
[...] and so is Anders Heijlsberg (who I first met way back when here in Scandinavia when he was a young punk who had just sold Turbo Pascal to Borland). [...]
All three of these come across as really nice guys.
Terje
I am not entirely sure of the pedigree, but did Turbo Pascal owe much to UCSD Pascal and hence to Dystra? Isn't the connection fairly intimate?
Of course Pascal was pretty storngly typed and didn't have pointers, which hampered its spread out of academe. It may have promoted structured programming,
and the discipline of writing functions with guards, as I remember Dystra's books.
I'm going to throw a wrench in here from left-field, mixing metaphors wildly and without regard. It is, suppose that the large majority of unemployed and underemployed workers woke up one morning and realize that it was software developers who were destroying their jobs and not replacing them with meaningful opportunities? Would you take pride in anything? The Luddites may have overreacted too quickly to the Industrial Revolution because at least they didn't have as large a learning curve to retrain for another industry, Until late in the last century it was possible to walk in off the street and apprentice in a trade with no prior experience and have life-long skills. That is increasingly rare and even though people can retrain at a trade school, even learning software development, there is no likely hood that the skill set will serve them for more than a few years. And I am not talking at all yet about the potential of machine intelligence to speed up software development so that even your job becomes marginalized.
I can't get a cite. but a few years ago I heard of a study that compared self-image with competence. It found an inverse correlation. People who know their stuff and its limitations also tend to under rate their competence. People who are less accomplished but want more attention for what they think they know and rate themselves more competent then they really are.
We can view this along the lines of personality types and flaws in character that gravitate to roles in life. People who get more by conveying an image may not really understand the limitations and complexity that knowledge brings, those pesky details and gottchas, they may be less competent, but their strength may be to lead others to focus their efforts to a goal at the risk that the goal is ill-considered or even fraudulent. The real achievers may not be good at sales or persuasion, especially of most people, but as befits their exceptional character, they create most of the advances. They are also less likely to rate their achievements as important as they really are, and often not resting on their laurels before rushing off to the next challenge, leaving the credit taking to lesser folk.
The ever-present danger for leaders and business people is that they are biased towards to the sizzle and less towards the stake. Managers need to keep this in mind, that the self-promoters may not be the sharpest tools in the shed and that some of the shy and even less attractive people may be able to help much more.
Someone posted on the "coolness" of Apple products, and I agree. Much of its sales has to be due to imagery, and to quality in the designs. I don't really disagree with that appeal, but I have always been dissuaded by price and I have been able to achieve and surpass in a couple of cases the functionality with Linux running on PC hardware that costs half as much or less. And I wasn't pleased when my Power PC Mac went obsolete. It is still running Mac OS X 10.4.
The other day this 10-year old PC that had been running Ubuntu 12.04.1 in 1/2 gig of ram failed. Wont boot, the BIOS probably failed and the board is so old, runing Pentium 64 bit, that is isn't worth replacing. So I had this even older Dell Celeron system lying around, and tried to run a couple of live Linux distros off its DVD ROM. I was able to get the latest Knoppix, ver. 7.0.4 to run albeit slowly. What shocked me was that I found out that the old machine which I bought used in 2001, had only 1/4 gig of ram.
There these thumb sized systems appearing that run off of low power chips designed for mobile that run Android or Linux. They can live inside mobile devices or in tiny set top formats; they can be docked on a monitor or affixed to it and replace desktop systems. These could kill Apple, or at least exert downward pressure on its price. iMac has the basic technology already but $1200 as opposed to $100 is pretty uncompelling.
There is a disconnect in logic here that what is good for investors, who are increasingly only flash-in-the-pan short-term-return-on-investment champions of anything, has anything to do with what is good for products, technology and ultimately its customers. Customers are way down the list, as investors can take their profits and run, what customers want, be dammed.
If you are arguing that Elop managing Nokia like a financialized asset is the same as running a competitive company in a market, I'd beg to differ.
What do many companies lack is a vision of what their products really are for, and I think the reason is that the backgrounds of the executives and the boards are all wrong. This is a horror brought on by the training of business and increasingly political leadership in business schools, who should all be shut down for spreading lies and half-truths.
You can say what you want about Apple, but when Steve Jobs came back he rebuilt the company based on his acute understanding of his products and the market and giving his customers what they needed. Some of it was imagery, but his products worked reliably and have a firm basis in technology. They weren't mere variations on proven techniques to realize a marginal profit, the way many people in business, think. What we will see post-Jobs is not that he was a nice guy, or that he wasn't as ruthless than the next CEO, what we will see at Apple is if the next guy has the vision to keep Apple's innovations going. I would say that the odds of that are slim because of the backgrounds of most of the people who want to manage companies.
The fear of a Balkenized Internet has greatly increased by the revelations about how much spying is done by security agencies on it. If the fear was about a Great Firewall of..., it should be now about whole nations snipping fibre at their borders, and thanks to the duplicity of the U.S. and others about free speech and freedom.
And it should be addressed locally by meshes using encrypted low-power radio to send packets between local store and forward nodes. We may yet see the reappearence of something like UUCP.
The reason the spying has happened is that it is easy to snoop on the main pipe. That can be made a whole lot harder by distributing the traffic and making the network typology go ad hoc and dynamic.
Of course that is a rhetorical question and it is an answer to the flanebait that started the discussion which said to read the source, provided you have it. But if source code were so readable, it seldom is, then source would be the only document you need. People have pointed out that coding practice often inverts the logic of action, especially in OOD, The other truth is that most developers are poor writers and even though they are capable designers they can't explain the design, especially to a novice. This is a forest for the trees problem and relates to the role of educational techniques in spreading knowledge. The discipline it takes to develop and test and debug an object hierarchy in a modern language is often the reverse of the steps it takes for a novice to understand what it does, which is why reading the source is often the worst way to learn what an application does.
And still most people who develop cannot write. The proof of this is to read what documentation they do write. It is highly uneven in quality. While a tutorial that is written to advocate for a piece of code, a programming language, a library, might be quite readable and interesting, such as the kind of article that appears in a newsstand computer magazine, or on the main web site for a product. It doesn't take much delving into using the product or code to reach an inflection point where the character of what is documented changes abruptly into a specfication document and in which the writer has left out, or worse, glossed over, some pesky detail, whose inattenion to causes your project using the tool to fail and to not be easily and timely fixed. If developers want to know why what they do doesn't get used, they need look only at this problem.
On the other hand poor or non-existent document may serve a purpose. It may guarentee the elites an existence and provide a barrier to entry by less than elites, average or bad programmers and users who the elites say shouldn't be messing around in the innareds. The risk of that is slow adoption of the product, which can hurt developer security if the product has been over-hyped for its ease of use, when its use is hindered by poor documentation.
I consider myself a bad programmer, but I have experimented around with many programming languages, most recently Python, and have been looking for tasks to ignite a passion to get something done and to relearn the right way to develop applications. I have an avid interest in music and serious music composition, I can remember large works easily and know a great deal about the literature, so I was quite interested when a composition program written in Python came may way. I won't tell you the name of the software, but it was the usual approach, a collection of objects and methods to do various tasks associated with scales and pitches. There was some good tutorial and example code, but the use of it quickly became arduous, because the tutorials and examples emphasized the easy things to do and the other things you might want to do were either ignored or the jump off into the object hierarchy was so deep that you couldn't wade through the complexity. I wanted to go from the relatively easy processing of musical parts, horizontally, into the vertical aspect of chords, and in particular to be able to generate reasonable piano reductions of open scores based on where the pitches crossed from the left hand to the right with reasonable intervals. Not only had this not been tackled by the software design, but because of the ease with which Python handles lists, the emphasis was roo much on processing parts and not enough on harmony.
As usual, the replies have missed the point..... slash-dot!
Face Book shut down the Social Fixer page accsuing it of being spam. Could it be that they didn't pay the troll? FB can change its revenue strategy and start charging more and more people to promote their pages, and shoot themselves in the foot.
Social fixer is a Javascript and CSS app that tried to fix the numerous flaws of FB's default UI. It is based on quicksand provided by FB jerking everybody around. That can be fixed by defunding FB and forcing unbundling of the UI and CMS from the friend's list, and negating FB's business strategy.
I think that the recent changes at FB show that they are struggling with their business model, and that possibly it will fail soon. We can hope, as it will allow someone else to do it better.
I was born just after WWII. It amuses me how little some adults know about history that I thought of as second nature, because my parents lived in that war and knew what we were fighting for. Now, that experience is lost, probably because of all the intervenning history, and because the schools don't teach it. One thing to note is that the schools have so much on their plate. They how have to cater to the differing agendas of the factions in society, so they have no time to teach who Hitler was and why we had to defeat him.
What has changed, and it began with Vietnam, is that these once United States have splintered into a bunch of factions, One of these is by generations, and with the economic decline brought about by high tech and bad management and investment ideas in the economy, a battle between young and old has become just another ingredient of dissolution and divide. One of the signs of decline is that people stop working together to get much done. They go through the motions, but nothing really gets done. Decay of nations and society is not far behind.
Ironically, this is the fault of the Boomer Generation which now runs things. They made the mistake that there was nothing to be learned from the past and that because an idea sounded good we should try it. This is also promoted by the idea that if you trained as a professional and had a specialized academic training that you must be wise, when a classical or liberal arts education would have better, I know of no more morally and intellectually misleading degree to hold than an MBA. I wish all the Business Schools were shutdown. I have less respect for NBA's that for lawyers. In general most of the corruption we face is centered around professionals whose training is specialized. So is it surprising that high-tech has actually damaged the economy more that it has helped, People jobs have been replaced by simulations of social activity that are not the same and that either positions have been lost of don't pay a decent wage. The decline of the American Middle Class if the fault of high tech. It benefits many fewer people that it helps. Now, I have benefitted from it, but how few people if helped and what is lost was not anticipated correctly by my generation.
I am well past 60. I grew up in a time when behaving in public and respecting your elders was important and expected. You not only deferred to older people, you went out of your way to respect them. I think that change and innovation have trumped experience too much. Many of us older people are regarded by the young as obsolete because we don't know the newest fads and lingo.
The problem you are describing is the Young Turk problem that has been with us for a long time, but it is exaggerated by the illusion that the new is necessarily better, and that recent experiments have always been a success. One success that has been a dismal failure is training business management in business schools. This poisons the minds of sr. and middle management with financialization thinking and they forget that they are providing a service and mistreat their customers and staff.
Like a boot camp for business, having to come up through the ranks rather than being full of yourself via academic and professional degrees, is a source of much of the disconnect as is the fast-paced social and entertainment media that dominates public life.
But the irony is that I don't exonerate my generation, now grey and old, because we *ucked up and created much of the mess. We thought that you didn't have to pay your dues, that having new ideas was better, and now every body pays. I raised four children, now in that cohort born after 1980 and they treat me with some respect not because I demand it from them but because they learned that life is hard and challenging and that my take on it is valuable. They don't ask for much advice from me but they see that what has happened to me informs them, gives them much perspective. They know how to speak to me.
Elitism of all sorts is everpresent and it threatens the long slide back to oligarchy and exploitative institutions. It is susally most obvious in times of economic stagnation and decline. Market and elitist forces begin to take over and price and group descrimination begins to emerge which excludes groups of people or takes away resources that everyone should have access to.
The idea that education should be universal is relatively new, especially for high schools and higher education, and the problems of sustaining it are well known and much of the cause for Private Schools. But the fact that class and wealth can be used to separate people and deny many resources that would give them access to the benefits of society is why one could argue that private schools are evil; because they create elitism and the return to oligarchy and elitism. Not all elites, but most, fit on the right side of the political spectrum. Most Conservatives are first elitiist of one form or other. Most are wealth elites, but some are religious or race elites, but elitist nonetheless. They believe that they are better than most everybody else. Sometimes they wish to erect barriers to others entering their elite, but most often they think that they are better by birth or virtue and because of that will remain in their elite. This is what is evil.
And it is much worse in the investment climate that has prevailed since about 1990. Thanks to the very technology that makes this web site posaible, investors can micromanage their investments and they want as much profit in as little time as possible. This means that public firms are much more risk adverse than they have ever been. I didn't say that investors couldn't be taken for a ride, indeed they seem more vulnerable now than ever before. What I am saying is that they want a sure bet and they don't want as much to wait around for an idea to bear fruit.
The government has traditionally filled in where public for-profit companies fear to tread, long-term or high risk development, and space exploration is still very much that. Only in areas where the risks have been determined, are well known, do private enterprise enter. Someone mentioned communications satellites. The risk of getting something into earth orbit is pretty well known as is the risk of electronics working in space for X years. Beyond that the risks and payouts are very uncertain.
It is clear that once the risks in a new industry are established, that for profit companies jump in. Even though early auto companies experimented with electric cars and abandoned the idea with the advent of cheap gas a century ago, they are back in the game with the end of cheap oil, and it didn't take them long to retool and make advances, maybe a decade or so, but it was largely proven technology.
An even better example is the Internet. I had an Arpanet account when it was maybe 30 nodes, and witnessed the rise of UNIX and DNS, so that by the time it was privatized by companies like Cisco and Sun and IBM and DEC in the early 1980's as the Internet, it had been running for about a decade and proven technically.
The biggest thing that would set Microsoft wise is to end legally its right to ship Windows as an OEM OS. Even if 85% of users make the decision to use it, make Nicrosoft spend the money to persuade people to ask to install it on their systems, otherwise users can find many alternative systems they could install and of those the most popular could be an available install option at purchase.
Like other aspects of market economics there is a five-finger discount for making an effort and being informed. You can install a good OS for next to nothing yourself.
Oh, come on! By this year a low-power device running on mobile chips will get glued to your flat panel display and that will be running Linux and displace your desktop, or it will have the same form factor as your smartphone but dock on your desktop peripherals hub and do everything your desktop did. The desktop isn't going anywhere it is just going to shrink. That is what an iMac is really, only it will cost about $100 and replace your desktop box. This stuff is here now, it just has to grow in capacity a little to surpass what is dying off.
There is a Grace Hopper singing outside my window tonight:-)
I have always been mystified about the numbers of women NOT in tech. It has always been clear to me that women I have known are just as smart and in many cases smarter than men I know and that includes myself. I think that my fiance, who is a third grade teacher and accomplished classical pianest, is just as good at trouble shooting and problem solving as any male engineer I know. So there is some other factor than ability that discourages them. It may be discrimination that it subtiile enough that any man who screens for tech applicants would insist that he doesn't do it. I am sure that my fiance would make a good engineer and in fact I discovered that she has a near photographic memory, something I just found out, and we first met as teens 42 years ago, and after a haitus of 30 years reconnected two years ago.
Facebook is shit, and I presume your product is shit.
Well, it a grand effort to fix the shit that is FB's UI. And that is moving shit!
I have favorably compared what slash-dot does with contextual reply, to FB's failed effort. But slash-dot is shit too, just different shit. FB is stupid shit, ordinarily stupid people posting echo-chamber-like stuff that FB's investors love because they can snoop on its users. Shit is the main, mature market, and that is what FB is. The problems with FBs UI that Social Fixer tries to fix is that it is intended for the Big Data users of the CMS, not for the edification or communication of the users. You aren't a total luser to use FB, because you want world-wide coverage to pick up your far flung friends. You pay to promote interesting stories, there should be a more social way to do that, to get topics exposed to a larger audience, like the page, but promotion of one topic. FB does get more exposure than most blogs, but it has a really bad UI.
Slash-dot is smart-ass shit, nasty, snarcky shit, and too much of it. An even better model for slash-dot's contextual reply is to collapse all the replies under each heading and encourage users to change the subject line when the thread changes. The USENET newagroup is a good model for handling the volume and the cruff, so slash-dot gets there, but not quite.
I think that FB will be gone in a year or two, or when the investors realize that the business model doesn't return on investment. When that happens Social Fixer can branch out as one of many UIs for a distributed CMS managed by others in the cloud, with only the global list of friends maintained by a global entity. FB will only survive in any form when the CMS and UI are unbundled. Then it will be possible to encourage users to behave differently. To require a comment when a user shares, for one, to change the zone layout so the news stream goes beyond the relatively little content now taken up entirely by the side panels when that content doesn't float, so the news fills the page, eventually. With stable content the style can become customized for several alternative layouts. Since Social Fixer has to cope with a quicksand foundation, it doesn't have the freedom it needs. Wrest the UI away from FB and enact features that shape better user behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
Facebook deserves to be defunded, but as I have little faith in the wisdom of markets and investors, surly to annoy Libertarians and other rabid Captalists, maybe even that most obvious sociopath, Marrk Zuckerberg himself, the stock price is as high as it has ever been, stupid idiots, so much for Milton Freeman who never deserved a Nobel Prize, and economics does not deserve to be a Nobel Prize catigory. But I digress!
The irony of all is that the blue on glaring white default style was inpsired by Zuck's own COLOR BLINDNESS according to a NetTuts+ discussion of the UI. and Social Fixer was an attenpt to fix defficiencies in the default style. It made FB accessable for me, a low vision user who could use a big colored font on a dark background. It still doesn't go far enough in using the screen real estate in an efficient and responsive way. I would like to see someone take the UI away from Facebook's engineers, do this locally on the browser with a CSS reset and use of a local DOM parser like jQuery, and thumb its nose at Face Book engineering by hiding the right pane of the grid, the challenge is to hack the javascript from Face Book on your browser and either thwarting FB control or providing an allowed secondary app to post from. Fact is, that if ONE disabled Federal worker has to use FB in his work and struggles with the limitations of FB's UI, FB can be sued to provide accmmmodation under the ADA, and for that they should embrace Social Fixer, not screw with it.
Facebook needs to be taken down for its arrogance. What I hope, against hope, is that investors wise up and take their money out of the corporation and cause it to fail. At that point the decent parts of the social media experiment can be reconstituted by unbundling the CMS fron the UI and the global friends list. The three parts could be separate business entities and the model Facebook users, a Big Data control for the benefit of its business partners at the expense of the user experience can end. As it happens I leve a couple of miles from FB's HQ, in fact worked in those buildings when it was Sun Microsystems, but that is only incidental, as I think that a bit of code running on my browser can fix the mess and screw FB's business model. It is time to hack FB, and with their help, because their SDK is the keys to the kingdom and if one can build an app outside the browser that does something they support for mobile use. It can be used against them and punish them for not being kind to their users.
This is why I just hate business people and would love to close down every business school i Could because financializng everything is a big cop out used to conceal sociopathy. I'd make CEOc and CFOs commit sepiku in their headquarters lobby when their business models fail.
It is not a nit that unless stratigraphers are able to decipher daily weather reports from fossils and the horizons they are found on, that you are talking about climate.
Because of the problems of getting absolute dates and their precision being low, there is always the danger that causes get confused when the error bars of dates overlap or, worse, when gradual changes get telescoped into seeming catastrophies. So, there is persistant change in climate from late Pliocene on that stresses mammalian communities the world over, and there are sudden events that interceed, such as the glacials and interglacials and the arrival of Mankind, to confuse matters.
This is not unlike the debate over the robustness of dinosaur populations before the K/T event. Few doubt that a big event ended the Cretaceous, but we now know that the diversity of the fauna was very much in decline for several million years prior. Even though it is common to call the K/T event a catastrophic mass extinction event, we have the terrestrial predator birds and all the modern birds to attest that these things are usually matters of degree, If there had been no asteroid or massive trapps eruptions in India, the decimation of the large fauna may have still happened. It might have been less total and taken a longer time, but the fact that the terror birds and the rest of modern birds made it through may simply be a demonstration of degree and not kind. This is more of a statistical process.
Clarification of who you are. You are a mediocre to below mediocre programmer with an inferiority complex.
Wow, you're a sad, bitter asshole, aren't you? Either that, or you just turned thirteen, you are out for some of teh lulz, and you forgot to check the "Post Anonymously" box.
Which raises the question, would you talk like this to a 13-year-old, really? I'd call it child abuse if so. So at least you must regard what you don't know about the person on the other end of the conversation. I dont have anything to say about the assumptions in the top of the thread. It may confirm my belief that there is an inverse relation between self-promotion and competence.
[...] and so is Anders Heijlsberg (who I first met way back when here in Scandinavia when he was a young punk who had just sold Turbo Pascal to Borland). [...]
All three of these come across as really nice guys.
Terje
I am not entirely sure of the pedigree, but did Turbo Pascal owe much to UCSD Pascal and hence to Dystra? Isn't the connection fairly intimate? Of course Pascal was pretty storngly typed and didn't have pointers, which hampered its spread out of academe. It may have promoted structured programming, and the discipline of writing functions with guards, as I remember Dystra's books.
I'm going to throw a wrench in here from left-field, mixing metaphors wildly and without regard. It is, suppose that the large majority of unemployed and underemployed workers woke up one morning and realize that it was software developers who were destroying their jobs and not replacing them with meaningful opportunities? Would you take pride in anything? The Luddites may have overreacted too quickly to the Industrial Revolution because at least they didn't have as large a learning curve to retrain for another industry, Until late in the last century it was possible to walk in off the street and apprentice in a trade with no prior experience and have life-long skills. That is increasingly rare and even though people can retrain at a trade school, even learning software development, there is no likely hood that the skill set will serve them for more than a few years. And I am not talking at all yet about the potential of machine intelligence to speed up software development so that even your job becomes marginalized.
I can't get a cite. but a few years ago I heard of a study that compared self-image with competence. It found an inverse correlation. People who know their stuff and its limitations also tend to under rate their competence. People who are less accomplished but want more attention for what they think they know and rate themselves more competent then they really are.
We can view this along the lines of personality types and flaws in character that gravitate to roles in life. People who get more by conveying an image may not really understand the limitations and complexity that knowledge brings, those pesky details and gottchas, they may be less competent, but their strength may be to lead others to focus their efforts to a goal at the risk that the goal is ill-considered or even fraudulent. The real achievers may not be good at sales or persuasion, especially of most people, but as befits their exceptional character, they create most of the advances. They are also less likely to rate their achievements as important as they really are, and often not resting on their laurels before rushing off to the next challenge, leaving the credit taking to lesser folk.
The ever-present danger for leaders and business people is that they are biased towards to the sizzle and less towards the stake. Managers need to keep this in mind, that the self-promoters may not be the sharpest tools in the shed and that some of the shy and even less attractive people may be able to help much more.
Someone posted on the "coolness" of Apple products, and I agree. Much of its sales has to be due to imagery, and to quality in the designs. I don't really disagree with that appeal, but I have always been dissuaded by price and I have been able to achieve and surpass in a couple of cases the functionality with Linux running on PC hardware that costs half as much or less. And I wasn't pleased when my Power PC Mac went obsolete. It is still running Mac OS X 10.4.
The other day this 10-year old PC that had been running Ubuntu 12.04.1 in 1/2 gig of ram failed. Wont boot, the BIOS probably failed and the board is so old, runing Pentium 64 bit, that is isn't worth replacing. So I had this even older Dell Celeron system lying around, and tried to run a couple of live Linux distros off its DVD ROM. I was able to get the latest Knoppix, ver. 7.0.4 to run albeit slowly. What shocked me was that I found out that the old machine which I bought used in 2001, had only 1/4 gig of ram.
There these thumb sized systems appearing that run off of low power chips designed for mobile that run Android or Linux. They can live inside mobile devices or in tiny set top formats; they can be docked on a monitor or affixed to it and replace desktop systems. These could kill Apple, or at least exert downward pressure on its price. iMac has the basic technology already but $1200 as opposed to $100 is pretty uncompelling.
There is a disconnect in logic here that what is good for investors, who are increasingly only flash-in-the-pan short-term-return-on-investment champions of anything, has anything to do with what is good for products, technology and ultimately its customers. Customers are way down the list, as investors can take their profits and run, what customers want, be dammed.
If you are arguing that Elop managing Nokia like a financialized asset is the same as running a competitive company in a market, I'd beg to differ.
What do many companies lack is a vision of what their products really are for, and I think the reason is that the backgrounds of the executives and the boards are all wrong. This is a horror brought on by the training of business and increasingly political leadership in business schools, who should all be shut down for spreading lies and half-truths.
You can say what you want about Apple, but when Steve Jobs came back he rebuilt the company based on his acute understanding of his products and the market and giving his customers what they needed. Some of it was imagery, but his products worked reliably and have a firm basis in technology. They weren't mere variations on proven techniques to realize a marginal profit, the way many people in business, think. What we will see post-Jobs is not that he was a nice guy, or that he wasn't as ruthless than the next CEO, what we will see at Apple is if the next guy has the vision to keep Apple's innovations going. I would say that the odds of that are slim because of the backgrounds of most of the people who want to manage companies.
The fear of a Balkenized Internet has greatly increased by the revelations about how much spying is done by security agencies on it. If the fear was about a Great Firewall of ..., it should be now about whole nations snipping fibre at their borders, and thanks to the duplicity of the U.S. and others about free speech and freedom.
And it should be addressed locally by meshes using encrypted low-power radio to send packets between local store and forward nodes. We may yet see the reappearence of something like UUCP.
The reason the spying has happened is that it is easy to snoop on the main pipe. That can be made a whole lot harder by distributing the traffic and making the network typology go ad hoc and dynamic.
Of course that is a rhetorical question and it is an answer to the flanebait that started the discussion which said to read the source, provided you have it. But if source code were so readable, it seldom is, then source would be the only document you need. People have pointed out that coding practice often inverts the logic of action, especially in OOD, The other truth is that most developers are poor writers and even though they are capable designers they can't explain the design, especially to a novice. This is a forest for the trees problem and relates to the role of educational techniques in spreading knowledge. The discipline it takes to develop and test and debug an object hierarchy in a modern language is often the reverse of the steps it takes for a novice to understand what it does, which is why reading the source is often the worst way to learn what an application does.
And still most people who develop cannot write. The proof of this is to read what documentation they do write. It is highly uneven in quality. While a tutorial that is written to advocate for a piece of code, a programming language, a library, might be quite readable and interesting, such as the kind of article that appears in a newsstand computer magazine, or on the main web site for a product. It doesn't take much delving into using the product or code to reach an inflection point where the character of what is documented changes abruptly into a specfication document and in which the writer has left out, or worse, glossed over, some pesky detail, whose inattenion to causes your project using the tool to fail and to not be easily and timely fixed. If developers want to know why what they do doesn't get used, they need look only at this problem.
On the other hand poor or non-existent document may serve a purpose. It may guarentee the elites an existence and provide a barrier to entry by less than elites, average or bad programmers and users who the elites say shouldn't be messing around in the innareds. The risk of that is slow adoption of the product, which can hurt developer security if the product has been over-hyped for its ease of use, when its use is hindered by poor documentation.
I consider myself a bad programmer, but I have experimented around with many programming languages, most recently Python, and have been looking for tasks to ignite a passion to get something done and to relearn the right way to develop applications. I have an avid interest in music and serious music composition, I can remember large works easily and know a great deal about the literature, so I was quite interested when a composition program written in Python came may way. I won't tell you the name of the software, but it was the usual approach, a collection of objects and methods to do various tasks associated with scales and pitches. There was some good tutorial and example code, but the use of it quickly became arduous, because the tutorials and examples emphasized the easy things to do and the other things you might want to do were either ignored or the jump off into the object hierarchy was so deep that you couldn't wade through the complexity. I wanted to go from the relatively easy processing of musical parts, horizontally, into the vertical aspect of chords, and in particular to be able to generate reasonable piano reductions of open scores based on where the pitches crossed from the left hand to the right with reasonable intervals. Not only had this not been tackled by the software design, but because of the ease with which Python handles lists, the emphasis was roo much on processing parts and not enough on harmony.
Wow, that is a great non sequitor, the part about having common sense and then taking a job in NYC :-)
As usual, the replies have missed the point ..... slash-dot!
Face Book shut down the Social Fixer page accsuing it of being spam. Could it be that they didn't pay the troll? FB can change its revenue strategy and start charging more and more people to promote their pages, and shoot themselves in the foot.
Social fixer is a Javascript and CSS app that tried to fix the numerous flaws of FB's default UI. It is based on quicksand provided by FB jerking everybody around. That can be fixed by defunding FB and forcing unbundling of the UI and CMS from the friend's list, and negating FB's business strategy.
I think that the recent changes at FB show that they are struggling with their business model, and that possibly it will fail soon. We can hope, as it will allow someone else to do it better.
I was born just after WWII. It amuses me how little some adults know about history that I thought of as second nature, because my parents lived in that war and knew what we were fighting for. Now, that experience is lost, probably because of all the intervenning history, and because the schools don't teach it. One thing to note is that the schools have so much on their plate. They how have to cater to the differing agendas of the factions in society, so they have no time to teach who Hitler was and why we had to defeat him.
What has changed, and it began with Vietnam, is that these once United States have splintered into a bunch of factions, One of these is by generations, and with the economic decline brought about by high tech and bad management and investment ideas in the economy, a battle between young and old has become just another ingredient of dissolution and divide. One of the signs of decline is that people stop working together to get much done. They go through the motions, but nothing really gets done. Decay of nations and society is not far behind.
Ironically, this is the fault of the Boomer Generation which now runs things. They made the mistake that there was nothing to be learned from the past and that because an idea sounded good we should try it. This is also promoted by the idea that if you trained as a professional and had a specialized academic training that you must be wise, when a classical or liberal arts education would have better, I know of no more morally and intellectually misleading degree to hold than an MBA. I wish all the Business Schools were shutdown. I have less respect for NBA's that for lawyers. In general most of the corruption we face is centered around professionals whose training is specialized. So is it surprising that high-tech has actually damaged the economy more that it has helped, People jobs have been replaced by simulations of social activity that are not the same and that either positions have been lost of don't pay a decent wage. The decline of the American Middle Class if the fault of high tech. It benefits many fewer people that it helps. Now, I have benefitted from it, but how few people if helped and what is lost was not anticipated correctly by my generation.
I am well past 60. I grew up in a time when behaving in public and respecting your elders was important and expected. You not only deferred to older people, you went out of your way to respect them. I think that change and innovation have trumped experience too much. Many of us older people are regarded by the young as obsolete because we don't know the newest fads and lingo.
The problem you are describing is the Young Turk problem that has been with us for a long time, but it is exaggerated by the illusion that the new is necessarily better, and that recent experiments have always been a success. One success that has been a dismal failure is training business management in business schools. This poisons the minds of sr. and middle management with financialization thinking and they forget that they are providing a service and mistreat their customers and staff.
Like a boot camp for business, having to come up through the ranks rather than being full of yourself via academic and professional degrees, is a source of much of the disconnect as is the fast-paced social and entertainment media that dominates public life.
But the irony is that I don't exonerate my generation, now grey and old, because we *ucked up and created much of the mess. We thought that you didn't have to pay your dues, that having new ideas was better, and now every body pays. I raised four children, now in that cohort born after 1980 and they treat me with some respect not because I demand it from them but because they learned that life is hard and challenging and that my take on it is valuable. They don't ask for much advice from me but they see that what has happened to me informs them, gives them much perspective. They know how to speak to me.
Elitism of all sorts is everpresent and it threatens the long slide back to oligarchy and exploitative institutions. It is susally most obvious in times of economic stagnation and decline. Market and elitist forces begin to take over and price and group descrimination begins to emerge which excludes groups of people or takes away resources that everyone should have access to.
The idea that education should be universal is relatively new, especially for high schools and higher education, and the problems of sustaining it are well known and much of the cause for Private Schools. But the fact that class and wealth can be used to separate people and deny many resources that would give them access to the benefits of society is why one could argue that private schools are evil; because they create elitism and the return to oligarchy and elitism. Not all elites, but most, fit on the right side of the political spectrum. Most Conservatives are first elitiist of one form or other. Most are wealth elites, but some are religious or race elites, but elitist nonetheless. They believe that they are better than most everybody else. Sometimes they wish to erect barriers to others entering their elite, but most often they think that they are better by birth or virtue and because of that will remain in their elite. This is what is evil.
But will that have SCSI terminators?
Naw, it would be made in Romania!
And it is much worse in the investment climate that has prevailed since about 1990. Thanks to the very technology that makes this web site posaible, investors can micromanage their investments and they want as much profit in as little time as possible. This means that public firms are much more risk adverse than they have ever been. I didn't say that investors couldn't be taken for a ride, indeed they seem more vulnerable now than ever before. What I am saying is that they want a sure bet and they don't want as much to wait around for an idea to bear fruit.
The government has traditionally filled in where public for-profit companies fear to tread, long-term or high risk development, and space exploration is still very much that. Only in areas where the risks have been determined, are well known, do private enterprise enter. Someone mentioned communications satellites. The risk of getting something into earth orbit is pretty well known as is the risk of electronics working in space for X years. Beyond that the risks and payouts are very uncertain.
It is clear that once the risks in a new industry are established, that for profit companies jump in. Even though early auto companies experimented with electric cars and abandoned the idea with the advent of cheap gas a century ago, they are back in the game with the end of cheap oil, and it didn't take them long to retool and make advances, maybe a decade or so, but it was largely proven technology.
An even better example is the Internet. I had an Arpanet account when it was maybe 30 nodes, and witnessed the rise of UNIX and DNS, so that by the time it was privatized by companies like Cisco and Sun and IBM and DEC in the early 1980's as the Internet, it had been running for about a decade and proven technically.
The biggest thing that would set Microsoft wise is to end legally its right to ship Windows as an OEM OS. Even if 85% of users make the decision to use it, make Nicrosoft spend the money to persuade people to ask to install it on their systems, otherwise users can find many alternative systems they could install and of those the most popular could be an available install option at purchase.
Like other aspects of market economics there is a five-finger discount for making an effort and being informed. You can install a good OS for next to nothing yourself.
Oh, come on! By this year a low-power device running on mobile chips will get glued to your flat panel display and that will be running Linux and displace your desktop, or it will have the same form factor as your smartphone but dock on your desktop peripherals hub and do everything your desktop did. The desktop isn't going anywhere it is just going to shrink. That is what an iMac is really, only it will cost about $100 and replace your desktop box. This stuff is here now, it just has to grow in capacity a little to surpass what is dying off.
Huh? I don't think so, or "most people" are more dim than I thought.
UM, do you mean Brandi Womanthing? :-)
There is a Grace Hopper singing outside my window tonight :-)
I have always been mystified about the numbers of women NOT in tech. It has always been clear to me that women I have known are just as smart and in many cases smarter than men I know and that includes myself. I think that my fiance, who is a third grade teacher and accomplished classical pianest, is just as good at trouble shooting and problem solving as any male engineer I know. So there is some other factor than ability that discourages them. It may be discrimination that it subtiile enough that any man who screens for tech applicants would insist that he doesn't do it. I am sure that my fiance would make a good engineer and in fact I discovered that she has a near photographic memory, something I just found out, and we first met as teens 42 years ago, and after a haitus of 30 years reconnected two years ago.
Facebook is shit, and I presume your product is shit.
Well, it a grand effort to fix the shit that is FB's UI. And that is moving shit!
I have favorably compared what slash-dot does with contextual reply, to FB's failed effort. But slash-dot is shit too, just different shit. FB is stupid shit, ordinarily stupid people posting echo-chamber-like stuff that FB's investors love because they can snoop on its users. Shit is the main, mature market, and that is what FB is. The problems with FBs UI that Social Fixer tries to fix is that it is intended for the Big Data users of the CMS, not for the edification or communication of the users. You aren't a total luser to use FB, because you want world-wide coverage to pick up your far flung friends. You pay to promote interesting stories, there should be a more social way to do that, to get topics exposed to a larger audience, like the page, but promotion of one topic. FB does get more exposure than most blogs, but it has a really bad UI.
Slash-dot is smart-ass shit, nasty, snarcky shit, and too much of it. An even better model for slash-dot's contextual reply is to collapse all the replies under each heading and encourage users to change the subject line when the thread changes. The USENET newagroup is a good model for handling the volume and the cruff, so slash-dot gets there, but not quite.
I think that FB will be gone in a year or two, or when the investors realize that the business model doesn't return on investment. When that happens Social Fixer can branch out as one of many UIs for a distributed CMS managed by others in the cloud, with only the global list of friends maintained by a global entity. FB will only survive in any form when the CMS and UI are unbundled. Then it will be possible to encourage users to behave differently. To require a comment when a user shares, for one, to change the zone layout so the news stream goes beyond the relatively little content now taken up entirely by the side panels when that content doesn't float, so the news fills the page, eventually. With stable content the style can become customized for several alternative layouts. Since Social Fixer has to cope with a quicksand foundation, it doesn't have the freedom it needs. Wrest the UI away from FB and enact features that shape better user behavior.