Disqus - Latest Comments for skottk

Re: Chaos Engineering Meetups

skottk — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 09:36:43 -0000

Any plans for something on the east coast? New York or Boston?

Re: (iterate think thoughts)

skottk — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 20:29:54 -0000

Great post. Thank you for putting all of this together in one place.
I wonder, though - why are you using yesql directly here instead of your own conman?

Re: There Is No Higher Ed Bubble. Yet.

skottk — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 11:38:25 -0000

I'd love to see a discussion of higher-ed pricing that looked at some of its unique characteristics:

- The prices aren't the prices. Any research on paying for private schools will tell you that the schools with the most expensive tuitions don't charge those prices to everyone, or in some cases to anyone. Olin shows up on some lists, even though it gives a 50% scholarship to every student (and used to give 100%!). It's a truism that if you get into Harvard and Yale, they'll find some way for you to afford to pay for it. It would be fascinating to see "real tuition costs," tuition normalized for the effects of need and merit grants across the entire student body. There is real competition on price for top students, but the effects of it are not transparent.
- Price supports are everywhere. The other side of the coin - grants and subsidized loan programs from _outside_ the institutions themselves can't help but support prices, right? Conversely, fine state institutions have always exerted some competitive pressures on private schools, but as those state schools raise tuitions - particularly out-of-state - those competitive pressures have to decline, right?
- Something about endowment power. Drezner's private schools are Stanford and Williams, neither of which is ever going to hurt for the next dollar and will continue to use price purely as a quality signal forever. Schools that actually operate the school off tuition have been getting crushed since 2008.

Re: Who Knew Balloons Would Be Such a Big Part of the Future?

skottk — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 13:16:49 -0000

John Brunner, whose novels Shockwave Rider and Stand on Zanzibar anticipated vast swaths of the world we live in today from his vantage point of the late '60's-early '70's. Shockwave Rider - whose main action concerns a hacker who subverts the national network to retake control of it from the government intelligence agency that subverted it for its own purposes - drops casual mentions of cargo dirigibles here and there.

Re: Twitter and Their Cascading Libraries for Dealing With Different Scenarios

skottk — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:18:13 -0000

It's arbitrary, other than the JVM dependency. Twitter was in Java and started to look at Scala quite a while ago. They bought Backtype, an analytics company that specialized in Clojure on Hadoop; the Backtype engineers are some of the top Clojure coders around. Szabo may have brought Python with him when he joined Twitter and wrote PyCascading; historically Twitter started in Ruby and moved to Java, and Python's not a language they're well known for using.

It's hard to see that Scala's strong typing gives it particular advantages over Clojure or Jython for "numbers that must always be correct." All three languages are all using the same Java numerics inside.

The real story is more likely that people like using the tools they're already using. It's another manifestation of Conway's Law - systems take on the shape of the organizations that maintain them.

Re: Thoughts on the New Logo?

skottk — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 09:19:37 -0000

I agree with CarlM that it doesn't look enough like a tree. My first take was, "why does he want a mushroom cloud?" Then I realized it was a tree.

Re: Glamour in Glass: Anachronism in dining

skottk — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 09:45:53 -0000

Agreeing with Chris Gerrib's comment about how how jarring the "sit anywhere you like" arrangement would be to the modern reader. I think that the hardest part for me would be understanding how there could be a strict order of precedence, and all that that implies.
Does everyone at the party walk around assessing where they are in the ranking to make sure they stand in the right place in the dinner line? Or does the precedence get sorted out as everyone queues?
Would there be arguments over precedence in the dinner line-up?
I find it interesting that descending order of precedence would mean in theory that the highest get to choose where they sit, but the lower get to choose whom they sit with. In practice, this is probably another factor in favor of heighty-types associating closely with one another, to ensure
Most of all, I'm fascinated that we are able to retain these sorts of details in the historical record.
SK

Re: Annoying Things in OS X

skottk — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 13:09:09 -0000

Completely agree on all of these except 6.
Mac has Cmd-tab for apps AND Cmd-` for documents within an app.
It's a richer, more productive way to navigate through the keyboard. Ever since I learned that Cmd-` key combo on OSX, Windows has seemed broken to me for lacking it.

Re: Are open markets for ebooks a race to the bottom on price? Maybe our London show will help me understand

skottk — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:52:15 -0000

Thanks for bringing this thinking into the European market, Mike. So many sources only discuss the US market, so this perspective is refreshing.
Your point about a "race to the bottom" is interesting. Certainly, profits disappear if prices go all the way to 0 - or even $.99 - but given your thoughts on price experimentation, I'm sure you don't think that e-books are already priced near the profit-maximizing point. In other words, if publisher e-book prices are too high today, then lowering them will increase not only unit sales, but total e-book profits as well! At least until e-book prices go low enough that increased volume no longer makes up the unit price difference.
Of course, lower e-book prices must make hardcover prices harder to sustain, with their different underlying cost structures and retail model. That also hits brick and mortar sellers in the eye, and would certainly affect publisher profitability as well.
I'd love to hear whether you think there's any European equivalent to the influence Walmart/Costco have in the US. Doesn't an ebook price war have the potential to disrupt their 40%-ish share of the US market?
Skott Klebe

Re: Hackers and Hacking in Science Fiction

skottk — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:36:19 -0000

I'm not in print yet, but you can get on panels by volunteering. I offered
to do a preso on real hacking for SF writers, and they gave me the panel in
lieu.
SK

Re: Hackers and Hacking in Science Fiction

skottk — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 01:37:30 -0000

Johnny! It's been so long!
There was no shortage of Star Trek talk at WorldCon, believe me. I don't
think that anyone brought Kirk up in my panel on malware, though.

Re: Double negatives in Shakespeare

skottk — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:02:10 -0000

Try the link - there are twenty examples of that one double-negative
construction.

Re: OK, can we stop blaming vaccines yet?

skottk — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:20:20 -0000

Thanks for stopping by!
On one level, I am completely prepared to believe what you say. I wrote
this more out of my long-time frustration with anti-vaccine idiocy than out
of any specific concern with mercury in HFCS.
However, I have to say - finding out that HFCS has measurable mercury is
kind of like finding out that some Ford Excursions are upholstered with baby
seal skins. We're talking about a high-calorie artificial sweetener made
with industrial chemical processes that's only economical because of
pointless and expensive agricultural subsidies, incidentally impoverishing
tropical island economies that would otherwise be able to sell us the cane
sugar that we'd really prefer.
As a sensible skeptic, you're probably aware of the corrosive and distorting
effects of agricultural subsidies that create artificially low prices for
commodities like corn.
Your particular skepticism of hippies probably inclines you against using
taxpayer dollars as welfare for specific industries and in favor of the
power of the market to determine what crops are grown and how they're
prepared, cooked, consumed, cracked with caustic chemicals, and contaminated
with heavy metals.
Your disdain for fluff and ideology probably leaves you nervous, however at
the prospect of the Schumpetrian creative distruction that would inevitably
accompany the elimination of agricultural subsidies. Many ideologues will
hasten to reassure you, though, that it's the kind of pain you forget.

Re: So, you CAN cancel your Facebook account?

skottk — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:52:17 -0000

Cool!

Re: Meme

skottk — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:35:11 -0000

An Italian WWII vet. I spoke French, Latin, music, and food, he spoke
Italian. He was in the Navy, served on a small ship with 20 other
men. The youth hostel we were looking for was not far, he would be
happy to walk us there.
All that took about an hour.
That was 1988-just occurred to me he's probably not around any more.

Re: Party of five: Death, Killers, and King

skottk — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 20:21:37 -0000

No probs, man.

Hey, I think I hear a Kindle calling your name. Tobias! To-BI-as!

Re: http://textiplication.com/2008/08/24/now-posting-from-my-iphone/

skottk — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:38:08 -0000

It was - believe it or not - Honey I Shrunk the Kids. There's a giant
scorpion scene that terrified the little guy.

One boy or another has been terrified of movies that you'd never
expect. Finding Nemo? Never saw anything after the sharks.
Enchanted? Last hour the little guy was on my lap facing backwards.

Re: If there’s a new Raiders of the Lost Ark movie…

skottk — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:42:25 -0000

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