That’s what Marco Polo is. Visual text messaging. With the added perk of being able to save videos you make to your local device for sharing elsehow and elsewhere. And that, I think, is it’s true Killer Feature™ – the ability to take selfie videos, get more or less instant feedback, make a few tweaks, …
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Category:insights
you can’t disaggregate
Had a customer recently ask about to disaggregate a {{Splunk}} search that had aggregated fields because they export to CSV horribly. Here’s the thing. You can’t disaggregate aggregated fields. And there’s a Good Reason™, too: aggregation, by definition, is a one-way street. You can’t un-average something. Average is an aggregation function. So why would you …
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about burning bridges
While you should never be the one to burn the bridge of a relationship, sometimes you need to be aware that the other person had placed dynamite around the joints, soaked the whole shebang in gasoline, and is walking around on top with a lit road flare: and you don’t want to be around when …
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never be the one to burn the bridge
But always carry a can of gasoline and some matches – because sometimes you do need to be the one to break the relationship.
ben thompson missed *a lot* in his microsoft-github article
Ben Thompson is generally spot-on in his analysis of industry goings-on. But he missed a lot in The Cost of Developers this week. Here’s what he got right about this acquisition: Developers can be quite expensive (though, $7.5B (in equity) is only ~$265 per user (which is pretty cheap)) Microsoft is betting that a future …
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on internet sales tax
The debate is raging again as the Supreme Court of the United States is getting ready to make a decision on collecting sales tax for online sales. I’ve read as many viewpoints from supporting and detracting from requiring businesses to collect sales tax from their customers. And my [current] view is that all businesses conducting …
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more thoughts on `|stats` vs `|dedup` in splunk
Yesterday I wrote-up a neat little find in {{Splunk}} wherein running stats count by … is substantially faster than running dedup …. After some further reflection over dinner, I figured out the major portion of why this is – and I feel a little dumb for not having thought of it before. (A coworker added some …
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document what didn’t work
In a recent episode of Paul’s Security Weekly, an off-hand comment was made about documentation: you shouldn’t merely document what to do, nor even why, but also what you tried that didn’t work (ie, augment the status quo). The upshot being, to save whomever comes to this note next (especially if it turns out to be yourself) effort you spent that …
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but, i got them on sale!
Back in August 2008, I had a one-week “quick start” professional services engagement in Nutley New Jersey. It was a supposed to be a super simple week: install HP Server Automation at BT Global. Another ProServe engineer was onsite to setup HP Network Automation. Life was gonna be easy-peasy – the only deliverable was to …
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wonder how many zombie film/tv/game creators are/were computer science nerds
As you all know, I am a huge zombie fan. And, as you probably know, I was a CIS/CS major/minor at Elon. A concept I was introduced to at both Shodor and Elon was ant colony simulations. And I realized today that many people have been introduced to the basics concepts of ant colony simulations …
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what is happening with news publishers?
I think, closer to the lines of thought that Ben Thompson of Stratechery has laid-out, that news publishing is about to undergo a major nichification – the days of everyone trying to report everything is over. “Local” (whether by geography, interest, or some other grouping mechanism) publishing in narrowly-defined niches is basically going to finish gobbling …
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kvp is a lousy way to teach
Recently on one of the podcasts I listen to, I heard an offhanded comment made about how history is taught not in patterns but as facts. For example, “On the 18th of April in ’75, hardly a man is now alive, who remembers that famous day and year”. Rarely are the “whys” explained – understandably …
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apple tv – how apple can beat amazon and google
In e99 of Exponent, Ben Thompson makes a compelling case for his idea that {{Amazon Echo}} (Alexa) is an operating system – and that Amazon has beaten Apple (with {{Siri}}) and {{Google Home}} (with Assistant) at the very game they both try to play. And I think he’s onto the start of something (he goes …
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vampires vs zombies
A few years ago I wrote about why I like good vampire and zombie stories. I had an epiphany this week related to that, that I thought you’d all find interesting. If vampires exist, zombies can not exist [long] in the same universe. Why? Because they’d be eliminating the only source of food for the …
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hov lanes are misnamed
I dislike HOV lanes on principle, but I also dislike them grammatically: "high-occupancy vehicle" states the vehicle can hold many people (ie, it has a "high-occupancy"). They should be labeled "highly-occupied" vehicle lanes – same acronym, but with better grammar.
tesla’s solarcity bid isn’t about energy production
Ben Thompson* (temporary paywall) makes an excellent first-order analysis of Elon Musk's bid to acquimerge SolarCity with Tesla. But he, uncharacteristically, stops short of seeing the mid- and long-term reasons for the acquimerge. It's about SpaceX. It's about Mars. It's about the Moon. Musk knows that he needs an incredibly-solid pipeline of technology to get …
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on ads
My colleague Sheila wrote a great, short piece on LinkedIn about ads recently. And this is what I commented: I held off for years in installing ad blockers/reducers. But I have finally had to cave – been running Flash in “ask-only” mode for months now, and just added a couple blocker/reducer extensions to Chrome recently …
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meetings
The author of a recent Medium post is so close to right, it’s scary. Gary says the best thing you can do is to cut your meeting length in half. And that is a phenomenal step. One that needs to happen. But one that needs to happen in conjunction with an even more monumental shift. Change the start time …
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i’m not technical
I am. But not really. To paraphrase my prelicensing class instructor, “95% of consulting is not technical work – it’s psychological”. 5% of consulting is delivery. The remainder is listening, empathizing, training, selling, encouraging, improving, and a whole bunch more gerunds. I’m an unlicensed psychiatrist dabbling in technology -just call me Frasier Malone – the single …
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facebook is aol
Facebook is AOL. Yes, that AOL. America Online. The one that advertised 20 years ago in conjunction with companies things like, “search AOL keyword ‘ford’”. That’s what Facebook is now. It’s AOL – but without the ISP aspect. Check that – Facebook is (or “has”) an ISP: just look at internet.org. So we’ve come full circle. The ISP …
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“like” problems: social ‘voting’ is a bad idea
The news story making the rounds about {{Facebook}} the past few days indicates they’re working on a kind of “dislike” button. The problem with the Facebook “like” button is the same problem {{Google}} has with Google+ and their “+1” button: it doesn’t tell you anything meaningful. Voting on Reddit doesn’t really convey much meaning, either. Stack …
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automation is a multiplier
Multipliers. They’re ubiquitous – from ratchet wrenches to fertilizer, blocks-and-tackle to calculators, humans rely on multipliers all the time. Multipliers are amazing things because they allow an individual to “do more with less” – a single person can build a coral castle with nothing more complex than simple machines. Or move 70 people at 70 miles …
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a simple restructuring of elections
In close follow-up with my desire to see political parties abolished, we also need to rethink how voting is done. In the United States, you can only vote for a single candidate for most positions (town councils are an exception). You do not have the opportunity to say anything more than a binary yes|no to a …
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vision for lexington
Over the past 5 years, I have witnessed some of the growth Lexington KY has started to undergo. From a population in the city proper of about 260,000 in 2000 to 295,000 in 2010 to an estimated 315,000 in 2015, While there seems to be something of a plan/vision for the downtown area, the majority of …
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traveling consultant cheat sheet
“Join the Navy and See the World!”* Perhaps one of the most famous recruitment phrases ever established in the United States. And it’s not at all dissimilar form what a lot of budding consultants think they are going to do when either joining a services organization, or starting their own business. I have been fortunate in …
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