We've told engineers exactly how to specify products such that they get what they want and most of them proceed to ignore us.
So, it is a human problem, as I've said. Maybe if people were sacked until, um, quality of their output improved, things would be better. I don't know how to fix people, admittedly, but - again - where is the management, training, etc.? Can't no one develop and improve their employees anymore?
The human component is not solved the problems are not separable.
I'd seem to agree, but it should be a separable problem. For all I know it may be limited to Boeing's corporate culture, or to large corporate U.S. culture. How is it elsewhere? We know there's a bunch of entitlement-feeling jackasses in the U.S., perhaps this permeates the workplace so as to negatively impact the engineering output. What about China? Japan? India? Germany? I'm serious, I'd like to know. Maybe U.S. engineering culture has rotted away in the last two decades?
I do manufacture things, and it took me 10 years to figure out how to spec things out so that the techs make exactly what I want. The technical problem is solved. The human problem maybe isn't. Human is in having competent engineers. I'd have thought aerospace companies are better than someone who has no clue and a decade to learn it on his own, with nobody else to talk to.
It's the 21st century. It's not like Skype is a new thing, you know. It's a management fiasco. Boeing managers should have made sure that those engineers from various suppliers do in fact talk to each other, and talk often.
The batteries are small. They should have simply swapped them out for a tad heavier and larger Ni-MH units. They went to unproven technology for savings of tens of kilograms and tens of liters of volume over the whole plane. They are stupid. That's all. There's a point where the savings are too small to risk a whole new battery tech. It's not an all-electric plane where it'd be a big deal. Those batteries are relatively small, relatively light, and don't need such a level of optimization and risk taking.
Well, demonstrably it didn't contain much because there was smoke on board. Containment means the battery dies, and outside, apart from lost functionality, nothing bad happens. Smoke is kind of a no-no.
When it comes to mechanical parts, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing is a solved problem. When it comes to electrical interoperability, one'd think that's a solved problem as well. Someone, or many someones at Boeing and/or at the subcontractors don't know their engineering, that's all.
Not when you need 4 bytes per every instruction, and you don't have separate code space. All the code and "near" data must fit into those 500 words. "Far" data costs extra clock cycles. It's neat for what it can do, but it's a lot of hard work to squeeze things into it that won't naturally fit.
If you want to play on something multicore, modern and with 2 orders of magnitude more RAM per core, nothing beats XMOS's XS1 architecture. Their newer USB-phy-toting chips with on-board regulators cost just a couple times Propeller's price, but give you an order of magnitude faster code execution, 2x higher code density, and a hardware I/O model that doesn't have you doing any cycle counting in spite of hard real-time performance. It's a neat paradigm shift. Coupled with modern programming tools (XC language - a "safe" variant of C with added architecture-specific primitives), it's really something you have to see to believe.
When Propeller II comes around, the tides will turn again, of course, but still it'll be awfully short on RAM.
Propeller is all great, but it takes a lot of ingenuity to make it do anything useful if you code it up yourself. All you've got is ~500 32 bit words of RAM to store your code and fast registers. One word per instruction. A novice will not be, typically, really using Propeller architecture directly, just running some slow interpreted spin code and reusing the better objects out there.
Because some of this "obsolete" software is still in use. Maxima, nee Macsyma, for example. The code base, written largely in Lisp, has a bunch of files with original copyright in the late 60s, IIRC.
Given that the TV operates in an air-conditioned space, you need to apply a ballpark 3x multiplier to this energy cost, as every Watt has to be pumped out using a heat pump running at maybe 35% overall efficiency (this is a conservative figure). $63 vs. $39, now that looks like a real difference to me.
I have an ex girl friend that is illegal from Mexico that I am forced to support via child support. She has 4 children total from 3 different men. I'm the only one paying child support.
Oh poor baby, you're forced to support your own kid. Poor you. So per your own morality the mother's immigration status and national origins affect whether you should be responsible for what you've done? Sigh, you depress me, man.
Many H1-B workers did in fact get educated here. Certainly most I know of, although that's probably not indicative at all of the greater H-1B population.
All I know is that way too many of legal U.S. contractors are lazy bastards, and the only people who seem to be willing to do any real work are illegal immigrants. It's not even about taking jobs the citizens don't want, it's simply that the citizens seem to be useless. At least that has been my experience. With one exception, every legal contractor I had to deal with turned out in the end to be a piece of lying, lazy scum. The presumably illegal mexican crews hired by some companies were the only ones doing good work, doing it quick, and not leaving a mess afterwards.
I have seen a similar situation when it comes to engineering. People with sufficient experience simply prefer not to take on jobs than to do them for less than some astronomical rate that doesn't make sense and never really did, even in Apollo heyday. And those who did take on the jobs would produce crap that had to be redone.
Yep. As you alluded, it's not true that the atmosphere is uniformly to "try to minimize enforcement of immigration law". The atmosphere is that the law is pretty much dialed to 11 for people who are pursuing the stay here legally and have a paper trail, and dialed down for people where you don't even know who they are. It is, pretty much, entirely opposite of what it should be. The way things are promotes bureaucratic laziness and weight-throwing. I'd be all for a situation when folks who bother to hire an immigration lawyer and have everything in order were treated a bit better at least until the undocumented immigration issue is somehow sorted out, if there were ever a way to do so.
And it be better than the Feds would win! Otherwise you might as well disband the FBI and the state police - country sheriffs and city cops would be enough.
I'm not a citizen and yet I not only work, but I pay taxes and, oh horror of horrors, I invest all my money here. And please, cut the BS about not enforcing immigration laws. If my status were to lapse for some reason, they'd be knocking on my door and kicking me out of the country within a couple of months. There is a big difference between an undocumented immigrant, and one who has a long paper trail behind him. Protip: the latter are easy pickings.
But I don't completely blame you on not having much of a clue of how immigration laws are enforced, because if you asked me anything about immigrating into the countries I am a citizen of, you'd get a blank stare as I never had to deal with any of it. My only beef is that it you're not clever enough to realize that you have no clue what you're talking, nah, spewing about.
Besides, you can't really have, effectively, three different sets of laws (federal, state and local), and expect that it'd be OK for the local police to enforce it all. Either there is a need for FBI and state police, or there isn't, you can't have it both ways. Now it is of course a thing to discuss whether we need all those three layers of policing to begin with.
It's political lingo for removing the cap. You see, politicans know full well that people will buy whatever as long as the packaging is right. Thus the cap is, in reality, removed, but in words it remains.
A nuclear missile consists of the launcher, the payload, and the reentry vehicle. They haven't done any reentry tests, and as far as we know their payloads can't fit on anything near the size of the missiles they have tested so far. So you're, at the moment, very much mistaken. Clueless, even. I do agree that the Russian Federation isn't a rogue nation, and that neither was USSR, to an extent.
They may decide to do it under clear skies and have video terminal guidance. This can be achieved using pretty much open source software, for the most part.
I sincerely hope that the U.S. has a system in place to disable the GPS constellation as soon as a confirmed threat launch took place, because it'd be really silly if they simply guided their rocket using GPS and succeeded in hitting their target.
You're crazy if you think MySql is somehow underpowered for Akonadi. It's not the problem. The problem is with how Akonadi's details were engineered, and how it was executed. If you seriously think a mainstream database is too slow to do relatively simple indexed queries on a *personal* email/contact database, you're crazy. The database is not a problem. That's about the only design decision I agree with. The filesystem does not offer the data indexing and querying functionality that you need in an email application. You're basically shifting responsibility for the index and query tasks from people who know their shit (database folk) to people who are comparatively clueless. My only gripe is that they should have used postgresql as that's a project with somewhat saner ownership and some nice technical benefits..
Fuck, I've put an apostrophe in a plural form. I'll go kill myself or something. Sorry about that, everyone. I thought I was better than that. It's a disease of some sort, a U.S.-based pandemic, no less.
Slashdot Mirror
"I assume that big companies are hyper-competent" is one of this country's most pervasive and dangerous delusions.
And that's a rather scary thought, but I seems one can't but agree :(
We've told engineers exactly how to specify products such that they get what they want and most of them proceed to ignore us.
So, it is a human problem, as I've said. Maybe if people were sacked until, um, quality of their output improved, things would be better. I don't know how to fix people, admittedly, but - again - where is the management, training, etc.? Can't no one develop and improve their employees anymore?
The human component is not solved the problems are not separable.
I'd seem to agree, but it should be a separable problem. For all I know it may be limited to Boeing's corporate culture, or to large corporate U.S. culture. How is it elsewhere? We know there's a bunch of entitlement-feeling jackasses in the U.S., perhaps this permeates the workplace so as to negatively impact the engineering output. What about China? Japan? India? Germany? I'm serious, I'd like to know. Maybe U.S. engineering culture has rotted away in the last two decades?
I do manufacture things, and it took me 10 years to figure out how to spec things out so that the techs make exactly what I want. The technical problem is solved. The human problem maybe isn't. Human is in having competent engineers. I'd have thought aerospace companies are better than someone who has no clue and a decade to learn it on his own, with nobody else to talk to.
This may well be, but it's a starting state. People can learn to work around it -- when properly guided. That's where the management comes in.
It's the 21st century. It's not like Skype is a new thing, you know. It's a management fiasco. Boeing managers should have made sure that those engineers from various suppliers do in fact talk to each other, and talk often.
The batteries are small. They should have simply swapped them out for a tad heavier and larger Ni-MH units. They went to unproven technology for savings of tens of kilograms and tens of liters of volume over the whole plane. They are stupid. That's all. There's a point where the savings are too small to risk a whole new battery tech. It's not an all-electric plane where it'd be a big deal. Those batteries are relatively small, relatively light, and don't need such a level of optimization and risk taking.
Well, demonstrably it didn't contain much because there was smoke on board. Containment means the battery dies, and outside, apart from lost functionality, nothing bad happens. Smoke is kind of a no-no.
When it comes to mechanical parts, geometric dimensioning and tolerancing is a solved problem. When it comes to electrical interoperability, one'd think that's a solved problem as well. Someone, or many someones at Boeing and/or at the subcontractors don't know their engineering, that's all.
Not when you need 4 bytes per every instruction, and you don't have separate code space. All the code and "near" data must fit into those 500 words. "Far" data costs extra clock cycles. It's neat for what it can do, but it's a lot of hard work to squeeze things into it that won't naturally fit.
If you want to play on something multicore, modern and with 2 orders of magnitude more RAM per core, nothing beats XMOS's XS1 architecture. Their newer USB-phy-toting chips with on-board regulators cost just a couple times Propeller's price, but give you an order of magnitude faster code execution, 2x higher code density, and a hardware I/O model that doesn't have you doing any cycle counting in spite of hard real-time performance. It's a neat paradigm shift. Coupled with modern programming tools (XC language - a "safe" variant of C with added architecture-specific primitives), it's really something you have to see to believe.
When Propeller II comes around, the tides will turn again, of course, but still it'll be awfully short on RAM.
Propeller is all great, but it takes a lot of ingenuity to make it do anything useful if you code it up yourself. All you've got is ~500 32 bit words of RAM to store your code and fast registers. One word per instruction. A novice will not be, typically, really using Propeller architecture directly, just running some slow interpreted spin code and reusing the better objects out there.
Because some of this "obsolete" software is still in use. Maxima, nee Macsyma, for example. The code base, written largely in Lisp, has a bunch of files with original copyright in the late 60s, IIRC.
Given that the TV operates in an air-conditioned space, you need to apply a ballpark 3x multiplier to this energy cost, as every Watt has to be pumped out using a heat pump running at maybe 35% overall efficiency (this is a conservative figure). $63 vs. $39, now that looks like a real difference to me.
I have an ex girl friend that is illegal from Mexico that I am forced to support via child support. She has 4 children total from 3 different men. I'm the only one paying child support.
Oh poor baby, you're forced to support your own kid. Poor you. So per your own morality the mother's immigration status and national origins affect whether you should be responsible for what you've done? Sigh, you depress me, man.
I didn't know that! Interesting. I've been to Switzerland a bunch of times, and I'd love to retire there :)
Many H1-B workers did in fact get educated here. Certainly most I know of, although that's probably not indicative at all of the greater H-1B population.
All I know is that way too many of legal U.S. contractors are lazy bastards, and the only people who seem to be willing to do any real work are illegal immigrants. It's not even about taking jobs the citizens don't want, it's simply that the citizens seem to be useless. At least that has been my experience. With one exception, every legal contractor I had to deal with turned out in the end to be a piece of lying, lazy scum. The presumably illegal mexican crews hired by some companies were the only ones doing good work, doing it quick, and not leaving a mess afterwards.
I have seen a similar situation when it comes to engineering. People with sufficient experience simply prefer not to take on jobs than to do them for less than some astronomical rate that doesn't make sense and never really did, even in Apollo heyday. And those who did take on the jobs would produce crap that had to be redone.
Yep. As you alluded, it's not true that the atmosphere is uniformly to "try to minimize enforcement of immigration law". The atmosphere is that the law is pretty much dialed to 11 for people who are pursuing the stay here legally and have a paper trail, and dialed down for people where you don't even know who they are. It is, pretty much, entirely opposite of what it should be. The way things are promotes bureaucratic laziness and weight-throwing. I'd be all for a situation when folks who bother to hire an immigration lawyer and have everything in order were treated a bit better at least until the undocumented immigration issue is somehow sorted out, if there were ever a way to do so.
And it be better than the Feds would win! Otherwise you might as well disband the FBI and the state police - country sheriffs and city cops would be enough.
I'm not a citizen and yet I not only work, but I pay taxes and, oh horror of horrors, I invest all my money here. And please, cut the BS about not enforcing immigration laws. If my status were to lapse for some reason, they'd be knocking on my door and kicking me out of the country within a couple of months. There is a big difference between an undocumented immigrant, and one who has a long paper trail behind him. Protip: the latter are easy pickings.
But I don't completely blame you on not having much of a clue of how immigration laws are enforced, because if you asked me anything about immigrating into the countries I am a citizen of, you'd get a blank stare as I never had to deal with any of it. My only beef is that it you're not clever enough to realize that you have no clue what you're talking, nah, spewing about.
Besides, you can't really have, effectively, three different sets of laws (federal, state and local), and expect that it'd be OK for the local police to enforce it all. Either there is a need for FBI and state police, or there isn't, you can't have it both ways. Now it is of course a thing to discuss whether we need all those three layers of policing to begin with.
It's political lingo for removing the cap. You see, politicans know full well that people will buy whatever as long as the packaging is right. Thus the cap is, in reality, removed, but in words it remains.
I wish they did that to green card caps, though.
A nuclear missile consists of the launcher, the payload, and the reentry vehicle. They haven't done any reentry tests, and as far as we know their payloads can't fit on anything near the size of the missiles they have tested so far. So you're, at the moment, very much mistaken. Clueless, even. I do agree that the Russian Federation isn't a rogue nation, and that neither was USSR, to an extent.
They may decide to do it under clear skies and have video terminal guidance. This can be achieved using pretty much open source software, for the most part.
I sincerely hope that the U.S. has a system in place to disable the GPS constellation as soon as a confirmed threat launch took place, because it'd be really silly if they simply guided their rocket using GPS and succeeded in hitting their target.
If you need to triple your capacity in a week, there's probably a whole bunch of people who didn't do their jobs properly :)
You're crazy if you think MySql is somehow underpowered for Akonadi. It's not the problem. The problem is with how Akonadi's details were engineered, and how it was executed. If you seriously think a mainstream database is too slow to do relatively simple indexed queries on a *personal* email/contact database, you're crazy. The database is not a problem. That's about the only design decision I agree with. The filesystem does not offer the data indexing and querying functionality that you need in an email application. You're basically shifting responsibility for the index and query tasks from people who know their shit (database folk) to people who are comparatively clueless. My only gripe is that they should have used postgresql as that's a project with somewhat saner ownership and some nice technical benefits..
Fuck, I've put an apostrophe in a plural form. I'll go kill myself or something. Sorry about that, everyone. I thought I was better than that. It's a disease of some sort, a U.S.-based pandemic, no less.