Something that I've seen happen time and again with a lot of companies is the gutting and outsourcing of anything they don't regard as their "core competency". This reduces their corporate risk (easy to squeeze or drop a supplier in hard times) but it is insidious, and consumes the company from the inside. Eventually they are left with no competencies in anything except outsourcing and financial engineering.
So many of the individuals I work with are from the big outsourcing and management consultancy firms. It's everything from technical specialists, hr personnel, project managers and right up to fairly senior management. Some firms are little more than procurement and accounting departments with a brand, they don't actually have the skills/knowledge to do anything any more.
Amazon goes the other way. It is constantly insourcing things, and building up it's own skills in any field where it thinks it can do better than the existing suppliers. It treats things like the web store and the video service as it's first customer to get things started and drive development, and then spins round and makes it open. AWS is the obvious and most visible one, but their warehouse and logistics arm (certainly here in the UK) and even the web store are increasingly just a service that other people use to sell their stuff. I'd say about half the things I buy on amazon are sold by a third party but shipped from an Amazon warehouse by an Amazon Logistics delivery person.
This is why buying Wholefoods should terrify the entire food industry, and not just their direct retail competitors. Wholefoods is their new "first customer" for the supply chain management and sourcing of perishable goods and groceries, something they've struggled with scaling in the past. Once they turn all the back end systems (tech and people) into a service provided to Wholefoods retail, they will probably once again make it a service that other smaller retailers can tap into, and also use it to juice up other services like Amazon Pantry and Subscribe and Save.
They are prepared to take on almost anything and have a go, even if it ultimately fails (see the Fire Phone). Meanwhile much of the rest of the corporate world is taking the low risk, slow growth route powered by financial engineering where execs are more concerned with pointless mergers and restructuring than about actually doing anything concrete.
The mods' sarcasm detectors appear to be faulty today.
Every time Twitter comes up on Slashdot someone goes on a rant about how its decline is all the fault of SJWs, safe-spaces or some other perceived PCness.
The fact that Twitter has never had a viable business model is apparently of no importance.
Yeah, not impressed by this study. With this sort of approach it's hard to disentangle the various possible causes and effects. For example, people who spend longer on line may have more stuff going through their minds or are people who find it difficult to switch off, which affects their sleep pattern. I know that was one of the causes of my life long insomnia.
There have been much better studies demonstrating the effect of artificial light on sleep patterns. We know that blue light in particular seems to affect our circadian rhythm, so using screens, especially close up in the evening, can send things out of whack.
I've been a life long insomniac, and one of the things that *seemed* to help was to use software like F.Lux on my laptops and similar apps on my phone. They adjust the colour temperature of your screen towards the red later on in the evening. Obviously that's an anecdote, but there does seem to be some pretty reliable basic science behind in.
Personally, I found that the thing that helped the most was a strong routine. The moment I start slipping out of that for more than a couple of days I know I'm going to struggle to sleep. One of the things that will do that is aimless browsing.
What do you use BitCoin for? Genuinly not being sarcastic or anything, I'm interested to know how easy it is to actually use tor "real world" uses these days. I'd always been put off bothering with it as it didn't seem very useful, but it's been around for a long time now so clearly there are uses.
It'll be interesting to see how Trump and the rest of the GOP get along.
Obviously they now have all the levers of power, but there is a heck of a lot of bad blood there at the moment. I would love to be a fly on the wall when Trump and Paul Ryan meet for the first time after this.
Donald Trump does not seem like the kind of person to let bygones be bygones. Frankly if I were him I'd be pretty pissed off with a lot of Republicans. He'll (rightly) be able to say that he got where he did largely without them, and in many ways in spite of them. I can see some hard bargaining going on over the next four years.
And when he talks about "draining the swamp" in Washington, he and his supporters are talking as much about the GOP establishment as anyone else. There will be a lot of entrenched interests in the GOP who are going to be getting nervous about whether he's going to follow through on what he's promised his supporters.
However a Trump presidency turns out, I don't think this will be like George W Bush, where everyone around him was a GOP old-timer.
This. It felt like Hilary was running against herself most of the time.
As much as I'd rather not have Trump as president of the US, I don't envy the choice American's had to make. It seemed like almost any Democrat without a dodgy history would have stood a better chance. Of course we'll never actually know that, all we can do is talk shit and throw about half baked theories.
This really did feel like that early Southpark episode where they had to vote between the giant douchebag and the turd sandwich.
I don't think it's that there is more of the crap, it's that there's less of the good.
Trolls and trash have been a part of/. since the early days. I have a low 6 figure UID and I can't remember a time when the GNAA and their ilk were not active here. The difference is that then the quality discussions would be numerous enough to make it appear very different. Once upon a time an article like this might gather a couple of hundred comments, many of them from practicing physicists discussing/criticising/explaining the work. Meanwhile the trolls and shitposters would be downvoted. Anyone reading at 3 and up would probably see some good discussion. Now news like this seems unlikely to get even 100 comments, few are from knowledgable people.
It's like the water-level falling on a river and suddenly you can see all the crap that's been dumped there for years. With so few comments on most articles (there are only 3 articles on my front page with more than 100 comments), you end up reading at a lower level, so you see more of the crap beneath the water.
I wish the new owners of/. well, and I hope they somehow manage to revive it, but I honestly think it's too late, discussion has moved to Reddit or more specialised websites with more active moderation systems. Reddit might be full of trash (including whole subreddits), but the volume is so high, that it's submerged underneath the vast mass and only visible if you choose to go and look for it most of the time.
I was pretty sceptical about the Micro bit when it was announced. It seemed under-specced compared to all the other small board computers out there.
I was wrong. Talking to people who actually use them to teach, they (teachers and kids) love them. The combination of the on-board screen, accelerometer etc, and the toolchain all combine to make it really quick to get going and build something simple but fun. Like the old 8-bit micros, you can get going almost instantly.
Obviously they have limits, and something like an Arduino or Pi is going to be more use for bigger projects, but for teaching kids the basics and letting them have fun with them the Bit is great. These are designed as a first step, and that's what they are good at.
...before you get the idea that you need to start doing things properly?
Theranos really don't seem to be getting the hint that if they want to be taken seriously now they need to be utterly scrupulous about everything they do.
At worst there is an interesting effect going on that is worth further study and might provide some new insights into some aspects of physics, or simply improvements to experimental techniques. At best it has the possibility to revolutionise some aspects of space exploration.
I am sceptical that this will live up to the best case, but I really hope that my scepticism turns out to be wrong.
This is what science is all about. There's an odd effect, people are doing experiments, whatever happens we will have learnt something which may one day be useful. This is an extraordinary claim, it requires extraordinary proof, which we will hopefully get.
This is for civil small claims cases, in which lawyers are rarely involved and which are largely set up to support people litigating in person.
They tend to be more about arbitration of unpaid invoices or failure to provide a service that's been paid for etc. I have a couple of friends who have used the small claims courts either against non-paying customers or companies that have stiffed them. In all cases they attended in person and were supported by the court staff rather than lawyers, and they all had good things to say about the staff and the system in principal.
These are very much not cases where high paid lawyers square up against each other and slog it out in a dramatic battle of rhetoric. In fact I've heard from a number of people that the judges who preside tend to take a dim view of trained lawyers trying to steamroller or confuse non-lawyers on the other side. These are not cases involving complex points of law. If the case gets more complex then it may be referred to a higher court.
This proposal makes a lot of sense to me for those sorts of cases. While the cost of using the small claims court can put people off using it, the time and disruption, especially if they are running a business, can be more of an impediment. The ability to handle much of the case without having to attend in person would make the whole system much better, and if it reduced the costs it would make the small claims court more accessible to many people to seek redress from companies. There's also lots of potential to design the online system in such a way as to provide lots of help and advice to non-legal people to they can make their case batter, which should also make the whole process more effective and fair.
This is an intersting idea, and it would be fun to see it developed further, but this line really stuck out.
"Shall we continue to get killed because it is easier to produce aircraft with a design from 1950s?"
Bullshit. I'm not saying some improvement in air crash survivability isn't a good thing, but the idea that people are regularly dying because their aeroplane can't disassemble in midair and parachute them to the ground it frankly offensive to all the engineers who have worked over the years to make large scale commercial flying unbelievably safe.
Total number of air craft fatalities worldwide in commercial flight has been significantly less than 1000 per year for the last couple of decades. Something like 3.6 billion passenger journeys will be completed in 2016 (IATA estimate).
Safety is the single worst reason to throw away a tried and tested basic design that is fantastically safe and replace it with a much more complicated and new system.
The $13.25 is a calculation by Uber, not by the journalist. The journalists re-ran some of the calculations and got slightly lower figure.
"Internal Uber calculations, provided to BuzzFeed News by Uber, based on data spanning more than a million rides and covering thousands of drivers in three major U.S. markets — Denver, Detroit, and Houston — suggest that drivers in each of the three markets overall earned less than an average of $13.25 an hour after expenses."
Assuming Uber are not lying about the $13.25, that would still mean that if you worked 40 hours a week, every week of the year, you'd make $27,560 a year.
Whether this is a good or bad depends on how much ordinary taxi drivers make for a similar amount of work.
Uber has frequently talked about how much a driver's gross income will be as a way of encouraging people to join up, which is a nice bit of marketing, and standard practice for companies like Uber.
You joke, but that's actually a more coherent plan than half the "Leave" campaign can put forward for real.
The quality of the "debate" around the EU referendum has been one of the most depressing things I think I've ever seen in our political system, and that's saying something.
This idea was part of the plot of Margaret Atwood's excellent The Handmaid's Tale.
The story is about a post war world in which fertility has plummeted due to the use of chemical weapons (I think), and the US is now run by an ultra-conservative christian authoritarian government (think a Christian version of Saudi Arabia), and the limited number of fertile women are essentially "breeders" (the Handmaids of the title), slaves who bare children for the ruling elite. It's a fantastic dystopian novel.
The authoritarian regime that controls the US in the story did away with cash. Then at a later point they simply suspended women's access to any kind of payment system. Without recourse to cash they were utterly powerless. I've always felt The Handmades Tale was a far scarier book than 1984 (which is also great), because it seemed much more plausible, especially as such societies essentially already exist.
Unlike some of her other books, The Handmaid's Tale is a short and quick read, well worth an evening or two.
Genuine question, because I occasionally have to interview people: how do you interview people, and what sort of questions do you ask to try and work out if they are the right kind of person?
Being a small firm we don't hire very often, so we don't get much practice, it's good to hear how other people do it.
We will ask people to talk us through how they would solve a problem, or work with a client, but we are far more interested in their approach and how they think through the problem, and they are not abstract "invert this binary tree" type puzzles but real-world issues we've encountered.
We do ask developers to do a couple of simple programming tasks just to make sure they can actually code fluently (in any language, using any tool they like, and on a laptop not a whiteboard). As a sanity check it seems to work quite well.
Thanks for that. Where do you get your info from? I'd like to read more and try to get a better handle for wtf is going on over there. The UK media present a very simplified view of the situation.
1) Combine two things that are sort of similar but not really - e.g. EVs and hybrids or tablets and e-ink e-readers 2) Make a statistical claim about the combined group - 'People are leaving EVs and hybrids", "Tablets and E-readers bad for sleep/eyes" 3) Forget to mention one of the two in the headline - 'People dump EVs', 'E-readers bad for sleep/eyes"
By combining the two, this report doesn't really tell us anything useful. I'd love to know the different rates of people abandoning EV or hybrids, as I think they are two very different propositions.
Hybrids, at the end of the day, are simply a different way of building efficient petrol/diesel powered cars. From what I've heard that efficiency has been a lot less in real life, with milage claims for things like the Prius not really living up to the hype. With ever more efficient petrol engines on the market, and gas prices so low, the efficiency improvements have to be pretty significant to make a big difference and to offset the higher cost of buying many hybrids.
EVs on the other hand are a totally different beast, and the reasons people might give up on them are different. Are people buying EVs and then finding range is more of a problem than they thought? Did they have problems finding charing points? Was overnight, at-home charging not good enough for them? Etc, etc.
In addition, this report talks about the number of people who are trading in their EVs/Hybrids for something else. But that doesn't really tell us anything about how much people like EVs and Hybrids as it only includes people who are switching. It doesn't provide any analysis of how many people are keeping their EVs for longer.
What's most annoying is that there are genuinely interesting questions to be asking about the EV and hybrid market, but this data isn't really answering any of them well.
What a shock, a slashdot summary that misses the actual salient point of the linked article...
Here's the description of the new feature from the linked article:
If the same site was accessed in Chrome 43 -- which is beta now but should be stable in May -- the warning should vanish thanks to a browser Content Security Policy directive known as Upgrade Insecure Resources. The directive “causes Chrome to upgrade insecure resource requests to HTTPS before fetching them”, Google explained today.
Here's Google's own description of the feature from the Chromium Blog:
Upgrading legacy sites to HTTPS
Transitioning large collections of unmodifiable legacy web content to encrypted, authenticated HTTPS connections can be challenging as the content frequently includes links to insecure resources, triggering mixed content warnings. This release includes a new CSP directive, upgrade-insecure-resources, that causes Chrome to upgrade insecure resource requests to HTTPS before fetching them. This change allows developers to serve their hard-to-update legacy content via HTTPS more easily, improving security for their users.
So basically this means you don't have to worry if you accidentally miss an HTTP asset link on your site when upgrading to HTTPS, Chrome will automatically do that for you.
Hopefully the other browsers will follow suit soon, otherwise it's of limited use.
That's pretty much what happens with the voice and data recorders anyway, although for longer periods. The voice recorder records two hours (at a minimum), which is going to pick the entire runup to pretty much any crash (MH370 possibly being the exception).
Recording video for the same 2 hours seems very sensible to me. It's very easy to misinterpret noises or things people say if you don't have the full context.
I honestly don't understand the objections to video recording when you already have voice recording. What aspect of the privacy of someone who has died in a crash is going to be more negatively affected by seeing them, than by hearing them?
I can kind of see what he means, although I think the comparison with the uncanny valley is a bit weak.
I've taken to using Google Now's voice commands to set timers while I'm cooking, so something like "Ok Google, set a timer for 20 minutes". I don't have to touch my phone and it works brilliantly even in the noisy environments of a kitchen.
I've gotten used to talking to it in a very naturalistic way, which is where the problems occasionally crop up, and when they do they can be quite jarring.
A good example was the last time I asked it to set a timer for "an hour and a half", which Now interpreted as 1:00:30s, i.e. an hour and a half *minute*.
The jarring effect is at this edge where we feel like the speech recognition system is understanding what we say, but really it's just trying to use lots of different rules and patterns that have been coded in. If you happen to just fall outside of one of those rules it fails completely, and it can seem very arbitrary.
The other reason is that an ICE can't generate force when at rest (unlike an electric motor), so getting going from stationary is impossible without a clutch. That's why, if you drive a manual, the engine has to be revved and the clutch gradually engaged, bleeding power into the axels while allowing the engine to run without stalling. Engage the clutch too fast and the engine will simply stall.
I believe External CEs like steam engines can generate force when at rest, so they don't need gearing.
It's one of the reasons by diesel trains (and some very large vehicals) are diesel-electric. A rail engineer I used to work with told me the gearbox and clutch needed to gear down a diesel engine to the point it could start a train would be enormous, bigger than a train car. Diesel electric trains are basically diesel generators that power electric motors, which is why they are sometimes used for emergency power.
Slashdot Mirror
Something that I've seen happen time and again with a lot of companies is the gutting and outsourcing of anything they don't regard as their "core competency". This reduces their corporate risk (easy to squeeze or drop a supplier in hard times) but it is insidious, and consumes the company from the inside. Eventually they are left with no competencies in anything except outsourcing and financial engineering.
So many of the individuals I work with are from the big outsourcing and management consultancy firms. It's everything from technical specialists, hr personnel, project managers and right up to fairly senior management. Some firms are little more than procurement and accounting departments with a brand, they don't actually have the skills/knowledge to do anything any more.
Amazon goes the other way. It is constantly insourcing things, and building up it's own skills in any field where it thinks it can do better than the existing suppliers. It treats things like the web store and the video service as it's first customer to get things started and drive development, and then spins round and makes it open. AWS is the obvious and most visible one, but their warehouse and logistics arm (certainly here in the UK) and even the web store are increasingly just a service that other people use to sell their stuff. I'd say about half the things I buy on amazon are sold by a third party but shipped from an Amazon warehouse by an Amazon Logistics delivery person.
This is why buying Wholefoods should terrify the entire food industry, and not just their direct retail competitors. Wholefoods is their new "first customer" for the supply chain management and sourcing of perishable goods and groceries, something they've struggled with scaling in the past. Once they turn all the back end systems (tech and people) into a service provided to Wholefoods retail, they will probably once again make it a service that other smaller retailers can tap into, and also use it to juice up other services like Amazon Pantry and Subscribe and Save.
They are prepared to take on almost anything and have a go, even if it ultimately fails (see the Fire Phone). Meanwhile much of the rest of the corporate world is taking the low risk, slow growth route powered by financial engineering where execs are more concerned with pointless mergers and restructuring than about actually doing anything concrete.
Likewise. Pretty certain this is offered in most IKEAs in the UK.
Not sure this is a new service, more that they are going to use TaskRabbit to either expand it or replace the existing system in the US.
The mods' sarcasm detectors appear to be faulty today.
Every time Twitter comes up on Slashdot someone goes on a rant about how its decline is all the fault of SJWs, safe-spaces or some other perceived PCness.
The fact that Twitter has never had a viable business model is apparently of no importance.
Yeah, not impressed by this study. With this sort of approach it's hard to disentangle the various possible causes and effects. For example, people who spend longer on line may have more stuff going through their minds or are people who find it difficult to switch off, which affects their sleep pattern. I know that was one of the causes of my life long insomnia.
There have been much better studies demonstrating the effect of artificial light on sleep patterns. We know that blue light in particular seems to affect our circadian rhythm, so using screens, especially close up in the evening, can send things out of whack.
I've been a life long insomniac, and one of the things that *seemed* to help was to use software like F.Lux on my laptops and similar apps on my phone. They adjust the colour temperature of your screen towards the red later on in the evening. Obviously that's an anecdote, but there does seem to be some pretty reliable basic science behind in.
Personally, I found that the thing that helped the most was a strong routine. The moment I start slipping out of that for more than a couple of days I know I'm going to struggle to sleep. One of the things that will do that is aimless browsing.
What do you use BitCoin for? Genuinly not being sarcastic or anything, I'm interested to know how easy it is to actually use tor "real world" uses these days. I'd always been put off bothering with it as it didn't seem very useful, but it's been around for a long time now so clearly there are uses.
It'll be interesting to see how Trump and the rest of the GOP get along.
Obviously they now have all the levers of power, but there is a heck of a lot of bad blood there at the moment. I would love to be a fly on the wall when Trump and Paul Ryan meet for the first time after this.
Donald Trump does not seem like the kind of person to let bygones be bygones. Frankly if I were him I'd be pretty pissed off with a lot of Republicans. He'll (rightly) be able to say that he got where he did largely without them, and in many ways in spite of them. I can see some hard bargaining going on over the next four years.
And when he talks about "draining the swamp" in Washington, he and his supporters are talking as much about the GOP establishment as anyone else. There will be a lot of entrenched interests in the GOP who are going to be getting nervous about whether he's going to follow through on what he's promised his supporters.
However a Trump presidency turns out, I don't think this will be like George W Bush, where everyone around him was a GOP old-timer.
This. It felt like Hilary was running against herself most of the time.
As much as I'd rather not have Trump as president of the US, I don't envy the choice American's had to make. It seemed like almost any Democrat without a dodgy history would have stood a better chance. Of course we'll never actually know that, all we can do is talk shit and throw about half baked theories.
This really did feel like that early Southpark episode where they had to vote between the giant douchebag and the turd sandwich.
I don't think it's that there is more of the crap, it's that there's less of the good.
Trolls and trash have been a part of /. since the early days. I have a low 6 figure UID and I can't remember a time when the GNAA and their ilk were not active here. The difference is that then the quality discussions would be numerous enough to make it appear very different. Once upon a time an article like this might gather a couple of hundred comments, many of them from practicing physicists discussing/criticising/explaining the work. Meanwhile the trolls and shitposters would be downvoted. Anyone reading at 3 and up would probably see some good discussion. Now news like this seems unlikely to get even 100 comments, few are from knowledgable people.
It's like the water-level falling on a river and suddenly you can see all the crap that's been dumped there for years. With so few comments on most articles (there are only 3 articles on my front page with more than 100 comments), you end up reading at a lower level, so you see more of the crap beneath the water.
I wish the new owners of /. well, and I hope they somehow manage to revive it, but I honestly think it's too late, discussion has moved to Reddit or more specialised websites with more active moderation systems. Reddit might be full of trash (including whole subreddits), but the volume is so high, that it's submerged underneath the vast mass and only visible if you choose to go and look for it most of the time.
I was pretty sceptical about the Micro bit when it was announced. It seemed under-specced compared to all the other small board computers out there.
I was wrong. Talking to people who actually use them to teach, they (teachers and kids) love them. The combination of the on-board screen, accelerometer etc, and the toolchain all combine to make it really quick to get going and build something simple but fun. Like the old 8-bit micros, you can get going almost instantly.
Obviously they have limits, and something like an Arduino or Pi is going to be more use for bigger projects, but for teaching kids the basics and letting them have fun with them the Bit is great. These are designed as a first step, and that's what they are good at.
...before you get the idea that you need to start doing things properly?
Theranos really don't seem to be getting the hint that if they want to be taken seriously now they need to be utterly scrupulous about everything they do.
Likewise. I'm hopefully sceptical :)
At worst there is an interesting effect going on that is worth further study and might provide some new insights into some aspects of physics, or simply improvements to experimental techniques. At best it has the possibility to revolutionise some aspects of space exploration.
I am sceptical that this will live up to the best case, but I really hope that my scepticism turns out to be wrong.
This is what science is all about. There's an odd effect, people are doing experiments, whatever happens we will have learnt something which may one day be useful. This is an extraordinary claim, it requires extraordinary proof, which we will hopefully get.
This is for civil small claims cases, in which lawyers are rarely involved and which are largely set up to support people litigating in person.
They tend to be more about arbitration of unpaid invoices or failure to provide a service that's been paid for etc. I have a couple of friends who have used the small claims courts either against non-paying customers or companies that have stiffed them. In all cases they attended in person and were supported by the court staff rather than lawyers, and they all had good things to say about the staff and the system in principal.
These are very much not cases where high paid lawyers square up against each other and slog it out in a dramatic battle of rhetoric. In fact I've heard from a number of people that the judges who preside tend to take a dim view of trained lawyers trying to steamroller or confuse non-lawyers on the other side. These are not cases involving complex points of law. If the case gets more complex then it may be referred to a higher court.
This proposal makes a lot of sense to me for those sorts of cases. While the cost of using the small claims court can put people off using it, the time and disruption, especially if they are running a business, can be more of an impediment. The ability to handle much of the case without having to attend in person would make the whole system much better, and if it reduced the costs it would make the small claims court more accessible to many people to seek redress from companies. There's also lots of potential to design the online system in such a way as to provide lots of help and advice to non-legal people to they can make their case batter, which should also make the whole process more effective and fair.
All good stuff, but just to point out Peaky Blinders isn't a Netflix original, it's a show produced for the BBC.
It's also amazing.
Cilian Murphey is just brilliant in everything he's in
This is an intersting idea, and it would be fun to see it developed further, but this line really stuck out.
"Shall we continue to get killed because it is easier to produce aircraft with a design from 1950s?"
Bullshit. I'm not saying some improvement in air crash survivability isn't a good thing, but the idea that people are regularly dying because their aeroplane can't disassemble in midair and parachute them to the ground it frankly offensive to all the engineers who have worked over the years to make large scale commercial flying unbelievably safe.
Total number of air craft fatalities worldwide in commercial flight has been significantly less than 1000 per year for the last couple of decades. Something like 3.6 billion passenger journeys will be completed in 2016 (IATA estimate).
Safety is the single worst reason to throw away a tried and tested basic design that is fantastically safe and replace it with a much more complicated and new system.
The $13.25 is a calculation by Uber, not by the journalist. The journalists re-ran some of the calculations and got slightly lower figure.
"Internal Uber calculations, provided to BuzzFeed News by Uber, based on data spanning more than a million rides and covering thousands of drivers in three major U.S. markets — Denver, Detroit, and Houston — suggest that drivers in each of the three markets overall earned less than an average of $13.25 an hour after expenses."
Assuming Uber are not lying about the $13.25, that would still mean that if you worked 40 hours a week, every week of the year, you'd make $27,560 a year.
Whether this is a good or bad depends on how much ordinary taxi drivers make for a similar amount of work.
Uber has frequently talked about how much a driver's gross income will be as a way of encouraging people to join up, which is a nice bit of marketing, and standard practice for companies like Uber.
You joke, but that's actually a more coherent plan than half the "Leave" campaign can put forward for real.
The quality of the "debate" around the EU referendum has been one of the most depressing things I think I've ever seen in our political system, and that's saying something.
This idea was part of the plot of Margaret Atwood's excellent The Handmaid's Tale.
The story is about a post war world in which fertility has plummeted due to the use of chemical weapons (I think), and the US is now run by an ultra-conservative christian authoritarian government (think a Christian version of Saudi Arabia), and the limited number of fertile women are essentially "breeders" (the Handmaids of the title), slaves who bare children for the ruling elite. It's a fantastic dystopian novel.
The authoritarian regime that controls the US in the story did away with cash. Then at a later point they simply suspended women's access to any kind of payment system. Without recourse to cash they were utterly powerless. I've always felt The Handmades Tale was a far scarier book than 1984 (which is also great), because it seemed much more plausible, especially as such societies essentially already exist.
Unlike some of her other books, The Handmaid's Tale is a short and quick read, well worth an evening or two.
Genuine question, because I occasionally have to interview people: how do you interview people, and what sort of questions do you ask to try and work out if they are the right kind of person?
Being a small firm we don't hire very often, so we don't get much practice, it's good to hear how other people do it.
We will ask people to talk us through how they would solve a problem, or work with a client, but we are far more interested in their approach and how they think through the problem, and they are not abstract "invert this binary tree" type puzzles but real-world issues we've encountered.
We do ask developers to do a couple of simple programming tasks just to make sure they can actually code fluently (in any language, using any tool they like, and on a laptop not a whiteboard). As a sanity check it seems to work quite well.
Thanks for that. Where do you get your info from? I'd like to read more and try to get a better handle for wtf is going on over there. The UK media present a very simplified view of the situation.
1) Combine two things that are sort of similar but not really - e.g. EVs and hybrids or tablets and e-ink e-readers
2) Make a statistical claim about the combined group - 'People are leaving EVs and hybrids", "Tablets and E-readers bad for sleep/eyes"
3) Forget to mention one of the two in the headline - 'People dump EVs', 'E-readers bad for sleep/eyes"
By combining the two, this report doesn't really tell us anything useful. I'd love to know the different rates of people abandoning EV or hybrids, as I think they are two very different propositions.
Hybrids, at the end of the day, are simply a different way of building efficient petrol/diesel powered cars. From what I've heard that efficiency has been a lot less in real life, with milage claims for things like the Prius not really living up to the hype. With ever more efficient petrol engines on the market, and gas prices so low, the efficiency improvements have to be pretty significant to make a big difference and to offset the higher cost of buying many hybrids.
EVs on the other hand are a totally different beast, and the reasons people might give up on them are different. Are people buying EVs and then finding range is more of a problem than they thought? Did they have problems finding charing points? Was overnight, at-home charging not good enough for them? Etc, etc.
In addition, this report talks about the number of people who are trading in their EVs/Hybrids for something else. But that doesn't really tell us anything about how much people like EVs and Hybrids as it only includes people who are switching. It doesn't provide any analysis of how many people are keeping their EVs for longer.
What's most annoying is that there are genuinely interesting questions to be asking about the EV and hybrid market, but this data isn't really answering any of them well.
What a shock, a slashdot summary that misses the actual salient point of the linked article...
Here's the description of the new feature from the linked article:
Here's Google's own description of the feature from the Chromium Blog:
So basically this means you don't have to worry if you accidentally miss an HTTP asset link on your site when upgrading to HTTPS, Chrome will automatically do that for you.
Hopefully the other browsers will follow suit soon, otherwise it's of limited use.
"filament-shaped LED coated in graphene"
Filament-shaped, not a filament.
I assume that just means the LED is a strand, rather than a square or circle as they often are at the moment.
That's pretty much what happens with the voice and data recorders anyway, although for longer periods. The voice recorder records two hours (at a minimum), which is going to pick the entire runup to pretty much any crash (MH370 possibly being the exception).
Recording video for the same 2 hours seems very sensible to me. It's very easy to misinterpret noises or things people say if you don't have the full context.
I honestly don't understand the objections to video recording when you already have voice recording. What aspect of the privacy of someone who has died in a crash is going to be more negatively affected by seeing them, than by hearing them?
I can kind of see what he means, although I think the comparison with the uncanny valley is a bit weak.
I've taken to using Google Now's voice commands to set timers while I'm cooking, so something like "Ok Google, set a timer for 20 minutes". I don't have to touch my phone and it works brilliantly even in the noisy environments of a kitchen.
I've gotten used to talking to it in a very naturalistic way, which is where the problems occasionally crop up, and when they do they can be quite jarring.
A good example was the last time I asked it to set a timer for "an hour and a half", which Now interpreted as 1:00:30s, i.e. an hour and a half *minute*.
The jarring effect is at this edge where we feel like the speech recognition system is understanding what we say, but really it's just trying to use lots of different rules and patterns that have been coded in. If you happen to just fall outside of one of those rules it fails completely, and it can seem very arbitrary.
The other reason is that an ICE can't generate force when at rest (unlike an electric motor), so getting going from stationary is impossible without a clutch. That's why, if you drive a manual, the engine has to be revved and the clutch gradually engaged, bleeding power into the axels while allowing the engine to run without stalling. Engage the clutch too fast and the engine will simply stall.
I believe External CEs like steam engines can generate force when at rest, so they don't need gearing.
It's one of the reasons by diesel trains (and some very large vehicals) are diesel-electric. A rail engineer I used to work with told me the gearbox and clutch needed to gear down a diesel engine to the point it could start a train would be enormous, bigger than a train car. Diesel electric trains are basically diesel generators that power electric motors, which is why they are sometimes used for emergency power.