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Comment The government can't help (Score 2, Insightful) 47

Considering the current bloodbath over at CISA and the ongoing sabotage of the rest of the nation's cybersecurity infrastructure at the behest of Comrade Trump, I'd say the government is the last place to look for help keeping your secrets out of the hands of the competition.

Comment Hi, I am the author of this article. (Score 1) 73

There's a few other things which are worth taking a look at on the topic at http://internetofagreements.co... - the HBR piece is short, and this is not a topic that is particularly easy to compress.

There are two things in particular that didn't come across well. Firstly, we expect this to be a five to ten year process. We're well aware how much there is to do, and how far this all has to come. We don't dream you can just digitize a body of law through natural language processing and then have an AI make legal rulings any time soon. But narrow areas - product labeling comes to mind - might be high value and tractable quite soon. And Internet of Agreements blockchain. Blockchain is a *how*, but IoA is a *why*.

Second thing is that IoA's intention is to get people with various pieces of this picture into direct contact with each other, with a rough sense of the goal state in a decade or so, to start building the bits that are currently financially possible to do real engineering on. As time passes, more and more of the vision should become manageable, and things will pick up speed and come together.

Hope that helps.

Comment Re:This just in... (Score 4, Interesting) 160

Heh, unless you work for a GM dealership, you have NO idea how bad GM is at IT. Their dealer-side website still does not officially support anything other than IE8. Business reporting relies on ActiveX integration with Excel, and only works properly with Excel 2000 and 2003. It can be made to work under 2007, but they don't support anything higher. Parts of the service-related workbenches still use VBScript. It used to be accessible only over a super-slow satellite link, but they changed that a few years ago, thank god.

To be fair, though, Toyota's web back-end, Dealer Daily, is even worse. IE-only, accessible only through a dedicated T1 which may not be used for anything else (but which you still pay full price for, of course). Blank page under anything other than IE.

Come to think of it, a lot of dealership stuff is locked on IE. Dealertrack (intentionally locks out non-IE browsers), Dealersocket CRM (featured-limited under non-IE browsers). ADP is the biggest supplier of dealership management software in the US and most of their stuff is entirely reliant on IE.

It's a pathetic state of affairs.

Comment Ah, the wikihouse - interesting but *so* expensive (Score 5, Interesting) 96

I should start this with a disclaimer: I'm the founder of the Hexayurt Project, a Free Hardware building system aimed at refugees and in widespread use at Burning Man. It's those silver pod things (http://hexayurt.com)

I think Wikihouse is exciting technically, but it's *incredibly* expensive to build - something like 7000 EUR of CNC cutting time for a single room. The parametric design aspects of the project are great, however, and I can see a future in which the components are mass produced at reasonable price and then assembled according to plans generated from the parametric design software. But without some kind of standardization, this kind of production is going to remain incurably expensive and therefore just another architectural demo. It's not a technology until costs are estimated. This has happened before: Architecture For Humanity's Open Architecture Network (http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/) rapidly filled with impractical technology demonstrators and student projects - 10000+ designs, but how many practically buildable?

Actually getting buildings that people can build is hard. Architects are trained to think about custom work, one-offs and impressing other architects. Mass producing housing at a price people can afford (hello, Mortage Crisis, goodbye Mortgage Crisis) requires a radical rethink of how we do construction: modularity, prefabrication, standardization - all the same things we did for every other technology we wanted to be cheap, easy and reliable.

It's often said that home building is the last truly-madly-deeply inefficient global industry. Imagine if they built cars by having people come to your garage to hand-assemble them! Whether the radical change is mass manufacture of entire houses Buckminster Fuller style, interchangable modular components (structural insualted panels) or something like 3D printing with insulated concrete, we can't keep buliding houses by hand in a world where everything else is efficiently mass produced with near-zero defects and not distort the shape of our societies.

Hexayurts are dirt cheap and designed for modular mass manufacture. But they look weird. Such is life :-)

Comment London June 1, we're having an event to fix it (Score 2) 79

http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/swarm-cooperatives-more-event-details-including-speakers-3406

"Evolution of Swarm Cooperatives" is about hackathons, unconferences, bar camps etc. - anything where you get a large, reasonably diverse group together in an informal setting to work together, solve problems or learn from each-other. Specific topics to address: more effective code reuse after hackathons, documenting unconferences, and scheduling when you have at lot of potential speakers.

If you're in London and have an opinion, come along - we're about 1/4m from the London Hackerspace on Hackney Road.

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