Yup. Nothing like looking for a book and, finding it missing from where it should be, having to search for five feet in each direction just to make sure some random browser didn't just shove it back into place.
The other problem is time is automatically skewed. People running to the [Family Dollar] store late night to pick up toilet paper are unlikely to check in, especially on a weekday. But those trying out a new steakhouse on a Saturday afternoon are more likely to check in. So the time data is naturally skewed to recreational times.
Well, duh. Who do you think is more interested in the data? Family Dollar whose business model is based on moving product in bulk with rapid turnover? Or New Steakhouse who is interested in drawing a higher income crowd during dining hours?
While I applaud this as a way to see when advertising deals on social networks may best impact your business, this by no means will help you determine if you need to make sure your toilet paper is fully stocked at 3am.
Which is pretty much unsurprising, because it isn't *meant* to help you determine if you need to make sure your toilet paper is fully stocked at 3am.
Seriously, your objections are like objecting to a fork because it won't hold your soup. Different businesses use different tools for different goals.
Companies already have a perfectly valid method to measure their business. They have their receipts. They know when they sold items, what they sold, how much to stock, and how many people they need working there.
Try running a business using only those metrics - but make a reservation at your local bankruptcy court first, because you're going to need it. Those metrics don't tell you what brought customers into the store, or why those that left without buying didn't buy, etc... (Just for some very basic examples.)
So there was a line at Starbucks, big deal. They already know how many people that they can have in lines without losing too much business. They look at their costs versus the number of people who may just walk out . If they lose 2 $5 ($10 lost) sales during the 3pm hour, but to handle the load properly they would have needed 3 more people on that shift at $10/hr ($240), it's not advantageous to them to put 3 more people on that shift.
And then in your very next paragraph, you prove my point. The metrics needed to determine staffing levels go beyond the simple minded ones you posit above.
Business isn't about the customer experience. It's about making money. It's the same reason Disney doesn't mind having lines with an hour wait. They know you want their product, and are willing to stand in line waiting for it.
Then why does Disney provide the Fast Pass system so people *don't* have to stand in line for an hour? (Hint: Disney understands the value of customer experience, you do not.)
On the matter of the source, I picked that because, as an executive at the company, if he's not lying, he's in a very good position to really know the truth of the matter.
Here in the real world, there's a difference between "knowing the truth" and "speaking the truth".
It might not directly be uptime, but uptime is factored into the final result. You cannot get high capacity factors without high uptime.
Here in the real world, uptime and reliability matters. When you choose a statistic that hides those factors, one cannot help but wonder why.
It's like arguing over little screws that maybe cost 1/2 cent each, in an expensive device, like say a truck, where the vast majority of the cost doesn't come from the screws.
Well, here in the real world, personnel costs aren't like little screws. They're like the frame and the engine and the body of the expensive truck - they dominate your bottom line across your life cycle.
The source for my claim is an open letter from an Entergy executive, being mirrored at the website of Meredith Angwin, who runs the Yes, Vermont Yankee blog.
It would be nice if you had a source other than one that while mildly critical of the industry of the whole (mostly it seems to appear "fair and balanced"... is mostly a booster club for the Vermont Yankee powerplant.
In general, nuclear power plants in the U.S. have had an *industry average* of over 90%. That's not a cherry picked record for an individual plant - that's the *average* capacity factor. There are certainly some things to be worried about Nuclear plants, in terms of risks and costs, but reliability just isn't one of them.
It may not be cherry picked by plant, but the statistic itself is cherry picked, "capacity factor" is the percentage of full rated power produced. It's an important number, but it's not up time and tells us little to nothing about reliability. It's also not surprising to discover ex post facto that plants that are operated as baseload plants have numbers that show them to have been operated as baseload plants.
As mentioned above, it's less than 1.09 empl./MW, so it's in the same general ballpark as the solar plant.
No,.8 and 1.1 are nowhere near being "in the same general ballpark" - there's a difference of 30%, and that's huge.
You have no idea what goes in to running a business.
You are too fast to judge. I'm an employee in a small IT company. [...snip self indulgent laundry list of IT tasks...]
I'd say he was spot on. He's talking about running a business, and you answer with a laundry list of IT tasks that you do - and no mention whatsoever of the rest of the stuff it takes to actually run a business. Nothing about marketing, finance, planning, contracts, etc... etc... Just a worms eye view of the IT effort.
I doubt that the boss/owner puts significantly more time and effort in the company.
I'm not trying to downplay the importance of business owner. He provides something that I can't. But you also should not downplay importance of a dedicated subordinate.
Which means you missed the OP's point entirely. He wasn't talking about the level of effort, but rather about where that effort was directed. He wasn't downplaying subordinates, but pointing out that you miss and awful lot from the worm's eye view.
The bonus to this is if you work it right you'll be able to get almost as much as you are now and have taxes taken out and get stock as a sign on bonus.
Bonuses are given to people who you want to convince to come aboard - not to people desperate to come aboard.
Tell them you're wanting to take a pay cut (because you will have too) in order to get stock as a sign on bonus. It basically costs them nothing and they will save money by paying you a slightly lower hourly rate.
On the contrary - having an employee is more expensive than hiring a contractor, the company now has to pay taxes and benefits on top of the take home. That's why companies hire contractors in the first place.
Call me greedy, but I've worked hard (as the main IT guy essentially) to get the company to where it is now, and of course get paid contractor rates for this.
OK, you're greedy. You're also not irreplaceable.
You've taken none of the risk, and have no reason to ask for any portion of the reward. You've gotten what you contacted for.
Geiger counters are useless for someone without at least a basic education in nuclear physics.
I wouldn't go that far. If you have two cans of beans in front of you and pointing the geiger counter at one gives you the same reading as background and pointing it at the other makes the thing go crazy then I think it's pretty clear which is the safer one to eat.
You can tell which one appears to be safer to eat - but reality is, as usual, much more complicated than that. External contamination could cause a high reading, causing you to discard a can that's entirely safe to eat after washing the can or handling it with a dishcloth and aluminum foil. Equally, the can that reads 'safer' may actually be the more dangerous of the two if it has been internally contaminated (in the field or factory). Then again, both cans could be dangerous - by having a reading low enough to be undectable by a handheld detector but still significant once it enters the body.
The OP has it right - without significant education and experience and background knowledge, radiation detectors are pretty much useless.
Well, that's exactly how it should go. Given a certain level of wealth division in a society, the rich should be forced to pay their (higher) externalities.
Except that forcing the rich to pay for the.0000000001% extra they consume (compared to the global total) does nothing for the 99.9999999999% (of the global total) consumed by the rest of us. Yeah, to a certain kind of small minded zealot "f___ the rich, make 'em pay" leaves a certain warm and fuzzy feeling, but it doesn't actually accomplish anything.
The price of a certain resource caries important information into the market, and it allows the market to allocate it efficiently. If we agree the capacity of the ecosphere to absorb carbon dioxide is limited, with potential disastrous effects when exceeded, then we need to efficiently make use of the available margin.
True - but that only works if everyone pays. Otherwise, there is no incentive for that other 99.9999999999% to reduce their usage and the total effect is essentially zilch.
A method to accomplish that is via carbon caps or taxes, as opposed to 'just own it and go with it' method you propose, i.e a land-grab (resource-grab) by those in the best position to grab it (having the largest SUV, private jet, yacht etc.) despite having a no more legitimate claim on said resource than the average bushman or eskimo.
Except that "tax them rich m____r f_____s" produces the exact opposite of what you intend. While it ground rules out the rich from participating in the land grab - it encourages the not rich to do so. (Or at best, does not discourage them from doing so.) As above, it produces a warm fuzzy populist feeling without actually changing the situation.
In my experiences, American Airlines is terrible compared to other non-US airlines. It would be nice if they invested more in edible food and better service.
When people start choosing airlines on the basis of service and food rather than because one flight is $.05 cheaper than the other, then the airlines will change. Not one second before.
In reality they should feel reassured because the worst has happened and it didn't mean the end of the world.
Oh, yeah. I feel really reassured. Oh, wait. But the worst at coal plants doesn't mean the end of the world either. (Not that we've seen in Japan the worst nukes can deliver, not even close.)
Seriously, will folks give up the "it's only a flesh wound" spin? There's tens of thousands of people forced out of their homes and hundreds of square miles of land unusable for the foreseeable future. For most normal people, that's a significant impact. For few normal people does that equate to "safe".
Newspaper articles about the 1969 Moon Landing is (was?) on microfilm in different libraries around the world -- unless every single one of them tossed it all out.
Funny story about that... A friend of mine was studying old newspapers in the microfilm collection at his university, and found that several key issues of one paper were missing. He didn't think this would be a problem, as it was a semi-important newspaper and was thus archived at multiple libraries across the state. So off he went to the other libraries and found the same dates missing in every library. He checked a couple of out-of-state libraries... and no matter where he checked they were all missing the same issues.
Turns out one company had microfilmed one libraries collection - and the others had all bought the microfilm and trashed their paper copies and nobody had ever actually verified that the microfilm represented a complete run.
So, just because the "backups" are distributed is no guarantee they are complete.
Sports bars are a more egregious contributor to obesity than computer gaming is ever likely to be.
[[Citation Needed]]
You don't need data when you're trashing a lifestyle that Slashdotters don't like. On the other hand, even the word of God himself wouldn't convince them that video games could possibly cause any problems.
That means you are approximately nine times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a terrorist act in the U.S., and by that standard, GPP is correct: when compared to any other mundane risk we accept without thinking about it, the time, effort, money and liberty that we are throwing away fighting terrorism is absolutely absurd.
In a universe where we blindly accept the risk of dying in a swimming pool accident - that might be a true statement. But here in this universe there are codes about such things as having locked gates to prevent unauthorized access to private pools, laws that require lifeguards in public pools, new codes that require new covers over filter inlets (so people don't get sucked against them and held there and drowned), etc... etc... In this universe we don't just "accept without thinking about it" the risk of dying in a swimming pool accident - we take positive steps against it.
That's why you should be talking to the house, not the room, fixtures, or appliances. One always on circuit that can power up downstream only circuits as needed. There are times when distributed systems are the hammer you need, but this isn't one of them.
It would have taken *much* more than being shrunk slightly in width... None of the US (and hence Shuttle launched) ISS modules had any capability to self support or maneuver. So figure roughly 25% of their launch mass would have to bee parasitic (that is, required to support their survival until docked with the station, and unneeded afterwards), as opposed to essentially zero as they actually exist.
And most such modules were under 20 tons, meaning the launch vehicles I mentioned would be adequate for the purpose.
As usual, you either miss the point entirely or are stupid enough to not even comprehend the point. Module weight isn't the issue - the issue is that moving from the Shuttle makes the modules smaller, heavier, more complex, more expensive, and far, far less capable.
You might recall the SpaceX example I use on occasion. They certainly seem to have figured out how to keep development costs under control.
Here in the real universe, SpaceX is a recent development and utterly irrelevant to an ISS analog built with expendables in the 80's and 90's. Once again, you ignorance leads you to false conclusions.
Recall that NASA would not be paying for the fixed costs of the ULA vehicles.
In some fantasy universe where businesses don't bill for overhead. Or, in other words, once again your ignorance leads you astray.
We never needed the unique capabilities of the Shuttle.
We never 'needed' pretty much anything we've done so far as manned space is concerned. But if you mean that to be read as "we could have done everything the Shuttle did much cheaper", as abundantly and repeatedly demonstrated... you're wrong.
The ISS, after being shrunk slightly in width, could have been launched on the Titan IV or the Delta IV Heavy.
It would have taken *much* more than being shrunk slightly in width... None of the US (and hence Shuttle launched) ISS modules had any capability to self support or maneuver. So figure roughly 25% of their launch mass would have to bee parasitic (that is, required to support their survival until docked with the station, and unneeded afterwards), as opposed to essentially zero as they actually exist.
We could have also launched a much smaller Mir-sized space station for a small fraction of the cost of the ISS (no international "coopoeration") and have gotten most of the functionality of the ISS.
In some mirror universe where "most of" actually means "practically none of". In the same mirror universe, my PC-Jr has "most of" the functionality of my Athlon. Here in this universe, you also have to consider the problem of parasitic mass mentioned above.
Worse yet, you've forgotten the cost to develop and operate whatever you're planning on using for transporting crew to and from and supplies to your fantasy space station.
When you add up the costs required to deliver three station crew, return three station crew, and either delivering a module or delivering aa supply transport via expendables - you pretty much have paid for a Shuttle mission which can do all of those (and more since it can return that supply transport for re-use) in a single flight. When you examine the actual cost of a Shuttle flight (roughly $100 million to add a single flight to the manifest), expendables don't come off nearly as well as you think they do.
Yes, the Shuttle is expensive. But it's expensive for the same reason a desktop computer is more expensive than an iPhone, or a full size pickup is more expensive than a compact riceburner. Capability costs money.
Finally, with the money we would have saved by discontinuing the Shuttle way back when (say 1990), we could have manned missions beyond LEO, research into low gravity (not zero gravity) effects, ISRU research on the Moon or Mars, etc. You know, things that actually advance our knowledge of and presence in space and on other worlds.
And if pigs had wings, we'd all wear hats. You seem unaware that Congress combed through NASA's budget with a fine tooth comb from the early 70's to the early 00's and lining out anything that smelled of being intended to support of manned Lunar or Martian exploration.
Except that NASA's got better technology for longterm human occupation of undersea environments
Which is pretty much irrelevant as no human is going to be living at the depths involved.
better technology for automated human operations in inaccessible environments
You do realize that "automated operations" and "human operations" are pretty much mutually exclusive don't you? But anyways, for remote supervising of humans, NASA has nothing that anyone else doesn't have. For remote supervision of automated operations... well, pretty much ditto. (NASA does have a better PR department thought.)
nd better technology overall
If "technology" in the real world was like it was in games and bad fiction, that would be a reasonable statement. But technology in the real world can't be measured as "overall better" or "overall worse" because it can't be quantitatively measured at all.
As well as a better track record in tech transfer to industry for boosting the US economy and industrial capabilities.
Who funded it is utterly irrelevant to the matter. It's a symptom of your continuing delusion that you believe that it represents an adequate defense to "it wasn't yours in the first place".
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. Nothing like looking for a book and, finding it missing from where it should be, having to search for five feet in each direction just to make sure some random browser didn't just shove it back into place.
Indeed. These kinds of robots are seriously old hat - they've been around a couple of decades now.
Well, duh. Who do you think is more interested in the data? Family Dollar whose business model is based on moving product in bulk with rapid turnover? Or New Steakhouse who is interested in drawing a higher income crowd during dining hours?
Which is pretty much unsurprising, because it isn't *meant* to help you determine if you need to make sure your toilet paper is fully stocked at 3am.
Seriously, your objections are like objecting to a fork because it won't hold your soup. Different businesses use different tools for different goals.
Try running a business using only those metrics - but make a reservation at your local bankruptcy court first, because you're going to need it. Those metrics don't tell you what brought customers into the store, or why those that left without buying didn't buy, etc... (Just for some very basic examples.)
And then in your very next paragraph, you prove my point. The metrics needed to determine staffing levels go beyond the simple minded ones you posit above.
Then why does Disney provide the Fast Pass system so people *don't* have to stand in line for an hour? (Hint: Disney understands the value of customer experience, you do not.)
Here in the real world, there's a difference between "knowing the truth" and "speaking the truth".
Here in the real world, uptime and reliability matters. When you choose a statistic that hides those factors, one cannot help but wonder why.
Well, here in the real world, personnel costs aren't like little screws. They're like the frame and the engine and the body of the expensive truck - they dominate your bottom line across your life cycle.
Bullshit. You quoted his statement about not knowing how to run a business, and then argued with him by presenting a laundry list of IT tasks.
Had anyone claimed that, you'd have a point. But nobody did.
That would be believable - if you'd quoted the OP's point/paragraph about being indispensable or not. But you didn't.
It would be nice if you had a source other than one that while mildly critical of the industry of the whole (mostly it seems to appear "fair and balanced"... is mostly a booster club for the Vermont Yankee powerplant.
It may not be cherry picked by plant, but the statistic itself is cherry picked, "capacity factor" is the percentage of full rated power produced. It's an important number, but it's not up time and tells us little to nothing about reliability. It's also not surprising to discover ex post facto that plants that are operated as baseload plants have numbers that show them to have been operated as baseload plants.
No, .8 and 1.1 are nowhere near being "in the same general ballpark" - there's a difference of 30%, and that's huge.
I'd say he was spot on. He's talking about running a business, and you answer with a laundry list of IT tasks that you do - and no mention whatsoever of the rest of the stuff it takes to actually run a business. Nothing about marketing, finance, planning, contracts, etc... etc... Just a worms eye view of the IT effort.
Which means you missed the OP's point entirely. He wasn't talking about the level of effort, but rather about where that effort was directed. He wasn't downplaying subordinates, but pointing out that you miss and awful lot from the worm's eye view.
Bonuses are given to people who you want to convince to come aboard - not to people desperate to come aboard.
On the contrary - having an employee is more expensive than hiring a contractor, the company now has to pay taxes and benefits on top of the take home. That's why companies hire contractors in the first place.
OK, you're greedy. You're also not irreplaceable.
You've taken none of the risk, and have no reason to ask for any portion of the reward. You've gotten what you contacted for.
You can tell which one appears to be safer to eat - but reality is, as usual, much more complicated than that. External contamination could cause a high reading, causing you to discard a can that's entirely safe to eat after washing the can or handling it with a dishcloth and aluminum foil. Equally, the can that reads 'safer' may actually be the more dangerous of the two if it has been internally contaminated (in the field or factory). Then again, both cans could be dangerous - by having a reading low enough to be undectable by a handheld detector but still significant once it enters the body.
The OP has it right - without significant education and experience and background knowledge, radiation detectors are pretty much useless.
Except that forcing the rich to pay for the .0000000001% extra they consume (compared to the global total) does nothing for the 99.9999999999% (of the global total) consumed by the rest of us. Yeah, to a certain kind of small minded zealot "f___ the rich, make 'em pay" leaves a certain warm and fuzzy feeling, but it doesn't actually accomplish anything.
True - but that only works if everyone pays. Otherwise, there is no incentive for that other 99.9999999999% to reduce their usage and the total effect is essentially zilch.
Except that "tax them rich m____r f_____s" produces the exact opposite of what you intend. While it ground rules out the rich from participating in the land grab - it encourages the not rich to do so. (Or at best, does not discourage them from doing so.) As above, it produces a warm fuzzy populist feeling without actually changing the situation.
When people start choosing airlines on the basis of service and food rather than because one flight is $.05 cheaper than the other, then the airlines will change. Not one second before.
Oh, yeah. I feel really reassured. Oh, wait. But the worst at coal plants doesn't mean the end of the world either. (Not that we've seen in Japan the worst nukes can deliver, not even close.)
Seriously, will folks give up the "it's only a flesh wound" spin? There's tens of thousands of people forced out of their homes and hundreds of square miles of land unusable for the foreseeable future. For most normal people, that's a significant impact. For few normal people does that equate to "safe".
Funny story about that... A friend of mine was studying old newspapers in the microfilm collection at his university, and found that several key issues of one paper were missing. He didn't think this would be a problem, as it was a semi-important newspaper and was thus archived at multiple libraries across the state. So off he went to the other libraries and found the same dates missing in every library. He checked a couple of out-of-state libraries... and no matter where he checked they were all missing the same issues.
Turns out one company had microfilmed one libraries collection - and the others had all bought the microfilm and trashed their paper copies and nobody had ever actually verified that the microfilm represented a complete run.
So, just because the "backups" are distributed is no guarantee they are complete.
Sadly, you're completely correct.
[[Citation Needed]]
You have an anecdote, they have data. There is a difference.
In a universe where we blindly accept the risk of dying in a swimming pool accident - that might be a true statement. But here in this universe there are codes about such things as having locked gates to prevent unauthorized access to private pools, laws that require lifeguards in public pools, new codes that require new covers over filter inlets (so people don't get sucked against them and held there and drowned), etc... etc... In this universe we don't just "accept without thinking about it" the risk of dying in a swimming pool accident - we take positive steps against it.
That's why you should be talking to the house, not the room, fixtures, or appliances. One always on circuit that can power up downstream only circuits as needed. There are times when distributed systems are the hammer you need, but this isn't one of them.
As usual, you either miss the point entirely or are stupid enough to not even comprehend the point. Module weight isn't the issue - the issue is that moving from the Shuttle makes the modules smaller, heavier, more complex, more expensive, and far, far less capable.
Here in the real universe, SpaceX is a recent development and utterly irrelevant to an ISS analog built with expendables in the 80's and 90's. Once again, you ignorance leads you to false conclusions.
In some fantasy universe where businesses don't bill for overhead. Or, in other words, once again your ignorance leads you astray.
We never 'needed' pretty much anything we've done so far as manned space is concerned. But if you mean that to be read as "we could have done everything the Shuttle did much cheaper", as abundantly and repeatedly demonstrated... you're wrong.
It would have taken *much* more than being shrunk slightly in width... None of the US (and hence Shuttle launched) ISS modules had any capability to self support or maneuver. So figure roughly 25% of their launch mass would have to bee parasitic (that is, required to support their survival until docked with the station, and unneeded afterwards), as opposed to essentially zero as they actually exist.
In some mirror universe where "most of" actually means "practically none of". In the same mirror universe, my PC-Jr has "most of" the functionality of my Athlon. Here in this universe, you also have to consider the problem of parasitic mass mentioned above.
Worse yet, you've forgotten the cost to develop and operate whatever you're planning on using for transporting crew to and from and supplies to your fantasy space station.
When you add up the costs required to deliver three station crew, return three station crew, and either delivering a module or delivering aa supply transport via expendables - you pretty much have paid for a Shuttle mission which can do all of those (and more since it can return that supply transport for re-use) in a single flight. When you examine the actual cost of a Shuttle flight (roughly $100 million to add a single flight to the manifest), expendables don't come off nearly as well as you think they do.
Yes, the Shuttle is expensive. But it's expensive for the same reason a desktop computer is more expensive than an iPhone, or a full size pickup is more expensive than a compact riceburner. Capability costs money.
And if pigs had wings, we'd all wear hats. You seem unaware that Congress combed through NASA's budget with a fine tooth comb from the early 70's to the early 00's and lining out anything that smelled of being intended to support of manned Lunar or Martian exploration.
Even the book would be impressive if mass media that hewed to specific viewpoints/political slant didn't date back to the birth of mass media.
Which is pretty much irrelevant as no human is going to be living at the depths involved.
You do realize that "automated operations" and "human operations" are pretty much mutually exclusive don't you? But anyways, for remote supervising of humans, NASA has nothing that anyone else doesn't have. For remote supervision of automated operations... well, pretty much ditto. (NASA does have a better PR department thought.)
If "technology" in the real world was like it was in games and bad fiction, that would be a reasonable statement. But technology in the real world can't be measured as "overall better" or "overall worse" because it can't be quantitatively measured at all.
See above about "better PR".
Who funded it is utterly irrelevant to the matter. It's a symptom of your continuing delusion that you believe that it represents an adequate defense to "it wasn't yours in the first place".