My Twitter Digest for 10/02/2015

My Twitter Digest for 09/30/2015

Q&A with the head of open source at Twitter

In this exclusive interview with Chris Aniszczyk, the Head of Open Source at Twitter explains how company engineers are working on open source technologies internally and contributing to a range of community projects.

Source: An inside look at open source at Twitter – opensource.com

Twitter is built on open source software and this article provides insight into the contributions engineers at Twitter are making to a number of open source projects.

My Twitter Digest for 09/29/2015

Because profit is more important than innovation, high school testing still relies on the TI-83 graphing calculator.

But this is also a world where high school math students have to shell out $100 for the same TI-83 graphing calculator that their parents used twenty years ago (or one of its descendants, at least)—instead of using a free app that they could simply download to their phone. Why? Mic reports that the main reason is tradition. Texas Instruments has managed to get its calculators written into the standardized tests used by many schools. And inertia being what it is, it’s really hard to change something like that once it gets set down on paper.

Source: In an age of tablets and e-books, high school testing still relies on the TI-83 graphing calculator | TeleRead

This should serve as a reminder that it isn’t just the legal world that drags its feet when it comes to new and obviously better technology. The world is awash in examples of this sort of thing where a powerful incumbency holds back or outright blocks the adoption of new tech simply to preserve some profit margin. Ignoring, disregarding, or suppressing innovation in the name of maintaining profits especially in a near monopoly market is practically a rule of business.