The screen readers for the blind emit nonsense words when fed typographically incorrect input. Be glad you're not blind, and don't have to deal with them.
And that character on your keyboard, above the equals sign? It's the right one to use, but the author didn't use it. Instead, he made 100 typos using the wrong symbol.
What's news then, is that Amazon can't deploy a simple perl script to fix common typography errors such as these.
There is nothing simple about typography, and a script such as you describe would cause more damage than it would fix. Any editor has to fully understand English, to know which word is the right choice, to understand syntax and grammar, and to know when a writer is deliberately or playfully bending the rules.
If you want to see what the state of the art in automated editing looks like, try using Word's grammar checker. If all of its advice is followed, it can make any interesting story read as blandly as an 8th grader's essay paper on the history of frogs.
I can only think the reason it hasn't been fixed is because fraud makes the banks money and they love seeing stories like this.
Well, you would be very wrong. Fraud costs both the retailers and the banks money. The real problem is that issuing new chip cards would cost the banks more than the fraud. Not only are the cards about a dollar more expensive each, and they still have to be re-issued about every three years, but the systems that inject encrypted keys into them, and store the keys on their databases, are very expensive. Banks are notoriously cheap when it comes to spending money that won't make them money.
The other reason EMV hasn't rolled out across the U.S. is that millions of retailers have about 12 million old credit card terminals spread across the country, and most are owned by cheap store owners who don't like being told they have to spend money to replace them. Most retailers have been dragging their feet, not wanting to make an expensive change. But the new members of the breach-of-the-month club are mad about the insecure systems they've been forced to use, and are now championing the rapid switch to EMV instead of fighting it. The smaller retailers are also impacted now, and are no longer resisting.
The irony is that EMV readers for the small retailers are far, far cheaper than the old terminals, and the rates for using new companies like Square, Intuit, and PayPal are much lower than the typical old bank rates for the old credit card readers.
I think it's about time we implemented some sort of single use credit card system.
That's how Chip and PIN works. Your account number is still fixed, but your authorization to spend from it (your PIN) is encrypted by the chip, and is valid only for a single transaction. There are still kinks with non-electronic transactions, but those can be solved.
Look for it to be all over the US by October of next year.
Supply, demand, taxes, and regulations all combine to control the prices. If people are willing to pay X, and you're selling all your product, why would you reduce prices? All it would do is lower their profits; if they're even making any.
My guess is there are a lot of hidden factors, like big insurance costs. Most insurance policies have an exemption so they don't pay out if you're doing something illegal. This means they may have to self-insure, or find a company willing to take on the risk of a federal bust - and that likely isn't cheap. Maybe the state has a tax rate designed to keep the costs high to minimize chronic abuse. Maybe the costs of physical security are high. Likely all of the above will continue to keep prices very high.
I'd love to be able to publish these statistics for our organization, (I'd estimate we have close to a quarter million drives in the field) but there is a big hurdle in the way: legal liability. If I was to say something negative about Western-Sea-Tachi drives, their lawyers might call our lawyers, and we could easily spend a million in court fees.
The thing I think would be interesting is that we have a completely arbitrary mix of drives, based on drive availability over the last 6 years or so. We also have a mix of different service companies who replace the drives in our workstations. Our contract is such that we don't control the brands, or even the sizes, as long as they meet or exceed our specs. As a service organization, they're responsible for picking the cheapest option for themselves. If our spec says "40 GB minimum", and they can't get anything smaller than 500GB, they'll buy those. If 1TB drives are cheaper than 500GB drives, they'll buy those. And if we're paying them $X/machine/year for service, they can do the reliability decisions on their own, so if they think some premium drives will last two years longer than stock drives, they might be able to avoid an extra service call on each machine if they spend $Y extra per drive. I expect these service organizations all have their preferred drives, but that's not data they're likely to share with their competitors on the service-contract circuit.
I don't take pictures for "posterity", or for people who outlive me. I take pictures for me, and my family, for now. While I only have thousands of total pictures, (not 10,000 per month) I can still find the pictures I want on my hard drives. So when I die, if some future grandchild wants to trawl through those terabytes in the vain hopes of finding a good picture of a great-great-grandparent they never met, why should I care? What difference would that make to me, today, in how I choose to save or discard photos?
When will it be learned that choosing the right methodology for a given project is the best way to go.
It comes to understanding the methodologies. What makes each effective? What are their weaknesses? Do you have enough good people who can execute them?
Waterfall is often appropriate, especially when it comes to physical world engineering, or for software products that cannot and will not be changed. Agile is great when you are committed to fully automated testing, have a committed stakeholder who is an active participant, and can deploy on demand for low cost.
But many clients now expect instant updates like they experience with their iPhone apps, and it's very difficult to deliver like that with waterfall. Agile is the answer, but for legacy projects that lack adequate testing, it's a big challenge to migrate to agile, and requires the business be put on hold while the developers clean up their technical debt. Most businesses can't afford such a shift.
Following Best Practice (ie. ITIL), you would start questioning at the organizational and process-level, before even beginning to consider technology.
That way is also not a guarantee of success. If management is implementing their imagined-perfect new organization structure, they are often blind to the problems they are creating, believing the problem lies with the underlings who "aren't trying hard enough", or "don't believe in the vision."
What's so IT-specific about this maxim, that it warrants being on Slashdot? A slow news day?
Not a damn thing. As a matter of fact, the original HBR story referenced in the TFA is not about IT at all. And TFA could have been written by Captain Obvious, except it's not nearly as clear.
Traffic calming measures have been common for quite a few years now. But I think that Sherman Oaks could take this one step further.
Traffic furniture rearranging.
Every day, get the road crews out there to move some barriers around randomly: dead ends in the middle of some block, random one way signs, maybe just drop a wrecked car in the intersection where the off-ramp exits the freeway. Reprogram traffic lights to introduce 10 minute delays. Make Waze's advice to be worse-than-worthless to the average driver, and just maybe they'll give up on your city.
That depends entirely on the jurisdiction. In some US states, the price marked is the price that must be honored, or the shopkeeper can go to jail. The merchant doesn't get to claim "computer glitch", because there were so many glitches people could no longer tell them from bait-and-switch tactics. So the laws were passed in favor of the consumer, and if the merchant's computer systems aren't up to the task, it's not the problem of the general public.
Doesn't matter if you think it's fair or unfair, it's the law in those places. I think Massachusetts, Michigan, and California all have some flavor of this, with Massachusetts being the most stringent.
Because Flash still works on many old browsers. YouTube wants to serve as many people as they can, and want to avoid as many technical issues as they can. They know there are many people who got something working five or more years ago that haven't upgraded their browsers to anything that can display HTML5.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you on that point. The virus has no "motive", it has only the genetic predisposition to achieve successful reproduction. The humans, on the other hand, have the motive of protecting society, and the responsibility to do so safely. We may be less than perfect on our implementation, but "do no harm" is at the top of the list. The virus does not have any such interest, and death of the host is a perfectly acceptable outcome for a virus.
Do I mistrust the humans doing the vaccinations? Generally not in this country today, but in pre-AIDS Africa, forced vaccinations there were a terrifying prospect. Army units traveled the rivers by boat, and they would stop you to see your vaccination papers. If you weren't vaccinated, they jabbed the needle in your arm on the spot. They'd ask the next person for papers, and would jam the exact same needle in the next guy's arm!
If our programs were that badly run, I'd not only agree with you, I'd take up arms myself. But they're not.
Here, vaccination programs are stellar successes. Polio? Smallpox? Gone, thanks to strong vaccination programs. And most vaccinations are administered by private clinics, who can be sued into oblivion for making any mistakes. They take care with each patient. I trust them.
I had the same question, so I read the article, then browsed their site. I found out the site is a service that offers you the ability to upload an.STL file, pick a nearby guy-with-a-printer, send it to him for printing, then drive over and pick it up an hour later. So the guide is basically a survey of hundreds of hobbyists who are turning over a little cash by operating their machines.
The market then, is still the "interested hobbyist, enthusiast, or specialized craftsman", and not "average guy who just wants to click the "3D Print" button in his browser and have it spit out plastic trinkets."
Actually, I wasn't trying to be funny or snarky. I do know some people who would take it as a challenge to drunk-post every day; I also know people who sadly couldn't post any other way. And yes, I don't see Facebook voluntarily deleting data on anything their subscribers do.
Vaccines are not 100% effective. Many are only 60-70% effective. Or maybe he's allergic to the vaccine components and can't get vaccinated from the particular virus you're spreading that you could easily have prevented.
I'd agree with you except for one very small detail. A virus pierces your cell walls without your permission. And you shed viruses on other people without asking them for their permission. It's not a choice anyone makes, it's simply a fact of how viruses replicate.
If there was any practical way to stop the process prophylactically, without requiring you to get a shot, I'd say go for it. Wear a giant condom over your body. Sit in the "unvaccinated section" of a restaurant, or a bus. But really, those other solutions just aren't practical or even very effective. Vaccines are.
Allowing people the freedom of choice is effective at protecting society only when enough people arrive at the rational conclusion. But too many people confuse decision making with rhetoric-spewing actors and pandering politicians, and they confuse the "right to avoid vaccination" with the mistaken idea that "vaccines are some kind of government plot and should be avoided". And it's now getting so bad that the rest of us are no longer safe in their presence.
As a society, we pass lots of laws that infringe upon our rights: we don't each have the individual right to murder other people, or rob them. We don't have the right to drive drunk; even if we haven't hurt anybody, as a society we've agreed we don't like the risk. Well, I don't like the risk that unvaccinated people pose to me, and I don't think anyone has the right to run around shedding potentially lethal microbes when an effective preventative solution exists.
My son has had whooping cough twice in the past, two years in a row. He was vaccinated against it. As was most of the schools that were sent home for a week because of it. Clearly the vaccinations against it don't work in my child.
I took the liberty of adding the words that were missing from your anecdote. You're welcome.
I expect you should be pushing hard to ensure all the other children in your child's school are vaccinated so the herd immunity can help prevent future infections in your family. You've gotten lucky twice that your son wasn't seriously harmed, it would be truly tragic if he got it again from some deliberately unvaccinated child.
The problem is you are dealing with people who already refuse to participate in logical discussions. They have religious or other belief systems that teach them "facts come from this holy book and these people, not through discussion or science." They think applying logic means "we have a book, scientists have a book, therefore we both have equal basis for our points." They also have a poor grasp on the concepts of statistics, correlation, and causality, and usually can't explain the difference between a personal experience and a body of data.
You will rarely win an argument with these people on a purely logical basis, and even if you do, it's often only temporary. They'll change their position back if their spiritual adviser tells them to.
I wish it was different. I wish more people would learn and apply logic, instead of learning just enough fallacious logic for the sole purpose of defending their "beliefs". It's just the data shows a lot of people are a long way from improving.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean seriously, unsecured WiFi is one thing, but it's the trolls I need to worry about.
I hear sunshine takes care of trolls, if you can get them to come out of their mothers' basements during the day.
At least the sword glows blue when the MAC address begins with 4f:52:43.
Can someone explain why we should care that he announced vaporware (again)?
I'd ask someone why we should care about him at all, but I'm afraid I'd get an actual answer from someone who takes this stuff seriously.
Try asking on http://www.hackaday.com./ Lots of people there doing exactly that kind of stuff.
I hope the secret code is 'shibboleet'.
The screen readers for the blind emit nonsense words when fed typographically incorrect input. Be glad you're not blind, and don't have to deal with them.
And that character on your keyboard, above the equals sign? It's the right one to use, but the author didn't use it. Instead, he made 100 typos using the wrong symbol.
What's news then, is that Amazon can't deploy a simple perl script to fix common typography errors such as these.
There is nothing simple about typography, and a script such as you describe would cause more damage than it would fix. Any editor has to fully understand English, to know which word is the right choice, to understand syntax and grammar, and to know when a writer is deliberately or playfully bending the rules.
If you want to see what the state of the art in automated editing looks like, try using Word's grammar checker. If all of its advice is followed, it can make any interesting story read as blandly as an 8th grader's essay paper on the history of frogs.
I can only think the reason it hasn't been fixed is because fraud makes the banks money and they love seeing stories like this.
Well, you would be very wrong. Fraud costs both the retailers and the banks money. The real problem is that issuing new chip cards would cost the banks more than the fraud. Not only are the cards about a dollar more expensive each, and they still have to be re-issued about every three years, but the systems that inject encrypted keys into them, and store the keys on their databases, are very expensive. Banks are notoriously cheap when it comes to spending money that won't make them money.
The other reason EMV hasn't rolled out across the U.S. is that millions of retailers have about 12 million old credit card terminals spread across the country, and most are owned by cheap store owners who don't like being told they have to spend money to replace them. Most retailers have been dragging their feet, not wanting to make an expensive change. But the new members of the breach-of-the-month club are mad about the insecure systems they've been forced to use, and are now championing the rapid switch to EMV instead of fighting it. The smaller retailers are also impacted now, and are no longer resisting.
The irony is that EMV readers for the small retailers are far, far cheaper than the old terminals, and the rates for using new companies like Square, Intuit, and PayPal are much lower than the typical old bank rates for the old credit card readers.
I think it's about time we implemented some sort of single use credit card system.
That's how Chip and PIN works. Your account number is still fixed, but your authorization to spend from it (your PIN) is encrypted by the chip, and is valid only for a single transaction. There are still kinks with non-electronic transactions, but those can be solved.
Look for it to be all over the US by October of next year.
Supply, demand, taxes, and regulations all combine to control the prices. If people are willing to pay X, and you're selling all your product, why would you reduce prices? All it would do is lower their profits; if they're even making any.
My guess is there are a lot of hidden factors, like big insurance costs. Most insurance policies have an exemption so they don't pay out if you're doing something illegal. This means they may have to self-insure, or find a company willing to take on the risk of a federal bust - and that likely isn't cheap. Maybe the state has a tax rate designed to keep the costs high to minimize chronic abuse. Maybe the costs of physical security are high. Likely all of the above will continue to keep prices very high.
It's harder to carry a trunkful of "gambling" back across the border to sell to the people back home.
Pot is a noun. Gambling is a verb.
I'd love to be able to publish these statistics for our organization, (I'd estimate we have close to a quarter million drives in the field) but there is a big hurdle in the way: legal liability. If I was to say something negative about Western-Sea-Tachi drives, their lawyers might call our lawyers, and we could easily spend a million in court fees.
The thing I think would be interesting is that we have a completely arbitrary mix of drives, based on drive availability over the last 6 years or so. We also have a mix of different service companies who replace the drives in our workstations. Our contract is such that we don't control the brands, or even the sizes, as long as they meet or exceed our specs. As a service organization, they're responsible for picking the cheapest option for themselves. If our spec says "40 GB minimum", and they can't get anything smaller than 500GB, they'll buy those. If 1TB drives are cheaper than 500GB drives, they'll buy those. And if we're paying them $X/machine/year for service, they can do the reliability decisions on their own, so if they think some premium drives will last two years longer than stock drives, they might be able to avoid an extra service call on each machine if they spend $Y extra per drive. I expect these service organizations all have their preferred drives, but that's not data they're likely to share with their competitors on the service-contract circuit.
I don't take pictures for "posterity", or for people who outlive me. I take pictures for me, and my family, for now. While I only have thousands of total pictures, (not 10,000 per month) I can still find the pictures I want on my hard drives. So when I die, if some future grandchild wants to trawl through those terabytes in the vain hopes of finding a good picture of a great-great-grandparent they never met, why should I care? What difference would that make to me, today, in how I choose to save or discard photos?
When will it be learned that choosing the right methodology for a given project is the best way to go.
It comes to understanding the methodologies. What makes each effective? What are their weaknesses? Do you have enough good people who can execute them?
Waterfall is often appropriate, especially when it comes to physical world engineering, or for software products that cannot and will not be changed. Agile is great when you are committed to fully automated testing, have a committed stakeholder who is an active participant, and can deploy on demand for low cost.
But many clients now expect instant updates like they experience with their iPhone apps, and it's very difficult to deliver like that with waterfall. Agile is the answer, but for legacy projects that lack adequate testing, it's a big challenge to migrate to agile, and requires the business be put on hold while the developers clean up their technical debt. Most businesses can't afford such a shift.
Following Best Practice (ie. ITIL), you would start questioning at the organizational and process-level, before even beginning to consider technology.
That way is also not a guarantee of success. If management is implementing their imagined-perfect new organization structure, they are often blind to the problems they are creating, believing the problem lies with the underlings who "aren't trying hard enough", or "don't believe in the vision."
What's so IT-specific about this maxim, that it warrants being on Slashdot? A slow news day?
Not a damn thing. As a matter of fact, the original HBR story referenced in the TFA is not about IT at all. And TFA could have been written by Captain Obvious, except it's not nearly as clear.
Traffic calming measures have been common for quite a few years now. But I think that Sherman Oaks could take this one step further.
Traffic furniture rearranging.
Every day, get the road crews out there to move some barriers around randomly: dead ends in the middle of some block, random one way signs, maybe just drop a wrecked car in the intersection where the off-ramp exits the freeway. Reprogram traffic lights to introduce 10 minute delays. Make Waze's advice to be worse-than-worthless to the average driver, and just maybe they'll give up on your city.
That depends entirely on the jurisdiction. In some US states, the price marked is the price that must be honored, or the shopkeeper can go to jail. The merchant doesn't get to claim "computer glitch", because there were so many glitches people could no longer tell them from bait-and-switch tactics. So the laws were passed in favor of the consumer, and if the merchant's computer systems aren't up to the task, it's not the problem of the general public.
Doesn't matter if you think it's fair or unfair, it's the law in those places. I think Massachusetts, Michigan, and California all have some flavor of this, with Massachusetts being the most stringent.
Because Flash still works on many old browsers. YouTube wants to serve as many people as they can, and want to avoid as many technical issues as they can. They know there are many people who got something working five or more years ago that haven't upgraded their browsers to anything that can display HTML5.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you on that point. The virus has no "motive", it has only the genetic predisposition to achieve successful reproduction. The humans, on the other hand, have the motive of protecting society, and the responsibility to do so safely. We may be less than perfect on our implementation, but "do no harm" is at the top of the list. The virus does not have any such interest, and death of the host is a perfectly acceptable outcome for a virus.
Do I mistrust the humans doing the vaccinations? Generally not in this country today, but in pre-AIDS Africa, forced vaccinations there were a terrifying prospect. Army units traveled the rivers by boat, and they would stop you to see your vaccination papers. If you weren't vaccinated, they jabbed the needle in your arm on the spot. They'd ask the next person for papers, and would jam the exact same needle in the next guy's arm!
If our programs were that badly run, I'd not only agree with you, I'd take up arms myself. But they're not.
Here, vaccination programs are stellar successes. Polio? Smallpox? Gone, thanks to strong vaccination programs. And most vaccinations are administered by private clinics, who can be sued into oblivion for making any mistakes. They take care with each patient. I trust them.
I had the same question, so I read the article, then browsed their site. I found out the site is a service that offers you the ability to upload an .STL file, pick a nearby guy-with-a-printer, send it to him for printing, then drive over and pick it up an hour later. So the guide is basically a survey of hundreds of hobbyists who are turning over a little cash by operating their machines.
The market then, is still the "interested hobbyist, enthusiast, or specialized craftsman", and not "average guy who just wants to click the "3D Print" button in his browser and have it spit out plastic trinkets."
Actually, I wasn't trying to be funny or snarky. I do know some people who would take it as a challenge to drunk-post every day; I also know people who sadly couldn't post any other way. And yes, I don't see Facebook voluntarily deleting data on anything their subscribers do.
Vaccines are not 100% effective. Many are only 60-70% effective. Or maybe he's allergic to the vaccine components and can't get vaccinated from the particular virus you're spreading that you could easily have prevented.
I'd agree with you except for one very small detail. A virus pierces your cell walls without your permission. And you shed viruses on other people without asking them for their permission. It's not a choice anyone makes, it's simply a fact of how viruses replicate.
If there was any practical way to stop the process prophylactically, without requiring you to get a shot, I'd say go for it. Wear a giant condom over your body. Sit in the "unvaccinated section" of a restaurant, or a bus. But really, those other solutions just aren't practical or even very effective. Vaccines are.
Allowing people the freedom of choice is effective at protecting society only when enough people arrive at the rational conclusion. But too many people confuse decision making with rhetoric-spewing actors and pandering politicians, and they confuse the "right to avoid vaccination" with the mistaken idea that "vaccines are some kind of government plot and should be avoided". And it's now getting so bad that the rest of us are no longer safe in their presence.
As a society, we pass lots of laws that infringe upon our rights: we don't each have the individual right to murder other people, or rob them. We don't have the right to drive drunk; even if we haven't hurt anybody, as a society we've agreed we don't like the risk. Well, I don't like the risk that unvaccinated people pose to me, and I don't think anyone has the right to run around shedding potentially lethal microbes when an effective preventative solution exists.
My son has had whooping cough twice in the past, two years in a row. He was vaccinated against it. As was most of the schools that were sent home for a week because of it. Clearly the vaccinations against it don't work in my child.
I took the liberty of adding the words that were missing from your anecdote. You're welcome.
I expect you should be pushing hard to ensure all the other children in your child's school are vaccinated so the herd immunity can help prevent future infections in your family. You've gotten lucky twice that your son wasn't seriously harmed, it would be truly tragic if he got it again from some deliberately unvaccinated child.
The problem is you are dealing with people who already refuse to participate in logical discussions. They have religious or other belief systems that teach them "facts come from this holy book and these people, not through discussion or science." They think applying logic means "we have a book, scientists have a book, therefore we both have equal basis for our points." They also have a poor grasp on the concepts of statistics, correlation, and causality, and usually can't explain the difference between a personal experience and a body of data.
You will rarely win an argument with these people on a purely logical basis, and even if you do, it's often only temporary. They'll change their position back if their spiritual adviser tells them to.
I wish it was different. I wish more people would learn and apply logic, instead of learning just enough fallacious logic for the sole purpose of defending their "beliefs". It's just the data shows a lot of people are a long way from improving.