Adding this because I didn't know about it for awhile and maybe someone reading doesn't know - iOS notes includes a pretty good document scanner with the iphone camera. Open a new note and press the camera icon, you can scan multiple pages with the camera and it turns it into a reasonable PDF.
Yes yes yes!!! I had these in elementary school in Northern Ontario. The blog doesn't mention it but it also had multiplayer games. I remember a few..
- a horse race game where people raced horses by answering math questions
- a fishing game where your boat went across the top of the water and you had to catch fish and lobster without snagging your line
- a typing game that did not check if you typed the correct words or all the words, and would just calculate "number of words entered / time you took", so if you started a typing test and hit a letter and then escape, it would give you a ridiculous WPM score
It's wild to think that this entire system was only for such a small segment of the population, that we'd have our own computer line. What a weird time, the 1980s
I also had these in my elementary school in Sault Ste. Marie. Mine were also used for games only, never programming.
I remember a game where you played the role of a colonial farmer in Canada and you got to decide what to plant every season. It always stuck with me because there was a bug that didn't allow you to skip one section.
> Any protest of any respectable size will block the roads it chooses to march in, every climate change protest and every gay pride blocks the roads, never see people complaining about those.
Ottawa gets protests for left- and right- wing causes on a weekly basis. One of the biggest protests we see is a yearly "bus all the catholic school children to parliament hill to protest abortion", and it goes by without a hitch every year.
Anyways, protests last for maybe an afternoon or day or two at most and involve people standing on parliament hill or marching around the downtown core, not blockading the city core and constantly harassing the people who live there for multiple weeks.
I see this word used multiple times in people arguing against the protest, never with any details about the concrete instances of the supposed harassment. Noise is not harassment, any activity with a large group of people is going to annoy and disturb the place they happen to choose to congregate, this is not even specific to protests.
Actually, just to be clear, what exactly did the protestors do besides blocking the road and making a lot of noise?
>protests last for maybe an afternoon or day or two at most
So
(1) The duration of a protest and
(2) How much inconvenience it causes to the locals
are the two factors that determine whether it's a legitimate protest or not ?
Noise is 100% absolutely definitely harassment, especially when it is over 100dB within people's homes, and every hour of the day for weeks on end. Why do you say it's not? It was loud enough to cause permanent damage and was unending for a significant portion of the occupation, until a citizen managed to get a court injunction.
The level of noise, the duration of the noise, and the tools they were using to create that noise (including multiple actual train horns) were all illegal under existing laws, as well.
You mean they did this at night? Wow. And police let this go on for multiple nights? When sleep deprivation is done to alleged terrorists, Amnesty International calls it torture.
Because it's not, harassment is usually implied to be personal, involving hostile contact between the harasser(s) and the harassed. Did the protestors shout insults or threats at you or other neighborhood residents ?
>all illegal under existing laws
Do we really need to constantly circle back to the point that protests have to be lawful ? they do not, protesting is about breaking the ordinary and disrupting the status quo, that's the point, especially when the people protesting feel cornered and without a lawful retort to perceived injustices.
Every action against the government will hurt the population to some degree or another, 100db noise seems pretty mild compared to the private property damage valued in the millions that large-scale protests usually cause. Prioritising comfort over protest is implicitely siding with the government, which is your right off course, as long as you're explicit about it.
Edit : 100db noise turns out to be a deadly serious matter, I apologize to the person I'm replying to for making light of it.
I still believe it's wrong to use this as justification for quashing a protest, there is a whole spectrum of solutions from reasoning with the protestors to wearing ear covers, but I can better understand and empathize with the antagonism most of the affected city's residents hold toward the protests.
At 100dB, a safe dose is about 15 minutes. Blowing horns all day for weeks on end poses a significant risk of severe hearing loss. Per affected person, a hearing loss payout can be up to around $100k. Given the ~1M people in Ottawa, I would expect the physical damage to persons in the area to exceed the millions of dollars in your "[usual] large-scale protest."
Let's flip it - can your neighbour block the end your driveway and lay on their car horn 24/7 for weeks straight if they say they're protesting the government? Bonus points for harassing you if you walk by
I wouldn't like it, but I also wouldn't call it an illegal protest because I don't like it.
Truth be told I've rarely encountered a protest I liked - they are always annoying (even the ones I agree with are annoying - they block traffic to friends and foes equally).
It comes with the territory, and it's something you must tolerate to have a democracy.
If the government had stopped at halting the horns, very few people would object, and even then not seriously. A lack of a horn does not prevent a protest.
But that's not what Canada did, is it? They not just remove the protest they froze bank accounts of supporters. That's not democracy. That's a government very very threatened by the protest.
If Canada does not wipe the slate clean and vote away every single politician who was culpable in this, then Canada is not the place it's been advertised to be.
I mean, aside from the noise torture they shut down a city's downtown core for 3 weeks, continually threatened, harassed, and assaulted it's residents, released multiple statements and videos calling for overthrowing and arresting elected leaders (especially women / people of colour), and the municipal police force proved itself incapable of enforcing the law and keeping Canadians safe. Not to mention the other blockades that halted more than $300mil/day in trade.
> The police couldn't touch the protest for weeks not because of inaction but because your right to protest is a human right. They required the national emergency to remove our right to protest in order to label the protest illegal.
This is wholly incorrect. The Ottawa Police made a huge error at the beginning of the occupation, allowing the occupiers to entrench themselves in the city. Further disagreements in the police force and municipality extended the situation that all levels of government agreed was illegal from day 1.
This wasn't a protest, it was an illegal occupation.
I live in Ottawa. This was not a protest, it was an 21 day occupation, blocking the city core and removing citizen's ability to sleep in their own homes due to the constant excessive noise, (often at ear-damaging levels) or leave without harassment. Businesses in the area could not open.
So to compare these occupiers with typical protestors does not make sense. Talking with other locals, the last time someone could remember a non-peaceful protest in Ottawa was around the beginning of the Iraq war, aside from when about a dozen BLM protestors occupied a single intersection overnight and were all arrested on day 2 of their attempt to keep the intersection shut down.
Occupy Wall Street was a protest and an "occupation". CHAZ was literally people "occupying" a part of Seattle. Both of those protests were a good thing, but they were still protests. You don't get to decide what is and what isn't a protest just because you disagree with the message or the methods and the government's rhetoric in the past few weeks (calling it terrorism, occupation, foreign backed agitation) is very dangerous and should not be encouraged.
It's literally straight out of a third world country's dictator textbook on how to discredit any opposition, especially the cold War Era style insanity around "foreign backing!!" by... Americans. I guess at least they didn't blame the Russians this time
Occupy Wall Street was a protest and an "occupation". CHAZ was literally people "occupying" a part of Seattle. Both of those protests were a good thing, but they were still protests.
Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement basically just took over city parks and fed people. Occupy was basically a good. CHAZ is a kind of rolling disaster that involved over-anxious security killing a guy who'd stolen someone's car. As a leftist who knows people who were involved with it, I would say CHAZ was a very bad thing.
Of course, a democratic society has to decide what sorts of disruptions are acceptable and which have to be stopped. Of course such a society is going to do that. Otherwise, the first extremist cult to field enough armed people to seize the state will win.
...just because you disagree with the message or the METHODS(emphasis added)...
If the trucker convoy was basically thugs who were breaking the law because they thought they could and because they thought doing this would force the rest of the nation to bow to their demands, I don't think anyone has an obligation to have the least respect for their efforts.
The truckers seems vastly more peaceful than the people involved in CHAZ, but government should still not be able to freeze their accounts. That is just insane.
I think it's necessary to draw the distinction between this occupation, and other protests, because other protests do not greatly impact the ongoing lives of random unrelated citizens in the city who just happen to live in the area for weeks on end.
So sure, we can call both protests, but the important thing is that this was also a foreign-funded occupation. So there is no value in comparing this with the protests for both left- and right- wing causes that Ottawa sees on a weekly basis. Protests that get a permit, last an afternoon, and then go home and lets people live their lives without being harassed.
>because other protests do not greatly impact the ongoing lives of random unrelated citizens in the city who just happen to live in the area for weeks on end.
From my experience this is not true. Protests mostly involve discomfort to normal people.Be it BLM, occupy wall street, students manifestations, railroads blocking, etc
Maybe the scales of some are different, but calling this a "foreign-founded occupation" is disingenuous.
I think the trucker protest was unique (and different from OWS, BLM) due to it deliberately targeting ordinary, unrelated citizens instead of the government. It would have been more like other protests if they blockaded and blew their horns at Trudeau's front lawn or Parliament or Big Business or something, but instead the protesters specifically went after the wellbeing of ordinary Canadians. All protests "involve discomfort" to normal people, but this one uniquely targeted them.
EDIT: This is not letting individual BLM protestors (who did deliberately target private businesses) off the hook, but the movement itself did not specifically call for belligerence against unrelated citizens.
I just want to address the comment about most protests involving discomfort to normal people. I live and work in the downtown core of Ottawa. I'm sure you will not be surprised to hear that the city is a focal point for protests and has had many of them, large and small, over the years. I completely agree that protests often include some measure of discomfort for random, unrelated citizens.
However, I can tell you that there has never been a protest even remotely close to the number of torments this protest inflicted upon the residents of the city. I personally know numerous people who were harassed verbally and physically while walking in the streets simply for wearing a mask. A downtown mall was forced to close for multiple weeks due to protesters refusing to follow masking rules. Think of the retail staff who lost out on multiple weeks of pay. There was an attempt to set fire to a residential building with the main lobby door being taped shut. Fireworks were being set off on city streets downtown. Extremely loud horns were being sounded throughout all hours of the day and night, including train and boat horns that could be heard throughout the downtown core. People were prevented from buying groceries within a reasonable distance due to the grocery store having to close; the workers having been harassed while working by protesters. Numerous small retail shops in the downtown were forced to close their doors due to protester harassment and reduced traffic as people largely felt unsafe in the downtown core. There was an instance of protesters harassing a homeless shelter into providing them food.
This was not discomfort. This was a complete prevention of the ability to feel safe in their homes and neighbourhood for a large swath of Ottawa residents who had nothing to do with the mandates. Many people were materially affected by this and had no way of escaping beyond leaving the city.
> "complete prevention of the ability to feel safe"
Kind of a hard thing to prove. I don't feel safe due to climate destruction. Can we invoke the Emergencies Act against the Canadian fossil fuel industry and the automotive parts manufacturers to make me feel better?
I really don't think it was that hard to prove. If you look up the injunction against the horns, it specifically cited the volume being well into what the law considered harassment. The fact that it was granted and extended shows that the judge felt the people of downtown as a whole were being harassed.
If you can get the majority of people to agree that they feel unsafe due to climate destruction and neither the municipal nor provincial governments respond accordingly, then, by all means, invoke the emergency act. I'd certainly be on board.
They protested against vaccination mandates and the store closure was due to government policy. To be honest, this sound very peaceful for a protest all in all.
Feeling unsafe is often invoked lately to restrict the rights of others. I don't believe this is sufficient in a larger context.
Yes, what's your point? That gotcha is really annoying, there's no reason to pretend canada and the USA aren't extremely interlinked. Canadians have never been shy of comparing canada to the USA whenever it suits us, so it's funny to see how we are now pretending canada is completely unique and not comparable.
Also, I'm sure the CBC never talked about whats happening in the US but if they did they surely described CHAZ as terroristic occupation, not protests? Like do you think some canadians condemned those like they are condemning the current protests?
My point was about public opinion and hyperbolic media narratives, because it's abundantly clear that the reaction to this protest is hypocritical at best and unhinged at worse. Hence why I brought up CHAZ and OCCUPY (two movements that I fully supported )
If protests were "comfortable", then there would be no pressure for the government to do anything. The point of a protest is to make enough noise (heh) so the government is forced to react.
Look at protests like Euromaiden, or the recent protests in Kazakhstan with 200+ dead. If the Ukrainian people didn't protest at the levels they did, and occupy Kiev for as long as they did, would the government have done anything? I don't think anyone in Kiev was sleeping when people were building barricades and engaging in deadly firefights with the Ukrainian police & army.
I don't hold that exact viewpoint, so I don't feel the need to defend it.
There's varying levels of "uncomfortable", and a question of who is being made uncomfortable.
If a protest is permanently damaging the hearing of regular people who are not in positions of leadership for 21 days straight, and subjecting them to significant harassment, some of them a botched arson attempt, and a whole litany of other assaults as have been documented in Centertowne Ottawa, I would argue it is more akin to holding them hostage.
Fair enough. I can sympathize if you had to endure 3 weeks of loud noise. Frankly if I wasn't supportive of the Convoy, I would be pretty upset too.
One more thing I would say is that the fault for how long the "Occupation" went on for isn't entirely with the Convoy. With a large protest like this, it's up to the government to deal with, one way or another.
The authorities didn't take the right actions. They should either come out to negotiate with the protesters, or quickly utilise force to disperse them. Instead, they basically sat still for 3 weeks while Trudeau "fled" Ottawa to some undisclosed location.
So I would lay some blame on the government in its tardiness in addressing the Convoy, as part of the reason it went on for so long. You can't expect angry people who are determined to change government policy to just pack up and go home when the government told them to
Yeah the municipal government and police force were first to completely drop the ball. They didn't do their job and let our downtown become a parliament hill autonomous zone. Heck, they gave the convoy participants access to a city parking lot which was then set up as a forward operating base for their supply lines for the next 3 weeks.
If the police had managed this situation properly after the first weekend this would never have become an international issue. As a police force they basically completely failed to maintain order in the city, and that's a big part of why we required an eventual federal response to clean up the occupation that had free reign to establish itself for weeks.
I'm not a Trudeau supporter but I'm not sure what he should have done differently in this situation - he apparently had covid on the first weekend, is that what you're referring to about him fleeing? Anyways, this should have been handled by the municipal police force with adequate support from the provincial police force within the first week. I hope that the eventual federal review that comes with enacting the EA will find the root cause why our police force failed so hard.
When you organize a large, funded protest, internal organization, tactics, and policing are definitely your responsibility. Unleashing an incoherent mob is just vandalism.
ok, just want to say i’ve heard this before and this is what i really hate about protests.
You want politicians or big business to react but you’re pissing off small businesses and civilians. Even if I 100% agree with your protest, I don’t want you to blare loud music and block off roadways and generally be aggressive and obnoxious. In fact this kind of thing makes ordinary people go against you.
If you can’t target the politicians and big businesses directly, if you want to get the people’s support, bring attention to your issue. If it’s a serious issue people will take interest themselves. Once you some support, then you can go out and protest and lead a huge rally, but don’t blatantly piss off bystanders.
As I understand things, a factor in how this has played out is that local (Ottawa) police essentially threw up their hands and said they couldn't do anything - when it was a matter of those police basically being sympathetic.
Emergency powers were needed to force what would be the normal job of police.
I agree - this would not be international news if the police had managed the situation appropriately in the early days. What happened within OPS, nobody fully knows yet. But apparently by enacting the federal Emergencies Act, an in-depth review of the events leading up to requiring the act will be a part of the aftermath.
I also live in Ottawa, in fact in the downtown core. This was absolutely a protest. I didn't support the message they were pushing, but it was a protest. The horns were a nuisance (people ending up in the hospital unable to sleep) but they were a problem solved a little before the halfway mark. It's unfair to give the impression this was still a problem.
I wonder if the government would have taken the same steps if these people simply protested on the lawn of Parliament or some other area that didn't block people from living their lives. I suspect not but I'm just a random Canadian.
I am not a fan of Trudeau, but I do live in Ottawa.
These are not peaceful protests. It's an occupation backed by our extreme right wing and significantly funded by people in other countries (cough). It's been terrorizing local residents night and day. Too loud to sleep, get harassed if you leave your house, and in one case the occupiers attempted to light an apartment building on fire and trap the residents inside.
Our local municipal police and council could not have done a worse job in the early days of this situation, and now the occupiers are well entrenched.
The occupation is also easy to mimic. A small group closed down a $300mil/day border crossing into the US. Another blockade in Alberta has now had 12 arrests and two caches of weapons siezed.
Before anyone brings up BLM, I will say I don't agree with violent protests on either side and that BLM protests were peaceful here in Ottawa.
Do earplugs work? I ask because the truckers arrived in Toronto and I worried about 24 hour noise, but then the TPS did their job, and I never needed to find out.
As an aside, I actually had a lot of respect for Sloly when he was in TO, so I am completely baffled why he didn’t keep this under control. Any ideas why this went so badly in Ottawa?
I live far enough away to not be directly impacted by the horns, but from what I understand the best is active noise cancelling headphones, but when three 120db train horns are blaring from trucks parked in front of your apartment (as someone had to deal with the first week of the occupation) it was still unbearable.
I really don't understand either how fast and how far this got away from the control of the police. At the start, OPS leadership saw this as a valid protest and gave away a ton of ground from the get go. Ottawa downtown does not help in that there are 5 different authorities and their areas overlap: OPS, OPP, RCMP, NCC, PPS, plus the police in Gatineau. But the response from the police has been very disheartening. I think they have a chance of ending this during the week, but on the weekend when the autonomous zone grows to 5000+ people who are there to party and bring their kids it's a whole other nightmare.
Can you set more than one cookie in the request and read more than one cookie in the response? Was shocked when I learnt that's not supported by the spec..
I worked for a large e-commerce company. I wanted to investigate putting all our support data into Watson and see what sort of recommendations it could provide, maybe a sort of auto-suggestion to help our customers. Three really funny points stand out from the experience:
1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was somewhat his idea). A few months later, an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. Imagine how it felt to have the CEO walk up to me, deadpan hand me his personal iphone and say "It's for you."..
2) They told me they'd help me with the support data idea, and every meeting we set up they tried to pitch "what if we put Watson on all of your customer's storefronts, we could add a 'powered by watson' banner on every page, and you give us a cut of GMV?". I pivoted them to our plugin framework and told them to build it themselves.
3) To demo the technology, the first step was to buy a $250k server from IBM. To demo it.
IBM is famous for charging people for the privilege of talking to them, even if you're trying to sell them something.
This strategy makes sense if you consider that even in it's heyday Watson was 95% data science consulting firm and 5% actual valuable technology.
I really think Watson is one of the biggest tech marketing bamboozles of the 21st century. Through Jeopardy they really had a segment of the business world and the general public convinced that they had cracked AI, but behind the scenes it was all one-off custom solutions under one trademark.
I think maybe the common problem is that there’s a hidden and false assumption that being good in one domain will transfer elsewhere, it doesn’t and didn’t
The Jeopardy thing was pretty brilliant in a sense - wrangling an episode of free advertising from one of the most popular game shows. A memorable episode at that!
AI/ML has somewhat continuous research going all the way back to the First AI/ML Boom of the 1960s and the Second AI/ML Boom era of the "Lisp Machines" [1] in the 1980s. Depending on who you ask the current AI/ML Boom is something like third or fourth wave, and yeah some of that depends on where you fit Deep Blue and/or Watson in the timelines (or even if you bother at all to count them, given all the other comments here on how Deep Blue/Watson have always been PR maneuvers more strongly than technical lines in the sand).
Deep Blue isn't ML at all, it's just a purpose built system for solving chess. It doesn't learn anything as such and just a fancy brute forcing machine that (smartly) goes through all possible chess moves and selects the best possible tree of outcomes. The work on actual ML happened independently of this.
That is a form of machine learning. It uses an algorithm with an enormous ability to look ahead, and selects the moves according to a heuristic that have been shown previously to be most likely to create the desired end state.
Chess is not a solved game from the starting state, so it has to make assumptions based on the data it has. This is machine learning.
Please don't make such definite statements. You even say it in your own comment "selects the best possible true of outcomes", how do you think it selects this? It uses heuristics to assign values to different board states, and in the case of Deep Blue these values were created through previous game analysis. If a knight to c2 on turn 8 is rarely seen in the same game as a winning board state, then this is valued lower.
Looking through the tree wasn't the ML part, but knowing how to pick the best node on the tree was.
Deep Blue is ML.
> It uses heuristics to assign values to different board states, and in the case of Deep Blue these values were created through previous game analysis.
Unless I’m misinformed, this part isn’t true. The heuristic was hardcoded with the help of human experts.
From the paper Deep Blue by Murray Campbell et al (people who worked on Deep Blue)
"The initialization of the feature values is done by the “evaluation function generator”, a
sub-program which was run on the master node of SP system." Which would suggest it generated the heuristic itself. The features may have been hardcoded, but assigning values to them wasn't.
In addition to this, feature values could be static or dynamic, meaning it would update dynamic ones depending on the board state. It not only generated the heuristic values (feature values) it could modify them to reflect their relative change in impact throughout the game.
Deep Blue and Watson aren’t the same thing. Deep Blue was a chess computer from the 90s — and it was not the first chess computer, so regardless of whether you consider computer chess to be part of AI, the answer is no.
They bamboozled no one who knew anything. Even the "sold off in parts" bit in the OP article title doesn't surprise anyone who knows what "Watson Health" means. It was never a platform just a bunch of disjoint garbage components. You couldn't sell the platform so now they're selling off the tools. Imagine a toolbox with a spade a fork lift and a soldering iron.
Watson is one the greatest marketing achievements of the 21st century.
It’s literally consulting with open source software. But they packaged it up in an attractive format that got them buzz. Imagine what that marketing team could do for a product that was able to half work!!!
Ehh...I get why tech people are suspect of Palantir but they're just disrupting other government contractors.
And from my limited experience working with the government, they absolutely need / want / rely on having companies hold their hand as they insist on doing things the hard, slow, and very custom way.
I feel like with this comment, the word "disrupting" has officially jumped shark and lost any and all meaning.
Palantir isn't "disrupting" government contractors. It is a government contractor, țhe old-fashioned kind, at that, and nothing more.
And people aren't suspect of Palantir. People dislike Palantir because its government contracts are shady and boring (they're all about efficiently tracking people), but they pretend to be a "saving the world with tech" startup with such enthusiasm you'd think they put the Kool-Aid into the water coolers.
Unsurprisingly, XXI century Stasi trying to look hip to recruit the tech talent give off nothing but "how do you do, fellow kids" kind of vibes.
Disclaimer: interviewed for Palantir. They thought I could be a fit. Must have not been using their own software to vet candidates back then.
To be honest, my experience of private enterprise is that they insist on doing things hard, slow and very custom. Almost every problem that exists is distinct enough that you can argue it doesn't fit the existing COTS software. It's sometimes necesary to build something yourself, but no where near as often as it is done.
If I remember correctly, John Ralston Saul made the point [0] that there is little observed difference in terms of the efficiency of decision making between large government and large corporations.
My personal experience is that large organisations and government are barely distinguishable. This is often excused in the name of "risk mitigation" - but in my experience it's really just that there are more snouts in the money trough, and that politics is more important than success. The close ties between government and the largest organisations also invite a similar culture.
The end result for both government and large enterprise is "hard, slow and very custom". (Of course, there are exceptions in both government and enterprise).
Some might do it under the belief that it makes them more flexible later on, but going with off the shelf stuff means it's easier to find people to create and migrate to a custom system when or if it's needed.
Disrupting? Their stock price has dropped by two thirds from its peak. They're probably looking to find a buyer at this point, such as IBM itself, while the leadership uses them as a stock-printing machine to enrich themselves.
Doesn’t this apply to most startups though? The core technical problems aren’t “hard” it’s that the industry involve can’t adapt due to inertia of entrenched companies.
>Karp has described himself as a socialist and a progressive, and said he voted for Hillary Clinton. In 2017, he was recorded during a Palantir company meeting claiming he turned down an invitation from President Trump, saying “I respect nothing about the dude.”
>He has said that technology companies like Palantir have an obligation to support the U.S. military. He has defended Palantir's contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the controversy over family separations, saying that while separations are "a really tough, complex, jarring moral issue," he favors "a fair but rigorous immigration policy". He has said the U.S. government should have a strong hand in tech regulation and that western countries should dominate AI research.
>Karp founded the London-based money management firm Caedmon Group.
>In 2004, along with Peter Thiel (who had been a classmate at Stanford) and others, he co-founded Palantir as CEO.
>He is described as a wellness fanatic who swims, skis cross country, practices Qigong meditation and martial arts, and keeps Tai Chi swords in his offices.
He'd make for a good Silicon Valley or Black Mirror character.
IBM, Oracle, Panatir....in a lot of cases these are pro services companies that custom build whatever is needed. LOTS of money in enterprise application development.
Consultancy + adaptable software is a decent business model. Unfortunately "adaptable software" for {insert industry} is a really hard target to architect right.
Especially when the majority of your tech headcount bills by the hour and gets paid to tell the customer "Yes."
That's how it is for just about any non-trivial business system. They're sold as complete systems, but there's still customization required for those systems to actually fit the business - and it's through offering consulting for those customizations that enterprise software vendors make the big bucks.
Not really assuming they are the prime contractor all the value is in the contracts and those are time limited before being re-competed lose all your contracts and your business value goes to zero because there is no IP like a Google or a Microsoft would have that is at the core of the value of the company.
Who thinks that? I've never heard this. People thought Watson was a lot more capable than it actually was just because of the Jeopardy PR stunt. People outside tech were buzzing about IBM and Watson. In my experience, people outside tech barely know Palantir exists.
The company I worked for used some Oracle tech and I was trying to get some high level information about a product but their website kept requesting my e-mail just to show me some documentation.
Once I provided them with my e-mail, I started receiving "You must take us to your leader" messages in a tone as if I was their employee and they were commanding me to take them to my CEO. I can't imagine myself chasing the CEO in the building because some sales people in Oracle told me to do so :)
To be fair, after being in meetings with theirs sales engineers(who wore the best shirts I've ever seen) a few times I grew to respect their stubbornness and the way they structured their corporate machine. It's a valuable lesson to have an exposure to corporate dealings I believe, before that I used to do freelance stuff and had no idea how a simple webpage can cost millions and why a large corporation won't buy that easily from a small company with similar or better product at the fraction of the cost.
IBM along a few other behemots pitched for a serious project at a company I worked for as enterprise arch. All companies brought their top salespeople, and all tried nasty things, but IBM was by far the worst. Their top guy started their pitch by saying he chatted with our CEO over the christmas holidays. He mentioned - and I am not making this up - that he should be talking to people higher in the org. (The most junior person in the room was me, the rest were board-2/-3s). It soon emerged their thing could not work, and I killed it in the first round of pitching. What followed was my bosses' boss, the CIO of a very large company, called me and gave me an earfull since he himself has to explain to CEO why we had the audacity to not choose IBM.
I'd not touch anything IBM ever. Bunch of assholes.
Yup - I had the same "your guy is a problem, he's anti-innovation." The brilliant thing was that they rang the CEO of the business unit who was at that time +4 on me and had never met me. He was flummoxed and invited me for lunch to find out how I'd made such a big impression! Did me loads of good!
It's because they want to talk to the most power in the decision but with the least information as to how the problem could be solved without the help of Oracle/IBM/whoever.
This, 100%. Think about it another way: IBM et al. sales only lose by talking to lower-title folks.
Best case, they lose control of the narrative as it's reported up internally, and someone higher up still has to approve it.
Worst case, some engineer who actually knows their shit very quickly outlines why this can never work for the given problem.
Once you're into the VP level, there's (usually) less technical knowledge, because folks at that level have full days crammed with higher-level decisions. So it's more plausible for sales to pitch {insert whatever buzzwordy, batshit crazy idea} and have it fly.
To add on, it's also a standard negotiation tactic for a negotiator to try and speak to the highest-ranking person possible. This tactic was specifically recommended by a guest speaker at a Stanford Business School seminar about how to negotiate uploaded to YouTube (timestamped to 31:59 for the relevant bit). [0]
Yep. I used to do technical sales support. I would come in after the sales manager had broken the ice and arranged for some of the customer's technical team to listen to our proposed solution. But the sales training we got told us to always sell at the highest level possible, preferably the person who would sign the purchase order, not lower level technical people.
That didn't always work out. We sold a lot of stuff to Hewlett-Packard and they always forced most of the decisions down to the engineers. They would rarely let us talk to the people who could sign the purchase order. The sales people didn't like it much since they didn't have the control that they were used to. But it was kind of great for all of us technical people because we could sit around with the HP engineers and talk about technical stuff without a lot of sales-speak getting in the way.
But wouldn't a competent VP, C-level just shrug and say 'I want technical approval first from my teams, we don't do favorites here, my time is precious and you're making me lose precious amount of it? I had a business unit manager answer that to such queries that way and it felt like good management... Isn't the whole shtick about management to be able to delegate and trust your org?
The quote I mentioned is just a quote, but it points to a part of a reason. If you are a CEO or a high level executive of a big company, going with IBM or Oracle is a safe bet. It's not very likely you will be blamed for failures of IBM or Oracle. It may be a money hole and bad for business but it's a much safer bet than going with some smaller vendor instead of big name vendors.
The "nobody got fired for buying IBM" thing expired decades ago, that mantle passed on to Microsoft. Last 5 - 10 years, nobody gets fired for architecting dozens of microservices in the cloud.
One would think the decision makers would trust the technical advice of the smart people they've hired instead of the opinion of some obviously lying salesman...
Yeah except that a lot of - not all - executives maintain something akin to class solidarity with other executives at big companies, especially their big vendors..
Because at some point they might want/need another job, and so often times it's better to help each other out, at the expense of the folks lower down.
Those folks are useless to them, personally, but that VP at Big Vendor probably isn't.
Considering that the buzzword shooting, smooth talking sales rep offering an easy to solution to, well, all of the problems is much closer to how most C-Level guys (in established companies at least) think, I'm not surprised anymore. This till manages to chock me from time to time, so.
> Their top guy started their pitch by saying he chatted with our CEO over the christmas holidays.
I had a former Oracle employee use a similar line in an interview for a software engineer position. After repeatedly refusing to answer technical questions then admitting they hadn't written software in over a decade:
"I'm actually good friends with someone high up in Company."
You perfectly demonstrated why they shouldn’t be speaking to you. Their schtick is crafted to work on levels where you don’t get to tank the deal until it’s way too late and egos are now on the line.
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was the common phrase at our company in the 1990s. At the time, that was certainly true. Which lead to adoption of truly awful tech, token-ring over type-1 cable, versus ethernet over twisted pair.
I was involved in a small project, and we were running low on the money runway for next phase. The IBM sales guy literally barged into a FORTUNE 50 CIOs office, without an appointment, asking for budget to be approved for the next phase. project continued, but I never saw the sales guy again. The team had a good chuckle and I never understood what the guy was thinking he would achieve with this tactic.
IMHO that is like kids and lying. More often than not, the right answer to the question "Why are you doing this, when we always catch you?" is "Because it works more often than you catching me lying and also because you don't even get that".
Well, no. In the end they backed my reco and we didnt go IBM. I feel like I did inconvenience my managers though, and indeed left not long afterwards for a better job.
My first Oracle experience was similar. Back in the 90s, I was tasked with replacing our old mssql6.5 generic custom built rack log server with something stronger as the product was successful and we had money.
Oracle put me in touch with their eval solutions people who took all my info on number of users, transactions, size, etc and came back with an estimate of a $2M Sun+Oracle box. I told them that the current solution ran on like $10k of licenses and hardware and they revised the spec down to $250k.
They were totally clueless but projected absolute competence.
Unfortunately, still don't know what you're talking about. Probably because I don't have expertise in the area. Am imaging some kind of white-collar business shirt that's... platinum plated? If the design is not extravagant, how would anyone know?
Nothing exotic but extremely good quality and attention to details that you can recognise from distance. No button looks off the shelf, no detail is cheap out. The cut matches the body perfectly and elegantly and the designer and manufacturer definitely went the extra mile even if it wasn't the easiest or cheapest thing to do. Maybe cutting in straight lines would be the easiest way to do it but if the design requires a slight curve, they wouldn't shy away from it. The more you look at it the more details you notice that someone must have agonised over it even if it wouldn't make any functional difference. Just because it's not visible all the time, doesn't mean that can't have a nice design, for example inside the collar has also a seperate design.
To expand on this, because I think some of the confusion is probably from more basic concepts...
Clothing patterns, stitching, and details differ in manufacturing time and suitability for mass production.
The vast majority of clothing is optimized for production, because time is expense, and therefore less time is more profit.
In men's sizing, we generally come in fewer shapes. Square-to-athletic-to-slim fit + arm length + overall size.
But for most people, there's still going to be a delta between {hypothetical optimal fit} and {nearest mass-market fit}. So a nice shirt really starts at doing whatever it takes to get closer to optimal fit (even if it requires some difficult, hand-sewn-only magic) and adds better materials and finishes (buttons, button-holes, stitching, etc).
At the end of the day, it's kind of like watches though -- 95% of people won't recognize the differences. I got more complements from C-level folks on my $50 quartz Casio diver [0], because it copies a lot of Rolex details, than anything mechanical without plastic.
Oh, it is much better than a $10 shirt but its utility doesn't come from it's comfort or purely aesthetics IMHO.
Maybe it's silly but people do judge from appearance because it tells something about you. I have been watching this famous fashion photographer and he was talking about using an iPhone for last photoshoot and he noted that he can do it and charge full price for it only because he already has a name in the industry and a nobody will need to flash large and expensive cameras to justify the price asked.
Think what it it tells about you to wear really nice shirt. Firstly, it implies that you already sold something to someone for a lot of money and you got paid and bought that shirt, right? Secondly it implies dominance at least in one area, you are the person with the best shirt in the room so who knows what else you are best at. Silly but our primate brains easily get intimidated and extrapolate. There are also many other fallacies that our brains easily fall in, so looking impressive is a superpower actually.
Also, everything is a costume. If you are interviewing for a nerdy position you better look like a nerd but you can always be the nerd with the best nerdy shirt.
The nerd costume is a costume too. If I'm wearing a t-shirt and a battered hoodie in a meeting with a bunch of suits, then everyone is going to defer to me on technical matters
I have multiple articles of clothing that cost more than that. I’m baffled as to why anyone would want a keyboard that costs more than $100. To each his own.
Keyboards that cost over $100 tend to be much, much nicer, and are more easily tailored to an individual's taste.
Around $200 and above, most are machined from aluminum, and require the user to supply their own switches and keycaps. My daily driver, whose USB connector seems to be reaching EOL, is a heavy-ass chunk of bright blue Alu, makes noise like a machine gun when I need to correct someone on the internet, and has limited edition keycaps in a fun (imo) purple-and-cyan color scheme. Total cost of this thing was probably $250~$300, but I'm happy.
I have over $1k worth of keyboards and related hardware strewn about my apartment, and the only reason I've considered selling some of my collection is to buy fancier pieces. To each their own.
The keyboardio keyboard I'm typing on (A Model 1) puts substantially less stress on my hands and wrists than any other keyboard I've used. As someone who has had repetitive stress pain in my wrists, I consider it - well, not beyond price, but certainly worth a few hundred dollars when it avoids surgery and enables me to pursue a HIGHLY lucrative profession full time. Each person's hands are different, so maybe you do fine with an inexpensive keyboard, and my keyboard won't suit everyone, but it's a fairly straightforward explanation the way I see it.
A crisp, blinding white, heavy oxford cotton shirt that requires cufflinks is noticed by everybody but nerds. In financial circles you can even wear colored shirts but don't stray from blue or pink.
The people who wear those shirts also have expensive shoes. Get the tie right and you can get away with a slightly less expensive suit for technical sales meetings.
A clean shave and neat, well cut hair help too.
Its interesting to look at shoes, tells you a lot about a persons status in a big organisation.
Having said that, my daughter bought me some checkerboard vans so I wear those everywhere now.
Aren't shirts in that range having diminshing returns? like couldn't get a $100 shirt that covers most of the benefits? there has to be a optimal local maximum there right?
Not if you’re in sales, I’d guess. It almost literally tells your target C-suite that you’re cut from the same cloth and to ignore the bleating of underlings. It’s a peripheral cue calibrated to increase bonding and trust. “These are my people. I’m safe with them.”
I guess it's sortof like going into a "hackers" convention and seeing people typing on a 3$ Dell keyboard. Those are not our people. However, the guys in the corner with DasKeyboard or Happy Hacking Keyboard; those ARE our people.
>1) To apply for Watson access you needed to show C-level approval, so our CEO put his name and phone number on the application (trying Watson was somewhat his idea). A few months later, an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME. Imagine how it felt to have the CEO walk up to me, deadpan hand me his personal iphone and say "It's for you."..
This sounds like the biggest power move you could ever pull.
Everything about this sounds like they hired inexperienced sales people and promised them huge payouts if they could close certain deals. The kinds of sales people who won’t hesitate to burn a lot of customer relationships to the ground as long as they could close a few big deals for themselves.
Wow, I can't believe how accurate this story is, same thing happened to me I think summer 2016 but I thought it was because our execs were idiots not that IBM would treat every company like that... CTO calling me to his office to talk to IBM on their personal phone, he was the only one who wanted Watson (this was a healthcare company, I was VP of Eng). And yes, they were obsessed with putting their logo everywhere, and as soon as we heard it was so expensive, we had to tell our CTO to chill, we stopped, cause you know you can hire at least 2 devs for that money.
I concur with the experience of dealing with IBM sales.
Years ago my client wanted me to checkout out IBM mobile app builder - Worklight, The pricing wasn't available on website and so I had to contact them. Soon I was reached out by their sales department and before I could get any details on the pricing I was speaking with VP of sales.
If I remember it correctly, It was priced ~>150K USD and even after repeatedly telling the VP that I was just exploring what their product was, The VP told me he was ready to fly in to my office the same week to 'talk further'. It was weird to end that conversation with them and my client had a good laugh when I shared the experience.
I don't get why IBM finds it hard to deal with Startups, All other behemoths (MS/Amazon/Google etc.) have successfully created products for Startups often by offering generous freebies and 'Pay as you go' plans . Where as IBM still thinks they can slap Fortune 500 pricing on entry-level startups.
I guess as long as those Fortune 500 companies & even Govt. fall for that Watson type products, They don't have a reason to change.
IBM don't want to deal with startups. They need big, old, ossified, cashed up businesses who are in some kind of trouble. There isn't any money in most startups that bootstrapped off a pile of open source or free tech.
Startups are more likely to see through the bullshit. It's similar to why spam emails often have intentional spelling mistakes - to get the marks to self-select.
> an IBM marketing team called HIS CELL and asked for ME.
What the fuck is this? A name/email for your company when trying something out is so that you can keep track of any support requests we need, not for you to sell shit to me.
Yeah, the whole culture there (and other places like Oracle) is all about implanting mindshare at the decision-maker level and driving unilateral adoption from the top down. Pursuing such an approach is highly revealing because if the technology actually worked, that approach would not be necessary.
Once they’re “in” at the decision-maker level, they can continue to milk the organisation with long-duration support and consulting contracts, feeding parasitically and gradually becoming more and more entangled.
Oh yeah I worked on a similar project at Oracle. The sales people basically sold the state on a 'stack' with a bunch of random horseshit that was magically supposed to work together and then dumped it on engineering. I mean that in a totally serious way, sales seemingly just grabbed a bunch of names of Oracle software and mashed it together. It literally never worked at any point.
I met one of the "managers" on that who told me with a straight face "All you need is a college degree in anything to manage developers" (hers was in English IIRC)
> Pursuing such an approach is highly revealing because if the technology actually worked, that approach would not be necessary.
This is, sadly, untrue. Enterprise reps do this because on the whole, it doesn't matter if you have the best technology - if the other guy is successful at the CxO level, the customer will go their way.
> Once they’re “in” at the decision-maker level, they can continue to milk the organisation with long-duration support and consulting contracts, feeding parasitically and gradually becoming more and more entangled.
IBM seems like a really interesting case study in parasitism at the organisational level. Just moving around, feeding from host to host. I wonder if anyone’s studied it in those terms.
Marketers have no sense of boundaries or limits. Everything they do is in violation of social norms. You give them an email that's clearly for some specific and useful purpose, they abuse it by turning it into their personal marketing channel which benefits nobody but them.
In my experience this seems to be a theme with very senior executives - they are very often interested in snake oil and can’t seem to discern snake oil from real medicine.
This reminded me of my experience with them a few years back with MQTT. They were pushing their Bluemix/cloud hard and I just wanted to test it out. Never again.
It used to be you can't get fired for hiring big blue. In the end it was always a lot of sales /pre sales folks, and a lot of substandard subcontractors milking the golden cow. I don't miss managing their implementations/deliveries at all.
Adding this because I didn't know about it for awhile and maybe someone reading doesn't know - iOS notes includes a pretty good document scanner with the iphone camera. Open a new note and press the camera icon, you can scan multiple pages with the camera and it turns it into a reasonable PDF.