So, I went looking around on Twitter and subsequent links from such websites, typically news websites, and I’ve gathered a few interesting things that I note here.
There are cliques on Twitter, and indeed clique-forming is touted as a fundamental part of human nature. It doesn’t end after high school.
20190329/https://mashable.com/article/twitter-cliques-high-school-human-nature/#4.tyXMzwvPOJ
This is an interesting article about an Uber employee involved in evaluating the Uber driver app and looking for ways to improve it. When meeting with actual Uber drivers, they find it reassuring that his test drive experience means he understands more of what are doing, rather than someone who is only looking at spreadsheets at high.
20190329/https://mashable.com/article/uber-driver-app/#Vm3Q2PaAkaqj
Now this is really interesting. Garfield phones washing up upon a shore in France for over 30 years? These were discovered to have come from a lost container that crashed upon the shore during a heavy storm. Although the container fragments have been found, the garbage pollution caused by it will keep washing up on short for several decades to come, as the phones are scattered throughout the waters and stuck upon miscellaneous rocks.
20190329/https://mashable.com/article/garfield-phones-france-coast-mystery/?utm_campaign=a-rr-culture&utm_source=internal&utm_medium=onsite#jgcGYiHdEsqo
Interesting, in a world where so many people have hundreds for friends on social media, having a nemesis on social media is touted as a positive alternative. The idea is to keep competition with your nemesis in a positive light, avoiding putting them down.
20190329/https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/03/how-choose-best-nemesis/585712/
Interesting open-source startup growing fast with good valuation. What do they do? They specialize in a system built on top of Apache Kafka that expedites message passing between different large, dynamic enterprise databases.
20190329/https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/01/23/open-source-unicorn-confluent-reaches-25-billion-valuation-three-years-after-hiring-its-first-sales-rep/#e1f8df815e2c
You know the the great amphibian decline in recent years that I’ve mentioned before? Well, it looks like we now know one of the key culprits clearly. The culprit is a bacterial disease named Bd, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, that attacked nutrients in frog skins, sub sequentially causing a fatal heart attack, and spread raedily through the waters, especially aided by faster modern intercontinental shipping and transportation methods. This is a super-killer disease that knows of no niches in terms of amphibian species it attacks and is quite persistent in the environment once it reaches its destination. Our understanding is that it emerged in Asia, then spread to the rest of the world through transportation for international commerce.
20190330/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/bd-frogs-apocalypse-disease/585862/
Now, this is what we’ve been waiting for. Discussion and past events about cameras in airbnb rentals.
20190330/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/what-happens-when-you-find-cameras-your-airbnb/585007/
This is interesting. Why has homework in America followed the pattern it has? Much of it was due to inertia… if parents remember doing homework one way, they think that their children should do it exactly the same way.
20190330/https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/homework-research-how-much/585889/
This is a pretty interesting article. An explanation of how technical debt doesn’t really exist… the problem is that the term is overloaded and when people start talking about it, they quickly don’t know what they are talking about because they are thinking about different things. This article goes into detail about what these different specific things are.
20190328/https://kellanem.com/notes/towards-an-understanding-of-technical-debt
Native GUI apps in Golang? Don’t be too fooled by this article… note that it touts using the software of its own site’s name for building a Golang GUI. The idea here is to build something “entirely new”… so you’ll be disappointed by the experience if you use the so-named software. But yes, there are Golang bindings to more mainstream native GUI library software.
20190328/https://fyne.io/blog/2019/03/19/building-cross-platform-gui.html#about
20190328/https://fyne.io/
Now, this is another one of those things “you’ve been waiting for to happen.” Someone fired from a company later finding a way to hack the company in a denial-of-service manner. They got prosecuted for the damages.
20190328/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/20/steffan_needham_aws_rampage_prison_sentence_voova/
AWS has its own backup made by Amazon? Third party cloud backup vendors, watch out! By all means this is a big hit for them, though they still have their niche use case of touting multi-cloud compatibility, which Amazon does not, at least not yet.
20190328/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/17/aws_amazon_backup/
IBM has long been known for harboring lots of diversity, but in recent years, it’s gone the Medtronic way of being hostile to senior-level employees and terminating them under the false guise of poor performance, when the real determinant of their termination was merely their physical age. IBM is trying to reinvent itself as the more modern, more hip, more agile, more stereotypical tech company that is comprised out of lots young white males and lots of allegations of discrimination. Meanwhile, the U.S. military is considering expanding the demographic restrictions of the selective service beyond young males.
20190328/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/27/new_bim_lawsuit/
20190328/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/03/ibm_langley_age_discrimination/
20190328/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/09/ibm_workfromhome_cull_companywide/
20190328/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/22/ibm_age_discrimination/
Noteworthy is that Intel as a company has a few allegations of discrimination, but I’m not quite sure if the scale of what is going on is comparable to IBM.
20190331/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/02/who_had_intel_in_the_discrimination_lawsuit_pool_congratulations/
This DXC Security company is facing off some hard financial cuts in its future plans, with questions about cutting security certifications and training budget called into question. How are employees going to stay relevant?
20190331/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/26/dxc_security_spending/
Britian’s security investigation into Huawei’s smartphone software upon the suspicion of nation-state backdoors injected into there has found more security issues at fault due to the general software development methodology than any clandestine government operative. Clearly they realize that they are not holding any other vendor to as much scrutiny as they would be holding Huawei at this point, so additional investigation into other vendor software is needed. Noteworthy is that the build system is in bad need of improvement, especially for the capability of reproducible binary builds.
20190331/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/28/hcsec_huawei_oversight_board_savaging_annual_report/
Now, this is really interesting. I’m kind of surprised to learn about this. An Oracle spokesperson touts that most open-source database software was not really open-source after all. Why is this? If you look at their development model, you’ll find that most of the purportedly open-source database software is really only developed by a single party. This is quite unlike more “true” open-source projects such as the Linux kernel, that clearly has a number of different types of developers from several companies contributing to it.
But in the case of database software, it appears monopoly rule is the nrom. And, especially in light of modern cloud developments, the develpoment methodology of these parties has gotten astir. These monopoly developer parties are seeing that the cloud operators have much bigger customer bases, and they are purportedly getting paid much less than they previously would have in the pre-cloud world. So, they are one-by-one shifting their software licenses to be more proprietary. This is getting many parties upset. Ultimately, this appears to be a battle that the newly minted database proprietors are going to loose. The cloud pundits are stating theat they fundamentally don’t understand the cloud revenue model: the cloud revenue model is to amortize and reduce hardware operating costs, while the open-source software model is meant to do likewise for software. The newly minted database proprietors simply don’t understand their target market.
Meanwhile, the Oracle database pundits are pointing out that their existing and new strategies are quite aligned with the trends of the time.
20190331/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/17/oracle_exec_opensource_vendors_locking_down_licenses_proves_they_were_never_really_open/
20190331/https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/23/redis_database_license_change/