3,474 karma · joined November 11, 2011
People will either do the job or you have to pay a reasonable amount for it - one key principle of the UBI - more people get a choice how they use / sell their time and are not prey like today in many regions / countries to the few who dictate how much they will receive for their time.
How are you planning to find suitable space / scale in such conditions?
Sending you amazon / kindle tv promos does not help to cover up such obviously bad business approach, reliability & ethics as a supplier.
We will cancel all our Amazon subscriptions including their cloud services as a result of this "marketing stunt".
We need businesses to partner with that we can trust and build long-term relationships with - otherwise if they act like amzn here they should be treated like commodity suppliers - replaceable and not worth a penny premium or branding.
Sold off most of their manufacturing and now becoming one more "service provider" - classic setup: 6 overhead / 1-2 delivery (1 Programme Man, 3 PMs, 1 engagement & liaison man. - 1-2 tech staff doing the implementation). Target task: sell more IBM services to the client.
Or maybe they want to live off their vast patent portfolio - when will we start to call them a non practicing entity?
Sad story.
That's on top of what the bottling companies use (hundreds of million liters for bottlers) for a few dollars.
This pricing does not look like water is a sparse commodity and so much on the difference it makes not to water your lawn.
From Oct 2008 to Oct 2009 the SSE dropped from almost 6,000 to 1,700 (after it rose from 1,800 to 6k the year before).
Artificial bubble created by many different factors one being the limitations for Chinese investors / money to go abroad.
So we've seen much worse or the same in 2007 / 2009.
What I understood from that - it worked quite well with code bases like from the Google Code Jam (large LoC, no style guides etc), but not that well with smaller amounts of code and I'm looking forward to some additional results e.g. with a codebase from a corporate development environment.
As soon as you stop allowing to turn prisons into profits with inmate occupations guaranteed by the DoJ but instead come back to a different understanding and deliver various social functions and protections of our societies in the way they are intended to be (Not for profit as a service to society that you finance / support with your taxes) this will change and together with it most likely the stop of "unnecessary arrests" as they have recently be called by the NYPD will become more permanent.
Otherwise soon the "Ministry for Information" might charge you for "information retrieval" and the cost of your execution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_%281985_film%29)
Some of the biggest offenders of the Freedom of Press are now not battling for the protection of the press, but for being seen by the media as one of the mourners in the first row of the Paris events on the weekend (for a better overview of that see https://storify.com/tometty/staunch-defenders-of-free-press-...)
Most of these providing their "condolences" have been constantly mocked by CH, have tried to criminalize the work of CH in the past (e.g. German politicians), and are now shamelessly exploiting media attention and believe again that there will be no better time to even further crush the rights of European citizens, some with measures (e.g. further extending telco data retention, dragnet snooping in the UK & Germany) that latest with the events in Paris should again been demonstrated as not effective to protect from such attacks (both measures were already in place and broadly used in France before the attacks).
We can only hope that Cameron's statement in the article linked is solely a political one, fishing for voters in the far right & UKIP spectrum. Otherwise this might be another nail in the coffin of a growing and successful UK Internet industry.
Some additional info: Noam Chomsky on the aftermath / events in Paris - http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/We-Are-All---Fill-i... Reporters sans Frontieres / Reporters without Borders: http://en.rsf.org/rwb-condemns-presence-of-predators-11-01-2...
Compressed Air storage has been around for some time and one of the limits is of course the low energy density. They mention 750 kWh modules containerize - how many containers will that be at what pressure - 20 ? 50 ? 100 ? (so that they can still match safety standards while being closer than e.g. 1km to residential areas)
The diagram he shows in the presentation around 5min is from Scaled Agile that is trying to formalise the use of agile development approaches within the enterprise context (online at http://scaledagileframework.com/ )
I believe some the key messages from Dave are:
* Use common sense and focus on the goals and what you're planning to deliver - the approaches provide you with the agility to more likely arrive there.
* People and working solutions before processes and approach
* Collaborate, explore and adjust to change vs follow a predefined fixed plan
Some negative examples I've seen:
"Funny and ridiculously expensive certifications" - Job adverts making it a key requirement to have a "scrum master" certification instead of looking for people who successfully delivered solutions (within change / complex environments) Note: It takes 1-2 days from absolute beginner to being a "certified scrum master" and it costs a stunning £1,200 in London.
"Process over common sense" - Within a company of some of my friends when they asked me to help to turnaround a critical situation with their key development team - besides 2 developers all others had left because of conflicts with their line managers, one of them now standing in as "scrum master" and prescribing to continue and do daily stand-ups like before with two 6 people teams - sometimes only one developer together with the manager.
this is sad news. Dr. Dobb's was always a beacon in the computer and software publication landscape, one I grew up with and I've cherished till today.
I still remember the moments of pride and the feeling of recognition when we've seen the first positive reviews of our work in Dr Dobb's many years ago - something that could only be achieved by the high standing and excellent editorial work of the magazine's team and efforts.
While it might be understandable from a financial or commercial point of view that it's better to stop now than later, hopefully there will be an agreement found with one of the big data center providers (IBM, MS, Google, AWS)to keep the current site online and the archives open for the many who certainly will find inspiration and guidance in much of what had been written in Dr Dobb's during almost 40 years.
The conservative party massively expanded the copyright of publishers (German legislation: Leistungsschutzrecht - English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_p... ) and some of the larger publishers then started to demand payments from Google for including snippets in its news services. Google reacted by removing all those publishers from their news indexes and services.
Somewhere down the line even the dumbest of those publishers must have realised (they've been receiving 80%+ of their traffic via Google) that the laws pushed through by their sock puppets in Berlin did not give them the additional extra risk free payments they had expected (for the work of others - in this case Google). Hint to the publishers: Understand how the (distribution) medium works before you write yourself some dreamy business plans.
To my know by now almost all of those publishers have paddled back and have given Google free licenses so that they again will be included in the index - Question: Will they provided the same free licenses to other search engines or web sites? - looks like this should be another example for an overall review of the legality of these publisher friendly regulation vs fair use & censorship. It will then be another change of legislation pushed through for "special interest groups" by the current government and it's last 2 predecessors that has been declared unconstitutional.
The latest step in this play was the EU Parliament vote on breaking up Google (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/27/european-p...) - I wonder who paid for that vote.
What seemingly gets mixed up by quite a few commentators on this topic:
Docker is an orchestration, deployment, management, etc solution - the "container" is created by LXC, jails, libVirt or other OS features and now also libContainer.
This discussion also shows how far away / how early we are with "containerization" or container that are exchangeable / movable between different (OS) environment - we are discussing the companies that are building cranes to load and unload the boxes before we even have an understanding how the boxes will really look like.
Came across their early announcement beginning of this year (http://www.cdapress.com/news/local_news/article_6c1e49d6-8f2...) - now it seems they are getting ready to deliver / having every day use applications on the market in the next 6 months (by 3rd party industry members).
How does this compare to other multi-core processors / architectures e.g. epiphany http://www.adapteva.com/introduction/
or goto
and a video interview and demo with a SanDisk manager at a computer fair - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jarsTLGXx9c (currently only available for OEM, requires special bios setup)
There also students very frequently were using GMail and just used mail forwarding from their university email accounts.
With at least one large UK university we've seen very strong uptake of the MS Office apps & email (85% vs 30% in the years before). They also have a large number of distance learners for which these solutions are substantially better than what the university offered previously so that might skew the numbers a bit. Uptake of OneDrive for example was much lower around 40% 3 months after the roll-out but still rising. Stats that MS provides on this are mainly MS Exchange (online) based (plus some SharePoint / OneDrive data - the rest of the stats they provide are at best historic or unusable).
At the same time when the university wanted to communicate with all students besides their course work, they used Twitter or Facebook and not email.
One of the reasons MS is so successful within the (higher) education sector is the general risk avoidance of ITC management in these institutions (in the UK, central government wants cloud services so cloud are being implemented) and being driven by revenue-based investment vs CapEx - MS caters directly for that with their packaging and existing framework contracts already in place. One example - currently you get a US$100k StorSimple appliance from MS for free / paid soft via 1 year Azure services cost for scale-out storage service e.g. to replace shared drives (yes many universities still use them).
The other area where MS has done their home work is with EU Data Protection laws / DPA in the UK where they negotiated a full turn-key framework with JaNet that allows universities to be compliant without going to another 6m-1y assessment as they currently still have to do with Google.
Have a look at http://linuxgizmos.com/stick-computer-runs-on-quad-core-atom... to see what I meant with sticks plugged into the monitor - guess these certainly can be called commodity end user devices.
On one side the institutions cash strapped from years of government under-investment into education and with lots of their infrastructures long beyond end-of-life.
On the other, large software vendors that - like with FMCG - want to create their products from childhood onward as everyday items that every child knows (and will continue to buy for the rest of their lives).
Within higher education, at least in the UK, Microsoft seems to be winning in the moment.
You have only a (very) small set of universities that are providing Google apps etc to their students. With HW - BYOD and that latest every second year student now has her own computer(s)has most likely helped a few of the universities to stay more easily afloat. Microsoft at the same time has managed to win over more than 60% of all universities in the UK (to use Office 365).
One reason for that might also be that those universities that tried to provide Google Apps 1-2 years ago to their students mostly had rather negative experiences & many issues with the "roll-outs". But an even more important reason is the continuous dominance of MS Office in the business world - full proficiency with MS Office does still sound much better on a CV than having used Google Apps for 4 years.
This is now intensifying with Microsoft providing MS Office for free directly to all students (including K12) latest from next month on. They have last week started to give free access to their mobile (iPad, Android - tablet solution soon arriving) versions and those are now leading the download charts of all app stores. BTW - real world stats show that about 2/3 students use MS Office on at least 2 devices (laptop plus 1-3 mobile).
And the battle for the education infrastructures (storage space, business compute, thin clients - higher edu is one key client for that market) is also intensifying with MS now getting more aggressive with their virtualised desktop solution offerings (see also IE as a service).
If Google wants to regain some ground here it needs to provide more turn-key solutions in the infrastructure area. With day-to-day web based and virtualised application infrastructure, the OS becomes more and more secondary for typical end users (HPC / scientific computing / design & engineering are completely different ballgames and dominated by Apple machines on one side and linux / unix clusters for the other use cases).
When most mass use and productivity apps can be delivered to almost every machine including Chromebooks in those ways, the end user OS has fully become a commodity and decisions are / can be made mainly by the price / cost only. At that point Chromebooks (together e.g. with NUCs today, US$100 sticks to plug into monitors running Win8/10 / ChromeOS tomorrow) might become the cheapest option with all the consequences for the manufacturers (small margins, scale needed, etc).
What we have as transparency rules today is at best a good show - take the UK for example (considered as one of the best with regards to open data): DFID - the UK's development aid department publishes every £500 spent but with many 100s of millions they spend p.a. the only thing we know is that it disappeared in some opaque gov. shops in Geneva that have zero accountability, spend money on themselves as if there is no tomorrow and - when someone has a closer look - have "lost" billions or fostered corruption and organised crime globally.
And the OECD - like most international organisations - is not exactly a light when it comes to efficient use of (tax) funding.
First governments have to demonstrate and assure that they use the funds entrusted in an efficient way that is best for their citizens and not only for special interest groups. There must be rules to hold those in Government accountable and not only £5000 fines if someone "lost" or wasted £1Billion+ funds, and afterwards (s)he is moved to another senior post or receives a large consultancy contract from where they funds have disappeared.
In the moment this looks more like trying to threaten or milk successful companies or to make them compromise e.g. on the participation in dubious spy programs on citizens.
At the same time don't forget who is "running" the biggest tax heavens on this planet - its the UK and the US plus a series of "independent" island states where dozens of trillions of dollars have found a home (including for some of the largest multinational players mentioned here).