41–50 of 67 posts
Funnily enough, microcomputers themselves were once the technology solution in search of a problem. The "home computer" fad of the 80s promised lots of applications that didn't quite pan out, including finance, "helping kids with the homework", "the little lady can store her recipes", and home automation. The only ones that really panned out were games (including edutainment), spreadsheets, word processing, and maybe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
His complaint isn't against the Blockchain or Hadoop, but against the people proposing their use for its own sake, without concern about whether it actually provides benefits. He specifically says that virtual currencies themselves are a valid reason to use the Blockchain.
>His complaint isn't against the Blockchain or Hadoop, but [...] whether it actually provides benefits. For his blockchain example, I couldn't find his Dutch handicap parking story via Google for more details so I don't know if a traditional central database would solve the same exact problem . I'm saying that virtually all dismissals of a blockchain in favor of central databases almost always removes the benefits of…
Maybe the "exact same problem" is the wrong thing to try to solve? It might not be a problem in the first place (by itself), just a re-formulation of the actual problem so that it's solvable by blockchain, which seems to be the author's point.
I think the author has an interesting direction but don't quite like the examples.. Taking a step back and looking at it more generally I see this as problem solving vs problem finding (in Alan Kay's words), where a perfect example would be the hype with self driving cars and high speed car tunnels. This is problem solving (traffic jams, car accidents, "I need to get there faster"). Whereas problem finding will ask t…
Keep expanding your problem field. How do you create a car free society? I live in Palatka, FL. A small town that's great for tech since housing is low cost and we have reasonably fast Internet to facilitate remote work or cloud based solution development. But to get anything other than food, I have to travel at least 45 minutes to St Augustine unless I purchase online. This means I need a car. For example, I have 12…
The solution is public transport; it seems you already have a train that goes to Jacksonville, though it's rather slow; the Brussels-Bruges line is about the same distance and takes only 1h, even with intermediate stops.
As for not having delivery, that's solved by the question itself: if people didn't have cars, they would definitively deliver!
As for choosing the boards, that's hardly a problem, you go to the shop, choose them and they'd package those specific boards and deliver them. That's fairly common for large items, at least here in Europe, where people (even small town dwellers) tend to have small cars.
Funnily enough, microcomputers themselves were once the technology solution in search of a problem. The "home computer" fad of the 80s promised lots of applications that didn't quite pan out, including finance, "helping kids with the homework", "the little lady can store her recipes", and home automation. The only ones that really panned out were games (including edutainment), spreadsheets, word processing, and maybe…
>> the little lady can store her recipes That's a great perspective, and I'm really glad you mentioned this in particular. It's one of those things that was so often repeated, and I always found it to be really bizarre. Recipes? Really? I'd add music synth to your list of real world uses, in some sense that was a killer app for microprocessors.
- microservices architecture
- using document data stores despite your data being relational
Real consensus about a specific technology stack takes at least a couple of years to build up. If a tech product becomes popular very quickly, it is purely because of its superficial qualities - Often at the expense of finer details.
I think the title of the article does not accurately reflect the author's thesis, which is more like "trending tech may not be the best solution to your problem". I agree that riding the hype train instead of using established "mundane" tools is probably a bad idea for most problems, but exploring existing tech that might help you also qualifies as "tech-driven problem-solving" IMHO
I've worked at a large financial services company and a large medical billing company who both thought they could use big data and machine learning to monetize customers(!) data. Niether had expertise with either. One muddled through with local talent, the other brought in a ph.d ML guy. Both spent millions and got nothing in return. Anecedotal, but representative I believe.
One of the biggest challenges we had was introducing all kinds of new technology but minimal impact on bottom-line. In fact, it probably caused a great deal of productivity and cultural issues that just slows everything down.
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Keep expanding your problem field. How do you create a car free society? I live in Palatka, FL. A small town that's great for tech since housing is low cost and we have reasonably fast Internet to facilitate remote work or cloud based solution development. But to get anything other than food, I have to travel at least 45 minutes to St Augustine unless I purchase online. This means I need a car. For example, I have 12…
Not that I'm actually arguing for eliminating cars from small towns: The solution is public transport; it seems you already have a train that goes to Jacksonville, though it's rather slow; the Brussels-Bruges line is about the same distance and takes only 1h, even with intermediate stops. As for not having delivery, that's solved by the question itself: if people didn't have cars, they would definitively deliver! As…