Coders, BYOD, and Car Mechanics

When you are a car mechanic and you are looking for work, you are expected to have your own tools.  (Take a look at the want ads in the United States of America if you don't believe me.)

Why don't we require that coders have their own hardware/software tools?  That would save a lot of the cost of supporting those technicians.  After all, they are technicians, right?

Scientists / Engineers / Technicians

When scientists mess up, people lose money and humanity slows down.

When engineers mess up, people lose money and people might get hurt.

When technicians mess up, an engineer signed off on something he/she should not have.

Google drive has crashed. Click this balloon to restart the application.

The "cloud" of the future is just as unstable as the junk upon which we built it.  :-/

Where are those computer systems which remain up and available for decades at a time when we need them?

-Todd

(Written on my Macbook Air.)

Sprint PCS v. Metro PCS and the $4,000 MacBook Air

I looked at the total cost of ownership (TCO) for my new Galaxy Note II with a Sprint PCS plan.  It is

$300 + $80/month = $2,220

If I had purchased a new Galaxy S III with a Metro PCS, which is pretty much the same phone, it would have been:

$40 + $50/month = $1,240

From my understanding, they use the same physical network, so they should be exactly the same thing.

Wow, that is an 80% increase!  That would be like this change:

My Apple MacBook Air I bought 6 months ago:  $2,200 TCO (if I ignore the $400 I paid for accessories like a mouse, and extra charger, cables to use an external monitor, etc.).

Today's cost for a new product that basically does the same thing:  $4,000!

Would you pay $4,000 for a MacBook Air?

Yup, smart phones are the future.  :-)

Windows 8 Performance

As long as Microsoft is selling a server version and a "single-user" version of Windows, they will likely have to continue to internally hobble the "single-user" version so people will not use it instead of paying more for the server version.

Until Microsoft figures out a way to officially separate the two--make Windows "single-user" free or almost free--people are going to use other OSes for their personal devices, and developers are going to continue to use Linux/OS-X/Solaris/etc.

Idea of the Day.

A remote-control amplifier which works with any remote!  Just place it on a surface and it amplifies the signals coming from your remote control.  It works like magic!

It can be advertised as "as seen on TV."  :-)

Every Cloud Device has Prior Art

...proof to follow.

Idea of the day.

Create an iPhone app so your kids can take a picture of their lost pet.

If a similar pet shows up in any picture taken by anyone (or any video feed), they are alerted.

It's not too hard to do if you limit the location from which you mine results based on how long ago the loss was reported.

Heart Surgery, Plumbing, Lawyers, and the Future of Computer Engineering in Silicon Valley

...and the rest of the world.

I see two fundamental problems with how some companies employ engineers in Silicon Valley.  I don't know if they exists in the rest of the world because I only work there, I don't live there.  You don't learn about these problems from working as an engineer (at a good company).  You learn about them through experience (at a "bad" company).

The problems:

1. Engineers have been jumping around between companies in Silicon Valley for years.  When the industry is booming, engineers jump companies to get raises.  When an engineer (similar to a CEO) is not performing well, they jump companies.  As an example, I know of several engineers who left a company recently, one of whom had not had a raise for at least four years.  I'd have left long before that unless I was doing something that was going to change the world, i.e. make lots of money for my company.
2. Because it is impossible to prevent engineers from passing along information they have "learned," it is virtually impossible to keep secret data from moving between companies when engineers switch jobs. (More on "What Engineers Learn" in a future post if I remember to post it.)

How do we handle these problems when we hire other professionals (highly educated or not)?

• When we hire a doctor, we want one who has a great background.  We don't have to worry about him/her passing along medical records.
• When we hire a lawyer, we want one who has a great background.  We don't have to worry about him/her passing along legal documents.
• When you hire a plumber, you probably wouldn't mind if he reused the cast-offs from your plumbing job.  (But you might not want him using cast-offs from his previous jobs on yours.)

These professionals are expected to not pass along your valuable information, old plumbing, or scraps from things you were billed for.

Engineers can't keep from passing along what they know.  If you ask them, don't pass along any company secrets, they can do that.  When you hire an engineer.  Trust that person with your IP.  If you don't he/she can't do a good job.  If you can't trust them don't hire them.

However, if you ask them to not pass along their knowledge of programming computers, building complex systems, getting everything done correctly, you can't keep them from passing that along.

If you hire an engineer, don't hinder him/her by not answering questions or by keeping skunk-works projects from him/her.

So, why is it we don't trust engineers with our corporate secrets, but we are willing to ask them if they have programmed in C / LISP / FORTRAN / Erlang / node.js / etc?  Because computer engineers (and software engineers) are not programmers!

Use your engineers correctly.  Computer/software engineers design correct/scalable/maintainable systems.  They don't write programs if there is no one else (or no budget) available to do it.  You don't ask a computer/software engineer what languages they know, you ask him/her what language you should be using.

When we hire a good heart surgeon, we don't ask him what kind of scalpel he uses.  When we hire a plumber, we might ask him what kind of faucet or pipes he prefers.  When we hire a lawyer, we might listen to his advice (if we're smart).

-Todd

Social Media, Advertising, and Performance

I make computers fast.

These guys make social networks need more compute power!:

http://www.addthis.com/
http://freedns.afraid.org/

They are my heros.  :-)  Why be afraid?

-Todd

Does Google Pay for Non-security Fixes?

I have one for them.  It is a bug in Gmail running on Chrome running on Linux running on Intel.

If the bug causes me to lose money, which one will be liable?

-Todd

Reminder section:


- Send marketing idea (Q-drive for wikipedia) to the marketing guy at Q.

- Eventual consistency and GoDaddy.com.

- BLOG: Context Switching, Amdahl's Law, and How the Internet Made me More Efficient

- Brandon: A true crowd-sourcing idea.

- A new card game: I have to keep them all until I find a way to help them [make money].

- Why GoDaddy.com needs a computer engineer.

- Companies are entitified.  Entitify me.  Apply to be elected as word of the year!  That would look great on a resume!

COTS, Engineering, Politics, and Teachers

COTS:  Commodity, off-the-shelf (parts).

Engineers know what that means because they build things.  Scientists don't learn that until they start working for a company, unless they are involved in manufacturing (I'll guess).

Because engineers have not distinguished themselves from everyone else they (we?) have become a commodity.

Companies hire them (us?) and don't feel comfortable telling them (us?) everything we need to know to do our jobs.

When engineers started jumping between companies in Silicon Valley, they lost the trust of the companies for which they work.

Most of what you see above, I learned from teachers.

-Todd

p.s. The "politics" is built-in.  Read the above again.

The U.S. Presidential Debate According to Freud

Looking at the second Presidential debate at a higher level, the election is already decided.

If you watch it again and look at all of the slips, the people involved in the debate already think Romney is going to be elected.

The only question that remains is whether that is because they have been told that will happen or if they think that will happen.

-Todd

Knowledge is Power

From this BLOG post about storage capacity:

What else do you do with unlimited [computing] power?

The only thing needed to make the most powerful computer this guy is NOT complaining we have too much of is networking.

Doing a quick search for "Turing Test Networking" revealed this and digging a little led to this and then to this.

It continues to get more interesting the farther I go.

It Alan Turing the ghost in Princeton's machine?

The Bush Brothers are Pretty Smart

From here:

Currently, however, helium reserves in the U.S., which supplies 75% of world's annual demand for 6.2 billion cubic feet, are at an all-time low. Under current conditions, the largest U.S. reserve will only last another five to six years unless additional supplies are brought on line.

Interesting fact to tell your kids:

While helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, here on earth, most of it bleeds right through the atmosphere and into space.

From Wikipedia:

By 2007, the federal government was reported as auctioning off the Amarillo Helium Plant. The National Helium Reserve itself was reported as, "(S)lowly being drawn down and sold to private industry."^[4]

Of course, in order to figure out how smart they are, I'd have to find out who owns what, but I assume even the dumbest people don't miss a golden goose when it walks across their desk.  :-)

Engineering our Economy

Wow!  What a nice interface.

I'm watching a PBS-like talk about economics which was probably triggered by the U.S. Presidential debate earlier today.

I don't even know what side is which as far as the economists go.  I do know that if the very rich take too many of the world's resources, some people will hurt for it.  If not now, later when we start to run out of something.

Everybody seems to agree there are two absolutes:  death and taxes.

The solution:

Tie the tax rate to our willingness to invest.  If the tax rate is too high, people won't risk their money to pursue new things.  If it is too low, we end up with a big deficit and we can't pay for what we think is important, whether that is defense, education, vice, or health care.

Engineers call this a negative feedback system.  It is stable if the amount of feedback is tuned appropriately.  Here are the two sides of the control: (Stable-feedback rate regulation is a more palatable name.)

• If the income-equality gap is growing too large, tax more for free/assisted benefits for all.
• If high-income people are not willing to invest, lower taxes.

The obvious question here is, why have we not done this?  Answer: The feedback loop is several years in length, so we have not had a chance to experiment with this.  If we go back to a flat-tax system and set taxes at a point where our budget is balanced, we can see where we need to go from there.

Our current system is chaotic.  We need to rein in the chaos...but not too much.

-Todd