Technorama

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One of the issues faced by introducing changes in software, is that colleagues or management may be too afraid to change things for risk of breaking something. Develop the changes on a branch, and innovate, minimise the risk.

What an amazing thing it was that a stagnant corporation Nokia failed. 4000 engineers were liberated to form their own startups. In a socialist country, Nokia would have been propped up by subsides and consumers would have been suck buying crappy phones for eternity.

I think we need a Universal Port Standard. Let's unify USB with DisplayPort and HDMI. There's no reason to keep them all separate

Where a business doesn't completely investigate defects raised, it creates apathy, consumers and engineers won't bother to report again. We have experienced this with major companies. It just means we remember to not bother reporting a bug next time, and we try and choose another provider.

The same happens with any service that's under performing, eg if police didn't investigate crime, over time people give up on reporting crime.

By not making the most of that user bug report and crash dumps provided, businesses are harming their own business.

Looks like LLVM has really started a language revolution, everything from shaders to Julia seems to be based on LLVM these days. It's really powering the next revolution in IT and machine learning

Where will we be in 40 years time economically, and employment?

Newspapers talk about the machines taking over, but in reality that is far off. GPUs are terribly inefficient, compared to human brains. Human thinking (neurons) and learning doesn't even use back-propagation. Human minds are much more chaotic, but those neurons run on such low energy requirements.

I expect to see
1. Machines and automation freeing up the population. We've seen car production automated, we're now seeing traditionally paper-based application forms, opening a bank account, verifying ID, post, packing, delivery being automated.
2. As freed up, a typical family or individual will need to work less, eg 3 day week, at $50 per hour, instead of 5 days a week at $15 per hour in 2018.

Re (2) to be clear, this isn't a Socialist Universal Income, everyone able to work, should still work. And this $50 per hour is a min-wage, only for those 3 days a week, you're welcome to work longer hours if you want, but employers aren't required to pay you at that hourly rate. Overtime is actually paid less than regular time!


What's ironic, the left is starting to claim innovative, democratic, dynamic, capitalistic economic activity, will delivery  "fully automated luxury communism" - unfortunately, at what ever point a society switches away from democracy dynamism, and stops, that is the end of progress. Also, isn't it ironic, that communism didn't deliver their fully automated luxury utopia.

Well we all remember, it was Karl Marx who wanted communism to occur in industrialised countries like USA and Germany, Marx never intended it to happen in the Russian Empire. Revolution in the Russian Empire was simply overthrowing the royal family, it just so happened that the revolutionaries were not democratic economically minded individuals.

What adapts quickest? a centrally planned socialist society, or a dynamic, democratic, innovative society? There's no startup culture or dynamic innovation in a centrally planned socialist economy - innovation is actually prevented, because only those at the top are allowed to decide anything for the "workers" the plebs. Ironic that a society for the workers, treats workers so badly, and forces all decisions upon those workers.

Why does Outlook hide the email address of senders? GMail kindly puts it after the display name in a replies even.

I think its because Outlook developers want an integrated address book system, which meant people didn't need the know actual email addresses. However, as they've not gone about this in an open way their solutions don't integrate with the wider world and we thus do need to know actual email addresses, so why not show us them in Outlook!? instead we have to click properties, and try and find it on one of the tabs, adding the domain to the username etc.

A problem which seems to come up remarkably often still is email clients which send broken URLs. RFC1738 defines the URL format, so we can do . Outlook and Mac OS X's mail client are the most common offenders. As I use Thunderbird or GMail and that doesn't have such a bug I don't send broken urls myself, but I do suffer receiving broken URLs! So please, if you can't/won't switch to a bug-free email client, the least you can do is use something like tinyurl.com!

RFC 2546 defines format flowed, a way to avoid embarrasing line-wrap. Ditch the clients that dont support the standards!