This is Dave Edstrom's personal blog called Photons and Electrons. This blog is about technology, as well as some of my personal interests. I am the CEO/CTO of Virtual Photons Electrons. I was the CTO for MEMEX for three years, the President and Chairman of the Board for the MTConnect Institute from May 2010 to January 2014 and prior to that I spent 23 years at Sun Microsystems.
One of the bucket list bike rides I have been wanting to do was from Ocean City, MD to north of Lewes, Delaware (where I run out of land and have to turn around). I did this last week for the first time and it was 64.8 miles round trip. It was a GREAT day for this ride.
Above is the bridge over the Oregon Inlet in Delaware.
Above is the view north of Lewes, DE.
Above is the Cape May-Lewes Ferry entry point.
Above and below is from Gordon's Pond north of Rehoboth, DE.
Above is the huge wind mill from University of Delaware and below is an old Farmall like my grandfather had that is used for pulling boats in a boat yard I pulled into north of Lewes.
Below is my bike speedometer that shows the total miles.
In January of this year we received an email from Bobbi and Richard Franklin mentioning that we should try to get the entire crew together for a reunion at Ocean City, Maryland this summer. We all looked at dates, spoke to our kids, and settled on the week of June 24th. The Franklin and Edstrom families have been vacationing together since the 1990s and have always had a great time. This was the absolute BEST week we have had! Below are photos from this past week and in years past as well.
Above is the big group of us enjoying dinner at Crabcake Factory Seafood Restaurant. From the left going clockwise is Michael, Tim, Laura, Janet, John, me, Taylor, Bobbi, Julie, my sister Dr. Julie, my father John, my mother Ruth and Richard.
Above is a photo of all us with Bobbi's parents sitting in the front row on the left next to my parents.
Below is the weather forecast and it turned it was correct and we had GREAT weather in Ocean City, Maryland this past week.
Above is the water bottle that I had made at Walls Litho (former boss Sue Walls Print Shop) which Tim and I designed and gave out to everyone who attended. I thought it would be a nice way to remember a GREAT week.
Above, Janet took a photo of Tim, John and Julie in front of the first place we hit at lunch which is The Dough Roller and Dayton's Chicken with Thrasher Fries at Ocean City's famed board walk. Michael showed up for lunch and the Franklins got in later in the day.
A must dessert is Dumser's Dairyland for some ice cream!
Above is me and my three sons enjoying a drink before we all had dinner at the bar at Hooked the first night.
Above is all of us at Harborside Bar and Grill in West Ocean City. Michael's girlfriend Colleen was able to make it for a few days after taking the red-eye in from California.
Above is Tim, Michael and John before they left on their 55mph Jetskis at Top Gun on Dorchester Street next to Marina Deck.
Above is my sister with her three nephews.
Above is Grandpa with his three grandsons and below is my mother with Colleen.
Below is Taylor, Julie, Tim and me enjoying a drink at The Big Chill at Oregon Inlet in Delaware on our way to have dinner at Jake's in Rehoboth.
Below are five photos of the Edstrom and Franklin kids in the early to mid 2000s. From left to right on the back row is Michael and John Edstrom with Casey and Max Franklin. In the front row is Tim Edstrom and Taylor Franklin. Unfortunately Casey and Max Franklin could not make it for the 2017 reunion.
The Jordan's know how much I love Old Bay, that they bought me the hat! Above I am drinking Deadrise beer (Old Bay Beer) with my hat on :-)
Above is from 2006.
Above is from 2007.
Above is from July 2007.
Above is from 2003.
Above is from 2002.
Above is from 2006 where are all of us including my sister holding onto Tim with my parents - John and Ruth - between Tim and me. This was down near the lower part of OC near Marina Deck Restaurant.
Above is Taylor and Tim in 2003.
Above is Julie and Bobbi in 2015.
Above is Casey and his girlfriend Kelsey in 2015.
Above is from 2015 with our multiple umbrella setup so folks can get out of the sun.
Above is Bobbi, Richard, Julie and me in 2013.
Above is from 2010 with Richard and the whole crew with Janet next to John.
Above is a photo from a few years ago of Bobbi, me, Richard and Julie.
Below are two videos of Richard and me competing on who could ride the waves the furthest - Richard won one and I won one :-)
Ms. Butcher brings out 10 important points and I found #4 of particular interest. It reminds of the first acronym I learned in Data Processing in the mid 1970s - GIGO - Garbage In - Garbage Out
"4. An army of people will be needed to acquire, clean, and assess the data
Before machine learning strategies can be implemented, data
scientists and quantitative researchers need to acquire and analyze the
data with the aim of deriving tradable signals and insights.
J.P. Morgan notes that data analysis is complex. Today’s datasets are
often bigger than yesterday’s. They can include anything from data
generated by individuals (social media posts, product reviews, search
trends, etc.), to data generated by business processes (company exhaust
data, commercial transaction, credit card data, etc.) and data generated
by sensors (satellite image data, foot and car traffic, ship locations,
etc.). These new forms of data need to be analyzed before they can be
used in a trading strategy. They also need to be assessed for ‘alpha
content’ – their ability to generate alpha. Alpha content will be
partially dependent upon the cost of the data, the amount of processing
required and how well-used the dataset is already."
The article does a great job defining areas of machine learning and what you need to know and what you do not. It also brings up the important languages and data analysis packages.
The sub-title is: “This could cause wide-scale damage to infrastructure systems that are vital.”
Mr. Finkle starts off:
"Two
cyber security firms have uncovered malicious software that they
believe caused a December 2016 Ukraine power outage, they said on
Monday, warning the malware could be easily modified to harm critical
infrastructure operations around the globe.
ESET,
a Slovakian anti-virus software maker, and Dragos Inc, a U.S.
critical-infrastructure security firm, released detailed analyzes of the
malware, known as Industroyer or Crash Override, and issued private
alerts to governments and infrastructure operators to help them defend
against the threat."
It's interesting that I have had these conversations with friends and they conflate Y2K with grid malware and don't believe it is possible.
What is scary, is how easy it can be to use these malware tools as is stated below:
“The
malware is really easy to re-purpose and use against other targets.
That is definitely alarming,” said ESET malware researcher Robert
Lipovsky said in a telephone interview. “This could cause wide-scale
damage to infrastructure systems that are vital.”
The
Department of Homeland Security corroborated that warning, saying it
was working to better understand the threat posed by Crash Override.
“The
tactics, techniques and procedures described as part of the Crash
Override malware could be modified to target U.S. critical information
networks and systems,” the agency said in an alert posted on its
website."
Ms. Mlot brings out a number of key a very interesting points: "After some training, the AI
managed to outperform humans at pinball and match them at Q*bert and
Space Invaders. But the computer struggled with Ms. Pacman and
Montezuma’s Revenge (named after an expression for diarrhea contracted
while visiting Mexico).
“Atari has recently become a
benchmark for testing reinforcement learning algorithms,” Kurin said,
citing a 2015 experiment in which Google’s DeepMind created an artificial intelligence platform that taught itself how to play 50 Atari titles.
Read more about the Atari Grand Challenge Dataset in a paper
published last week by Kurin, fellow RWTH Aachen University researchers
Lucas Beyer and Bastian Leibe, and Sebastian Nowozin and Katja Hofmann
of the Machine Intelligence and Perception Group at Microsoft Research
in Cambridge."
The video below really drives home the point of reinforcement learning:
I absolutely agree with the opening sentence (having spent a good chunk of three years in Canada):
"Most Canadians have never heard of James
Gosling. But the Alberta-born principal creator of Java – one of the
most widely used and longest-lived programming languages in modern
computing – is a hero in Silicon Valley.
Java
is the foundational software behind Android, the operating system found
on most mobile devices. By some measures, Java can be found on 97 per
cent of enterprise computer systems, and the virtual-machine systems Mr.
Gosling designed for Java are critical to the world of cloud computing.
For those who remember the Y2K computing crisis, Java was the main tool
used to repair and replace the broken systems.
There are millions of Java programmers the
world over, and some of those people still stop Mr. Gosling on the
street for selfies – as if he were a movie star – and then thank him for
their careers.
“That
tends to weird out your kids. People mostly leave me alone, [but] if
there is the wrong kind of conference in San Francisco and I wander
around Moscone [the city’s main convention centre], it can be a little
tough,” he says. “If I go to places like India or China it can get
seriously tough.”
I love the story that James tells about Oracle:
"Then came Oracle Corp.’s purchase of Sun
in 2010, a marriage of two corporate cultures that couldn’t have been
more different, especially for Mr. Gosling, who had been with Sun for 26
years. “It’s like grabbing your hand onto an electric fence … Oracle is
a very painful corporation,” he says.
He
recounts an infamous story: Even before the acquisition closed, Oracle
cancelled an employee appreciation party that Sun’s founders had
organized, even though Sun had prepaid to book an entire amusement park.
Sun was the kind of place that had a closet full of tequila, he said;
Oracle was not so loose.
“Oracle does
not do employee appreciation events. You get one employee appreciation
event every two weeks; it’s called a paycheque. My early experiences
with it were just, like, really, really, really awful. So I just had to
flee. ”"
I am really glad to see James excited about joining Adrian Cockcroft, Tim Bray and other former Sun folks at AWS:
"On May 22, Mr. Gosling returned to the
world of big-time software development when he announced he was joining
Amazon Web Services (one of the world’s leading cloud-computing
providers) as a distinguished engineer.
He
has been tight-lipped about what he’ll be doing at Amazon.com Inc.,
though he posted this intriguing message on Facebook: “Years ago, I
worked at IBM for a while and had to go through
‘confidential-information’ training. When I came back grumpy, my manager
smiled and said, ‘IBM’s biggest secret is that it has nothing worth
keeping secret.’ Doesn’t apply at Amazon. It looks like it’ll be a fun
ride.”"
Below is my oldest son John, when he worked for Sun Microsystems as a Campus Ambassador at Virginia Tech, between Jonathan Schwartz on the left and James Gosling on the right.
I first went out with Frank going back to the early 1980s with the famous "Fishin Groene's" and always had a great time.
We had a record day today! We left out of Happy Harbor at 5:50am and by 6:48am we had caught our limit! I have never hit our limit THAT quickly!
Below are some pictures and a movie.
Above Matt and Tim on Loosen Up.
Above is Tim catching a big rockfish.
Big garbage can of rockfish.
Above is Tim catching one of his rockfish.
Matt, Tim and I holding our prize rockfish!
Tim won the "gold hook award" by Captain Frank for landing the biggest fish for the day's outing.
Above is is Kathy, who helped out as well and showed us some amazing photos!, with Matt, Tim and me.
Above is Matt, me, Tim, Captain Frank Carver and Captain Bryan Schmitt.
We were also VERY lucky that Captain Bryan Schmitt decided to mate for his buddy Frank. Just last week - per the FLW - Fishing League Worldwide: "LA CROSSE, Wis. – Pro Bryan Schmitt of Deale, Maryland, weighed a five-bass limit totaling 14 pounds, 10 ounces Sunday to win the FLW Tour at the Mississippi River presented by Evinrude.
Schmitt’s four-day total of 20 bass weighing 61 pounds, 6 ounces, was
enough to edge second-place pro Joshua Weaver of Macon, Georgia, and win
the top prize of $125,000 in the four-day event that featured 160 of
the world’s best bass anglers competing in La Crosse."
Huge thanks to Captain Frank, Captain Bryan and Kathy for all their help
Thanks to my father John Kenneth Edstrom who did two tours of duty in Vietnam as an officer in the Air Force. My father is also in the very unique category in that he was awarded TWO BRONZE STARS for the two tours of duty for his countless acts of bravery in his two years in Vietnam. The Bronze Star Medal is a United States Armed Forces military decoration that may be awarded for bravery, acts of merit, or meritorious service.
Thanks to my
cousin Chris Edstrom who has done two tours of duty in Iraq and three in
Afghanistan and who is doing work back to both countries now as a contractor. Thanks to Dr. Harry Foxwell, Brad Kirley, Bruce Adams and Paul Warndorf
for their service to our country.
History of Veterans Day as stated at TimeAndDate.com
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 an armistice between Germany and the Allied nations came into effect. On November 11, 1919, Armistice Day was commemorated for the first time. In
1919, President Wilson proclaimed the day should be "filled with solemn
pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and
with gratitude for the victory". There were plans for parades, public meetings and a brief suspension of business activities at 11am.
In
1926, the United States Congress officially recognized the end of World
War I and declared that the anniversary of the armistice should be
commemorated with prayer and thanksgiving. The Congress also requested
that the president should "issue a proclamation calling upon the
officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government
buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to
observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with
appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples."
An
Act (52 Stat. 351; 5 U. S. Code, Sec. 87a) was approved on May 13,
1938, which made November 11 in each year a legal holiday, known as
Armistice Day. This day was originally intended to honor veterans of
World War I. A few years later, World War II required the largest
mobilization of service men in the history of the United States and the
American forces fought in Korea. In 1954, the veterans service
organizations urged Congress to change the word "Armistice" to
"Veterans". Congress approved this change and on June 1, 1954, November
11 became a day to honor all American veterans, where ever and whenever
they had served.
In 1968 the Uniforms Holiday Bill
(Public Law 90-363 (82 Stat. 250)) made an attempt to move Veterans Day
to the fourth Monday of October. The bill took effect in 1971. However,
this caused a lot of confusion as many states disagreed with this
decision and continued to hold Veterans Day activities on November 11.
In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford signed Public Law 94-97 (89 Stat.
479), which stated that Veterans Day would again be observed on November
11 from 1978 onwards. Veterans Day is still observed on November 11.
Harry
Foxwell always would send out a nice email to Sun employees (and I
imagine others). Two years ago, he asked the question: Do you know where your veterans are?
Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery:
http://www.arlingtoncemetery.org/visitor_information/tomb_of_the_unknowns.html
National World War II Memorial: http://www.wwiimemorial.com/
Marine Corps Memorial: http://www.nps.gov/archive/gwmp/usmc.htm
US Navy Memorial: http://www.navymemorial.org/
Air Force Memorial: http://www.airforcememorial.org/
Korean War Veterans Memorial: http://www.nps.gov/kowa//index.htm
Vietnam Veterans Memorial: http://www.nps.gov/vive/index.htm
Vietnam Women's Memorial: http://www.visitingdc.com/memorial/vietnam-women%27s-memorial.htm
Iraq Veterans Memorial: http://iraqmemorial.org/
Department of Veterans Affairs: http://www.va.gov/
As Mr. Mercer points out regarding the initial requirements:
"There were five requirements from this experiment. The new language had to:
be “simple, object-oriented and familiar”
be “robust and secure”
be “architecture-neutral and portable”
execute with “high performance”
be “interpreted, threaded and dynamic”"
I often bring up that I think the phrase, "Write Once, Run Anywhere" was a HUGE factor in its success because EVERYONE could understand those four words versus listing the five requirements above.
I do remember seeing slides on what Mr. Mercer speaks about below:
"The first attempts looked at combining C and Mesa,
producing an object-oriented environment in C++, and Gosling even tried
creating a new form of C++ which he called C++ ++ -- which is a bit of a
mouthful, to say the least.
C++ would be cast aside as it required too much memory and
had a tendency to lead to developer errors thanks to its complexity due
largely to developers having to manually manage the system memory."
In my office I have a James Gosling signed t-shirt of the 10th Anniversary of Java. Oh, the good ole days.....
The article in Atlas Obscura titledHow San Francisco Chronicled Its Own Tech Boom, is definitely interesting, especially the photo of the famous April 1st, 1991 prank of having Scott McNealy's office moved to the shark tank at the Steinhardt Aquarium in San Francisco,
This references an Instagram Account worth following -- SFChronicle_Vault
"It's a big deal, particularly for smaller companies. The court voted unanimously to say that patent lawsuits should be tried where the defending company is based, rather than in a court of the plaintiff's choosing.
Legal analysts say this decision could shift a huge number of cases away from “plaintiff-friendly” districts and toward more “neutral” venues where a defending company stands a better chance of fending off a suit.
“From here out,” according to Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, “defendants can still be sued in a district such as E.D. Tex. if they have a regular and established place of business in it, but the decision is likely to shrink what I called in my January preview a ‘jackpot patent litigation sector.’ "
As Mr. Fung points out, the challenge has been that:
"Until the Supreme Court's ruling this week, patent lawsuits could be heard all across the country, giving companies the opportunity to seek out courts where the odds were tilted in their favor.
This led to a kind of clustering, where a handful of federal courts became responsible for deciding a huge number of patent cases. One major example is the Eastern District of Texas, which is notorious both for hearing a lot of patent infringement cases and also for handing accusers big wins. A 2015 study byPricewaterhouseCoopersfound that the court was far more likely to decide in a patent plaintiff's favor than other courts."
The Eastern District of Texas was infamous for its friendliness for patent trolls.
I always gravitate towards these "technology will take all of our jobs and we will need to pay people to exist because robots and AI software bots will have most of the jobs" articles.
"We have yet another study that debunks the widespread notion that robots — and other forms of automation, including “artificial intelligence” — will destroy our jobs and lead to a future of permanently high unemployment. According to the study, that would completely rewrite history, which has shown job creation to be an enduring strength of the U.S. economy.
Thestudy(”False Alarmism: Technological Disruption and the U.S. Labor Market, 1850-2015”) comes from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank focusing on technology. The study’s greatest virtue is to remind us that past changes have wiped out entire job categories without spawning a high-unemployment society."
He brings up a few examples that show panic over the years that all turn out to be unfounded.
These points in the Atkinson and Wu article were particularly interesting:
"Specific occupations usually grow when it is hard to improve
worker productivity. Forty years ago, economist William Baumol described what became
known as “Baumol’s disease,” where some industries that could not raise productivity (or at
least did not raise it as quickly as the rate of economy-wide productivity growth) would
become a larger share of the economy, at least in terms of the percentage share of the
workforce. A case in point is the education industry and teachers. It still takes one teacher
to teach 30 students in elementary school, just as it did 40 years ago. As a result, the total
number of elementary- and secondary-school teachers increased by 1.5 million, or 39
percent, from 1980 to 2015, but as a share of all employment hovered at 3 percent over the
past three decades.25 But technology doesn’t just eliminate jobs; it also creates them, although as noted above,
normally not as many as it eliminates. If we look at some of the occupations of today that
largely didn’t exist 30 years ago (e.g., distance-learning coordinators, green marketers,
informatics nurse specialists, nanosystems engineers, and cytotechnologists), we can see this
dynamic. These occupations emerged because technological innovation made them
possible. There was no need, for example, for informatics nurse specialists when virtually all
medical information was on paper. Likewise, why have a distance-learning coordinator
when broadband communications were largely nonexistent, or a green marketer when clean
tech was a niche product at best? In 2012, there were 466,000 U.S. jobs related to mobile
apps, up from zero in 2007. Indeed, if you examine the fastest-growing U.S. industries over
the last 15 years, certainly some are due to technological innovation. For example, support
activities for oil and gas operations grew by 537 percent, in part to support natural-gas
“fracking,” which was in turn enabled by innovations, much of it with U.S. Department of
Energy origins.26 Many fast-growing industries are, not surprisingly, in the IT industry,
such as Internet publishing, Internet services providers, software, and cellular
communications systems. Others—such as biological products and surgical and medical
instrument manufacturing—are also spurred by innovation, enabling new products to
come to market (but also by globalization, which enables access to larger markets for an
industry that the United States still has competitive advantage in)."
The statement by the authors in the above paper that resonates the most with me is: "Moreover, if we are going to realize the American dream of continuing progress and increasing standards of living, then the last thing we want to do is to constantly stoke people’s unwarranted and unfounded fears that their jobs are on the techno-chopping block."
The question I like to pose to these individuals that "new_insert_new_technology_here" will kill all the jobs is the following: "Imagine that we have Albert Einstein with us at a bar in 1917 and we ask him to predict out 100 years in terms of what type of jobs will be the most sought after? We ask Dr. Einstein to be specific. Do you REALLY think he would be able to list the hot jobs that are around today?" Of course not. It is just as silly to expect today's geniuses such as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and the other prognosticators of doom and gloom to be able to do better than Albert Einstein.
At the end of the Samuelson article he references the following articles:
HUGE congratulations to my youngest son Tim for graduating yesterday from James Madison University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Science!
Above is Tim before graduation with his favorite NBA player of all time on his cap #2 John Wall of the Washington Wizards. Here is a story of photos that John (Tim's oldest brother took).
Above is Tim's name listed in the 2017 Commencement Guide and below is his framed diploma.
Above is Tim's aunt, mom, grandma, me and grandpa. Below is oldest brother John, good friend Max, Tim's girlfriend Katie and brother Michael. It was 52 degrees and raining, BUT everyone was excited to be there!
Above is the video of Tim receiving his diploma!
Tim waving just after he got his degree.
Above we had a GREAT lunch at Tim and our favorite restaurant in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia - Edelweiss German Restaurant.
Above is Tim with the cake grandma made him.
Tim with grandma and grandpa.
Tim with his godparents - his aunt and Jeff.
Julie and and me with Tim.
Below is Michael, John, Katie, Tim, me and Julie.
Above is John Magnuson - Tim's long time buddy - they lived behind us and knew each other since they were two years old.
Above is Tim and Katie.
Above is John, Tim and Max - doing something :-)
His brothers lifting Tim to victory for his degree!
Below is us cracking up on a comment that grandma made.
This is Dave Edstrom's personal blog called Photons and Electrons. This is the same name of the blog I had for Sun Microsystems for many years. I am the CEO/CTO for Virtual Photons Electrons, LLC. More info is available at http://VirtualPhotonsElectrons.com I was the CTO for MEMEX for almost three years. More information on MEMEX is at http://MemexOEE.com
Jim Finkle wrote a very nice article:
