The insurance industry already has a clearinghouse of information on people similar to the credit bureaus. Rates, especially for car insurance, are increasingly determined by a subset of your credit score (the "insurance score.") They already know your history with other insurance companies, which can make it very hard to find another carrier at reasonable rates if you are dropped. Also, every state's DMV has records on every reported accident and theft. So, you're tracked an awful lot when you buy insurance anyway. I don't do the whole data collection thing, simply because I know I drive in heavy traffic with aggressive drivers, and having to stop for them would negate any savings. Having good credit really does help though...insurance is cheap if you can maintain your credit.

Not that I agree with it, but Allstate is smart to take out a patent on "quantifiable self" data for 2 reasons:
- Future customers coming of age now show very little concern about privacy, or at least they prefer the convenience of "free" services and an always-on gadget in their pocket. This means that there will slowly be less resistance to it.
- Let's face it, one day soon self-driving cars will be a thing. With a computer doing the driving, the overwhelming cause of accidents now will be people who continue to manually drive. Those people will probably end up causing a lot more damage because they will get into bigger accidents.

It's only one leap from car insurance to life insurance though -- I'm not sure that will go over well. Since all insurers are basically placing a bet that you won't file a claim, or in the case of life insurance, you'll pay enough in premiums to cover the inevitable, this would really stack the deck in their favor.

" Like me, are you sucking it up, getting along, and and fighting the important fights, or do you give your management the same complaints you voice here?"

Yes, and just like you, I am luckily in a place where I can at least complain and be heard without getting kicked out. Our group just keeps moving along, continuing to turn out good work even if we have to clean up messes. The naive hope is that decision makers will eventually see how much mess cleaning we've been doing (all of which has been reported in a very non-"See, I told you so!" manner.) I'm not totally against outsourcing, but I can't stand when it doesn't work, and when the decision makers aren't smart enough to notice. Our company is easily 5 or 6 years out of phase with current HR trends, so they're just starting to notice problems now that they've gone on a full blown early 2000's style offshoring rampage.

I've worked with a lot of people in the past who just complain bitterly and lose all interest in doing their job when stuff like this happens. That's exactly what you don't want to do. Like you said, fighting about the important stuff rather than biting back on every little thing is the way to stay sane.

My problem isn't with Disney's profits, it's the fact that they don't have to resort to tactics like this, but they do anyway.

I'm guessing this will continue until the public eye is no longer on them all the time. I've posted previously about this - Disney is not a low-margin business with a need to reduce IT spending. Just their theme parks alone must generate millions per day. To use a Disney analogy, they probably store all their free cash in Uncle Scrooge's money bin. They're very similar to the way Apple is right now -- Apple is immune to market forces; they take 30% of every purchase people make with their ultra high margin iPhones, and their margin on laptop and desktop PCs is stratospheric. Disney is immune to market forces simply because they have so many rabid fans.

The fact that companies like this are resorting to H1-Bing their IT departments is very disturbing. Just because they're not doing this particular exercise doesn't mean they're not looking to do it when the heat is off later on. Again, I would expect this from a traditional retailer or similar low-margin business...not Disney.

Unfortunately, I'm dealing with this now - a product manager in charge of one of the medium-margin products I do design/engineering work for has the offshoring, low cost country bug in their head right now. I can't hire anyone to supplement our staff locally, but I can have all the foreign contractors I want because "they're so cheap." I'm sure there's lots of success stories for the outsourcers to cite, but I've never had good luck. Basically, anything we hand over to an offshore team to implement has to be documented as if we were sitting there doing it, and they still come back with questions. The problem is this -- you will never convince an MBA that it's worth it to have a few people making more money than 50 people making 20% of what you're paying the onshore staff.

One of the things about banks is that most of their core transaction processing is done on mainframes. There's tons of stuff layered on top of it to do fancier things, but the day to day moving of funds from account to account is usually batched and run after business hours on a mainframe. One of the reasons for this is the sheer amount of business logic tied up in these systems, the massive transaction volume. and the fact that you can't easily swap out a working process with something untested.

The problem is that all the mainframers are starting to retire, and no one is stepping up to fill the spots. So, basic supply and demand kicks in, and mainframe customers have to start paying more for expertise. And we all know what happens when labor rates go up in IT..... You would think younger people would jump at this opportunity -- an environment with a low volume of change that, while important, has safeguards built in that other commodity x86 based things don't. However, there is a persistent "mainframer == old curmudgeon stuck in a dead end job" mentality, so I can see why people might not want this on their resume.

One other site I read a lot is The Register, and they have an interesting UK take on these bank IT failures, including the recent NatWest and other RBS failures, which were pretty big. Their reports indicated that (surprise, surprise) the bank offshored mainframe support and was having quality issues. The banks in question replaced staff with ages of real-world experience on these systems. In my personal experience, these folks know where all the bodies are buried, the stuff that isn't easily laid out in a runbook for a disinterested third party. Root cause for the NatWest failure was someone not knowing how to safely stop CA's batch processing software and dropping tons of messages they thought were backed up, if I recall correctly.

I wonder what it will take for companies to realize that not every IT task is run of the mill, and having some people who know the entire system on staff is a good thing.

This basically defines some of the problems of "enterprisey" software:
- It's composed of a million glued-together libraries.
- It's written by chronically understaffed/overworked IT department employees.
- Rigorous testing either (a) doesn't exist, (b) is so onerous that most developers try to avoid it, or (c) is outsourced/offshored to the lowest bidder, and therefore isn't completed without the staff basically doing the tests for the outsourcer.
- Anything that breaks it is avoided at all costs because of all of the above.

By extension, this is why some companies are stuck running IE 6 for key applications, or Office 97 because rewriting the scary mess of macros that runs a process isn't something anyone wants to do. I do systems integration work, and new versions of Java, web browsers, etc. are miserable. They introduce bugs small enough to be annoyances (rendering problems, etc.) and big enough to break the entire system.

The key to fixing this is for the software architects to require that developers move up to at least a semi-modern release of their key libraries, test everything against them, and remove the old outdated ones once all the bugs are fixed. The problem is that this is never done.

I posted something like this yesterday about the San Francisco CS education mandate. Getting people familiar with computers is good, labeling it as "CS education" is disingenuous. Millenials and "digital natives" aren't CS experts because they can use their iPhones and post on Facebook, nor are they CS experts because they can write a document in Office. If those same people can actually understand how the iPhone does what it does, or have some clue about how an operating system works, then that's different. Being a proficient user of a pre-packaged, easy to use platform is not the same as understanding how that platform works. I'm sure that the CS education they're referring to will be mainly focused on the "user" side of things.

That being said, I wonder how many true CS people will be needed in the future. There will always be a need for hardcore OS development, kernel hacking, embedded systems work and so on. I'm not so sure about the legions of corporate application developers, web coders, etc. Even if the goal of the program is to reduce salaries in the long term, and increase H-1B visas in the short term, it seems to me like the market might do that anyway, as platforms consolidate and applications become easier for non-CS people to code up.

One of Microsoft's licensing tiers for Windows 8 was free, but OEMs were forced to set the default homepage and search engine to Bing. This sounds like the adware equivalent. I'm not sure how they'll implement it, since Windows 10 licenses are going to be free for upgraders.

Here's something interesting to think about though. Unlike the rabid-anti advertising folks, I don't really do much on my own systems to avoid ads. I really don't like them, but I'm content with ignoring them simply because I don't want to spend the effort to install ad blockers or change HOSTS files. If someone like me, who could do all this stuff, chooses not to do so because I have more important things to do...then what will your average consumer do? Given this, it seems like it could have some traction. Serving up ads from localhost, and therefore having at least some access to the local machine might be where I would draw the line and start the blocking.

Oh, and to the person who mentioned Internet Explorer 4.x "channels" on Win98...thanks for the horrible flashbacks to the Mickey Mouse and Taz. :-)

If I wanted my kids to have more screen time, I could provide plenty at home. Most kids already spend too much time in front of a screen. They need to be outside, moving.

I'm seeing this with my 2 little kids. Screen time just leads them to want more screen time. I doubt you want this in preschool-age children. My 4-year-old started reading pretty early, and we've been working really hard to keep encouraging that rather than stuff him in front of a computer. Kids at this age need to learn motor skills, appropriate behavior and how to interact with others. The computer stuff can come later...there's a whole lifetime to watch cat videos on YouTube. Kids in preschool would be much better served learning reading, counting, how to sit still for 5 minutes and concentrate on something, and impulse control. I'm no parenting genius, but focusing on this stuff for now has worked out OK so far...ask me in 14 years whether I failed or not. :-)

I doubt they mean actually teaching Computer Science, even the concepts, to preschoolers.

Everyone points to this as a way to ensure the future supply of cheap labor for companies, and there's some truth to that. But, wouldn't you rather people have at least some exposure to the basics? I highly doubt anyone who wouldn't already be attracted to a CS-related career will be swayed by this, but introducing concepts earlier might intensify student focus in kids who are already interested.

IMO, this would help with the current problem I see. Millenials are often touted as "technology gurus" and "digital natives" because of the fact that they grew up from birth with modern computers. The reality is this -- technology is easy for the end user to use now. Phones and even computers have operating systems that anyone can pick up and use at a "user" or "content consumer" level. Everyone has a laptop sitting in their pocket that can make phone calls. The difference between computer skills and computer science is the ability to do things beyond the user level, and that's getting harder and harder to teach as things get further abstracted. 500 million iPhones != 500 million computer science nerds!

What will be interesting is the next wave of transition. You're still going to have the hardcore CS guys hacking the Linux kernel, writing the VMWare hypervisor, etc. What I don't see being good as a long term career is "corporate development." A lot of those CRUD applications or website stuff are going to get easier and easier to cobble together from frameworks, and I'm betting there will be a point where it gets shuffled off to "the business." Hardware is cheap now, so inefficient code can be easily covered up, and frameworks can be as bloated as necessary to make things easy. It'll be the equivalent of today's corporate departments being run on a scary mess of Access databases and Excel macros...and I'm betting it won't pay well.

First, I know people are telling this guy to just walk away without documenting anything, but I think he's doing the right thing. Yes, there's no employee/employer loyalty anymore, but I've worked with a bunch of people that I would never consider working with again because of their actions or attitude. Even in a big industry, I'm amazed how many times I've run into people from former employers...and reputations do follow you. You don't want to be remembered as they guy whose mass of scripting blew up 3 days after he left and required weeks of consulting to pull apart. (Yes, this has happened to me.)

My recommendation for this task is OneNote. It's structured enough and free-form enough at the same time to handle an internal knowledge base. No one is going to keep a wiki going unless there's a real need, and commercial knowledge base software, usually tied to million-dollar ITIL compliant ticketing systems, is useless. Even better, you can directly paste in emails from Outlook. OneNote also lets you quickly mess around with screenshots, diagrams, and Office documents. I've used this method to communicate some of the proprietary stuff that off-the-street sysadmins wouldn't know about.

Something like this is useful in organizations like the one I'm in now -- where knowledge sharing is an extremely formal process requiring documents be written in a certain format, every aspect of a system needs to be documented in full detail, etc. This gives the person following you at least a head start before they start digging into the formal stuff. Kind of like the mystery letter every President leaves behind for his successor.

Could this be a sign that the Fiorina/Hurd/Apoteker era is coming to an end for HP? Large companies often have near-death experiences before something gets too bad to ignore. IBM had this in the early 90s, and had to resort to major surgery to stay in the game. They're currently experiencing another one under Rometty, maybe the last, by which they're gutting everything out of the company and trying to become a white-shoe management consulting firm...with big data!

I'm guessing HP is doing the same. They just hived off their PC/printer division, probably to sell it off to the highest bidder sometime soon. It remains to be seen whether the Enterprise division has anything good left to sell. Their servers are very good, and their non-consumer PCs/printers are still good. Software is awful, don't know about their network stuff, and that steaming mass of former EDS services guys probably won't help. :-)

Far be it from me to throw cold water on an idea, but I do have an observation. One of the byproducts of the mobile/social/web 3.0/content dotcom boom is the sheer number of different content providers that offer a library of movies, music and TV shows. Amazon offers Prime Instant Video plus for-purchase titles, Google has the Play Store, Netflix offers streaming, Hulu offers streaming, Spotify offers streaming, Microsoft is offering content, and now Apple offers a mix of both like Amazon does. (Fun fact, you pay a couple more dollars in Apple tax for the same content if you use iTunes rather than Amazon to buy some movies.)

The question is -- when will the Great Consolidation happen? Now that everyone is opting to license their content rather than pay for physical media, will there come a day when all the competing App Stores, Music Stores and Movie Streaming Services start merging, and what will happen to the content when that happens? It just seems to me that having Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Apple, and all the TV providers maintaining their own separate content libraries can't be sustainable. Nor will people want to purchase subscriptions from all of them, or the Fire TV Stick, Apple TV, Google TV, etc etc etc

The thing I'm going to miss about this dotcom crash is the lack of eBayable computer equipment. The market was flooded with oodles of cheap gear for years after the dotcom bust because of this. Now it's all Azure/AWS instances, and Microsoft or Amazon own it all.

Just looking at some of the reasons for failure, I see a potential problem:
"WhatsApp for customer service"
"Tinder for jobs"
"Flash sales for toddlers"

I understand it's the '10s now, and companies can start up with an AWS account and big enough credit card limit, but it seems to me like the primary reasons for failure are (1) just a stupid idea that has no way to make money or gain customers, and (2) oversaturation and copying of "successful" companies' business plans or apps. That's one thing that hasn't changed since the 90s -- the only difference is that the companies get to hang around longer because they aren't blowing 6 figures on Sun servers and colo charges.

The offline analogue would be the frozen yogurt shop or cupcake bakery that have popped up in recent years. Nothing wrong with either, but I have seen so many of them come and go, and I feel bad because I know why. I'm sure most of those business owners read some article or listened to their friends describing the ultra-high margins to be made in the yogurt business, or living their dream of being a cupcake baker. They probably had visions of hordes of people descending on their perfectly-located shop and emptying their wallets on the counter. So, they quit their job, cash in their 401(k) and invest 6 figures to open up. Six months later, they're gone. The reason I feel bad is this -- sure, people make their own decisions and stuff, but after they've lost everything in a disastrous business venture, most peoples' lives are going to be significantly harder than if they hadn't wasted all that money. It's even worse if the owner is just a franchisee -- then the franchisee is getting rich off of the deal too.

Technology alone can't fix education problems. Applying it where it's useful is a good thing, but school districts shouldn't be wasting money on tech just for the sake of having it. That money can be better spent paying teachers a decent salary.

Public schools have to take everyone who comes their way, a problem charter and private schools don't have. Therefore, it stands to reason that you're going to get a close-to-normal distribution of abilities in your students. Some just aren't going to be as successful as others. On top of that, some of your students with the potential to do well can have horrible home lives that make concentrating on school impossible. How is buying an iPad for everyone and subscribing the district to an expensive electronic curriculum platform going to solve these problems?

Two things predict student success - involved parents (minus the helicoptering) and good teachers in good schools with solid infrastructure. My son is about to enter kindergarten, and we have intentionally been limiting his and his sisters' interactions with tablets/phones/computers as much as is practical. They still watch plenty of YouTube and stuff, more than I'd like, but we've focused on giving them other experiences. Am I a Luddite? Nope, I'm a happy IT person and my wife's in a technical field as well. I just see what happens when parents let their kids sit and stare at the tablet for hours on end. I can't imagine that gets better as the kids age, so why dump technology into a classroom that needs other things more urgently? I'd rather the kids spend this pre-kindergarten time learning to be good humans and picking up skills they'll need when it is time to sit down and learn something.