It's not that they suck at their jobs. Due to "fairness, transparency and accountability" requirements any testing methodology they come up with has to be fully documented and given to the manufacturers ahead of time. Manufacturers being the scum-sucking bastards that they are will, of course, run all these tests in their own labs ahead of time and tweak the crap out of things so they come out on top.
Sorry, but the tests are supposed to be "representative of normal usage".
Even if they document the tests, if they can be gamed in a test representative of "normal usage", then the same gaming will kick in on actual "normal usage", and so the test will not have been gamed.
You can have them be shitty at designing tests, or you can have them being shitty at determining what constitutes "normal usage", but it's not possible to game something that doesn't have a variance between expected use and actual use.
The manufacturers are exploiting a variance that should not be there in a correctly designed testing scenario, because the variance would not be there in actual usage.
My argument boils down to "legislating morality (rather than ethics) is about as useful as trying to legislate Pi to be 3 to make the math easier".
If you could make a law against murder that actually *precluded* murder, you might have something. The best you can do otherwise is make it so that people fear the punishment for violating the law (as opposed to fearing the actual law -- which they don't).
You are merely disincentivizing the behaviour, not eliminating it. The point being is that it'a impossible to effectively hold someone else to your own moral standards.
You're free to call this either "moral relativism" or you could be more honest, and admit that you can't control someone else's thoughts.
Uhm.. Law is a codification of common morals. Why do you think murder is illegal but self defense an exception? Legislation of morality have worked extremely well. It's the laws that doesn't have to do with morality that doesn't work.
I hadn't realized the teen pregnancy problem had been resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Thank you for enlightening me on the effectiveness of those laws; I was under the mistaken impression that underage sex acts still occurred!
The Hatfields and the McCoys didn't actually have to *hit* each other, to feel good about *shooting* at each other. Like any feud, it kind of doesn't matter if the shots *hit*, only that there is continued shooting.
It's almost like you didn't read anything but the headline and then proceeded to post without thinking...
It's almost like you didn't read anything but my post and then proceeded to post without thinking...
I read the article. You apparently, have not.
It's almost like you think that the UI, including the one that would be brought up by a mechanical "Home" button to enter a passcode, doesn't require capacitive coupling to enter the passcode...
So you wear the capacitive gloves, you "press" the virtual button (which can't read a fingerprint through the glove anyway), and, just as if you were using an iPhone with a mechanical button with gloves on, you use your capacitive gloves to input the passcode.
They are bitching about having to have something *before* pressing the capacitive button, which they have to have anyway *after* pressing the mechanical button, just so they have something to bitch about the switch from a mechanical to a capacitive button.
---
To be *crystal clear*, the only ones impacted are going to be Siri-only users who run around with their iPhones always unlocked.
This may somewhat impact blind users of iPhones, who might be in that small group, but it's no worse than the pre-Siri (or early Siri) days, where there really wasn't any accessibility for the things at all, or where you could use Siri, but then Siri would futz up on you, more often than not.
I suppose that we could also be concerned about people with artificial limbs, who, if they have not been retrofit with **technology I invented while at Google, and then gave away, rather than patenting**, can't capacitively couple at all, and so are utterly incapable of using touch-screen devices.
But then, this is a general problem of touch screen devices being disability unfriendly.
And I suppose we should also include people who are unable to utilize multitouch for gestures -- like those who have artificial limbs, but can't make more than 1-finger gestures, even if their artificial limbs *have* been retrofit to support capacitive coupling.
---
I suppose which of the above applies depends on what you are actually whining about.
While the individual words are are better... the sentence pacing is not.
This is similar to the "singing computer" pronunciation, many years ago, in which the ACM distributed CD's with the tracks on it.
You don't get the stilted words, but unless it's intentionally paced (for example, a real human would have put a pause before "directed"), it's still going to be recognizably artificial -- but worse than that: difficult for a human expecting the pacing to understand.
Given that age related hearing loss tends to cut out vowels and not consonants, this is unlikely to be a useful implementation for care giving of older people, for example, unless there are also visible facial cues associated with it, if the pacing can not be made distinct.
Oh please, the government doesn't throw you in jail for that, they make you work, and take a slice off your paycheck. Much better for them.
It's called "tax evasion", dude. Look it up. It's how Al Capone ended in jail, when they couldn't arrest him for killing people.
Though honestly, where does this Underwater Basketweaving nonsense come from?
It's a proxy for any non-marketable degree. This includes many non-STEM degrees, and, with the ability to outsource, it also includes IT degrees (as opposed to CS degrees, which are currently still marketable, but with an unknown future).
Now I suppose you COULD say that the government should only foster those degrees it considers valuable, but then you'd just have the free market types bitching about government thinking it knew better and spending decades ignoring say, the Computer science field because it wasn't in their projections or whatever.
You appear to not know the difference between CS and IT. IT emphasizes business and communications. IT is what used to be called an "MIS" degree, and it used to be taught by the College of Business or the College of Technical Education, rather than the College of Engineering.
You can trust HCL (which is actually located in Sunnyvale, not India) with that, because they have deep pockets to sue, if they ever screw up. You can't really trust students to the same degree.
Isn't it the exact opposite? The outsourcing company sells its services entirely on low cost and not on quality or trustworthiness, so a hit on reputation is insignificant.
Not really. The point of outsourcing is to prove that you are able to do the job, in order to obtain the contract. Part of that is your new customer talking to past customers, as references, to decide whether or not to hire you.
If it were that easy, all the laid off IT workers in the U.S. would be doing two things:
1. Starting their own outsourcing companies to compete with HCL
2. Doing their damnedest to "death by a thousand cuts" HCL and similar companies over issues that apply only to companies with relatively large numbers of H1-B workers.
It's be pretty easy to be competent, take advantage of the same economies of scale, and at the same time ethically sabotage HCL.
In contrast, the student is working for a degree, so the university has extreme leverage in being able to add negative annotations to the student's transcript or even expel the student.
The consequences to the student are that they don't get to work in a dying field if they are expelled. I've never, ever seen a transcript with a job application in over 30 years, and I don't expect to be seeing them, so not getting a blue star that day for attendance isn't really going to hurt their job prospects.
Also, the outsourcing company has multiple contracts, so it probably factors a nonzero probability of a soured contract into its cost of operations, while for the student, the impact of a single incident with the university is huge.
I disagree. You blow one HIPAA audit, and all your HIPAA contracts get pulled/audited, if you are a single company doing a lot of them. The idea is that if you screwed the pooch on one of them, then you probably made the same mistake on all of them. That's the downside of being a clearinghouse.
You can trust HCL (which is actually located in Sunnyvale, not India) with that, because they have deep pockets to sue
If they ever lose a major judgement we will find out that the US entity is a penniless shell and the money is all in India.
Obviously, I look forward to the test of that theory, but I wouldn't hold my breath, since I think that there are a lot of people who are capable of meeting the HIPAA threshold, I just think they are professionals, and not UC students.
And what does it say to those CS students across the bay. No worries, you're wasting your time?
What it says to UCB CS students... is "Aren't you glad you're getting a CS degree (computer science emphasis), rather than an IT degree (business and communications emphasis)?"...which is probably exactly what it should be saying.
Are you telling me you can't find a handful of smart kids in your Computer Science department that would rather do remedial computer work than work at the mall?
Yes, they are telling you that.
UCSF doesn't have a CS department, and they aren't talking about CS anyway, they are talking about IT. Different degrees.
I look forward to people using Turbo C in a 32 bit VM under FreeDOS to learn their "mad software engineering skillz". This seems to be a pretty common approach to teaching programming in many universities in India.
But seriously: it's unlikely to happen at UCSF, which only sells graduate medical related degrees.
Laying off current qualified workers should cause all of their H1B visas to be automatically canceled.
Like when Microsoft laid off Nokia workers?
Obviously there is not a shortage of available workers.
I'm sure that Microsoft could have employed all those "Can't make a cell phone product anyone wants to buy" workers in another segment of their business, like the X-Box division. That would have enabled them to make an X-Box no one wants to buy too, since that's the core competency of those workers.
In other words: that's a dumb idea with frosting on top.
They used to be. But then the federal government took over the entire industry and got rid of bk'ing student loans.
There's theory, and there's fact.
The theory was that no one in their right mind would loan someone in poverty, and who did not qualify academically or athletically for a scholarship, the money for them to get an underwater basket weaving degree, unless the government agreed to do it.
In exchange, the government, as guarantor, put the condition on the loans that they could not be discharged in bankruptcy -- just like any debt owed the government (i.e. we still have debtor's prisons, only they are for taxes). That way the guarantor could throw your butt in jail if you decided not to pay the student loan back.
The fact is that underwater basket weaving isn't really a marketable enough skill to allow you to make your student loan payments.
What is stopping them from "outsourcing" their IT to another UC school which teaches system administration as part of it's curriculum. It seems like it would be a good opportunity to teach remote administration.
It was probably on the table that they have another UC's IT department handle it; it was likely *never* on the table that IT students handle it.
Personally, I wouldn't be an IT student, if it's obvious that IT is going to be outsourced everywhere; about the only thing you could train to be would be a trainer. It's like being an English major: the only jobs are in creating more English majors.
What am I missing?
Most likely the fact that UCSF is a graduate medical university, and that means that pretty much every IT system on campus has "live data", which means, in turn, that you have to be able to trust the people running it with HIPAA sensitive information.
You can trust HCL (which is actually located in Sunnyvale, not India) with that, because they have deep pockets to sue, if they ever screw up. You can't really trust students to the same degree.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that they suck at their jobs. Due to "fairness, transparency and accountability" requirements any testing methodology they come up with has to be fully documented and given to the manufacturers ahead of time. Manufacturers being the scum-sucking bastards that they are will, of course, run all these tests in their own labs ahead of time and tweak the crap out of things so they come out on top.
Sorry, but the tests are supposed to be "representative of normal usage".
Even if they document the tests, if they can be gamed in a test representative of "normal usage", then the same gaming will kick in on actual "normal usage", and so the test will not have been gamed.
You can have them be shitty at designing tests, or you can have them being shitty at determining what constitutes "normal usage", but it's not possible to game something that doesn't have a variance between expected use and actual use.
The manufacturers are exploiting a variance that should not be there in a correctly designed testing scenario, because the variance would not be there in actual usage.
What's our take away on this supposed to be?
(A) These evil scoundrels are cheating on the government tests
(B) The people who are designing the government tests epically suck at their jobs, should be fired, and have competent people hired in their places
I'm going to have to vote "B" here, folks.
No.
My argument boils down to "legislating morality (rather than ethics) is about as useful as trying to legislate Pi to be 3 to make the math easier".
If you could make a law against murder that actually *precluded* murder, you might have something. The best you can do otherwise is make it so that people fear the punishment for violating the law (as opposed to fearing the actual law -- which they don't).
You are merely disincentivizing the behaviour, not eliminating it. The point being is that it'a impossible to effectively hold someone else to your own moral standards.
You're free to call this either "moral relativism" or you could be more honest, and admit that you can't control someone else's thoughts.
Uhm.. Law is a codification of common morals. Why do you think murder is illegal but self defense an exception?
Legislation of morality have worked extremely well. It's the laws that doesn't have to do with morality that doesn't work.
I hadn't realized the teen pregnancy problem had been resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Thank you for enlightening me on the effectiveness of those laws; I was under the mistaken impression that underage sex acts still occurred!
Perhaps they could consider them for humans next.
Let's legislate morality for everyone, since that's always worked so well in the past...
They are just taking potshots at each other.
The Hatfields and the McCoys didn't actually have to *hit* each other, to feel good about *shooting* at each other. Like any feud, it kind of doesn't matter if the shots *hit*, only that there is continued shooting.
It's almost like you didn't read anything but the headline and then proceeded to post without thinking...
It's almost like you didn't read anything but my post and then proceeded to post without thinking...
I read the article. You apparently, have not.
It's almost like you think that the UI, including the one that would be brought up by a mechanical "Home" button to enter a passcode, doesn't require capacitive coupling to enter the passcode...
So you wear the capacitive gloves, you "press" the virtual button (which can't read a fingerprint through the glove anyway), and, just as if you were using an iPhone with a mechanical button with gloves on, you use your capacitive gloves to input the passcode.
They are bitching about having to have something *before* pressing the capacitive button, which they have to have anyway *after* pressing the mechanical button, just so they have something to bitch about the switch from a mechanical to a capacitive button.
---
To be *crystal clear*, the only ones impacted are going to be Siri-only users who run around with their iPhones always unlocked.
This may somewhat impact blind users of iPhones, who might be in that small group, but it's no worse than the pre-Siri (or early Siri) days, where there really wasn't any accessibility for the things at all, or where you could use Siri, but then Siri would futz up on you, more often than not.
I suppose that we could also be concerned about people with artificial limbs, who, if they have not been retrofit with **technology I invented while at Google, and then gave away, rather than patenting**, can't capacitively couple at all, and so are utterly incapable of using touch-screen devices.
But then, this is a general problem of touch screen devices being disability unfriendly.
And I suppose we should also include people who are unable to utilize multitouch for gestures -- like those who have artificial limbs, but can't make more than 1-finger gestures, even if their artificial limbs *have* been retrofit to support capacitive coupling.
---
I suppose which of the above applies depends on what you are actually whining about.
What?!?!?!
We must now be able to capacitively couple with a device to unlock and use it's capacitively coupled UI?
Outrageous!
Rats are very clean animals.
Except, you know, for:
lymphocytic choriomeningitis ...but except for those, VERY CLEAN!
bubonic plague
typhus
hantavirus
leptospirosis
rat-bite fever (it's a real thing; look it up)
salmonellosis
Colorado tick fever
cutaneous leishmaniasis
While the individual words are are better... the sentence pacing is not.
This is similar to the "singing computer" pronunciation, many years ago, in which the ACM distributed CD's with the tracks on it.
You don't get the stilted words, but unless it's intentionally paced (for example, a real human would have put a pause before "directed"), it's still going to be recognizably artificial -- but worse than that: difficult for a human expecting the pacing to understand.
Given that age related hearing loss tends to cut out vowels and not consonants, this is unlikely to be a useful implementation for care giving of older people, for example, unless there are also visible facial cues associated with it, if the pacing can not be made distinct.
Oh please, the government doesn't throw you in jail for that, they make you work, and take a slice off your paycheck. Much better for them.
It's called "tax evasion", dude. Look it up. It's how Al Capone ended in jail, when they couldn't arrest him for killing people.
Though honestly, where does this Underwater Basketweaving nonsense come from?
It's a proxy for any non-marketable degree. This includes many non-STEM degrees, and, with the ability to outsource, it also includes IT degrees (as opposed to CS degrees, which are currently still marketable, but with an unknown future).
Now I suppose you COULD say that the government should only foster those degrees it considers valuable, but then you'd just have the free market types bitching about government thinking it knew better and spending decades ignoring say, the Computer science field because it wasn't in their projections or whatever.
You appear to not know the difference between CS and IT. IT emphasizes business and communications. IT is what used to be called an "MIS" degree, and it used to be taught by the College of Business or the College of Technical Education, rather than the College of Engineering.
You can trust HCL (which is actually located in Sunnyvale, not India) with that, because they have deep pockets to sue, if they ever screw up. You can't really trust students to the same degree.
Isn't it the exact opposite? The outsourcing company sells its services entirely on low cost and not on quality or trustworthiness, so a hit on reputation is insignificant.
Not really. The point of outsourcing is to prove that you are able to do the job, in order to obtain the contract. Part of that is your new customer talking to past customers, as references, to decide whether or not to hire you.
If it were that easy, all the laid off IT workers in the U.S. would be doing two things:
1. Starting their own outsourcing companies to compete with HCL
2. Doing their damnedest to "death by a thousand cuts" HCL and similar companies over issues that apply only to companies with relatively large numbers of H1-B workers.
It's be pretty easy to be competent, take advantage of the same economies of scale, and at the same time ethically sabotage HCL.
In contrast, the student is working for a degree, so the university has extreme leverage in being able to add negative annotations to the student's transcript or even expel the student.
The consequences to the student are that they don't get to work in a dying field if they are expelled. I've never, ever seen a transcript with a job application in over 30 years, and I don't expect to be seeing them, so not getting a blue star that day for attendance isn't really going to hurt their job prospects.
Also, the outsourcing company has multiple contracts, so it probably factors a nonzero probability of a soured contract into its cost of operations, while for the student, the impact of a single incident with the university is huge.
I disagree. You blow one HIPAA audit, and all your HIPAA contracts get pulled/audited, if you are a single company doing a lot of them. The idea is that if you screwed the pooch on one of them, then you probably made the same mistake on all of them. That's the downside of being a clearinghouse.
You can trust HCL (which is actually located in Sunnyvale, not India) with that, because they have deep pockets to sue
If they ever lose a major judgement we will find out that the US entity is a penniless shell and the money is all in India.
Obviously, I look forward to the test of that theory, but I wouldn't hold my breath, since I think that there are a lot of people who are capable of meeting the HIPAA threshold, I just think they are professionals, and not UC students.
And what does it say to those CS students across the bay. No worries, you're wasting your time?
What it says to UCB CS students... is "Aren't you glad you're getting a CS degree (computer science emphasis), rather than an IT degree (business and communications emphasis)?" ...which is probably exactly what it should be saying.
Are you telling me you can't find a handful of smart kids in your Computer Science department that would rather do remedial computer work than work at the mall?
Yes, they are telling you that.
UCSF doesn't have a CS department, and they aren't talking about CS anyway, they are talking about IT. Different degrees.
just wait til they outsource professors to H1B...
I look forward to people using Turbo C in a 32 bit VM under FreeDOS to learn their "mad software engineering skillz". This seems to be a pretty common approach to teaching programming in many universities in India.
But seriously: it's unlikely to happen at UCSF, which only sells graduate medical related degrees.
Laying off current qualified workers should cause all of their H1B visas to be automatically canceled.
Like when Microsoft laid off Nokia workers?
Obviously there is not a shortage of available workers.
I'm sure that Microsoft could have employed all those "Can't make a cell phone product anyone wants to buy" workers in another segment of their business, like the X-Box division. That would have enabled them to make an X-Box no one wants to buy too, since that's the core competency of those workers.
In other words: that's a dumb idea with frosting on top.
They used to be. But then the federal government took over the entire industry and got rid of bk'ing student loans.
There's theory, and there's fact.
The theory was that no one in their right mind would loan someone in poverty, and who did not qualify academically or athletically for a scholarship, the money for them to get an underwater basket weaving degree, unless the government agreed to do it.
In exchange, the government, as guarantor, put the condition on the loans that they could not be discharged in bankruptcy -- just like any debt owed the government (i.e. we still have debtor's prisons, only they are for taxes). That way the guarantor could throw your butt in jail if you decided not to pay the student loan back.
The fact is that underwater basket weaving isn't really a marketable enough skill to allow you to make your student loan payments.
What is stopping them from "outsourcing" their IT to another UC school which teaches system administration as part of it's curriculum. It seems like it would be a good opportunity to teach remote administration.
It was probably on the table that they have another UC's IT department handle it; it was likely *never* on the table that IT students handle it.
Personally, I wouldn't be an IT student, if it's obvious that IT is going to be outsourced everywhere; about the only thing you could train to be would be a trainer. It's like being an English major: the only jobs are in creating more English majors.
What am I missing?
Most likely the fact that UCSF is a graduate medical university, and that means that pretty much every IT system on campus has "live data", which means, in turn, that you have to be able to trust the people running it with HIPAA sensitive information.
You can trust HCL (which is actually located in Sunnyvale, not India) with that, because they have deep pockets to sue, if they ever screw up. You can't really trust students to the same degree.
Pretty sure this is just a thumb in the eye for John McAfee suing Intel to get commercial use of his name back.
When the data flow stops...
...All eyes will turn to the Brexis. The Baron and the Emperor himself will be forced to deal with us.
Apropos... Barons are from Germany, and Emperors are from Japan... Kismet?
BBC: "Warner Brothers has yet to comment."
Are you blind?!?
It's right there, in the press release on their website!
Oh. Wait. Never mind.
Just wait until next year: Comey has already promised us another "adult conversation" about encryption following the 2016 election.
Adult conversation about encryption?
"You see Jimmy, when Alice and Bob love each other very, very much, Bob sends packets to Alice, and..."
The part I find most astonishing is... Last.fm had over 43 million users. Ever.
Hopefully no one is stupid enough to buy a Nest dialysis machine...
Why?
It's one of those things, like an iron lung, that you don't want being turned off on you via grid management.