Almost all of the software I've written is as useless outside of the company as air pockets taken out of a loaf of bread.
The big-rectangle diagram of what I do is fetch data from A, apply B(A), and send the result to Z. This is great when A is a proprietary API delivered over long-poll HTTP, B(A) converts it into a vocabulary common to just our products, and Z is Websockets to a mobile app. When we add a new customer who uses A2 all I do is write B2() and the rest stays the same.
Outside of the company, it's useless. There are thousands of products that do the same thing for different flavours of A, B and C. However, we can get our particular product to our target markets a year earlier than someone starting from scratch.
Compulsorily licensed to a competitor, they'd barely be able to install it because it's not packaged like a product. There's an old database that has evolved over more than a decade that's as crusty as an old fishing boat's keel. If a "good compulsory licensing scheme" would compensate the company for packaging it and writing manuals for it, then it's looking at millions of dollars just in the opportunity costs of taking the lead developers off other projects.
To edit and elaborate: they shut down a large portion of New England, affecting millions of people. Amtrak service, for example, was suspended north of New York City at 12:30pm today. Private taxi service in the Boston Metro area shut down until 11am. Other public transit, such as the T, shut down for most of the day. People didn't go to work.
I know it sounds callous, considering how many died or were maimed, but we now have to consider that a couple of pressure cookers are on par with hurricanes, blizzards and power blackouts when it comes to anesthetizing the North East corridor. I think we should think about this.
I don't know what 128 is, but I know of people who were taking Amtrak to Connecticut but had to get off at NYC and travel uptown to Grand Central Station to get on a commuter train. They weren't going to Boston. Amtrak service was halted north of NYC because of this manhunt.
I do know that much of Boston had no choice but to take a day off on Friday. I know the Bruins game was cancelled, and that Comic Con was "postponed" and likely cancelled because of the difficulty of re-booking the conference center anytime before next year.
Not even considering the salaries and overtime of the officers involved, it is not wrong to say that this manhunt may have cost hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of dollars in economic losses. For example, some of the speculation from The Washington Post this afternoon:
Route 128 is the loop highway running around Boston.
I do know that much of Boston had no choice but to take a day off on Friday
Much of Boston is not the same as "a large portion of New England." New England is ~14 million people. The affected areas covered about 600K people.
may have cost hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of dollars in economic losses.
Your own link doesn't support "billions of dollars in economic losses." In any event, extraordinary events require an extraordinary response. In any event, I can't see how having those streets packed with cars and pedestrian traffic (as happens on a normal Friday) would have done anything but hinder the manhunt.
> Much of Boston is not the same as "a large portion of New England."
Alright, much of Boston is not "a large portion of New England" but to use your figures, even 600 thousand is still huge. Does it really disprove my point that this manhunt will have enormous economic consequences? Even if our economy can absorb it, we must address the fact that the cost was staggering in proportion to what it cost the bombers to conduct their attack.
> In any event, extraordinary events require an extraordinary response.
Bruce Schneier pointed out, once, that airport security was brittle because it couldn't contain an event to the gate: it had to shut down a whole terminal and often--such as with the LAX evacuations after 9/11, an entire airport. This event shut down the work of perhaps 600,000 for the price of some pressure cookers and black powder.
If it cost a few hundred dollars to shut down 600,000 hosts or terminals on the Internet, we would be looking at ways to improve security and protocols so that such an inexpensive attack could not force such enormous losses.
I think we should brainstorm ways to block this vulnerability. It should not be possible for two guys, 26 and 19 years old, to freeze a major city.
That bitcoins are infinitely divisible is one of the ways in which problems associated with deflation are mitigated once the 21M bitcoin cap is reached.
Divisibility doesn't really help with the overall money supply however. There's also the loss of currency that occurs from loss of Bitcoin wallets.
Even without deflation I think there would still be problems with high variance of BTC just from the psychological aspects of the currency. With central banks you can at least say that there are persons whose job it is to watch currency exchange rates and take one or more of many available actions to curb both inflation and deflation. As far as I can see you just don't have that with BTC (and by design). You can't increase the money supply, any action to decrease the money supply is permanent, and how can you change interest rates for loans when all of the money is already issued?
I just can't imagine BTC being useful for transactions in general (especially important stuff like payroll) when the inherent variance in value seems to require systems akin to what a high-frequency trader would use. It might be useful as a commodity for similar reasons that gold is (but with the improvements that come from its high divisibility).
Maybe this is a stupid question, but why is the mining needed at all? If we can keep subdividing them, shouldn't 1 bitcoin theoretically be sufficient?
"Mining" is really accounting. Miners add new blocks to the blockchain which provides for verification of transactions and the value of individual addresses. So providing a reward to mining (initially) was a means of providing a reward for performing an essential function for the bitcoin economy. Now that more bitcoins are in the wild it's possible to collect transaction fees, the second method by which miners can profit from their activity. Eventually the transaction fees will be more than the mining reward and the theory is that miners will remain in business in order to collect those fees.
Ah interesting, that makes sense. Can miners set their own transaction fees? And related if I want to make a bitcoin transaction can I (or my software) choose which miners to use to verify those transactions? Or are those fees determined by the protocol itself?
My understanding is that when conducting bitcoin transactions you can establish the fee you're willing to pay, the miners can optionally prioritize based on those fees. Theoretically it's possible that you'd have a transaction never verified or verified after a great period of time in the blockchain because your fee was set too low.
Head mounted cameras with live video streaming and two way audio, over commercial cellular networks, using commodity hardware (well, prototype commodity hardware), is still a thing. I'm more into the thing as a compute device than headmount camera, but until they come up with a good audio UI or chording keyboard (ideally as glove), they'll be really limited on input, so video recording is probably the best use case.
(I worked for a guy who was doing this in the 1980s, with ~50 pounds of equipment in a backpack, a 5W radio transmitter on his head, etc.)
That part is cool, but it's also "FaceTime with a head-mounted camera". They spent most of their time showing something that is better but not unique. I was under the impression that Glass is supposed to put a UI in your field of vision, yet the entire presentation focused on the camera.
Project Glass is interesting ... but this demo didn’t show anything new.
But when Apple copies Android's notification center (which has now been massively bumped in JB) that is a huge thing and everyone is up in arms about what sort of geniuses the people at Apple are.
They released the next step in their roadmap. The device will be released to US developers in the IO audience who pre-order and they will be able to hack on it at the beginning of 2013.
What hasn’t happened? live video streaming and two way audio, over commercial cellular networks, using commodity hardware?
I have been doing that with my phone for a few years.
Also, look at the part of the glasses behind the ear, now look at any recent smartphone teardown and see how they compare in size.
I’m sure Project Glass will eventually be interesting, this demo was really cool, but hardly a technological achievement. You can do the same thing by strapping a phone to your helmet.
I'm referring to the "shrinking at will." If you can back, well, anything you're saying up about how Glass isn't impressive beyond "lol open up a phone," I'd love to hear it!
> I’m sure Project Glass will eventually be interesting, this demo was really cool, but hardly a technological achievement. You can do the same thing by strapping a phone to your helmet.
Yeah... you don't see any technical challenges going from the latter to the former? Sounds like you made up your mind a "years ago" when this apparently already existed.
Apple ask everyone to turn of wifi at WWDC to make their iPad work and that is awesome.
Live, two-way audio/video-streaming from AR computer glasses during a freakin' parashoot jump over regular cellular networks however, that is not really that much of a big thing?
Excuse me. What standards are you applying to whom where?
But saying it's worth "10 IQ points" is a bit of a stretch. There's no drug that's like the one in _Limitless_. Piracetam and most other nootropics are either stimulants, like caffeine, or agents that protect against/repair damage.
I used to be the Editor In Chief of the OS/2 e-Zine! (http://www.os2ezine.com), although I began as just a contributor. The e-Zine was started by Trevor Smith, who slowly handed over more responsibilities until eventually retiring to do other things.
I have fond memories of that era, and of constantly working to keep your chin up as IBM's support grew more and more reluctant. Probably the most important lesson I walked away with was understanding how deep the roots of zealotry can go, how something as cosmically unimportant as an operating system can get woven into a person's identity until the two are indistinguishable.
Boss: "This new feature is similar to one that's already in another program, so you can just copy that code. You can do that in a couple of hours, right?"
Me (coining a metaphor): "The fuel distributor in a Pratt & Whitney Turbojet engine will not work in a Norelco Electric Shaver, even though both can be used to cut grass."
When you combine gross underestimation of effort with the re-prioritization cycle, you get a monster that probably destroys millions of hours of productivity every year around the world. As soon as it becomes clear that the project won't get done as early as expected, the boss re-assigns you to a new priority. What would have taken 4 weeks to do 3 projects now takes 4 months and only results in the completion of one.
One of them mentions a shutdown from Amazon because they ship too many orders late. That rang lots of bells for me, because it sounds like IT at an independent fulfillment company, which will usually have its own web store and sell through many other companies besides Amazon.
432 projects are a lot to you? Imagine your boss is someone who reacts to every business challenge and opportunity by creating a new project. Imagine that every vendor you ship for has re-invented EDI, without ever having heard of EDI, and it was designed by one of:
A) Someone they found on Craigslist
B) A kid they hired who doesn't comprehend how you can write a program without wrapping it between <% and %> and loading it in a browser
C) A guy who thinks he's a programmer because he once wrote an Excel macro
Their mechanisms can be so bizarre that you can't really support them by configuring an existing fetch-n-post, or Extract-Transform-Load system. You just have to fire up Visual Studio and write Project 433, AKA "Overstock.com Is Tripping On Acid And Now Requires That We Convey Order Status Via Modulated Carrier Pigeons".
Some of the weirdest I've been asked to support:
* Moving the order file between different subdirectories on their FTP server to convey status (ie: we log into their FTP site and issue a MOVE command on the file to put it in the /shipped folder). Did I mention that each file contains multiple orders?
* We have to implement a SOAP API to _their_ spec and expose it on the public internet for them to call at-will to send orders and query for status.
* CSV wrapped in XML, but it's CSV with a sub-delimiter because one of the columns has to be treated like an array to convey the status of each line-item.
* Orders that come in an Excel file, but they never order or name the columns consistently from file-to-file.
Oh joy. Sounds like dealing with telco billing. On one side you get excel tariff files which change in random ways every month, on the other you get silly billing data. Can you imagine ITSP getting an itemised bill for a month of calls from upstream provider? I think it was 3 rather large boxes filled with printouts. Still not sure why that happened.
The post office themselves claim it's a congressional mandate to pre-pay 75-years worth of employee pensions and benefits in a 10-year window. They give Congress 5.5 billion dollars every year, and it's that which is driving the crisis.
I believe the USPS snark is that they are paying pension and benefit costs for mail carriers that haven't been born yet. How unusual, congress screwed something up. The cynic in me is yelling "conspiracy!"
You may be able to grasp the instantaneous distribution of forces in a building or charges in a circuit without needing to know the order that they deploy. While a computer itself is an example of a circuit where the order of execution matters, a radio is not.
Order-of-execution is not perceived the same way as cause-and-effect, even though they're both the same thing. It's a damn weird thing that I've seen people do. A little bit like how artists can comprehend how the position of an arm has an effect on the way bones, fat and muscle are distributed over the rest of the body, but can't understand why they got smacked with an overdraft fee when their average daily balance would have covered it easily.
The big-rectangle diagram of what I do is fetch data from A, apply B(A), and send the result to Z. This is great when A is a proprietary API delivered over long-poll HTTP, B(A) converts it into a vocabulary common to just our products, and Z is Websockets to a mobile app. When we add a new customer who uses A2 all I do is write B2() and the rest stays the same.
Outside of the company, it's useless. There are thousands of products that do the same thing for different flavours of A, B and C. However, we can get our particular product to our target markets a year earlier than someone starting from scratch.
Compulsorily licensed to a competitor, they'd barely be able to install it because it's not packaged like a product. There's an old database that has evolved over more than a decade that's as crusty as an old fishing boat's keel. If a "good compulsory licensing scheme" would compensate the company for packaging it and writing manuals for it, then it's looking at millions of dollars just in the opportunity costs of taking the lead developers off other projects.