| Artificial Intelligence
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AI (Artificial Intelligence) isn't what people think it is, and we're not nearly as advanced as the laypeople think, and the others prey upon that ignorance for scares, clicks and attention. This is a little primer on the terms, what it can and can't do. And where it still needs to go.
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| Balanced tech company
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As an oversimplification, balancing opposing forces in Sales/Marketing, Finance/Operations and Engineering is key to having a well run Tech Company. Throw in some other difficulties like good communication, good focus, and reducing politics, and things will hum along smoothly. But it's like trying to keep jugglers riding unicycles-sticks on a slack-line: while the theory is easy, the continuous shifting makes the real-life implementation hard.
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| Beta
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Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta... what is a beta version anyways? Many companies talk about Beta version, or "going Beta". Many non software people, or even many managers at software companies, don't even know what that means. The short version is just letters of the Greek Alphabet: Alpha (1st) was generally for in house testing, Beta (2nd) was for outside testers, and Golden Masters were versions burned onto prototype CD's (that were gold in color) and sent to places that would manufacture many CDs/DVDs from.
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| Dotcom Bubble
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People on both sides of the dot-com bubble can be wrong at the same time. The Internet IS changing the global economy, and this IS NOT just a "flash-in-the-pan" fad that's going to be gone tomorrow. But the other side is that investors CAN overreact to hype, get way ahead of returns, and that can cause a big pullback. But in the long term, this is the new normal.
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| Ergonomics
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Ergonomics is the study of people's efficiency in their working environment. But it practically means adapting our environment (or tech) to meet our needs. Most commonly it is used to describe how we design our workplace (environment) to maximize our productivity or minimize our operator fatigue and discomfort. Let's focus on how it applies to computers and the workplace.
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| FUD
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There is a computer term that you hear some geeks and industry insiders use, but many people new to computers don't know, but should. That term is FUD. FUD means "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt", and it was the tool of large companies to scare users from using small companies software (or hardware). They'd so uncertainty, so customers would buy from the safest (largest) company, even if it wasn't currently the best software, or scare them into buying the biggest program, over features they might someday need (but only added complexity today).
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| Female Geeks
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Why are there so few female geeks? Sexism is a part of life.
Some who don't know me might call me a sexist pig. Not because I think one gender is better than the other, I just think everything in life is about tradeoffs. Genders are not better or worse, but there are differences. I don't just mean different as in input vs. output, or physical differences, I mean that we are fundamentally different in how we behave, what motivates us, how we think, as well as how our environment effects (and changes) us. This helps explain why there are so few Female Geeks.
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| Hollywood Hackers versus real life
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Intrusion and prevention is nothing like the movies. Think months to deliver an attack, to get through layers of defenses. And most counter-hacking is computer forensics to figure out what they got, days or weeks after they're gone: following log trails, or decoding some payload. If you know they're there, they can block you -- and they can usually only figure out someone was there, long after they're gone.
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| Information Age
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These article were first written as BBS posts, in the 1980's or in the 1990's computer forums. Microcomputers (you probably know as desktops) displaced "Big Iron" and dumb terminal, but these battles and questions had been raging for decades back then. Did people want all their data on them, or just be able to access it from anywhere (and any device). And the answer was, and still is, "yes", both please.
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| Information Age: Changes
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Information Age Changes: Information is power, and it's in the hands of the unwashed masses!
In the past, the media, the press, or whatever you choose to call them, had a lot of power over people. They controlled the information, and that alters people's perspectives and their entire lives. People fail to realize how significant this power is. Now it is being wrested from their control and put in the hands of the common man. Will anarchy result?
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| Information Age: Copyrights
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The information age is disruptive, and one of the most disrupted areas is copyrights (intellectual property). Economic wars are being fought over who owns what, and for how long, and it's breaking whole markets. The Music industry sort of collapsed and is scrambling because used music is as good as the original. The same with books, articles, comics, and anything creative. An information economy is a pirate economy... the sellers of content (whether that's audio, video, written), no longer have a monopoly on distribution, because it is so easy to get it from other people. And there becomes conflict between buying something new, and giving the author their piece, or buying something used and getting the best deal -- but cutting the author out.
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| Information Age: History Repeating
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Alan Kay thought up the idea of the DynaBook in 1968 (which later became laptops, or tablets), by listening to those around him, predicting the same things. History and progress is happening in slow motion. It only seems fast, because we're moving slower.
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| Information Age: Interesting Times
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These article were first written as BBS posts, in the 1980's or in the 1990's computer forums. Microcomputers (you probably know as desktops) displaced "Big Iron" and dumb terminal, but these battles and questions had been raging for decades back then. Did people want all their data on them, or just be able to access it from anywhere (and any device). And the answer was, and still is, "yes", both please.
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| Journaling
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Journaling is the art of creating logs of things that you're doing, such that you can reverse or recreate things, using the logs. I joke it's, "Dear Diary, now I'm going to make a change..."
Basically it is like being followed around by the FBI or a secretary, and have them writing down every little thing you do, every day. A minute by minute diary of events. While we might think of this as an annoying invasion of privacy, it could occasionally come in handy during a lawsuit or something where you want to know exactly what you were doing when something bad happened, or if you lost something and you needed to retrace your steps.
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| Legacy Kills
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Ahh Legacy, being haunted by your own past. Sometimes great, always painful, a products legacy can be both its greatest strength (name recognition, customers, trained users, and so on), and it can be it's greatest weakness (cruft, resistance to change, millstone to drag around, etc). While it is great to have a customer base paying for your R&D, it can also suck when you're trying to adapt to a changing market or changing technology: it can suffocate companies and products under its own weight.
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| Origins of the Internet
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Government/ARPA research gave us the Internet the same way they invented the car or airplane. By 1976 (founding of ARPA) we had hundreds of computers networked, by 1993 the Internet only carried 1% of the information traffic (and we had plenty of traffic). But by 2007 that had flipped and most traffic was TCP/IP based, because it was free, standard and good enough. However, without TCP/IP, one of the other protocols would have become a standard, and we’d still have had everything we have today (in some areas, more). The government gave us nothing that we didn’t already have (or wouldn’t have). Politicians (as usual) took credit for other people’s work.
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| PCs 20 year anniversary
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The media claimed last week was the 20 years anniversary of the "PC", and it was, if you think the IBM PC was the beginning of the computer or personal computer revolution. But of course it wasn't.
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| Quality Assurance
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Quality Assurance is a bit of an oxymoron, as quality is never assured. I spent a lifetime doing Software Quality Assurance one summer. After that, my dealings with QA, and appreciation for what they do has never been the same.
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| Spam
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My Aunt asked a question the other day about all those unsolicited emails she gets. Emails telling her she can "Make money while she sleeps...", asking her if should would like to earn an extra "$10,000 a month, part time...", or telling her where she can "buy herbal viagra on-line...". She asked, "What are these emails, and how does she stop them?".
I told her they were "spam".
She asked, "what's spam and where does the term come from?" In my usual geek style -- ask a simple question and get a four page answer that may eventually stumbles into the point.
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| Speed and Performance
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Speed and Performance: how they differ. Many people understand simple specs and performance changes in a subsystem. What they don't understand is those effects on the whole system. Improving a subsystem's speed may have a very small impact on real-world performance. This is why you hear someone claim to increase the speed by 50% or 100%, while in the real world users only see a 5% performance gain. The claims aren't fraudukent, just misleading and people just don't get what the numbers mean.
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| Throughput and Latency
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Speed is relative. What kind of speed are you talking about? There are a few aspects to speed on a computer. People start looking at benchmarks, or hearing numbers, and they don't always understand what they mean -- or what changes will mean to them. For example if a machine is twice as fast as another, why doesn't it take half as long to do something? Well, mainly because computers are complex systems, and mostly because twice as fast at one thing is not twice as fast overall. Lets start with the basics, the difference between throughput and latency.
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| Wetware
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The other day, I got the pleasure of speaking with a bunch of teens at a career center, on a "career day", about what it is that I do, and why I do it (at the time, I was Director of New Media for a media conglomerate.... fancy speak for I helped Newspapers get online and make money doing so). Career day was a lot of fun. One of the things I was asked about is what is holding technology back the most. The answer was easy, "Wetware (People)".
Wetware is slang for the human brain/computation. You have hardware, software, and human cognition (Wetware). Well, wetware is need for the other two, for now... but it is also holding us back. People are the biggest barrier to technology, innovation and adoption. Computers are incredibly simple devices - as one kid asked, "aren't they all just 0's and 1's"? And they are. What makes them more complex is how many 0's and 1's there are, and how we put them together. Computers are doubling in capabilities every few years, the reason progress is much slower than that, is people's ability (or desire) to grow, is not up to that challenge.
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| Why is software so buggy?
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Why are programs so buggy? They're not bugs, they're features... sorry, that's an old programmer joke. Everyone has problems with their programs (software), it crashes, stalls, or does unexpected things. People ask about these "bugs", why are there so many, and what can they do about it. Hopefully this helps you understand why.
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