Just because a company/sovereignty is able to rationally appeal to a group (that they themselves have put into a subordinate position) into seeing the terms of they offered as beneficial to them, does not make it reasonable.
For instance, the West very often convinces resource-rich nations that their (cheap) offer to buy the nation's resources is beneficial. They argue that there is no infrastructure in the country to transport their vast resources to the market -- a condition the West has helped to maintain. So, yes, the benefit to the producing nations is high but it is not fair.
I think that there is something similar to be said for "network effect" sites like FB, Twitter, etc: You want to communicate with our users but we make sure that you cannot (closed protocols, closed source etc) unless you "voluntarily" join our site. So, the rational user makes a calculation that is reasonable to join but that does not make it fair.
On one hand I completely agree with you: He is out of touch with the mainstream. However, I would argue that it is we who have drifted from the mainstream and not the other way around.
We (computer users) are so willing to do things that are obviously against our best interest in order to get a "free" service -- gmail, facebook, linked in, etc.
Yet he is willing to actually go out and produce things that are in the user's best interest in terms of privacy, choice and freedom.
So, yes, he is out of touch but it's important to look at the reference point.
I completely agree with your point. SV should care about disrupting society in the same way that they care about disrupting industries. Valley visionaries are more than willing to preach technolibertarianism when it helps them improve their bottom line but they are (willfully) ignorant about the ways that their disruptions can affect real people.
Besides the privacy implications (default to auto-on location tracking, etc), there are actual physiological and family implications (covering Uber passengers assaulted by lightly-screened Uber drivers).
I wish that the every engineer was required to take a course on the societal implications of their work. Those in SV are incredibly smart and if they are exposed to the problems I am hopeful that they would be able to make a positive impact.
I wish that there was a standard method for "accounting" these externalities. Do companies that run coal mines or plants forecast or hedge against the possibility of future lawsuits related to pollution? If so, who determines that hedge amount? Are they buying insurance against these eventualities? If so, what do the actuarial tables say for such things. If we could at least quantify these externalities, we could start looking at the real cost of these things.
Of course, that is not to say that these companies would eventually be subjected to these costs. We know that they won't be as long as coal and oil production are linked to the survival of states. But, sometimes seeing dollar amounts are more enticing for changing people's behavior than "long term health effects".
When I hear them, I know the speaker, although physically part of a conversation, had changed their focus to their device and is attempting to re-engage.
Their attempt to re-engage is usually precisely timed to match a) when they think the conversation has returned to being about them or b) when they want to interrupt the conversation to say something that they think is important but was JUST SAID WHILE THEY WERE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.
Although it is a small number, those who use the MDM features think that their client devices are impenetrable because they've applied this technology. It feels like corporate IT departments want to just wash their hands of the responsibility for really working with (protecting) their client devices -- they wash their hands of responsibility as soon as they deploy MDM.
As far as I can tell, MDM on these devices (or any device, really) only works if the device can phone home (as far as remote wipe, etc, go). So, there is no way to prevent someone from running brute force attacks for the entirety of the time they are able to keep them offline.
I could not agree more, but with one slight modification:
I do not think that "quietly" needs to fit. I think that RMS (who should be on your list), Linus and others who are among the pantheon of great programmers are not necessarily quiet. In fact, I don't want them to be. I want them to proclaim their lessons and techniques. I want to hear about how they go about their jobs. I want to learn from them.
That said, I completely agree with what I think was your sentiment in saying, "quietly". Perhaps humble or thoughtful is a better way to put it.
They are specifically focused on the use of technology in early education, but I think that their reports will showcase a need for deeper thinking about the use of technology at all levels of education.
Thank you for posting this. I completely agree with your main point: these devices are great, but they are NOT phones.
I grew up split between the gen-x and millenials and I have had cell phones on AMPS, PCS, GSM, CDMA,... The list goes on. Even though I was able to look at WAP sites as early as 1999, the ability of these devices to get on the "Internet" has improved significantly over the last ten years.
And yet their ability to act as a phone has roughly stayed the same over the same time period.
Even though I love the fact that my Android and/or iPhone can do all the amazing app things, I wish that I could have a Blackberry for the voice. Although the device itself cannot cover for a bad network, the BB was famous for it's strong phone and they had engineered the best cell phone speakerphone I've ever used.
Now that I am without a landline telephone (never had one, actually), there is no way for me to say, "I'd love to have this heart-to-heart conversation in a way that we can understand each other clearly; let me call you back on my landline." So, I would sincerely hope that people are working on improving the voice quality of these devices.
And yet, ultimately, I agree with the parent: People have bad experiences with the devices as phones, they use the phone less, engineers don't improve the phone, and the cycle continues.
The surplus glut brings attention to the other problem that Norman Borlaug realized during the green revolution: distribution systems. Unless there are ways for the surplus to get to the needy, it's wasted. And as areas start to produce a crop (thanks to new breeds, or whatever) they need to have access to a distribution network so that their products can reach the proper market.
Until people stop taking this very attitude toward the problem the situation will never change. It cannot be enough for the next sucker to take a burnt-out developer's place. There has to be a conscious effort by the developers to stop this situation.
As younger developers move up it will only continue: "If I went through it as a developer, they can go through it." This is exactly what happens with young doctors who become attending physicians when they subject their students to long hours and harsh treatment.
The reason why companies develop new languages is because the ones coming from academia are focused on the wrong things. Product development requires an industrial strength, strongly typed (for the most part) fast language.
Projects coming from academia are interpreted, JVM based, functional, obsessed with (im)mutability, closures, and lambda functions.
This is not to say those things are not nice, however they are not central to a programming language as used in large scale industrial systems.
"academia projects" that have "(im)mutability, closures, and lambda functions" are often very strongly typed. In fact, I would argue that the features of those academic projects are exactly what would make a language industrial strength. If we could convince developers to take the time to learn those tools they would produce industrial applications that didn't, you know, kill people (or less drastically, suck).
In re: open floor plans, I think that they are awful. Besides the fact that I personally do not thrive in that type of environment, it taught me bad habits. I try to be very considerate of other people's workspace and recognize the fact that they should not be arbitrarily disturbed. If others are like me, I know that a disruption at the wrong moment can cost mental context and lost time. However, from the open office plan I "learned" that I could distract any one at any time for absolutely the smallest reason. Even thought I would have hated someone doing it to me, I fell into bad habits. In general, I think that our entire organization lost.
That said, for certain people and industries it might work well. In fact, there were times when the open floor plan was beneficial -- large group debugging on the same problem, brainstorming, camaraderie.
In re: cheerleading, I cannot agree more. You are right on about this: one very successful person's anecdotes become fact just because they are successful. It does not take into account the differences in organization and personnel that ultimately lead a particular technique to succeed or fail.
I'm not entirely sure why this post is modded -1 other than it is from AC. In fact, I think that, although they are incompatible in some way, both AC and GP have said something incredibly valid.
I like the way that the GP described how the process by which people who have a single brilliant idea that nets them capital can work hard with that capital to leverage that into a larger enterprise. Although I'm sure he participates in VC activity, Musk did not simply take his money and "steal" from other's ideas by snookering inventors and founders into giving up huge equity stakes for a paltry amount of cash (albeit with very high risk). He took what he made and kept learning and then applied that to a venture that he did not think could succeed without someone willing to put some of their own hide into the game. Although there is a new article in HBR saying that Tesla is not really as "disruptive as you might think" link, I think that his work proved that you can have electric cars that people treat like cars and not buggies.
On the other hand, I definitely agree with the AC too. There is a significant amount of luck that contributes to whether or not someone's hard work simply keeps them alive (food on the table, shelter, medicine, etc) and whether their hard work nets them a huge payday. The sad part is that there are plenty of people whose hard work simply keeps them alive that, if freed from the Sisyphusian Task of looking out for their safety and survival, would improve the world in ways that we could not even imagine. We are awash in missed opportunities as a society because we waste so many people's intellect and talent by forcing them to deploy them in self defense against a system that wants them to fail.
I am glad that they got this funding and can't wait to see what they are able to do with it. I hope that they look closely at secure ways to improve their naming. In other words, I hope that they are looking at any ways that they can "square" Zooko's Triangle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle). The reason that I am not as confident using DarkNet services as I am the "regular".com is because of the naming system.
To anyone from Tor reading this: keep up the great work!
Thank you to AC and clovis for their insightful replies to this article. Hearing the "inside story" on EMR interoperability is fascinating.
I am always impressed by the fact that these extremely complex systems interact at all. In fact, it's more unbelievable when they interoperate than when they do not. It seems similar to the surprise I had when the government was creating its healthcare exchanges. I was amazed that they were able to get those large private insurers' systems to work together at all. Again, it was more surprising that the system worked at all than it was that it broke down under heavy load.
As far as security goes, I'd really like to have it both ways. I'd like to have the ability for my doctors and providers to share records so that, like AC said, I can get that organ donation done quickly. However, I want to be able to restrict "Joe Administrator" or "Jane Administrator" from being able to query through those records to make decisions about my insurability without my permission. I know that you can't always have it both ways, but with something as important as medical records I think it is important to talk about ideal scenarios.
The problem with an ideal scenario in this case is that it is probably exactly what keeps these systems from interoperating in the first place. I would imagine that each system believes they have the best standards, the best implementations and the best security. When they think that a peer does not meet their standards they are probably less inclined to make the systems interoperate because they are worried that doing so would expose them to data breaches which would result in HIPAA violations and, ultimately, suits for damages or penalties.
After significant experience deploying embedded wireless routers, I've always been impressed with their physical manufacturing. Their outdoor devices are extremely resilient to weather and the casing generally seals as designed. They do operate at a pricepoint above average consumer grade hardware. What's more, and this was always more important to me, their hardware is extremely well supported by OpenWRT. In fact, the OpenWRT derivative I used was frequently cited by Ubiquiti itself -- it seemed like they were happy to promote the fact that their OS was not the end all be all.
Which makes news like this all the more disappointing to me. I consider abiding by the GPL to be a very important part of user (corporate) responsibility and do not tolerate violations.
As another poster said, just another company to scratch off my list.
Thank you (and the follow-up posters) for making this point. I wish that I had moderator points to use for this particular discussion. Yes, I'm sure that the application is crappy and does not use XOR in the way you describe. That said, XOR itself is not at fault here.
I almost feel bad for the little guy/girl. It gets blamed for so much. Can't a gate catch a break?
Slashdot Mirror
Completely agreed.
Just because a company/sovereignty is able to rationally appeal to a group (that they themselves have put into a subordinate position) into seeing the terms of they offered as beneficial to them, does not make it reasonable.
For instance, the West very often convinces resource-rich nations that their (cheap) offer to buy the nation's resources is beneficial. They argue that there is no infrastructure in the country to transport their vast resources to the market -- a condition the West has helped to maintain. So, yes, the benefit to the producing nations is high but it is not fair.
I think that there is something similar to be said for "network effect" sites like FB, Twitter, etc: You want to communicate with our users but we make sure that you cannot (closed protocols, closed source etc) unless you "voluntarily" join our site. So, the rational user makes a calculation that is reasonable to join but that does not make it fair.
Will
On one hand I completely agree with you: He is out of touch with the mainstream. However, I would argue that it is we who have drifted from the mainstream and not the other way around.
We (computer users) are so willing to do things that are obviously against our best interest in order to get a "free" service -- gmail, facebook, linked in, etc.
Yet he is willing to actually go out and produce things that are in the user's best interest in terms of privacy, choice and freedom.
So, yes, he is out of touch but it's important to look at the reference point.
Will
Part 1
Part 2
I completely agree with your point. SV should care about disrupting society in the same way that they care about disrupting industries. Valley visionaries are more than willing to preach technolibertarianism when it helps them improve their bottom line but they are (willfully) ignorant about the ways that their disruptions can affect real people.
Besides the privacy implications (default to auto-on location tracking, etc), there are actual physiological and family implications (covering Uber passengers assaulted by lightly-screened Uber drivers).
I wish that the every engineer was required to take a course on the societal implications of their work. Those in SV are incredibly smart and if they are exposed to the problems I am hopeful that they would be able to make a positive impact.
I wish that there was a standard method for "accounting" these externalities. Do companies that run coal mines or plants forecast or hedge against the possibility of future lawsuits related to pollution? If so, who determines that hedge amount? Are they buying insurance against these eventualities? If so, what do the actuarial tables say for such things. If we could at least quantify these externalities, we could start looking at the real cost of these things.
Of course, that is not to say that these companies would eventually be subjected to these costs. We know that they won't be as long as coal and oil production are linked to the survival of states. But, sometimes seeing dollar amounts are more enticing for changing people's behavior than "long term health effects".
Those are my clue words.
When I hear them, I know the speaker, although physically part of a conversation, had changed their focus to their device and is attempting to re-engage.
Their attempt to re-engage is usually precisely timed to match a) when they think the conversation has returned to being about them or b) when they want to interrupt the conversation to say something that they think is important but was JUST SAID WHILE THEY WERE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.
So frustrating.
Wait, what?
Although it is a small number, those who use the MDM features think that their client devices are impenetrable because they've applied this technology. It feels like corporate IT departments want to just wash their hands of the responsibility for really working with (protecting) their client devices -- they wash their hands of responsibility as soon as they deploy MDM.
As far as I can tell, MDM on these devices (or any device, really) only works if the device can phone home (as far as remote wipe, etc, go). So, there is no way to prevent someone from running brute force attacks for the entirety of the time they are able to keep them offline.
I thought that was going to happen "this year".
:-)
I could not agree more, but with one slight modification:
I do not think that "quietly" needs to fit. I think that RMS (who should be on your list), Linus and others who are among the pantheon of great programmers are not necessarily quiet. In fact, I don't want them to be. I want them to proclaim their lessons and techniques. I want to hear about how they go about their jobs. I want to learn from them.
That said, I completely agree with what I think was your sentiment in saying, "quietly". Perhaps humble or thoughtful is a better way to put it.
In the same way that dropping 100s (or 1000s) of OLPCs into Africa was not an ED TECH program.
There are a great group of "critics" working on this exact topic at New America:
http://www.edcentral.org/learningtech/
They are specifically focused on the use of technology in early education, but I think that their reports will showcase a need for deeper thinking about the use of technology at all levels of education.
Thank you for posting this. I completely agree with your main point: these devices are great, but they are NOT phones.
I grew up split between the gen-x and millenials and I have had cell phones on AMPS, PCS, GSM, CDMA, ... The list goes on. Even though I was able to look at WAP sites as early as 1999, the ability of these devices to get on the "Internet" has improved significantly over the last ten years.
And yet their ability to act as a phone has roughly stayed the same over the same time period.
Even though I love the fact that my Android and/or iPhone can do all the amazing app things, I wish that I could have a Blackberry for the voice. Although the device itself cannot cover for a bad network, the BB was famous for it's strong phone and they had engineered the best cell phone speakerphone I've ever used.
Now that I am without a landline telephone (never had one, actually), there is no way for me to say, "I'd love to have this heart-to-heart conversation in a way that we can understand each other clearly; let me call you back on my landline." So, I would sincerely hope that people are working on improving the voice quality of these devices.
And yet, ultimately, I agree with the parent: People have bad experiences with the devices as phones, they use the phone less, engineers don't improve the phone, and the cycle continues.
Will
The surplus glut brings attention to the other problem that Norman Borlaug realized during the green revolution: distribution systems. Unless there are ways for the surplus to get to the needy, it's wasted. And as areas start to produce a crop (thanks to new breeds, or whatever) they need to have access to a distribution network so that their products can reach the proper market.
Until people stop taking this very attitude toward the problem the situation will never change. It cannot be enough for the next sucker to take a burnt-out developer's place. There has to be a conscious effort by the developers to stop this situation.
As younger developers move up it will only continue: "If I went through it as a developer, they can go through it." This is exactly what happens with young doctors who become attending physicians when they subject their students to long hours and harsh treatment.
In the end, no one wins.
The reason why companies develop new languages is because the ones coming from academia are focused on the wrong things. Product development requires an industrial strength, strongly typed (for the most part) fast language.
Projects coming from academia are interpreted, JVM based, functional, obsessed with (im)mutability, closures, and lambda functions.
This is not to say those things are not nice, however they are not central to a programming language as used in large scale industrial systems.
"academia projects" that have "(im)mutability, closures, and lambda functions" are often very strongly typed. In fact, I would argue that the features of those academic projects are exactly what would make a language industrial strength. If we could convince developers to take the time to learn those tools they would produce industrial applications that didn't, you know, kill people (or less drastically, suck).
Yes, but neither of those examples are Eastern religions.
In re: open floor plans, I think that they are awful. Besides the fact that I personally do not thrive in that type of environment, it taught me bad habits. I try to be very considerate of other people's workspace and recognize the fact that they should not be arbitrarily disturbed. If others are like me, I know that a disruption at the wrong moment can cost mental context and lost time. However, from the open office plan I "learned" that I could distract any one at any time for absolutely the smallest reason. Even thought I would have hated someone doing it to me, I fell into bad habits. In general, I think that our entire organization lost.
That said, for certain people and industries it might work well. In fact, there were times when the open floor plan was beneficial -- large group debugging on the same problem, brainstorming, camaraderie.
In re: cheerleading, I cannot agree more. You are right on about this: one very successful person's anecdotes become fact just because they are successful. It does not take into account the differences in organization and personnel that ultimately lead a particular technique to succeed or fail.
You are exactly right (about shedding debt), but I don't think that federal contracts hurt either:
U.S. Department of Defense Awards Iridium $400 Million, Five-Year Contract for Iridium® Airtime Services
I'm not entirely sure why this post is modded -1 other than it is from AC. In fact, I think that, although they are incompatible in some way, both AC and GP have said something incredibly valid.
I like the way that the GP described how the process by which people who have a single brilliant idea that nets them capital can work hard with that capital to leverage that into a larger enterprise. Although I'm sure he participates in VC activity, Musk did not simply take his money and "steal" from other's ideas by snookering inventors and founders into giving up huge equity stakes for a paltry amount of cash (albeit with very high risk). He took what he made and kept learning and then applied that to a venture that he did not think could succeed without someone willing to put some of their own hide into the game. Although there is a new article in HBR saying that Tesla is not really as "disruptive as you might think" link, I think that his work proved that you can have electric cars that people treat like cars and not buggies.
On the other hand, I definitely agree with the AC too. There is a significant amount of luck that contributes to whether or not someone's hard work simply keeps them alive (food on the table, shelter, medicine, etc) and whether their hard work nets them a huge payday. The sad part is that there are plenty of people whose hard work simply keeps them alive that, if freed from the Sisyphusian Task of looking out for their safety and survival, would improve the world in ways that we could not even imagine. We are awash in missed opportunities as a society because we waste so many people's intellect and talent by forcing them to deploy them in self defense against a system that wants them to fail.
I wish that we could have it both ways.
Here is an outline of the response to this week's congressional activity from the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation:
http://www.newamerica.org/oti/house-passes-second-flawed-cybersecurity-information-sharing-bill/
To be completely transparent, I worked at OTI and think they are great.
Will
I am glad that they got this funding and can't wait to see what they are able to do with it. I hope that they look closely at secure ways to improve their naming. In other words, I hope that they are looking at any ways that they can "square" Zooko's Triangle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle). The reason that I am not as confident using DarkNet services as I am the "regular" .com is because of the naming system.
To anyone from Tor reading this: keep up the great work!
Will
Thank you to AC and clovis for their insightful replies to this article. Hearing the "inside story" on EMR interoperability is fascinating.
I am always impressed by the fact that these extremely complex systems interact at all. In fact, it's more unbelievable when they interoperate than when they do not. It seems similar to the surprise I had when the government was creating its healthcare exchanges. I was amazed that they were able to get those large private insurers' systems to work together at all. Again, it was more surprising that the system worked at all than it was that it broke down under heavy load.
As far as security goes, I'd really like to have it both ways. I'd like to have the ability for my doctors and providers to share records so that, like AC said, I can get that organ donation done quickly. However, I want to be able to restrict "Joe Administrator" or "Jane Administrator" from being able to query through those records to make decisions about my insurability without my permission. I know that you can't always have it both ways, but with something as important as medical records I think it is important to talk about ideal scenarios.
The problem with an ideal scenario in this case is that it is probably exactly what keeps these systems from interoperating in the first place. I would imagine that each system believes they have the best standards, the best implementations and the best security. When they think that a peer does not meet their standards they are probably less inclined to make the systems interoperate because they are worried that doing so would expose them to data breaches which would result in HIPAA violations and, ultimately, suits for damages or penalties.
After significant experience deploying embedded wireless routers, I've always been impressed with their physical manufacturing. Their outdoor devices are extremely resilient to weather and the casing generally seals as designed. They do operate at a pricepoint above average consumer grade hardware. What's more, and this was always more important to me, their hardware is extremely well supported by OpenWRT. In fact, the OpenWRT derivative I used was frequently cited by Ubiquiti itself -- it seemed like they were happy to promote the fact that their OS was not the end all be all.
Which makes news like this all the more disappointing to me. I consider abiding by the GPL to be a very important part of user (corporate) responsibility and do not tolerate violations.
As another poster said, just another company to scratch off my list.
Thank you (and the follow-up posters) for making this point. I wish that I had moderator points to use for this particular discussion. Yes, I'm sure that the application is crappy and does not use XOR in the way you describe. That said, XOR itself is not at fault here.
I almost feel bad for the little guy/girl. It gets blamed for so much. Can't a gate catch a break?