This is the second contract software project over $100 million that NYC has screwed up in just the past couple of years. (CityTime was the other.)
NYC is a big city which no doubt has lots of custom software projects it needs to do. Wouldn't it make more sense to hire employees to do this? It couldn't possibly cost more than the $600 million (!) of overbilling on CityTime plus the $160 million overbilling on this new white elephant. And they'd have actual control over the people they hire, and be able to hold them fully accountable if/when something went wrong.
There are a lot of IT job postings out there which are really this bad, but the absurdity of it becomes much more obvious when using an example from another field that people outside IT will be more familiar with.
The current "target WebKit" movement happening is not about just supporting standards, people are increasingly using webkit specific prefixes and other tricks
Then those prefixes and tricks will become de facto standards and other browsers will eventually implement them. If the W3C wants to sit around for years on end doing nothing, the web won't stand still waiting for them to finish.
The problem is actually exactly the opposite of what the original poster thinks. Microsoft is making too much of a break with the past with Windows 8, being far too quick to chase trends and forgetting that real work is done on the traditional desktop and will continue to be for the forseeable future. The cloud is a fad that will flame out after the first couple of high-profile security breaches and/or data loss incidents. Tablets are great as consumption devices, but not if you're actually doing real work.
Microsoft is so consumed with "Apple envy" that they seem to have forgotten what their bread and butter is: the business desktop. They are so obsessed with being a competitor in the tablet market that they are making a product that actively hurts their core demographic.
Why do people use Windows? Legacy support is a BIG reason – and yet Microsoft under Ballmer seems dedicated to trying to kill it as quickly as possible. Guess what? If legacy support goes away, so does a large part of the reason for people not switching to another OS! After all, if they have to rewrite everything anyway... Ballmer once understood that "developers, developers, developers" were what made Microsoft's platform dominate; now he seems to be going for tablet/smartphone-using hipsters and tweens, and giving developers the middle finger.
Visual Studio is hardly the only development IDE on Windows.
What open-source C/C++ compilers for Windows support the full range of APIs? Last I checked, MinGW had no support for Direct2D and DirectWrite, which are hardly obscure or brand-new. And MinGW also does not support structured exception handling.
Can somebody with more knowledge ofthe US legal system explain what appears to be a tiny penalty for crashing into and permanently disabling two people? I would have expected a more serious punishment.
Is this a typical punishment for this kind of crime?
In the U.S. it is very easy to get a driver's license, and punishments for driving offenses is usually little more than a fine and some "points" on the license. (Too many points means you lose your license.) You will also be charged higher insurance rates. The only exception is drunk driving, due to a protracted political campaign that started in the late 1970s.
This is because the physical layout of the U.S. makes walking, biking, and public transit infeasible in most parts of the country. The only way to live an independent adult life is to have an automobile. Therefore, we can't be as strict about driving licenses and driving-related offenses as Europe, because over there, it's much more livable without a car. In the U.S., taking away someone's drivers license is basically demoting them to childhood, dependent on someone else for every single trip.
The lack of national health care and a decent social safety net in the United States is one of the biggest drivers behind "frivolous" lawsuits like this.
In most European countries, the injured couple would have all their medical expenses automatically covered. They would not face the risk (ubiquitous in the U.S.) of medical bankruptcy. They would also be able to take advantage of other social programs if they were too seriously injured to continue work in their current jobs.
In the U.S., when you get seriously injured, you face the very real probability that you will be financially ruined as well. Therefore, your only defense is to find someone with deep pockets who is arguably responsible for the accident, and sue them.
Likewise, in Europe, it's harder and less lucrative to sue for injuries arising from consumer products – but there are also much stricter safety regulations and the regulators are less shy about yanking products from the market if they do prove genuinely unsafe.
We as a country have decided to outsource large parts of our regulatory and insurance apparatus to the courts, and this is the result.
Human intelligence is just as reliant upon "magic tricks" to work. You seem to be stuck in some kind of 18th-century Rationalist notion of man. It's all shortcuts, heuristics, and hacks, all the way down.
Regarding the feasibility of AI
on
Where's HAL 9000?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Some commenters in this thread (and elsewhere) have questioned whether "strong" artificial intelligence is actually possible.
The feasibility of strong AI follows directly from the rejection of Cartesian dualism.
If there is no "ghost in the machine," no magic "soul" separate from the body and brain, then human intelligence comes from the physical operation of the brain. Since they are physical operations, we can understand them, and reproduce the algorithm in computer software and/or hardware. That doesn't mean it's *easy* – it may take 200 more years to understand the brain that well, for all I know – but it must be *possible*.
(Also note that Cartesian dualism is not the same thing as religion, and rejecting it does not mean rejecting all religious beliefs. From the earliest times, Christians taught the resurrection of the *body*, presumably including the brain. The notion of disembodied "souls" floating around in "heaven" owes more to Plato than to Jesus and St. Paul. Many later Christian philosophers, including Aquinas, specifically rejected dualism in their writings.)
Re:No, that doesn't even do it justice.
on
Where's HAL 9000?
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· Score: 1
The Turing Test is more like demanding that aircraft makers design a plane that is larger on the inside than on the outside and can travel faster than the speed of light without using any fuel or reaction mass. *If* it's even theoretically possible, we would have to revise our current fundamental understanding of how things work rather substantially in order to even begin to have any idea at all how to get started working on the problem.
Unless you believe that the human brain has magical properties, it must be possible to simulate its operation. Your analogy fails.
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
·
· Score: 2
I'm not. AI is to real intelligence what margarine is to butter - it's artificial. It isn't real. You're never going to get a Turing computer to actually think, although some future chemical or something machine may. However, you could get to the point where intelligence was simulated well enough that it appeard to be sentient.
Intelligence isn't a physical thing – it's a process. It makes no difference whether that process happens in meat or in silicon. This is why Searle is a moron. Any argument against artificial intelligence is actually a disguised argument in favor of Cartesian dualism. If you reject the notion that there is a "ghost in the machine," then it logically follows that the brain is a physical object, an organic computer, and strong AI must be possible.
DVRs cannot record HDMI streams in hi-def due to HDCP protection.
HDCP's master key was discovered over a year ago. There's no technical (as opposed to legal) reason why an open-source DVR couldn't support HDCP input through a device like the Blackmagic Intensity. Software might be too slow to handle the decryption, but a FPGA development board would probably work.
I will go out on a limb, here, and predict that this suit will run pretty much the same course as a similar suit successfully filed by the RIAA many, many years ago. A compliant judge could be convinced that hardware makers who include a skip capability must compensate the content providers, in the same way the RIAA convinced other compliant judges that the makers of blank recording media must fork over a portion of their sales to the RIAA, even if the blank media is never used to record content produced by the RIAA's clients.
Fees for blank media weren't established by a lawsuit – they were established by national legislation, specifically the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
The guidelines do not represent mandatory U.S. or international requirements. NASA provided them to help lunar mission planners preserve and protect historic lunar artifacts and potential science opportunities for future missions.
So basically they're just asking nicely. It doesn't seem like they can actually do anything even if the new spacefarers are based in the United States, and they almost certainly can't do anything if they are based in another country.
I think the bigger questions are "WTF was the VP of SAP doing pulling a cheap ass eBay scam like what your average meth head would pull? Is he a kelpto? Is the company in trouble? Is his pay THAT shitty?" These questions sound more relevant to me than how long he was able to pull this shit off.
The VP title means less than you think. At some companies, they hand these out like candy. He could easily have been making under $100K a year.
The buyers expected this would be like every other major IPO in the recent past: the initial offering would be underpriced, then it would shoot up in the first day, which means that the banks and early buyers would have effectively taken money that should have gone to the founders and employees and instead diverted it into their own pockets. But it turned out Zuckerberg was smarter than that, and ensured that the IPO price was actually a bit on the high side. Now the buyers who planned on scamming Zuckerberg and the Facebook employees got scammed themselves. I don't feel sorry for these whiners.
I agree with Henderson's point. I also think that we should make basic education in statistics part of the math curriculum in schools. When you don't understand statistics, don't know what a standard deviation from the mean is, don't understand the concept of "statistically significant," etc., it's very easy for someone to lie to you by manipulating numbers or misrepresenting study results.
What if the average person doesn't have enough raw brainpower to understand statistics?
I can see states like Mississippi, Alabama doing poorly because they are run by Republicans and republicans hate spending money on kids. (Yes I just heard a guy on MSNBC say that last night.) But California is a Democrat-run state. Their students should be the best and brightest and most well-funded. Like Democrat-run Maryland. Hmmmm.
California has an idiotic 2/3 vote requirement for passing a routine yearly budget (!) which means that Republicans still have veto power. And while California's Democrats tend to be further left than the national average, their Republicans also tend to be further right-wing than the national average.
There's also Proposition 13, which makes it essentially impossible to raise property taxes in California ever – and property taxes are where the bulk of school funding comes from. On top of that, large amounts of funds are sequestered for specific purposes by other ballot initiatives – "Three Strikes" for example is part of the state Constitution, so whether or not the legislature thinks it's a good idea, they have no choice but to spend >$50,000 a year indefinitely locking up some guy who stole a slice of pizza after committing 2 previous felonies.
Until they "unify" their platform on the basis that "its been like that on the ARM for years"
Only if they want to completely write off the business market, which is their bread and butter. Systems used to do real work simply can't be locked down to this degree. It's a rare business that doesn't have at least one piece of custom-written software (which will not be in the Windows Store and won't have any certificates.)
In a state like Florida, where just about all grass is basically some variety of cultivated crabgrass (northern-type grass is almost impossible to grow year-round because some part of the year is inevitably too hot, wet, or both), you'd be hating life completely if you had to cut any meaningful lawn with a push-type reel motor. Or even a rotary-blade mower without power-assisted wheels.
Maybe that's a hint from Nature that you shouldn't be growing grass down there in the first place. What does grass do, anyway? What purpose does it serve?
There's a difference between using outdated systems for a specific, limited purpose and using outdated systems as a general computing/application development platform.
Move Voting Day to Saturday. The only reason it was on Tuesday was to allow for travel time and to avoid the often-strictly observed Sabbath of the still quite Puritan colonial USA. Make it a Saturday, and make all businesses except essential service and emergency personnel close on that day period, so the people can take their time to vote.
Why not just have a voting *week* instead of a single day? In many states something similar to this is already done with early voting, but it should be standardized and rolled out nationwide.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think private companies don't get gouged by badly-thought-out IT contracts, you haven't been looking hard enough.
This is the second contract software project over $100 million that NYC has screwed up in just the past couple of years. (CityTime was the other.)
NYC is a big city which no doubt has lots of custom software projects it needs to do. Wouldn't it make more sense to hire employees to do this? It couldn't possibly cost more than the $600 million (!) of overbilling on CityTime plus the $160 million overbilling on this new white elephant. And they'd have actual control over the people they hire, and be able to hold them fully accountable if/when something went wrong.
This really should be marked Insightful.
There are a lot of IT job postings out there which are really this bad, but the absurdity of it becomes much more obvious when using an example from another field that people outside IT will be more familiar with.
The current "target WebKit" movement happening is not about just supporting standards, people are increasingly using webkit specific prefixes and other tricks
Then those prefixes and tricks will become de facto standards and other browsers will eventually implement them. If the W3C wants to sit around for years on end doing nothing, the web won't stand still waiting for them to finish.
The problem is actually exactly the opposite of what the original poster thinks. Microsoft is making too much of a break with the past with Windows 8, being far too quick to chase trends and forgetting that real work is done on the traditional desktop and will continue to be for the forseeable future. The cloud is a fad that will flame out after the first couple of high-profile security breaches and/or data loss incidents. Tablets are great as consumption devices, but not if you're actually doing real work.
Microsoft is so consumed with "Apple envy" that they seem to have forgotten what their bread and butter is: the business desktop. They are so obsessed with being a competitor in the tablet market that they are making a product that actively hurts their core demographic.
Why do people use Windows? Legacy support is a BIG reason – and yet Microsoft under Ballmer seems dedicated to trying to kill it as quickly as possible. Guess what? If legacy support goes away, so does a large part of the reason for people not switching to another OS! After all, if they have to rewrite everything anyway... Ballmer once understood that "developers, developers, developers" were what made Microsoft's platform dominate; now he seems to be going for tablet/smartphone-using hipsters and tweens, and giving developers the middle finger.
Visual Studio is hardly the only development IDE on Windows.
What open-source C/C++ compilers for Windows support the full range of APIs? Last I checked, MinGW had no support for Direct2D and DirectWrite, which are hardly obscure or brand-new. And MinGW also does not support structured exception handling.
Can somebody with more knowledge ofthe US legal system explain what appears to be a tiny penalty for crashing into and permanently disabling two people? I would have expected a more serious punishment. Is this a typical punishment for this kind of crime?
In the U.S. it is very easy to get a driver's license, and punishments for driving offenses is usually little more than a fine and some "points" on the license. (Too many points means you lose your license.) You will also be charged higher insurance rates. The only exception is drunk driving, due to a protracted political campaign that started in the late 1970s.
This is because the physical layout of the U.S. makes walking, biking, and public transit infeasible in most parts of the country. The only way to live an independent adult life is to have an automobile. Therefore, we can't be as strict about driving licenses and driving-related offenses as Europe, because over there, it's much more livable without a car. In the U.S., taking away someone's drivers license is basically demoting them to childhood, dependent on someone else for every single trip.
I've seen "deliberately caused an accident" a few times, as absurd as it sounds.
In North Korea, you can apparently be sentenced to death by traffic accident.
The lack of national health care and a decent social safety net in the United States is one of the biggest drivers behind "frivolous" lawsuits like this.
In most European countries, the injured couple would have all their medical expenses automatically covered. They would not face the risk (ubiquitous in the U.S.) of medical bankruptcy. They would also be able to take advantage of other social programs if they were too seriously injured to continue work in their current jobs.
In the U.S., when you get seriously injured, you face the very real probability that you will be financially ruined as well. Therefore, your only defense is to find someone with deep pockets who is arguably responsible for the accident, and sue them.
Likewise, in Europe, it's harder and less lucrative to sue for injuries arising from consumer products – but there are also much stricter safety regulations and the regulators are less shy about yanking products from the market if they do prove genuinely unsafe.
We as a country have decided to outsource large parts of our regulatory and insurance apparatus to the courts, and this is the result.
Human intelligence is just as reliant upon "magic tricks" to work. You seem to be stuck in some kind of 18th-century Rationalist notion of man. It's all shortcuts, heuristics, and hacks, all the way down.
Some commenters in this thread (and elsewhere) have questioned whether "strong" artificial intelligence is actually possible.
The feasibility of strong AI follows directly from the rejection of Cartesian dualism.
If there is no "ghost in the machine," no magic "soul" separate from the body and brain, then human intelligence comes from the physical operation of the brain. Since they are physical operations, we can understand them, and reproduce the algorithm in computer software and/or hardware. That doesn't mean it's *easy* – it may take 200 more years to understand the brain that well, for all I know – but it must be *possible*.
(Also note that Cartesian dualism is not the same thing as religion, and rejecting it does not mean rejecting all religious beliefs. From the earliest times, Christians taught the resurrection of the *body*, presumably including the brain. The notion of disembodied "souls" floating around in "heaven" owes more to Plato than to Jesus and St. Paul. Many later Christian philosophers, including Aquinas, specifically rejected dualism in their writings.)
The Turing Test is more like demanding that aircraft makers design a plane that is larger on the inside than on the outside and can travel faster than the speed of light without using any fuel or reaction mass. *If* it's even theoretically possible, we would have to revise our current fundamental understanding of how things work rather substantially in order to even begin to have any idea at all how to get started working on the problem.
Unless you believe that the human brain has magical properties, it must be possible to simulate its operation. Your analogy fails.
I'm not. AI is to real intelligence what margarine is to butter - it's artificial. It isn't real. You're never going to get a Turing computer to actually think, although some future chemical or something machine may. However, you could get to the point where intelligence was simulated well enough that it appeard to be sentient.
Intelligence isn't a physical thing – it's a process. It makes no difference whether that process happens in meat or in silicon. This is why Searle is a moron. Any argument against artificial intelligence is actually a disguised argument in favor of Cartesian dualism. If you reject the notion that there is a "ghost in the machine," then it logically follows that the brain is a physical object, an organic computer, and strong AI must be possible.
DVRs cannot record HDMI streams in hi-def due to HDCP protection.
HDCP's master key was discovered over a year ago. There's no technical (as opposed to legal) reason why an open-source DVR couldn't support HDCP input through a device like the Blackmagic Intensity. Software might be too slow to handle the decryption, but a FPGA development board would probably work.
I will go out on a limb, here, and predict that this suit will run pretty much the same course as a similar suit successfully filed by the RIAA many, many years ago. A compliant judge could be convinced that hardware makers who include a skip capability must compensate the content providers, in the same way the RIAA convinced other compliant judges that the makers of blank recording media must fork over a portion of their sales to the RIAA, even if the blank media is never used to record content produced by the RIAA's clients.
Fees for blank media weren't established by a lawsuit – they were established by national legislation, specifically the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
So basically they're just asking nicely. It doesn't seem like they can actually do anything even if the new spacefarers are based in the United States, and they almost certainly can't do anything if they are based in another country.
I think the bigger questions are "WTF was the VP of SAP doing pulling a cheap ass eBay scam like what your average meth head would pull? Is he a kelpto? Is the company in trouble? Is his pay THAT shitty?" These questions sound more relevant to me than how long he was able to pull this shit off.
The VP title means less than you think. At some companies, they hand these out like candy. He could easily have been making under $100K a year.
The buyers expected this would be like every other major IPO in the recent past: the initial offering would be underpriced, then it would shoot up in the first day, which means that the banks and early buyers would have effectively taken money that should have gone to the founders and employees and instead diverted it into their own pockets. But it turned out Zuckerberg was smarter than that, and ensured that the IPO price was actually a bit on the high side. Now the buyers who planned on scamming Zuckerberg and the Facebook employees got scammed themselves. I don't feel sorry for these whiners.
I agree with Henderson's point. I also think that we should make basic education in statistics part of the math curriculum in schools. When you don't understand statistics, don't know what a standard deviation from the mean is, don't understand the concept of "statistically significant," etc., it's very easy for someone to lie to you by manipulating numbers or misrepresenting study results.
What if the average person doesn't have enough raw brainpower to understand statistics?
I can see states like Mississippi, Alabama doing poorly because they are run by Republicans and republicans hate spending money on kids. (Yes I just heard a guy on MSNBC say that last night.) But California is a Democrat-run state. Their students should be the best and brightest and most well-funded. Like Democrat-run Maryland. Hmmmm.
California has an idiotic 2/3 vote requirement for passing a routine yearly budget (!) which means that Republicans still have veto power. And while California's Democrats tend to be further left than the national average, their Republicans also tend to be further right-wing than the national average.
There's also Proposition 13, which makes it essentially impossible to raise property taxes in California ever – and property taxes are where the bulk of school funding comes from. On top of that, large amounts of funds are sequestered for specific purposes by other ballot initiatives – "Three Strikes" for example is part of the state Constitution, so whether or not the legislature thinks it's a good idea, they have no choice but to spend >$50,000 a year indefinitely locking up some guy who stole a slice of pizza after committing 2 previous felonies.
Until they "unify" their platform on the basis that "its been like that on the ARM for years"
Only if they want to completely write off the business market, which is their bread and butter. Systems used to do real work simply can't be locked down to this degree. It's a rare business that doesn't have at least one piece of custom-written software (which will not be in the Windows Store and won't have any certificates.)
In a state like Florida, where just about all grass is basically some variety of cultivated crabgrass (northern-type grass is almost impossible to grow year-round because some part of the year is inevitably too hot, wet, or both), you'd be hating life completely if you had to cut any meaningful lawn with a push-type reel motor. Or even a rotary-blade mower without power-assisted wheels.
Maybe that's a hint from Nature that you shouldn't be growing grass down there in the first place. What does grass do, anyway? What purpose does it serve?
There's a difference between using outdated systems for a specific, limited purpose and using outdated systems as a general computing/application development platform.
The former is OK. The latter is... well, IE6.
Move Voting Day to Saturday. The only reason it was on Tuesday was to allow for travel time and to avoid the often-strictly observed Sabbath of the still quite Puritan colonial USA. Make it a Saturday, and make all businesses except essential service and emergency personnel close on that day period, so the people can take their time to vote.
Why not just have a voting *week* instead of a single day? In many states something similar to this is already done with early voting, but it should be standardized and rolled out nationwide.