Ephemera

Témata a ideje současné mladé radikální levice se většině mladé generace jeví přinejlepším jako strašně vzdálené a odcizené. Anebo kladou nároky na sebeomezení vlastního hedonismu, což platí rovněž o jinak atraktivní ekologii. A tohle sebeomezení, to je přesně to, co se většině mladé generace nechce, ač by ho ráda předepisovala všem jiným, zejména nezaměstnaným a staré generaci.

Many pundits have complained about the iPad’s inability to support multitasking, and while I can see how that makes it impractical as a tool for work, it’s actually an asset for someone who just wants to focus.

Geeks control the Internet because geeks built the Internet. We earned the freedom we have here. We earned it by creating something incredibly valuable and sharing it with millions and millions of people. What did we earn with the App Store? Did we build the App Store? Did we write iPhone OS? Did we design the groundbreaking hardware? Or are we just customers?

We can honestly report that we’ve been unable to find the right monetization strategy, one that allows for us to provide the level of service that our users require.

In 2008, a pair of researchers at the University of Texas showed that the customer data released for [Netflix first] contest, despite being stripped of names and other direct identifying information, could often be “de-anonymized” by statistically analyzing an individual’s distinctive pattern of movie ratings and recommendations.

By examining correlations between various online accounts, the scientists showed that they could identify more than 30 percent of the users of both Twitter, the microblogging service, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing service, even though the accounts had been stripped of identifying information like account names and e-mail addresses.

So because of a dictum from the IT department, HP — one of the biggest, proudest, and most successful companies in the history of the computer business — has URLs that are cryptic, long, and ugly. Whereas anyone with, say, a Tumblr account, can get far nicer URLs for free.

One thing that’s become clear is that the film industry feels no confidence about the cultural significance of its own products. Hollywood’s self-appointed division of self-importance, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, passed up the chance to honor one of the most ambitious and successful films the American movie factories have ever made in order to hand out hardware to a mid-budget, semi-independent production made in Jordan without movie stars.

Note the same pattern again and again, in theory with a relational database the list of following and followers is a single table with fields like following_id and follower_id. With queries you can extract the followers or following of every user. With a key-value DB that’s a bit different as we need to set both the 1000 is following 1001 and 1001 is followed by 1000 relations. This is the price to pay, but on the other side accessing the data is simpler and ultra-fast.

I myself don’t feel it is stealing, because I put all the material into a completely different and unique context and from the outset consistently promoted the fact that none of that is actually by me.

Také samotné IT profese se mění – IT odborníci se transformují do kombinace IT specialisty a byznys konzultanta. Například systémový specialista se stává spíše IT architektem. Programátor se transformuje do analytika, který umí programovat. Případně musí odborníci zvládat více technologií najednou, takže jsou schopni nabídnout balíček řešení. Firmy očekávají, že za své peníze získají všestranného a velmi užitečného zaměstnance.

CS is not like an English paper where you can just turn it in and there’s not a way to say if it’s a good paper or not,” [a computer science major and a teaching assistant] said.
“At 3 a.m, you can be looking at a program and definitively say that it’s not going to work.

This is really good stuff. But why did someone mute the laugh track?