Dice owns it. The 'editors' are barely literate, can't spot dupes, and are in charge of periodically adding stories. There's a team of incompetent coders furiously working on the beta site they occasionally force me to see.
Once you hit the moderation system... it's monkeys flinging poo.;-)
Here's what I don't understand, whats so wrong about defining the Ampere in terms of coulombs per second?
Really? Because this sounds like it's a pretty darned hand-waving definition to me.
At present, an ampere is defined as the amount of charge flowing per second through two infinitely long wires one meter apart, such that the wires attract each other with a force of 2x10^-7 newtons per meter of length. That definition, adopted in 1948 and based on a thought experiment that can at best be approximated in the laboratory, is clumsy
Where, for instance, are you going to get two infinitely long wires? How are you going to guarantee they're precisely 1m apart? How do you precisely measure 2x10^-7 newtons per meter of length?
If your measure can "at best be approximated in a laboratory", you don't have an objective measure, you have a vague description of what you mean.
Essentially, the reference object isn't free from contamination or interacting with its environment.
We don't have a mechanism which allows us to define it in a more rigorous manner which can be reproduced, so we've got this hunk of of whatever it is sitting on a shelf which is defined as the reference kilogram. (OK, it's not just sitting on a shelf, but close)
Not what you'd call an objective standard. More of an approximation which is official and which the other official approximations are measured against.
Unlike an atomic clock where you can precisely define the unit of time in wavelengths of whatevers, there's no way to define the kilogram in a more specific way.
Including numbers greater than 255 just makes it look obviously fake.
Who cares? I expect any IP address on TV to be fake.
Sure, the nerds can sit there and say "ZOMG, teh IP address is teh sux0r". And the rest of the world doesn't give a damn (including some of the nerds).
From the (mistaken? wise?) use of a.300 in an IPv4 address in The Net
I count that as wise. If you put a real IP address, it would likely get a lot of traffic.
Mostly, I've long since learned to go "la la la" when techno-babble happens -- either the movie is good, or it isn't, the specifics of what they show on the screen are irrelevant.
Getting mired in the fact that it's actually just a scrolling Pascal program or a web-page is kind of pointless for me.
Hell, the biggest piece of techno-babble that made me cringe in the theater made sense in the Directors cut -- and that was the use of the Apple laptop in Independence Day to take over the stuff. In the directors cut they make it clear it's radio frequencies, in the theater felt it was using Apple Talk or telnet or something.
When I saw the director's cut I was thinking, "OK, why didn't you do it like that in the theater, this actually (mostly) makes sense".
Someone wrote with the idea for conduit between rooms in the walls for future wiring. I like it. Aircraft carriers are built that way.
Having zero knowledge about home automation, but having occasionally wished it was easier to string cabling between rooms... conduits to be able to make future wiring easier sounds like an awfully good idea.
I'm about to move into a house in which some networking cables are going to have to be strung some annoying distances, and the house has new laminate flooring I'd rather not tear into.
Conduits would likely make this far easier. Instead I see a fish-tape in my future.
Of course, the big question is if they'll break pattern and have two good releases back to back, or, if they'll break pattern and have two releases back to back which suck.
Oh, and you've forgotten about Windows 2003, which to the best of my knowledge falls into the 'great' category since it's still widely used.
Actually, many digital cameras will pick up infra-red. Try sticking a remote control in front of one - depends on the camera, but a lot of them will show it lighting up.
Absolutely true.
A year or so ago I was having problems getting the remote for my new TV to work.
I ended up confirming the remote worked by pointing it into my digital camera and confirming I could see the IR being sent in a picture.
Once I confirmed that it was working, it let me narrow down the places I could be looking for my problem.
Knowing this little fact comes in handy sometimes, because you can quickly confirm you're remote (or whatever) is actually transmitting.
if this is hard, then they're assholes. that should practically be a checkbox.
Oh? How do you figure?
If you allow anonymous access to view, you can have that before you have registration implemented.
If not, you have to have resolved all of the problems with registration before anybody can see anything.
To me, the difference between "system provides some functionality anonymously to read documents" and "system requires a working registration/sign-in system in order to be able to read documents" is a hell of a lot more than 'practically a checkbox' -- not unless your checkboxes come with stuff which magically generates the entire registration system.
I was on a project once where on page one of our gathered requirements, there was the axiomatic-assumption that "this condition can never happen because it's meaningless and an error condition, and would be really bad". So, you build the system on that assumption, build rules to enforce that behavior can never happen... and then 6 months later someone says "well, some times it can happen, and we need it to happen right now because we now consider it a deficiency that it doesn't do what we told you it's not allowed to do".
When someone changes how one of the parts fundamentally works, it can be far far more than a checkbutton to correct it. In fact, it can be almost impossible once you've built stuff around doing it the way you were told in the first place.
It's NOT more flexible, except in hairball wacko scenarios that never happen in reality.
I never said it was, nor am I defending the notion of this.
GP expressed an inability to imagine what this was for. I pointed out that TFS explicitly stated what it was for.
I have no idea about the practicality of this or how often these scenarios come up. I've never had to evac wounded under fire, because, thankfully, it's not in my job description.:-P
Me, I figure you shoot big, and aim for what they had in Aliens -- a VTOL craft you can unload your vehicles from and skip off to a safer place and provide fire support. If that fails, nuke the whole site from orbit.;-)
What plausible reason could there be for moving a project to IIS? Does IIS have any advantages over free alternatives?
Clearly, you've not dealt with companies who have built their world around a specific technology before.
Those companies tend to be like hammer-makers -- they view everything as a problem to be solved with a hammer.
We once had a manger (well, briefly, he was someone's drinking buddy) who was a huge RDB ER-diagram nut.
Now, our system wasn't an RDB, and was never going to be. In fact, it was nothing at all like an RDB. But, he insisted on making reams of meaningless ER-diagrams which had nothing at all to do with the system.
We repeatedly told him his diagrams had nothing to do with our system, and that there was no point in creating ER-diagrams that didn't apply, and that we were not going to use them because they were meaningless. He continued to insist that the only workable way to describe what we were doing was with an ER-diagram, and continued to produce even more. Of course, since the ER-diagrams were meaningless, they neither described the system as it existed, nor as it was supposed to be.
Eventually, his pretty little models were demonstrated to be pure fantasy, completely unrelated to the software at hand, and mostly just something he did to make it look like he was productive. And, to top it off, they were done in software he owned a copy of, but the company didn't -- which means nobody but him could do anything with them besides look at them and wonder what they were for.
Someone finally understood what the developers had been saying for a while, and realized that not only was this guy not helping us get anything done, he was giving the ER diagrams to the client, who were then asking "what is this, and how does it relate to what we have". Eventually management realized what was happening, and got rid of him.
It really isn't uncommon for someone to come in and more or less say "I consider myself an expert in X, and you are using Y, therefore in my professional opinion you need to start using X".
It has nothing at all to do with the specific needs, or even the problem at hand. But it's what they know, and what they think everyone should be using.
You are correct, but hiring a contractor with some rather spectacular failures (and numerous smaller ones) isn't exactly going to fix that...
Name me ONE contractor who has never had any failures, spectacular otherwise.
Because I'm betting a lot of companies would love to engage them (if they exist).
I've seen epic fails from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and a fair few others.
Hell, I was on a project once that had 11 PMs, 8 managers/Directors, coming from 5 different entities (3 of which were fully-owned divisions of a single parent entity), and fewer than 6-10 people doing most of the technical work.
The PMs and stakeholders spent so much time fighting one another that it was completely impossible to not fail. Most of our status meetings were spent trying to get the PMs to agree on anything, and then recapping stuff for them -- because they didn't communicate among themselves at any other time, and they all had their own agenda to carve out or protect their little fiefdoms.
When you have more managers, stakeholders, and PMs than you do people with 'boots on the ground', this is a predictable outcome.
When every decision becomes a re-hash of every previous decision (and frequent attempts to redesign the whole thing based on someone's pet technology), you never get anything done.
You just end up drowning in a process mired in itself, and incapable of moving forward. And often, it's the client and the stakeholders who make that happen.
They bring in the "top tech talent" for the initial meetings, then bill you the same rates for a horde of junior incompetents, and you never see that senior talent again.
But, really, do you see this as different from any IT organization/software company you've dealt with?
The early enthusiasm and usefulness drops off pretty quick once the deal is signed and the sales guys get their commission checks.
And then you have the people wondering how the hell to implement a flying car and deliver on the unicorns which were promised by the sales guys.
I've certainly been on the receiving end of this from Oracle and a few others.
The problem is the people who chase the deals and carefully craft the responses to make it look like you've solved the problem. In a lot of cases, it's basically a shell game.
... but I don't think firing everyone in charge of a massive project does a lot of good when it you're trying to make it work.
No, but it gives the impression that you're Trying to Fix It.
My question is "how much will change?" How much of this can be laid at the feet of the contractor, and how much was more of a symptom of the inability of the feds to handle the project? Because I've dealt with clients who essentially made a successful project impossible, and then groused when they didn't get a successful project (as if we could force them to do what was needed, but they ignored or failed to actually do).
I don't always assume that just because they say "it was all their fault" that it was actually the case. Sometimes, it's people covering their own asses making the claim.
I don't know about you, but my internet package is metered. If I go beyond a certain point, they charge me more money.
Unless of course, I decide to upgrade to the big giant one they have, so they can charge me more money.
And, of course, even the big giant one isn't truly 'unlimited', so if you go too far, they'll still charge you more money.
So, if a BluRay movie is huge, content in 4K is going to be much more huge. Which would likely cost me -- wait, you guessed it, more money.
Which to me, has always been the problem with Netflix and their business model -- I pay them money to be able to stream the movie, and then I will need to pay my ISP even more money for the bandwidth I use.
I'd just as soon buy the Blu-Ray disc and ignore the streaming altogether. Because then I can watch it all I want without paying someone more money.
If we had real net neutrality, and real unlimited packages, I might think it worth my while. But for now, it doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
I have no interest whatsoever in changing my TV over to 4K resolution -- because there's no content, because I don't care and don't see the benefit, and because my current big screen and associated stuff is still really new.
But, I'd dearly love to have that kind of resolution for my monitor. That much screen resolution and real-estate would be awesome, especially in a dual monitor setup.
However, it's still technology, which means I refuse to be on the bleeding edge of it. I know a lot of people who bought HD TVs early in the game, only to find out that the evolving spec and addition of DRM made their TVs obsolete before they ever really got to see them fully used.
I predict there will be at least one generation of this technology which ends up getting abandoned and the purchasers will be left holding the bag.
For TV, I figure just because Sony et al want to believe I should be replacing my TV stuff every few years -- well, that's not my problem.
Let's say the software is very buggy and they hide that, withheld updates, and so on.
Have you ever looked at the fine print of the licensing for Microsoft Windows?
It clearly spells out the software isn't suitable for health/medical devices, aircraft maintenance, and a whole raft of things.
But, there's tons of stuff which do those things using Windows.
But since you've agreed to the license terms (you're using it after all), the license terms say "we bear no responsibility". And since license terms have been upheld, you can safely bet than anybody making autonomous cars will have also covered their asses.
And, then of course, there's the fact that they bribe politicians into passing laws in their favor by using lobbyists -- whose job it is to ensure they carry little of the risk.
You'd likely have to demonstrate some pretty widespread malfeasance to actually hold them responsible for anything. But, since Obama was happy to give Monsanto retroactive immunity, I'm sure some other politician will also do this.
In other words, assume they're buggy as hell, dangerous, and simply don't buy one. Because that's what I'm gonna do.
Slashdot Mirror
This was a spiteful and petty act of retribution, pretty much much as reported already.
Except, as has been pointed out elsewhere here, the Coulomb is defined in terms of Amps.
So, if you defined the Amp in terms of the Coulomb, and the Coulomb is defined in terms of Amps ... you end up with a circular definition.
I don't get the impression you *can* define a Coulomb independent of the Amp.
I think what they're trying to find is a precise way to define the foundation of both of these.
Nobody is in charge.
Dice owns it. The 'editors' are barely literate, can't spot dupes, and are in charge of periodically adding stories. There's a team of incompetent coders furiously working on the beta site they occasionally force me to see.
Once you hit the moderation system ... it's monkeys flinging poo. ;-)
Really? Because this sounds like it's a pretty darned hand-waving definition to me.
Where, for instance, are you going to get two infinitely long wires? How are you going to guarantee they're precisely 1m apart? How do you precisely measure 2x10^-7 newtons per meter of length?
If your measure can "at best be approximated in a laboratory", you don't have an objective measure, you have a vague description of what you mean.
Mostly I think it's dirt and other crud.
Essentially, the reference object isn't free from contamination or interacting with its environment.
We don't have a mechanism which allows us to define it in a more rigorous manner which can be reproduced, so we've got this hunk of of whatever it is sitting on a shelf which is defined as the reference kilogram. (OK, it's not just sitting on a shelf, but close)
Not what you'd call an objective standard. More of an approximation which is official and which the other official approximations are measured against.
Unlike an atomic clock where you can precisely define the unit of time in wavelengths of whatevers, there's no way to define the kilogram in a more specific way.
Who cares? I expect any IP address on TV to be fake.
Sure, the nerds can sit there and say "ZOMG, teh IP address is teh sux0r". And the rest of the world doesn't give a damn (including some of the nerds).
A 555 number is also obviously fake.
Same as most other governments do, make the onus of reporting on you, and failure to report illegal.
Ummm ... it's right there in the summary:
Or, are you somehow suggesting "Slashdot should be enough for anybody"?
I count that as wise. If you put a real IP address, it would likely get a lot of traffic.
Mostly, I've long since learned to go "la la la" when techno-babble happens -- either the movie is good, or it isn't, the specifics of what they show on the screen are irrelevant.
Getting mired in the fact that it's actually just a scrolling Pascal program or a web-page is kind of pointless for me.
Hell, the biggest piece of techno-babble that made me cringe in the theater made sense in the Directors cut -- and that was the use of the Apple laptop in Independence Day to take over the stuff. In the directors cut they make it clear it's radio frequencies, in the theater felt it was using Apple Talk or telnet or something.
When I saw the director's cut I was thinking, "OK, why didn't you do it like that in the theater, this actually (mostly) makes sense".
Having zero knowledge about home automation, but having occasionally wished it was easier to string cabling between rooms ... conduits to be able to make future wiring easier sounds like an awfully good idea.
I'm about to move into a house in which some networking cables are going to have to be strung some annoying distances, and the house has new laminate flooring I'd rather not tear into.
Conduits would likely make this far easier. Instead I see a fish-tape in my future.
Hell no. The new Uhura, also good.
And Chekov (Weektor Weektor). And Scotty. I also like Quinto as Spock.
I actually like the fact that the new Trek movies have thrown canon out the window and don't have to be bound by it.
It means I can stop trying to catch them on something and just enjoy the movie.
Frac-u-later. ;-)
Not unlike Star Trek movies. :-P
Of course, the big question is if they'll break pattern and have two good releases back to back, or, if they'll break pattern and have two releases back to back which suck.
Oh, and you've forgotten about Windows 2003, which to the best of my knowledge falls into the 'great' category since it's still widely used.
Absolutely true.
A year or so ago I was having problems getting the remote for my new TV to work.
I ended up confirming the remote worked by pointing it into my digital camera and confirming I could see the IR being sent in a picture.
Once I confirmed that it was working, it let me narrow down the places I could be looking for my problem.
Knowing this little fact comes in handy sometimes, because you can quickly confirm you're remote (or whatever) is actually transmitting.
Oh? How do you figure?
If you allow anonymous access to view, you can have that before you have registration implemented.
If not, you have to have resolved all of the problems with registration before anybody can see anything.
To me, the difference between "system provides some functionality anonymously to read documents" and "system requires a working registration/sign-in system in order to be able to read documents" is a hell of a lot more than 'practically a checkbox' -- not unless your checkboxes come with stuff which magically generates the entire registration system.
I was on a project once where on page one of our gathered requirements, there was the axiomatic-assumption that "this condition can never happen because it's meaningless and an error condition, and would be really bad". So, you build the system on that assumption, build rules to enforce that behavior can never happen ... and then 6 months later someone says "well, some times it can happen, and we need it to happen right now because we now consider it a deficiency that it doesn't do what we told you it's not allowed to do".
When someone changes how one of the parts fundamentally works, it can be far far more than a checkbutton to correct it. In fact, it can be almost impossible once you've built stuff around doing it the way you were told in the first place.
I never said it was, nor am I defending the notion of this.
GP expressed an inability to imagine what this was for. I pointed out that TFS explicitly stated what it was for.
I have no idea about the practicality of this or how often these scenarios come up. I've never had to evac wounded under fire, because, thankfully, it's not in my job description. :-P
Me, I figure you shoot big, and aim for what they had in Aliens -- a VTOL craft you can unload your vehicles from and skip off to a safer place and provide fire support. If that fails, nuke the whole site from orbit. ;-)
Clearly, you've not dealt with companies who have built their world around a specific technology before.
Those companies tend to be like hammer-makers -- they view everything as a problem to be solved with a hammer.
We once had a manger (well, briefly, he was someone's drinking buddy) who was a huge RDB ER-diagram nut.
Now, our system wasn't an RDB, and was never going to be. In fact, it was nothing at all like an RDB. But, he insisted on making reams of meaningless ER-diagrams which had nothing at all to do with the system.
We repeatedly told him his diagrams had nothing to do with our system, and that there was no point in creating ER-diagrams that didn't apply, and that we were not going to use them because they were meaningless. He continued to insist that the only workable way to describe what we were doing was with an ER-diagram, and continued to produce even more. Of course, since the ER-diagrams were meaningless, they neither described the system as it existed, nor as it was supposed to be.
Eventually, his pretty little models were demonstrated to be pure fantasy, completely unrelated to the software at hand, and mostly just something he did to make it look like he was productive. And, to top it off, they were done in software he owned a copy of, but the company didn't -- which means nobody but him could do anything with them besides look at them and wonder what they were for.
Someone finally understood what the developers had been saying for a while, and realized that not only was this guy not helping us get anything done, he was giving the ER diagrams to the client, who were then asking "what is this, and how does it relate to what we have". Eventually management realized what was happening, and got rid of him.
It really isn't uncommon for someone to come in and more or less say "I consider myself an expert in X, and you are using Y, therefore in my professional opinion you need to start using X".
It has nothing at all to do with the specific needs, or even the problem at hand. But it's what they know, and what they think everyone should be using.
Name me ONE contractor who has never had any failures, spectacular otherwise.
Because I'm betting a lot of companies would love to engage them (if they exist).
I've seen epic fails from IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and a fair few others.
Hell, I was on a project once that had 11 PMs, 8 managers/Directors, coming from 5 different entities (3 of which were fully-owned divisions of a single parent entity), and fewer than 6-10 people doing most of the technical work.
The PMs and stakeholders spent so much time fighting one another that it was completely impossible to not fail. Most of our status meetings were spent trying to get the PMs to agree on anything, and then recapping stuff for them -- because they didn't communicate among themselves at any other time, and they all had their own agenda to carve out or protect their little fiefdoms.
When you have more managers, stakeholders, and PMs than you do people with 'boots on the ground', this is a predictable outcome.
When every decision becomes a re-hash of every previous decision (and frequent attempts to redesign the whole thing based on someone's pet technology), you never get anything done.
You just end up drowning in a process mired in itself, and incapable of moving forward. And often, it's the client and the stakeholders who make that happen.
But, really, do you see this as different from any IT organization/software company you've dealt with?
The early enthusiasm and usefulness drops off pretty quick once the deal is signed and the sales guys get their commission checks.
And then you have the people wondering how the hell to implement a flying car and deliver on the unicorns which were promised by the sales guys.
I've certainly been on the receiving end of this from Oracle and a few others.
The problem is the people who chase the deals and carefully craft the responses to make it look like you've solved the problem. In a lot of cases, it's basically a shell game.
No, but it gives the impression that you're Trying to Fix It.
My question is "how much will change?" How much of this can be laid at the feet of the contractor, and how much was more of a symptom of the inability of the feds to handle the project? Because I've dealt with clients who essentially made a successful project impossible, and then groused when they didn't get a successful project (as if we could force them to do what was needed, but they ignored or failed to actually do).
I don't always assume that just because they say "it was all their fault" that it was actually the case. Sometimes, it's people covering their own asses making the claim.
Most especially where governments are concerned.
And Edison 'invented' electricity.
Well, did you read the whole 3rd sentence of the summary?
Nobody is asking you to imagine anything.
Surprisingly, there's even more in the actual article.
I don't know about you, but my internet package is metered. If I go beyond a certain point, they charge me more money.
Unless of course, I decide to upgrade to the big giant one they have, so they can charge me more money.
And, of course, even the big giant one isn't truly 'unlimited', so if you go too far, they'll still charge you more money.
So, if a BluRay movie is huge, content in 4K is going to be much more huge. Which would likely cost me -- wait, you guessed it, more money.
Which to me, has always been the problem with Netflix and their business model -- I pay them money to be able to stream the movie, and then I will need to pay my ISP even more money for the bandwidth I use.
I'd just as soon buy the Blu-Ray disc and ignore the streaming altogether. Because then I can watch it all I want without paying someone more money.
If we had real net neutrality, and real unlimited packages, I might think it worth my while. But for now, it doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
I have no interest whatsoever in changing my TV over to 4K resolution -- because there's no content, because I don't care and don't see the benefit, and because my current big screen and associated stuff is still really new.
But, I'd dearly love to have that kind of resolution for my monitor. That much screen resolution and real-estate would be awesome, especially in a dual monitor setup.
However, it's still technology, which means I refuse to be on the bleeding edge of it. I know a lot of people who bought HD TVs early in the game, only to find out that the evolving spec and addition of DRM made their TVs obsolete before they ever really got to see them fully used.
I predict there will be at least one generation of this technology which ends up getting abandoned and the purchasers will be left holding the bag.
For TV, I figure just because Sony et al want to believe I should be replacing my TV stuff every few years -- well, that's not my problem.
Have you ever looked at the fine print of the licensing for Microsoft Windows?
It clearly spells out the software isn't suitable for health/medical devices, aircraft maintenance, and a whole raft of things.
But, there's tons of stuff which do those things using Windows.
But since you've agreed to the license terms (you're using it after all), the license terms say "we bear no responsibility". And since license terms have been upheld, you can safely bet than anybody making autonomous cars will have also covered their asses.
And, then of course, there's the fact that they bribe politicians into passing laws in their favor by using lobbyists -- whose job it is to ensure they carry little of the risk.
You'd likely have to demonstrate some pretty widespread malfeasance to actually hold them responsible for anything. But, since Obama was happy to give Monsanto retroactive immunity, I'm sure some other politician will also do this.
In other words, assume they're buggy as hell, dangerous, and simply don't buy one. Because that's what I'm gonna do.