Excellent point! The only thing is "Blockchain" (just the term?) sells stock.
If I had a dollar for every company I worked for and put out a press release talking about how they embraced the tech-sector's "Flavor of the Month"? I wouldn't have to work.
It's probably not going to be to the un-wieldly level of drilling down to the exact tomato, but whatever product has a complex list of ingredients it would be enough to know what supplier and batch of something was used to the point of where it makes sense.
e.g. a truckload of tomatoes from Bob's Farms might be bad and grabbing a whole set of whatever products was in contact with that truck - right down to who was driving is capturable data, No need to truly drill further.
And why blockchain? Oh c'mon - that's the easiest answer. It's the latest craze - and not too many things in the food sector can boost stock price and get people talking about you than when you start dropping "Blockchain" everywhere. . Efficient? Oh Hell no. Noteworthy to make your company name more relevant to today's news? Absolutely.
Heck, it had me at "find child pornography stashed in hidden hard drives"! Wow! they have biologic quantum decrypting noses?
Anyone that puts stuff (illegal OR personal) on a USB stick in anything other than an encrypted volume is an idiot. Someone grabs my USB keys and they get nothing but random data bits.
I'm still pissed at Ross Perot. I was with Perotsystems before they went public. It was awesome - and yet even after he knew the people in the company wanted every single share they would have offered and then some? He still sold the lion's share to institutional investors and all employees were only allowed to buy 100 shares at the IPO price - and the company went down the toilet - especially when Junior took over. He was a real estate man and couldn't give two shits about consulting services.
It was in that moment that I learned to not pay any attention to the suits in the C-level. They're all about growing their portfolio and couldn't give a shit less about the "troops". Ross's statements all turned out to be rhetorical bullshit, and it was after that when I became wildly successful as a freelance consultant and never looked back.
It was the kick in the ass I needed to prove that nobody looks out for you but you. No matter how "touchy feely" the company is? If it's tied in any way shape or form to Wall Street, it's all bullshit "What About Next Quarter" mantra. And quality across the board suffers.
Their target is no longer innovation or excellence, but next quarter's earnings reports.
Honestly I would really like someone to mention a tech company (or any company for that matter) that once they hit Wall Street, they didn't suddenly develop a myopic "What Can We Do This Quarter To Make The Executive Stock Options Fatter?"
Every time I worked for a privately held consulting or software company - it totally rocked. As soon as they went public? It was all downhill from there.
I'm a firm believer that it's the vision of the controlling entity that can make or break it - in the case of Jobs? He was a fastidious tyrant - but people followed him and respected him and made shit that "just works". With him being gone? Where's the rallying entity? It sure isn't Tim Cook or Wall Street.
Hopefully they will inform the USPS, as having "Check ID" or something similar on the back of the card is NOT accepted by the idiots at the Post Office.
It doesn't really happen until the US Postal Service supports it, as they seem to be the litmus test as the lowest common denominator with respect to technology./sarcasm
They have a buttload of inventory just sitting in California. I can't even come CLOSE to seeing one in person anywhere near Albuquerque. I have to drive all the way to Denver to MAYBE see one in stock. So right now a MAJOR part of their problem is retarded distribution.
Loved your comment "BMW price with a Fisher-Price interior", by the way.
Looked at a BMW i8 at an electric car meet here in ABQ about a month ago. Sales dude was reluctant to even let me sit in it (first mistake), I ask "What is the electric only range?" and he says "Battery only? Oh, uhm, 15 miles"... Seriously? I asked "So why are you here?"
For a car that takes two people to open the hood otherwise the carbon fiber it's made of will split in half, to cost a buttload more than a Tesla Model S that would blow its doors off the line? Puhleeze. Whomever buys an i8 (uncomfortable as Hell, visibility blows) they have too much money and should really give me some:)
I'd personally go for the "Fisher-Price Interior" over those pompous asshat blowhard tards at BMW. Why? Because at 238 miles at least they frigging _tried_ to make an actual electric car and not a overpriced sports car with an extra battery.
If Chevy wants to sell more Bolts? Those tards need to move some of the inventory that is clogging up all the dealers in California to rest of the !@#$% nation!
I saw a Bolt locally at an electric car meet. Nice car! Sadly the guy had to order it from Denver and it took a while. But if you look online for any style/color/option you want? You'll find it all over California!
Wanted the wife to look at one, and they cannot keep them in stock in the Midwest. None to be found.
Whomever is in charge of their advertising and distribution really should be fired. Or shot.
Gyroplanes are wickedly cool - the sad thing is, every single time someone comes up with a "roadable aircraft" like the PAL-V https://www.pal-v.com/ it turns into something so expensive that it will always remain a rich-person's toy.
And with respect to the "flying car" of the original article? 30 minutes flight time my ass. The number of lipo batteries you'd need to carry in order to lift a human out of ground effect for 30 minutes would be ridiculously heavy and take a day and a half to charge. Unless there is an order of magnitude improvement in battery power density with a drastic reduction in weight - us flying around in a bunch of quadcopters is little more than a bullshit pipe dream like Moller's "Sky Car".
Yup. It's that bad and there is like zero traffic on it with one team. Just to have a presence in memory drags the machine. They really do have performance issues with it they need to address before expecting corps to deploy it.
Even if they said "Just go virtual" you'd still hear an ESX farm scream in terror as a group of people logged into their virtual desktops in the morning!
I've been using Teams for a little bit at two of my clients - and I have to say Microsoft REALLY needs to improve the efficiency of Teams before they go fully replacing Skype. As soon as I run the fat-client app whether on Windows or Mac, it's a resource suck as bad as anything I have seen. It's like a really sad, slow version of Google Wave.
Not a chance in Hell. People can't drive regular cars today, and my biggest fear about autonomous driving is what little skill people have will be neutered away until they cannot safely drive anything at all.
Sorry - but I'm still pissed that all we ever got was Moller and his useless, bullshit "Skycar" that never had a chance in hell, coupled with a number of "roadable aircraft" like the Icon, Terrafugia, PAL-V, et. al., that are now and will always will be nothing but toys for the idle rich.
Flying Cars? As said in my best Lumberg impersonation - "Uhhhhhmmmmm Yeahhhhhhhhh".
Flying cars are the pipe-dreams we grew up reading about in the 70's Popular Mechanics magazines. It was fiction then - and it's fiction now. The best we have are Lipo batteries that to carry anything useful for any distance would be dangerous as f**k. Or we could be that dude on the turbine-powered hoverboard with a backpack full of kerosene? I forget his name/link but it's cool - but again, never gonna happen for the regular Joe.
The bottom line is that it's picking the right tool for the right job.
MUMPS though still alive in Open Source fashion has been pretty much taken over by Intersystems and re-branded/extended called "Cache" and the language "Cache Objectscript". At it's core it's still an awesome language for manipulating persistent sparse arrays and includes easy methods of exposing pretty much any data hierarchically as well as SQL projections, and has the ability to talk to Java,.NET, C, C# and just about everything else.
At the time of its inception, it was built to "fiscal edge" needs, not "bleeding edge" needs - as MUMPS ran on pretty inexpensive hardware and could do things with massive amounts of clinical data faster than most other languages at the time. It's what Epic (a giant Hospital Information System implementation at most hospitals anymore) runs on, including Indian Health Services RPMS and VA's VistA (not saying much as both of those behemoths could use serious re-engineering - but they work)
You're right though - I couldn't give a rats ass what the framework is - does it fit the job? Is it maintainable? Does it make sense? And if my developers all walked out or committed mass suicide to reach some comet in the sky, could I bring in people that could pick it up and support it?
"Wicked Cool" are not words I ever want to hear with respect to code that is running in production. I want safe, supportable, accurate, responsive. If I get paged at 2AM in the morning to fix something that broke, and that's after I had a couple margaritas celebrating a friends birthday the night before? If I cannot read that code, debug it, figure out what is going on and get it working rapidly, then someone did NOT do their job right and deploy code that is easy to maintain. I do not want to have to jump into stack traces going "What the F**K was this guy trying to do?!" because he thought it was cool and witty at the time. Save that Perl-esqe obfuscating bullshit for your Github-based personal projects. That kind of shit would never pass peer-review.
I used to come across "JavaEE is the answer to EVERYTHING in Healthcare" like bloated engines sitting on top of Glassfish and Tomcat. it was goddamned ridiculous (still is). And when a real-time message went "boom" someplace in the architecture, it took a team of onshore and offshore ass-hats just to find the problem? Your solution sucks ass. Period. I know of a very large healthcare entity that still uses IBM Websphere and ESQL that requires many DOZENS of people to support and has the responsiveness to change like glacier made of tungsten. And of course dropping millions into keeping it going because nobody wants to admit they totally fucked up and didn't keep up with the times? It seems the choice of architecture is sadly more of a political one than one of technical correctness.
Personally I'd love to have an 8 core chip running in a laptop with something like 128 or 256 GB of RAM. I already do most of my work from an MBP running VMWare Fusion and having two or three desktops running simultaneously. Something like that would put me in heaven.
Hmm... I wonder how far away we are from running a laptop with at least 16 cores, at least 1 TB of RAM, multi-terabyte SSD all with a battery that could last at least 8 hours? Running multiple instances of machines (Linux, Windows, etc.,) for developing multi-tier data intensive apps - and never having to use swap space on disk.
Yeah, that would be my nirvana. I'd never look at a desktop again.
I'm not surprised Intel is doing this. When your competition for IoT devices includes widely available Arduino, Raspberry Pi and other simple, cheap boards with legions of followers? Embedded stuff is either going to COTS (Common Off The Shelf) stuff or very highly customized. At least that's my thought.
Well, with all due fairness it has been quite a while since I tried going the VoIP route. Maybe I'll give it another chance. I could always use another phone line, actually. We'll see:-)
However with all the net neutrality things getting hammered and destroyed, unless in my case if it's not an ISP-supplied number, they might just jack my throughput anyway:-\
Exactly. And it always just _seems_ that when the call is absolutely critical? That's when Murphy shuts me down with garbled voices or seconds of dead silence.
I very rarely get into a situation when my landline doesn't work flawlessly. That's why I will keep it until I retire from the rat race entirely:)
Same situation here. I start my workday when most people are still jumping into their cars (and depending on weather, scraping off the ice, etc) or heading to the airport to do that long-ass journey - and why? So both of them can grab a "floating cubical" so they can get to a SCRUM meeting and "collaborate"?
About the only gripe I could possibly have is that I typically produce MORE work than my in-office counterparts on a salary - as I don't have a commute, endless interruptions and the siren call of the after work happy hour.
The benefits to my employers (and me) are far too numerous to count. I have a better on-site virtualized data center I've built myself, with three internet supplies (business broadband cable, DSL and a cellular modem), battery backed power supplies, onsite generator and a GSA-approved safe - and a security system better than most commercial facilities.
Above all though? I have the luxury of having contemporary bosses that know they can delegate a "goal" to me and not feel the need to delegate "tasks" - and they know I'll get my stuff done - on time, and the client will be all smiles and rainbows. If I need help from someone I can always use this thing they call a "telephone" (let alone chats and webcams). Dodge my calls more than once and you (and your boss) get followup emails that I am trying to reach you - so that "hunting you down" bullshit stays to a minimum. Just because I am working from home in no way means I cannot be proactive.
Best lesson I learned by working remotely - over-communicate on just about everything. Want to know where I am at on something at any given time? Hit my Phacility website where I keep all my work notes and track issues.
I've found that at least for some of the jobs I've done - management mostly needed people they could watch because they were the dying breed of 50's management - "I don't know you're working when I cannot see you" micromanagers. I've converted more than a few managers to my way of thinking. When they realize the money they save on travel fees means they get a LOT more work completed for those dollars? Their desire to see my face in a cubical drops to nil.
I have a landline - comes with my DSL backup in case my business internet tanks.
And I have to say, I will never give up my land line. Every single time I have needed to make an important conference call and listen to every detail, every VoIP vendor I tried along with my ISP? They scrambled and made the call have dropouts every few seconds. VoIP fucking SUCKS when you REALLY REALLY need to have that call be stable. Murphy watches that shit with a ever-opened eye and wreaks havoc whenever I NEED to use VoIP.
At least, that's how it always seemed. Now that I have a landline? Most all of my calls go off without a hitch.
Yep. I have seen credit unions do this to people when they're late on their car payments. They show up as the person employer on the CID. Neat trick, but I always thought violated some law or other.
Oh - and in addition - if I were the airlines I would be seriously worried about this technology.
I think there are a LOT of people that if faced with a similar situation, that shorter flights where the majority of time is taken up by all the bullshit surrounding TSA and airline hassle, that they'd rather have their car drive them while they could do other things to stay productive.
Hell, if the tech was seriously _that_ good at some point? I could see ending my day of meetings and just jumping in the car and going to sleep while it drove me home. And heck, I could see specialty companies rent out showers and such to people who have been riding in their car to their destination - their own "red-eye" version but on wheels - so they can get cleaned up and dressed for the day when they get there. Hourly motels might not be "just for sex" anymore. Or a national chain of gyms - or whatever.
No doubt about it. Self-driving technology is hugely disruptive IMHO.
Aside from the fact that just about any self-driving algorithm is better than a human behind the wheel distracted by texting, I personally welcome owning a vehicle with self-driving capability - especially if it means I can focus on working on projects on my way to work.
I occasionally have to drive from my location to my largest client in Denver, which is a 6.5 hour drive for me. Whether I drive or take a plane, it's a wash for me. Going to the airport, getting on the plane, flying, getting a rental car and driving to the site vs. just driving there is roughly the same time. If that time could be spent productively working on my laptop while the car drove itself the entire way it would be frigging awesomeness.
In fact, if I had that ability, I would far rather drive to my clients (I actually like road trips) and just work along the way. I personally have nothing but contempt for the airlines and all the bullshit TSA crap that goes along with it.
Also, telcos and other organizations would be stupid to ignore building out their networks better along all the major highways linking all the major metropolitan areas. If I had awesome connectivity along the routes I would drive all the time? My SUV would become my mobile office and I would be in "work heaven":-)
My theory is, the more that virtualization takes over and sites migrate their uber expensive AIX and HACMP high-availability architecture to RedHat and Oracle Linux, etc., the less relevancy IBM will have in any context.
In my field there are only a dwindling few Healthcare shops that still use Websphere and have to hire droves of offshore folks to maintain care and feeding of their ESQL WebSphere monstrosity - and when they learn they can do a lot better integration with newer, cheaper and more efficient tech? Maybe IBM will finally pass away into obscurity. It's funny, for such a big organization they completely suck at managing technical people.
Of course one giant healthcare entity that permeates the west coast and arizona that still uses Websphere using droves of offshore teams probably won't migrate because the consulting company they work with has too much of a vested interest to do anything efficiently. How does the consulting saying go? "Instead of offering a solution there's always money to be made in prolonging the problem!":) But that's a different discussion for another time.
And this is spoken as someone who has been working with Healthcare IT for the last 25 years - and the last 8 have been 100% from home. And the people and sites I work with are smart enough to collaborate over webcams and shared electronic whiteboards. What's IBM's problem? Ohhh that's right. Whack the old people and jump on the Agile bandwagon! IB can then say, "See! We're relevant now!" Bwaaaahahahahaa!!
Personally I hope IBM and their soft-layoff, Agile touting bullshit flames out and dies a horrid, screaming death. I just feel bad about the employees that are between a rock and hard place having to move from their home office to warm a dinky cubical to "collaborate" with "SCRUM". Whatever. Every site I help migrate from expensive proprietary AIX to Linux managed via VSphere makes me giggle like a schoolgirl.
I used to be like you. I don't put up with any of that shit anymore. Get really good at what you do, network, consult, etc., and get out from under that asshat. It will never get better - only worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent point! The only thing is "Blockchain" (just the term?) sells stock.
If I had a dollar for every company I worked for and put out a press release talking about how they embraced the tech-sector's "Flavor of the Month"? I wouldn't have to work.
Practical? God no. Marketable? Hell yes.
It's probably not going to be to the un-wieldly level of drilling down to the exact tomato, but whatever product has a complex list of ingredients it would be enough to know what supplier and batch of something was used to the point of where it makes sense.
e.g. a truckload of tomatoes from Bob's Farms might be bad and grabbing a whole set of whatever products was in contact with that truck - right down to who was driving is capturable data, No need to truly drill further.
And why blockchain? Oh c'mon - that's the easiest answer. It's the latest craze - and not too many things in the food sector can boost stock price and get people talking about you than when you start dropping "Blockchain" everywhere. . Efficient? Oh Hell no. Noteworthy to make your company name more relevant to today's news? Absolutely.
Heck, it had me at "find child pornography stashed in hidden hard drives"! Wow! they have biologic quantum decrypting noses?
Anyone that puts stuff (illegal OR personal) on a USB stick in anything other than an encrypted volume is an idiot. Someone grabs my USB keys and they get nothing but random data bits.
I'm still pissed at Ross Perot. I was with Perotsystems before they went public. It was awesome - and yet even after he knew the people in the company wanted every single share they would have offered and then some? He still sold the lion's share to institutional investors and all employees were only allowed to buy 100 shares at the IPO price - and the company went down the toilet - especially when Junior took over. He was a real estate man and couldn't give two shits about consulting services.
It was in that moment that I learned to not pay any attention to the suits in the C-level. They're all about growing their portfolio and couldn't give a shit less about the "troops". Ross's statements all turned out to be rhetorical bullshit, and it was after that when I became wildly successful as a freelance consultant and never looked back.
It was the kick in the ass I needed to prove that nobody looks out for you but you. No matter how "touchy feely" the company is? If it's tied in any way shape or form to Wall Street, it's all bullshit "What About Next Quarter" mantra. And quality across the board suffers.
Their target is no longer innovation or excellence, but next quarter's earnings reports.
Honestly I would really like someone to mention a tech company (or any company for that matter) that once they hit Wall Street, they didn't suddenly develop a myopic "What Can We Do This Quarter To Make The Executive Stock Options Fatter?"
Every time I worked for a privately held consulting or software company - it totally rocked. As soon as they went public? It was all downhill from there.
I'm a firm believer that it's the vision of the controlling entity that can make or break it - in the case of Jobs? He was a fastidious tyrant - but people followed him and respected him and made shit that "just works". With him being gone? Where's the rallying entity? It sure isn't Tim Cook or Wall Street.
Hopefully they will inform the USPS, as having "Check ID" or something similar on the back of the card is NOT accepted by the idiots at the Post Office.
It doesn't really happen until the US Postal Service supports it, as they seem to be the litmus test as the lowest common denominator with respect to technology. /sarcasm
They have a buttload of inventory just sitting in California. I can't even come CLOSE to seeing one in person anywhere near Albuquerque. I have to drive all the way to Denver to MAYBE see one in stock. So right now a MAJOR part of their problem is retarded distribution.
Loved your comment "BMW price with a Fisher-Price interior", by the way.
Looked at a BMW i8 at an electric car meet here in ABQ about a month ago. Sales dude was reluctant to even let me sit in it (first mistake), I ask "What is the electric only range?" and he says "Battery only? Oh, uhm, 15 miles"... Seriously? I asked "So why are you here?"
For a car that takes two people to open the hood otherwise the carbon fiber it's made of will split in half, to cost a buttload more than a Tesla Model S that would blow its doors off the line? Puhleeze. Whomever buys an i8 (uncomfortable as Hell, visibility blows) they have too much money and should really give me some :)
I'd personally go for the "Fisher-Price Interior" over those pompous asshat blowhard tards at BMW. Why? Because at 238 miles at least they frigging _tried_ to make an actual electric car and not a overpriced sports car with an extra battery.
If Chevy wants to sell more Bolts? Those tards need to move some of the inventory that is clogging up all the dealers in California to rest of the !@#$% nation!
I saw a Bolt locally at an electric car meet. Nice car! Sadly the guy had to order it from Denver and it took a while. But if you look online for any style/color/option you want? You'll find it all over California!
Wanted the wife to look at one, and they cannot keep them in stock in the Midwest. None to be found.
Whomever is in charge of their advertising and distribution really should be fired. Or shot.
Gyroplanes are wickedly cool - the sad thing is, every single time someone comes up with a "roadable aircraft" like the PAL-V https://www.pal-v.com/ it turns into something so expensive that it will always remain a rich-person's toy.
And with respect to the "flying car" of the original article? 30 minutes flight time my ass. The number of lipo batteries you'd need to carry in order to lift a human out of ground effect for 30 minutes would be ridiculously heavy and take a day and a half to charge. Unless there is an order of magnitude improvement in battery power density with a drastic reduction in weight - us flying around in a bunch of quadcopters is little more than a bullshit pipe dream like Moller's "Sky Car".
Yup. It's that bad and there is like zero traffic on it with one team. Just to have a presence in memory drags the machine. They really do have performance issues with it they need to address before expecting corps to deploy it.
Even if they said "Just go virtual" you'd still hear an ESX farm scream in terror as a group of people logged into their virtual desktops in the morning!
I've been using Teams for a little bit at two of my clients - and I have to say Microsoft REALLY needs to improve the efficiency of Teams before they go fully replacing Skype. As soon as I run the fat-client app whether on Windows or Mac, it's a resource suck as bad as anything I have seen. It's like a really sad, slow version of Google Wave.
Not a chance in Hell. People can't drive regular cars today, and my biggest fear about autonomous driving is what little skill people have will be neutered away until they cannot safely drive anything at all.
Sorry - but I'm still pissed that all we ever got was Moller and his useless, bullshit "Skycar" that never had a chance in hell, coupled with a number of "roadable aircraft" like the Icon, Terrafugia, PAL-V, et. al., that are now and will always will be nothing but toys for the idle rich.
Flying Cars? As said in my best Lumberg impersonation - "Uhhhhhmmmmm Yeahhhhhhhhh".
Flying cars are the pipe-dreams we grew up reading about in the 70's Popular Mechanics magazines. It was fiction then - and it's fiction now. The best we have are Lipo batteries that to carry anything useful for any distance would be dangerous as f**k. Or we could be that dude on the turbine-powered hoverboard with a backpack full of kerosene? I forget his name/link but it's cool - but again, never gonna happen for the regular Joe.
The bottom line is that it's picking the right tool for the right job.
MUMPS though still alive in Open Source fashion has been pretty much taken over by Intersystems and re-branded/extended called "Cache" and the language "Cache Objectscript". At it's core it's still an awesome language for manipulating persistent sparse arrays and includes easy methods of exposing pretty much any data hierarchically as well as SQL projections, and has the ability to talk to Java, .NET, C, C# and just about everything else.
At the time of its inception, it was built to "fiscal edge" needs, not "bleeding edge" needs - as MUMPS ran on pretty inexpensive hardware and could do things with massive amounts of clinical data faster than most other languages at the time. It's what Epic (a giant Hospital Information System implementation at most hospitals anymore) runs on, including Indian Health Services RPMS and VA's VistA (not saying much as both of those behemoths could use serious re-engineering - but they work)
You're right though - I couldn't give a rats ass what the framework is - does it fit the job? Is it maintainable? Does it make sense? And if my developers all walked out or committed mass suicide to reach some comet in the sky, could I bring in people that could pick it up and support it?
"Wicked Cool" are not words I ever want to hear with respect to code that is running in production. I want safe, supportable, accurate, responsive. If I get paged at 2AM in the morning to fix something that broke, and that's after I had a couple margaritas celebrating a friends birthday the night before? If I cannot read that code, debug it, figure out what is going on and get it working rapidly, then someone did NOT do their job right and deploy code that is easy to maintain. I do not want to have to jump into stack traces going "What the F**K was this guy trying to do?!" because he thought it was cool and witty at the time. Save that Perl-esqe obfuscating bullshit for your Github-based personal projects. That kind of shit would never pass peer-review.
I used to come across "JavaEE is the answer to EVERYTHING in Healthcare" like bloated engines sitting on top of Glassfish and Tomcat. it was goddamned ridiculous (still is). And when a real-time message went "boom" someplace in the architecture, it took a team of onshore and offshore ass-hats just to find the problem? Your solution sucks ass. Period. I know of a very large healthcare entity that still uses IBM Websphere and ESQL that requires many DOZENS of people to support and has the responsiveness to change like glacier made of tungsten. And of course dropping millions into keeping it going because nobody wants to admit they totally fucked up and didn't keep up with the times? It seems the choice of architecture is sadly more of a political one than one of technical correctness.
Personally I'd love to have an 8 core chip running in a laptop with something like 128 or 256 GB of RAM. I already do most of my work from an MBP running VMWare Fusion and having two or three desktops running simultaneously. Something like that would put me in heaven.
Hmm... I wonder how far away we are from running a laptop with at least 16 cores, at least 1 TB of RAM, multi-terabyte SSD all with a battery that could last at least 8 hours? Running multiple instances of machines (Linux, Windows, etc.,) for developing multi-tier data intensive apps - and never having to use swap space on disk.
Yeah, that would be my nirvana. I'd never look at a desktop again.
I'm not surprised Intel is doing this. When your competition for IoT devices includes widely available Arduino, Raspberry Pi and other simple, cheap boards with legions of followers? Embedded stuff is either going to COTS (Common Off The Shelf) stuff or very highly customized. At least that's my thought.
Well, with all due fairness it has been quite a while since I tried going the VoIP route. Maybe I'll give it another chance. I could always use another phone line, actually. We'll see :-)
However with all the net neutrality things getting hammered and destroyed, unless in my case if it's not an ISP-supplied number, they might just jack my throughput anyway :-\
Exactly. And it always just _seems_ that when the call is absolutely critical? That's when Murphy shuts me down with garbled voices or seconds of dead silence.
I very rarely get into a situation when my landline doesn't work flawlessly. That's why I will keep it until I retire from the rat race entirely :)
Preach brother!
Same situation here. I start my workday when most people are still jumping into their cars (and depending on weather, scraping off the ice, etc) or heading to the airport to do that long-ass journey - and why? So both of them can grab a "floating cubical" so they can get to a SCRUM meeting and "collaborate"?
About the only gripe I could possibly have is that I typically produce MORE work than my in-office counterparts on a salary - as I don't have a commute, endless interruptions and the siren call of the after work happy hour.
The benefits to my employers (and me) are far too numerous to count. I have a better on-site virtualized data center I've built myself, with three internet supplies (business broadband cable, DSL and a cellular modem), battery backed power supplies, onsite generator and a GSA-approved safe - and a security system better than most commercial facilities.
Above all though? I have the luxury of having contemporary bosses that know they can delegate a "goal" to me and not feel the need to delegate "tasks" - and they know I'll get my stuff done - on time, and the client will be all smiles and rainbows. If I need help from someone I can always use this thing they call a "telephone" (let alone chats and webcams). Dodge my calls more than once and you (and your boss) get followup emails that I am trying to reach you - so that "hunting you down" bullshit stays to a minimum. Just because I am working from home in no way means I cannot be proactive.
Best lesson I learned by working remotely - over-communicate on just about everything. Want to know where I am at on something at any given time? Hit my Phacility website where I keep all my work notes and track issues.
I've found that at least for some of the jobs I've done - management mostly needed people they could watch because they were the dying breed of 50's management - "I don't know you're working when I cannot see you" micromanagers. I've converted more than a few managers to my way of thinking. When they realize the money they save on travel fees means they get a LOT more work completed for those dollars? Their desire to see my face in a cubical drops to nil.
I have a landline - comes with my DSL backup in case my business internet tanks.
And I have to say, I will never give up my land line. Every single time I have needed to make an important conference call and listen to every detail, every VoIP vendor I tried along with my ISP? They scrambled and made the call have dropouts every few seconds. VoIP fucking SUCKS when you REALLY REALLY need to have that call be stable. Murphy watches that shit with a ever-opened eye and wreaks havoc whenever I NEED to use VoIP.
At least, that's how it always seemed. Now that I have a landline? Most all of my calls go off without a hitch.
Yep. I have seen credit unions do this to people when they're late on their car payments. They show up as the person employer on the CID. Neat trick, but I always thought violated some law or other.
Oh - and in addition - if I were the airlines I would be seriously worried about this technology.
I think there are a LOT of people that if faced with a similar situation, that shorter flights where the majority of time is taken up by all the bullshit surrounding TSA and airline hassle, that they'd rather have their car drive them while they could do other things to stay productive.
Hell, if the tech was seriously _that_ good at some point? I could see ending my day of meetings and just jumping in the car and going to sleep while it drove me home. And heck, I could see specialty companies rent out showers and such to people who have been riding in their car to their destination - their own "red-eye" version but on wheels - so they can get cleaned up and dressed for the day when they get there. Hourly motels might not be "just for sex" anymore. Or a national chain of gyms - or whatever.
No doubt about it. Self-driving technology is hugely disruptive IMHO.
Aside from the fact that just about any self-driving algorithm is better than a human behind the wheel distracted by texting, I personally welcome owning a vehicle with self-driving capability - especially if it means I can focus on working on projects on my way to work.
I occasionally have to drive from my location to my largest client in Denver, which is a 6.5 hour drive for me. Whether I drive or take a plane, it's a wash for me. Going to the airport, getting on the plane, flying, getting a rental car and driving to the site vs. just driving there is roughly the same time. If that time could be spent productively working on my laptop while the car drove itself the entire way it would be frigging awesomeness.
In fact, if I had that ability, I would far rather drive to my clients (I actually like road trips) and just work along the way. I personally have nothing but contempt for the airlines and all the bullshit TSA crap that goes along with it.
Also, telcos and other organizations would be stupid to ignore building out their networks better along all the major highways linking all the major metropolitan areas. If I had awesome connectivity along the routes I would drive all the time? My SUV would become my mobile office and I would be in "work heaven" :-)
My theory is, the more that virtualization takes over and sites migrate their uber expensive AIX and HACMP high-availability architecture to RedHat and Oracle Linux, etc., the less relevancy IBM will have in any context.
In my field there are only a dwindling few Healthcare shops that still use Websphere and have to hire droves of offshore folks to maintain care and feeding of their ESQL WebSphere monstrosity - and when they learn they can do a lot better integration with newer, cheaper and more efficient tech? Maybe IBM will finally pass away into obscurity. It's funny, for such a big organization they completely suck at managing technical people.
Of course one giant healthcare entity that permeates the west coast and arizona that still uses Websphere using droves of offshore teams probably won't migrate because the consulting company they work with has too much of a vested interest to do anything efficiently. How does the consulting saying go? "Instead of offering a solution there's always money to be made in prolonging the problem!" :) But that's a different discussion for another time.
And this is spoken as someone who has been working with Healthcare IT for the last 25 years - and the last 8 have been 100% from home. And the people and sites I work with are smart enough to collaborate over webcams and shared electronic whiteboards. What's IBM's problem? Ohhh that's right. Whack the old people and jump on the Agile bandwagon! IB can then say, "See! We're relevant now!" Bwaaaahahahahaa!!
Personally I hope IBM and their soft-layoff, Agile touting bullshit flames out and dies a horrid, screaming death. I just feel bad about the employees that are between a rock and hard place having to move from their home office to warm a dinky cubical to "collaborate" with "SCRUM". Whatever. Every site I help migrate from expensive proprietary AIX to Linux managed via VSphere makes me giggle like a schoolgirl.
I used to be like you. I don't put up with any of that shit anymore. Get really good at what you do, network, consult, etc., and get out from under that asshat. It will never get better - only worse.
Totally agree with this. It's all a matter of setting boundaries and keeping them enforced. Not a big deal when someone gets used to it.