That's a bit like Bush talking about evolution and intelligent design, and claiming that "we have two theories". They both are theories, but only one is scientific. Same with these two theories about the origin of the universe. When scientific theory is demonstrably false, the theory is revised. When a theory fails to explain certain phenomena, it is refined. Scientific theories are put to the test. In religion, the theory is the test, even it that means denying what is staring you in the face. Or as another one put it: "Science needs to be seen to be believed, while matters of faith need to be believed to be seen".
Which one did you end up buying (there appear to be several of these things)? I've been interested in the Solowheel, but the price tag is a bit hefty for buying such a thing on a lark. $400 sounds much better...
Sex based discrimination is sex based discrimination, whatever the motives behind it are. yes, affirmative action is a corrective for sexism, but it isn't a counter for it, and isn't that what we really want? If one institution discriminates against women, and another applies affirmative action as a corrective measure, we may end up with cosily balanced statistics (men & women being equally likely to be hired), but we actually end up with 2 institutions who discriminate based on sex, and where actual ability plays second fiddle.
I'm surprised to see a complete lack of audit trails on critical systems like this. They need to require individual accounts of which every action is logged in an immutable audit trail. On both the camera system and the random number box. There is no way to prevent malfeasance committed using privileged accounts, but you should at least be able to determine who did what after the fact.
Rape? It looks a hell of a lot like it's merely some petty revenge after 2 disappointing dates (Assange's lawyer has mentioned proof of darker motives, but I am not aware that any substantial proof to that effect has come to light). Giving a woman an odd look constitutes "rape" in Sweden. He did a bit more than looking, but by all accounts what he did falls well short of what people normally see as "rape": i.e. clearly unconsensual intercourse.
Interestingly, your point about consultants and developers having had the time to learn from their mistake was a point made against MS not that long ago. MS switched their technologies and APIs so fast that developers had at best a few years of experience, since that's how long each iteration lasted. In contrast, a lot of stuff I picked up about X11 in the 90s is still valid.
Open source can be a bit of a jumble. We have had some experience with solutions based on a number of FOSS products working together (in many cases, one has to rely on additional modules or bits of software written by different communities). Which is fine until one of those products is no longer being developed further. Your NTLM-based SSO module doesn't work with the Kerberos based system the company is switching to, and the devs have long gone. But that doesn't really have to be a problem. If you know you'll have to replace a FOSS component, you start looking for a replacement. Worst case scenario: you pay someone to develop a new version for you, which rarely is a major effort. It's a problem when it is a surprise and it breaks things. Because then the responsible manager does not have a vendor to shout at.
That ties in to the cost element as well. Estimating price and timelines for MS-based projects is reasonably well understood and not more inaccurate than in other projects, in my experience. But to what degree do you favour predictability over a (much) lower cost? As an example: Sharepoint.
My client (a large multinational) rolled out Sharepoint and is gradually replacing other systems with it: document management, team collaboration spaces, web content management, discussion forums, and the company Wiki. Some of the software SP is replacing was over 15 years old, but it had some good qualities: it was designed to scale up as well as down, to run in a multi-tiered organisation with delegated administrative responsibilities, and though (or because) it was not all-singing-all-dancing web 3.0 ultra-integrated software, it performed well with a minimum of maintenance and ran on pretty light hardware. TCO was low, and most change requests could be executed on the cheap as well.
Now there is Sharepoint. The cost of implementation (including migration from the older platforms) would feed a small nation for a year. It requires much beefier hardware and an army of consultants: lift a floor tile in any of the datacenters and you'll see a few Sharepoint guys scuttle off. Maintenance is at least an order of magnitude more expensive. And functionally, it only offers the very barest of any of the solutions it replaced. What it does do well is integration between functions and with Office, and workflow... but compared to all the other stuff, I consider those to be nice-to-haves.
There's the problem: Sharepoint was too easy a choice for management. A one stop shop, well understood cost structure, a traditional big iron approach to run the project, and someone to blame when things go south. And the sexy integration with Office of course. However, if they would have looked into FOSS solutions for CMS, Forums, Wikis and team sites, and selected a tried and true document management system from a vendor who knows what document management is, they would have saved time, saved a ton of money, had less disappointment and frustration from the rank-and-file, and enjoyed a much lower TCO. What they would miss is integration between all of these functions, but you know what? They are not that important.
There are long range goals as well, and in some cases it may be worth trying to "scare straight" a teenager by hauling him off in a police cruiser and reading him the riot act down at the station. In this case, it should stop short of actually bringing those charges.
Suppose your neighbour's kid notices you often leave the back door unlocked when you leave for a short errant, so next time you step out he:
1) Sneaks in and leaves a turd on the dinner table
2) Sneaks in and steals your wife's fresh baked apple pie
3) Sneaks in and makes off with your new iPad.
The 1st case is pretty innocent, the 2nd not so much and the 3rd is pretty serious. So you grab him the first time and make it abundantly clear that he'll be in a whole mess of trouble if it comes to case #3 (not to mention he might spook grandma and get both barrels of her 12 gauge, to name another possible consequence). Same with computer crime. Using a teacher's password is serious. The consequence for changing a screen background should be a stern warning, and nothing less, because next time he'll be after next week's test papers.
The point is that it doesn't need to last. It only has to work once; enough to scare off or incapacitate a burglar. There is already a design for a 3D printed gun that is sort of reliable for a single shot.
Give it time. And there's one area where people might be interested in printed firearm: home defense. Sure, I'd much prefer a nice, reliable high caliber revolver. But even a shitty single shot / single use gun will greatly improve my chances over nothing at all, as long as the gun only has a small chance of misfiring or blowing up in my face. And I don't think we're that far off from that reality.
It's not about the gun itself, but about gun proliferation in countries that have strict gun control laws. The general public has no access to guns produced by legit companies on a production line. Lathing, machining and gunsmithing take skill that few people possess. However, if and when access to 3D printers becomes commonplace, and if a viable 3D printable gun is designed, then anyone will be able to hit "print", do a little finishing and some assembly, and have a gun. This will make having an illegal firearm well within reach of the majority of the population (of course you'll still have to get some ammo for it).
Cute, but not as brazen as the Dutch "journalist" (with ties to ETA terrorists) who requested a list of all Dutch licensed gun owners in the country, under FOI rules. He didn't get them in the end (he tried a few times and went to court over it as well), but the problem is that there don't seem to be clear guidelines on what is fair game for FOI requests, and what isn't. And in general, there is no political debate over "big rules" on privacy; they quibble over details of specific cases sometimes, but without any guiding principles on the matter, legislation and case law is a mess.
It's also about having a level playing field. For large multinationals it is easier and cheaper (in terms of cost vs profit) to invent new loopholes, vet them with legal and financial experts, and set up the necessary vehicles for shifting profits to a country with low taxes. For small local businesses with no foreign presence this is a lot harder. They lack the required knowledge, and the cost of experts and legal fees are prohibitive compared to the tax advantage they stand to gain. So local businesses pay the full 30% or whatever your local tax rate is, while multinationals get away with a couple %. Besides, a local business cannot readily threaten a government to vote with its feet and leave.
With that said, I agree with Google lady that governments should fix the loopholes rather than appeal to corporations to pay their fair share. If you bring morality into it, you don;t understand what a corporation is.
TFA article mentions this new battery's potential for just that: buffering of surplus renewable energy. They'll need to achieve a reasonable energy density for these batteries to be practical and make economic sense (especially for residential applications), but energy density doesn't need to be on the cutting edge like EV batteries are.
Have the Hugos of the past been awarded to white males because they were white and male? Or was it simple statistics? If 80% of all SF writers are white males, then you can expect around that same fraction of the nominees to be white and male. And even if the percentage is much higher, that can be due to cultural bias: if the other 20% is relatively unknown, less successful with a smaller fan base for whatever reason, then they are even less likely to be nominated. The reason doesn't have to be anything as bad as racism or misogyny.
Was that really the goal of the "SJW" group? This quote from TFA is spot-on:
Wherever they emerge, social-justice warriors claim to be champions of diversity. But they always reveal themselves to be relentlessly hostile to it: they applaud people of different genders, races, and cultures just so long as those people all think the same way. Theirs is a diversity of the trivial; a diversity of skin-deep, ephemeral affiliations.
SJW of all stripes have one thing in common: a relentless drive for conformist groupthink on the issues they fight for. Few people are as scary and dangerous as the ones who are convinced that theirs is a righteous battle, and are prepared to fight it, whether their belief flows from religion or from ideals. And what appears to make the SJW crowd more belligerent is the fact that often they are right, in that there are still plenty of inequities and social injustices. Compared to other "noisy" groups like extreme right wingers, these are the noisiest, most exclusionary, and indeed most violent. And the really scary part is that because the issues they attack are real, this mindset is percolating into the mainstream. Writers being excluded from an association or from an award because they have the wrong ideas. Or in my home country, where no one so much as blinked when a school official stated that "if you have the wrong ideas or are a member of the wrong political party, perhaps you shouldn't be a student or a teacher here". Remember Churchill: "The fascists of the future will be called anti-fascists".
The last 1% is a gamechanger, though. If cars can drive themselves everywhere, then:
- Many people no longer need to own a car; if they need one, they just dial one up and have it arrive 15 minutes later. Or you would have 1 small EV for your daily needs, and order up a truck, family car, or long-range vehicle as needed.
- You would no longer need to have a driver's license. No more need to drive your kid to school either, the car can do it for you.
- Parking will be hassle-free: let the car worry about it. And who cares if it parks itself 10 minutes away? This means that parked cars can be removed from the urban landscape I always thought that American suburbs, with cars parked in driveways instead of the street, look rather nice. Over here, most middle class people cannot afford the land for a house with an actual driveway.
It'll be nice to have the car drive itself over the highways, but having it drive that last % changes everything.
And it has new animated emojis! Always wanted those... As for the scroll wheel, I wonder why it's there (instead of using gestures on the touch screen)
Still, I think this watch is an interesting development. Maybe this will go the way of 3D TV or VR Headsets that make a comeback every so often but always fall a little short in value compared to the cost and effort, and personally I don't really see the appeal of smart watches. But as an app developer I have an excuse to get one, and perhaps wearing it for a while will reveal some useful use cases.
A common mistake when scaling up is to think that these 3 activities must necessarily exist as levels in a rigid hierarchy, and especially that strategy and management are part of the same work stream. Imagine a department having a management team (handling the day-to-day stuff) and a strategy team, working side by side and reporting to the department head. The strategy team will have some senior "worker bees" in it as well as some managers, but the head of that team (*not* the department head) has a seat in the division strategy team one level up (and so on). I've seen this structure work, sort of, but the problem is to make managers accept this model. Many managers at all levels demanded involvement in strategy, even though it is not their job, and they are often not very good at it, and if they can according to the hierarchy, they will overrule their strategists.
The problem in general is that what we see as "management" is actually several very, very different jobs: business administration, strategy, people management, etc. Managers who do even an adequate job at all of them are rather rare. Yet somehow we haven't yet figured out how to subdivide this work... or maybe managers resist because it makes their jobs a lot less glamorous and a great deal more monotonous, if they are merely career managers, business administrators, strategists or process architects. Well, compartimentalizing of jobs has been ruthlessly applied across almost all other jobs in large corporations. Now it's their turn.
There is a problem with the IT or technical ladder itself in many companies where IT is not core business (and even in some where it is). The ladder can be rather short: Junior / Medior / Senior tech (and senior can be someone with as little as 5 years experience), then you basically leave tech and be project manager, line manager or the manager of a division or competence center or some such. A few rock stars may stay in tech as Principal Consultants, but those are rare (and often not promoted from within).
In many companies, there will be a few clever techies who are recognized as being very knowledgable in their own area of expertise as well as having a wider and forward looking view, and who are consulted on where to head the company's strategic direction. Such a techie may be promoted to management (and possibly do a crap job at the people and process aspects of that), or the existing manager may continue to draw upon his best techies to help him strategize, but why not turn it into a role? Some companies do, but I don't see it very often and it's a shame, because it can be a very nice role for a senior tech to be promoted into, increasing his value to the company as well.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a bit like Bush talking about evolution and intelligent design, and claiming that "we have two theories". They both are theories, but only one is scientific. Same with these two theories about the origin of the universe. When scientific theory is demonstrably false, the theory is revised. When a theory fails to explain certain phenomena, it is refined. Scientific theories are put to the test. In religion, the theory is the test, even it that means denying what is staring you in the face. Or as another one put it: "Science needs to be seen to be believed, while matters of faith need to be believed to be seen".
Light, not life.
Interestingly, according to Genesis God created the earth before he created life. Maybe he has good night vision...
Which one did you end up buying (there appear to be several of these things)? I've been interested in the Solowheel, but the price tag is a bit hefty for buying such a thing on a lark. $400 sounds much better...
Sex based discrimination is sex based discrimination, whatever the motives behind it are. yes, affirmative action is a corrective for sexism, but it isn't a counter for it, and isn't that what we really want? If one institution discriminates against women, and another applies affirmative action as a corrective measure, we may end up with cosily balanced statistics (men & women being equally likely to be hired), but we actually end up with 2 institutions who discriminate based on sex, and where actual ability plays second fiddle.
Audit logs should sit on a separate machine, or preferably be written to optical media sitting in a vault.
I'm surprised to see a complete lack of audit trails on critical systems like this. They need to require individual accounts of which every action is logged in an immutable audit trail. On both the camera system and the random number box. There is no way to prevent malfeasance committed using privileged accounts, but you should at least be able to determine who did what after the fact.
By the way, has Bolivia asked for (and gotten) an apology from any of those countries?
Rape? It looks a hell of a lot like it's merely some petty revenge after 2 disappointing dates (Assange's lawyer has mentioned proof of darker motives, but I am not aware that any substantial proof to that effect has come to light). Giving a woman an odd look constitutes "rape" in Sweden. He did a bit more than looking, but by all accounts what he did falls well short of what people normally see as "rape": i.e. clearly unconsensual intercourse.
Iphone user here, but I would definitely like to make the same trade-off: a few mm extra thickness in exchange for longer battery life.
Interestingly, your point about consultants and developers having had the time to learn from their mistake was a point made against MS not that long ago. MS switched their technologies and APIs so fast that developers had at best a few years of experience, since that's how long each iteration lasted. In contrast, a lot of stuff I picked up about X11 in the 90s is still valid.
Open source can be a bit of a jumble. We have had some experience with solutions based on a number of FOSS products working together (in many cases, one has to rely on additional modules or bits of software written by different communities). Which is fine until one of those products is no longer being developed further. Your NTLM-based SSO module doesn't work with the Kerberos based system the company is switching to, and the devs have long gone. But that doesn't really have to be a problem. If you know you'll have to replace a FOSS component, you start looking for a replacement. Worst case scenario: you pay someone to develop a new version for you, which rarely is a major effort. It's a problem when it is a surprise and it breaks things. Because then the responsible manager does not have a vendor to shout at.
That ties in to the cost element as well. Estimating price and timelines for MS-based projects is reasonably well understood and not more inaccurate than in other projects, in my experience. But to what degree do you favour predictability over a (much) lower cost? As an example: Sharepoint.
My client (a large multinational) rolled out Sharepoint and is gradually replacing other systems with it: document management, team collaboration spaces, web content management, discussion forums, and the company Wiki. Some of the software SP is replacing was over 15 years old, but it had some good qualities: it was designed to scale up as well as down, to run in a multi-tiered organisation with delegated administrative responsibilities, and though (or because) it was not all-singing-all-dancing web 3.0 ultra-integrated software, it performed well with a minimum of maintenance and ran on pretty light hardware. TCO was low, and most change requests could be executed on the cheap as well.
Now there is Sharepoint. The cost of implementation (including migration from the older platforms) would feed a small nation for a year. It requires much beefier hardware and an army of consultants: lift a floor tile in any of the datacenters and you'll see a few Sharepoint guys scuttle off. Maintenance is at least an order of magnitude more expensive. And functionally, it only offers the very barest of any of the solutions it replaced. What it does do well is integration between functions and with Office, and workflow... but compared to all the other stuff, I consider those to be nice-to-haves.
There's the problem: Sharepoint was too easy a choice for management. A one stop shop, well understood cost structure, a traditional big iron approach to run the project, and someone to blame when things go south. And the sexy integration with Office of course. However, if they would have looked into FOSS solutions for CMS, Forums, Wikis and team sites, and selected a tried and true document management system from a vendor who knows what document management is, they would have saved time, saved a ton of money, had less disappointment and frustration from the rank-and-file, and enjoyed a much lower TCO. What they would miss is integration between all of these functions, but you know what? They are not that important.
There are long range goals as well, and in some cases it may be worth trying to "scare straight" a teenager by hauling him off in a police cruiser and reading him the riot act down at the station. In this case, it should stop short of actually bringing those charges.
Suppose your neighbour's kid notices you often leave the back door unlocked when you leave for a short errant, so next time you step out he:
1) Sneaks in and leaves a turd on the dinner table
2) Sneaks in and steals your wife's fresh baked apple pie
3) Sneaks in and makes off with your new iPad.
The 1st case is pretty innocent, the 2nd not so much and the 3rd is pretty serious. So you grab him the first time and make it abundantly clear that he'll be in a whole mess of trouble if it comes to case #3 (not to mention he might spook grandma and get both barrels of her 12 gauge, to name another possible consequence). Same with computer crime. Using a teacher's password is serious. The consequence for changing a screen background should be a stern warning, and nothing less, because next time he'll be after next week's test papers.
The point is that it doesn't need to last. It only has to work once; enough to scare off or incapacitate a burglar. There is already a design for a 3D printed gun that is sort of reliable for a single shot.
Give it time. And there's one area where people might be interested in printed firearm: home defense. Sure, I'd much prefer a nice, reliable high caliber revolver. But even a shitty single shot / single use gun will greatly improve my chances over nothing at all, as long as the gun only has a small chance of misfiring or blowing up in my face. And I don't think we're that far off from that reality.
It's not about the gun itself, but about gun proliferation in countries that have strict gun control laws. The general public has no access to guns produced by legit companies on a production line. Lathing, machining and gunsmithing take skill that few people possess. However, if and when access to 3D printers becomes commonplace, and if a viable 3D printable gun is designed, then anyone will be able to hit "print", do a little finishing and some assembly, and have a gun. This will make having an illegal firearm well within reach of the majority of the population (of course you'll still have to get some ammo for it).
Cute, but not as brazen as the Dutch "journalist" (with ties to ETA terrorists) who requested a list of all Dutch licensed gun owners in the country, under FOI rules. He didn't get them in the end (he tried a few times and went to court over it as well), but the problem is that there don't seem to be clear guidelines on what is fair game for FOI requests, and what isn't. And in general, there is no political debate over "big rules" on privacy; they quibble over details of specific cases sometimes, but without any guiding principles on the matter, legislation and case law is a mess.
They'll probably reject you just for using Imperial measures. And rightly so...
It's also about having a level playing field. For large multinationals it is easier and cheaper (in terms of cost vs profit) to invent new loopholes, vet them with legal and financial experts, and set up the necessary vehicles for shifting profits to a country with low taxes. For small local businesses with no foreign presence this is a lot harder. They lack the required knowledge, and the cost of experts and legal fees are prohibitive compared to the tax advantage they stand to gain. So local businesses pay the full 30% or whatever your local tax rate is, while multinationals get away with a couple %. Besides, a local business cannot readily threaten a government to vote with its feet and leave.
With that said, I agree with Google lady that governments should fix the loopholes rather than appeal to corporations to pay their fair share. If you bring morality into it, you don;t understand what a corporation is.
TFA article mentions this new battery's potential for just that: buffering of surplus renewable energy. They'll need to achieve a reasonable energy density for these batteries to be practical and make economic sense (especially for residential applications), but energy density doesn't need to be on the cutting edge like EV batteries are.
Have the Hugos of the past been awarded to white males because they were white and male? Or was it simple statistics? If 80% of all SF writers are white males, then you can expect around that same fraction of the nominees to be white and male. And even if the percentage is much higher, that can be due to cultural bias: if the other 20% is relatively unknown, less successful with a smaller fan base for whatever reason, then they are even less likely to be nominated. The reason doesn't have to be anything as bad as racism or misogyny.
Wherever they emerge, social-justice warriors claim to be champions of diversity. But they always reveal themselves to be relentlessly hostile to it: they applaud people of different genders, races, and cultures just so long as those people all think the same way. Theirs is a diversity of the trivial; a diversity of skin-deep, ephemeral affiliations.
SJW of all stripes have one thing in common: a relentless drive for conformist groupthink on the issues they fight for. Few people are as scary and dangerous as the ones who are convinced that theirs is a righteous battle, and are prepared to fight it, whether their belief flows from religion or from ideals. And what appears to make the SJW crowd more belligerent is the fact that often they are right, in that there are still plenty of inequities and social injustices. Compared to other "noisy" groups like extreme right wingers, these are the noisiest, most exclusionary, and indeed most violent. And the really scary part is that because the issues they attack are real, this mindset is percolating into the mainstream. Writers being excluded from an association or from an award because they have the wrong ideas. Or in my home country, where no one so much as blinked when a school official stated that "if you have the wrong ideas or are a member of the wrong political party, perhaps you shouldn't be a student or a teacher here". Remember Churchill: "The fascists of the future will be called anti-fascists".
The last 1% is a gamechanger, though. If cars can drive themselves everywhere, then:
- Many people no longer need to own a car; if they need one, they just dial one up and have it arrive 15 minutes later. Or you would have 1 small EV for your daily needs, and order up a truck, family car, or long-range vehicle as needed.
- You would no longer need to have a driver's license. No more need to drive your kid to school either, the car can do it for you.
- Parking will be hassle-free: let the car worry about it. And who cares if it parks itself 10 minutes away? This means that parked cars can be removed from the urban landscape I always thought that American suburbs, with cars parked in driveways instead of the street, look rather nice. Over here, most middle class people cannot afford the land for a house with an actual driveway.
It'll be nice to have the car drive itself over the highways, but having it drive that last % changes everything.
And it has new animated emojis! Always wanted those... As for the scroll wheel, I wonder why it's there (instead of using gestures on the touch screen)
Still, I think this watch is an interesting development. Maybe this will go the way of 3D TV or VR Headsets that make a comeback every so often but always fall a little short in value compared to the cost and effort, and personally I don't really see the appeal of smart watches. But as an app developer I have an excuse to get one, and perhaps wearing it for a while will reveal some useful use cases.
A common mistake when scaling up is to think that these 3 activities must necessarily exist as levels in a rigid hierarchy, and especially that strategy and management are part of the same work stream. Imagine a department having a management team (handling the day-to-day stuff) and a strategy team, working side by side and reporting to the department head. The strategy team will have some senior "worker bees" in it as well as some managers, but the head of that team (*not* the department head) has a seat in the division strategy team one level up (and so on). I've seen this structure work, sort of, but the problem is to make managers accept this model. Many managers at all levels demanded involvement in strategy, even though it is not their job, and they are often not very good at it, and if they can according to the hierarchy, they will overrule their strategists.
The problem in general is that what we see as "management" is actually several very, very different jobs: business administration, strategy, people management, etc. Managers who do even an adequate job at all of them are rather rare. Yet somehow we haven't yet figured out how to subdivide this work... or maybe managers resist because it makes their jobs a lot less glamorous and a great deal more monotonous, if they are merely career managers, business administrators, strategists or process architects. Well, compartimentalizing of jobs has been ruthlessly applied across almost all other jobs in large corporations. Now it's their turn.
There is a problem with the IT or technical ladder itself in many companies where IT is not core business (and even in some where it is). The ladder can be rather short: Junior / Medior / Senior tech (and senior can be someone with as little as 5 years experience), then you basically leave tech and be project manager, line manager or the manager of a division or competence center or some such. A few rock stars may stay in tech as Principal Consultants, but those are rare (and often not promoted from within).
In many companies, there will be a few clever techies who are recognized as being very knowledgable in their own area of expertise as well as having a wider and forward looking view, and who are consulted on where to head the company's strategic direction. Such a techie may be promoted to management (and possibly do a crap job at the people and process aspects of that), or the existing manager may continue to draw upon his best techies to help him strategize, but why not turn it into a role? Some companies do, but I don't see it very often and it's a shame, because it can be a very nice role for a senior tech to be promoted into, increasing his value to the company as well.