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.
The unreasonable necessity of subject experts
Experts make the leap from correct results to understood results.
We can't forget that data is ultimately about insight, and insight is inextricably tied to the
stories we build from the data. Subject experts are the ones who find the stories data wants to tell.
The privacy arc
How do we build satisfying connections back into our lives without the superficiality of automated sharing?
We're at a point in privacy's evolution where sanitized tech solutions are clumsily attempting to introduce (or reintroduce) human connections into our experiences.
The NoSQL movement
How to think about choosing a database.
A relational database is no longer the default choice. Mike Loukides charts the rise of the NoSQL movement and explains how to choose the right database for your application.
On pirates and piracy
The media industry's wholesale takeover of creativity is the real piracy.
Mike Loukides: "I'm not willing to have the next Bach, Beethoven, or Shakespeare post their work online, only to have it taken down because they haven't paid off a bunch of executives who think they own creativity."
Don't expect the end of electronics obsolescence anytime soon
Software updates can't rejuvenate old hardware.
Software updates for consumer electronics sound great in theory. But over time, the discrepancy between what the software is supposed to do and what your devices are capable of will rub obsolescence in your face.
From SOPA to speech: Seven tech trends to monitor
Data, voice recognition, and the "social backbone" will shape the months ahead.
Mike Loukides weighs in on the tech trends — good and bad — that will exert considerable influence in 2012.
Putting money where our mouths are
The business that can't deliver the goods doesn't deserve to survive.
SOPA and PIPA are attempts by established companies to preserve an industry that has been fundamentally unchanged since the 1950s, if not the 40s.
Understanding randomness is a double-edged sword
A review of "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives."
While Leonard Mlodinow's book offers a good introduction to probabilistic thinking, it carries two problems: First, it doesn't uniformly account for skill. Second, when we're talking probability and statistics, we're talking about interchangeable events.
The end of social
When you take the friction out of sharing, you also remove the value.
If you want to tell me what you listen to, I care. But if sharing is nothing more than a social application feed that's constantly updated without your volition, then it's just another form of spam.
An open response to Sen. Blumenthal on Protect IP and SOPA
Almost anything can be claimed as a copyright violation if you don't have to defend the claim.
SOPA and Protect IP are proposing remedies to copyright violation that never come under the scrutiny of the legal system.
