I can't believe you actually wrote all of that. I can't believe that you wrote all of that, 20 minutes after I child-posted that it was a joke. I was so certain it was blatently ridulous, I decided to omit the smiley.
Hey, you aren't my brother-in-law, are you? No, of course not...he'd probably still be thinking it was a good idea.
You know, like a set of Shure E3cs that just connect to each other, with all the memory and battery built in. Now that would be cool. And much closer to nano sized.
Guess I'll have to wait for the iPod Pico or Femto before my wish comes true.
He makes two partitions, uses 250GB for his working drive, and then uses ghost to mirror it to the second partition every couple of months. How can you lose?
What you forgot to ask is how his tech savvy cousin (who also does taxidermy and accounting) makes it faster, larger, and redundant. In that case he makes 7 partitions and uses software to do a raid5 setup over the first 6 partitions, using the last one as parity. 428GB with a perfect, online safety net. Pretty smart, huh?
...that with every order will come with two strippers to entertain you while you set the machine up. I mean, c'mon, Taco, if you're gonna give us a nerd hard-on, at least include something naughty, too.
Actually, there is a minor correlation. The larger the energy storage container is, the larger the vehicle must be. That generally results in increases in mass and volume, reducing the efficiency due to increased internal component friction and wind resistance (with regenerative breaking and/or coasting down hill w/o brakes, some losses of lifting more mass up a hill are effectively recovered).
The ohter part is practicality. It's a marketing issue for electric cars - you have to drive a large vehicle, or one with no storage space in order to fit the batteries in for a long journey.
Much of this will disappate if the cost per mile is sufficiently low. That's the real driver, not the actual energy efficiency. Unless you're a hard-core tree hugger, the efficiency of the process will pale in comparison to the cost. If you could make the pellets hold twice as much for the same energy cost, but the dollar cost was 1.5x based on the driven mile, would you buy the more expensive product? (Realise that the efficiency will not produce a vehicle with double the range, as the "tank" for these high efficiency pellets will be made smaller, just as it is is gasoline cars)
Geez, it's like that stupid game you played in grade school where a whispered phrase went around the room, and was almost totally different by the time it had gone through 15-20 people.
The article subtitle meat is "...the world's first hard disk drive/DVD recorder that can store one terabyte of data..."
Is there really that little space in/. titles that you can't add "HDD"? "Terabyte HDD / DVD recorder combo box." There, now that wasn't so hard.
As for the dupe, does it count if the first post on it was vaporware?
It's like anything else...the more safe you make it, the more complacent we will become. I'm convinced that each person has a risk tolerance band, rather than a limit. They will do foolish things to stay above the "minimum risk" line while still staying below the "maximum risk" line. They will also endeavor to raise the lower limit, proving a perceived reduction in risk. This creates a sort of risk-instability, in which the drive to maximize your "return" (aka, stay above your minimum risk)puts you perilously close to your maximum risk line and results in catastrophic failures rather than minor, progresive ones.
I probably shouldn't have used "return" above, as you might think I'm referring to financial investing. I'm not. A return would be to reduce your commute time by 2-5 minutes, allowing you to sleep a bit later. The risk you add is driving faster and closer to the car in front of you than conditions would otherwise permit because you have ABS and air bags. Or reducing the effort required to mow the lawn by getting a self-propelled lawnmower, and then using a velcro strap to lock it in the "on" position so you can mow one-handed, closer to that steep hillside, increasing the chance that you and the (locked-on mower) will careen down the bank, cutting out chunks of your [insert appendage here] and destroying your neighbor's [insert anything valuable here].
The corallary to that should be: "and the capitalist will sell it to you for ninety-eight cents."
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Damnit, how am I supposed to post to slashdot and get my job done if I have to sit here and hit reload twenty times to post the three comments I want. Sheesh.
It is very true. I find that I need two part vacations, though. About six to eight days of all-out fun & sun followed by about two days of hanging around the house and getting little details and annoyances fixed is enough to really let me concentrate at work. That is, until the stress and bits of unfinished projects at home pile up again.
You think surfing the web doesn't require a network? Hell, thats what our corporate network is used mostly for! Oh, networking, right.
Well, to be quite honest, surfing (web, that is) and golfing are two entirely different wastes of time. Now, if you were to compare surfing the web with browsing trade rags or the Wal Street Journal every morning as you grab that first cup of jo, you'd be more on target.
Golf is a social activity for nearly the entire group*, akin with hanging out at the local bar** for a beer...for 4 and a half hours. It's a bonding experience for the participants, and does gove you a chance to get a little insight into the other people you're playing with. Casual clothes, first name basis conversations, personal anecdotes (real or imagined) all make for a personal connection. Typically, it has little impact on your business unless you happen to be a president or well-placed VP. Otherwise, it's an oppotunity to forge personal relationships for personal gain. When you had all lifetime employees and pensions, those personal gains were corporate gains as well, but with the time-in-job for good people dropping to 2-5 years, those personal connections are really just a way to enrich the employee without any benfit to the company, on whose time you're "putting for bird" after taking a mulligan on your OB tee shot.
*exceptions exist - lobbiests working congressmen is a case where only 1/2 the group will be loafing.
Hope you never need to work in a classified environment. In that case its not a company thing, but a national security thing. And, no, humans as a group cannot be trusted.
The miss rate matters. It matters because you'll never get a duplicated hit rate - one where both the system and the lifeguard recognized the problem in-time/simultaneously (i.e. - the system wan't needed). The false hit rate also matters, as lifeguards are human, and will fall prey to the cry wolf syndrome over time if the false positive rate is too high.
I do think the system is worth it. I also think it's been overrated by its marketers, and will continue to believe so until I see more complete data.
Yes, I was a lifeguard, and a lifeguard instructor, back when I was younger. I would have liked to have this system. Now that I'm older and, presumably, wiser I would like it twice as much. Why? Two sets of eyes are better than one, even if one set is digital. I would never fogive myself if I lost a child at a pool simply because I didn't happen to notice one of them slip under the surface and get lost in the commotion of a really busy summer pool day.
We played games like this when I was a little kid. You know, jump in and pretend you're dead, sinking slowly to the bottom, then lying there until you have to come up for air. With this system, it would gie a false positive. Lifeguards are tuned to see progressive problems, and to filter out as much play as possible. This girl might have been pulled out by the guard anyway, or it could have taken an extra 30 seconds to a couple of minutes to register that she wasn't just playing.
4 people is pretty slow, so shes more likely to have been pulled out "in time" without the system. I think the marketing pimp was a bit sensational with his "one more minute" claim, but if it bought this girl 30 seconds, it was probably worth it.
I didn't see any mention of the "miss" rate on this system.
The article says 8 UK pools (one save). 100 pools worldwide for a total of 5 saves.
11.8M/5 = 2.25M per life, assuming all systems stop working today. That's a steep price - probably close to a jury award.
If you'll grant me 1000 total patrons per pool, I get about $118/patron for the system. Not too bad, quite honestly. The question is: would pool management feel that they could reduce lifeguards if they bought this system? That might reduce the overall effectiveness. The whole false send of security thing.
One thing that wan't mentioned is the loss rate at those pools. Have they missed any drownings in that time?
The video is a bit surreal. After the fact (having a three year old daughter myself), $118k is a small fraction of what it would be worth. Every penny I've ever made, and every penny I'll make for the rest of my life is a bit closer, but probably still on the low side.
For pool management, though, you have to decide what your risk tolerance is. It's a dollars game for them. Kind of sick, really. But practical. No neighborhood pool, or one with only human lifeguards.
Personally, it would be nice to see the price come down a bit (maybe 75% or so). I was a lifeguard for several years in my teens/early 20s. Even as a teen I would have had a hard time dealing with having someone drown on my watch. I would have like this system. It's a good backup for times when you can't see everything, or your attention is drawn away by running/horseplay/other problem bathers (no, I don't mean the girls who haven't learned that white bathing suits look cool, but are see through when they get into the water).
I have pulled a kid out of the water, once. I watched him tread water for 20-30 seconds in the diving well, lower and lower, until his body jerked a bit (gasp of air) and his head went under water. He was a decent swimmer for a 5-6 year old, but was too tired. I jumped in and pulled him out - he was fine after he coughed out a mouthful of water. Know what his parents did? Yelled at me for pulling him out. They said he was doing fine and was just swimming to the side. Yeah, right. Another guard who was walking the deck saw me go in and agreed that he wasn't about to swim anywhere. The parents didn't bother me - I knew I was lucky that I happend to be watching him. He'd been there all day, and you learn to keep an eye on certain bathers more carefully.
Of course not, I don't think people should be allowed to die because a natural disaster struck. I know, as an engineer in this field, that these wind loads and flooding can be significantly mitigated with proper design and construction.
I'm dismayed and disappointed that these people had to sie because people who know better (building officials, engineers, code writers, builders) let these people die unnecessarily by their lack of caring. The killed these people because they didn't follow accepted engineering practice - set out in the buidling code - to make buildings safe for the public.
We're not a nation of barbarians - we're a nation of optimists. We don't really believe that winds can be this bad, even when confronted with the data. We want people to be able to buy affordable housing. We want them to get the most (square footage, creature comforts) for their money. We bend the rules, take shortcuts, over-promise. Nobody is the wiser and, hey, we've done it for XX years without any problems, so why change? We believe that our builders are honest, truhful folks who will abide by the code. We think our building officials will catch the few unscrupulous builders, and correct the honest ones who just miss something. We're walking into the abattoir with our eyes closed and a song on our lips.
(Okay, that last line is a bit sensational, but it seemed a good way to sum it up with a little "punch";-)
"But you don't listen. You don't require your building departments to hire qualified professionals to monitor contractors. You don't make them enforce inspection provisions in the code. You don't make them require complete plans for construction. How do you allow this? By requiring that the cost of construction be more important than the safety fo the building. You think you'll be happier in a 4000SF ticky-tacky box than a properly designed 1800SF gem. You let your legislators enact statues of repose (how long you can sue for defects) which are far less than the design life of the building (50 years, btw). So you put you and your families in harm way, intentionally, through inaction and the need to have a bigger, more extravagant home than you can afford to build properly. And even if you claim you know no better, and are ignorant of the law and common sense, you listen to news reports for a couple of days of a major hurricane coming, huge winds, terrible rain, storm surge far in excess of levys, and you sit in your freaking house and wait until its too late to go to higher ground. So you die.
Is that better?
I do have some sympathy for the victims. It's a horrible tragedy. Looks like it very well may be worse (no, certainly IS worse) than the damage inflicted by the suicide hijackers on 9-11-01. I have a family, too, and would be devastated if I lost any of them. And I'd be pissed at them, as well, if they sat in their house for two days watching a 175MPH hurricane slowly make its way towards them, and didn't do anything. Tsunamis, Earthquakes, Tornadoes...they all happen vary quickly. Hurricanes take a while to get to you. That's why I live on the east coast - of all the natrual disasters, hurricanes are fairly predictable. I'm okay with that predictability - I have time to decide whether to run for my life. If I choose not to...well, its my own damned fault if I goes toes up.
(guess I'm not really redeeming myself here. oh, well, its been a long day)
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I can't believe you actually wrote all of that. I can't believe that you wrote all of that, 20 minutes after I child-posted that it was a joke. I was so certain it was blatently ridulous, I decided to omit the smiley.
Hey, you aren't my brother-in-law, are you? No, of course not...he'd probably still be thinking it was a good idea.
If it will bury (or orphan) the children, I'll take it.
Good lord, somebody mod me Funny so all these /. numbnuts get that it was a joke.
I live in the US, and I didn't vote for him either.
You know, like a set of Shure E3cs that just connect to each other, with all the memory and battery built in. Now that would be cool. And much closer to nano sized.
Guess I'll have to wait for the iPod Pico or Femto before my wish comes true.
Joe Sixpack?
He makes two partitions, uses 250GB for his working drive, and then uses ghost to mirror it to the second partition every couple of months. How can you lose?
What you forgot to ask is how his tech savvy cousin (who also does taxidermy and accounting) makes it faster, larger, and redundant. In that case he makes 7 partitions and uses software to do a raid5 setup over the first 6 partitions, using the last one as parity. 428GB with a perfect, online safety net. Pretty smart, huh?
It sounds to me like somebody in Oregon really needs to stop replying to all those spam emails.
...that with every order will come with two strippers to entertain you while you set the machine up. I mean, c'mon, Taco, if you're gonna give us a nerd hard-on, at least include something naughty, too.
Actually, there is a minor correlation. The larger the energy storage container is, the larger the vehicle must be. That generally results in increases in mass and volume, reducing the efficiency due to increased internal component friction and wind resistance (with regenerative breaking and/or coasting down hill w/o brakes, some losses of lifting more mass up a hill are effectively recovered).
The ohter part is practicality. It's a marketing issue for electric cars - you have to drive a large vehicle, or one with no storage space in order to fit the batteries in for a long journey.
Much of this will disappate if the cost per mile is sufficiently low. That's the real driver, not the actual energy efficiency. Unless you're a hard-core tree hugger, the efficiency of the process will pale in comparison to the cost. If you could make the pellets hold twice as much for the same energy cost, but the dollar cost was 1.5x based on the driven mile, would you buy the more expensive product? (Realise that the efficiency will not produce a vehicle with double the range, as the "tank" for these high efficiency pellets will be made smaller, just as it is is gasoline cars)
Geez, it's like that stupid game you played in grade school where a whispered phrase went around the room, and was almost totally different by the time it had gone through 15-20 people.
/. titles that you can't add "HDD"? "Terabyte HDD / DVD recorder combo box." There, now that wasn't so hard.
The article subtitle meat is "...the world's first hard disk drive/DVD recorder that can store one terabyte of data..."
Is there really that little space in
As for the dupe, does it count if the first post on it was vaporware?
One of the few times I get to point out that smart guys make unpopular presidents, and the inverse of the theory seems to hold, as well.
It's like anything else...the more safe you make it, the more complacent we will become. I'm convinced that each person has a risk tolerance band, rather than a limit. They will do foolish things to stay above the "minimum risk" line while still staying below the "maximum risk" line. They will also endeavor to raise the lower limit, proving a perceived reduction in risk. This creates a sort of risk-instability, in which the drive to maximize your "return" (aka, stay above your minimum risk)puts you perilously close to your maximum risk line and results in catastrophic failures rather than minor, progresive ones.
I probably shouldn't have used "return" above, as you might think I'm referring to financial investing. I'm not. A return would be to reduce your commute time by 2-5 minutes, allowing you to sleep a bit later. The risk you add is driving faster and closer to the car in front of you than conditions would otherwise permit because you have ABS and air bags. Or reducing the effort required to mow the lawn by getting a self-propelled lawnmower, and then using a velcro strap to lock it in the "on" position so you can mow one-handed, closer to that steep hillside, increasing the chance that you and the (locked-on mower) will careen down the bank, cutting out chunks of your [insert appendage here] and destroying your neighbor's [insert anything valuable here].
Okay, not exactly, but it's sounding like that.
The corallary to that should be:
"and the capitalist will sell it to you for ninety-eight cents."
Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment
Damnit, how am I supposed to post to slashdot and get my job done if I have to sit here and hit reload twenty times to post the three comments I want. Sheesh.
It is very true. I find that I need two part vacations, though. About six to eight days of all-out fun & sun followed by about two days of hanging around the house and getting little details and annoyances fixed is enough to really let me concentrate at work. That is, until the stress and bits of unfinished projects at home pile up again.
You think surfing the web doesn't require a network? Hell, thats what our corporate network is used mostly for! Oh, networking, right.
Well, to be quite honest, surfing (web, that is) and golfing are two entirely different wastes of time. Now, if you were to compare surfing the web with browsing trade rags or the Wal Street Journal every morning as you grab that first cup of jo, you'd be more on target.
Golf is a social activity for nearly the entire group*, akin with hanging out at the local bar** for a beer...for 4 and a half hours. It's a bonding experience for the participants, and does gove you a chance to get a little insight into the other people you're playing with. Casual clothes, first name basis conversations, personal anecdotes (real or imagined) all make for a personal connection. Typically, it has little impact on your business unless you happen to be a president or well-placed VP. Otherwise, it's an oppotunity to forge personal relationships for personal gain. When you had all lifetime employees and pensions, those personal gains were corporate gains as well, but with the time-in-job for good people dropping to 2-5 years, those personal connections are really just a way to enrich the employee without any benfit to the company, on whose time you're "putting for bird" after taking a mulligan on your OB tee shot.
*exceptions exist - lobbiests working congressmen is a case where only 1/2 the group will be loafing.
**sometimes referred to as a "Gentleman's Club"
I agree. DirecTV is never gonna make it.
Hope you never need to work in a classified environment. In that case its not a company thing, but a national security thing. And, no, humans as a group cannot be trusted.
The miss rate matters. It matters because you'll never get a duplicated hit rate - one where both the system and the lifeguard recognized the problem in-time/simultaneously (i.e. - the system wan't needed). The false hit rate also matters, as lifeguards are human, and will fall prey to the cry wolf syndrome over time if the false positive rate is too high.
I do think the system is worth it. I also think it's been overrated by its marketers, and will continue to believe so until I see more complete data.
Yes, I was a lifeguard, and a lifeguard instructor, back when I was younger. I would have liked to have this system. Now that I'm older and, presumably, wiser I would like it twice as much. Why? Two sets of eyes are better than one, even if one set is digital. I would never fogive myself if I lost a child at a pool simply because I didn't happen to notice one of them slip under the surface and get lost in the commotion of a really busy summer pool day.
We played games like this when I was a little kid. You know, jump in and pretend you're dead, sinking slowly to the bottom, then lying there until you have to come up for air. With this system, it would gie a false positive. Lifeguards are tuned to see progressive problems, and to filter out as much play as possible. This girl might have been pulled out by the guard anyway, or it could have taken an extra 30 seconds to a couple of minutes to register that she wasn't just playing.
4 people is pretty slow, so shes more likely to have been pulled out "in time" without the system. I think the marketing pimp was a bit sensational with his "one more minute" claim, but if it bought this girl 30 seconds, it was probably worth it.
I didn't see any mention of the "miss" rate on this system.
The article says 8 UK pools (one save). 100 pools worldwide for a total of 5 saves.
11.8M/5 = 2.25M per life, assuming all systems stop working today. That's a steep price - probably close to a jury award.
If you'll grant me 1000 total patrons per pool, I get about $118/patron for the system. Not too bad, quite honestly. The question is: would pool management feel that they could reduce lifeguards if they bought this system? That might reduce the overall effectiveness. The whole false send of security thing.
One thing that wan't mentioned is the loss rate at those pools. Have they missed any drownings in that time?
The video is a bit surreal. After the fact (having a three year old daughter myself), $118k is a small fraction of what it would be worth. Every penny I've ever made, and every penny I'll make for the rest of my life is a bit closer, but probably still on the low side.
For pool management, though, you have to decide what your risk tolerance is. It's a dollars game for them. Kind of sick, really. But practical. No neighborhood pool, or one with only human lifeguards.
Personally, it would be nice to see the price come down a bit (maybe 75% or so). I was a lifeguard for several years in my teens/early 20s.
Even as a teen I would have had a hard time dealing with having someone drown on my watch. I would have like this system. It's a good backup for times when you can't see everything, or your attention is drawn away by running/horseplay/other problem bathers (no, I don't mean the girls who haven't learned that white bathing suits look cool, but are see through when they get into the water).
I have pulled a kid out of the water, once. I watched him tread water for 20-30 seconds in the diving well, lower and lower, until his body jerked a bit (gasp of air) and his head went under water. He was a decent swimmer for a 5-6 year old, but was too tired. I jumped in and pulled him out - he was fine after he coughed out a mouthful of water. Know what his parents did? Yelled at me for pulling him out. They said he was doing fine and was just swimming to the side. Yeah, right. Another guard who was walking the deck saw me go in and agreed that he wasn't about to swim anywhere. The parents didn't bother me - I knew I was lucky that I happend to be watching him. He'd been there all day, and you learn to keep an eye on certain bathers more carefully.
Okay, a non-reactionary take instead:
;-)
Of course not, I don't think people should be allowed to die because a natural disaster struck. I know, as an engineer in this field, that these wind loads and flooding can be significantly mitigated with proper design and construction.
I'm dismayed and disappointed that these people had to sie because people who know better (building officials, engineers, code writers, builders) let these people die unnecessarily by their lack of caring. The killed these people because they didn't follow accepted engineering practice - set out in the buidling code - to make buildings safe for the public.
We're not a nation of barbarians - we're a nation of optimists. We don't really believe that winds can be this bad, even when confronted with the data. We want people to be able to buy affordable housing. We want them to get the most (square footage, creature comforts) for their money. We bend the rules, take shortcuts, over-promise. Nobody is the wiser and, hey, we've done it for XX years without any problems, so why change? We believe that our builders are honest, truhful folks who will abide by the code. We think our building officials will catch the few unscrupulous builders, and correct the honest ones who just miss something. We're walking into the abattoir with our eyes closed and a song on our lips.
(Okay, that last line is a bit sensational, but it seemed a good way to sum it up with a little "punch"
Sorry, that was a bit harsh. I should have said:
"But you don't listen. You don't require your building departments to hire qualified professionals to monitor contractors. You don't make them enforce inspection provisions in the code. You don't make them require complete plans for construction. How do you allow this? By requiring that the cost of construction be more important than the safety fo the building. You think you'll be happier in a 4000SF ticky-tacky box than a properly designed 1800SF gem. You let your legislators enact statues of repose (how long you can sue for defects) which are far less than the design life of the building (50 years, btw). So you put you and your families in harm way, intentionally, through inaction and the need to have a bigger, more extravagant home than you can afford to build properly. And even if you claim you know no better, and are ignorant of the law and common sense, you listen to news reports for a couple of days of a major hurricane coming, huge winds, terrible rain, storm surge far in excess of levys, and you sit in your freaking house and wait until its too late to go to higher ground. So you die.
Is that better?
I do have some sympathy for the victims. It's a horrible tragedy. Looks like it very well may be worse (no, certainly IS worse) than the damage inflicted by the suicide hijackers on 9-11-01. I have a family, too, and would be devastated if I lost any of them. And I'd be pissed at them, as well, if they sat in their house for two days watching a 175MPH hurricane slowly make its way towards them, and didn't do anything. Tsunamis, Earthquakes, Tornadoes...they all happen vary quickly. Hurricanes take a while to get to you. That's why I live on the east coast - of all the natrual disasters, hurricanes are fairly predictable. I'm okay with that predictability - I have time to decide whether to run for my life. If I choose not to...well, its my own damned fault if I goes toes up.
(guess I'm not really redeeming myself here. oh, well, its been a long day)
If FuckedCompany.com is still on line, I can't imaging much you could say or have posted on your 'blog that would get you in trouble.