Yes I agree, we're heading for asymmetric demand pricing [something I just made up] like the airlines and railways, it's expensive at the moment you need it, but the base costs remain constant. It's called automated blackmail or increasing shareholder value [in Europe, most of the utilities are privatised]. Also there's cash to be made on speculative option and contract purchase using the big data leeched out of the grid.
Am I being cynical? No, just reflecting the values of late stage capitalism...
Yes, but unhappily the other fuckers are usually very similar to the previous fuckers and about as corrupted by non-transparent lobbying and the entitlement culture of professional politicians [in the UK, they've usually been to Oxford and haven't actually had a 'job' except as 'special advisers']. I think there are a couple of solutions:
Apprenticeships for politicians and senior civil servants. They need to live in bad housing and do shit jobs before any promotion
Sortition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition choosing representatives by lottery, to prevent all the cosy, sweetheart stuff. The quality won't be worse and will even out
There are probably plenty of other ideas, but what we have certainly doesn't work properly for the 'people'.
Not really, given that a lot of our lifestyles are unhealthy anyway. I have relatives in Korea where they eat tons of meat and then have regular colonoscopies, that seems to me to be faintly ridiculous. Why would we change the planet so that we can become obese and ill?
Incidentally there's a strawman argument there too. I'm not suggesting that we return to the state of hunter/gatherers.
I agree 100% with you that GMO holds promise and != Monsanto. But we live in a corporate-dominated world and it's a legitimate fear that GMO will become a tool for control and profit rather than improvement of the human condition. Second point, mono-culture and gene-spliced is a lot less sustainable/more risky than natural high-yield. We could concentrate on eating less protein too, that's what takes the majority of the space/water etc.
Oh absolutely, at 62, I've seen punched cards, disk drives the size of washing machines, computers the size of a decent sized appartment, compuserve and everything on up to the Raspberry Pi. That included hacking via acoustic couplers, slow modems etc. etc. Old certainly now doesn't mean pre-technology and old tech is tech, usually just slower and bigger.
Yes agree, we seem have US influenced laws in the UK too, either as part of our highly asymmetric 'special relationship', some the recent deportations and deportation attempts, for example, or via the WTO [wealthy terrorist organisation]. We need to wake up to this and see what we can do to push back via boycott etc.
I'm 62, I don't really use my mobile [to the great exasperation of younger members of my family and certain friends, yes I do have those] except for emergencies and uncertain rendez-vous arrangements. I don't have an ipod or mp3 player either. I have plenty of computers at home.
By now you are thinking, here's an old luddite, an idiot, aren't you? But I like to sit on a London bus and stare into people's gardens or read a book on the tube [that's the subway or MRT to most of you] rather than scrunch up my face with some tiny game, even frozen bubble: http://www.frozen-bubble.org/, my all-time favourite. I find a lot of time to play the guitar, program and paint too.
To me, most of smartphone world is just a drain on money and time for trivialities like facebook and other social media. The telecom companies are encouraging it all, because it's revenue from 'apps', bandwidth, premium services etc. I don't need any of it minute by minute. If I'm reading a serious book on public transport, I'm learning stuff, if I'm staring at things randomly I find that problems are getting solved in the background, same with running which I [obviously from above] do without the obligatory mp3 player.
I'v been messing with computers since about 1975 and I really enjoy most of the modern world, but, I assure you, real conversations, real downtime, staring in space here and there is part of the mix, life isn't just pokes, tweets and 'friend' requests.
Agree, this is dot.froth to coin a new phrase and tld isn't it? Important problems aren't solved by 12 hour hacks even using 'world class experts'. If things [world hunger, war, disease, space travel] were that easy, we'd all have our togas, flying cars and vacations on the moon now. Get over it.
Well, for the moment, I'm still using AWS EC2, but I've started buying books [and everything else] from other suppliers, because of this. A real shame, I feel that Amazon is a genuine success rather than dotcom froth, but big things seem to become evil by some hidden law of scale.
Yes, second that, I'm from the UK, white[ish] preppy type education, still don't feed the trolls.
On the subject, actually this is a big advantage for Linux in these settings anyway. I've set up a couple of drop-ins in the east end of London where there's a fair amount of random crime and I've used recycled computers and Linux. The computers have practically no resale value, so they are not worth stealing and they can be replaced pretty quickly and cheaply. Other projects with 'brand new' have, in fact, had trouble apart from being trashed by all the viruses associated with random downloading because they are Windows based projects. Ours have the problem that 'we can't teach Word' for example, this may not be a problem in your setting.
I wouldn't use the Rasberry or only have that as a small hardware hacking part of the mix, for reasons stated in other posts. I agree with LSTP idea, if power is going to be a problem, though it's harder than individual systems.
Finally we've always found sustaining the teaching to be more difficult than setting up and sustaining the infrastructure. The next project I start will include a heavyweight, teach the teachers element too.
Yes agree completely. I'm a hoarder so this goes against my instincts. One way I deal with electronics in UK is that I give them to a recycling charity that will make a little money and provide a little employment from it. I give books to charity shops. I have a sneaking feeling that there should be a recovery program for this [maybe there is?]: I am powerless over books, electronics, cruciform screws and assorted leads and my house, garage, garden and toolshed has become unmanageable...
One of my friends introduced me to their smallish child [now in their 20s, this was some years ago] with 'this is.... he collects wires' huh!
Well exactly, in the UK nearly every large system that the Civil Service commissions [from recent memory Child Support Agency, Crown Prosecution Service, Tax Credits, National Health data spine, Secure email for National Health, various bits of HMRC [our taxation department for overseas readers]] has failed, been delivered over-cost and late or abandoned.
Incidentally on the consultancy side, the same 'usual suspects' EDS, Cap-Gemini and Accenture, for example, tend to be involved nearly every time.
However senior Civil Servants stay in post and, indeed, go on to greater things and usually end up with decorations and honours. Before in the days of high Dickensian stools, quill pens and Latin phrases, the time that the Civil Service still live in, it mattered somewhat less. Now that modern society is highly technology-based, this really, really, really has to stop.
Yup, I always reply on these threads, I'm 62 and [having had more senior jobs that required a suit and talking rubbish in meetings] I'm usually coding as contractor part of the year. On the other hand, I've been sweating over a hot computer since about 1975 and I enjoy it, so I've been very lucky.
I think part of the secret would be a good niche or target audience. Because I'm a Perl person I do a certain amount of back-end, some glue code, some data cleaning/ETL etc. But I do also have a fair sized personal network, built over the years.
But, one of the great 'virtues' of open source is that pretty heavyweight and marketable skills can be approached by downloading something and building something with it. I didn't really know that much about jquery last year, now, I'm not an expert but I'm 'medium' and lots of people use it for commercial stuff.
May the older folks force be with you! [sort of like the Force but a bit grumpy, especially in the mornings].
I presume that you are some kind of corporate shill from Google or other unhelpful individual. The 666 in the user name provides a bit of a clue. You've never taught have you? I'm not sure why you are 'in constant retraining' or 'reacting to current trends' either.
You need to learn the difference between 'scapegoating' and 'boycott' too and some logic too, the fact that one is not boycotting all of them at once doesn't invalidate the process of boycotting one of them.
Agree, but that's the 'big' digital divide problem, not hardware/software, everywhere has been flooded with that, but teaching is problem, maintenance of an inventory of equipment is a problem. I live in the East End of London and have seen expensive grant-funded computer suites lying useless because no-one much knows about firewalls, anti-virus, teaching people about phishing, drive-by all the 'elementary' things for the geek-minded. Then when they 'work' there's no cash for teaching and limited access [one hour a week was quoted by a kid who came to one of our drop-ins].
Teaching and maintenance is more labour intensive and expensive than just giving away a load of stuff to get a little positive publicity. Also, we in the UK are not very keen on Google at the moment, another specialist in fiscal dumping, like Starbucks and Amazon.
Except, Amazon, the BBC [less than before, admittedly], Booking.com, Zoopla, Lovefilm.com for examplem all huge sites. I've worked for most of those too as a freelance. Don't blame the language for badly written code either. Actually, it's the one language I find incredibly intuitive because of the linguistics ideas and TMTOWTDI meaning that one can code around 'stuckage' and 'suckage'. Also CPAN is messy sometimes but awesome in terms of productivity and 'things that needn't be coded'.
I so agree but for different reasons. I'm doing a little open-source based work in the area of water/air pollution sensors, mainly for the grid/big data bit. I've talked to some of the usual suspects in London [I'm London-based] including 'Digital Greenwich'.
An example: http://living-planit.com/ is closed source, supported by big corporates who would probably like their noses in this particular government trough and also harvest the big data so that they can trade energy/carbon futures and help themselves/other corporates do some predatory/on-demand pricing.
So the £24m will probably run quickly into corporate pockets for the benefit of the status quo rather than the citizenry. At Accenture etc. rates, it'll be gone in a month or two anyway. I sincerely believe that the best way to do this is with small federated projects within an open framework. Then the benefit is maximised and transferrable elsewhere too.
I'm sorry to sound so cynical about this, but it's the truth of the current state of Airstrip One [north].
I call this kind of thing 'open season'. Some sleazy corporate, profiting from the buzz around 'hackathons', 'sprints' and 'open source' [tm] pays for some pizza and maybe a $5k or £5k 'prize' for 'game-changing' ideas. Result, the naive [and geeky people, including myself, tend to have pretty literal mindsets] get sucked in and end up giving the corporate several £100k of code and good ideas.
A variation [and I'm going to one in London in February, but I behave in a fairly guarded fashion] is to sponsor an 'unconference' and perform the same amount of intellectual harvesting in exchange for sandwiches and, even, croissants and danish pastries. We're past the beads and little mirror stage now, you'll be glad to hear.
These are near cousins of the now infamous unpaid internships, slavery, at last, for the white middle classes.
But the Vauxhall ones are mainly just drunken, incompetent, inoffensive ex-public [public = private and very expensive in UK!] school boys who leave their laptops in any convenient pub. Beside they are 'our' eavesdroppers, rather than the cousins. We should embrace them.
Great word bludgers! I think you may have meant bu**ers and I agree. Apart from how to tax them, we need to have a debate about whether we want these currently untaxable, intrusive, search-solely-for-profit [rather than search-for-general-utility in the economic sense] eavesdroppers in the middle of Kings Cross. Personally I preferred it as a red-light area.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes I agree, we're heading for asymmetric demand pricing [something I just made up] like the airlines and railways, it's expensive at the moment you need it, but the base costs remain constant. It's called automated blackmail or increasing shareholder value [in Europe, most of the utilities are privatised]. Also there's cash to be made on speculative option and contract purchase using the big data leeched out of the grid.
Am I being cynical? No, just reflecting the values of late stage capitalism...
There are probably plenty of other ideas, but what we have certainly doesn't work properly for the 'people'.
Not really, given that a lot of our lifestyles are unhealthy anyway. I have relatives in Korea where they eat tons of meat and then have regular colonoscopies, that seems to me to be faintly ridiculous. Why would we change the planet so that we can become obese and ill?
Incidentally there's a strawman argument there too. I'm not suggesting that we return to the state of hunter/gatherers.
I agree 100% with you that GMO holds promise and != Monsanto. But we live in a corporate-dominated world and it's a legitimate fear that GMO will become a tool for control and profit rather than improvement of the human condition. Second point, mono-culture and gene-spliced is a lot less sustainable/more risky than natural high-yield. We could concentrate on eating less protein too, that's what takes the majority of the space/water etc.
Just take liver out, go out drinking and put it back in when finished. What could wrong with that?
Oh absolutely, at 62, I've seen punched cards, disk drives the size of washing machines, computers the size of a decent sized appartment, compuserve and everything on up to the Raspberry Pi. That included hacking via acoustic couplers, slow modems etc. etc. Old certainly now doesn't mean pre-technology and old tech is tech, usually just slower and bigger.
As in any 1950's science fiction film: 'Sir they're getting bigger!' Yes, what go possibly go wrong with all of this?
Yes agree, we seem have US influenced laws in the UK too, either as part of our highly asymmetric 'special relationship', some the recent deportations and deportation attempts, for example, or via the WTO [wealthy terrorist organisation]. We need to wake up to this and see what we can do to push back via boycott etc.
I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy [with a laser]...
Yes naughty students for dying just to avoid their financial obligations. Never heard of such outrageous behaviour.
Rot13 is exactly one half of Rot26 which is a stronger algorithm used to hide things in plain sight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Purloined_Letter I hope this explanation is useful.
I'm 62, I don't really use my mobile [to the great exasperation of younger members of my family and certain friends, yes I do have those] except for emergencies and uncertain rendez-vous arrangements. I don't have an ipod or mp3 player either. I have plenty of computers at home.
By now you are thinking, here's an old luddite, an idiot, aren't you? But I like to sit on a London bus and stare into people's gardens or read a book on the tube [that's the subway or MRT to most of you] rather than scrunch up my face with some tiny game, even frozen bubble: http://www.frozen-bubble.org/, my all-time favourite. I find a lot of time to play the guitar, program and paint too.
To me, most of smartphone world is just a drain on money and time for trivialities like facebook and other social media. The telecom companies are encouraging it all, because it's revenue from 'apps', bandwidth, premium services etc. I don't need any of it minute by minute. If I'm reading a serious book on public transport, I'm learning stuff, if I'm staring at things randomly I find that problems are getting solved in the background, same with running which I [obviously from above] do without the obligatory mp3 player.
I'v been messing with computers since about 1975 and I really enjoy most of the modern world, but, I assure you, real conversations, real downtime, staring in space here and there is part of the mix, life isn't just pokes, tweets and 'friend' requests.
Agree, this is dot.froth to coin a new phrase and tld isn't it? Important problems aren't solved by 12 hour hacks even using 'world class experts'. If things [world hunger, war, disease, space travel] were that easy, we'd all have our togas, flying cars and vacations on the moon now. Get over it.
Well, for the moment, I'm still using AWS EC2, but I've started buying books [and everything else] from other suppliers, because of this. A real shame, I feel that Amazon is a genuine success rather than dotcom froth, but big things seem to become evil by some hidden law of scale.
Yes, second that, I'm from the UK, white[ish] preppy type education, still don't feed the trolls. On the subject, actually this is a big advantage for Linux in these settings anyway. I've set up a couple of drop-ins in the east end of London where there's a fair amount of random crime and I've used recycled computers and Linux. The computers have practically no resale value, so they are not worth stealing and they can be replaced pretty quickly and cheaply. Other projects with 'brand new' have, in fact, had trouble apart from being trashed by all the viruses associated with random downloading because they are Windows based projects. Ours have the problem that 'we can't teach Word' for example, this may not be a problem in your setting.
I wouldn't use the Rasberry or only have that as a small hardware hacking part of the mix, for reasons stated in other posts. I agree with LSTP idea, if power is going to be a problem, though it's harder than individual systems.
Finally we've always found sustaining the teaching to be more difficult than setting up and sustaining the infrastructure. The next project I start will include a heavyweight, teach the teachers element too.
Yes agree completely. I'm a hoarder so this goes against my instincts. One way I deal with electronics in UK is that I give them to a recycling charity that will make a little money and provide a little employment from it. I give books to charity shops. I have a sneaking feeling that there should be a recovery program for this [maybe there is?]: I am powerless over books, electronics, cruciform screws and assorted leads and my house, garage, garden and toolshed has become unmanageable...
.... he collects wires' huh!
One of my friends introduced me to their smallish child [now in their 20s, this was some years ago] with 'this is
Well exactly, in the UK nearly every large system that the Civil Service commissions [from recent memory Child Support Agency, Crown Prosecution Service, Tax Credits, National Health data spine, Secure email for National Health, various bits of HMRC [our taxation department for overseas readers]] has failed, been delivered over-cost and late or abandoned.
Incidentally on the consultancy side, the same 'usual suspects' EDS, Cap-Gemini and Accenture, for example, tend to be involved nearly every time.
However senior Civil Servants stay in post and, indeed, go on to greater things and usually end up with decorations and honours. Before in the days of high Dickensian stools, quill pens and Latin phrases, the time that the Civil Service still live in, it mattered somewhat less. Now that modern society is highly technology-based, this really, really, really has to stop.
Yup, I always reply on these threads, I'm 62 and [having had more senior jobs that required a suit and talking rubbish in meetings] I'm usually coding as contractor part of the year. On the other hand, I've been sweating over a hot computer since about 1975 and I enjoy it, so I've been very lucky.
I think part of the secret would be a good niche or target audience. Because I'm a Perl person I do a certain amount of back-end, some glue code, some data cleaning/ETL etc. But I do also have a fair sized personal network, built over the years.
But, one of the great 'virtues' of open source is that pretty heavyweight and marketable skills can be approached by downloading something and building something with it. I didn't really know that much about jquery last year, now, I'm not an expert but I'm 'medium' and lots of people use it for commercial stuff.
May the older folks force be with you! [sort of like the Force but a bit grumpy, especially in the mornings].
I presume that you are some kind of corporate shill from Google or other unhelpful individual. The 666 in the user name provides a bit of a clue. You've never taught have you? I'm not sure why you are 'in constant retraining' or 'reacting to current trends' either.
You need to learn the difference between 'scapegoating' and 'boycott' too and some logic too, the fact that one is not boycotting all of them at once doesn't invalidate the process of boycotting one of them.
I hope it works out for you.
Agree, but that's the 'big' digital divide problem, not hardware/software, everywhere has been flooded with that, but teaching is problem, maintenance of an inventory of equipment is a problem. I live in the East End of London and have seen expensive grant-funded computer suites lying useless because no-one much knows about firewalls, anti-virus, teaching people about phishing, drive-by all the 'elementary' things for the geek-minded. Then when they 'work' there's no cash for teaching and limited access [one hour a week was quoted by a kid who came to one of our drop-ins].
Teaching and maintenance is more labour intensive and expensive than just giving away a load of stuff to get a little positive publicity. Also, we in the UK are not very keen on Google at the moment, another specialist in fiscal dumping, like Starbucks and Amazon.
Except, Amazon, the BBC [less than before, admittedly], Booking.com, Zoopla, Lovefilm.com for examplem all huge sites. I've worked for most of those too as a freelance. Don't blame the language for badly written code either. Actually, it's the one language I find incredibly intuitive because of the linguistics ideas and TMTOWTDI meaning that one can code around 'stuckage' and 'suckage'. Also CPAN is messy sometimes but awesome in terms of productivity and 'things that needn't be coded'.
Go Perl!
I so agree but for different reasons. I'm doing a little open-source based work in the area of water/air pollution sensors, mainly for the grid/big data bit. I've talked to some of the usual suspects in London [I'm London-based] including 'Digital Greenwich'.
An example: http://living-planit.com/ is closed source, supported by big corporates who would probably like their noses in this particular government trough and also harvest the big data so that they can trade energy/carbon futures and help themselves/other corporates do some predatory/on-demand pricing.
So the £24m will probably run quickly into corporate pockets for the benefit of the status quo rather than the citizenry. At Accenture etc. rates, it'll be gone in a month or two anyway. I sincerely believe that the best way to do this is with small federated projects within an open framework. Then the benefit is maximised and transferrable elsewhere too.
I'm sorry to sound so cynical about this, but it's the truth of the current state of Airstrip One [north].
I call this kind of thing 'open season'. Some sleazy corporate, profiting from the buzz around 'hackathons', 'sprints' and 'open source' [tm] pays for some pizza and maybe a $5k or £5k 'prize' for 'game-changing' ideas. Result, the naive [and geeky people, including myself, tend to have pretty literal mindsets] get sucked in and end up giving the corporate several £100k of code and good ideas.
A variation [and I'm going to one in London in February, but I behave in a fairly guarded fashion] is to sponsor an 'unconference' and perform the same amount of intellectual harvesting in exchange for sandwiches and, even, croissants and danish pastries. We're past the beads and little mirror stage now, you'll be glad to hear.
These are near cousins of the now infamous unpaid internships, slavery, at last, for the white middle classes.
Don't!
But the Vauxhall ones are mainly just drunken, incompetent, inoffensive ex-public [public = private and very expensive in UK!] school boys who leave their laptops in any convenient pub. Beside they are 'our' eavesdroppers, rather than the cousins. We should embrace them.
Great word bludgers! I think you may have meant bu**ers and I agree. Apart from how to tax them, we need to have a debate about whether we want these currently untaxable, intrusive, search-solely-for-profit [rather than search-for-general-utility in the economic sense] eavesdroppers in the middle of Kings Cross. Personally I preferred it as a red-light area.