Our tools works well -- I have the environment it runs on spec'ed out to handle more people than my company could put on it, so we don't have performance problems (and thanks to my background in systems administration I'm ready with a "shit just happened" plan for dealing with a slowdown if one were to occur). We use clustering for the primary servers for performance and fault tolerance, the database runs on a SQL cluster and the data is all stored on a SAN, so we can grow easily and absorb a pretty significant number of parallel failures before the end users would notice anything amiss.
I wouldn't describe your situation as malicious compliance since your enterprise tool doesn't deliver. The stuff I've encountered is quite different. Lemme give you an example:
We had a user call from another location complaining of performance issues, saying that he shouldn't have to use the system because it took ten minutes to check in a small file. We worked with him, involved our network group, went over server logs, called in the vendor -- nobody could figure this out. Finally, I hopped a plane to his location, showed up at his desk without notice and demanded he show me and, lo and behold, it took a few seconds. He confessed that he'd just been lying to us (although he said "exaggerated"), and as a result we wasted dozens of man-hours (and the cost of my travel) to find that out.
Most of the situations aren't quite that crazy, but they tend to be out there in their own way (for example, we had a user cite particular functionality as a reason he couldn't migrate... except his existing tool didn't have that functionality, either). Again, I think it just comes down to certain people not being able to play along with the team, and at a company as big as mine that just doesn't work out.
Re:Everybody IT needs these skills, not just bosse
on
IT Manager's Handbook
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· Score: 1
That sort of thing is possible at a smaller company, but as I mentioned in another post I work for a very, very large company. We made the decision with the involvement of the heads of the major departments and pilot teams that they specified, but we did not make the decision together with everyone because there is no possible way to do something like that. It's just a fact of life.
That aside, you should consider the fact that in cases such as this one the developer is not the only one who recognizes benefits from the use of the tool -- the system also functions to benefit project management, promotes company-wide code reuse, records data for the financial folks, allows upper management to track the progress via reporting and lets people in different phases of development work together without needing to know how to use multiple tools (saving us huge $$ in licensing and training fees). These sorts of benefits are measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars woth of savings to a company like mine, and they're things that can be sabotaged if developers (or other users) decide that they don't need to play ball.
I know this can seem strange if you're used to smaller companies (like I was until I came to work here), but take it from me that a lot of the stuff you take for granted at a company with a few hundred people is the sort of thing that is very hard to achieve at larger companies.
So I hope you understand when I say that we don't have the luxury of giving developers the option to do what they feel like. My preference is always to explain these benefits to people who object to using the new system, but it's getting to the point where the words "we wish you luck in your future endeavors" are about to be used. I don't like that at all but, and I suppose this is my point for this thread, it's sometimes necessary.
Re:Everybody IT needs these skills, not just bosse
on
IT Manager's Handbook
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· Score: 1
It's not ClearCase.
You (and several of the other people who commented) are making the assumption that we're a small organization. We're not -- the technical term for the size of my company is "holy crap that's a lot of people". So while we did identify a significant number of pilot groups and involve them in the decision that was being made, obviously we couldn't possibly involve everyone or even most everyone. Instead, we got sign-off on requirements from the heads of each of the major divisions and piloted the tool with selected teams.
Which is, of course, an interesting part of the problem. At previous companies, I've been able to deal with my developers one on one and generate a working relationship, but when you have thousands of users that just isn't an option. This also brings us back to the reason for having an enterprise-wide SCM project: As I mentioned, people weren't keeping their code in one place and, in some cases, we found still-active legacy systems for which the source code could not be located.
What it looks like we're going to do is opt for a solution where the CTO makes it clear that use of this new system is a condition of employment, that anyone circumventing it will be terminated. It's an iron-fist approach and that sucks, but (a) you're never going to get tens of thousands of users to agree on anything and (b) honestly when you get down to brass tacks the code belongs to the company, not the individual developers or project managers, and therefore the company has every right (and, in our case, a legal responsibility) to secure that information.
That's a rather redundant chapter title, don't you think?
Actually, upper management should be somewhat uninformed. I want my CTO thinking about budgets and etc rather than knowing too much about network setup -- aside from the fact that the ones who do know a lot of details being the ones who micromanage, I want them to take care of that sort of trash so I don't have to.
The trouble comes, of course, when upper management is uninformed *and* doesn't listen to the people they hired to take care of that sort of thing for them. Heck, I've had jobs where I felt like I needed to dress up like a consultant to get management to give me the time of day...
Everybody IT needs these skills, not just bosses
on
IT Manager's Handbook
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· Score: 4, Interesting
That sort of information isn't only needed by IT managers -- just working in tech jobs, you need a lot of those skills.
For example, I've found myself having the deal with a real spike in software zealots (you know, the people who are way too devoted to a certain software package or OS). I dunno if they all went away after the dot-com bust, if they were just laying low after seeing so many people lose their jobs or if I just got lucky and didn't encounter them for a while, but it seems like all of the sudden my company is crawling with people who absolutely positively can only use their one preferred product and how dare you suggest they use something else?
Right now, we're working to push all the source code in the company into a certain version control system that we set up. Someone in upper management finally realized that we had zillions of dollars in developed code sitting on desktops and servers that aren't backed up, so we spent the bucks to set up a high-availability, secure, backed up system.
With certain people, you'd think we'd asked them to cut off a pinky. We've had all sorts of trouble, from people ignoring the efforts to convert them over to outright "malicious compliance" where they check in once and then go back to the old way of doing things. I mean, c'mon, one SCM system is basically like the other and this one is pretty easy to use. Is it really that onerous for the people who are paying you to develop things to ask you to put them someplace in particular once they're done?
I know it's not a new problem, but I've never worked out a good way to handle folks like this.
I'm trying to understand your comment, and I see three possibilities. Either:
(a) You believe this woman intentionally got herself killed in order to collect easy money from the radio station.
(b) You don't believe that the radio station, which set the rules of this contest and provided enticement for people to participate, was at all negligent in not exploring the possible injuries that could result from it.
(c) Your comment had nothing to do with this case, you just have a problem with lawsuits in general.
Assuming (c), I feel like I should point out that, given the facts as we currently understand them, this would hardly be a frivolous lawsuit. The radio station was clearly negligent in not exploring the hazards of what they were encouraging people to do and, although you may not think it's fair, they have an obligation under the law to do so.
Furthermore, the example you cited with the GPS, aside from sounding like an obvious urban legend, doesn't actually map to this situation. Anyone with a driver's license should know that you look before you turn your car, but understanding the risks of this sort of contest would require some basic medical training. It is therefore reasonable to expect a driver to look before turning and not reasonable to expect the average person to understand the health risks of this sort of activity.
Which is, ultimately, why we as a society have lawsuits like this. The radio station was obligated to do their due-diligence before enticing people into this behavior. And that's why they're going to get clobbered by the lawsuit that will come from this.
I can't believe that nobody involved in this event had misgivings about this, especially since just a couple of years ago a kid at Chico State died of the same thing (which got all sorts of press around California at the time).
What a stupid thing to have happen. You've got to feel for her family, especially with all the reports saying she was doing it for her kids -- having your mom die trying to get you some stupid video game system would be a shitty thing to live with. I hope they sue this radio station and the individuals involved into the poorhouse...
I think what made me saddest was the name change from Apple Computer Inc to Apple Inc. Ars has been saying for sometime that Apple's future seems to be gizmo's and gadgets after the switch to Intel. I'm just all sorts of dejected.
You ask me, everybody's future is going to be in "gizmos and gadgets". The PC as we know it is slowly riding off into the sunset.
Or maybe that's a misleading statement. IMO, the PC will be around for a good long while, but it will increasingly be as a coordination center for your other devices and for a few specialty items (editing photos, for example). From what I can see, many of the other things it can do, the things that previously *only* a PC could do, are going to become incorporated into more convenient devices. This is only a first, albeit welcome, step.
I'd be fine with that myself. I'm mostly afraid that they'll upgrade me at the cost of an additional two years plus a couple of hundred extra bucks since the contract I got my Razr with will still be in effect come June.
This raises some important questions, such as what the hell I'm going to do about that year I have remaining on my current Cingular contract. Stupid Razr.
The biggest trouble Apple's going to have is getting this into the hands of people who want it but are locked into other contracts where they got free phones. If they were really smart, they'll have strong-armed Cingular into not marking the phones up very much for their existing customers.
Man, if I had a nickle for every time I wanted to bomb Paypal, I'd have... er... probably a real hassle getting all the money out of my Paypal account.
You heard it here first, folks: IE and Firefox make up only a small minority of web browsers in use.
Star-based rating systems are useless for more than getting a quick idea of what's up. They don't really tell you anything; for instance, I've purchased items in the past that have issues that don't bother me that I would have passed on just based on a "star" approach.
This goes for Alexa, this goes for movies, etc. I suspect that most consumers of this sort of information use it like I do -- only as a starting point to filter out the really bad products. For anything important or where I'm spending more than a few bucks, I'll read the reviews of a product as it's still the only way to really get any good information.
I just heard the other day about some kind of 'mark' that digital cameras put on all images, that notate what type camera you have...and some of the programs put registration information on the images (name, etc).
You're thinking of Exif data. It contains information regarding a specific image: the camera model, the date and time of the photo and all sorts of potentially useful photographic details -- the ISO, aperture used, shutter speed, focal length, etc.
This can be extremely useful stuff if you're a semi-serious photographer. Whenever I run across a photo that I like, that produces a neat visual effect or was taken under circumstances I generally have problems with, I can look at the EXIF data and see how it was done. This also works in reverse -- when I fuck up and take a slew of bad photos, I can look at the EXIF data and work out what I did wrong so I (hopefully) don't make the same mistake again.
I'm not sure why you wouldn't want this sort of metadata saved in your pictures; even if it's not useful to you, it may be useful to other people who look at your pictures. It's not as if it's reporting your full legal name and social security number or anything.
That aside, I can think of a few applications where having GPS data automagically stored could be useful:
Reshoots -- I have a few "landscape"-style photos that would be great images if I could only go back and fix something about how I shot them, but I don't know specifically where I was when I took them.
Copycatting -- Same as above, but with someone else's shots. Retaking photos from other people that you enjoy is an excellent way to learn about how to look at a situation and frame a shot. For example, people have spent a lot of time and effort to figure out where and when Ansel Adams took some of his more famous pics.
Memory Aid -- A dozen years from now when you look at your photos, are you going to remember specifically where you were during that Scotland vacation? Extra info -- location data included -- can help you out there.
Official uses -- Obviously helpful to efforts like forensic investigations, large-scale insurance adjusting (especially after something like Katrina) and etc.
Obviously, none of this is "mission critical" stuff, but like EXIF data it's nice to have and is another tool you can use to make yourself a better photographer.
Most people (with the obvious exception of Grampa Simpson) know not to give out their credit card number to someone who calls them on the phone and asks for it, regardless of where they say they're calling from. The lesson that needs to be imparted here is along those same lines -- never click on a link embedded in an email that takes you to a web site that asks for personal information, no matter where that site seems to be.
Phishing? Man, I dunno -- seems to me that if you get suckered into giving someone your account information, that's kind of your own problem. It's not Paypal's fault if you actually believed that the poorly-worded email you got was actually from them because it had their logo someplace on it.
On the other hand, this sort of thing could also seriously undermine the confidence that people have in online transactions and the like, so I can't help but wonder if maybe it isn't shortsighted not to just take the hit.
I think microscopic black holes couldn't eat up the earth due to the three stooges problem. They are so small that only an atom at a time can get in, but the gravity is strong enough to try to suck in more, so all the atoms get bunched up around the event horizon like the three stooges all trying to get through a door at the same time.
Fortunately, I don't have a sense of humor. This allows me to point out that, in theory anyhow (I've never seen one in person), all black holes are the same size. Their mass may vary, their size does not.
Seems to me that the only real problem with blowing this sort of thing off by saying "this is just like last time when we tried something that had a small chance of destroying the world and it worked out okay then" is that you really only have to be wrong once.
"Oh shit! Yeah, our bad -- man, are our faces red. Sorry about that, everybody."
Came back through SFO from Edinburgh yesterday and saw signs for a couple of dedicated test lanes for this (they were closed, but they were all set). I was wondering what the heck it was about.
I just got the EFF's "we're winning, now please donate more cash" spam and surfed over here to see if there were details. Scary how the two lined up so perfectly.
So yeah, if you have a few bucks, they could probably use it. I realize it's only our basic liberties, but let's be honest -- if you don't donate your spare cash to the EFF, you're just going to waste it on booze.
Sure, and better yet the business model already exists -- take your network to a pay basis like HBO or Showtime.
The big problem with that approach for ABC, of course, is that it requires that you have decent television that people will actually shell out a few bucks a month to watch. I mean, "Grey's Anatomy" might be all well and good for a network show, but put it up against "Rescue Me" on FX or "Deadwood" on HBO and it's revealed for the lame-brained homogenized crap that it is.
The networks should be the last people with any input into the technology that will define the future of the TV industry. All the decent television is elsewhere, either on HBO or SciFi or Comedy Central or other channels that were never broadcast through the air to begin with. Listening to ABC's bright ideas here is like, well, listening to the music industry when they tell us that the only legitimate way to listen to music is on a CD that we paid full price for and will never lend to a friend or resell ('cause that's just like stealing, you know).
So long as it's just blocking fast-forwarding on
ABC shows and not other channels, let me be the
first to say that I have absolutely no problem with
this.
Re:"The mst complex machine ever built, blaah, bla
on
Shuttle Launch Success
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm not sure they're trying to say that it's a good thing in and of itself that the shuttle is complex, but rather to point out (rightly) that it's impressive that it works right on a fairly consistant basis.
I would be the last person to argue that the shuttle isn't overly complex. Because of the dueling priorities between NASA and the Pentagon during its design phases combined with the basic nature of design-by-committee, it ended up trying to do too many things. The shuttle is one of my favorite cautionary examples to bring up during requirements meetings because of this.
That aside, it's a serious mistake to take KISS too far -- this is something I see over and over again. Once you start diking complexity out of anything, it's always tempting to keep going even to the point where it starts impacting your actual goals (a fact which, in my experience, you won't realize until you go into testing, at which point you get to try and tack it back in at the expense of timelines, vast amounts of money and the jobs of easily-blamed underlings).
Indeed why! It's cheap, it's simple - simpler can and often does mean safer. The Redstone can get a person or two into orbit. And why not launch a couple a week? Burt Rutan goes on to point out that after each new space vehicle is created the old designs are never used again.
He states that if we followed this philosophy with aircraft we would have only one airplane flying right now, the B2 bomber!
Not to nit-pick, but this isn't really the case.
Granted, the US only flies one manned orbiter at the moment, but there are several options to choose between when you're putting anything other than people into orbit. So, it's probably way more accurate to say that there tends to be only one logical option for any given type of launch.
Given that we're talking about items that remain largely expendible (except for the shuttle, although given the amount of work involved in turning it around, it tends to strain the definition of "reusable spacecraft"), this makes sense. After all, it's far easier to certify and keep safe fewer types of launchers than more.
Aside from that, this is still relatively cutting-edge tech when you think about the numbers of generations of rockets we've seen. Given that the older generations tend to be less capable and/or safe than the newer ones, I imagine most of us would rather take our chances with the Shuttle than a Redstone.
Even given how outdated, expensive, failure-prone and downright dangerous the Space Shuttle is, they're still pretty goddamn sweet looking when they lift off.
I hope to Christ they get through these last few shuttle missions without a problem and manage to stick the remaining three in museums where they belong.
Slashdot Mirror
Our tools works well -- I have the environment it runs on spec'ed out to handle more people than my company could put on it, so we don't have performance problems (and thanks to my background in systems administration I'm ready with a "shit just happened" plan for dealing with a slowdown if one were to occur). We use clustering for the primary servers for performance and fault tolerance, the database runs on a SQL cluster and the data is all stored on a SAN, so we can grow easily and absorb a pretty significant number of parallel failures before the end users would notice anything amiss.
I wouldn't describe your situation as malicious compliance since your enterprise tool doesn't deliver. The stuff I've encountered is quite different. Lemme give you an example:
We had a user call from another location complaining of performance issues, saying that he shouldn't have to use the system because it took ten minutes to check in a small file. We worked with him, involved our network group, went over server logs, called in the vendor -- nobody could figure this out. Finally, I hopped a plane to his location, showed up at his desk without notice and demanded he show me and, lo and behold, it took a few seconds. He confessed that he'd just been lying to us (although he said "exaggerated"), and as a result we wasted dozens of man-hours (and the cost of my travel) to find that out.
Most of the situations aren't quite that crazy, but they tend to be out there in their own way (for example, we had a user cite particular functionality as a reason he couldn't migrate... except his existing tool didn't have that functionality, either). Again, I think it just comes down to certain people not being able to play along with the team, and at a company as big as mine that just doesn't work out.
That sort of thing is possible at a smaller company, but as I mentioned in another post I work for a very, very large company. We made the decision with the involvement of the heads of the major departments and pilot teams that they specified, but we did not make the decision together with everyone because there is no possible way to do something like that. It's just a fact of life.
That aside, you should consider the fact that in cases such as this one the developer is not the only one who recognizes benefits from the use of the tool -- the system also functions to benefit project management, promotes company-wide code reuse, records data for the financial folks, allows upper management to track the progress via reporting and lets people in different phases of development work together without needing to know how to use multiple tools (saving us huge $$ in licensing and training fees). These sorts of benefits are measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars woth of savings to a company like mine, and they're things that can be sabotaged if developers (or other users) decide that they don't need to play ball.
I know this can seem strange if you're used to smaller companies (like I was until I came to work here), but take it from me that a lot of the stuff you take for granted at a company with a few hundred people is the sort of thing that is very hard to achieve at larger companies.
So I hope you understand when I say that we don't have the luxury of giving developers the option to do what they feel like. My preference is always to explain these benefits to people who object to using the new system, but it's getting to the point where the words "we wish you luck in your future endeavors" are about to be used. I don't like that at all but, and I suppose this is my point for this thread, it's sometimes necessary.
It's not ClearCase.
You (and several of the other people who commented) are making the assumption that we're a small organization. We're not -- the technical term for the size of my company is "holy crap that's a lot of people". So while we did identify a significant number of pilot groups and involve them in the decision that was being made, obviously we couldn't possibly involve everyone or even most everyone. Instead, we got sign-off on requirements from the heads of each of the major divisions and piloted the tool with selected teams.
Which is, of course, an interesting part of the problem. At previous companies, I've been able to deal with my developers one on one and generate a working relationship, but when you have thousands of users that just isn't an option. This also brings us back to the reason for having an enterprise-wide SCM project: As I mentioned, people weren't keeping their code in one place and, in some cases, we found still-active legacy systems for which the source code could not be located.
What it looks like we're going to do is opt for a solution where the CTO makes it clear that use of this new system is a condition of employment, that anyone circumventing it will be terminated. It's an iron-fist approach and that sucks, but (a) you're never going to get tens of thousands of users to agree on anything and (b) honestly when you get down to brass tacks the code belongs to the company, not the individual developers or project managers, and therefore the company has every right (and, in our case, a legal responsibility) to secure that information.
That's a rather redundant chapter title, don't you think?
Actually, upper management should be somewhat uninformed. I want my CTO thinking about budgets and etc rather than knowing too much about network setup -- aside from the fact that the ones who do know a lot of details being the ones who micromanage, I want them to take care of that sort of trash so I don't have to.
The trouble comes, of course, when upper management is uninformed *and* doesn't listen to the people they hired to take care of that sort of thing for them. Heck, I've had jobs where I felt like I needed to dress up like a consultant to get management to give me the time of day...
That sort of information isn't only needed by IT managers -- just working in tech jobs, you need a lot of those skills.
For example, I've found myself having the deal with a real spike in software zealots (you know, the people who are way too devoted to a certain software package or OS). I dunno if they all went away after the dot-com bust, if they were just laying low after seeing so many people lose their jobs or if I just got lucky and didn't encounter them for a while, but it seems like all of the sudden my company is crawling with people who absolutely positively can only use their one preferred product and how dare you suggest they use something else?
Right now, we're working to push all the source code in the company into a certain version control system that we set up. Someone in upper management finally realized that we had zillions of dollars in developed code sitting on desktops and servers that aren't backed up, so we spent the bucks to set up a high-availability, secure, backed up system.
With certain people, you'd think we'd asked them to cut off a pinky. We've had all sorts of trouble, from people ignoring the efforts to convert them over to outright "malicious compliance" where they check in once and then go back to the old way of doing things. I mean, c'mon, one SCM system is basically like the other and this one is pretty easy to use. Is it really that onerous for the people who are paying you to develop things to ask you to put them someplace in particular once they're done?
I know it's not a new problem, but I've never worked out a good way to handle folks like this.
Howzabout counting registered users? Like 500's fine, but 508? You're screwed.
I'm trying to understand your comment, and I see three possibilities. Either:
(a) You believe this woman intentionally got herself killed in order to collect easy money from the radio station.
(b) You don't believe that the radio station, which set the rules of this contest and provided enticement for people to participate, was at all negligent in not exploring the possible injuries that could result from it.
(c) Your comment had nothing to do with this case, you just have a problem with lawsuits in general.
Assuming (c), I feel like I should point out that, given the facts as we currently understand them, this would hardly be a frivolous lawsuit. The radio station was clearly negligent in not exploring the hazards of what they were encouraging people to do and, although you may not think it's fair, they have an obligation under the law to do so.
Furthermore, the example you cited with the GPS, aside from sounding like an obvious urban legend, doesn't actually map to this situation. Anyone with a driver's license should know that you look before you turn your car, but understanding the risks of this sort of contest would require some basic medical training. It is therefore reasonable to expect a driver to look before turning and not reasonable to expect the average person to understand the health risks of this sort of activity.
Which is, ultimately, why we as a society have lawsuits like this. The radio station was obligated to do their due-diligence before enticing people into this behavior. And that's why they're going to get clobbered by the lawsuit that will come from this.
I can't believe that nobody involved in this event had misgivings about this, especially since just a couple of years ago a kid at Chico State died of the same thing (which got all sorts of press around California at the time).
What a stupid thing to have happen. You've got to feel for her family, especially with all the reports saying she was doing it for her kids -- having your mom die trying to get you some stupid video game system would be a shitty thing to live with. I hope they sue this radio station and the individuals involved into the poorhouse...
I think what made me saddest was the name change from Apple Computer Inc to Apple Inc. Ars has been saying for sometime that Apple's future seems to be gizmo's and gadgets after the switch to Intel. I'm just all sorts of dejected.
You ask me, everybody's future is going to be in "gizmos and gadgets". The PC as we know it is slowly riding off into the sunset.
Or maybe that's a misleading statement. IMO, the PC will be around for a good long while, but it will increasingly be as a coordination center for your other devices and for a few specialty items (editing photos, for example). From what I can see, many of the other things it can do, the things that previously *only* a PC could do, are going to become incorporated into more convenient devices. This is only a first, albeit welcome, step.
I'd be fine with that myself. I'm mostly afraid that they'll upgrade me at the cost of an additional two years plus a couple of hundred extra bucks since the contract I got my Razr with will still be in effect come June.
This raises some important questions, such as what the hell I'm going to do about that year I have remaining on my current Cingular contract. Stupid Razr.
The biggest trouble Apple's going to have is getting this into the hands of people who want it but are locked into other contracts where they got free phones. If they were really smart, they'll have strong-armed Cingular into not marking the phones up very much for their existing customers.
Stupid Razr.
Man, if I had a nickle for every time I wanted to bomb Paypal, I'd have... er... probably a real hassle getting all the money out of my Paypal account.
> not supported for most browsers in the world
You heard it here first, folks: IE and Firefox make up only a small minority of web browsers in use.
Star-based rating systems are useless for more than getting a quick idea of what's up. They don't really tell you anything; for instance, I've purchased items in the past that have issues that don't bother me that I would have passed on just based on a "star" approach.
This goes for Alexa, this goes for movies, etc. I suspect that most consumers of this sort of information use it like I do -- only as a starting point to filter out the really bad products. For anything important or where I'm spending more than a few bucks, I'll read the reviews of a product as it's still the only way to really get any good information.
I just heard the other day about some kind of 'mark' that digital cameras put on all images, that notate what type camera you have...and some of the programs put registration information on the images (name, etc).
You're thinking of Exif data. It contains information regarding a specific image: the camera model, the date and time of the photo and all sorts of potentially useful photographic details -- the ISO, aperture used, shutter speed, focal length, etc.
This can be extremely useful stuff if you're a semi-serious photographer. Whenever I run across a photo that I like, that produces a neat visual effect or was taken under circumstances I generally have problems with, I can look at the EXIF data and see how it was done. This also works in reverse -- when I fuck up and take a slew of bad photos, I can look at the EXIF data and work out what I did wrong so I (hopefully) don't make the same mistake again.
I'm not sure why you wouldn't want this sort of metadata saved in your pictures; even if it's not useful to you, it may be useful to other people who look at your pictures. It's not as if it's reporting your full legal name and social security number or anything.
That aside, I can think of a few applications where having GPS data automagically stored could be useful:
Reshoots -- I have a few "landscape"-style photos that would be great images if I could only go back and fix something about how I shot them, but I don't know specifically where I was when I took them.
Copycatting -- Same as above, but with someone else's shots. Retaking photos from other people that you enjoy is an excellent way to learn about how to look at a situation and frame a shot. For example, people have spent a lot of time and effort to figure out where and when Ansel Adams took some of his more famous pics.
Memory Aid -- A dozen years from now when you look at your photos, are you going to remember specifically where you were during that Scotland vacation? Extra info -- location data included -- can help you out there.
Official uses -- Obviously helpful to efforts like forensic investigations, large-scale insurance adjusting (especially after something like Katrina) and etc.
Obviously, none of this is "mission critical" stuff, but like EXIF data it's nice to have and is another tool you can use to make yourself a better photographer.
It's a simple sophistication issue.
Most people (with the obvious exception of Grampa Simpson) know not to give out their credit card number to someone who calls them on the phone and asks for it, regardless of where they say they're calling from. The lesson that needs to be imparted here is along those same lines -- never click on a link embedded in an email that takes you to a web site that asks for personal information, no matter where that site seems to be.
Hacking? Yes.
ID theft? Yes.
Fraud? Yes.
Phishing? Man, I dunno -- seems to me that if you get suckered into giving someone your account information, that's kind of your own problem. It's not Paypal's fault if you actually believed that the poorly-worded email you got was actually from them because it had their logo someplace on it.
On the other hand, this sort of thing could also seriously undermine the confidence that people have in online transactions and the like, so I can't help but wonder if maybe it isn't shortsighted not to just take the hit.
I think microscopic black holes couldn't eat up the earth due to the three stooges problem. They are so small that only an atom at a time can get in, but the gravity is strong enough to try to suck in more, so all the atoms get bunched up around the event horizon like the three stooges all trying to get through a door at the same time.
Fortunately, I don't have a sense of humor. This allows me to point out that, in theory anyhow (I've never seen one in person), all black holes are the same size. Their mass may vary, their size does not.
Seems to me that the only real problem with blowing this sort of thing off by saying "this is just like last time when we tried something that had a small chance of destroying the world and it worked out okay then" is that you really only have to be wrong once.
"Oh shit! Yeah, our bad -- man, are our faces red. Sorry about that, everybody."
Came back through SFO from Edinburgh yesterday and saw signs for a couple of dedicated test lanes for this (they were closed, but they were all set). I was wondering what the heck it was about.
So yeah, if you have a few bucks, they could probably use it. I realize it's only our basic liberties, but let's be honest -- if you don't donate your spare cash to the EFF, you're just going to waste it on booze.
Whoops, time to change their business model!
Sure, and better yet the business model already exists -- take your network to a pay basis like HBO or Showtime.
The big problem with that approach for ABC, of course, is that it requires that you have decent television that people will actually shell out a few bucks a month to watch. I mean, "Grey's Anatomy" might be all well and good for a network show, but put it up against "Rescue Me" on FX or "Deadwood" on HBO and it's revealed for the lame-brained homogenized crap that it is.
The networks should be the last people with any input into the technology that will define the future of the TV industry. All the decent television is elsewhere, either on HBO or SciFi or Comedy Central or other channels that were never broadcast through the air to begin with. Listening to ABC's bright ideas here is like, well, listening to the music industry when they tell us that the only legitimate way to listen to music is on a CD that we paid full price for and will never lend to a friend or resell ('cause that's just like stealing, you know).
So long as it's just blocking fast-forwarding on ABC shows and not other channels, let me be the first to say that I have absolutely no problem with this.
I'm not sure they're trying to say that it's a good thing in and of itself that the shuttle is complex, but rather to point out (rightly) that it's impressive that it works right on a fairly consistant basis.
I would be the last person to argue that the shuttle isn't overly complex. Because of the dueling priorities between NASA and the Pentagon during its design phases combined with the basic nature of design-by-committee, it ended up trying to do too many things. The shuttle is one of my favorite cautionary examples to bring up during requirements meetings because of this.
That aside, it's a serious mistake to take KISS too far -- this is something I see over and over again. Once you start diking complexity out of anything, it's always tempting to keep going even to the point where it starts impacting your actual goals (a fact which, in my experience, you won't realize until you go into testing, at which point you get to try and tack it back in at the expense of timelines, vast amounts of money and the jobs of easily-blamed underlings).
But I guess that's the value of experience.
Indeed why! It's cheap, it's simple - simpler can and often does mean safer. The Redstone can get a person or two into orbit. And why not launch a couple a week? Burt Rutan goes on to point out that after each new space vehicle is created the old designs are never used again. He states that if we followed this philosophy with aircraft we would have only one airplane flying right now, the B2 bomber!
Not to nit-pick, but this isn't really the case.
Granted, the US only flies one manned orbiter at the moment, but there are several options to choose between when you're putting anything other than people into orbit. So, it's probably way more accurate to say that there tends to be only one logical option for any given type of launch.
Given that we're talking about items that remain largely expendible (except for the shuttle, although given the amount of work involved in turning it around, it tends to strain the definition of "reusable spacecraft"), this makes sense. After all, it's far easier to certify and keep safe fewer types of launchers than more.
Aside from that, this is still relatively cutting-edge tech when you think about the numbers of generations of rockets we've seen. Given that the older generations tend to be less capable and/or safe than the newer ones, I imagine most of us would rather take our chances with the Shuttle than a Redstone.
I hope to Christ they get through these last few shuttle missions without a problem and manage to stick the remaining three in museums where they belong.