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Comment You get what you measure (Score 2) 285

If your metric is hours, smart people will optimize with respect to hours. If your metric is students passing a standardize test, some teachers will optimize by "helping" the students pass the test.

Deciding on what metric to evaluate people is a very challenging problem that surfaces in any situation where you need to manage people. The best approach that is supported by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great is to create a culture on your team/company/etc.. that has the values that you as a manager want. This culture will then weed out the people who don't "fit in". Of course, creating this culture may take some time and so is suited for managers looking for long-term reward. Unfortunately, some managers are looking at things in the short-term.

Comment Re:Captain Obvious (Score 2) 341

All it does is move the pollution

Main point: Centralized power source vs decentralized power source. Centralized power sources (i.e. Electric vehicles) can benefit immediately from improvements to technology/efficiencies at the power plant.

Electric vehicles can do more than this by allowing for a centralized power source. Think about traditional gas powered cars. Changes in technology that allow for increased power efficiencies (i.e. better mpg) mostly impact the newer cars. Cars that were produced 10-15 years ago are less efficient, but they are still driven by a good chunk of the population.

Improvements in technology at the power plant can have an immediate impact on all Electric vehicles.

Comment Re:Remember the old addage (Score 1) 488

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Microsoft freely admits it, and when everyone jumps on the TypeScript bandwagon, the carpet will be pulled out from under you.

This seems reminiscent of the Excel vs Lotus 123 war and how Microsoft won. Joel Spolsky has a great article describing the tactics M$ used to win the war.

The basic idea was to eliminate barriers that would keep people from switching from Lotus 123. Below are some exerts from the article. I think there are some interesting parallels to Typescript and javascript.

Barrier:They have to convert their existing spreadsheets from 123 to Excel
Solution:Give Excel the capability to read 123 spreadsheets

Barrier:They have to learn a new user interface
Solution:Give Excel the ability to understand Lotus keystrokes, in case you were used to the old way of doing things

Comment Hidden Costs? (Score 2) 2

I seriously doubt that this is the actual savings. What about the servers that you need to purchase and run to do the data processing? What about the network equipment you will need to buy and run to support the large amount of data traveling across the network? (Using pc’s instead of terminals allows more data to be processed locally at the pc instead of sending it to the server)

What about the additional staff that you will need to manage the network and the servers?

Moving to dumb-terminal big-server model can introduce a single point of failure. At least with a pc, some data processing can happen locally even if the server goes down for some reason. With a terminal, its game over until the server is back up running. Every model has its tradeoff. Does this model make sense?
IT

Submission + - Child Death Sparks Post-PC Era at Seattle Hospital (wsj.com) 2

kye4u writes: The wall street journal reports that 'At Seattle Children’s Hospital, the death of an infant spurred its CIO, Wes Wright, to install a new generation of PCs providing faster boot-up times. Called zero clients because they contain no conventional operating system of their own and instead rely almost entirely on data and applications transmitted from a server, the new devices can shave almost an hour per day of wasted time per employee. Wright won’t be going back to traditional PCs, even for employees who don’t handle critical cases. “The speed and ubiquity the staff now has – if I took that away I’d have a riot on my hands,” Wright tells CIO Journal.' The CIO claims that making the switch to dumb terminals will save the hospital 6 million over 5 years. I don't see that savings. Is the hospital really better off?

Comment Weakest link principle (Score 2) 335

Why are they expending money on new versions of the scanners when not all airports have the first version?

Even if one assumed that the scanners could detect everything (which they can't), it would make since to at least have a version 1 scanner at all the airports.

So TSA purchases version 2 scanners that go into some airports. Terrorists just go to airports that have version 1. Oh wait, they can just go to airports that don't have any scanners. Weakest link principle.
Android

Submission + - FBI vs. Google: The Legal Fight to Unlock Phones (allthingsd.com)

kye4u writes: Even with passwords, full disk encryption, and/or any other methods that is used to secure data on a mobile device, uses may be at the mercy of mobile os makers. Law enforcement agencies want to be able to get Google, Apple, and other mobile os makers to unlock the phones and access the data.

According to WSJ, "Google earlier this year defied the FBI’s demand to unlock an alleged pimp’s cellphone powered by its Android software—even after the agency obtained a search warrant, reports The Wall Street Journal’s Julia Angwin. The refusal underscores a battle brewing between technology companies and the U.S. government over whether law-enforcement agents have the right to obtain passwords to crack into smartphones of suspects, particularly because those passwords are often the keys to a wide assortment of content troves, including email, calls, address lists and text messages."

Comment Dynamic pricing is a new word for and old concept (Score 1) 294

This dynamic pricing idea is an extension of something that have been practiced by merchants for a very long time. Dynamic pricing is just price discrimination among different types of customers.

One method to discriminate is in favor of the most loyal customers. Airlines and hotels are examples of businesses that provide loyalty reward points that can be redeemed for discounts and fringe benefits.

Another method is to discriminate in favor of least loyal or new customers. Cable companies like Comcast do this. Here is how. They offer ridiculously low discounts for their cable packages for first time customers for the first x amount of months. The customers that threaten to leave, which would be the least loyal customers, are offered discounts on their current plans and packages if they stay. The people who don't get any discount are the most loyal. In fact, they can expect their cable bill to increase each month for channels/services that they don't really need or want.

Comment Re:Irrelevance and mediocrity (Score 2) 112

The entire reason I loved my blackberry was its keyboard-centeredness. Why the heck do I want a business phone that has a crappy touch keyboard? Theres android and iPhone for that.

I guess we still get the BES stuff, but which users are actually going to want a blackberry? If youre going to mandate a business phone, why mandate one that sucks at being a business phone?

I mean, I guess what they had wasnt selling phones, and their market share was shrinking-- seems logical to make a change, right? Except they just killed 80% of what made blackberry so popular to begin with. Being just another touch-device clone isnt really the way to claw your way back into the game.

This is the classic innovator's dilemma. It is how once great companies can miss the boat on new markets. They are constrained and encumbered by the demands and wants of their current customer base, which are responsible for the huge profits. Satisfying current customer demands can result in not allocating enough resources needed to develop technologies for emerging/new markets. It is easy to ignore new markets as they do not initially provide the profit opportunities that the companies current market provides.

Comment Lego mindstorm and programming (Score 1) 307

Although I applaud the initiative of Estonia, I think that using the lego mindstorm would be a better first step to introducing your kids to programming. Here is why. (By the way, I am a grad student who is working with kids at a local middle school with the mindstorm)
1) Motivation: Many kids are naturally excited about seeing stuff move and do stuff, and therefore robotics is a very nice programming application for kids.
2) Logic: Mindstorm GUI has a nice interface that is easy for kids to use because the GUI uses visual logic blocks. It is pretty much like flow diagram that the kids can build to represent the logic. This flow diagram is of course is compiled into real code behind the scenes.
3) Problem solving skills: Kids can do really neat experiments with the mindstorm such line following and wall following. These experiments are fun and allow the kids to really fine-tune their problem solving skills.

Comment Innovation is often a relative term (Score 1) 287

What is innovative shouldn't be relative in theory, but in practice it almost always is.
When people use the word innovative to describe something, it is based on their prior knowledge and insight. Joe-average may see some technology or device as innovative and requiring huge intellectual leaps, while Joe-tech may see the same technology as a minor incremental improvement or perhaps obvious.
The difference is that Joe-tech may have domain expertise in areas related to that technology and is aware of similar technologies that others in the field have created. Joe-tech may also see that the intellectual leaps needed to create this technology are really very small steps based on prior art and the fact that joe-tech is also skilled in the art.

Comment Patent system broken (Score 5, Insightful) 1184

The patent system is broken. The real question is should the patents that Apple claims Samsung infringed upon been granted. Imagine if this happened in the car industry. Only the first car company to put anti-lock brakes on their cars would ever be allowed to use the technology. Good ideas get copied. That is what is called progress. Only the specific implementation of that idea should be patented.

Comment Re:Why the link to nutbag Breitbart instead of AP? (Score 2) 1184

Thanks Timothy... not.

In the case of Apple, it's clear that Samsung was directly copying Apple on many fronts - hell, look at their Samsung Stores or their power adapters. This case however, will immediately be appealed and this is nowhere near the last we'll hear of it.

Copying happens in every industry (i.e. fashion, auto industry, etc...). It is what smart companies do. The real question is are the patents really valid.

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