Actually, why do they need a physical facility at all? It's not like they go out and interact with the hardware. All they need is to ship a fancy chair to the Netherlands or wherever, and train them virtually.
The outlier that still amazes me was featured on Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs" show, where a trash collector in New Orleans uses a canvas sack. He negotiates a tiny staircase to climb or descend to a shop, dumps their trash into his tarp, then hauls the tarp back down to the truck where he empties it. It looks unchanged from the founding days of New Orleans.
Could this be automated? There isn't currently space in the alleys or in the buildings for the trash cans themselves. It would require the city to change how trash collectors operate.
Exactly. The difference between design and code is the difference between thermoplastic engineering and assembling a house out of Lego. And managing the dependencies means the difference between a proven clean API and code that has no chance of change short of total replacement.
A future where everyone is a skript kiddie is one where every damn product will become completely fragile. You won't be able to buy a reliable alarm clock or a refrigerator that keeps your food consistently cold, because some stupid interaction with a non-essential system will cause them to break.
You can have my cloud when you can blow it from my cold, damp fingers.
It's actually the same root cause for both -- incompetent management. Having an idiot in the C$(x)O suite forcing competent engineers into supervisory roles for which they are extremely unqualified does as much damage as having him force the engineers to follow Waterfall development methodology.
And it's absolutely not a matter of training. A CIO who isn't an engineer and who hasn't spent at least part of their life actually doing engineering can't be "trained" to be a competent engineer; not without giving up the CIO gig and becoming an actual hands-on engineer for a while.
By the same exact logic, you can't take a random engineer out of the pool, send him to manager school, and then stick him in a corner office. The day-to-day tasks of scheduling and spreadsheets and budgets may not be technically difficult, but managing is all about handling people, and many engineers won't have the schmoozing abilities needed to make them comfortable in that role. Ever take a Meyers Briggs test? Ever notice how the managers' results are generally distinct from those of the engineers? There's a clue.
Just like someone chooses to go into engineering, some people choose to go into management. The office of the CIO is best served when it contains someone who naturally has both talents.
It's a huge problem when the CIO isn't an engineer. That's simply a disaster in glorious slow-motion Technicolor. Look at the time-lapse downfall of HP from a respected engineering company to one that's known today only for selling printers that are cheaper than their overpriced ink. (Thanks, Carly, I'm sure this country could use a genius of your caliber at the helm.)
But the more common source of discontent happens when developers are tossed a pile of requirements and told "shut up and make this X." Every developer I've known will have serious questions about those requirements, because they're always filled with errors and inconsistencies. In most cases the flaws are not evident until after development has progressed beyond the Rubicon. Being able to discuss the requirements with the stakeholder, to make suggestions on how to improve the product, to develop the best possible X to further the business, that's what developers crave. Give them that, and a steady paycheck, and you have happy people with satisfying jobs.
And if you tell them "hand this coding over to Haich WunBee over at Outsorcery, Inc.", don't be surprised if satisfaction drops.
I also believe that to date the FCC has received zero actually complaints about someone illegally modify current routers. So in attempting to address this imagined problem the FCC is going to enlarge a gigantic real problem (ie unpatched routers).
There's the clue to "follow the money." If this isn't a real problem, it's likely legislation that's been written by some big company whose profit model is threatened by open source. Look for the sponsors to be Cisco or Belkin, someone who would benefit by selling you replacement hardware if their old hardware gets hacked.
And that suggests a potential cure.
If this is to go forward, it needs to come with a big safety, hacking, and consumer safety clause, something like "Due to the restrictive nature of this rule, the vendors of devices subject to these restrictions must offer a free 20 year warranty repair or replacement of any device found to have a flaw in either the hardware or the software included with the device, including any flaws that expose the device to unauthorized access or use. This replacement must include free shipping of the replacement part, free return shipping of the failing device, and free on-site installation of the replacement device. If repairs can be made via software update, the manufacturer may opt to update all affected machines remotely. All such repairs must be completed within one month of the FCC being made aware of the flaw. This free service must be extended for 20 years from the date of the device registration with the FCC. Any company who dissolves or reorganizes before the 20 year span expires will automatically transfer the liability for free replacements to the majority acquirer of their assets. Non-compliance with this law will result in fines to the manufacturers and distributors of these devices equal to twice the retail purchase price at the date of the sale of the first device multiplied by the quantity of devices manufactured, with the fines to be disbursed equally to customers who physically present the device to an authorized FCC representative, and the FCC."
If they still want this law when it includes a poison pill like this, then we'll all be cheering for bugs to be found every month so we can get another "router check" from them.
The student team had freedom to choose any network traffic capture tool for their study. The tools and environment used by the students included a Lenovo attack laptop running Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro, Sun Virtual box (version: 4.3.8) with BackTrack 5 Release 3, iStan medical mannequin, iStan laptop running OSX Lepord (version: 10.5.2), iStan Muse software (version: 2.1), and a monitor used to display the mannequin’s vitals to the medical trainees utilizing Touch Pro display software 2.0
They used a BackTrack distro. Perhaps your problem is Slashdot's editor referring to what would more properly be called a "toolbox full of tools" as simply "tools"?
My problem isn't the description at all. It's that the front end to iStan runs in Adobe Flash, and these students somehow got credit for "hacking" it. That's like asking a 300# professional football lineman to tackle a grade school quarterback during a game of flag football.
What do you mean "most"? I put Economists in the same fraudster category as Psychics and Clergy and Life Coaches (and somewhat worse than Psychologists). Lets not do anything that might pretend to legitimize these can artists.
Despite the examples set by the economists visible in government roles, private economists are actually proving to be valuable in certain sectors; specifically, MMORPGs. Bringing in an economist to help set up, monitor, and maintain the currencies, item prices, trade values, treasure drops, etc., can make the difference between a fun game and an endless grind.
You're right. Neural networks are trained to spot only outcomes, and don't understand the inputs. Economists try to put human behaviors and motivations into selecting their equations, and when they find an equation that matches reality, they claim to have modeled the behavior. But the "math problem" isn't the real problem here.
Regardless of how these equations are arrived at, whether it be from some economist or from some neural network, the next step is for someone to exploit them for gain. "Hey, if we buy and sell X really rapidly, we'll trigger their logic into reacting on Y, at which point Z will drop and we can buy it for profit." This directly alters the system they were modeling.
This equation may work for a few trades, and some quants will get richer, but then the secret is out. As more people attempt to exploit the new algorithm, the activity that was keeping the market in check modifies itself to chase the new source of profits, and the entire system returns to the prior state of equilibrium.
The real trick, then, is to produce market-unbalancing models on a daily basis. Maybe machine learning is faster than the quants, and can solve that problem.
If this was 20 years ago, such things were both possible and actually not all that hard. Windows 95 allowed just about anyone to whip up a system modal dialog box. And i think there was a way to create one over port 139 using SMB.
Did you catch the article yesterday on/. "Microsoft intensifies data collection on Windows 7 and 8" they are hard coding sites, bypassing the HOSTS file.
The application firewall still works, though. You can shut off much of that traffic; it just takes a ridiculous amount of time and effort.
My PC is hobbled to near-uselessness with crapware installed by Lenovo
We've recently purchased some Lenovo machines, and yes, they came with a metric assload of shitty software that nobody could possibly use or want, and that soaked up RAM and CPU like a drunk in a vineyard. But you do know you're allowed to uninstall all that shovel-ware, right? And if you don't know what to remove or how to uninstall them yourself, a useful tool is the PC Decrapifier, which is so simple anyone can run it.
The Decrapifier is not perfect, though, as the authors seem to be dodging some legal lines by not being particularly aggressive in what they recommend you remove. And it won't get everything. My sister asked me to help her as her machine had slowed to the point of unusability. At some point her machine had become infested by some particularly nasty McAfee "free" malware that required a ludicrous amount of effort to destroy. It took me far too long to discover I had to surf to their site to download a custom uninstall tool. I think I spent almost two hours downloading updates and scrubbing the malware from three machines simultaneously. But once all the crapware was gone, and they had current patches, they actually became some decent machines. (Then I had to go home and take a shower, because that McAfee software made me feel filthy.)
I consider that wasted time as an expense that jacked up the cost of owning the machines by a couple hundred dollars. It would not be worth the investment on a cheap Lenovo, which I would never recommend unless you have the nothing but time to waste, but as I was getting a big SSD, fast CPU, hi res screen, and lots of RAM, I overlooked it. But I'm not forgetting it.
Lenovo, if you're reading this, know that I'm the senior buyer for all computer and electronic equipment purchased by my two extended families, and that $20 in kickbacks you got for installing the shitware on my machine will never recoup the costs of even one of the never-buy-Lenovo recommendations I've been handing out. Multiply that by the thousands of nerds who feel like I do, and that's millions of units you're not selling because of your own stupidity.
Gamification existed long before "online". People have always played the angles to get a better grade, and some even mistake the effort of "begging for points" for "doing actual work and learning from it". They've learned only how to game the system, so to them every future task becomes a game in which they only have to demonstrate a positive outcome.
My online classes have occasionally included a few points for "participation". Some profs simply stated "thou shalt post thrice weekly to thy Blackboard forum", and that gets them off the hook for having to think about how to get online students to participate. They can show a metric to the department chair and say "see, 80% of my students are participating. Therefore your decision to mandate classroom participation online was a good and wise decision, o chair of my department." </brownNose>
The better profs didn't define participation. They simply said "I'll notice when you participate." The ambiguity encouraged people to speak up, ask questions, send emails, etc. I don't remember any case where the Blackboard forum was effectively used for "participation" in those classes.
Pretty much the only thing I ever remember people posting to Blackboard were whiny complaints about 'hey, I answered question #17 with A, and you said A and B, so I should get half credit right? And you should round all those half points up, so I will get a B- instead of a C+."
This lack of real communication between people is leading to more and more misunderstandings.
Au contraire. In an email, I can carefully choose the exact words to tell you what I think of you, your ideas, and describe in precise detail where you exist on the food chain. After reading that email, you will have no doubt as to what was said. In conversation, I could slip up and say the wrong thing in the presence of the wrong person, or forget what X said about Y even though I was there and so I must have been "listening".
Most of the things you list would punish the stock holders, who are just as likely to be a pension plan for retired veterans. You want to punish those responsible, not the senior citizens who got blindsided by the crimes of someone else.
Are you kidding? No retirement plan or index fund is heavily invested in a single stock, just in case something happens to the stock price. Corporate malfeasance is just one of many possibilities, so fund managers hedge their bets and spread the risk amongst dozens or hundreds of stocks. You're not going to seriously hurt grandpa Joe by bankrupting these slimeballs.
Regardless of their percentage of investment, the actions of the company are indeed the responsibility of the stockholders. While they may not have said "go do illegal things to increase my share value", they did not sell their stock as they profited from the ongoing illegal behavior. They can damn well lose that money if the corporation is found guilty.
"Last week, a report from market research firm NPD Group claimed the Apple Watch was partially behind the largest slump in U.S. watch sales since 2008." And according to the article, "Retailers sold $375 million of watches during the month, 11 percent less than in June 2014... a 14% decline in unit sales."
Put another way, the Apple Watch led the US in the largest sales boost in watch history, with an estimated $4 billion in sales so far.
It's almost impossible to feel bad for someone who produces such a clearly inferior product get handed their asses when the competition arrives. If Fossil had been producing watches people really wanted, part of that $4 billion would have been theirs.
Slashdot Mirror
That reminds me of a friend. He read so much about the harmful effects of smoking that he gave up reading.
Actually, why do they need a physical facility at all? It's not like they go out and interact with the hardware. All they need is to ship a fancy chair to the Netherlands or wherever, and train them virtually.
The outlier that still amazes me was featured on Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs" show, where a trash collector in New Orleans uses a canvas sack. He negotiates a tiny staircase to climb or descend to a shop, dumps their trash into his tarp, then hauls the tarp back down to the truck where he empties it. It looks unchanged from the founding days of New Orleans.
Could this be automated? There isn't currently space in the alleys or in the buildings for the trash cans themselves. It would require the city to change how trash collectors operate.
Exactly. The difference between design and code is the difference between thermoplastic engineering and assembling a house out of Lego. And managing the dependencies means the difference between a proven clean API and code that has no chance of change short of total replacement.
A future where everyone is a skript kiddie is one where every damn product will become completely fragile. You won't be able to buy a reliable alarm clock or a refrigerator that keeps your food consistently cold, because some stupid interaction with a non-essential system will cause them to break.
You can have my cloud when you can blow it from my cold, damp fingers.
I know a guy with nerves of steel. I always wondered why they weren't copper, it's a much better conductor.
It's actually the same root cause for both -- incompetent management. Having an idiot in the C$(x)O suite forcing competent engineers into supervisory roles for which they are extremely unqualified does as much damage as having him force the engineers to follow Waterfall development methodology.
And it's absolutely not a matter of training. A CIO who isn't an engineer and who hasn't spent at least part of their life actually doing engineering can't be "trained" to be a competent engineer; not without giving up the CIO gig and becoming an actual hands-on engineer for a while.
By the same exact logic, you can't take a random engineer out of the pool, send him to manager school, and then stick him in a corner office. The day-to-day tasks of scheduling and spreadsheets and budgets may not be technically difficult, but managing is all about handling people, and many engineers won't have the schmoozing abilities needed to make them comfortable in that role. Ever take a Meyers Briggs test? Ever notice how the managers' results are generally distinct from those of the engineers? There's a clue.
Just like someone chooses to go into engineering, some people choose to go into management. The office of the CIO is best served when it contains someone who naturally has both talents.
It's a huge problem when the CIO isn't an engineer. That's simply a disaster in glorious slow-motion Technicolor. Look at the time-lapse downfall of HP from a respected engineering company to one that's known today only for selling printers that are cheaper than their overpriced ink. (Thanks, Carly, I'm sure this country could use a genius of your caliber at the helm.)
But the more common source of discontent happens when developers are tossed a pile of requirements and told "shut up and make this X." Every developer I've known will have serious questions about those requirements, because they're always filled with errors and inconsistencies. In most cases the flaws are not evident until after development has progressed beyond the Rubicon. Being able to discuss the requirements with the stakeholder, to make suggestions on how to improve the product, to develop the best possible X to further the business, that's what developers crave. Give them that, and a steady paycheck, and you have happy people with satisfying jobs.
And if you tell them "hand this coding over to Haich WunBee over at Outsorcery, Inc.", don't be surprised if satisfaction drops.
I also believe that to date the FCC has received zero actually complaints about someone illegally modify current routers. So in attempting to address this imagined problem the FCC is going to enlarge a gigantic real problem (ie unpatched routers).
There's the clue to "follow the money." If this isn't a real problem, it's likely legislation that's been written by some big company whose profit model is threatened by open source. Look for the sponsors to be Cisco or Belkin, someone who would benefit by selling you replacement hardware if their old hardware gets hacked.
And that suggests a potential cure.
If this is to go forward, it needs to come with a big safety, hacking, and consumer safety clause, something like "Due to the restrictive nature of this rule, the vendors of devices subject to these restrictions must offer a free 20 year warranty repair or replacement of any device found to have a flaw in either the hardware or the software included with the device, including any flaws that expose the device to unauthorized access or use. This replacement must include free shipping of the replacement part, free return shipping of the failing device, and free on-site installation of the replacement device. If repairs can be made via software update, the manufacturer may opt to update all affected machines remotely. All such repairs must be completed within one month of the FCC being made aware of the flaw. This free service must be extended for 20 years from the date of the device registration with the FCC. Any company who dissolves or reorganizes before the 20 year span expires will automatically transfer the liability for free replacements to the majority acquirer of their assets. Non-compliance with this law will result in fines to the manufacturers and distributors of these devices equal to twice the retail purchase price at the date of the sale of the first device multiplied by the quantity of devices manufactured, with the fines to be disbursed equally to customers who physically present the device to an authorized FCC representative, and the FCC."
If they still want this law when it includes a poison pill like this, then we'll all be cheering for bugs to be found every month so we can get another "router check" from them.
From the students' paper:
Experiment Configuration
The student team had freedom to choose any network traffic capture tool for their study. The tools and environment used by the students included a Lenovo attack laptop running Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro, Sun Virtual box (version: 4.3.8) with BackTrack 5 Release 3, iStan medical mannequin, iStan laptop running OSX Lepord (version: 10.5.2), iStan Muse software (version: 2.1), and a monitor used to display the mannequin’s vitals to the medical trainees utilizing Touch Pro display software 2.0
They used a BackTrack distro. Perhaps your problem is Slashdot's editor referring to what would more properly be called a "toolbox full of tools" as simply "tools"?
My problem isn't the description at all. It's that the front end to iStan runs in Adobe Flash, and these students somehow got credit for "hacking" it. That's like asking a 300# professional football lineman to tackle a grade school quarterback during a game of flag football.
What do you mean "most"? I put Economists in the same fraudster category as Psychics and Clergy and Life Coaches (and somewhat worse than Psychologists). Lets not do anything that might pretend to legitimize these can artists.
Despite the examples set by the economists visible in government roles, private economists are actually proving to be valuable in certain sectors; specifically, MMORPGs. Bringing in an economist to help set up, monitor, and maintain the currencies, item prices, trade values, treasure drops, etc., can make the difference between a fun game and an endless grind.
You're right. Neural networks are trained to spot only outcomes, and don't understand the inputs. Economists try to put human behaviors and motivations into selecting their equations, and when they find an equation that matches reality, they claim to have modeled the behavior. But the "math problem" isn't the real problem here.
Regardless of how these equations are arrived at, whether it be from some economist or from some neural network, the next step is for someone to exploit them for gain. "Hey, if we buy and sell X really rapidly, we'll trigger their logic into reacting on Y, at which point Z will drop and we can buy it for profit." This directly alters the system they were modeling.
This equation may work for a few trades, and some quants will get richer, but then the secret is out. As more people attempt to exploit the new algorithm, the activity that was keeping the market in check modifies itself to chase the new source of profits, and the entire system returns to the prior state of equilibrium.
The real trick, then, is to produce market-unbalancing models on a daily basis. Maybe machine learning is faster than the quants, and can solve that problem.
> Isn't this the same as having economists doing the work, just faster?
Of course not! A machine is a cold, emotionless, insensitive, empathy-deprived entity, while an economist...
Hmm, it really is the same...
In other words, instead of calling it "the dismal science", we should be calling them "the dismal scientists".
If this was 20 years ago, such things were both possible and actually not all that hard. Windows 95 allowed just about anyone to whip up a system modal dialog box. And i think there was a way to create one over port 139 using SMB.
That's what Flashblock, Privacy Badger, NoScript, and AdBlock are for.
But it turns out it doesn't take much of an algorithm to determine which flash is important:
if (content==flash) { unimportant = true; }
So far, it's infallible.
Did you catch the article yesterday on /. "Microsoft intensifies data collection on Windows 7 and 8" they are hard coding sites, bypassing the HOSTS file.
The application firewall still works, though. You can shut off much of that traffic; it just takes a ridiculous amount of time and effort.
My PC is hobbled to near-uselessness with crapware installed by Lenovo
We've recently purchased some Lenovo machines, and yes, they came with a metric assload of shitty software that nobody could possibly use or want, and that soaked up RAM and CPU like a drunk in a vineyard. But you do know you're allowed to uninstall all that shovel-ware, right? And if you don't know what to remove or how to uninstall them yourself, a useful tool is the PC Decrapifier, which is so simple anyone can run it.
The Decrapifier is not perfect, though, as the authors seem to be dodging some legal lines by not being particularly aggressive in what they recommend you remove. And it won't get everything. My sister asked me to help her as her machine had slowed to the point of unusability. At some point her machine had become infested by some particularly nasty McAfee "free" malware that required a ludicrous amount of effort to destroy. It took me far too long to discover I had to surf to their site to download a custom uninstall tool. I think I spent almost two hours downloading updates and scrubbing the malware from three machines simultaneously. But once all the crapware was gone, and they had current patches, they actually became some decent machines. (Then I had to go home and take a shower, because that McAfee software made me feel filthy.)
I consider that wasted time as an expense that jacked up the cost of owning the machines by a couple hundred dollars. It would not be worth the investment on a cheap Lenovo, which I would never recommend unless you have the nothing but time to waste, but as I was getting a big SSD, fast CPU, hi res screen, and lots of RAM, I overlooked it. But I'm not forgetting it.
Lenovo, if you're reading this, know that I'm the senior buyer for all computer and electronic equipment purchased by my two extended families, and that $20 in kickbacks you got for installing the shitware on my machine will never recoup the costs of even one of the never-buy-Lenovo recommendations I've been handing out. Multiply that by the thousands of nerds who feel like I do, and that's millions of units you're not selling because of your own stupidity.
That's quite the piquant wit you've got there.
It was an excellent example of Muphry's law in action.
You may or may not believe in karma, but that doesn't seem to stop her from taking her cut.
There's a long list of people who have contributed work to this, and I'd just like to say thanks to all of them.
Gamification existed long before "online". People have always played the angles to get a better grade, and some even mistake the effort of "begging for points" for "doing actual work and learning from it". They've learned only how to game the system, so to them every future task becomes a game in which they only have to demonstrate a positive outcome.
We generally call them "executives."
My online classes have occasionally included a few points for "participation". Some profs simply stated "thou shalt post thrice weekly to thy Blackboard forum", and that gets them off the hook for having to think about how to get online students to participate. They can show a metric to the department chair and say "see, 80% of my students are participating. Therefore your decision to mandate classroom participation online was a good and wise decision, o chair of my department." </brownNose>
The better profs didn't define participation. They simply said "I'll notice when you participate." The ambiguity encouraged people to speak up, ask questions, send emails, etc. I don't remember any case where the Blackboard forum was effectively used for "participation" in those classes.
Pretty much the only thing I ever remember people posting to Blackboard were whiny complaints about 'hey, I answered question #17 with A, and you said A and B, so I should get half credit right? And you should round all those half points up, so I will get a B- instead of a C+."
This lack of real communication between people is leading to more and more misunderstandings.
Au contraire. In an email, I can carefully choose the exact words to tell you what I think of you, your ideas, and describe in precise detail where you exist on the food chain. After reading that email, you will have no doubt as to what was said. In conversation, I could slip up and say the wrong thing in the presence of the wrong person, or forget what X said about Y even though I was there and so I must have been "listening".
Email is great. Conversation is for chumps.
That's probably why Amazon and Google are really ditching it. Too easy to block.
Most of the things you list would punish the stock holders, who are just as likely to be a pension plan for retired veterans. You want to punish those responsible, not the senior citizens who got blindsided by the crimes of someone else.
Are you kidding? No retirement plan or index fund is heavily invested in a single stock, just in case something happens to the stock price. Corporate malfeasance is just one of many possibilities, so fund managers hedge their bets and spread the risk amongst dozens or hundreds of stocks. You're not going to seriously hurt grandpa Joe by bankrupting these slimeballs.
Regardless of their percentage of investment, the actions of the company are indeed the responsibility of the stockholders. While they may not have said "go do illegal things to increase my share value", they did not sell their stock as they profited from the ongoing illegal behavior. They can damn well lose that money if the corporation is found guilty.
"Last week, a report from market research firm NPD Group claimed the Apple Watch was partially behind the largest slump in U.S. watch sales since 2008." And according to the article, "Retailers sold $375 million of watches during the month, 11 percent less than in June 2014 ... a 14% decline in unit sales."
Put another way, the Apple Watch led the US in the largest sales boost in watch history, with an estimated $4 billion in sales so far.
It's almost impossible to feel bad for someone who produces such a clearly inferior product get handed their asses when the competition arrives. If Fossil had been producing watches people really wanted, part of that $4 billion would have been theirs.