From the category archives:

Anti-Buzz

Anti-Buzz: Monty Hall

June 7, 2014

Andrew has been writing Anti Buzz for 4 years resulting in almost 200 articles. For the next several weeks we will revisit some of these just in case you missed it: There really isn’t some magical strategy that just makes you innovate. In practice, you have to exercise your ability to think differently and to think counterintuitively. […]

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Anti-Buzz: Twenty Questions

May 31, 2014

Andrew has been writing Anti Buzz for 4 years resulting in almost 200 articles. For the next several weeks we will revisit some of these just in case you missed it: Computers generally run in a binary fashion, that is to say for any situation there are only two possible answers or next steps. How does that […]

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Anti-Buzz: Do computers age?

May 24, 2014

Andrew has been writing Anti Buzz for 4 years resulting in almost 200 articles. For the next several weeks we will revisit some of these just in case you missed it: The Buzz: Our expectations change too fast, and we dismiss machines too quickly. The Anti-Buzz: Our expectations change not because of new hardware, but […]

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Anti-Buzz: HBO’s Silicon Valley

May 3, 2014

HBO is currently running the first season of “Silicon Valley”, and now is as good a time as any to “anti-buzz” its depiction of the software engineering industry. It was pointed out to me that for decades television shows have been mangling the professions of cop, lawyer, and doctor en masse, so in as much […]

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Anti-Buzz: XP Retired

April 26, 2014

I’m going to keep it simple and practical this week. Last time I mentioned in passing that Windows XP support has ended. I thought I would give a run down of what this might mean for you and others. In anti-buzz fashion, I’ll take the position that I’m trying to talk you down from your […]

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Anti-Buzz: Junk

April 19, 2014

The old joke about computers has always been that as soon as you buy one, it becomes outdated. The joke itself is a little dated as it is a joke about frustration over computing costs, something that doesn’t have the bite it used to. But it is also a joke about how computers mysteriously become […]

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Anti-Buzz: Data Smog

April 12, 2014

In case you missed it, Anti Buzz from April 2013: I’m not a social scientist, but I play one on the Internet. And so does everyone else. Which is sort of the problem with the Internet. If you’ve read my articles even a little bit, you know I’m pretty much a wild optimist about the positive […]

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Anti-Buzz: Counter-Intuitions

April 5, 2014

(Repeat from August 2013) Having given you a slew of practical articles, and having just returned from the very nerdy experience of a data mining conference, I’m inspired to go all math geek on you. I should really say stats geek as both mathematicians and statisticians want you to know that they are very different. […]

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Anti-Buzz: Bracketology

March 22, 2014

So in American Sports Fandom there is this thing called March Madness, famous for its high variance and its invitation to fill out predictive tournament brackets. ESPN has coined the phrase “Bracketology” and when our President participates, they call it “Baracketology.” Some of my Canadian colleagues have admitted that they quietly have the stereotype of Americans […]

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Anti-Buzz: Scheduling

March 15, 2014

Another attempt to explain a complex computer science topic in simple terms, it is also something else: I’m going to validate a business process that does not get validated enough: scheduling. So point your receptionist or office manager or whoever configures your employee schedule to this article because scheduling, in general, is very very hard, […]

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Anti-Buzz: Infrastructure Perfectionism

February 22, 2014

To turn to non-tech news, as you know, the southern U.S. has seen some unusual amounts of snow and cold this winter. The highest profile instance was the inch of ice that covered Atlanta some weeks ago, resulting in a fairly catastrophic situation on the city’s freeways and roads. The governor of Georgia took some […]

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Anti-Buzz: Software Bloat

February 15, 2014

In Case You missed it: Anti-buzz re-visited from October. It’s something we joke about from time to time: Getting a new computer and marveling at how fast it seems, and yet in a few years time it will seem unreasonably slow. When we experience this we ask ourselves if it was the computer that […]

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Anti-Buzz: You’ve Been to the Future Before

February 1, 2014

If you want to predict the future, don’t look at the technology, look at the people. Both the would-be tech predictors and the would-be innovators want to know how to put lightning in a bottle, how to guess correctly at the future of technology. The typical line is to assess current technologies, (“Mobile is big […]

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Anti-Buzz: 2014 Prediction – The Privacy Boom

January 11, 2014

This week I will expand one of the issue I mentioned last week: Privacy. Right now I’m not really here to push any particular point of view, (as I have before and will again), but rather to examine the issue in a “tech trend” sense. While the Snowden leaks might have many people angry with […]

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Anti-Buzz: Meta-trends 2014

January 4, 2014

As 2014 begins I’m going to ramp up with a series of articles incidental to the trend of picking tech trends at the start of the year. For this week, I’ll be highlighting the most common or most interesting tech predictions for 2014 and weigh in on them. We could call some of these ‘meta-trends’ […]

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Anti-Buzz: 2013 Year in Review

December 28, 2013

It’s the last anti-buzz of the year, so let’s do a quick recap of how myself and others did at tech predictions. I’ll begin with myself. Last year I did something for the first time: I made an actual tech prediction. In keeping with the traditions of this column, it was sufficiently vague. The nature of […]

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Anti-Buzz: The New Lawyers

December 21, 2013

For a moment, forget all negative stereotypes you have of lawyers and consider the following, related to me by a lawyer acquaintance of mine: Software engineers are the new lawyers. Not so much in what they do and what they offer the public, (though I will indulge with some analogies soon enough), but in the […]

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Anti-Buzz: Ancestry

December 14, 2013

Welcome to the final part of my backward crawl through time, showing you that the ideas of computation and complexity exist outside of those gadgets and devices you hold in your hand. This is a broad topic, so I’ve stuck to a theme, namely powers of two. Exponential growth has a bit of a hold on […]

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Anti-Buzz: Tower of Hanoi

December 7, 2013

So, right off, go play this simple game. (You might need Flash). Try it with a few different numbers of disks. If you get frustrated or (rightfully) don’t have the patience for the higher-disk puzzles, the same site offers this solver. This is the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, a famous riddle of sorts introduced by […]

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