America's IT companies are today's modern-day equivalent to the pre-WW2 German Industrialists. More than happy to clamp diigital handcuffs on their own customers for a few $$$, shove them into electronic cattle cars and ship them off to Information Death Camps.
It has to be designed some way or another, why not Star Trek?
Because the Millennium Falcon had cooler gun bays, that's why!
I kind of wish they'd used the Death Star for greater irony and creepiness.
Suggested experiment: remove all NSA leaders and administration but leave all hardware intact.
Expected result: no significant change.
We'd need a New Tron Bomb for that.
Perhaps NSA chose the wrong movie.
The shark with the fricking laser beam is over at DARPA.
Get yore agencies straight!
I even then only in a programming conferences for apps or interpreted languages.
"Interpreted languages"?!!!
What kind of racist mindset is that, anyway?
If you're paying attention, the consumer IT industry is consolidating along a 'vertical stack integration" strategy.
Check out my Microsoft column for "mobile hardware".
You can't legislate egos.
Young guys always know more than old guys.
I remember two years ago young guys telling me about Mongo
and how they were "beyond Codd's rules and integrity contraints".
Of course, now there's a movement to "structure" Mongo.
Yuk yuk yuk.
Why, just on this board somebody replied that they were now "beyond design patterns".
Yeah, let me know that one works out, kid.
I mean, really, a for loop is a for loop.
How hard is that to figure out?
Apparently quite hard for younger people who think they invented a new for loop
because it's in javascript or erlang.
Are you the type that stands there staring at other mens junk?
Not now when I can disable my camera LED and just film surreptitiously.
Apple and Google are rapidly owning their entire vertical infrastructure.
Their own power centers.
Their own data centers
Their own hardware.
Their own mobile.
Facebook is missing a lot of that, although they're (apparently) trying to catch up.
Likewise with Amazon and Microsoft.
Maybe most of the women gamers are lesbian or bi
and like sexy female characters, too?
Maybe they like imagining they are those characters?
Maybe the teen-minded boys like imagining they are those characters, too?
So yeah I'm only a top UNIX syadmin for... 150 year old company so I may be out of the loop.
Well, if you're a charter member of the company,
you could be out of the loop.
I doubt it.
I did some of the early tablet software from 1992-1996.
The real obstacles were cost and weight.
iPad is about 1/5th the cost in nominal terms, and 1/10th in real terms.
Weight difference is 1/5th, too.
Users liked the tablets overall, they just didn't like the cost.
The Big Four - Google, Apple, Amazon and the NSA.
The market is consolidating along three (perhaps four) vertical stacks. Apple and Google are well along in understanding and pursuing this. Yahoo finally figured it out but they're running a poor third. Amazon seems to have stumbled into a configuration that's competing with Apple and Google but I don't see that they really grasp what's happening, i.e. no power centers, no mobile presence. Facebook has money and users but I'm skeptical they can grow along vertical dimensions to survive. I imagine Twitter will be absorbed by one of the Big Three (or Four) at some point.
Sometimes geeks have an abysmal grasp of history.
http://www.carhistory4u.com/the-last-100-years/car-production
"During the period 1896 to 1930 over 1,800 car manufacturers were believed to have existed in America"
How many now?
Basically three, although there's a few niche makers like Tesla.
Mature industries consolidate into oligopolies.
Welcome to the end of the IT Boom.
GMO!
GMO!
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker
