47% of statistics are just made up, but I don't know if that even applies to completely unverifiable statements like "eight qualified candidates for every 10 openings". Please define "qualified".
"Qualified" means "meets our prejudices". Most of the time they're only interested in a certain "type" of person (worst of all is the line "bad fit for culture" - if your culture is that full of BS then I don't want to fit in). I think many employers are not even aware that their prejudices are prejudices. If you really want to see how many qualified candidates there are, tighten the job market further and see how quickly any company that wants to survive becomes more flexible in their hiring practices.
The best examples of this are the world wars, when many men volunteered or were drafted, and demand for production soared. In WWI northern factories (there were very few down south back then) took the radical step of not only hiring black people, but sending recruiters down south to hire them (there were comparatively few black people in the north back then - it was the start of the great northern migration).
In WWII factories hired women. What do you know, that cute brunette does a pretty good job of building airplanes (cue sanctimonious criticism of my use of the phrase "cute brunette"). A truly tight labor market makes employers very creative.
If there was truly a tight labor market for programmers today, then you'd see prejudices put aside. They would, for example, try re-tooling old farts. I'll be the first to admit that some old farts genuinely deserve to be put out to pasture (just as many young squirts don't deserve to be hired in the first place) but many of them have kept up with the tech, even if they can't shake the habit of calling an app a "program" (whatever that is). Many more old farts who might not have kept up as much as they should, would educate themselves in newer technologies, before looking for a job, if they thought it gave them a ghost of a chance of getting hired. Typically old farts avoid things like the slide at Box's Los Altos, Calif., as shown in the article, but might still get some use out of it when they bring the grandkids in for a visit. Hey ma, grandpa doesn't really work - he goes to the playground every day!
tl;dr This article brings new meaning to the term BS.
We haven't used flammable anesthetics in the US in a looooooong time.
Non-flammable? Wusses.
Like I said I got out of the medical electronics biz a looooooong time ago, and OR stuff wasn't our mainstay. Maybe even then it was a legacy thing in case somebody still had a few tanks of the good stuff lying around.
What do you think the small fleet of self driving cars do now when they encounter something they do not know what to do? They pull to the side of the road stop and turn on the machine that goes ping.
According to the article they tell the human to take control.
As for pulling over to the side of the road, how does it do that from the middle of a crowded five lane highway, in the snow, when it's already confused about what to do? What does it do on those urban highways that have no shoulder?
Dont know about you but most of the accidents I have been in happened in 1-2 seconds. I did not have minutes to think about what was going on. If 2-3 mins were true auto accidents would be near 0.
And so you completely missed what the GP was saying, including where he said that most car accidents happen in 1-2 seconds? Where is it that you disagree with him? He said many aircraft accidents take minutes to unfold, hence allowing the human pilots to take over when the autopilot says "beats me what's happening - good luck!"
But read this...
An excellent example of writing about technical issues in the popular press. Amongst other things it mentions the important fact that one of the engineers is very tall. Oh, and all of them are really, really smart. Technical details are a little short on the ground though.
You are thinking too narrow. Why would I drive to the store? I can send my car and someone can load the stuff up.
But if the car goes into fail safe mode and stops on the side of the road, the beer will get warm while you're waiting.
Wow, one simple contrived test was demonstrated. Was there any background clutter? Snow or rain? Was the dummy even moving? Detecting a single target in a clear field at a distance of 100 yards is about as easy as you get. Consider me unimpressed.
We do these sort of demos all the time when developing products. It just means "we got something kind of working in some circumstances", and there's a lot of work to be done to turn it into a reliable full-functioning design. Any engineer should know that, and when we demo stuff internally, we make no bones about it. Dealing with gullible members of the press is another matter. They love hype, because they need something interesting to write about. "Nothing interesting" is not something editors like to hear.
By all accounts autonomous cars are better at spotting potential road hazards
The OP's second sentence was "What coverage I do see is short on details of what they actually can and cannot do.". So what sort of "accounts" have you heard, Google hype? (now augmented by Volvo). Any details on conditions or varieties of road hazards tested (not just the ones they successfully detected), not to mention many other details without which this is all meaningless hype? How does it do in a heavy snowfall? Oh, hold it, being in CA Google may not have done much testing with that. Has Volvo taken that into account? Does it ever snow in Sweden?
There are good reasons for wireless connections on aircraft as well - at least as backups but due to weight savings maybe cables will be skipped completely if a wireless backup system has to exist anyway.
The day they start using wireless as the primary means of communication between different critical parts of the plane is the day I stop flying. As for weight saving, fiber optics don't weigh much.
it already exists and its called image guided surgery with its many many different approaches and applications. yes, believe it or not, people have thought of that idea. the google glass thing is just another extension of a HUD...
But, but, but... nobody could have thought of it before. It's not from a cool company like Google or even Silicon Valley. It's impossible I tell you.
This is why, despite the fact that there's still some great tech there, I think SV's main product has become hype. You don't have to look hard to find similar devices older than Google glass - the Wikipedia article has even has links. IIRC correctly another use for these types of HUD/camera/wireless devices is in things like aircraft repair. Crawl into some cramped spot inside the plane and it sucks to say "damn, forgot to check p. 417 of the manual!".
What is new about Google glass is the idea of marketing this as a consumer item, as though everyone would jump at the chance to be trendy and look like a bargain basement Borg. This marketing approach was described by P.T. Barnum when he said "there's a sucker born every minute".
I've had four full-on procedures in the past year and was on a heavy regime of antibiotics after every one, with two infections acquired either from OR or hospital, and two that I had going in
But do you know that those infections are due to the distinction in the OR between sanitary and sterile? Some countries (e.g. Norway, IIRC) have done a good job of reducing nosocomial infections. Have they done away with this distinction? If nothing else I heard that sheep dipping the OR personnel in antiseptic had some undesirable side effects.
Are you certain they use off-the-shelf computers in OR's? Frankly I got out of the medical electronics business a long time ago, but I recall that any electronic equipment had to be designed so that there was no chance of it creating a spark and doing fun things with the flammable anesthetics. Sparks don't have to be like the things you get from Tesla coils. For example, switches (even relatively low current/voltage) can produce small sparks. You might not even notice if you were looking. Also, something like a component burning up in a power supply can be bad news. In a non-explosive atmosphere such things can often be contained with the appropriate use of materials, so the flame doesn't spread. In a potentially explosive atmosphere it's different.
Is a sensory deprivation tank as quiet as this? From what I understand of their design, it doesn't seem as though they would be. Water is a great conductor of sound, and you can hear things through bone conduction (maybe even soft tissue to some degree? we are ugly bags of mostly water).
I'm an EE. I don't own a "smart" phone. 10 years ago I was designing cell phone chips and I didn't have a cell phone. It's an interesting way to make a living, but you don't have to live with the junk.
Glass is very much tech - it may not be, at this moment, the revolutionary tech that some people think it is, but it's tech.
So is a singing fish. What's your point? My point is that at least the singing fish is kind of funny, and thus the superior application of technology.
Remember kids, technology isn't good or bad, it's what people do with it.
That's true. And if what you do with it is design, make or wear Google glass, it's a bad use. Certainly not pollute the planet or blow it into oblivion bad, not even increased crime rate or stress related injury bad. This is the sort of penny ante bad that doesn't get you the cachet of an evil genius, just ridicule.
And people are supposed to waste their time worrying about which version you're wearing and how to distinguish between them? Google glass is an idiotic idea, and anyone wearing one deserves to be thrown out of a restaurant and generally ridiculed wherever they go, unless it's Halloween.
Apparently your definition of Luddite includes objecting to idiots being trendy by doing bad Borg imitations. I love technology. I know it's why the average person no longer has to break their back 12 hours/day to live without electric lights, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, central heat and various modern forms of communication. I also know that Google Glass isn't tech - it's a bored billionaire's silly idea that will live on as a joke. Good riddance to it. Perhaps the restaurant should make its policy clear by posting a "no a-holes allowed" sign.
I'd agree with you except for your misunderstanding of "trash". "Trash" are people with an unwarranted lack of respect for others (often in an attempt to compensate for their inadequacies), rather than those without the best academic ability.
Slashdot Mirror
you could have been on the edge of technology in fields like high energy physics
No jobs there.
The latter is illegal (and what the companies you mention got caught doing).
Fear not citizen - justice was done. Each of the violators was fined $1.50 and said "I won't do it again, cross my heart and hope to die".
47% of statistics are just made up, but I don't know if that even applies to completely unverifiable statements like "eight qualified candidates for every 10 openings". Please define "qualified".
"Qualified" means "meets our prejudices". Most of the time they're only interested in a certain "type" of person (worst of all is the line "bad fit for culture" - if your culture is that full of BS then I don't want to fit in). I think many employers are not even aware that their prejudices are prejudices. If you really want to see how many qualified candidates there are, tighten the job market further and see how quickly any company that wants to survive becomes more flexible in their hiring practices.
The best examples of this are the world wars, when many men volunteered or were drafted, and demand for production soared. In WWI northern factories (there were very few down south back then) took the radical step of not only hiring black people, but sending recruiters down south to hire them (there were comparatively few black people in the north back then - it was the start of the great northern migration).
In WWII factories hired women. What do you know, that cute brunette does a pretty good job of building airplanes (cue sanctimonious criticism of my use of the phrase "cute brunette"). A truly tight labor market makes employers very creative.
If there was truly a tight labor market for programmers today, then you'd see prejudices put aside. They would, for example, try re-tooling old farts. I'll be the first to admit that some old farts genuinely deserve to be put out to pasture (just as many young squirts don't deserve to be hired in the first place) but many of them have kept up with the tech, even if they can't shake the habit of calling an app a "program" (whatever that is). Many more old farts who might not have kept up as much as they should, would educate themselves in newer technologies, before looking for a job, if they thought it gave them a ghost of a chance of getting hired. Typically old farts avoid things like the slide at Box's Los Altos, Calif., as shown in the article, but might still get some use out of it when they bring the grandkids in for a visit. Hey ma, grandpa doesn't really work - he goes to the playground every day!
tl;dr
This article brings new meaning to the term BS.
We haven't used flammable anesthetics in the US in a looooooong time.
Non-flammable? Wusses.
Like I said I got out of the medical electronics biz a looooooong time ago, and OR stuff wasn't our mainstay. Maybe even then it was a legacy thing in case somebody still had a few tanks of the good stuff lying around.
Thanks for the update.
What do you think the small fleet of self driving cars do now when they encounter something they do not know what to do? They pull to the side of the road stop and turn on the machine that goes ping.
According to the article they tell the human to take control.
As for pulling over to the side of the road, how does it do that from the middle of a crowded five lane highway, in the snow, when it's already confused about what to do? What does it do on those urban highways that have no shoulder?
Dont know about you but most of the accidents I have been in happened in 1-2 seconds. I did not have minutes to think about what was going on. If 2-3 mins were true auto accidents would be near 0.
And so you completely missed what the GP was saying, including where he said that most car accidents happen in 1-2 seconds? Where is it that you disagree with him? He said many aircraft accidents take minutes to unfold, hence allowing the human pilots to take over when the autopilot says "beats me what's happening - good luck!"
But read this ...
An excellent example of writing about technical issues in the popular press. Amongst other things it mentions the important fact that one of the engineers is very tall. Oh, and all of them are really, really smart. Technical details are a little short on the ground though.
You are thinking too narrow. Why would I drive to the store? I can send my car and someone can load the stuff up.
But if the car goes into fail safe mode and stops on the side of the road, the beer will get warm while you're waiting.
What else is important?
Wow, one simple contrived test was demonstrated. Was there any background clutter? Snow or rain? Was the dummy even moving? Detecting a single target in a clear field at a distance of 100 yards is about as easy as you get. Consider me unimpressed.
We do these sort of demos all the time when developing products. It just means "we got something kind of working in some circumstances", and there's a lot of work to be done to turn it into a reliable full-functioning design. Any engineer should know that, and when we demo stuff internally, we make no bones about it. Dealing with gullible members of the press is another matter. They love hype, because they need something interesting to write about. "Nothing interesting" is not something editors like to hear.
By all accounts autonomous cars are better at spotting potential road hazards
The OP's second sentence was "What coverage I do see is short on details of what they actually can and cannot do.". So what sort of "accounts" have you heard, Google hype? (now augmented by Volvo). Any details on conditions or varieties of road hazards tested (not just the ones they successfully detected), not to mention many other details without which this is all meaningless hype? How does it do in a heavy snowfall? Oh, hold it, being in CA Google may not have done much testing with that. Has Volvo taken that into account? Does it ever snow in Sweden?
Or does Volvo also plan to move the parliament?
They can do anything they like - Volvo owns the parliament. Oh no, wait, I'm thinking of American politics. Not sure about Sweden.
There are good reasons for wireless connections on aircraft as well - at least as backups but due to weight savings maybe cables will be skipped completely if a wireless backup system has to exist anyway.
The day they start using wireless as the primary means of communication between different critical parts of the plane is the day I stop flying. As for weight saving, fiber optics don't weigh much.
it already exists and its called image guided surgery with its many many different approaches and applications. yes, believe it or not, people have thought of that idea. the google glass thing is just another extension of a HUD ...
But, but, but ... nobody could have thought of it before. It's not from a cool company like Google or even Silicon Valley. It's impossible I tell you.
This is why, despite the fact that there's still some great tech there, I think SV's main product has become hype. You don't have to look hard to find similar devices older than Google glass - the Wikipedia article has even has links. IIRC correctly another use for these types of HUD/camera/wireless devices is in things like aircraft repair. Crawl into some cramped spot inside the plane and it sucks to say "damn, forgot to check p. 417 of the manual!".
What is new about Google glass is the idea of marketing this as a consumer item, as though everyone would jump at the chance to be trendy and look like a bargain basement Borg. This marketing approach was described by P.T. Barnum when he said "there's a sucker born every minute".
I've had four full-on procedures in the past year and was on a heavy regime of antibiotics after every one, with two infections acquired either from OR or hospital, and two that I had going in
But do you know that those infections are due to the distinction in the OR between sanitary and sterile? Some countries (e.g. Norway, IIRC) have done a good job of reducing nosocomial infections. Have they done away with this distinction? If nothing else I heard that sheep dipping the OR personnel in antiseptic had some undesirable side effects.
Not requiring a $85,000 LIDAR unit, and about $40k worth of other equipment
That's Sergey Brin's hobby project. An actual car company's product might be different.
Are you certain they use off-the-shelf computers in OR's? Frankly I got out of the medical electronics business a long time ago, but I recall that any electronic equipment had to be designed so that there was no chance of it creating a spark and doing fun things with the flammable anesthetics. Sparks don't have to be like the things you get from Tesla coils. For example, switches (even relatively low current/voltage) can produce small sparks. You might not even notice if you were looking. Also, something like a component burning up in a power supply can be bad news. In a non-explosive atmosphere such things can often be contained with the appropriate use of materials, so the flame doesn't spread. In a potentially explosive atmosphere it's different.
Is a sensory deprivation tank as quiet as this? From what I understand of their design, it doesn't seem as though they would be. Water is a great conductor of sound, and you can hear things through bone conduction (maybe even soft tissue to some degree? we are ugly bags of mostly water).
Work as a technologist - live like a Luddite.
I'm an EE. I don't own a "smart" phone. 10 years ago I was designing cell phone chips and I didn't have a cell phone. It's an interesting way to make a living, but you don't have to live with the junk.
Where were you when I was saying smart phones are idiotic?
Agreeing with you.
491 comments and counting about some guy complaining he couldn't wear his Google glass into a diner.
P.S. A bunch of those comments are mine.
If you use a phrase like "think outside the box", you should think outside the box of writing in bad clichés.
Glass is very much tech - it may not be, at this moment, the revolutionary tech that some people think it is, but it's tech.
So is a singing fish. What's your point? My point is that at least the singing fish is kind of funny, and thus the superior application of technology.
Remember kids, technology isn't good or bad, it's what people do with it.
That's true. And if what you do with it is design, make or wear Google glass, it's a bad use. Certainly not pollute the planet or blow it into oblivion bad, not even increased crime rate or stress related injury bad. This is the sort of penny ante bad that doesn't get you the cachet of an evil genius, just ridicule.
The words I've heard associated with google glass among my friends are 'douche', 'ass', 'moron', etc.
Your friends are very diplomatic and given to understatement.
make a version of Google glass without a camera
And people are supposed to waste their time worrying about which version you're wearing and how to distinguish between them? Google glass is an idiotic idea, and anyone wearing one deserves to be thrown out of a restaurant and generally ridiculed wherever they go, unless it's Halloween.
Bah. If a proctologist can remove it, you obviously haven't expressed your opinion forcefully enough.
restaurants are often the clandestine meeting places of many people for many reasons
Various Italian restaurants in NY and NJ specialize in that.
Apparently your definition of Luddite includes objecting to idiots being trendy by doing bad Borg imitations. I love technology. I know it's why the average person no longer has to break their back 12 hours/day to live without electric lights, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, central heat and various modern forms of communication. I also know that Google Glass isn't tech - it's a bored billionaire's silly idea that will live on as a joke. Good riddance to it. Perhaps the restaurant should make its policy clear by posting a "no a-holes allowed" sign.
I'd agree with you except for your misunderstanding of "trash". "Trash" are people with an unwarranted lack of respect for others (often in an attempt to compensate for their inadequacies), rather than those without the best academic ability.