john_other_john

I'm confused, because I understand your comment to mean, that if I set out to learn something, by commitment alone, I recreate within my mind the tutor's knowledge and vision.

I should dearly love that to be the case, the real possibility.

I don't think that was the subject of my comment, however.

My concern is that search engines are limiting information quality by nature of making most money when they provide the shallowest and most common presumptions for results.

why is Microsoft so lame?

I think much of the industry a joke, and Microsoft a exception.

I have lived through a 30 year saga of battles for really basic baselines to be established, insofar as the wars over office software databases and operating systems are concerned. Yes, I am impressed by what I see now, so much has evolved fantastically, but mostly users perform the same tasks and there is no recorded gain in productivity I am aware of. Gates wanted ubiquity of computers. His actions probably did more to enable that than any other individual. Without Microsoft the sometimes seemingly embittered motivation for Linux would not have been anything like it was. I think Gates always wanted to move on to more interesting goals in computing, and am inclined to think the company open source decisions do more for enabling advancement than anything else, because they make a ubiquitous platform more consistent to write for, the perennial monopoly complaint of a aggressive Microsoft. The cash cow applications are bundled now with facility permitted only by integration at prices only low as they are enabled by dominance, and I see nothing not dominant or lame, about that. I only recently benefitted from VS Community, and am still really happy at that, and I bet BillG would dearly love to give SQLServer away if only he could earn from it like a operating system (it is enough one already) and it's a peculiar delight to think Larry E may actually lay awake at night, one day, fearful that possibility is real. I think the reason has more to do with necessity to pay big sales commission to maintain the ecosystem around Microsoft database business, which provides for the channel welfare in turn supporting the rest. Meanwhile there is no Linux competitor because the GPL is anti competition. Except and unless, like all the big convert lovers of open source, someone uses the ability of cloud VDI to never have to release their code. Then we'll have incentive to make a Linux ecosystem selling desktop seats. I'm sure that's why Microsoft is porting so much, even experimentally.

I felt that was his message, too.

I never see any exercises in deducing limits of APIs to understand means to break their literal limits. I think with cost of bandwidth and instances now, subsets of search might be attempted against a private crawl, to peer into invisible optimisations.

I recently have been thinking, how vertical markets and subject areas may be susceptible to challenge for search traffic supremacy, how if the big search and data slurpers may be toppled sooner rather than later by federations of sophisticated narrow search. What if, hypothetically of course, big companies used their own data to train search models, and the models could be traded, the cost regained by advertising arbitrage in industry portals, related industries aggregated and new search models developed at both higher and lower levels? After all, what does Google do, but an implicit quid pro quo, in particular with gmail accounts? Do we need such intimate personalization to ever be even possibility? It would be strange and maybe profound irony, if big companies' actions relieved us all of intrusions by way of enabling a new search competition.

Yep, Fravia would not have felt constrained - to overmuch anyway - by an API being deprecated. I'm sure he would immediately ponder why, and whether there was a reason important to the searcher.

I always thought it poor thinking, that the SEO game was self limited by the fact it set about to skew results, instead of first learning how accurate the non gamed indexes might be already gamed. I see the way Google seems to prefer decisions following user behaviour even over any lookup at all (follow the most followed links, assume audience is right, as opposed to worry that was best of poor set of results) was the natural outcome of a industry determined to rewrite the source material constantly, even to the point of creating new grammars. Of course, what SEOs affect is not all the web, but they have been too influential, to my taste anyhow. The most written language, I forget who pointed this out here not long ago, is actually transliterated speech, exclamatory or emotive not structured with dependant clauses for elimination of risk for misinterpretation is priority, information subordinate to emotional appreciation of message intent, and semantics choice over expression. Only the other week, a comment which expressed the received impression of a company's marketing stance as speech from their spokesperson, was warned that HN doers not accept such language, and the reprimanding moderator (?) went on in such a way I was uncertain they, as opposed to a supposed audience they meant to protect from such dangerous prose, understood the words they criticized.

My view is that more "formal and correct" search might go a long way to

edit: just continuing last sentence as pushed this too quickly...

might go a long way to averting many kinds of linguistic rot.

try passing out walking down street impromptu

you're not even close to the reality of it, you might or might not even be aware of how heavily knocked you are, and it cold go on doe months or years

... "coming to" mid crossing a six lane street narrowly missed by a vehicle... how did you get there? will you reenber the incident two minutes later? or ever?

vr immersion and opiods play vital roles in creating non traumatised memory paths in your brain, and since opiods can be substituted for vr immersion for pain relief in multi amputees, to a considerable degree, that link is worth checking too.

oops, p.s. re my hypothetical of a director abusing powers:

digital signatures and other online filing is of course potential safeguard to much abuse,

but how many accountants are given those keys, to file reports, and how many accountants will typically be contracted to accept instruction solely from two simultaneous directors authorizing together?

I has one bank account, where it's never been possible to get the bank to enforce the |two signatures required| rule that was supposed to be created on ticking the obvious, simple, standard feature, option box on their form!

I personally think the way to go with UK entities, is to ensure all company compliance is handled by a larger or larger accountancy, and to begin the contract with a obligation to report "any notable alteration or variation from last known fully authorized intent as mandated by a order approved by the full board", with requirement to cease work until they have a appropriate (by scale, with "if in doubt, require every approval as if the contract is void" e.g, written responses from directors, not mere "informed by email at 03.42hrs Saturday".

But that is expensive, of course.

I can no longer neatly summarise, and I would be woefully out of date anyhow, how the principles of England & Wales company law, tend to uphold directors powers, almost to omnipotence.

But the actual Companies Court, a branch of the High Courts, has teeth, if you apply to it.

I never looked up if this was affected by recent legislation, and I cannot even recall the case docket any longer, but a 1973 case caused a director to be disqualified fro life from being involved in any company, solely on the evidence he relied on a accountant for advice during a decision.

The principle the court upheld, was that a director gains his power under the act solely by competency to run a company, and solely under his or her own attestation and reconnaissance of such competence and in the event that a director explicitly sought even professional external advice, he was under a duty to the company to de minimus inform the board his positive reconnaissance of competency was I doubt; second that by failing to do so, he acted fraudulently in being without capacity to contract his obligations, which is a implied prerequisite of employment, which employment is a fact of appointment, thirdly that by relying on (even professional) advice, he caused the actual decision basis to become unknown to the board, as he could not be questioned at a later extraordinary meeting about the crisis the company faced, and therefore was liable to a criminal standard of deception.

Name me one company director (count of fingers, I mean, if you can name any) whom you know do not rely on accountants to make financial decisions?

As late as mid 2000s, I found no superseding case law to overrule this earlier precedent. But actual actions in Companies Court are rare. If you were in need of stopping a rogue director in their actions, or others in acting upon rogue instructions, you would wan to rush down to Applications Court, with as much evidence as you can grab, the pertinent law for reference, and a draft "without notice" application to obtain a order immediately, not waiting for anyone to reply, not wasting time politely writing cease & desist of other futile letters, and most likely unless you really are mistaken, you probably will get such a order to serve to stop rogue actions, with little or no delay. Such action is easily within the competence of most anyone here, to quickly prepare and present. You will find the Master Of Court, himself usually a senior judge, acting as a "doorman" or "bouncer" to prevent rubbish cases wasting the court's time. The Master is exactly who can be willing to get your application in good order, something I know no remotely affordable solicitor can do, within the time necessary, or at all. The experience in court is infinitely less troubling or intimidating, than the real worries you likely are facing, time of your visit. I found that court almost friendly, if friendly wasn't quite the effect they would ever go for... Judges are not unhelpful to law litigants in person, nor is anyone in the high courts, allowing you aren't silly or time wasting.

I used to rant and rave about how much complete and utter disrespect for company law costs the UK, the lassezx faire of it all, providing none of the benefits the legislation might be hoped to provide a smaller business, in terms of a level base of behaviour etc. But that was before Companies House began citing legislation guidance notes, stating the purpose of the act was to promote business, a nebulous and at worst deceptive "mission statement" that the registrars' offices were not hiding behind so much, as using as a clear warning sign to the attentive, whenever they could. It's really worth getting a chat with anyone there able to still give their time and not attached to a ACD headset, but in real office, I wholeheartedly recommend inquiring beyond casual call center contact, if the moment offers itself to do so.

FWIW, my most rewarding, productive, and of all my experiences the least every worried about money, collaboration in business, was with a family friend and henceforth, my friend, who sadly passed away unexpectedly and far too young, a decade ago. But my experience of "doing business with a friend" is almost unique, and we almost vied with one another competitively to be "by the book" and compliant with our duties to one another and company because of lousy earlier experiences. If anything, I think we raised that to the point of being a unnecessarily high cost, at least from our time. But it was absolutely a superb and indeed rare case of continuous trust building, which didn't supplant other necessary trust creating behaviour, nor detract or affect life negatively in any way. (e.g. bothering too much about being "above board" never caused one of us to think the other was "overdoing it much" for the wrong reasons. I can merely hope I'll have as good a experience again. But one huge positive legacy of all that exercise in transparency and proper discharge of our duties, really made me acutely aware of how I've just not met anyone since who I felt could meet my late partner's standards. I think we used our exchange of concerns as a means to inspect our business very usefully, but in the real world, you simply must have systems in place to fulfil this role, or you'll go crazy.

Indeed.

Anyone forming a company in England & Wales, also, might benefit from a chat with someone with long experience as a company director, or professional secretary, or even better a insolvency practitioner. If none are to hand, the staff at Companies House are unable to provide opinions, but I found they are ready to give well rounded observations which might make anyone think twice as to the value of relying on Companies Act, to protect their rights. At least the Act, alone. I've even enjoyed a very candid conversation at some length with the Registrar Of Companies, when the last major Act came into force, and she was incredibly helpful and illuminating, explaining the nuances of her statutory role and its offices. For guidance as to effect of Articles or Association, please do ask their Compliance office. Articles or Table A are the bylaws of a company, and many sharp operators will try to get Companies House to accept heavily modified articles, which contradict or attempt to restrict, statutory rights, roles or obligations. There was once a inactive registered company, names Silverstone blah blah management, about the time of a rumoured bid for control of the motor racing circuit. I pulled the Table A, and none to my surprise, almost every page of it was marked in the margin, alongside almost every paragraph, with a dot or a code, indicating Compliance was highly suspect of this document, as to its legality. But, as Compa ies House began to intone by reflex, I remember the information becoming a mantra when inquiring about almost anything, they are only a records office, not enforcers. The Registrar told me in addition, that that year sh had budget and allowance (I got the sense as if she felt it was a deliberately token allowance, arbitrarily set somehow and not under her budgetary power, to prosecute four directors each month, for technical breaches of the law. I had presented her office with a single director, for whom records tallied literally hundreds of summary offences.

Larger but less scrupulous or less publicly reported companies, flout the law routinely, a trivial cost of doing business. Small fly by nights and sham "business partners" you may encounter, may roll right over you, in a instant. You might be a director and have majority equity in common shares, but another director may (quite unlawfully, but see further) de-register you as a director, call a company meeting, if one is even required, dilute you to nothing, seek shareholder approval for consolidating fraudulent actions, like divesting working capital via special dividend, and banks will almost in every single case, do as they are told if the right forms are provided. You will sure have recourse under the Act, and many summary (not tried but assessed on the facts by a judge) offenses are criminal and even punishable by imprisonment, but you would be lost without a proper management contract and ideally a law firm of repute contracted as Company Secretary and that contract specifying detailed additional procedures, even clerical checks and notifications help here, and ultimately if thus sort of thing happens, you are in real trouble with little real recourse and no immediate remedy.

That's a mere taste of the fun which can be English Limited Companies!

From memory, and it's long since I undertook any comparative study, only Sweden has laws which truly make a manager / managing director, responsible for their behaviour, under real penalty. Obviously, don't take my word for it, but I was seeking answer to just this: "So where can I risk turning my back one second, on a limited company I invest in?", and Sweden was the only jurisdiction which I felt satisfied me.

Oh, yes! I do understand, second hand, something of what you face: my friend's daughter called her contemporaries babies and bossed them around, as if playing tea parties with her dolls, too! Now she's 15...

I don't know if I was clear in my editing, because this is a thought I've first attempted to express, since reading your comment nearly 12 hours ago, since when I could hardly think of anything else. --

Just a arbitrary question: if your child speaks as if years ahead, but is not yet two, do you speak to them as their age suggests, or as their precocious age suggests?

I mean, can we as parents afford to "start acting adults" in communication, or should some more "childish" vocalisation be maintained, e.g. to affirm closeness, affection etc? Another issue, but when my mom reached her eighties, I found she couldn't engage with "adult talk", but all I had to do to get her engaging, was intone my voice as I would more a child: I realized she needed the emotional connection, but still understood the rest just fine. Maybe she was excluding the unfamiliar, a natural response to age and frailty which would make her feel unsafe outside family.

I couldn't find the word, earlier, but if I was plotting a critical path analysis for verbal engagement conducted by a mentally and linguistically 10 year old, if this was about understanding emotional contexts, there would be far greater homomorphisms in the chart I plotted, than if I was testing a child for ability to appreciate e.g. related concepts or word / idea groupings. In theory, basic emotion is simpler, but there are more paths being evaluated by a more advanced child, before life experience catches up to their intellectual age, and we measure intelligence not on the basis of finding routes to a very few states, but in way we measure intelligence by ability to distinguish paths, outcomes, and differences. We emphasize the differences, and I question whether when a child wants to know how she will feel, in any given situation, this emphasis on different paths through thought, creates a sense of dislocation or remoteness from comforting emotional states. I think this is the "big wide world, big scary wide world, effect" when our minds boggle at, say, a first sight of a major landscape or city map. There at that many possibilities, and we don't know how we feel about them. And that is us as adults.

(I didn't mean to pretend i know anything serious behind my ideas, just remembered some words that seemed to help describe my thought.)

So I'm harping on about something quite narrow here, about whether we mess up, for example by pushing kids with potential amid a tense or stressful atmosphere, among parents whose love may be felt conditional on performance (and teachers can be vile, one friend's daughter had half her school problems turn out to be ridiculous expectations from one teacher, in the one class she excelled in, so they let her flunk almost every class and this teacher pushed her, "or prove she's not stupid or lazy and just disrupting the other classes" -- sorry letting off steam, the kid's got dyslexia, not known a the time, but was killing it in history because of older family providing 24/7 oral histories at home..) anyhow, trying to return to pre-school..

For myself, this is when things happened for me, just I didn't get that memory back! So I'm reconstructing thoughts best I can...

One friend, a retired head teacher, firmly believed 5 thru 8 are most important. But I believe the 3 or 4 years before then, really are, just not educationally, but obviously affecting education.

I think exposure to adult age ranges is so important, in pre-school years. I grew up in a retirement resort demographic, small town, and exposure to friendly seniors did wonders for my social development, which was still lacking or notably disjointed well into my life. I was constantly challenged, learning how to help folk do gardening, not chores but proper growing and planting etc, whch i loved, and ettung what elderly folk want done, the right way for them is a particular skill. That was specifically very useful, later, comprehending nuanced instructions.

I realize my childhood had some lucky, even idyllic, parts to it. I have been trying to understand my life's calamities linking directly back to education an parenting, pretty much forever.

But back to this: unstructured, semi -formal engagement, and if it can be provided with individual attention, providing a variety of situations, contexts, people, challenges...

If I could create such a possibility for every child, I would, and I would require parents pushing still to my view infants, through formal education plans at that age, to justify themselves formally, before being allowed.

Social exploration, then, is even more valuable to your daughter, in my book.

If there is any way to find her friends who are older, approach parents whose kids need babysitting jobs, with the none too subtle, "you should be paying us for tuition" pitch, ,... No, I'm serious, if not serious I'd say it just like that! Young girls like to help, appreciate the role and status that that attracts to them in society, so as and when such a time comes, sell the idea as the status symbol it really is. Oh, and older kids have better toys, wondering if the older play date can supervise tablet access responsibly or not..

I can't tell from your comment, what nature your daughter's inquiry and inquisitiveness assumes, what direction it takes, whether you have local resources whether countryside or a town with a high young parent demographic, and so I've no idea how you are reaching limits. (Not no idea how you reached a limit, just no idea in what ways possibilities may be limited or available)

The key thing is what human resources do you have?

If your and your wife's parents are far away, I'm not joking, change that! If you've a brother sister or cousin house sharing in the same city, and could persuade them with cheaper rent or such like, get them moving in!

My friend's daughter, who was wowing everyone with her history appreciations, even if they were plagiarised, they were not Wikipedia rip offs, but from her own aural comprehension, is now a 15yr old right little miss, and trouble smouldering into her teen years, but when she was oh simply a whole other level of hard work - and it turns out basically her education was updended by late diagnosis for dyslexia, there's major trouble now in progressing her at all, I'm livid and still speechless how her school was run - I've known with varying degrees of social life bringing me around her parents, from when she was 2 and a half I think now, and almost shocking in her advanced and precocious demand for insights, was immeasurably helped by the variety of people in her immediate environments at home, which was a long while a larger home only ad hoc divided into apartments shared by colleagues of her dad, nobody strange at all, but a constant input from ages of 20 through 70, whom she overwhelmed with demands for what I now realize so belatedly, and not unmeassurable anger, she was unable from at school.

Yet if I have to take her any place, I immediately found a completely charming, curious, engaging, character who made me feel rotten good, when moms in parks complimented me on my friends' daughters' good behaviour. Because she was a delight of proper manners and politeness, on her own, around me. Just back home, chaos resumes. Since she has been analyzing her parents (all agree that is a vital nsurvival skill for her her since burth),usuallywhisoering excuses for them in my ear, I say she'd make a useful sociologist. Just the retaking a year at school...

I can only think, after all that, if you could move to a community where kids can get about, like I did, in our small home town (I doubt you could now, though, this was really when we rarely locked front doors), a gated community even, or if you have links to a church possibly...

We teach parents and sticvtly define in pomotional society how they are supposed to cope with everything all prim and proper, an aligned with neat values and formalized "advancement" I prefer to call it, even if merely "progression" is the uninspiring word i hear from "education professionals". But we are helped out so little what to do, in event we are faced with life unconventional in any way.

There surely must be some online - and real, physical,- communities who share experiences in wealth far beyond my little thoughts. The unmentioned benefit of my friend's family living semi communally during a real tough time, was they had powerfully articulate advocates, when CP got called by a teacher with a ugly attitude and no good reason, one time, and though that nearly became a .., well a nightmare was averted, because CP couldn't twist up two overloaded parents, as I've sadly seen happen a few other families suffer. I really doubt that sort of bonus is important or needed near you, but I mention it as how a little community real close to you, always defends its own. That safety and assurance, is priceless, i think when growing up. It's the next 16 years of your life, I guess, so you can afford to plan slowly and act carefully, and administer cures sparingly since real problems rarely show overnight.

best wishes - j

I worried – as you kinda hint yourself - you might worry yourself or your family, into a corner, and this is my third take, to try to fly under the comment length limit, please accept my apologies, I just had so much to say about self reinforcing worry from when I was a kid, from memory I had lost until this summer, from which I'm beginning to think I'm learning...

My thinking follows a year in which I regained, suddenly, memory of my childhood I had lost completely.

Does an exceptionally intelligent kid, necessarily, as if in a zero sum game, lose out emotionally and in social development?

Or is the young mind, learning how to go fast, simply slipping gears necessary to answer emotional questions?

Or was my experience of my parent’s constant worry over me, which became toxic, a over-arching problem, merely causing me to exaggerate the importance of questions that seem to fit with my “theory”?

And do parents of unusually quick infant / child minds, ever manage to provide the calm reassurance in which their child can make the approach back to emotional assurance of parents' love and stability, when lines of new inquiry into the world don't provide answers that can yet be comprehended?

I am personally convinced that young children can and sometimes do advance emotionally at a similar pace to academic measures, when very young, but we only see the results of when the brightest fail to find it so easy, because of worried or even pushy parents, and so we get developmentally imbalanced stereotypes which I do not think ought to be stereotypes. As in a truly bright kid with no social skills, is not one I think with a social deficiency, just they were not able to find links emotionally at a suitable pace for them.

I cannot imagine anything worse (or just difficult) than a mind on over drive, supercharged, forming its first connections without having a fall back safety of comfort and peace and reassurance in the atmosphere it finds. Nobody can manufacture perfect atmospheres or emotional moods, but I dare to suggest - as a point of reference at least, my father tried with some success - that meditation and related ideas might help you project the emotional calm which could provide an important means for your infant to retreat into the safety of emotional needs, and attachment to you, as parents.

I think I didn't get how many paths there are to making things feel right, and thought people were much more complex than they were. I imagined I had to make things just so, or nobody would be happy. Whilst simultaneously being told by adults I was unusually complicated little child, that made me miss so much I could have done with learning solidly, then. Unfortunately, my history was sadly littered with unfortunate events that distinctly did not assist me in self evaluation, so I may have had a more tricky time than others.

My father would every now and then declare something like "I give up you are too annoyingly difficult for me to solve", and shut whatever he was reading, and there would be a wonderful change in the atmosphere for all of us. He did know he had to give up, also, stop fretting I mean, just wasn't so great at it. He would act out those gestures with exaggerated relief, and pursue something impromptu we'd all enjoy, probably carefully prepared but who would care. He would clearly be relieved and appear delighted himself, as if he had "solved" me. We just loved he'd stopped worrying. Like they say acting out happy, even just standing the way you do when say joyous at your team scoring, triggers the emotion itself. I reckon that learning about acting, about body language improv, tones of voice etc are super useful tools in parenting. (and lots of fun, potentially, too)

The hardest thing I always can see some parents find, if I ask, or chat with or observe, is they think they make mistakes with overmuch significance. I want to joke now, that if your child gets too far ahead in learning, slow them down with existential philosophy, and ask why they know anything they appear to claim as knowledge. One of the happiest people I grew up around, said her father constantly took the mickey out of her, when she was little. Humor, with the ingredients of counter-factuals and questions of comprehension, is obviously a great socializing influence, and I truly am jealous of your predicament in one sense, that I would love to watch such a child grow up appreciating subjects thab vnt adults so poorly understand, humor in particular a important one to me, as well as interesting from a mental development, theory of mind and so on, as well.

If I may suggest one last thing, it is when I am talking through any problem with someone really stressed long term by the problem's intractability, I make sure to go over every last detail, several times different takes. I find that by being completely thorough, and running over detail with differing but complimentary thoughts, my friend rarely gets stressed again right away because they suddenly remark, "but you forgot about x, we're doomed". Oh, and when the problem is anxiety or worry not solving a actual problem (very much the case with female friends, or anyone inclined to use indirect speech) I try only to generalize that other perspectives exist, and find complimentary paths through "the data", because the main thing is to get someone "unstuck" from e.g. circular thoughts. Saying that because I think you could do well to review who is best to turn to, when you do need advice, and I learned this technique/habit from someone who helped me the most, and I think when truly worried deeply (as one always is about a child's development) then at the time you are worried, just I wouldn't want to hear any "actual answers" or advice, because i'd be in a bad place to evaluate real useful information or views. I figure I can always ask again or in the morning, but it's not great to hold on to ideas of fixes to longstanding problems, when you are low about them. If you can, try to assemble and nurture friends and colleagues with the "basic equipment" you need around you, and make sure to evaluate, alongside your wife, what you both think of the quality and value of such support, if you do find it useful. (From experience, I must say when it comes to kids, social factors are really important, who advises can become more important than any other factor, in-laws usually teach you this son as your baby is born, but it’s worth noting more widely, how political advice about child rearing can be, and having a strategy to appreciate that can help reduce stress, get more people onboard, avoid comments such as “no wonder he’s stressed about your baby, just look what he’s doing!. Irrational, sure, but human stuff like this demands proactive approaches) I sincerely doubt I could be of any help or guidance, but since the related areas have been very much on my mind, a good while, I'd be delighted to _try, or be a sounding board, if you felt someone out of the loop appropriate, and I'll add my email to my profile, if you wish, by reply. (Literally only if you thought there was some unlikely lead in my comment, or a once in blue moon exchange might offer a alternate thread to follow, but I feel I’m merely flattering myself by offering, it’s just your use of words and seriousness of problem, the way you put it, well if you are as concerned, I read HN daily, and will check for any replies, the subject is real close to me)

I really do think we get early development sorely wrong, generally, for kids with exceptional absolute or relative ability. I mean, in the sense of we are missing something, even maybe for a reason like cognitive dissonance, or something actually simple we've not considered. My line of inquiry is into how "hard" intellectual tasks are versus emotional "reasoning". Just Friday, chat came up about the kind of rehabilitation courses they put felons through, typically titles such as "emotional reasoning", and my argument was that if we got emotions right, they wouldn't require "artificial" reasoning, that we need a more direct interface or language, or means to learn to control without reasoning, as evidenced by breathing exercises e.g.. The subject is beyond me, but it's one I will continue to try to study, as it does seem vital to me, one day, hopefully. It’s with the same level of hope, that I do hope I may have added something, however little, of use to your efforts. If nothing else, please take this away: I so wish my pop ever asked or was able to ask what best to do about me, on HN or something like it back in the day, so I'm rotten jealous of your parenting, as a adult and a grown up child! All my best wishes – j

I can only ever see this as a kind of broken transference of emotions that normally attach to the pleasures (and trials) of proximity to one's friends.

Most simplistically, we have traversed a social arc between almost hard - wired numerical limits to groups, by tribe or family or township, or travelling together, through dissociation of conurbations and suburbia and the popularism of the "atomic family" which mae feel-good about a life within a picket fence and a statutory numberof offspring, all separated from relations, co-workers and even neighbors by white-picket and loosely connecting these nodes via tin chariot (well, steel, but tin chariot scans more to my liking), through synchronous but limited (by cost of area code) node to node networks (POTS) until today one only has to sign up for Facebook and one is inundated not only with "friends" * but the immediacy of multifaceted interaction in many time-division multiplexes of attention, which is in comparison with our earlier means to communicate, infinitely closer to the real thing of mingling among people we know or vaguely know.

Meanwhile, for a litany of reasons, from specialisation in study to the economic drive that demands ever greater input from students to adjuncts and in similar fashion in business demand for narrow "verticals", silos of expertise, the straining naturally not automatically robust interdisciplinary lines of correspondence, even to the distraction of once innocently the snake game, but our phones themselves...

It feels to me as if we have been corralled, and I do not say this has been to any grand plan, but it feels to me as if our lives are inverted. Or at least I felt that I experienced a inversion: My work was a primary social interaction, and home a "refuge" or rather a seclusion at best, a isolation at worst, and it could feel so even when not alone, if I was in my wife's bad books. But now instantaneously I can obtain the adrenaline, serotonin, the chemistry caused by high value, high consequence socialising, whilst individually I cannot communicate silently my mood with a gesture or sigh, whilst individually I can be picked off for especial treatment to pump my brain chemistry in the right way to receive a advertisement, without someone guffawing what a load of tripe the product is or telling me I won't like a violent scene in a movie or..

I may not be doing so well at this, but I am trying to describe how I believe Facebook and imitators can co-opt the physical self that is keyed to complex social interaction, [edit to add next few words] and in a larger social context high value things such a reputation and acceptance carry heavy processing burdens as well, which potentially may impair other critical thought. [end edit]

Along with the chemical and thence psychological rewards, comes very possibly "being happy" or "a happy user", yet because we are alone, a sole observer, I see risks. Even in company we have created our unique context. I recently described the difficulty of discussing code between two on even the same part of a project, to being able to tell from what they say how, by reading what articles or using what sites, your love on the sofa with you has arrived at a particular remark, without them explaining it. I said just keep adding bells on that one." Because social interaction at a wider mark is high value and high risk, and because we process so much of this intuitively or subconsciously, any extension of the framework that omits balances and checks, which are provided in face to face society where communication is necessarily open, I believe there is significant potential for undesirable system wide side effects on a individual.

So I do not think that users are in of themselves happy _because of a product like Facebook, but Facebook has created for them a simulacrum. I believe like any simulation which is necessarily crude, inherently non - deterministic, and isolating whilst increasing sensory or other input, such a system is not inherently not dangerous.

*That experience was made even fresher to me, not very long ago, when I first time ever registered on FB, and before anything else, entered a pre-pay cell number. I was quite confused a while how many people seemed to know me, even invite me to be friends, who seemed to stretch my recollection a bit much, before I twigged the number had been allocated not long before I bought the phone. Invites to be friends were surprising - I checked and I don't share a name with anyone in this other social group...

[Edits for punctuation, minor clarity]

Forgive me if this is without the applicable context, but sp527, I sincerely doubt you are a person of average means.

I mean neither to backhanded compliment the abilities of the HN crowd, nor to - as seems increasingly common when I find myself in the change - state interfaces of society, silently denigrate you by implicit reference to privilege I may not have. If you can take my statement literally, that would be superb!

I mean, I think the word average when it comes to ability or performance or self assessment is poorly used. Too frequently it is meant as self denigrating before a audience (which, as with above, I did not infer nor deliberately infer from your comment) and when it is used plainly, as in "I'm an average kinda guy" I find it too often misleads one into imagining one's interlocutor is saying they are a unremarkable character personally. It's a safety pitch in a chat up line, for one example of use subset my last classification of "average" use.

I take your statement literally in a socio - economic and intellectual sense, but with a skew that probably does put you quite a bit above the census bureau averages in most ways.

But what does frustrate me, when self description of "average" is used, is that perfectly "average" people perform quite wondrous feats or succeed with way above the deviation accomplishment, because one is able to trade in life.

I have just remembered this, prompted by your comment: when in my early twenties, despite I had received a privileged education, imagined what I could do by trading futures in myself. Take my thirties away and give that time to me now. Forget my personal growth (that was a biggie I left too late, beware!) because now I want to design things 24/7/365. And so on and so forth. I estimated not my ability or relative ability, but looked about at how long (by mere guesstimate) things I admired took to do, when I imagined most on that job were going home normal hours to wives and children, and having weekends and social lives, and the odd sick day or holiday, and maybe only reading two or three work related books a year, max, and certainly not consuming a subset of citeseer in unbroken mind-high caffeinated sessions which cared little to distinguish weeks, let alone days.

Quite apart form the fact you are either a engineer or have some capacity in that regard, the bounds of possible optimisation achievable from "a person of average means" I think must be very excellent indeed. How indeed, did mankind excel, when there was just a few of us in any social group hanging about with no tools or fire or built shelter and so on? Someone hit it right out the park, not merely once, but probably a while lot of times in a row, to get us through some earlier developing stages, just as we have some now, particularly in systematising and understanding what all this software lark is really about and how to make all of us good at it, instead of - one wonders - mere self defined _potential_ outlier points around some average.

I'm also quite sure, that when you are in your metier, when you are at a fundamental level aware you are where you want to be, you will find relevant skills or muscles or abilities notably at a higher functional level than you ever imagined they could be. Because there is something reflexive, compounding, about the human existence at least I have known, just as equally there can be compounding, confounding negative spirals. I believe there must be a art I have not learned in my 40 some years, of neatly skipping sideways from the spirals and letting one's instincts guide us to where some factor or energy or whatever phenomenon it may be is compounding and positive. If we could so dance with our own entropy, what a dance it would be. But meanwhile, I think "average" is most definitely not always average.

Oh boy....

Pro 2 user here, and to better understand it for work reasons, I made it primary machine for over 8 Hurst / day since last April. Until I guessed I had reached the point no software updates were likely.

I am genuinely disappointed.

Despite the initial impression of execution was positive enough for me to have a eight week or so honeymoon. I think the idea has legs longer term.

For me, of many many issues I encountered, it is IE tablet / touch version which has been become what in hindsight ought to be a showstopper.

There is no alternative for touch use without contortions.

Yet IE left to far too much grief.

I guess here nobody will freak if I had 50 or more tabs open. Not a usual search decision list to keep handy.

But without respite, IE would seize and redraw, reload no matter how cache sized (which pretty much needs a trip to the registry) and commonly crash.

I was heavily reliant on a 3G mifi connection during most of this time.

It is beyond my comprehension how a browser in theory close to OS that knows I am using a metered connection in particular with long latency, can be shipped with a addiction to cache miss reloads.

I would close down tabs carefully and exit IE (touch).

Reboot and ....

The entire past session and even sometimes earlier sessions would reload.

I found that bookmarks did not store or persist.

It just goes on and on from there.

This is merely the highlight commentary.

But within nearly 80 single spaced pages of description, not solely concerning IE behavior, I realized I had been building a "not fit for purpose" complaint.

I did not exclusively encounter the IE problems with only a few tab open, either.

I actually do think that the shipping state of the Pro 2 would, if I had understood beforehand, guaranteed I did not purchase it.

I don't maintain a web presence or have access to a appropriate place to publish my extensive review. But I am thinking what to do about that, right now.

Although I speak very casually about what ought to touch upon different memory models for touch aps from Metro thinking, the process sumps I ran, API monitoring, attempts at querying NTFS to find "lost" writes and a determined effort to seek out any possible corruption of the SSD writes.... all of which were reasons in terms of finding free time which delayed my formal complaint so far beyond when I first became incredibly frustrated, I hope I may be permitted here a modicum of credibility that I did at least have a fair go at figuring out anything that might be otherwise wrong.

I very much like this format.

This new 3 might be just the ticket for lightweight moments needing a x86 device I can carry substitute another tablet.

Yet, the sad ending to this, is that in my private but professionally minded quest to bring a 5th decade brain out of atrophy and into the current device world, this is the punching:

I bought a Sony Xperia Z3 Compact.

For everything I commonly did with my Surface Pro 2, exception anything requiring long concentration, I suddenly found myself using the Z3c for entire days and continue to in cactuses it primarily.

Even when I have a environment up to write and edit, how exactly can it not plain suck to be fighting with a browser when piling through API refs or SO to check out whichever. That was simply a concentration breaker.

I probably will check out the new one as above.

But I have rarely found anything so frustrating in primary use as intended or advertised....\

And I get done faster with my Z3c, for too many tasks.

I almost feel bad at the tome I am about to dump on Microsoft, but I felt strongly enough about the potential utility to me of this device format, I am not writing any consumer report complaint. I very much want my observations, which had me regularly disrupted from my flow even of corridor meetings, to be appreciated. I am to concerned by my experience to plump for a new model without most definitely being certain I can get refund after sufficient time to go the necessary test distance. And absolutely no way will I let myself think a future update will solve anything.

That last point, the confidence that updates will resolve glaring problems, is the kind of issue that would have me shut the entire teams to standstill (per Toyota System) until this was understood.

At present, the market for any Surface is small and tolerant and sophisticated. But this is if unsolved, a PR problem that could shut down regular consumer retail dead.

I may exaggerate, and as well two years ago I thought neither Lumina WP nor Android phones (I tested a variety from mid to flagship) were persuasive, but the change in experience since then has blown my mind. Still yet so much I would do on WP or 'Droid. But the complete experience is entirely impressive. Not only that, but my very elderly family members who are most immune to me thrusting new toys into their hands in ever desperate attempts to connect our diaspora family, are finally impressed. Because above all the response of apps is good enough to prevent a kind of "Senior Valley" in which UX and app latency makes them just pause enough to think they "did it wrong".

The story will continue nevertheless.... it feels like the second or wherever we are counting, Act, is not the dramatic finale but having introduced the Dramatis Personae, we are getting some action sufficient to appreciate full blown characters.

Oh boy....

Pro 2 user here, and to better understand it for work reasons, I made it primary machine for over 8 Hurst / day since last April. Until I guessed I had reached the point no software updates were likely.

I am genuinely disappointed.

Despite the initial impression of execution was positive enough for me to have a eight week or so honeymoon. I think the idea has legs longer term.

For me, of many many issues I encountered, it is IE tablet / touch version which has been become what in hindsight ought to be a showstopper.

There is no alternative for touch use without contortions.

Yet IE left to far too much grief.

I guess here nobody will freak if I had 50 or more tabs open. Not a usual search decision list to keep handy.

But without respite, IE would seize and redraw, reload no matter how cache sized (which pretty much needs a trip to the registry) and commonly crash.

I was heavily reliant on a 3G mifi connection during most of this time.

It is beyond my comprehension how a browser in theory close to OS that knows I am using a metered connection in particular with long latency, can be shipped with a addiction to cache miss reloads.

I would close down tabs carefully and exit IE (touch).

Reboot and ....

The entire past session and even sometimes earlier sessions would reload.

I found that bookmarks did not store or persist.

It just goes on and on from there.

This is merely the highlight commentary.

But within nearly 80 single spaced pages of description, not solely concerning IE behavior, I realized I had been building a "not fit for purpose" complaint.

I did not exclusively encounter the IE problems with only a few tab open, either.

I actually do think that the shipping state of the Pro 2 would, if I had understood beforehand, guaranteed I did not purchase it.

I don't maintain a web presence or have access to a appropriate place to publish my extensive review. But I am thinking what to do about that, right now.

Although I speak very casually about what ought to touch upon different memory models for touch aps from Metro thinking, the process sumps I ran, API monitoring, attempts at querying NTFS to find "lost" writes and a determined effort to seek out any possible corruption of the SSD writes.... all of which were reasons in terms of finding free time which delayed my formal complaint so far beyond when I first became incredibly frustrated, I hope I may be permitted here a modicum of credibility that I did at least have a fair go at figuring out anything that might be otherwise wrong.

I very much like this format.

This new 3 might be just the ticket for lightweight moments needing a x86 device I can carry substitute another tablet.

Yet, the sad ending to this, is that in my private but professionally minded quest to bring a 5th decade brain out of atrophy and into the current device world, this is the punching:

I bought a Sony Xperia Z3 Compact.

For everything I commonly did with my Surface Pro 2, exception anything requiring long concentration, I suddenly found myself using the Z3c for entire days and continue to in cactuses it primarily.

Even when I have a environment up to write and edit, how exactly can it not plain suck to be fighting with a browser when piling through API refs or SO to check out whichever. That was simply a concentration breaker.

I probably will check out the new one as above.

But I have rarely found anything so frustrating in primary use as intended or advertised....\

And I get done faster with my Z3c, for too many tasks.

I almost feel bad at the tome I am about to dump on Microsoft,

Isn't a few now of the major websites, just formatting our random output into templates? I'm convinced we're as a race still just as sold on having nice templates in our wordprocessors, only just now for the web, and here's the funny thing, how meanwhile everyone and his dog seems to want to write a new basic, oh so very basic, word processor, for each new website they drum up, the irony of it all is that to me it harkens so much more evocatively of the days of VBA ruling the small biz game, and VBA developer magazines selling code and tool bundles, and boy there was indeed a lot to be made, in that sort of thing... just nowadays we're suppose to all follow this or that ethos or ethic or way of fiddling our formats and pay someone else to curated our invaluable output online, preferably for a fee that does not exclude the possibility to better advertise to us...

How many to make the donuts, or to milk the Bavarians and churn the cream?

Well you may be the first person I heard say that, but likewise, brit humor, American spelling seems the easiest combination to me.

Nah, at the fringes of east London's trendy "digital" parts, you can hear marital type arguments launched clearly across whole estate (project) courtyards, any given weekend..

Anyhow what was that about being so bad about being loud SPEAK UP DEAR, I CAN'T HEAR YOU?

long ago, when I had just a tiny company and we were essentially a friendly lot, we'd do skits once a month, competing to come up with the best reasons to fire each other, for prizes and forfeits. It was a game, but it helped among other things to relieve a lot of internal tension that might otherwise have politicized us.

About that time, or rather a few years later, reflecting on those skits, I told my cofounder, "Dude, I have come to the conclusion that lately if I worked for myself i'd have quit, and if I hired myself i'd have fired myself. What went wrong?" as a result I stepped out of management for a while, and hit the proverbial drawing board.

I can imagine now that someone would sue for this sort of thing being bullying at work, or some such rot, but the skits gave us often too much insight into the real effective personalities at our work, often in the "too much information" category, but almost invariably in good humor.

Just thought the exercise might yet benefit somebody else, still, for the mention.

And if the Surface 3 ever gets some market share, too!

Hey, IMAX is a "tall" format, also... will that be the argument to sell us new screens, if or once the 4K television game is over? :~)

Many films originally printed in color for theaters had their delicate color internegatives lost or destroyed or decayed. Often only archive mono prints manages to survive, because of better or more stable chemistry.

Ted Turner wasn't all crazy. He had history on his side, for some movies. But then he also got a huge upsurge in viewing, of the films he colorized. I think there's fair argument that more distribution, more viewing, of a art form, is a good thing.

Also, what's dismissed as SD is so often truly awful SD, not clean and heavily compressed.

Like the commented above, I often wish for just a decent SD copy. Really well transferred DVDs are pretty good to watch.

The Daily Mail is not anyone's prime choice for a source for anything, but this interview snippet, with Ray Winston, a actor who grew up around my neighborhood, is very telling:

'I was skint, I couldn't get a job and I hadn't paid my tax,' adds Winstone, who declared himself bankrupt in 1988 and 1993.

'I had two choices. I could either go and sign on and get my flat paid for or go to work.

'I chose to go to work and I paid all my debts off.'

....

[sic] "I could sign on and get my flat paid for"

The DM is known for right wing bias, but Winstone is known for left wing support, and you can make of the whole thing wherever you like, but the truth remains much the same today: you can go and sign on for benefits, and get your rent paid for. That's a amazing thing, if your life falls through the cracks. But it is a way of life. I have had friends explain to me how they chose to "go on the sick", one after a epileptic fit. That person does suffer epilepsy, or something similar, but the fits I witnessed coincided with being involved in a frightening relationship based as far as I could tell, on access to a boyfriend's money to indulge a long term heroin habit. I'd in ten years not seen or known of a fit, before that abusive blow out, and meanwhile her habit had been paid for by renting out her provided home, at a discount to, but still substantial profit on, market rates, whilst she lived with her partner in squats. This is not a exceptional example.

We now have even fourth generation children of families who have never worked a regular job.

And a vast health service burdened in so many ways my head spins.

They took away the notion of self responsibility.

That, as far as I can see it, is my prognosis for the terminal decline that is wreaking havoc in every walk of life.

We call for education "reform".

Reform usually means slow action, changing structures piecemeal or adjusting parameters in a technocratic ideal.

But, blinkers off, what took generations to rot, to completely decompose, may not be resuscitated if the conditions of good growth are poisoned soil.

Please forgive me my outpourings.

I lucked out in early life in so many ways.

And I screwed up big time, about a decade or so ago.

It's taken ten years work, not nine to five or even hours I could count, but a wholesale reeducation of this once super privileged, highly educated, young man, to just begin to reclaim the advantages I had.

What hope, then, those who fell through the same gaps in life, which I did, who did not benefit from a unrivalled academic education? People think I boast, rest on laurels, when I mention my young years. BS. I am highlighting just how harsh this system is. And the safety net that is provided, amazing though it be on paper, is totally alien to people of comparable upbringing to me (distorted also by genuinely Georgian era parents) and I could surmise my experience as being that alienation is in fact a class distinction, highly archive in this (to parrot John Major)" classless society". Rot. Class divisions have never been more acute. If Marx did not choke himself to death whilst reading our papers, he might laugh at the ridicule of social inversion, where now the lowest are elevated to national priorities, where the intelligence of the proletariat as worshipped by Tolstoy has become the fattened (on junk food), indigent (on "benefits" and "entitlements")and uneducated (c.f. all the above) idle class.

This was the reality, into which Tony Blair, and coterie, believes mass immigration would instill a work ethic and a hunger for self betterment. I and my friends often receive taunts, for being friends across race lines, in a majority immigrant, second to third gen, neighborhood. So I could care less for racialist nonsense. But consider the sheer scale of the solution that was promoted, to solve a problem that whilst occasionally identified, is still verboten speech in true debate.

As programmers, however many LOCs we debug a day, we should be gravely concerned as to the trivialization where supers, "3M" ideals, of twenty years ago are pocket sized stolen currency for hits of crack, and the technology is more seen as a vector against which state must protect children, or swoop in SWAT style upon admittedly amoral copyists of entertainment. The charade of the BBC, on the recent SONY hack, tells us all; a self proclaimed hacker was not interviewed but subjected to faux indignation, asked what right he had to spoil innocent childrens' appreciation of their new PS4s. We ought to be indignant instead at the presumption that technology exists for such trivial gratification. I guess anything which is potentially apolitical, is soon co-opted by political interests. But where is the promise of individual capability that once switched on and delivered a BASIC interpreter at a prompt? There's progress, measured by landfills, but where is that promise? There is the political disaster of technology, as affects us all. I want to scream at adverts for employees, asking for skills in using Microsoft word. Not because word might actually need ability in macro scripting, but because I thought the necessity to specify elementary ability with computers should have died out by the time I was in my thirties. I guess, too, that much of life is a disappointment. Software became a pseudo- religious ground, arguably, and all systems close to money will fight within themselves. But lately it seems to me every website was reinventing the wheel of a basic text editor, and I started to cry a little, inside. Not least because perfection never came for a word processor. But because I don't know in what direction this technology is going, not beyond the "d'oh-horizon" of jargon, the realization of the omits of monikers such as "cloud computing", but more generally, I could not see a direction. The proverbial revolution seems to have come and gone without revolving much at all. But look now, and everything I see does amaze me, it's wonderful. The riches make me cry. But they seem to make those who would rather attain riches without any work, cry the louder. I have never imagined there could be such a polarization of have and have not, for real, in my lifetime, growing Jo as I did, in the safe illusion of the late seventies, but I feral it now, and what we do, and no amount of web n.x hipsterism is changing this detrimental dynamic. One is only cool for so long, and the cooling cycle is on better than web time, beyond nay hope that politicians, or those involved, might ever catch up, let along "get with" any program.

If I go on, i'll be searching for New Year's Resolutions, so i'll just beg once again forgiveness for my personal outflowing of worry, and say a little prayer that there's the ingenuity to find solutions that are not mere rehashes or inversions of the same old problems.

"I've managed and I did badly at school"

The sad fact is that the vast majority of individuals and families in the UK are entire reliant on the state. If you pay a marginal tax of about GBP 20,000 pa you still likely receive more than that in direct value of services. I think the value is much higher, both of services delivered to those in lower tax brackets or lower net tax payers, and the rate of earnings required to net contribute in taxes is much higher also. It's entirely possible that the only net contributors are the maligned "one percenters".

The numbers are subject to wild variation, how you calculate them. But you can pick out anecdotal evidence that is significant. In much of central London, family homes are housing association (QUANGO) or local authority owned, and rents are typically below GBP 100 pwk, I hear 70 or 80 wish, commonly, and less. Whereas the market rental for equivalent homes, is approaching four times that. That's one massive distortion in housing supply. In the extreme, I know of one person who was "forcibly downsized" to a slightly smaller home, still with more bedrooms than they, a single man, needs, caused by need to structurally refurbish the building where he lived, where he was relocated around the corner into a newly refurbished and appointed home, paid GBP 5000 for inconvenience, cost and arrangement of moving all provided, an the market rental value of this man's 78 pound a week hone is over six hundred a week.

It's true, also, there are some really appalling failures in social systems for housing and support, but I live and grew up in a "deprived" area, where I enormous resources are almost thrown at those eligible for public support.

The problem is, that not nay in many cases, is there no viable exist from public support, because low wage earners are able to claim top ups for low or i'd argue illegally poor pay, and many can legally stay īn subsidized housing all their lives, whilst earning market salaries, but I believe the situation is so politicized as to permit no rational debate or discussion. I have been verbally threatened for the very fact I live in a private dwelling, by complete strangers, visitors to neighbors in the same building, such is the actually false politicization of "have and have not" "society".

When I was at prep school, about nine, we had a support math teacher, who regaled us mainly with stories of his time n the Military Police. That was actually good education, but we were flunking any math we didn't study n our own, that year. This teacher also told us of his time in teaching for the ILEA, he Inner London Education Authority, in the mid seventies, not long before he was teaching us. We laughed in disbelief how exams or exam results were banned, for "creating hostility towards the children of the better off families", who, one might surmise, did put a value on their children's education.

Like most so called socialist systems, there has been a enforcement of the lowest common denominator, not a enforcement of what the LCD should be. In result: no self respect, c.f. the quote which spurred my reply here today. That result, no self respect, is the death knell of civilization and yet the panacea to becalm nervous politicians queasy their unsupportable, inept, uneducated, policies risk challenge.

I prefer to think it congeals...

Possibly your last description of good fit, "long uninterrupted stretches of focus" is the best advantage one can look for, when hiring, as well. If I can be forgiven a few possibly unnecessary words, I got to mismanage remote working and remote employees, a food long time before something very obvious dawned on me:

Although many managers gripe about the possibility for distraction at a home position, I simply cannot believe that a good candidate, who is therefore thoughtful, methodical, consistent, analytical, competent communicator, is going to have more distractions in a environment they control, compared with a office.

Often the most important aspects of any project design, require multi discipline technique and thought, consideration of the problem at deeper levels than the implementation, and long stretches of attention.

My ability to remain concentrated, in the sense of having a problem set or exercise or contemplation loaded in my head, over long periods, is almost always far greater at home, where those around me are usually attuned to my moods, able to accommodate me when I grunt I'm not really available, and I can filter these situations well enough to not become disassociated with my family. Even kids do not really pose a major distraction, when at home, because I attune to them, and can mentally prepare, e.g. for "invasions" such as the end of school day: if you pay attention enough to your kids to know what their day will be like, you can blend in your attention to them, until they have your full preoccupation. I'd far rather have a serious deadline or a crunch problem working around my family, than in any office.

And yet, I like offices, very much. I enjoy office life, not because I no longer lead a primarily office led existence. But the utility I can get from a office, from rapid interaction, from meetings whether formal or at the water cooler are a different structure and utility which I try to appreciate as a different tool set. The office is a tool for me, and I trunk differently when there. I bring everything that requires direct interaction, survey of opinion, consensus or confrontation, of rapid action and installation of need, to the office.

Basically, if you try to apply interchangeability to both office and remote working, maybe you should not expect great results. For a very long time now, it's known to my colleague that when I'm in the office, I am fully theirs, subject usual behavioral norms, that I am there to do something specific, that they can dump things in me if they want, but I will probably work on them if I cannot resolve in the office context, until I come back, and so on. I just present a different "me" by presenting a different activity bias, and even a different language style. You won't find me in deep contemplation in the office, unless others have joined me to hit some long hours together for a specific reason.

Offices are about activity, and programming is not the mind of activity that offices have grown up with, throughout the history of modern workplaces. I dislike to such a degree the standoffishness of donning noise cancelling headsets, of bunker mentality in cubicles, of being present but erecting barriers, that rather than rail against it (even this feels too much the rant) I exclude as much of that possibility by my own actions and behavior.

I couldn't function without my family (maybe too melodramatic, but I've been through divorce once, thanks, before) and yet i'd get withdrawal symptoms from the office. Admittedly, it's "my" office, or rather I was instrumental enough to be heeded and possibly even to set cues for behavior, but I don't think seniority or anything like that alone cues better behaviors, on the contrary I think more junior or even new hires have more influence than they realize. I've sat there as I realize that I have been "losing authority" because new hires are simply leading by - effective - example, which is a feeling that sucks if you don't grasp what are the reasons, i.e. what is being done better. It's not always "just better" but this authority loss experience early on, attuned me to the idea maybe we were expecting the wrong things of people, when really bright talent would rather code on their laptop in the office kitchen, as if it were a Starbucks... only then a colleagues, then another, and the headphones on... so it was time to realize, there was a fundamental impedance mismatch: send people home, but tell them the point is to work on that home balance not to go be isolated. I've no opinions much as to working with anyone remotely exclusively, though I have done in the past, only think that if you have a office, it's possibly rather silly to mandate any way of working.

The upshot when it works, is great: when someone comes into the office, it's because a job is done, because they've got news we need to hear (including not great news, but I feather like the physical drama of the entrance which gains attentive minds) or they have (naturally my favorite) a new idea to present. This keeps the place from stinking of sweat and takeaway food, as much as it has any other benefit. Club house, not doss house.

None of this seems to work for the finance crew as well as it does for production code, but I think it just highlights you have to think differently according to each job. Maybe we don't study ourselves as well as we should: the office is getting to be a old idea, but camping out in Starbucks is pretty tired also. If I could, I'd take a office with a courtyard of garden. In our city, that's a dream for now. But the ne thing I know would make things go better, if not more productively in KLOC or sales, would be fresh air space that's private to us. The immediate thing we're doing, is rigging a better Skype conference setup, using their broadcast edition, so we can use proper cameras - I think poor videoconferencing is awful nervous twitchy time, but a clear fast frame rate on a decent screen is almost relaxing and enjoyable. That's something I think that matters for remote work. Our plan is to buy as close to broadcast kit, hooked up through Skype, as makes sense, to give to everyone who works remotely. I'm that convinced the ease of communication and even intimacy breaks down the remote barrier. I'm convinced also, that if I was contracted and had to conference with management via Skype, I would lay for my own installation. What value is that guy, in the fuzzy stuttery window? I don't know what other practical considerations one can allow remote workers, but to me, anything which makes the relationship smoother, is something I would immediately consider. That went for nice microphones, also, and will probably extend to at least subsidizing new desks for home use. When I think of all the days I got up on the right side of bed, in a great mood, sun shining, birds singing and all that, and by the time I was through the traffic and greeted by who knows what random disgruntlement of petty politics, I cringe. Those great days transformed into a day at home feeling top, writing well, thinking all the better.. they are the real payoff. What I don't know, is how best to integrate a new hire if they are genuinely remote, as in will visit rarely. I loathe enforced office "holidays" ("training days", whatever you call them, they just are not in my experience done in a straight up fashion, there's something dishonest because of trying to mix the objectives, in my mind) but when in the past we nearly were joined by who was happily living abroad, I figured we'd go see him, regular, plain socially half the time, and anyone working with him could, for all I cared, take that as a holiday. I'm that against artificial "bonding" things I put my neck out on that one.

Anyhow, sorry if I went on far too long. There's so much work that just requires pottering about your own home or garden or even playing with the kids, to get to sit with the creative part of one's mind, that I think the mega cute offices of the Google's of this world still miss the point, almost grate even with the conflicting signals of it all. I just happen to really like a smart office like office. I think more people would agree with me, if they had provided a genuinely smart office. Even if we've hard cored all week and are unshaven, why not bust out a new tee (ahem, oxford collar, whatever! )and take a power trip into the office, to deliver I person? I think it works great too, if we have customers about, because they too often have the idea a young firm is going to be slovenly, and worse of remote employees, they genuinely can and do often enough, think we'd all be in mom's basement still, had we not been kicked out. Bottom line, a remote employee can be the best asset, if you realize everything around them and you is part of the capital investment. Theatrics like I like, are just icing on the cake. When time to time we have visitors, I clean out my (very minimal) stuff and put the project / objective lead's name plaque on my door, so it's like they come to meet Bob, to see his new feature, he's lead on, and, yeah, we treat people who write neat new features that well ... would do , if they needed a office full time ~> The salesman in me does this to mess with customer heads...

Ninja edit, will edit better after a cup of tea, lots of silly autocorrect typos, my apologies, I'm actually rather passionate about office and remote working situations...

I was one of those who bought books, took weekly reverent hauls at the bookstore, from Prentice Hall, until about twenty plus years ago.

I could not bring myself to appreciate Linux as it was, as it could be, back then. But I realized the trend, because I could understand the economics, both financial and cultural.

What I think happened to me, was a kind of disillusionment. I saw the progression as a long reimplementation of then already ageing concepts, because there was a genuine need to prevent too much being stalled by myopic business and pseudo or real monopoly. Once Microsoft had their hands on the VMS code, or at least David Cutler (it's a strange story and a car crash that ended his counteract architect, and look where senior DEC management got their sinecures)i felt that all Microsoft had to do for twenty years, was expose functions form the NT kernel, to stay ahead in terms of features. With the only viable chase being a reconstruction of what was by definition much earlier thinking, that had to become the spirited, almost religious, movement behind Linux, or fail. I think that era is over.

I don't think anyone won. Not exactly, but I am biased because I will happily consider windows a development platform, with exceptions, and vice versa. I hope that era of chasing against a monopoly is closed, but the massive expansion of installed systems has not helped anyone. Minis or Plan 9 are far better ways to explore computing in a fundamental way, and remain in some ways, more advanced, and if there's a toss up, that can be argued by accessibility. You can't play with the Linux kernel, or with NT, without enormous system knowledge, compared with even ten or fifteen years ago. As a result, we have stagnated the progress of the art.

Sometimes I am even more hopeful, for the windows platform, since the win32 system has survived so much, and lived in emulation on its primary system now fifteen years at least. The compartmentalized driver model for NT offers a certain hope, e.g. for storage driver development, because it was well separated by design. POSIX holds everything closer to the system descriptions that were drawn thirty and more years ago. Obviously that is powerful, but it reduces potentially useful abstraction.

What hope now, is the research in distributed systems, that first interested me, thirty years ago, and I was not reading up to date papers, then, finds a home, in the mix of virtual machines, virtual datacenter even, we can put into a box. Things like on the fly code recompilation and all that's been done to accommodate usually legacy systems and VMs, did progress a lot of art, and instruction sets developed to accommodate that. Yet, with some instructions that matter to me, they are norm and likely will not be virtualized.

Forgive me my hand waving approach, please, but what interests me is when user applications are so many layers away from the kernel, especially in windows systems, I think there is room for approaching again what underlies everything. When ZFS was announced, I immediately craved for a PCI card subsystem for every windows workstation we had. This is now more of a economic quandary, nothing serious stops you building the card and exposing higher level APIs that way. We've performance we can deliberately waste. So much so in consumer space, enthusiast home users, there needs to be a application that takes advantage.

My thoughts are that we need better content addressing, than the web has an ability to offer. Content addressing is what the web has enabled, on a massive scale. The network design behind it has caused all manner of diversions for design, just take a look at how a CDN is built, or buffer bloat, or the economic constraints of "real" internet access, which is available in the UK through only maybe two consumer DSL ISPs...

To change from the "white coat", "glass room" datacenter model, which has prevailed so well that the company who so accurately proclaimed "The Network Is The Computer" (to mem memorably, in a billboard right outside my office, no place anyone save me and colleagues would ever see much) is part of a classical "mainframe" model company.

The next applications that matter, will challenge the infrastructure of computing we use. This is why things like Minis and Plan 9 still matter. Both are great educational tools, but in my shop, I try to get everyone who joins us, to spend some time with Plan 9, to rethink how we appreciate data and content at a low level, and I believe that is really important to my company, the way we think, and will become important much more widely.

Just a related thought to having GPU and vision input on cars. Get enough data and you can start finding the optimal lines through corners. It's a bit theoretical, to sell as a economy feature, or maybe just a little bit premature, but as above, I really do want more GPU horsepower on my GPS device, beyond what mobile phones can supply.

I think it is UPS trucks that Nokia HERE maps rig with LIDAR scanners. I'd like more of that to happen and become public data. Nokia seem to have the majority of auto manufacturers in deals, Microsoft didn't get to buy that bit of the company clean, and I bet they've thought about how to extend journey data capture. That's potentially a nice ecosystem to have strength in, as qualifying anything that my interact with car control is a substantial barrier to entry.

Which leads mw to wonder how long it will be until, assuming someone gains access to a platform, compiling a Google maps street view dataset is possible on a budget. Maybe that is Nokia's plan...

I suddenly imagined a cross function device: I don't see why dropping in a new car stereo should not hold a board like this able to process camera and sensor data for my own use, as well as aggregating for research. I'd love, for example, there be standard physical mounts for cameras and sensors, in front and tail lights, above the rearview, in wheel arches, and a data backplane. One of these, plus a display, would make a nice in car entertainment hub, and barely use the GPU abilities, which could switch to cams, or alert me to tire wear, or even ground condition. If connected to a ECU (regs ahead, sure, but..) you might damp steering input to deal, with camber, or unload the suspension at a corner if a object looked like a puncture risk. Maybe someone should make aftermarket lamp assemblies that accommodate bullet style cams. Would take some handy optical calculations. I think automotive sensing needs a boost for collecting data by affording accommodation to such retrofits, without causing people to do hardware mods, that are likely needing certification or plain ugly, and make a supplier alliance for anonymized data. Opt in, I hope, as nobody's done a good job of instilling trust much, but i'd go for it. As for Internet of Things ideas, driver driven vehicles might be able to broadcast data useful for driverless cars. The need is for retrofitting cars as much as hoping new models will sell, as this is the sort of thing that I imagine would be a option. Make it part of something people want, like strong GPU for mapping, and you might have a deal.

What's the fascination?

Edit: genuinely curious

If you are just arrested in the UK, without any charge or caution, you become ineligible for the Visa Waiver program for entry into the United States.

Interesting statistic, therefore, from this side of the pond, having strong links family, business and social in the US.

It has often been a double standard in many fields. The trademark laws are highly favorable to US companies versus Madrid Treaty Protocol countries, because the US did not ratify all that treaty. The UK does similar with EU/EC things, also. The trademark side is interesting, as the first enforcement of a trademark registered in a Treaty state against a US infringer, was Society des Baines de Mer, who own the Monte Carlo Casino, against various internet gambling sites, and I thought that may have had more allowance due to shifting policy about online gaming, than treaty affordances.

My general view, totally non specific to any country, is there needs to be a rebalancing of laws between genuine scrutiny and thoughtfulness of oversight, versus draconian penalties.

There is also just weeding through to prove very blatant frauds, which can be forensic in nature, if payments are hidden in group company loans or sale and buy back deals, or discounting tax rebate incomes. I mean starting with a very obvious con, you still have to prove it. Currently a project if mine, in this way. Not huge, but close to twenty million dollar property fraud.