Sonofabitch. I wish I'd know that (address) ten years ago. I spent so many years either directly connected on a managed network or, [shudder] on dialup w/o a modem, I'd never even though to look to see what IP the WAN port was using. Learn something new every day. Thank you, sir.
The problem is that they aren't always obscure. Even people I'd like to get updates from - just not have them as half of my freaking feed. And the everything or nothing switch is not really useful.
The tablet I currently use has more power than the ~100 watt, 4 (physical) core i7 processor in my 5 year old tower. It's not the hardware, it's the proliferation of ads with video content and web site developers who think that a 5-8MB download on a single web page is "fast".
The masterful (/s) algorithm for post visibility is skewed against personal updates. Based on the shit that's on my feed it's the stupid-ass memes that people post which seem to get play, and personal updates show up rarely, or several hours/days late. They should be running all those images through TinEye and if there's a hit, that post gets pushed to the background. If they constantly reward worthless content, they're going to get more and more of it. I wish there was a manual +/- on your friends so that if, by chance, you intentionally (or unintentionally) clicked on one story posted by that obscure guy you met at some conference, you wouldn't automatically be bombarded with his next 100 useless memes and radical political posts.
The T in LGBT is Transgender. Transgender means actually, physically modifying your sexual organs and hormones to take on the physical characteristics of the sex with which they identify. You're thinking of transvestites which dress in the clothes of the opposite sex.
And this isn't blackmail. This is libertarian capitalism. In a deliciously irony, the sex-fearing protestants who selectively quote libertarian principles like the do from the Bible, are appalled that the corporate bastions of money-makes-right would side against the moral fiber that they think founded this country - much as the liberals who often hate corporations for having too much say in the discourse of politics.
You're thinking of entropy, which must always increase. Sadly, you're elementary level understanding completely misses the complexity of a system of the size of the earth, which can easily allow entropy to increase while allowing the *apparent* contradiction of cold areas getting colder and warm areas getting warmer. The earth functions on a scale which means that low entropy conditions are required for current patterns to continue. By increasing entropy those patterns (ocean currents) may be disrupted. Of course it means nothing to the planet as a whole, but humans - and the myriad resources they require for survival - occupy an exceedingly narrow range of conditions that support life, universally speaking. A small shift her or there won't change whether this planet exists for another billion years, but it's likely to change the duration that human life can be supported in the numbers which currently exist.
Last time I looked at it, it was a pita to use. IFTTT watches my Dropbox for images to appear in a particular folder (the auto-storage for my desktop business card scanner), picks them up, transfers them to a specific notebook in my Evernote account, then deletes the image in the original location. Took all of 2 minutes to set up. I can't say that for anything I've ever tried to get Tasker to do on my Phone.
No, the submitter has 3rd grade reading comprehension skills and an agenda. And it's in the summary which suggests that software was available, TFA quote is actually "Commercial software products would be a better option for NASA as well, according to the audit, especially given recent advances in the area." Note the use of future tense, not past unreal conditional. IOW, it still might be more economical at this point, but it wasn't an option when the project was started.
The commercial firms which are servicing the space program had never delivered a payload to orbit at the time of the original design specification and plan, and had no tested software at the time. NASA, otoh, had subroutines already written which had been tested and vetted for decades, over hundreds, if not thousands, of successful launches and NASA wanted to use those [tested] routines in their new launch control system. The contract was to put them all together into a cohesive whole. Not a trivial task, but also not writing from scratch.
More importantly there is no COTS software in this arena. This is not Word with a custom skin. This is piece by piece built based on the unique hardware and control systems which are part of the critical safety path of the launch sequence. Even if SpaceX or another space transport company has software they use, it would have to be stripped, rebuilt, and re-tested for the configuration at the KSC launch complex to be used for these flights.
The "outsource everything" mantra of the 80s is still with us. It doesn't say in the article, but most of the work done by NASA is actually performed by outside contractors, and wI would bet a dollar that this is the work of USA (United Space Alliance - aka Lockheed and Martin Marietta) or one of the other giant government contractors like CSC or Booz. It may be NASAs project, but congress pretty much has gutted the real workforce so everything merely has project managers rather than actual engineers.
As for the submitter's (and, to some extent, the article writer's) take, I think they got it backwards. This project was started BEFORE there was any commercial launches of significance and so the code simply didn't exist for a robust launch control system as envisioned. The article does point out that there is more software available today, and that it could be an option. OTOH, we're talking about proprietary code from one of two competing firms with no outside review of the codebase. That's fine for putting up a couple of tons of food and electronics, but a private company has yet to successfully, reliably put humans into earth orbit. And that kind of responsibility is an order of magnitude higher than supplies.
It very well might. Still, as far as reliability goes, it pretty much beats anything I have. At a penny a day, give or take, that's a fair trade for longevity and durability. And at 4W (assuming isn't drawing more than its rated current), it's "Wasting" no more than the power supply to the docking station on my desk *when it's off*.
You could say this about phones, too, but it would be just as invalid. The real problem with upgradability is that it imposes a new set of constraints on the future design. The display and drive circuitry (and the power draw) are fixed, as is the working envelope of the device. The means you have a device which will be heavier, thicker, and less efficient than something which comes of the line. You also have to design in end-user replaceable parts, which means more thickness, weight and complexity. And if you're wrong on any part of the main device - like interface/physUI or display tech or charge method - you've destroyed al the extra cost you've put into the system.
Digital devices are now disposable items. There is no endgame because the changes are too rapid. Unlike my alarm clock on my nightstand, which I've had for 30 years and still functions perfectly without a single upgrade since I took it out of the box.
like who is better at kissing up to the boss. (I would think women would be better than men at that... why aren't they paid more?)
Because women, on the whole, don't go out drinking and golfing with their bosses, or play pick-up hoops, or root for the same football/baseball/hockey/basketball team (or any team for that matter), or any number of other manly things which put you on a personal basis with the boss. The best programmer in the world will make their own career, but for everyone in the middle 90% it's about who you and how you connect inter-personally than what your output is.
OTOH, if there's a 28% average pay gap, and fresh-outs are making similar wages, it means that all of the women with experience have an even greater pay gap. It sounds like hiring new female grads isn't a bargain, but those with 10 years of experience should be an absolute steal.
Could it be that women are attracted to jobs with lower pay and more flexible workplace rules and benefits - benefits which have value that is not quantifiable in dollar terms?
Tablet w/ LTE + Keyboard + Pencil = $1000 - and that's the small version with less memory than most flagship smartphones. But, hey, if you can sell as many as you can make, why the fuck not, right?
Supersonic transport is not electronics. Yes, you single handedly fixed/solved issues which [other] people created in just 5 months. Flying (significantly) supersonic requires that you fix/solve actual physics. Solving one part of this project puzzle may very well be accomplished in just a couple of months, but you're talking about hundreds or thousands of individual tasks which have to be solved, all of them simultaneously, and if you get it wrong people will die.
Juggling with 3 balls is one thing. Juggling a dozen double sided, razor sharp knives without handles between a 4 people is more than 4x as hard. Having a 20 month-to-flight schedule would be a near impossibility. For comparison, Burt Rutan - one of (if not the) top advanced aircraft designers in the world (if not in history) started idea development for SpaceShipOne in 1994. The full time, privately funded, fast-track development started three years prior to the first supersonic test flight.
20 months shows that they don't even know what they don't know yet.
Oh, he has a plan - he just can't quite afford it right now. Automation costs money, but it costs less and less every year. He's hoping to put off moving to automation until it's even cheaper, and to do that he needs lower wages. It is about money, but it's not about any long term human job prospects.
With government driving up the cost of labor, it's driving down the number of jobs
That's what he wants to make this about, but in reality his actual reasons for using robotics are
They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case
Which has nothing to do with the cost of the labor and everything to do with the repeatability and efficiency of the employee. I'm betting that, for the right money, you could get an employee to fit almost every one of those. But on the whole, it's not that employees are getting more expensive, in real dollars, but rather than AI and robotics which can do these jobs better than people - per his own words - is getting cheaper than the cost of an employee. It's not if people get replaced but when. The only thing that changes is the exact spot in time where the curves cross.
This happened in the industrial revolution when mechanical devices took over automatable tasks. It's just that it's coming for a different class of worker this time.
The end of the world? blending conversational interfaces with rich graphical UI elements is scary? I suppose it depends how you use it.
Yes, I realize that we are in a sort of difficult period in computing. There are still a lot of us that remember learning programming as kids, and it was high tech and new - and the only way to interact with computers. And yet there is a huge percentage of people under 24 which have absolutely no idea how technology works; I'd put them in a lower class than my mother who is in her 70s. She realizes that she has no idea how it works and that bothers her. Where as the 22 year old (real person) who doesn't understand what has gone wrong when the email on his computer isn't sync'd with his phone simply decides not to use the computer anymore for email, and figures he'll buy a new one someday and that will probably fix it.
We're going back to the 1970s, folks. These bots (what a horrible name) will bring back the historic travel agency model, where you are steered towards what you are looking for, and you just have to hope and trust that the agent handing you glossy brochures knows what the fuck they're doing and isn't screwing you on the price. If there's enough competition that the prices stay mostly in parity with keyboard-based bookings, it will simply be one more separation of the tech from the user. AI for the win. Or it could be like modern advertising on the web, and anyone who has a clue does their best to block out as much of it as possible because nearly all of it is predatory.
800km is a pretty far cry from the 9000km range on the graphic. And scaling up isn't all that easy to do, much less include a payload of significant mass.
I presume you have your single, digital version on a USB device or other machine-readable, portable format which you keep in your possession. How big is the key? Is it less than 8000 characters? Print two copies out on acid free paper and put them in two safety deposit boxes in banks in different cities - one local, and one remote. In the local SDB, also place a digitally readable version on a USB key.
In order to lose your key, you would need to have a physical disaster which simultaneously destroys two separate physical structures beyond recovery at the same time your personal key is lost or destroyed. If your key fails or is destroyed, you have a backup key which you can copy quickly from the local SDB from which to make a spare. If that key is bad, or if the local branch is destroyed in the cataclysm while your personal key is gone, you still have a paper copy which you can enter by hand. An 8000 character key should be enterable in under 2 hours, even with careful entry. And, lets be honest, what is 2 hours - or even 4 - if you're talking about the security of your data. And, no I'm not being sarcastic - you can travel to a remote SDB 100 miles away, retrieve the key (which can be photocopied locally and then redeposited), return to your office, enter the key and decrypt your data in less than one working day. Expand that to 400 miles and it's still retrievable in a long day by car (and who hasn't worked a 16 hour IT day before) and you're looking at avoiding nearly every natural or man made disaster in modern history.
This method is slightly inconvenient, but not excessively so, and yet *very* robust in terms of privacy, security, and retrievability.
Slashdot Mirror
Sonofabitch. I wish I'd know that (address) ten years ago. I spent so many years either directly connected on a managed network or, [shudder] on dialup w/o a modem, I'd never even though to look to see what IP the WAN port was using. Learn something new every day. Thank you, sir.
The problem is that they aren't always obscure. Even people I'd like to get updates from - just not have them as half of my freaking feed. And the everything or nothing switch is not really useful.
The tablet I currently use has more power than the ~100 watt, 4 (physical) core i7 processor in my 5 year old tower. It's not the hardware, it's the proliferation of ads with video content and web site developers who think that a 5-8MB download on a single web page is "fast".
The masterful (/s) algorithm for post visibility is skewed against personal updates. Based on the shit that's on my feed it's the stupid-ass memes that people post which seem to get play, and personal updates show up rarely, or several hours/days late. They should be running all those images through TinEye and if there's a hit, that post gets pushed to the background. If they constantly reward worthless content, they're going to get more and more of it. I wish there was a manual +/- on your friends so that if, by chance, you intentionally (or unintentionally) clicked on one story posted by that obscure guy you met at some conference, you wouldn't automatically be bombarded with his next 100 useless memes and radical political posts.
OTOH, depending on how big the code base is and how much the "rogue nations" are willing to pay for it, it might be worth a ground-up re-write.
The T in LGBT is Transgender. Transgender means actually, physically modifying your sexual organs and hormones to take on the physical characteristics of the sex with which they identify. You're thinking of transvestites which dress in the clothes of the opposite sex.
And this isn't blackmail. This is libertarian capitalism. In a deliciously irony, the sex-fearing protestants who selectively quote libertarian principles like the do from the Bible, are appalled that the corporate bastions of money-makes-right would side against the moral fiber that they think founded this country - much as the liberals who often hate corporations for having too much say in the discourse of politics.
He didn't say if it was the short half or the long half.
You're thinking of entropy, which must always increase. Sadly, you're elementary level understanding completely misses the complexity of a system of the size of the earth, which can easily allow entropy to increase while allowing the *apparent* contradiction of cold areas getting colder and warm areas getting warmer. The earth functions on a scale which means that low entropy conditions are required for current patterns to continue. By increasing entropy those patterns (ocean currents) may be disrupted. Of course it means nothing to the planet as a whole, but humans - and the myriad resources they require for survival - occupy an exceedingly narrow range of conditions that support life, universally speaking. A small shift her or there won't change whether this planet exists for another billion years, but it's likely to change the duration that human life can be supported in the numbers which currently exist.
Tasker works without Android?
Last time I looked at it, it was a pita to use. IFTTT watches my Dropbox for images to appear in a particular folder (the auto-storage for my desktop business card scanner), picks them up, transfers them to a specific notebook in my Evernote account, then deletes the image in the original location. Took all of 2 minutes to set up. I can't say that for anything I've ever tried to get Tasker to do on my Phone.
No, the submitter has 3rd grade reading comprehension skills and an agenda. And it's in the summary which suggests that software was available, TFA quote is actually "Commercial software products would be a better option for NASA as well, according to the audit, especially given recent advances in the area." Note the use of future tense, not past unreal conditional. IOW, it still might be more economical at this point, but it wasn't an option when the project was started.
The commercial firms which are servicing the space program had never delivered a payload to orbit at the time of the original design specification and plan, and had no tested software at the time. NASA, otoh, had subroutines already written which had been tested and vetted for decades, over hundreds, if not thousands, of successful launches and NASA wanted to use those [tested] routines in their new launch control system. The contract was to put them all together into a cohesive whole. Not a trivial task, but also not writing from scratch.
More importantly there is no COTS software in this arena. This is not Word with a custom skin. This is piece by piece built based on the unique hardware and control systems which are part of the critical safety path of the launch sequence. Even if SpaceX or another space transport company has software they use, it would have to be stripped, rebuilt, and re-tested for the configuration at the KSC launch complex to be used for these flights.
The "outsource everything" mantra of the 80s is still with us. It doesn't say in the article, but most of the work done by NASA is actually performed by outside contractors, and wI would bet a dollar that this is the work of USA (United Space Alliance - aka Lockheed and Martin Marietta) or one of the other giant government contractors like CSC or Booz. It may be NASAs project, but congress pretty much has gutted the real workforce so everything merely has project managers rather than actual engineers.
As for the submitter's (and, to some extent, the article writer's) take, I think they got it backwards. This project was started BEFORE there was any commercial launches of significance and so the code simply didn't exist for a robust launch control system as envisioned. The article does point out that there is more software available today, and that it could be an option. OTOH, we're talking about proprietary code from one of two competing firms with no outside review of the codebase. That's fine for putting up a couple of tons of food and electronics, but a private company has yet to successfully, reliably put humans into earth orbit. And that kind of responsibility is an order of magnitude higher than supplies.
Rehabilitation is explicitly not part of the job of US prisons.
Hmm...maybe it should be?
It very well might. Still, as far as reliability goes, it pretty much beats anything I have. At a penny a day, give or take, that's a fair trade for longevity and durability. And at 4W (assuming isn't drawing more than its rated current), it's "Wasting" no more than the power supply to the docking station on my desk *when it's off*.
You could say this about phones, too, but it would be just as invalid. The real problem with upgradability is that it imposes a new set of constraints on the future design. The display and drive circuitry (and the power draw) are fixed, as is the working envelope of the device. The means you have a device which will be heavier, thicker, and less efficient than something which comes of the line. You also have to design in end-user replaceable parts, which means more thickness, weight and complexity. And if you're wrong on any part of the main device - like interface/physUI or display tech or charge method - you've destroyed al the extra cost you've put into the system.
Digital devices are now disposable items. There is no endgame because the changes are too rapid. Unlike my alarm clock on my nightstand, which I've had for 30 years and still functions perfectly without a single upgrade since I took it out of the box.
like who is better at kissing up to the boss. (I would think women would be better than men at that... why aren't they paid more?)
Because women, on the whole, don't go out drinking and golfing with their bosses, or play pick-up hoops, or root for the same football/baseball/hockey/basketball team (or any team for that matter), or any number of other manly things which put you on a personal basis with the boss. The best programmer in the world will make their own career, but for everyone in the middle 90% it's about who you and how you connect inter-personally than what your output is.
OTOH, if there's a 28% average pay gap, and fresh-outs are making similar wages, it means that all of the women with experience have an even greater pay gap. It sounds like hiring new female grads isn't a bargain, but those with 10 years of experience should be an absolute steal.
Could it be that women are attracted to jobs with lower pay and more flexible workplace rules and benefits - benefits which have value that is not quantifiable in dollar terms?
Tablet w/ LTE + Keyboard + Pencil = $1000 - and that's the small version with less memory than most flagship smartphones. But, hey, if you can sell as many as you can make, why the fuck not, right?
I see you've never dealt with obtaining a contiguous stretch of land from thousands (or tens of thousands) of landowners.
Supersonic transport is not electronics. Yes, you single handedly fixed/solved issues which [other] people created in just 5 months. Flying (significantly) supersonic requires that you fix/solve actual physics. Solving one part of this project puzzle may very well be accomplished in just a couple of months, but you're talking about hundreds or thousands of individual tasks which have to be solved, all of them simultaneously, and if you get it wrong people will die.
Juggling with 3 balls is one thing. Juggling a dozen double sided, razor sharp knives without handles between a 4 people is more than 4x as hard. Having a 20 month-to-flight schedule would be a near impossibility. For comparison, Burt Rutan - one of (if not the) top advanced aircraft designers in the world (if not in history) started idea development for SpaceShipOne in 1994. The full time, privately funded, fast-track development started three years prior to the first supersonic test flight.
20 months shows that they don't even know what they don't know yet.
"which means he doesn't have a plan"
Oh, he has a plan - he just can't quite afford it right now. Automation costs money, but it costs less and less every year. He's hoping to put off moving to automation until it's even cheaper, and to do that he needs lower wages. It is about money, but it's not about any long term human job prospects.
With government driving up the cost of labor, it's driving down the number of jobs
That's what he wants to make this about, but in reality his actual reasons for using robotics are
They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case
Which has nothing to do with the cost of the labor and everything to do with the repeatability and efficiency of the employee. I'm betting that, for the right money, you could get an employee to fit almost every one of those. But on the whole, it's not that employees are getting more expensive, in real dollars, but rather than AI and robotics which can do these jobs better than people - per his own words - is getting cheaper than the cost of an employee. It's not if people get replaced but when. The only thing that changes is the exact spot in time where the curves cross.
This happened in the industrial revolution when mechanical devices took over automatable tasks. It's just that it's coming for a different class of worker this time.
The end of the world? blending conversational interfaces with rich graphical UI elements is scary? I suppose it depends how you use it.
Yes, I realize that we are in a sort of difficult period in computing. There are still a lot of us that remember learning programming as kids, and it was high tech and new - and the only way to interact with computers. And yet there is a huge percentage of people under 24 which have absolutely no idea how technology works; I'd put them in a lower class than my mother who is in her 70s. She realizes that she has no idea how it works and that bothers her. Where as the 22 year old (real person) who doesn't understand what has gone wrong when the email on his computer isn't sync'd with his phone simply decides not to use the computer anymore for email, and figures he'll buy a new one someday and that will probably fix it.
We're going back to the 1970s, folks. These bots (what a horrible name) will bring back the historic travel agency model, where you are steered towards what you are looking for, and you just have to hope and trust that the agent handing you glossy brochures knows what the fuck they're doing and isn't screwing you on the price. If there's enough competition that the prices stay mostly in parity with keyboard-based bookings, it will simply be one more separation of the tech from the user. AI for the win. Or it could be like modern advertising on the web, and anyone who has a clue does their best to block out as much of it as possible because nearly all of it is predatory.
800km is a pretty far cry from the 9000km range on the graphic. And scaling up isn't all that easy to do, much less include a payload of significant mass.
I presume you have your single, digital version on a USB device or other machine-readable, portable format which you keep in your possession. How big is the key? Is it less than 8000 characters? Print two copies out on acid free paper and put them in two safety deposit boxes in banks in different cities - one local, and one remote. In the local SDB, also place a digitally readable version on a USB key.
In order to lose your key, you would need to have a physical disaster which simultaneously destroys two separate physical structures beyond recovery at the same time your personal key is lost or destroyed. If your key fails or is destroyed, you have a backup key which you can copy quickly from the local SDB from which to make a spare. If that key is bad, or if the local branch is destroyed in the cataclysm while your personal key is gone, you still have a paper copy which you can enter by hand. An 8000 character key should be enterable in under 2 hours, even with careful entry. And, lets be honest, what is 2 hours - or even 4 - if you're talking about the security of your data. And, no I'm not being sarcastic - you can travel to a remote SDB 100 miles away, retrieve the key (which can be photocopied locally and then redeposited), return to your office, enter the key and decrypt your data in less than one working day. Expand that to 400 miles and it's still retrievable in a long day by car (and who hasn't worked a 16 hour IT day before) and you're looking at avoiding nearly every natural or man made disaster in modern history.
This method is slightly inconvenient, but not excessively so, and yet *very* robust in terms of privacy, security, and retrievability.
Okay, maybe it's not official, but I expect Netcraft to confirm it any day now.