The Death of Taxis: Google, Tesla stand Accused

So – I’d say within in ten years time, (inter)national legislation aside – chances are high that autonomous self-driving cars will be in the public commercial space, to the extent that one might decide to go canoeing down a river, and be reasonably confident that you could tell your car to meet you when you decide to make shore.

That, will be an awesome day.

But what would that mean for the ‘driver for hire’ sector?

I would no longer need a taxi driver to get me from A to B, I can just go online and order a cab, which will drive itself from the depot to my location, take me to me destination and then return to the depot, all paid for digitally.

Oh, someone will need to fill it up every now and then.

Ah, Tesla… The car will just return to its charging/induction dock at the depot.

No humans required other than for the odd internal valet and repairs… and no doubt graffiti removal.

So… Google drive kicks the need for Taxi drivers into the layby, and Tesla remove the need for refuelling with pesky smelly hydrocarbons…

To all Taxi Drivers: Better start retraining now…

Perhaps as Software/Hardware Engineers to fix crash (literally) bugs with the driving software and hardware sensors, or to replace exploded/burnt out batteries…

Edit:

Scratch the ‘in ten years’ perhaps? http://futurism.com/uber-launching-its-self-driving-cars-this-month/

 

Little Men become Big Men, or Empower Them

That probably sounds a little trite, but the context here is ‘games developers’ and indies vs the rest of the world.

I read this Games Industry article with interest…

It’s not that ‘mobile has become hostile’ to indies. The problem is getting any market-space to get sales traction for the indie game developer. Now the big boys are in, it’s impossible. And now Apple have provided ‘ad space for sale’ it’s made it 100x worse, as the big boys just buy all the ad space. Purdy dumb move IMHO. Great for cash generation though!

It’s not the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. Indies create the platform, because they are typically the first to embrace a new technology ‘because it’s cool’ or because it’s cheap/easy, etc.

iPhone was a desolate wasteland for games – Apple totally misunderstood their product for this genre, and took years to catch up. But by the time they did, the platform had been well established as a gaming hot spot by ‘the little men’, and it then attracted the attention of the big boys, who then dominated the top 20 from there on in. Only the really rare ‘stand out’ indie games made any headway. Nowadays you have to be the top 1% to get any revenue of note.

It doesn’t always work that way though – the GamePark 32 (which was awesome btw!) disappeared. The Raspberry Pi is doing well – but not stupendously so as it truly deserves – though again it’s a slightly different market niche.

So for the wannabe indie, there are two things to watch out for;

  • Hot new platform which none of the big boys support or care about (yet)
  • Big name behind the platform, or one who doesn’t understand the potential so hasn’t yet attracted the big boys

Get those two right, and get in early… and you never know…

Hmm… VR headsets anyone?

Mail Hackers are Pointless, Timewasting Muppets

Period. This is the second time this year I’ve had to deal with some bored sexually frustrated dullard f’baring my servers… earlier it was WordPress, which I had to secure up to the gills (hopefully!). Now it’s my email…

Today I suddenly started getting MAIL DELIVERY FAILURE NOTICE emails, initially a dozen or so… for emails I had not sent, and after reading some of the email address, to email accounts I’ve never heard of, and on reading the content… certainly with no content I’d ever send. It was all highly profane and offensive in nature.

Before I knew it, I’d got 103 email notices for emails I’d apparently sent to people whose accounts no longer exist. This means that far more had been sent to legitimate emails addresses. I shudder to think how many.

Fortunately, my domain hosts (unitedhosting.co.uk) responded within a minute of emailing my concern – they are very hot off the mark for all support calls. They checked the logs and found the password to my email account had been compromised (guessed) despite being non-obvious, mixed-case and alphanumeric – thankfully though this was easy to remedy.

So to the pathetic waste of DNA that thought spamming countless others with profane, offensive and highly inappropriate crap using my good name to do it, go $”^# yourself. No doubt I’ll be explaining & apologising to hundreds if not thousands of people should they choose to (quite rightfully) take umbrage.

One more thing on the list of ‘Too Many Things…’ only one I’d never have chosen and frankly resent having to do.

Thanks for wasting my life, and theirs.

 

Hello world!

Welcome to my new blog – Too Many Things!

It’s true for everyone, of course, that there are too many things to do, and too little time to do them… the ‘things’ vary from person to person, disposable income (for those fortunate to have one) and so on… and then some of us ‘creative types’ go even further and make up even more things to do, which of course, rarely get done!

Anywho, this blog is (kind of) my personal vent/rant-space, which will draw upon my few decades worth of software engineering and development, both in the games industry and enterprise application industry, and allows me to blow off the steam I can’t vent in the main site (maksw.com) or the game projects (dominium.maksw.com).

If you dared to visit here, then best visit rarely, as no doubt I’ll only update this more rarely still…

Visit the awesomeness ofDominium!