For a human, a skill test is OK, because we already know he's a human, and cities are built around humans. We can expect him to behave in a certain way, and we kind of know his possible range of abilities and limitations, even if not in a formal way.
There's a reason why we require other things, like a minimum age, because being a responsible adult is precondition to the test.
What they are doing right now is different. Still a black box test, but much more comprehensive. They are going to gather so much data that statistics are going to start kicking in, bc they should be able to somewhat "prove" that these cars are safer than regular cars.
That's just not true. Humans, specially urban dwellers, are known to have a certain set of capabilities, in general. Also, they are known to behave in a certain fashion, and to abide by certain rules. For example, a human with tendency to kill everyone in his path, would just not be able to apply for a drivers license, he would be in jail, dead, or something similar. That black box testing is only verifying very specific knowledge and ability. It doesn't do a great job at that, but its task is a lot easier than testing an AI from scratch. You could do that, if there was some "human like" validation test, you could take prior to getting a license.
You make a very interesting point. With automation, it's a lot easier for us to accept a given amount of understandable failure, than a much smaller amount of inexplicable failure. That might be a roadblock against some forms of automation.
In any case, there's also economics, which do like statistics, and will make you choose the strategy that fails less, overall. For example, insurance companies might favour driving algorithms that crash less often vs ones that crash a bit more often, but for better known causes.
Nonsense. Right now policemen are able to stop cars, no device needed. Autonomous cars should be able to match current driver behaviour. There's room for improvement, but they don't need a better solution in all regards, to replace drivers, only to be as good as them.
It's not really that hard for a bad guy to buy a cop costume. Humans can't tell them difference between the police and some random jackass. Also, if a guy is standing in the middle of the road signaling you to stop, you're gonna stop just to not run him over.
I think self-driving cars should be treated as taxis. Just like you can't expect your taxi driver to disobey a cop, nor can you expect your SDC to.
Good point, but that's a driverless taxi, not an autonomous car. An autonomous car would be a car you own and you command, that does what you ask it to do. Like a car, but instead of driving it, you tell it to go places, and override command _whenever_ you want it, not when it's lawful to do so.
I think that autonomous driving will probably be best applied to public transportation, because an automated taxi is a better taxi, while an autonomous car is a lesser car, after you take this kind of things into account.
Yes, that is the definition of undocumented software, when the only documentation is its observed behaviour.
But then you say...
Successfully reading and interpreting a file is one thing. Rendering its contents is another. The Office Open XML format,.docx, is open: ISO/IEC 29500.
No, it's not open. First, OOXML is a sanctioned standard, but it's not open. For example, there is no open reference implementation, only proprietary binaries. Also, and most importantly, msoffice does not implement OOXML completely. Its small differences are what make compatibility a moving target.
About this...
So, the second to best solution is to just acknowledge msoffice is not compatible with other software, so either ditch it completely, or keep it completely. Half assed efforts are doomed to fail from the start.
That is a fine strategy if you are not trying to get people to convert to your app. Blowing off a valid user expectation hurts adoption.
But these guys were not trying to get people to convert to anything. Their job was to provide office productivity software for the city personnel. The hybrid solution was a bad idea, they failed because they tried something that is known not to work.
OpenOffice/LibreOffice guys can work on interoperability as much as they want. That doesn't automatically make it viable as a solution for a big organization.
The problem was unrealistic expectations. They went from an all msoffice operation, to a hybrid one. msoffice is not compatible with anything else. You can migrate away from their formats, but you can't really interoperate with them without a lot of fiddling around. That's costly, and wasn't accounted for in the original planning. Shockingly, it costed time and money.
I did read the article and you are completely mistaken. The problem is OpenOffice's failure at being compatible. If it paginates wrong an OpenOffice developer should fix that. If macros are missing an OpenOffice developer should add those.
OK, but a developer can't "fix" what is not specified. msoffice formats are not specified so that they can be implemented. So that's not something a oo developer would be able to fix by himself.
So, the second to best solution is to just acknowledge msoffice is not compatible with other software, so either ditch it completely, or keep it completely. Half assed efforts are doomed to fail from the start.
Being a government, they can ditch it completely if it makes sense for them. Where I live, there is a law that requires all gov data to be available in open formats, so it's even easier to comply that way.
Governments can just do what's best for their citizens, and tell others to piss off. It's a nice place to start. Remember that governments deal with public data, so they should hold formats to higher standards than private companies. OOXML is just not open enough for government, partly due to the problems exposed in this article. Also, they don't sell stuff, so they don't need their.pptx or.docx to be easy to open for their prospective customers. They can just offer docs and data in open formats.
The problem was unrealistic expectations. They went from an all msoffice operation, to a hybrid one. msoffice is not compatible with anything else. You can migrate away from their formats, but you can't really interoperate with them without a lot of fiddling around. That's costly, and wasn't accounted for in the original planning. Shockingly, it costed time and money.
Ok, I'll bite. This whole story is about msoffice being _incompatible_ with anything but itself, and that issue costing the city a lot of money when trying to have a mixed environment.
This is just another example why their proprietary file formats should never have been approved as a standard, because in practice, they are not interoperable. Also, shows one of the the risks organizations face when using proprietary formats regarding access of information. Once you bite office, you are stuck with them for life, or for the life of your documents, whichever is longest.
"We encountered several hurdles and dysfunctions around the use of specific features," Bruscoli says in the report. "What's more, due to the impossibility of replacing Access and partly Excel (various macros used on tens of files), we decided we had to keep a hybrid solution, using the two systems at the same time. This mix has been devastating," he adds.
They didn't replace MSOffice in the first place, they had a hybrid solution, which was costly, due to compatibility issues. They should have been able to know that beforehand. msoffice doesn't play well with others, it doesn't even implement any standard format. If you absolutely need to use msoffice in some spots, you should forget about interoperating, and just use msoffice everywhere.
I don't like the fact that assholes lead us, but they do. So if you really want to make a splash, you need to either become one, or just learn to work effectively with them.
There are several reasons why most members of the elite come out as assholes, one of them is that it's a trait that just works.
I think it's related to the prisoners dilemma. Society as a whole needs to be cooperative, but assholes thrive in a cooperative environment. The problem for us is that they also rise to power. So, being a good member of society (a good person) collides with leadership, or at least with rising to the top.
Then, there's the "class" issue. Asshole traits are a good indicator of you being part of the elite, so it's easy to cooperate with the elite, if you show you are part of it. That means that you can't just behave like a good person, if you want to make an impact, because the other guys at the top will think you are not one of them, and resist you. So you need at least a fine coating of assholeness, if you want to make an impact.
I don't know the right mix of asshole and good person, but I'm working on it.
Doesn't seem right to me. I don't like Jobs or Apple, but...
There are lots of engineers. As an example, Woz is as good as they get. He was instrumental to Apple's early success. Nonetheless, Woz without Jobs did lots of great stuff, but nothing close to what Jobs achieved when no longer working with him. I think Jobs credit is well deserved. He did make things happen, and his own contribution did at least jumpstart the consumer smartphone industry, among other achievements. It was not a technical feat, it was all him.
I mean, engineers are good, but even when we are not cogs, you might think of them as the engines of innovation and technology. You need engineers, you need great engineers, but no single engineer makes enough of a difference to matter by his own. Maybe Jon Carmack may count as a notable exception, but most of the time, the tech guys are not the ones that make or break a company.
At the end of the day, the guys who steer the companies, seduce the customers and investors are the ones that matter the most and make the most difference. If you are an engineer and you think your vision is somehow better than the guy who runs your products, then you should become a product guy and leave engineering behind.
Cabs are expensive, but most of the expense is paying the driver. Once you get rid of the worker, it gets a lot cheaper. Also, with centralized control, routes can be optimized so the taxis are always driving and carying passengers. It's not slightly cheaper than driving, it can potentially cost an order of magnitude less, and be faster. Where I live, public transport is easily 5-6 times less expensive than driving, combining bus and cab rides, including the labor cost of drivers.
About keeping it clean, and accountability, we are now used to be identified always. The cars can have cameras, and even require an id for you to ride them (they won't be taking cash, after all). There would be abuse, but it would be close to trivial to punish that kind of thing.
If there's vomit in the car, the car should be able to detect that, and go to a cleaning station. In the event that you do get an unsuitable car, you can just reject it. You could even look at a stream of the inside of the car before it gets to your home.
Also, think about the carpooling possibilities. While people don't like sharing space with strangers, price can change some minds.
You don't need to go as far as requiring equal pay. That can be your goal. Knowing salaries is faster, and goes a long way. If you are minority X, face discrimination, and are paid 80k instead of 100k for a white male, it will be hard to get that fixed, but knowing what others make will help you set your goals. Maybe you can get together with others and discover which companies discriminate the most. You might even find out that some company is not discriminating, just pays less to all their employees. Information itself is a very useful tool, and it's actionable right now.
A free market comes with the notion of a price equilibrium. Faster information means faster equilibrium, less room for inefficiencies.
Of course labor market is regulater by government so it's not really a free market. But witholding information from sellers only hurts a free market, as a whole. This makes it effectively a buyers market, which would behave closer to an oligopsony (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopsony). That's inefficient for the market as a whole.
I understand if there were some trademark issue, that they _removed_ yt.com/lush, and replaced it with 301 to yt.com/matthewlush . Replacing the page with something else completely will only harm those who try to access the old link. If the company wants anything, they can get yt.com/lushcosmetics or whatever, but they shouldn't misrepresent their content. Users who have the old link expect the old content, that's what URIs are for.
Breaking links is a bad thing (TM), and google has the knowledge to know that you shouldn't break the web. Not for something this lame, at least.
Fraud is not the main thing here. Uber is paying cab riders bonuses that make riding without passengers profitable. So, they ride without passengers and collect bonuses. Their using fake ids or other illegal is just incidental. Uber itself is probably operating illegally, and nobody cares about that.
Modularity. This is their current situation. Stuff comes in different sized packages, and placement is not perfect. Of course they could get improvements, even for human workers, if stuff came pre-checked, correctly classified and stuff. The thing is that's not their current status. The idea is to get rid of the picking human, without changing anything other than the human. Self driving cars would be easy with the strategy you propose, just build intelligent roads, wired roads with wireless navigation, no people. Close to what a train is. It makes it a lot easier, but it just can't replace all driving, unless you change the whole infrastructure at once.
I don't think he says it's not his fault, even if he were trying to do that. Employees lawsuits might have been what forced them to close, but those lawsuits are his fault also, so no blame was transferred.
I used it in 2007 (VS 2005) and hated it. I hated it even more than I hated it when I programmed for Visual Basic 6, last century, though.
Severely underfeatured text editor, ugly looking, and subject to random lockups.
Of course, at some point they might even end up releasing something usable, but why keep trying? There are lots of IDEs out there, with a better track record.
This is news for nerds. It's a pattern detection strategy that relies on generating waves with input data, interweaving them physically, and using arrays of antennas to detect patterns. That's from the first couple of paragraphs. I don't know a lot of physics, but I am a nerd, and I like this kind of thing, so I can learn about cool stuff. If you don't care about it, you can look at other stories that talk about tesla and bill gates and whatever else. Posting is not mandatory.
I don't want the web to support encryption against users by third parties. Once that is readily available, and accepted by users (read: today), the freedom of users is endangered. You can read a deeper analysis of the consequences of such a situation http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/... When I first read that, it seemed a bit stupid that people would let their freedom go so easily, but now it's closer to real. The implications of DRM are way beyond video, the problem is that once DRM is standard and everywhere, restricting the flow of information becomes a lot more convenient. The web was, for a few years, like the internet itself, it routed around censorship. Right now, everything is heading the other way. It's just sad, looks like we are going to keep loosing freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
That's what the GP proposed.
For a human, a skill test is OK, because we already know he's a human, and cities are built around humans. We can expect him to behave in a certain way, and we kind of know his possible range of abilities and limitations, even if not in a formal way.
There's a reason why we require other things, like a minimum age, because being a responsible adult is precondition to the test.
What they are doing right now is different. Still a black box test, but much more comprehensive. They are going to gather so much data that statistics are going to start kicking in, bc they should be able to somewhat "prove" that these cars are safer than regular cars.
That's just not true.
Humans, specially urban dwellers, are known to have a certain set of capabilities, in general.
Also, they are known to behave in a certain fashion, and to abide by certain rules.
For example, a human with tendency to kill everyone in his path, would just not be able to apply for a drivers license, he would be in jail, dead, or something similar.
That black box testing is only verifying very specific knowledge and ability. It doesn't do a great job at that, but its task is a lot easier than testing an AI from scratch. You could do that, if there was some "human like" validation test, you could take prior to getting a license.
You make a very interesting point.
With automation, it's a lot easier for us to accept a given amount of understandable failure, than a much smaller amount of inexplicable failure. That might be a roadblock against some forms of automation.
In any case, there's also economics, which do like statistics, and will make you choose the strategy that fails less, overall. For example, insurance companies might favour driving algorithms that crash less often vs ones that crash a bit more often, but for better known causes.
Nonsense.
Right now policemen are able to stop cars, no device needed.
Autonomous cars should be able to match current driver behaviour. There's room for improvement, but they don't need a better solution in all regards, to replace drivers, only to be as good as them.
It's not really that hard for a bad guy to buy a cop costume. Humans can't tell them difference between the police and some random jackass. Also, if a guy is standing in the middle of the road signaling you to stop, you're gonna stop just to not run him over.
I think self-driving cars should be treated as taxis. Just like you can't expect your taxi driver to disobey a cop, nor can you expect your SDC to.
Good point, but that's a driverless taxi, not an autonomous car. An autonomous car would be a car you own and you command, that does what you ask it to do. Like a car, but instead of driving it, you tell it to go places, and override command _whenever_ you want it, not when it's lawful to do so.
I think that autonomous driving will probably be best applied to public transportation, because an automated taxi is a better taxi, while an autonomous car is a lesser car, after you take this kind of things into account.
You say:
Sometimes code's behavior is the documentation.
Yes, that is the definition of undocumented software, when the only documentation is its observed behaviour.
But then you say...
Successfully reading and interpreting a file is one thing. Rendering its contents is another. The Office Open XML format, .docx, is open: ISO/IEC 29500.
No, it's not open. First, OOXML is a sanctioned standard, but it's not open. For example, there is no open reference implementation, only proprietary binaries.
Also, and most importantly, msoffice does not implement OOXML completely. Its small differences are what make compatibility a moving target.
About this...
So, the second to best solution is to just acknowledge msoffice is not compatible with other software, so either ditch it completely, or keep it completely. Half assed efforts are doomed to fail from the start.
That is a fine strategy if you are not trying to get people to convert to your app. Blowing off a valid user expectation hurts adoption.
But these guys were not trying to get people to convert to anything. Their job was to provide office productivity software for the city personnel. The hybrid solution was a bad idea, they failed because they tried something that is known not to work.
OpenOffice/LibreOffice guys can work on interoperability as much as they want. That doesn't automatically make it viable as a solution for a big organization.
That, or you can RTFA.
The problem was unrealistic expectations. They went from an all msoffice operation, to a hybrid one.
msoffice is not compatible with anything else. You can migrate away from their formats, but you can't really interoperate with them without a lot of fiddling around.
That's costly, and wasn't accounted for in the original planning. Shockingly, it costed time and money.
I did read the article and you are completely mistaken. The problem is OpenOffice's failure at being compatible. If it paginates wrong an OpenOffice developer should fix that. If macros are missing an OpenOffice developer should add those.
OK, but a developer can't "fix" what is not specified. msoffice formats are not specified so that they can be implemented. So that's not something a oo developer would be able to fix by himself.
So, the second to best solution is to just acknowledge msoffice is not compatible with other software, so either ditch it completely, or keep it completely. Half assed efforts are doomed to fail from the start.
Being a government, they can ditch it completely if it makes sense for them. Where I live, there is a law that requires all gov data to be available in open formats, so it's even easier to comply that way.
Governments can just do what's best for their citizens, and tell others to piss off. .pptx or .docx to be easy to open for their prospective customers. They can just offer docs and data in open formats.
It's a nice place to start.
Remember that governments deal with public data, so they should hold formats to higher standards than private companies. OOXML is just not open enough for government, partly due to the problems exposed in this article.
Also, they don't sell stuff, so they don't need their
That, or you can RTFA.
The problem was unrealistic expectations. They went from an all msoffice operation, to a hybrid one.
msoffice is not compatible with anything else. You can migrate away from their formats, but you can't really interoperate with them without a lot of fiddling around.
That's costly, and wasn't accounted for in the original planning. Shockingly, it costed time and money.
Ok, I'll bite.
This whole story is about msoffice being _incompatible_ with anything but itself, and that issue costing the city a lot of money when trying to have a mixed environment.
This is just another example why their proprietary file formats should never have been approved as a standard, because in practice, they are not interoperable. Also, shows one of the the risks organizations face when using proprietary formats regarding access of information. Once you bite office, you are stuck with them for life, or for the life of your documents, whichever is longest.
From TFA:
They didn't replace MSOffice in the first place, they had a hybrid solution, which was costly, due to compatibility issues. They should have been able to know that beforehand. msoffice doesn't play well with others, it doesn't even implement any standard format. If you absolutely need to use msoffice in some spots, you should forget about interoperating, and just use msoffice everywhere.
Sorry for taking so long to see your comment.
I don't embrace it, I just understand it.
I don't like the fact that assholes lead us, but they do. So if you really want to make a splash, you need to either become one, or just learn to work effectively with them.
There are several reasons why most members of the elite come out as assholes, one of them is that it's a trait that just works.
I think it's related to the prisoners dilemma. Society as a whole needs to be cooperative, but assholes thrive in a cooperative environment. The problem for us is that they also rise to power. So, being a good member of society (a good person) collides with leadership, or at least with rising to the top.
Then, there's the "class" issue. Asshole traits are a good indicator of you being part of the elite, so it's easy to cooperate with the elite, if you show you are part of it. That means that you can't just behave like a good person, if you want to make an impact, because the other guys at the top will think you are not one of them, and resist you. So you need at least a fine coating of assholeness, if you want to make an impact.
I don't know the right mix of asshole and good person, but I'm working on it.
Doesn't seem right to me.
I don't like Jobs or Apple, but...
There are lots of engineers. As an example, Woz is as good as they get. He was instrumental to Apple's early success.
Nonetheless, Woz without Jobs did lots of great stuff, but nothing close to what Jobs achieved when no longer working with him. I think Jobs credit is well deserved. He did make things happen, and his own contribution did at least jumpstart the consumer smartphone industry, among other achievements. It was not a technical feat, it was all him.
I mean, engineers are good, but even when we are not cogs, you might think of them as the engines of innovation and technology. You need engineers, you need great engineers, but no single engineer makes enough of a difference to matter by his own. Maybe Jon Carmack may count as a notable exception, but most of the time, the tech guys are not the ones that make or break a company.
At the end of the day, the guys who steer the companies, seduce the customers and investors are the ones that matter the most and make the most difference. If you are an engineer and you think your vision is somehow better than the guy who runs your products, then you should become a product guy and leave engineering behind.
I think the point is price.
Cabs are expensive, but most of the expense is paying the driver. Once you get rid of the worker, it gets a lot cheaper.
Also, with centralized control, routes can be optimized so the taxis are always driving and carying passengers.
It's not slightly cheaper than driving, it can potentially cost an order of magnitude less, and be faster.
Where I live, public transport is easily 5-6 times less expensive than driving, combining bus and cab rides, including the labor cost of drivers.
About keeping it clean, and accountability, we are now used to be identified always. The cars can have cameras, and even require an id for you to ride them (they won't be taking cash, after all). There would be abuse, but it would be close to trivial to punish that kind of thing.
If there's vomit in the car, the car should be able to detect that, and go to a cleaning station. In the event that you do get an unsuitable car, you can just reject it. You could even look at a stream of the inside of the car before it gets to your home.
Also, think about the carpooling possibilities. While people don't like sharing space with strangers, price can change some minds.
You don't need to go as far as requiring equal pay. That can be your goal.
Knowing salaries is faster, and goes a long way.
If you are minority X, face discrimination, and are paid 80k instead of 100k for a white male, it will be hard to get that fixed, but knowing what others make will help you set your goals. Maybe you can get together with others and discover which companies discriminate the most. You might even find out that some company is not discriminating, just pays less to all their employees. Information itself is a very useful tool, and it's actionable right now.
A free market comes with the notion of a price equilibrium. Faster information means faster equilibrium, less room for inefficiencies.
Of course labor market is regulater by government so it's not really a free market. But witholding information from sellers only hurts a free market, as a whole. This makes it effectively a buyers market, which would behave closer to an oligopsony (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopsony). That's inefficient for the market as a whole.
I understand if there were some trademark issue, that they _removed_ yt.com/lush, and replaced it with 301 to yt.com/matthewlush . Replacing the page with something else completely will only harm those who try to access the old link. If the company wants anything, they can get yt.com/lushcosmetics or whatever, but they shouldn't misrepresent their content. Users who have the old link expect the old content, that's what URIs are for.
Breaking links is a bad thing (TM), and google has the knowledge to know that you shouldn't break the web. Not for something this lame, at least.
You would need unions to succeed in that kind of change.
Good luck promoting that idea.
Fraud is not the main thing here.
Uber is paying cab riders bonuses that make riding without passengers profitable. So, they ride without passengers and collect bonuses. Their using fake ids or other illegal is just incidental. Uber itself is probably operating illegally, and nobody cares about that.
Modularity.
This is their current situation. Stuff comes in different sized packages, and placement is not perfect.
Of course they could get improvements, even for human workers, if stuff came pre-checked, correctly classified and stuff. The thing is that's not their current status. The idea is to get rid of the picking human, without changing anything other than the human.
Self driving cars would be easy with the strategy you propose, just build intelligent roads, wired roads with wireless navigation, no people. Close to what a train is. It makes it a lot easier, but it just can't replace all driving, unless you change the whole infrastructure at once.
I don't think he says it's not his fault, even if he were trying to do that.
Employees lawsuits might have been what forced them to close, but those lawsuits are his fault also, so no blame was transferred.
I used it in 2007 (VS 2005) and hated it. I hated it even more than I hated it when I programmed for Visual Basic 6, last century, though.
Severely underfeatured text editor, ugly looking, and subject to random lockups.
Of course, at some point they might even end up releasing something usable, but why keep trying? There are lots of IDEs out there, with a better track record.
I've been getting spam about that for years now!
This is news for nerds.
It's a pattern detection strategy that relies on generating waves with input data, interweaving them physically, and using arrays of antennas to detect patterns.
That's from the first couple of paragraphs.
I don't know a lot of physics, but I am a nerd, and I like this kind of thing, so I can learn about cool stuff.
If you don't care about it, you can look at other stories that talk about tesla and bill gates and whatever else. Posting is not mandatory.
I don't want the web to support encryption against users by third parties.
Once that is readily available, and accepted by users (read: today), the freedom of users is endangered.
You can read a deeper analysis of the consequences of such a situation http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/...
When I first read that, it seemed a bit stupid that people would let their freedom go so easily, but now it's closer to real. The implications of DRM are way beyond video, the problem is that once DRM is standard and everywhere, restricting the flow of information becomes a lot more convenient.
The web was, for a few years, like the internet itself, it routed around censorship. Right now, everything is heading the other way. It's just sad, looks like we are going to keep loosing freedom.