I am one, of I am sure many, here who have written automated fraud prevention software.
Post a dataset somewhere that we can run our algorithms against, and a way of getting our findings back to you.
157 karma · joined June 4, 2017
Post a dataset somewhere that we can run our algorithms against, and a way of getting our findings back to you.
I would have a hard time believing that they are NOT looking to compete directly with us (actual information services); considering the massive advantages they are technically capable of providing their own hypothetical services while they own the pipes. I imagine they won't do a very good job of it, considering how easily they can throttle, manipulate packets of, introduce latency to, and just plain break competition (or anything they don't like). Or they'll just take the easy route and tax both ends and sell your personal information to advertisers.
Dystopian future, here we come!
The only silver lining I can imagine is that we may get LAN parties back. I miss LAN parties. Everything else about this very likely version of the future is pretty depressing.
Maybe next the water companies will lobby not to be utilities anymore and provide clean, and mostly clean water. $20 premium for water guaranteed not to cause brain-damage.
While he was running an exchange server, I was learning to program because I couldn't afford server software. I wanted to be the guy running an exchange server too. I wanted to run all sorts of stuff I couldn't afford. But I got my hands on visual studio 97 instead.
I home schooled, and worked as a tech at a sort of server junk shop in Dallas (what many may not know about Dallas is that it's city built on telecom). They would purchase computers from companies going out of business, refurbish, and resell them. I was 14, and paid in cash or store credit. My room was also full of servers and networking equipment. I bought as many of the servers that weren't selling as I could.
My friends and I watched the 1995 film "hackers" on repeat as if it were a new religion. We had LAN parties most weekends, and a lot of my equipment became "mobile". At any one time, I always had a "best" server that was stripped down for transport (which changed every time I could get my hands on something more powerful) and a bucket of switches and ethernet cables. Reminiscing is fun.
By the time the iPhone released, I was 7 years into my professional programming career writing desktop and server software. I completely ignored the iPhone. The idea was cool, it certainly looked cool, but the system itself was an appliance. I didn't believe in computing appliances. I still have little to no interest in mobile as it currently exists, and I don't regret it.
In my opinion, Apple's innovation wasn't the iPhone. It wasn't the app store. It was getting carriers to subsidize a $1,000 pocket computer and call it a phone. It makes sense, if you were building a $1k computer (that is actually worth a grand) to fit in consumer's pockets that you'd want to build in a store so you can make your money back. This business model already existed in gaming consoles (in consoles a majority of their money is made in licensing software). It was obvious it was going to sell like hotcakes. Unfortunately, this cemented the iPhone's appliance nature. They HAVE to be accessible. They HAVE to be secure. They HAVE to have long battery life. Those elements can only be maintained if they are viciously protected. I can get my windows machine to do whatever I want. The limit is physics and my imagination. I can get an iPhone to do what apple approves.
From a consumer perspective I understand that mobile is awesome. Everything is bite-sized and convenient. From a programmer's perspective, I can't help but see your phone as a toy computer, and "apps" as software appetizers. That may change, and I would welcome the change. As it stands, the walled garden, battery life, and touch inputs keep it at toy status for me.
I'm 34 now. When I started my career, the young programmers were 34. I was mentored by greybeards in their 40's and 50's. Now 34 is the beginning of being old. I don't meet many programmers over 40 anymore. I do the work the "young" guys are afraid of. I write the heavy math. I do the memory optimization. I do the complex multi-threading. I build the novel features. I write the code you can't copy and paste from stack overflow. I fix the fuck-ups. Maybe that's because the iPhone never killed my inner nerd.
When I was young I programmed because I couldn't afford the real stuff. Now when I program (outside of paid work) it's because the next real stuff doesn't exist yet.
I'll be really sad if the future truly is your phone as an interface streaming data to and from cloud processing. I can't help but feel like it's a step back.
It's such a shame WPF is in maintenance mode instead of active development. I'd imagine a big reason for that is that it didn't gain the level of popularity Microsoft hoped it would. I don't think they did a good job of explaining and evangelizing it since release. UWP/Win2d seems to be what was meant to replace it, but it doesn't offer the same level of control and compatibility at all. I'm sure there's some grand long term plan I'm not privy to, but I'd be much happier in the short term if we could stop pushing windows store apps and get back to building frameworks for the hardcore.
Did you know there was a managed version of DirectX 9? Have you looked into C++/CLI? I'd love to understand the story of why the .net initiative changed direction in the last decade. I'd love to hear the master plan.
You can build whatever you want on top of the WPF foundation. That's how .net framework API's work.
WPF is a rendering engine, with a control management system build on top of it. XAML is an HTML like way of defining controls, but you don't have to use it. XAML is sugar, and I generally avoid it unless my application is super simple. You don't have to use their control management system either, you can go strait for the retained mode graphics system.
As much as Microsoft tries to make windows development look like web development through sugar on top (XAML is the most recent) to attract the new generation of web only developers, it's not. There's a lot of depth, performance, and control to be had there.
If you want to see what I'm talking about, get visual studio community edition (if you don't have visual studio already) and spend a weekend with WPF without XAML. I think you'll be surprised with how much fun you can have, and the level of control you can take. Make your own controls, override measure, arrange, and render.
In WPF you can get direct access to their retained mode graphics system, built on top of direct x, and ignore XAML completely.
Before making a claim like "React is what WPF should have been", the author should have done a lot more research into what WPF is and what could be done with it. The beauty of WPF isn't in XAML, it is in WPF's underlying framework and rendering engine. XAML is WPF's training wheels.
XAML is WPF in easy mode.
Building a good visual programming environment I'd imagine would require either having a way to visualize and move around in higher dimensions, or dumbing down and limiting what can be done to fit neatly in two dimensions.
I like Reaktor Blocks a lot, by native instruments. They took the second tactic, and the result is beautiful (but limited). For what you use it for, it works great.