I've worked on big IT projects, and I've worked with government people who've worked on them, or managed or procured them. One director at Livermore Labs in the late 80s commented that he'd never seen a billion-dollar computer project succeed - it's just too big to do the communications that are needed to make it work, through the requirements, design, and management parts, and he was trying to work on how to break projects down into things that were small enough that they could be managed and implemented. Even the successful things are messy at large scale.
This was long before Agile (which is pretty tasty Kool-Aid, for some kinds of projects, but has its own limitations).
Agreed. Any software project which requires managing, rather than getting managed as a side effect of the code writing, is already halfway on the road to failure. Because at this point, human ability to write software outstrips human ability to manage software projects.
Black paint absorbs 90-95% of light, the military has Z306 that absorbs 96% of light (and is used for paint as well as coatings for telescopes). NASA has developed materials that absorb 99.95% of light, and Vantablack is 99.965%. The ultimate black is of course, a black hole which absorbs all light (barring quantum phenomena that results in hawking radiation).
The human eye cannot comprehend sucn black - since our black objects all reflect significant amounts of light back. Looking at Vantablack or this, your mind actually sees a hole and doesn't register that there's something there.
I call BS. How could you take a picture of these 'black things'
since they do NOT reflect light back to the camera's sensor./.'rs are so easily fooled....
Hypothesis: we have discovered dark matter. (kidding)
Obama isn't "black" at all, doesn't have the american black experience in his upbringing. He fooled millions of black voters. In fact, the phrase "rare species of wigger" comes to mind
Yes, this material should be renamed as the most African-American material ever.
When I was in high school in the 80's and was taught the Wien and black body radiation model, our teacher told us that there is way to produce a "black body surface" which absorbs virtually all incoming radiation (more than the TFA:s 98-99%), and that is to make a chamber with the inside walls painted black and to drill a hole in one of the walls of the chamber. That orifice will be a very, very good approximation of a black body.
Granted, it's kind of hard to construct objects with orifices only...
yeah, we had that too. makes good theoretical sense. on an equally nerdy level, we used to buy black flocked paper from Edmund Scientific for our telescope making forays, absorbs much better than flat black paint. Same idea; keep the reflections bouncing back into another absorbing surface, minimal escape.
What a shock to find an anti-science editorial in WSJ - surely by any measure the paper of record for plutocrats.
basic science gives rise to tech opportunities. isn't this obvious? the article actually claims that science is the result of tech, which I just cannot.
The WSJ editorial page isn't anti-science, they're just anti-government, more so than Fox News; even when that puts them at odds with their news pages. When it comes to science, they're agnostic, as evidenced by their long war with the Global Warming Fraud, at the same time their news pages were reporting on the effects on insurance company losses and the corporate strategies they engender, or their war on the ACA as a job killer that will bankrupt the country at the same time the news pages were reporting on how much the insurance companies were relying on the increased enrollment, etc.
They launched the first satellites, the first man into space and who could forget the great day when the employees of a mega corp walked on the moon. Their nuclear reactors are incredible too.
And their development of penicillin, and insulin...
The big financial killer for medical insurers is hospital admissions and ER visits. A drug that can head those off can command big bucks. as in, avoiding a liver transplant.
Because what is the most promising future technology? Genetic technology. And what does genetic technology depend on? Restriction enzymes. And where did restriction enzymes come from? They were an obscure result of a minor backwater of academic E. coli bacteriophage genetic research supported by federal grants, over the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Certainly nothing a self respecting for profit corporation would ever pay for.
Automatic tracking from beginning to end (also helps with lost/rerouted luggage). No more looking for the bag on the carousel, it will signal when your bag is up. No ticket, no bag - or see security.
Fedex tracks your package through the system. No reason the airlines can't get together and do the same. Todays airline baggage and handling and system is a perfect candidate for complete automation.
No kidding; nowadays, i check the bag, it gets the bar code label wrapped around the handle, i get the receipt with the corresponding bar code, it goes into the bowels of the system and is presumably tracked until it appears at the carousel, then the tracking stops and all the receipt is good for is showing them when I can't find the bag. which is less frequently than it used to be prior to tracking, why not close the last 10 feet of the loop?
I think the most annoying thing about "human beings in general" is that they are self-important and thus, never seem to consider that their status quo isn't as important as they think, and the real problem is that they're Doing It Wrong.
Fixed that for you. Until US society can figure out this "doors to public buildings are shared spaces, stop blocking them" deal, the problem you mention won't be solved anytime soon.
i've come to the conclusion that we are programmed to congregate in narrow spaces; doorways, narrow spots in hallways, middle of the street, etc. There is no other way to explain the universality of the behavior.
Buy your parents or grandparents a Google Chromebook and your days of supporting them will ended as soon as you have set-up their Google account and shown them Google Gmail, Google Photos+, and of course Google Chrome not to be confused with Google ChromeOS. I have spent a total of 2 hours technical support for my mother over the last 5 years versus entire weekends over a couple of decades before switching her to a Google Chromebook.
indeed. got malware of some kind infesting your chromebook? turn it off. next time you turn it on and it reloads from RAM, all is well.
Human quality of life would be better without so much efficiency and global trade, which doesn't raise quality of life
Nonsense. China opened to world trade in 1980. Since then, income has increased eight-fold, and hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty. The poorest countries in the world today are sub-Saharan African countries with near zero trade. The world's richest countries are those with the most open economies.
And that's been AWESOME for their cities' air quality, hasn't it? Rich (skyscrapers & lots of busy people) does not equal quality of life.
rich guy, speaking from one of his country houses: "Don't be silly you socialist. air pollution and living in a human anthill are the price we pay for this terrific life we lead"
Human quality of life would be better without so much efficiency and global trade, which doesn't raise quality of life
Nonsense. China opened to world trade in 1980. Since then, income has increased eight-fold, and hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty. The poorest countries in the world today are sub-Saharan African countries with near zero trade. The world's richest countries are those with the most open economies.
there's poverty, then there's poverty. (profound, right?) it's one thing to be on the cusp of starvation all the time, but another to be self sustaining with a subsistence farm, although both are poor.
are first world residents that much happier? the point being happiness, rather than just richer and with more stuff? i think once you get past antibiotics and modern sanitation, to the point where there's a good chance your kids will outlive you rather than the other way around, you're getting into the region of diminishing returns. witness the stereotypical worker in finance or law or something with a huge income but no leisure time or life outside work.
of course, as Bernie tells us, in Denmark they strike a balance, where you get both a safety net (if your subsistence farm fails due to AGW) and enough benefits to enjoy life, but they still manage to have the same productivity per hour worked as the US.
Ended up taking it to a local place where the Mexicanos who ran it figured out the problem and fixed the mower (In your face Donald Trump!).
The problem isn't that modern whitegoods aren't repairable, the problem is the spirit of MacGyver has left our society..
People dont consider how to fix things. When the bulb in a lamp goes it's time to get a new lamp. You cant blame the market to reacting and catering for laziness.
That being said, whitegoods are lasting much longer these days as well as being much cheaper. The last two things that broke on me were the fault of people (damaged whilst moving).
i remember meeting people when I was a kid, from the beaten down lower echelons of society, to whom replacing a headlight bulb in a car was literally unthinkable. when the headlight burned out, then the car was just a one headlight car from then on, like if it were a person whose eye got poked out. some people don't know how to fix things or get them fixed, some people don't bother to fix things, and some people really just do not grasp that they have enough control over their environment to fix the occasional item. that's why they're in the beaten down lower echelons of society.
I have a saying which is pertinent here (and summarises your post quite nicely I think): "Poor man pays twice"
which brings up the positive feedbacks that keep poor people poor; they don't have the bucks up front to buy something lasting, so they are locked into a cycle of buy cheap, and buy another one next year, keeping them from saving up to buy the reliable one in the first place.
same as why they can't replace every light bulb in their house with LED even though it would pay for itself; or insulate the house even though it would pay for itself; or even scrape up the down payment to buy a house instead of renting.
The old world is still available but unfortunately most people are not interested in participating. A nice Miele washing machine can be repaired by any mechanic. My Fema coffee grinder looks like it is about 100 years old and yet I can still buy each part individually, and a modern Honda lawn mower has every bit the service and warranty you expect from a quality Japanese product (not that you need to rely on that with such a nicely made engine). If you pay real money for quality gear then repairs are still possible. My neighbour has no problem finding replacement bits for his chainsaw after 20 years, but I couldn't find the shitty replacement tensioner for my cheap electric no-name brand only 3 years after I bought it.
There are of course exceptions to the rule. Even expensive TVs have no user serviceable parts, and if you buy a cheap Dell you're more likely to be able to replace a component then an expensive Surface.
as somebody once said about why it's easier to repair old cars; "they're just a bunch fo car parts put together". The basic principle applies to all goods; the more they're just a bunch of parts put together, the easier it is to diagnose and fix; the more things are constrained by needing to be compatible with 27 other systems in terms of size, performance, weight, interface, etc. the harder it becomes.
of course, in electronics you just get to the point where everything is on one chip which is one board with a few support chips to supply power, etc; the chip is completely unfixable, obviously, the board might be fixable if the defect is obvious like a broken trace, but mainly you just swap the whole board.
or you take the board out and put it into a pencil case and take it to school to show your teacher.
So, while in theory the cost of these appliances and the world efficiency is improved with the model of cheap parts&labor from China. The reality is a lot of wasted time, shipping wrong replacement parts, and giving up and tossing out the old piece-o-crap to a landfill and buying something new.
That conclusion is dependant on the value of your time (or a hired appliance repair dude @ $70/hr) looking up and understanding the schematic, deducing the cause of the failure, figuring out which part or parts need to be replaced and then doing the repair, adjusted for the probability of making a mistake anywhere in the process. Compare that with the number of engineer-hours required to design the thing, maintain the production lines and run the distribution apparatus (all of it) divided into the number of units produced. You might find that you just spent more time repairing your unit than was (amortized) spent on the entire rest of its lifetime...
I guess another way of saying this is that every good has an optimal level of reliability -- beyond which it costs less to regularly replace the failing units than to improve the process or to provide for repairs. We could probably build a washer (or a car, or a hard drive) that lasts longer than the ones we have today, but what would the point be if the TCO was actually higher? Unless you were running the Presidential Motorcade or going all Mad Max, would you buy a car that failed half as often if the TCO was $300/mo instead of $200/mo (and that's including cost of repairs plus your time and inconvenience to bring it to the shop already priced in)? Would Amazon buy more reliable hard drives for AWS (if they were on the market) or would they just buy the cheap ones and build in redundancy? Does my small business website need 99.99% uptime or is 99.9% sufficient? Will the business I lose in the 40 minutes per month difference make up the cost? We can always throw more money at any good/process to make it more reliable -- but there has to be some stopping point where we decide that the marginal gains no longer make sense.
Another aspect to keep in mind is that doing things more reliably at global-scale means paying attention to all those nines. Just like getting from 99.9% uptime to 99.99% is going to cost more than each previous SLA, so to is the calculation for every input to the washer, plus the process/machinery that assembles it, plus the process/machinery that tests it. The acceptable marginal failure rate is going to scale against the marginal cost for increasing reliability.
[ And interestingly enough, Speed Queen does specialize in super-simple super-reliable washers and dryers, largely for the commercial (coin-op) market where downtime is more expensive. If it means a lot to you for your washer, by all means pay more for one and rest easier. Last I checked, they were more than 3x the upfront cost though, meaning that even if your other washer breaks twice out of warranty and is totally unrepairable and you have to buy a new one, you're still ahead! ]
just an article in the paper today about "air force one", or the two 747-200s that play that role; they don't even manufacture spare parts for them anymore, and so any replacements have to be machined by hand; and even at that refined level of exclusivity, they're at the point where it's going to be cheaper just to buy new ones and scrap the old.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked on big IT projects, and I've worked with government people who've worked on them, or managed or procured them. One director at Livermore Labs in the late 80s commented that he'd never seen a billion-dollar computer project succeed - it's just too big to do the communications that are needed to make it work, through the requirements, design, and management parts, and he was trying to work on how to break projects down into things that were small enough that they could be managed and implemented. Even the successful things are messy at large scale.
This was long before Agile (which is pretty tasty Kool-Aid, for some kinds of projects, but has its own limitations).
Agreed. Any software project which requires managing, rather than getting managed as a side effect of the code writing, is already halfway on the road to failure. Because at this point, human ability to write software outstrips human ability to manage software projects.
First you see the code. Then you study the code. Then you know the code. Then you love the code. Then you hate the code. Then you rewrite the code.
What are the practical applications for a breakthrough like this? Other than for a government that wants to do some redacting of their documents.
Lucas headlights for British cars.
What are the practical applications for a breakthrough like this? Other than for a government that wants to do some redacting of their documents.
put it in a Keurig pod and sell it as decaf
What are the practical applications for a breakthrough like this? Other than for a government that wants to do some redacting of their documents.
Bring it to Best Buy any Friday to get 75% off.
What are the practical applications for a breakthrough like this? Other than for a government that wants to do some redacting of their documents.
might be good on redfish.
Black is an interesting color.
Black paint absorbs 90-95% of light, the military has Z306 that absorbs 96% of light (and is used for paint as well as coatings for telescopes). NASA has developed materials that absorb 99.95% of light, and Vantablack is 99.965%. The ultimate black is of course, a black hole which absorbs all light (barring quantum phenomena that results in hawking radiation).
The human eye cannot comprehend sucn black - since our black objects all reflect significant amounts of light back. Looking at Vantablack or this, your mind actually sees a hole and doesn't register that there's something there.
The American Chemical Society better explains this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
true, black as a color is just really dark white
I call BS. How could you take a picture of these 'black things' since they do NOT reflect light back to the camera's sensor. /.'rs are so easily fooled....
Hypothesis: we have discovered dark matter. (kidding)
Obama isn't "black" at all, doesn't have the american black experience in his upbringing. He fooled millions of black voters. In fact, the phrase "rare species of wigger" comes to mind
Yes, this material should be renamed as the most African-American material ever.
When I was in high school in the 80's and was taught the Wien and black body radiation model, our teacher told us that there is way to produce a "black body surface" which absorbs virtually all incoming radiation (more than the TFA:s 98-99%), and that is to make a chamber with the inside walls painted black and to drill a hole in one of the walls of the chamber. That orifice will be a very, very good approximation of a black body.
Granted, it's kind of hard to construct objects with orifices only...
yeah, we had that too. makes good theoretical sense. on an equally nerdy level, we used to buy black flocked paper from Edmund Scientific for our telescope making forays, absorbs much better than flat black paint. Same idea; keep the reflections bouncing back into another absorbing surface, minimal escape.
What if.... they combined the blackest material ever, with the most metal material ever?!??
http://www.last.fm/tag/black+m...
I thought this was going to be some new videos from the Apollo.
What a shock to find an anti-science editorial in WSJ - surely by any measure the paper of record for plutocrats.
basic science gives rise to tech opportunities. isn't this obvious? the article actually claims that science is the result of tech, which I just cannot.
The WSJ editorial page isn't anti-science, they're just anti-government, more so than Fox News; even when that puts them at odds with their news pages. When it comes to science, they're agnostic, as evidenced by their long war with the Global Warming Fraud, at the same time their news pages were reporting on the effects on insurance company losses and the corporate strategies they engender, or their war on the ACA as a job killer that will bankrupt the country at the same time the news pages were reporting on how much the insurance companies were relying on the increased enrollment, etc.
They launched the first satellites, the first man into space and who could forget the great day when the employees of a mega corp walked on the moon. Their nuclear reactors are incredible too.
And their development of penicillin, and insulin...
The big financial killer for medical insurers is hospital admissions and ER visits. A drug that can head those off can command big bucks. as in, avoiding a liver transplant.
Because what is the most promising future technology? Genetic technology. And what does genetic technology depend on? Restriction enzymes. And where did restriction enzymes come from? They were an obscure result of a minor backwater of academic E. coli bacteriophage genetic research supported by federal grants, over the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Certainly nothing a self respecting for profit corporation would ever pay for.
Automatic tracking from beginning to end (also helps with lost/rerouted luggage). No more looking for the bag on the carousel, it will signal when your bag is up. No ticket, no bag - or see security.
Fedex tracks your package through the system. No reason the airlines can't get together and do the same. Todays airline baggage and handling and system is a perfect candidate for complete automation.
No kidding; nowadays, i check the bag, it gets the bar code label wrapped around the handle, i get the receipt with the corresponding bar code, it goes into the bowels of the system and is presumably tracked until it appears at the carousel, then the tracking stops and all the receipt is good for is showing them when I can't find the bag. which is less frequently than it used to be prior to tracking, why not close the last 10 feet of the loop?
I think the most annoying thing about "human beings in general" is that they are self-important and thus, never seem to consider that their status quo isn't as important as they think, and the real problem is that they're Doing It Wrong.
Fixed that for you. Until US society can figure out this "doors to public buildings are shared spaces, stop blocking them" deal, the problem you mention won't be solved anytime soon.
i've come to the conclusion that we are programmed to congregate in narrow spaces; doorways, narrow spots in hallways, middle of the street, etc. There is no other way to explain the universality of the behavior.
Buy your parents or grandparents a Google Chromebook and your days of supporting them will ended as soon as you have set-up their Google account and shown them Google Gmail, Google Photos+, and of course Google Chrome not to be confused with Google ChromeOS. I have spent a total of 2 hours technical support for my mother over the last 5 years versus entire weekends over a couple of decades before switching her to a Google Chromebook.
indeed. got malware of some kind infesting your chromebook? turn it off. next time you turn it on and it reloads from RAM, all is well.
Human quality of life would be better without so much efficiency and global trade, which doesn't raise quality of life
Nonsense. China opened to world trade in 1980. Since then, income has increased eight-fold, and hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty. The poorest countries in the world today are sub-Saharan African countries with near zero trade. The world's richest countries are those with the most open economies.
And that's been AWESOME for their cities' air quality, hasn't it? Rich (skyscrapers & lots of busy people) does not equal quality of life.
rich guy, speaking from one of his country houses: "Don't be silly you socialist. air pollution and living in a human anthill are the price we pay for this terrific life we lead"
Human quality of life would be better without so much efficiency and global trade, which doesn't raise quality of life
Nonsense. China opened to world trade in 1980. Since then, income has increased eight-fold, and hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty. The poorest countries in the world today are sub-Saharan African countries with near zero trade. The world's richest countries are those with the most open economies.
there's poverty, then there's poverty. (profound, right?) it's one thing to be on the cusp of starvation all the time, but another to be self sustaining with a subsistence farm, although both are poor.
are first world residents that much happier? the point being happiness, rather than just richer and with more stuff? i think once you get past antibiotics and modern sanitation, to the point where there's a good chance your kids will outlive you rather than the other way around, you're getting into the region of diminishing returns. witness the stereotypical worker in finance or law or something with a huge income but no leisure time or life outside work.
of course, as Bernie tells us, in Denmark they strike a balance, where you get both a safety net (if your subsistence farm fails due to AGW) and enough benefits to enjoy life, but they still manage to have the same productivity per hour worked as the US.
Ended up taking it to a local place where the Mexicanos who ran it figured out the problem and fixed the mower (In your face Donald Trump!) .
The problem isn't that modern whitegoods aren't repairable, the problem is the spirit of MacGyver has left our society.. People dont consider how to fix things. When the bulb in a lamp goes it's time to get a new lamp. You cant blame the market to reacting and catering for laziness. That being said, whitegoods are lasting much longer these days as well as being much cheaper. The last two things that broke on me were the fault of people (damaged whilst moving).
i remember meeting people when I was a kid, from the beaten down lower echelons of society, to whom replacing a headlight bulb in a car was literally unthinkable. when the headlight burned out, then the car was just a one headlight car from then on, like if it were a person whose eye got poked out.
some people don't know how to fix things or get them fixed, some people don't bother to fix things, and some people really just do not grasp that they have enough control over their environment to fix the occasional item. that's why they're in the beaten down lower echelons of society.
You get what you pay for.
I have a saying which is pertinent here (and summarises your post quite nicely I think): "Poor man pays twice"
which brings up the positive feedbacks that keep poor people poor; they don't have the bucks up front to buy something lasting, so they are locked into a cycle of buy cheap, and buy another one next year, keeping them from saving up to buy the reliable one in the first place.
same as why they can't replace every light bulb in their house with LED even though it would pay for itself; or insulate the house even though it would pay for itself; or even scrape up the down payment to buy a house instead of renting.
The old world is still available but unfortunately most people are not interested in participating. A nice Miele washing machine can be repaired by any mechanic. My Fema coffee grinder looks like it is about 100 years old and yet I can still buy each part individually, and a modern Honda lawn mower has every bit the service and warranty you expect from a quality Japanese product (not that you need to rely on that with such a nicely made engine). If you pay real money for quality gear then repairs are still possible. My neighbour has no problem finding replacement bits for his chainsaw after 20 years, but I couldn't find the shitty replacement tensioner for my cheap electric no-name brand only 3 years after I bought it.
There are of course exceptions to the rule. Even expensive TVs have no user serviceable parts, and if you buy a cheap Dell you're more likely to be able to replace a component then an expensive Surface.
as somebody once said about why it's easier to repair old cars; "they're just a bunch fo car parts put together". The basic principle applies to all goods; the more they're just a bunch of parts put together, the easier it is to diagnose and fix; the more things are constrained by needing to be compatible with 27 other systems in terms of size, performance, weight, interface, etc. the harder it becomes.
of course, in electronics you just get to the point where everything is on one chip which is one board with a few support chips to supply power, etc; the chip is completely unfixable, obviously, the board might be fixable if the defect is obvious like a broken trace, but mainly you just swap the whole board.
or you take the board out and put it into a pencil case and take it to school to show your teacher.
So, while in theory the cost of these appliances and the world efficiency is improved with the model of cheap parts&labor from China. The reality is a lot of wasted time, shipping wrong replacement parts, and giving up and tossing out the old piece-o-crap to a landfill and buying something new.
That conclusion is dependant on the value of your time (or a hired appliance repair dude @ $70/hr) looking up and understanding the schematic, deducing the cause of the failure, figuring out which part or parts need to be replaced and then doing the repair, adjusted for the probability of making a mistake anywhere in the process. Compare that with the number of engineer-hours required to design the thing, maintain the production lines and run the distribution apparatus (all of it) divided into the number of units produced. You might find that you just spent more time repairing your unit than was (amortized) spent on the entire rest of its lifetime ...
I guess another way of saying this is that every good has an optimal level of reliability -- beyond which it costs less to regularly replace the failing units than to improve the process or to provide for repairs. We could probably build a washer (or a car, or a hard drive) that lasts longer than the ones we have today, but what would the point be if the TCO was actually higher? Unless you were running the Presidential Motorcade or going all Mad Max, would you buy a car that failed half as often if the TCO was $300/mo instead of $200/mo (and that's including cost of repairs plus your time and inconvenience to bring it to the shop already priced in)? Would Amazon buy more reliable hard drives for AWS (if they were on the market) or would they just buy the cheap ones and build in redundancy? Does my small business website need 99.99% uptime or is 99.9% sufficient? Will the business I lose in the 40 minutes per month difference make up the cost? We can always throw more money at any good/process to make it more reliable -- but there has to be some stopping point where we decide that the marginal gains no longer make sense.
Another aspect to keep in mind is that doing things more reliably at global-scale means paying attention to all those nines. Just like getting from 99.9% uptime to 99.99% is going to cost more than each previous SLA, so to is the calculation for every input to the washer, plus the process/machinery that assembles it, plus the process/machinery that tests it. The acceptable marginal failure rate is going to scale against the marginal cost for increasing reliability.
[ And interestingly enough, Speed Queen does specialize in super-simple super-reliable washers and dryers, largely for the commercial (coin-op) market where downtime is more expensive. If it means a lot to you for your washer, by all means pay more for one and rest easier. Last I checked, they were more than 3x the upfront cost though, meaning that even if your other washer breaks twice out of warranty and is totally unrepairable and you have to buy a new one, you're still ahead! ]
just an article in the paper today about "air force one", or the two 747-200s that play that role; they don't even manufacture spare parts for them anymore, and so any replacements have to be machined by hand; and even at that refined level of exclusivity, they're at the point where it's going to be cheaper just to buy new ones and scrap the old.