>>> weighed less than a fart in a vacuum
I assume as expressed in trumpagrams? (BTW what you do with your hoover is your own business).
1167 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2012
..oh.. p.s. the prime IBM interest was in the experience authoring system for developers... powered by a couple of cards stuffed in an IBM PS/2 - each card had a couple of IBM RS/6000 processors acting as GPUs. The number developed must have been under 100 (likely much less) so not a big finance success (nothing changed there either). The VR hardware (head mounted display, EM source, and pressure grip and spatial hand attachment (better than what I have seen on the market today) were produced by Virtuality. Graphics were crap compared to today but that isn't surprising. They had 6D tracking (x,y,z, yaw, pitch, roll) which was nice.
p.s. Newcastle United purchased one for the executive lounge mostly to play games (it was compatible with Virtuality's game systems) - mostly a failure as they had literally carpeted the walls of the lounge - the amount of static generated completely buggered up the electro-magnetic position sensing systems.
p.p.s. in my original post Glassholes refers to the original Google Glasses owners, the device recorded video of whoever you were talking to - hence "avoid that Glasshole!".
1. VR hardware is expensive - you better have something compelling for people to purchase it at scale or you lose money fast due to development and production costs.
2. Get a grip on the engineers! They will have produced version 21 of the hardware before you have even recouped the design costs of version 20 - the more you sell the more money you lose.
3. Trad flatscreen experience coders/authors are usually poor at 3D immersive environments - they don't get that if you were looking the wrong way it didn't happen.
4. Complete lack of standards meaning experience authoring costs are high across platforms.
5. Headsets that look like a diving mask, glasses that make you look like Joe 90 or the Borg.
6. Lack of compelling experiences beyond games and gimmicks - your audience is also not in the high earning category.
7. Major - Legal - Little Jimmy spends all his time in VR worlds, now he needs glasses (he would have done anyway) - class action lawsuits!
8. Completeness of vision - you really need to have VR, AR, telepresence, and teledildonics.
9. Privacy - what happens in VR worlds is subject to what legislation? AR and video recording... remember Glassholes?
AR has a much more compelling business case than VR if you can avoid creepy glasses and implement Privacy by Design: This is Fred, at the last meeting he spoke about carrots and you agreed to speak to the rabbits. This is Jane, you met at the conference last year, she drinks gin and tonics and has a pony. This is your son David, don't worry you have had a few memory problems and are in hospital, everything is OK.
(For context I used to be product manager for immersive virtual reality systems at IBM (Project Elysium in conjunction with the UK company Virtuality)... in 1995. What goes around comes around, sometimes people have not learned the lessons).
In a previous century when I worked for a company with Incredibly Borked Management we had an in-store sales system deployed in a popular high-street electrics retailer chain that is now defunct. Seemingly randomly the store server would go tits-up and would collapse in a e-pile of springs and cogs. No-one could work out what was going on... eventually a customer engineer was assigned the rewarding task of sitting there and watching things all day to see if something environmental was going on such as gross stupidity. It turned out it was the rear electric roll-up delivery door to the store, every time another fridge or whatnot was delivered and they opened their back door the motor sent spikes of death through the mains and the server stopped being one... fixed with some power conditioning.
From China there are plenty of 3rd party resellers that will gladly stuff your shipping container with locally priced devices (and more importantly in this direction with locally configured devices intended for the Chinese market that may have more liberal security policies embedded) and you can then ship them to the west and sell them under local retail rates for a healthy profit. I'm sure the same thing exists in the other direction, that there will resellers very willing to fill a container with stuff addressed to Singapore (crossed out with Shenzhen written in in crayon - could be Macao but that would be more of a gamble).
The PDP-10 (&11) were usually termed mini-computers not mainframes (limited address space). It still looked like a blue commercial freezer. I show my age by having actually programmed one. I know someone who hollowed out the gubbins of one and used it as a clothes cupboard (nerd award).
I agree all involved including Betty are absolute heroes.
For reading matter don't forget "The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes" by Gordon Welchman. Gordon does "toot his own horn" a bit but it does provide a broader picture to the code-breaking operation at Bletchley, and is more technical than other narratives. I think he is a bit neglected in favour of Turing (and I say that as a Manchester U Computer Science Alumni). He worked with the US post WW2 and sadly the NSA withdrew his security clearance as a result of him publishing this book.
Interesting that they split the role, Huawei also had (has?) a model of three rotating CEOs (not so much whirling dervishes) but they recognise the CEO role is incredibly taxing so they take it in turns to lead while other two do other senior roles in between. Not only does is lead to less burn-out and consistent energy, but in unfortunate circumstances such as these there is a natural succession plan. I guess if someone decides that one of them is total pants then it is much easier to take them 'round the back and put them up against the wall. Perhaps something to learn from this model.
There are various digital forensics tools out there commonly used by law enforcement that can read out your locked Apple iThingy in an hour or two (e.g. Exterro FTK as a popular example). Lose physical possession of your device and your information is pretty much toast without secondary encryption. Store your darkest secrets on a separate storage device with strong encryption using an open source encryption tool with a good master passphrase (unfortunately that is what any bad person who isn't thick as a brick will probably do anyway).
...if you are submitting a CV for a job, when it is going to be screened electronically, you cut and paste all the requirements into it in small type white on white (so the screening software scores it but it is invisible) - so similarly, lots of sites who have content that could be scraped should have similar content that is not visible and is maliciously evil garbage to bugger up AI training.... just sayin'.
Algol 60;
On an ICL 1902 mainframe;
And the program on paper tape;
Those were the days!
****ERROR Missing semicolon at line 4****
You lot don't know what you are missing! Whippersnappers.
I were programming when you were but knee-high to a grasshopper.
Now CESIL - there was a language.... hey let's have Visual-CESIL++
Is it Friday yet? I think I need a lie down.
;-)
The standard consulting model equation is 1.5x compensation plus expenses (benefits etc.). Fall below that you are in the crapper area. For sales it can be more simplistic - every quarter fire the bottom 10% and hire another 10%.... repeat. If you are a Partner in consulting it is a little more complex... you are expected to manage the pyramid underneath you (repeat up the chain except more golf skills and when to lose are involved). All Partners are not equal, in one of the big 5 there are 7 levels of partner, if your pyramid (everyone that reports to you) is lagging in revenue you may be on the gently out list. Other more basic factors come into play.... bugger another Partner's admin without permission is definitely a no-no. (I know a Partner who got the HR Partner's admin pregnant while having an affair...sudden death).