Mike Loukides
Mike Loukides is Vice President of Content Strategy for O'Reilly Media, Inc. He's edited many highly regarded books on technical subjects that don't involve Windows programming. He''s particularly interested in programming languages, Unix and what passes for Unix these days, and system and network administration. Mike is the author of System Performance Tuning", and a coauthor of "Unix Power Tools." Most recently, he's been fooling around with data and data analysis, languages like R, Mathematica, and Octave, and thinking about how to make books social.
Instagram: On being the product
Getting customers to use a service and then changing the rules isn't a decent way to treat people.
Let me start by saying that I’m not an Instagram user, and never have been. So I thought I could be somewhat dispassionate. But I’m finding that hard. The latest change to their terms of service is outrageous: their statement that, by signing up, you are allowing them to use your photographs without permission or compensation in any…
Interoperating the industrial Internet
If we're going to build useful applications on top of the industrial Internet, we must ensure the components interoperate.
One of the most interesting points made in GE’s “Unleashing the Industrial Internet” event was GE CEO Jeff Immelt’s statement that only 10% of the value of Internet-enabled products is in the connectivity layer; the remaining 90% is in the applications that are built on top of that layer. These applications enable decision support, the optimization of large…
The Narwhal and the Orca
The two campaign systems highlight the stark differences between DevOps and traditional models.
Leaving politics aside, there’s a lot that can be learned from the technical efforts of the Obama and Romney campaigns. Just about everyone agrees that the Obama campaign’s Narwhal project was a great success, and that Romney’s Orca was a failure. But why?
I have one very short answer. If you follow technology, you don’t have to…
Biohacking: The next great wave of innovation
The hacker culture that launched the computing revolution is now taking root in the bio space.
I’ve been following synthetic biology for the past year or so, and we’re about to see some big changes. Synthetic bio seems to be now where the computer industry was in the late 1970s: still nascent, but about to explode. The hacker culture…
Apple’s maps
Apple's maps problem isn't about software or design. It's about data.
I promise not to make any snarky remarks about Apple’s maps disaster, and the mistakes of letting a corporate vendetta get in the way of good business decisions. Oops, I lied. But it’s good to see that Tim Cook agrees, at…
Phished
As phishing improves and spreads, the importance of two-factor authentication grows.
Maybe I’m the last person to know this, but phishing has spread beyond email. And it’s not really pretty.
Here’s the story: A few nights ago, I got a Twitter direct message (DM) from a friend saying that someone was saying nasty things about me, with a link. The link was a shortened (t.co) link, so it was hard to…
StrataRx: Data science and health(care)
A call for data scientists, technologists, health professionals, and business leaders to convene.
By Mike Loukides and Jim Stogdill
We are launching a conference at the intersection of health, health care, and data. Why?
Our health care system is in crisis. We are experiencing epidemic levels of obesity, diabetes, and other preventable conditions while at the same time…
Discovering science
The excitement of science is tied to challenging assumptions about how things work.
The discovery of the Higgs boson gave us a window into the way science works. We’re over the hype and the high expectations kindled by last year’s pre-announcement. We’ve seen the moving personal interest story about Peter Higgs and how this discovery validates predictions he made almost 50 years ago, and which ones weren’t at the time…
The dark side of data
In a world of big, open data, "privacy by design" will become even more important.
A few weeks ago, Tom Slee published “Seeing Like a Geek,” a thoughtful article on the dark side of open data. He starts with the story of a Dalit community in India, whose land was transferred to a group…
