Nope. I've talked about this with many lawyers. It varies by state. In CA, non-compete clauses are basically unenforceable. In TX, where I live, they're the law of the land.
-Chris
I've tried Occulus and agree with the parent (I'm also 40 and have been around this block before). VR will never be a mainstream, mass market application. Now that the tech is mostly working (OR is awesome - it works like we all wanted it to the first time Jaron Lanier was in the news), it needs applications. Sure, core gaming will change as will some industrial applications, but otherwise there aren't a lot of good reasons to put an app in an head mounted display. HMDs are not exactly a great fashion accessory (even at the scale of google glass).
-Chris
Sacramento and the rest of the Central Valley has been trying this forever. It didn't happen during the first bubble, it likely won't happen this time around. The Delta and Valley regions may as well be flyover country as far as techs are concerned. It's almost as easy to hop on a plane and be in Austin, Boulder, Portland, SLC, or any other regional tech hub than it is to drive around in CA.
I grew up in Merced and have seen this same story too many times in the past... 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s... This conversation is a good predictor for bursting bubbles, though.
-Chris
I'm a bike commuter and I own two cars. I pay more taxes relative to car commuters for the use of the roads.
Of course, I could get rid of the fun car and keep just the practical one, but I'd still be paying more than most drivers relative to my impact.
For rule 1 to be a valid argument, all bikers can't own cars. In the US, that's almost universally not the case.
-Chris
How about this: sites that have their password databases breached pay a $1B fine, the fine paid in part by the company, the management, and the devs responsible.
The users are not the ones in need of training here.
-Chris
So, there are two types of people out there: those that wear watches and those that don't. I fall into the latter category. As someone who doesn't wear jewelry, I've never felt the need to accessorise with time (save for that brief period in 7th grade where I had a few Swatches...
Having played around with the "quantified self" gadgets, I can also say that they didn't give me much more than I could get through just general self awareness and a scale (or a more precise measuring device for whatever it is I'm quantifying). So, a smartwatch for me would just be a connected device for email, Web, and phone calls. My smartphone is great for that and I don't have to wear it on my wrist (see above: I don't wear jewelry). I can also set my phone aside and easily walk away from it when I need to be disconnected, which is key for long term sanity.
I know I'm only a portion of the market, but when it comes to smart watches, the manufacturers are already dealing with a segmented market. The luxury manufacturers are right to focus on what their bread and butter is: high end, mechanical jewelry (which, imho, is way cooler than a smart watch from an engineering perspective). The smartwatch space will need to focus on the intersection of smartphone users who wear watches for practical reasons and want to move away from their phone. They'll likely never capture the smartphone users who don't like to wear watches.
-Chris
"You need to be very adaptable, so that you have a baseline skill set that allows you to be a call center operator today and tomorrow be able to interpret MRI scans."
I'm not sure if this is just naivete or Silicon Valley hubris, but this statement doesn't really make much sense. MRIs are interpreted by MDs (radiologists) with years of training. Call centers can be staffed by high-school drop outs. I have friends from both ends of the spectrum in exactly those jobs and I can tell you the starting point for each career and baseline skill set are not the same. Note that baseline intelligence may be the same - my call center friends are all phenomenal musicians who put their intellectual effort into music and use call center jobs to pay the bills, but there's no way they're interpreting MRIs in this lifetime.
I'm seeing the same high level of hubris in tech right now that I saw (and was guilty of) in 1999. There seems to be this feeling that good software skills are a proxy for any other discipline. After all, if I can write an MRI app for an iPhone (or, in the 90s, if I could write a Web 1.0 MRI viewer - which I did, fwiw), then I'm clearly qualified to take the next step and start diagnosing patients (or better yet, just write an app for that, too). Once you know the jargon and basic requirements, everything else is just implementation details, right? Of course, the reality is is that those implementation details are years of dedicated training, not a few weeks of hacking. You only get so many years in life - you can't do everything with them.
In Bock's comments, I see either ignorance or sleaziness. Maybe he really believes that anyone can and should be anything and everything. In that case, he's wasting his time in HR and should become a motivational speaker. But, it also seems like he's just using this as a way to get more call center operators to believe that there's a career path at Google that will allow everyone with a CS degree to be true renaissance people. Sure, every now and then one will pull it off, but people also win the lottery. That doesn't mean everyone will.
-Chris
Literal, out of context interpretations of sacred documents by the masses has been great for science.
There is a middle ground in citizen scholarship, between taking a document at its most literal and complete deference to the the high priests. An educated populace should understand the nuances that led to a document being written in the first place and applying critical thought to determine if those reasons are still valid today or if the document should be evolved.
-Chris
With all the comments about moving to other free services or using this as an opportunity to start a new business, what is the value for most people? If there are enough people that value it at a certain price such that the costs of running the business are covered, there's a business to be made. Otherwise, it's just charity on the service's part. Sure, everyone likes getting stuff for free, but even free stuff costs money for someone.
-Chris
(and maybe the internet as we know it)
Here's a crowd-based experiment I've always wanted to initiate: For one day, everyone follows ads and stays on the ad site for a non-trivial amount of time.
If everyone clicks on ads (or even a small percentage of people), monthly ad budgets will be very quickly drained. The companies will have received no value from their ad spend (if they do at all as it is). Google, et al. will get a one day windfall from the ad revenues. It might take a few coordinated "denial-of-ad-attacks", but eventually vendors will start to question the value of their internet advertising budgets and find better ways to spend their money connecting with customers.
Of course, a side effect of this might be killing the goose that laid the golden egg. If Google and Facebook suddenly lose their primary source of revenue, they will have to look for other ways to monetize their services (maybe just asking users to pay? if Facebook's numbers are real (haha), $5/month/user would be ~$5B/month
A more devious alternative would be to have ad blockers silently follow the ads and "fake" a user session...
What's most interesting is that the anonymous reports from the US intelligence community the day after the plane disappeared said that the plane was on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. These claims seemed a little odd at the time since there was no supporting evidence at all and rescuers were still looking for debris on the original flight path. But, it's looking like they were spot on.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the only real conspiracy in this whole affair is the US govt's cover up of the initial leak. The plane itself likely just suffered a catastrophic failure and lumbered on until it ran out of fuel. But, the US govt also likely tracked it the entire time. That's why someone was able to make a confident pronouncement so quickly. They knew exactly where the plane was, if not exactly what happened. But, this intelligence capability (tracking all flying objects all the time) is probably highly classified. Rather than give it up for a civilian SAR effort, they decided to keep it under wraps, knowing that eventually the plane would be found and the capability is far more useful if no one knows it exists.
This. Software is expensive to maintain. For every old, supported version that a customer can rollback to, the company must maintain development and support infrastructure. This is likely a full time QA person whose job it is to ensure the rollbacks work, at least a part time developer to fix things that break the rollbacks, the team that supports the packaging and distribution of the rollback versions, and the front line support staff to answer calls when something goes wrong with the rollback. Already, that's at least 3 FTEs and likely 5 or more. Just to support rollback functionality. To put a price on it, it's at least $300k/year in direct costs, and more in opportunity and indirect costs.
For free apps, or apps that only cost a few dollars, there's absolutely no way a company can justify the cost and effort to do this.
Now, if users were willing to pay $50 for an app, then there would likely be resources available to support this. Of course, with those prices, the dev processes could be more robust and the need to rollback would be greatly diminished.
tl;dr: you get what you pay for.
-Chris
I think you nailed it in calling out that Eric Schmidt realizes this was a very bad move for Facebook and shows that Facebook is not really competition. "Good for them" is simply a way of saying that these guys made out like bandits at someone else's expense.
Facebook can only pull off a few more of these big deals before their cash is gone and their stock is worthless. If they have to do this every time a new startup starts to take users away (which seems to be what really happened with WhatsApp - losing everyone but the US to another messaging platform couldn't have been good for FB), they'll be out of money and equity quicker than you can launch a startup at SXSW.
Eric Schmidt knows this and hance can easily laugh it off. I'm sure Eric also knows what Facebook's actual user base is (hint: there's no way it's anywhere near 1B people, some simple top-down modeling should be enough to convince anyone that there is no way 1/7 of the world's population is actively using FB, kinda like when the Oscars used to claim 1B viewers). WhatsApp was probably just the confirmation he needed to write off Facebook as a competitor.
Ok... hopefully that's all the DST-sleep-deprivation ranting I'll do today...
-Chris
"It's the best thing since professional golfers on 'ludes." -- Rick Obidiah
