An interesting question is to what extent people will widely accept first-come-first-served solutions to naming. This is partly the case in DNS but not completely because the trademark system was imported into the DNS in an imperfect way, which means that some trademark holders have been able to use UDRP and/or litigation to seize domain names that relate to their trademarks.
In blockchain-style naming, there's no UDRP, and if you can't get jurisdiction over the particular name-holder, you can't get much joy from litigation either. There's no registry or registrar to whom a court order could be issued.
That has advantages and disadvantages from the end user's point of view: sometimes the legal system would have undermined uses of names that they wanted to make (as in the case of censorship by seizing or canceling a domain name, or transferring it as a punishment for violating an unrelated law), while other times it would have protected them from confusion and fraud.
I've been developing software professionally since the 1980s, when I had to build a computer from scratch. I've seen these three waves first hand- personal computers, now in your palm, the internet, now ubiquitous with cell networks, and finally crypto. The third has not yet become mainstream.
I will say this- we are on the verge of the crypto revolution. I have never before seen so much energy and effort, and finally, money in the crypto sphere. In large part because now there is cryptographic money (eg: bitcoin et al.)
For those of you who think that the startup scene has become lame where you're just building apps to sell advertising, you're missing out.
The thing about the crypto revolution is that it is not nearly as obvious. Internet and PCs were obviously great in the early days- great for everyone. Crypto is harder, has a learning curve for consumers and until that's eliminated it's easy to think that it will go nowhere in the same way that pgp has effectively gone nowhere for 20 years.
Much in the way that we've given up on "artificial intelligence" and made great strides in machine learning.. crypto is on the edge.
For Apple Beats Audio was a talent acquisition (eg: they got the founders, Trent Reznor and the like) for Apple Music, and a technology Acquisition (Beats streaming service and content is powering Apple Music) as well as buying a profitable accessories business.
Apple has great gross margins on computers because they have such operational excellence in building them, but still a Mac makes much less margin than headphones- at any price point along the quality curve.
I worked at Amazon, I interacted with Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post doing this does not surprise me. It is effectively his political blog, where he gets to push his agenda while being abstracted away from responsibility. (EG: Amazon PR can continue its campaign of BS propaganda without WashPo articles hurting them or Bezos.)
Fred Hiatt has run the Washington Post editorial page since 2000 and this editorial is entirely consistent with his past work. He's always pushed neoconservative positions and taken the word of sources like the House intelligence committee at face value. Amazon might well have financial interests in US intelligence, but it's very easy to imagine this same editorial being written with or without Bezos as the owner of the paper.
This is a good point. As far as I remember Amazon had/has a contract with the CIA for 100s of millions. When the rich own the media there is always a risk that they will hire those that push their agenda. Amazon could greatly profit from government contracts. I wouldn't argue one article proves a conspiracy, but it's so incredibly hypocritical that you have to wonder why WaPo would publish it. Especially when it means future leakers might not want to go to them for fear they will work with the govt to imprison them.
What does Amazon gain from an anti-Snowden article? Should we be worried about the privacy of our purchase history and AWS instances even more than we already were?
Not Amazon, but Bezos' startup Blue Origin is a defense contractor, currently bidding to supply the rocket engines for US national security launches (Air Force, NRO). He's one of two finalists (with Aerojet Rocketdyne), with a decision expected in 2016 or 2017.
I think it's reasonable to say it's a conflict of interest, trying to be both a newspaper reporting on the intelligence industry, and a major contractor for that industry at the same time.
(I apologize for creating a throwaway to post this; I'd prefer not to annoy AWS).
I realize this is an old thread, but it occurs to me that one of the problems is that implausible conspiracies are lumped together with plausible, likely operations and dismissed as a group with a single label.
Apparently the CIA popularized the term 'conspiracy theory,' in the 60s, though I don't have knowledge on the veracity of that claim. It's clear that at least a non-pejorative term would be useful.
Snowden's revelations did a lot of damage to trust in American servers and internet services internationally. (Bezos/Amazon probably stands to lose much in this way.) Many other parts of the world actually care for their privacy; Germany for example is still wary of excess data collection because of the Stasi and the problems they created.
News of PRISM et al is probably one of a few root causes behind underpinning this newfound federation of internet authority
> Snowden's revelations did a lot of damage to trust in American servers and internet services internationally. (Bezos/Amazon probably stands to lose much in this way.)
By attacking the messenger they show how little they care about their users.
Bezos kicked Wikileaks from Amazon's infrastructure with nothing more than a few senators expressing displeasure at WL's actions.
Whether Bezos is a True Believer in the American empire, or whether he just wants to curry favour with the government to make money is beside the point: Amazon is definitely a partisan in these things. It will be interesting how that fact will play out in Europe and Asia over time.
What Jeff believes is right is what accrues to Jeff more power. The founders of Google, Bill Gates and Steve Balmer, Jobs and Wozniak, the early Sun people, they all made mistakes and might have done bad things. Generally I think people running businesses are doing so because they want to make a dent in the universe. I don't buy the idea that CEOs are sociopaths (which seems to be a common perception). But if you told me you believed Bezos was a sociopath I would suspect you were right.
I only worked there a couple years but I had more interaction with him than I would like (though he never chewed me out) and usually, I'm eager to get close to the CEO and learn what I can.
I worked for Compaq for awhile in Houston. They built this fantastic houston campus, full of high rise buildings surrounded by woods. It was my first experience of a corporate tech campus, and while it was nothing compared to the Ski Lodge mentality of later (still 1990s) Microsoft Campus it was impressive to me.
At around the 2nd or 3rd story there was a tunnel between the buildings, making a big ring. You could run/walk the tunnel all the way around the campus, including thru the manufacturing area (yes, they actually made their computers on site in Houston, this was back when you didn't get everything made in asia.)
This company was the most paranoid I worked for. There were multiple levels of code names. EG: the code name for our product that my manager used with me was different than the code name that she used with her boss.[1] So she once started talking about a product but was using the wrong code name and I was completely confused! The product we were making was a printer driver. Nothing you would think needed to be that secret (and at this point the printers were increasingly commoditized- the job ended when Compaq got out of the business entirely.) And in fact there were different code names for the different versions, so I had to use multiple code names. We all knew the real product name too, so it was kinda silly.
I remember the really rough searches we had to go thru - the Compaq security guards seemed to be all assholes. Prototypes of todays TSA. You had to be searched when coming in and when leaving. (we were going to smuggle software out in a pocket??! didn't matter, there was manufacturing going on on the premises, we could be stealing Intel CPUs.)
At one point I discovered a woman from my high school graduating class was also working there (this was a big company at this point!) and we just met up one day in the tunnels and went to lunch. (also a woman in tech, I tell you it was no big deal until people started giving them a stigma.)
But it was great- in the stifling heat of Houston, to have that tunnel between the buildings, that was air conditioned, you could go anywhere in the company via those tunnels and you had a great view-- it was a sea of tree tops, with a few high rises sticking up. (Compaq was up north of houston, away from the Houston Sprawl.)
I wonder what happened to that campus.[2]
[1] Yes, back in the 1990s, females were about %50 of the tech population, their proportions dropped when people started telling young girls that tech was hostile to females. My mother is a programmer, for instance, and her team was %60 female, %40 male- in part due to sexism, women were perceived as being more appropriate for "sitting around typing all day" so she was able to hire females more than "ruining a guys career" by hiring guys. But that was because her company was old school. Tech companies like compaq were much better.)
I suspect the regulators who wrote the laws that are preventing this are wise to your idea and its the actual right of way that they are going after. The only advantage that a municipality has over a private company or not-for-profit, is a monopoly on the control of rights of ways in their geographic area. That's why municipality is can do this- private entities would have to get their permission to install a network. And it would come at high cost.
So long as there are levers of control, people will attempt to exploit them. The government at every level, should have no power to prohibit entities, whether government or not, from providing internet service.
Freedom of transaction is a basic human right (whether the Bill of Rights talks about it or not, read the Preamble to the Bill of Rights and you'll see the Bill of Rights doesn't create rights, according to the Bill of Rights, it creates limitations on government from violating those rights.)
Even if you disagree with the above, the First Amendment is unquestionably part of the constitution and thus this is a violation of freedom of speech (internet is speech.)
>The government at every level, should have no power to prohibit entities, whether government or not, from providing internet service.
Sure they should. You're being ridiculous.
The first amendment doesn't mean anyone can do anything because you can pretty easily cast a wide net and classify everything as speech.
I can't freely express myself with a firearm and shoot anybody I don't like.
Likewise, governments can regulate commerce. They're generally doing a pretty bad job when it comes to the Internet in many cases, but it's very much not a first amendment issue.
Freedom of transaction is not a basic human right - there are some markets so abhorrent that the correct response is to imprison those who participate in them.
Like, absolute freedom of transaction means that you could participate in assassination markets. It'd even be structured in a way that the buyer could avoid paying for performance - simply make a large payment available for whoever happens to accurately predict the day of death for a certain individual (and make the predictions expensive enough that you basically have to kill them in order for it to be a good idea).
A slightly more narrower statement of Freedom of transaction would be "if you can do it for free, you may do it for money".
Assassination is illegal by itself, paid or not, so using it as an example just confuses the issue. It's like saying Freedom of Speech is not a basic human right because you can use speech to order someone to be killed.
The government (the state of North Carolina) is simply choosing not to go into the Internet business. The municipality is just an organ of the state government. So it's the government telling itself what to do. Why should that not be permitted?
Yes, it's the most interesting new language since Go. It does a lot of things right, and much more importantly it's much better supported and moving much faster. For instance, there's no good go IDE/debugger setup right now (just the other day my boss was complaining that he's %10 as effective as he would be with a debugger, he's exaggerating, but not that much.) Also the way Swift has evolved so quickly makes me believe it's going to be a significant language. I don't think Apple intends for Swift to suffer the same fate as Objective-C (Which was never proprietary and which was superior to things like Java, and came out before Java, but was never widely adopted outside of Apple's ecosystem.)
Right now Swift has Playgrounds, no other language has that, excellent support in Xcode, works across platforms, and the language makes a lot of really good design choices and is improving rapidly.
What more could make a language worth learning?
As for whether it's the best language for you to learn next, that depends on what you have learned in the past. If you've never done a functional language, the next language you should learn is Elixir. Erlang is the only language I know that gets concurrency right, and Elixir is a ruby syntax and nice extensions on top of Erlang. Elixir is the best way to write erlang and erlang is a correct functional language with genuine concurrency (Haskell might also get concurrency right, I don't know, but Go does not and no other language or actor model framework does it right. It has to be in the language.)
If you've only done scripting like Python or Ruby and you want a compiled, heavier or more hard core language to learn, I think Swift is the ideal candidate for the next language to learn.
Unlike most engineers I want to be a manager. But it seems there is no opportunity for that. It seems that the non-engineers who are in the executive positions want non-engineers to manager engineers perpetuating the problems startups have.
There are few engineering management positions listed. The few I saw in the bay area resulted in excluding me because of my age (Stripe, I'm looking at you.)
It's frustrating to keep being pushed into individual contributor roles and then have low quality engineering managers hired in above you. (And I know I can do it because I end up leading teams all the time, they naturally form a round me. The members of the team are very happy with me- I have no authority but I end up leading them anyway.)
So I think the route for "old" folks is blocked also by the desire of non-engineers to make engineering management be done by non-engineers.
I did a Masters in Management of Technology, that opened up several recruiting opportunities.
I ended up not getting a management position however (they're extremely hard to get here in Uruguay), I believe it was because, like you, I didn't have a formal management position (I did end up having a lot of informal authority at my last job, and I've already won a lot of trust at my current one 3 months in).
One good route to more senior / management roles is to be an architect. The problem with that though, is your spend more time with your node in microsoft powerpoint, then you do in an IDE.
The best team composition is an age of ranges, spanning 20 years- eg: early twenties to late 40s. (I wouldn't turn down an engineer older than that though, of course). And ranges of experiences. You need diversity to refine the ideas before committing them to code. Often the younger guys are faster at producing features, but produce lower quality code while the older guys understand architecture but aren't as fast at executing it. Both is a good combo.
I think a lot of the startup failures of really early stage startups might be due to the entire team being exactly the same age and right out of college. So they make mistakes that have been made many times before. Put another way there are many mistakes that can kill you and the more experience you have on your team the better you are at identifying them-- but you have to have innovation and new ideas too.
Which is not to say that any of these sets of characteristics are exclusive to a specific age -- this is just generalizations.
> while the older guys understand architecture but aren't as fast at executing it
It's the older women who rock both architecture and quick execution. :) ("I'm sorry, but you opened the door, counselor")
Age does not immediately confer advantages or disadvantages - we just often use it as a proxy for "experienced", "more methodical", "slower", "inflexible", "good mentor". (Your pick here)
All of those are independent of age. Please don't compose a team by age. (Speaking as an older person. I bring a lot of things to the table, but my birthdate isn't one of them)
You can't have 30 years of experience when you're 20 years old. You're unlikely to have 15 years experience when you're 20 years old, and you're certainly going to have a different perspective when you're more years into programming, which has good and bad aspects.
Like I said, you want diversity of ages. I'm in my late 40s, I work with 20 year olds and 30 year olds and a guy whose even a fair bit older than me.
Hire the best people first, then make your team diverse, both across thinking and across ages and across everything else.
But there's a synergy I've noticed more than once when pairing a 40ish with a 20ish. OR even a 20ish, 30ish and 40ish three person team.
I'm obviously not (and it should be clear in the above message) calling for quotas, but it's a good goal.
Except it probably did. 15 years ago I'd been working mostly online for nearly 10 years. Sure the world was a different place when newsgroups were uucp over a (very expensive) 64k leased line and before the web, but still surprisingly recognisable.
Some of the details have changed, the languages, the size of the databases, the devices involved, and a million frameworks for front end have come and gone.
Some of the time 20 years experience feels like 4 years experience repeated 5 times with different buzzwords. The same screw ups, the same lack of understanding from missing the same point, the same management wish to do SEO and security later. Or to budget 2 weeks for bug fixing.
Now you know 5-10 languages all with good and bad points so tune out most of the zealotry of the latest fashion to try and get to real distinguishing points.
All that experience can help a lot. It's far from dead. We can even have the same emacs vs vim argument that happened in 1990.
To quote the other comment: "20 years experience feels like 4 years experience repeated 5 times with different buzzwords".
There are two things which come to mind and that I'd like to point out.
- Each 4 year cycle is bringing less and less experience. The guy who is starting now is going to work for at least 45 years. We could say that it will be a tremendous amount of experience, but it's more likely than he will not be able to sell > 30 years of experience. [it's challenging and not specific to tech work]
- There exist no people with > 30 years of experience. That's not to negate the handful of these guys in the SV and a couple of research centers across the world. Relatively speaking, the amount of people with 30 years of experience is roundable to zero.
- Corollary: It's difficult to know what it's like to have 30 years of experience in the current market.
- Final word: Shiny technologies are only affecting the 20 years old bro coders in the 70 hours web startups. The bunch of the jobs are still in old school industries like medical/aerospace/finance/government/contracting who stick to old school tech and never upgrade.
