The term of the lease is a bit excessive, yes BUT the U.S. Gov't really doesn't like selling ANY of their land. "What's our is ours forever" so the Google getting a "seemingly forever" lease on the land if about as close as the Gov't is going to go. I'll add that the specific use case for a big chunk of it (starting a space program it seems) requires a LOT of time especially if they go commercial with it so this is appropriate. That use case also falls in line with NASA's purvey these days "Get the easy stuff in corporate hands that have money so we can spend our less and less money on cool stuff"
Google wants to enter the space race and NASA is A-O-K with that.
As far as the gas? I guarantee if you were leasing space from NASA and buying 1.2 Million Gallons of fuel a year you'd get a discount too. Business not favoritism.
Consumer Watchdog wants to complain about something... trying to make a name for themselves? (Naming themselves after what they consider themselves to be wasn't good enough?)
The primary complaint they have against Google: Google got cheap gas from the US Gov't while leasing hangar space at this airfield. Boo Freaking Hoo. It is specifically mentioned that no loss of money occurred so they weren't even selling the gas below cost they were just selling the gas at below retail which they are more than entitled to do (When there are $5M of *savings I can only guess what the total bill was anyway!)
Reality of the world: When you have a lot of money you pay very little per unit than everyone else because you can afford to buy a LOT of whatever "it" is. Simple economics (Economy of Scale).
As far as this deal going forward: NASA gets a lot of money they need and gets to take a not insignificant amount of maintenance cost of their balance sheet at a time when their budgets are not exactly glamorous. If the $1.16B is even spread over time that's $19.4 M per year income plus $6.3M in savings = $25.7M net gain per year for giving up use of something they are not using. (Oh yeah and $200M in renovations of property they'd still own too)
I really don't like organizations that make noise for no reason when there are plenty of worthy causes in the world.
I prefer my minions to have 4-year degrees. Managing minions is not all the slapstick humor and chocolate rivers it's made out to be! I can teach you to code in 3 months but that's NOT what I learned from school. I'll give credit to the individual who can soak up the other stuff on their own but that is by far the exception not the rule in my experience. A pure code monkey is typically a drain on me not a help.
As the article describes this is a high energy accelerator that takes a 20GeV beam and accelerates it by 1.6GeV. That acceleration in 12" is what is the key here. The above linked article will allow you to build a relatively small accelerator measuring in the 100s of KeV but those traditional methods require a significantly larger device to get the beam in the MeVs or higher.
They needed a 2 km linear accelerator to get to 20GeV and added 8% to that in 1 foot.
CERN has 17 Miles to get up to their current 4 TeV (supposed capacity of 7 TeV I believe) If you assume (maybe bad assumption but seems right) that this technology is scalable then you get 1.6GeV for every foot added.
5280 * 1.6 GeV = 8448GeV / mi
7 TeV / 8448 GeV =.8286mi
1.24274mi (2km) +.8286mi = 2.0713mi to do what CERN needs 17 miles to do.
That's neat and possibly WAY more affordable to build than more traditional accelerators.
Yeah... 5 = Legalization. 23 = Medical 18 = Decriminalized...and there is overlap in the above numbers. My state, MN, is in the Medical and Decriminalized category. We've been tolerant (Decrim) for longer than most states but our recently passed Medical law is the most restrictive in the nation. For whatever reason straight up legalization didn't end up on the ballot this year but when it does, at least according to recent polls, it will pass by a landslide. We'd have it already if it weren't for the prick we currently (just reelected grr...) and most recently before him had in the governors office.
This may be considering the system as slightly less intelligent than it should be designed. There are also 2 different functions being considered:
1) Automation: If the ship is programmed to engage feathering automatically then it requires all of the sensor input to know when to properly deploy. This needs to be very accurate as it is attempting to perform the deploy exactly when it needs to be performed with flexibility for atypical scenarios. The more data collected the better the AI at handling the craft correctly.
2) Interlocks: If the ship just is equipped with "seat belts" to keep the pilot from engaging at a terrible time then you do you math for what air pressure/speed combinations (etc) will almost certainly result in structural failure and you prevent deploy under these circumstances. There will always be a grey area where the craft "might" survive deploy which the manufacturer can leave at their discretion whether to have an "Are you sure?" or "Go ahead... your risk" but the interlock should be present for the range of design specs where they should never deploy under those conditions because no matter what smart move they think they are making the result will be destruction of the aircraft and so cost outweighs benefit.
It's a balance between letting the pilot have control / exercise their human intuition vs. making sure they don't do the known stupid.
Honestly I'm a big fan of the Star Trek future however possible that may be. If through automation / etc the needs of *all can be produced by an extreme few why do we need to continue the philosophy that everyone must earn money to survive. I'm not for pure socialism but I have no problem with the safety net being high enough that everyone can do "good" on "nothing" not just eek by. Choosing to live on that minimum is a choice that is perfectly valid for all and not even to be shunned. That leaves those who want to follow their interests the freedom to do so without having to worry about where the shelter over their head or the food on their next plate is coming from.
There are all sorts of logistical issues to work out for that dream to be a reality (not the least of which is making sure enough people work for their own benefit to keep the engine running) and our level of automation isn't quite there yet to support it but that's the future I want to live in.
Honestly I find this to all be overblown... Really curious how much actual IBM chips the US Gov't is buying these days? My former employer did nearly all of their business with the US. (We also went through US Gov't Review when we were purchased by a foreign entity and it was severely painful how it all ended up but I digress...) Working for several of the Acronyms IBM hardware was ever-present BUT it was all Intel inside. The new super computers we see being built are all Intel or AMD cored. There is a LOT of hardware I'm sure is rotting in some massive server farm somewhere so maintenance has to be an issue but we really saw no signs in any Department of *any new acquisition with IBM chips under the hood.
Of course I'm glossing over the various other chips on a server MB that may be fabbed by IBM directly but else seems like a lot of noise for a supplier that they are not utilizing any more. I would think it would be a bigger deal that IBM sold their server division to Lenovo since they are heavily using IBM Server Hardware and Lenovo is originally a Chinese company but maybe I just missed that piece of news.
The balance also heavily swings on the quality of the devs involved. There's a vast field of difference between what one developer might consider trivial and another. If their pool of devs are true NP volunteers then it could be a fleet of "I read this book on Java once" quality devs which would make everything worse than trivial.
Since the requirements are pretty vague it's hard to say for certain but honestly I'd spec this project out at 2 people. I'd do all the dev and have another guy to get their infrastructure up and stable (maybe/probably cloud given the once a year use) with maybe another to put a second set of eyes on (essentially QA). Dealing with volunteers in a non-profit environment you get a lot of intention but not quite so much ability or follow through so keep the team small. (Honestly could do this solo but given guy 2 and 3 I'd take the help) If there are a lot of hidden requirements then this may need to be augmented but really we're talking about a fairly simple web app with extremely low load requirements.
More to the point of the OP's question, as you say there's a fine line here. Too many OTS solutions try to be the kitchen sink and so customizing them to your use ends up being more dev than creating the whole thing yourself. This use-case seems trivial enough that you would essentially want to say: Either what I'm buying from you works truly OTS or I'll build my own. Look at the cost of modification as your deciding factor. I used to work for an organization who had a bunch of in house software. Various CRM tasks were handled by this software and at least reasonably well. At some point a suit decided that instead of asking us for some more features he needed to ditch what was already working and buy ACT CRM. The modification development required by us to bring ACT even back to par with what it was replacing was significantly higher than it would have cost us to just add the features they wanted. This could be more of a specific dig on ACT than a general case but seems to happen a lot. The described non-profit seems to be in the similar boat of already having a custom solution so why throw it away when it just needs some mods?
Oh my I have a fan! Too bad they are shy and remain anonymous... Only someone with a personal vendetta OR a true fanboi would get so worked up over that innocuous comment. Guess I hit a little too close to home.
That method is working fine here for at least one particular grocery store. A large regional grocer named Lund's does this at a number of their stores. Of course the stores they are using it in have a certain dynamic and layout that seems to compliment its use.
Other than grocery: Best Buy uses this method during the Christmas Season and seems to be expanding that to other times of the year when they are busy. Local Electronics/Computer shop Microcenter has done this since they opened. The bathrooms in our stadiums end up working this way.
Definitely works well... not sure why others aren't catching on.
...also: Can't speak for the development community at large but I have yet to work in either a purely Agile OR a purely Waterfall project yet. Every one has been a balance of both and it has worked quite well so this research seems stale to me.
Given I've "only" been in the development world for 15 years I missed Waterfall's heyday (Thank Jebus) but its not like the switch flipped all the way over. Agile and a variety of other procedural breakthroughs just add to the development toolbox from which to pick the best style for each team and project.
The retina display is a "brand" for Apple. The term was supposed to imply that the display's ppi was great enough that your eye couldn't perceive any improvement with better. Of course it was shown pretty soon after that they were wrong BUT the measure is fairly close and they stuck with the name.
My new Dell has a less snappy name for its display "QHD+" but I'm not complaining since it has a noticeably higher PPI than Retina (as well as supposedly better tech for a brighter image at that rez)
1) IQ may be (possibly is) a terrible way to measure what makes an Einstein. Specifically the concept of creativity is complicated. There has been a bunch of research / analysis in this area with most of what I'm seeing saying an IQ test can indicate creativity but not purely the score but with in-depth analysis of how the different questions are answered (subtle).
2) There are a lot of geniuses dying on the vine for the unlucky habit of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
3) A genius may or may not choose to exercise their abilities in the way Einstein did. Many a genius would be pretty smart to be able to live their life in peace without the struggle. Apply your genius to a worthy goal of spending the rest of your life on a beach:-)
SO... is the OP actually saying we need more "contributing" geniuses?
Ya... I was working at a company about a decade ago that was purchased. When the new bosses came in they handed us a bunch of paperwork to sign including a non-compete which we hadn't had previously. It had explicit language that said any thing we created on or off clock at work or at home was theirs expressly. I refused to sign and urged my coworkers similarly. At some point I ended up on a conference call with the legal team at overlord corporate negotiating an alternate version of the contracts which all technical staff at my firm ended up signing instead of the original. Fun moment in my career for sure.
As for IP and employment it can be very lucrative. My most recent previous employer had at least a few employees on staff who's primary job responsibility was to keep their IP in house. They collected nice fat paychecks to do very little (essentially support for implementations and debugging of potential issues with the patented algorithms). The key is knowing the value of your IP to your potential employer and take no less than everything they are willing to compensate for it without actually giving up ownership.
Nah.. I think that's more common than that. I fly delta almost exclusively and they don't seem to mind at all (especially since on most flights you're watching a video anyway unless the video system is broken which happens a lot)
I've refused to follow the stow electronics rule just about as long as I've had electronics to stow. I've gone as far as to push the flight attendants for an actual *reason why we had to stow and only got one good answer (other than because I told you to) *ever. "If we have a problem during takeoff or landing your headphone/cords will interfere with the ability to quickly clear the seats/aisle" not that that dissuaded me.
Of course I also refuse to wear my seat belt. In the nearly half million miles I've flown that's only been an issue once and that was just sliding forward on a particularly hard landing (which I compensate for with the extremely challenging action of not having my feet tucked under me on landing) Aside from the dramatic scene in "Flight" where he barrel rolls the plane there are very few scenarios where that little strap is going to save me from whatever calamity we're going through.
Anyway... flying for me is like riding a bus these days (especially with TSA pre-approved to save the hassle going through security) so much like just about everyone on the bus I really only want to be interrupted by the crew on my way on and off the bus.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
The term of the lease is a bit excessive, yes BUT the U.S. Gov't really doesn't like selling ANY of their land. "What's our is ours forever" so the Google getting a "seemingly forever" lease on the land if about as close as the Gov't is going to go. I'll add that the specific use case for a big chunk of it (starting a space program it seems) requires a LOT of time especially if they go commercial with it so this is appropriate. That use case also falls in line with NASA's purvey these days "Get the easy stuff in corporate hands that have money so we can spend our less and less money on cool stuff"
Google wants to enter the space race and NASA is A-O-K with that.
As far as the gas? I guarantee if you were leasing space from NASA and buying 1.2 Million Gallons of fuel a year you'd get a discount too. Business not favoritism.
Consumer Watchdog wants to complain about something... trying to make a name for themselves? (Naming themselves after what they consider themselves to be wasn't good enough?)
The primary complaint they have against Google: Google got cheap gas from the US Gov't while leasing hangar space at this airfield. Boo Freaking Hoo. It is specifically mentioned that no loss of money occurred so they weren't even selling the gas below cost they were just selling the gas at below retail which they are more than entitled to do (When there are $5M of *savings I can only guess what the total bill was anyway!)
Reality of the world: When you have a lot of money you pay very little per unit than everyone else because you can afford to buy a LOT of whatever "it" is. Simple economics (Economy of Scale).
As far as this deal going forward: NASA gets a lot of money they need and gets to take a not insignificant amount of maintenance cost of their balance sheet at a time when their budgets are not exactly glamorous. If the $1.16B is even spread over time that's $19.4 M per year income plus $6.3M in savings = $25.7M net gain per year for giving up use of something they are not using. (Oh yeah and $200M in renovations of property they'd still own too)
I really don't like organizations that make noise for no reason when there are plenty of worthy causes in the world.
Probably not what you are thinking of but... Superman III.
http://ffilms.org/superman-iii...
Scene around the 47 minute mark :-)
It can fly or not fly on the federal level in Canada... that will have no bearing on the rest of the world NOR is it practically feasible.
blah blah blah being a cop is hard make it easier blah blah blah...
Well... except for the Next Gen ID program that TFA article is talking about which just so happens to run entirely on Linux.
Oh sorry... did I break your chain of thought?
I prefer my minions to have 4-year degrees. Managing minions is not all the slapstick humor and chocolate rivers it's made out to be! I can teach you to code in 3 months but that's NOT what I learned from school. I'll give credit to the individual who can soak up the other stuff on their own but that is by far the exception not the rule in my experience. A pure code monkey is typically a drain on me not a help.
Not the same thing but thanks for the link!
As the article describes this is a high energy accelerator that takes a 20GeV beam and accelerates it by 1.6GeV. That acceleration in 12" is what is the key here. The above linked article will allow you to build a relatively small accelerator measuring in the 100s of KeV but those traditional methods require a significantly larger device to get the beam in the MeVs or higher.
They needed a 2 km linear accelerator to get to 20GeV and added 8% to that in 1 foot.
CERN has 17 Miles to get up to their current 4 TeV (supposed capacity of 7 TeV I believe)
If you assume (maybe bad assumption but seems right) that this technology is scalable then you get 1.6GeV for every foot added.
5280 * 1.6 GeV = 8448GeV / mi
7 TeV / 8448 GeV = .8286mi
1.24274mi (2km) + .8286mi = 2.0713mi to do what CERN needs 17 miles to do.
That's neat and possibly WAY more affordable to build than more traditional accelerators.
From the early days of the WWW... :-)
http://www.tazerfish.com/
Yeah... ...and there is overlap in the above numbers. My state, MN, is in the Medical and Decriminalized category. We've been tolerant (Decrim) for longer than most states but our recently passed Medical law is the most restrictive in the nation. For whatever reason straight up legalization didn't end up on the ballot this year but when it does, at least according to recent polls, it will pass by a landslide. We'd have it already if it weren't for the prick we currently (just reelected grr...) and most recently before him had in the governors office.
5 = Legalization.
23 = Medical
18 = Decriminalized
This may be considering the system as slightly less intelligent than it should be designed. There are also 2 different functions being considered:
1) Automation: If the ship is programmed to engage feathering automatically then it requires all of the sensor input to know when to properly deploy. This needs to be very accurate as it is attempting to perform the deploy exactly when it needs to be performed with flexibility for atypical scenarios. The more data collected the better the AI at handling the craft correctly.
2) Interlocks: If the ship just is equipped with "seat belts" to keep the pilot from engaging at a terrible time then you do you math for what air pressure/speed combinations (etc) will almost certainly result in structural failure and you prevent deploy under these circumstances. There will always be a grey area where the craft "might" survive deploy which the manufacturer can leave at their discretion whether to have an "Are you sure?" or "Go ahead... your risk" but the interlock should be present for the range of design specs where they should never deploy under those conditions because no matter what smart move they think they are making the result will be destruction of the aircraft and so cost outweighs benefit.
It's a balance between letting the pilot have control / exercise their human intuition vs. making sure they don't do the known stupid.
This.
Honestly I'm a big fan of the Star Trek future however possible that may be. If through automation / etc the needs of *all can be produced by an extreme few why do we need to continue the philosophy that everyone must earn money to survive. I'm not for pure socialism but I have no problem with the safety net being high enough that everyone can do "good" on "nothing" not just eek by. Choosing to live on that minimum is a choice that is perfectly valid for all and not even to be shunned. That leaves those who want to follow their interests the freedom to do so without having to worry about where the shelter over their head or the food on their next plate is coming from.
There are all sorts of logistical issues to work out for that dream to be a reality (not the least of which is making sure enough people work for their own benefit to keep the engine running) and our level of automation isn't quite there yet to support it but that's the future I want to live in.
Honestly I find this to all be overblown... Really curious how much actual IBM chips the US Gov't is buying these days? My former employer did nearly all of their business with the US. (We also went through US Gov't Review when we were purchased by a foreign entity and it was severely painful how it all ended up but I digress...) Working for several of the Acronyms IBM hardware was ever-present BUT it was all Intel inside. The new super computers we see being built are all Intel or AMD cored. There is a LOT of hardware I'm sure is rotting in some massive server farm somewhere so maintenance has to be an issue but we really saw no signs in any Department of *any new acquisition with IBM chips under the hood.
Of course I'm glossing over the various other chips on a server MB that may be fabbed by IBM directly but else seems like a lot of noise for a supplier that they are not utilizing any more. I would think it would be a bigger deal that IBM sold their server division to Lenovo since they are heavily using IBM Server Hardware and Lenovo is originally a Chinese company but maybe I just missed that piece of news.
Maybe he's just cutting through to the heart of the issue.. ;-)
OR he's an ill-tempered sea bass... Hard to tell from the writing style.
The balance also heavily swings on the quality of the devs involved. There's a vast field of difference between what one developer might consider trivial and another. If their pool of devs are true NP volunteers then it could be a fleet of "I read this book on Java once" quality devs which would make everything worse than trivial.
Since the requirements are pretty vague it's hard to say for certain but honestly I'd spec this project out at 2 people. I'd do all the dev and have another guy to get their infrastructure up and stable (maybe/probably cloud given the once a year use) with maybe another to put a second set of eyes on (essentially QA). Dealing with volunteers in a non-profit environment you get a lot of intention but not quite so much ability or follow through so keep the team small. (Honestly could do this solo but given guy 2 and 3 I'd take the help) If there are a lot of hidden requirements then this may need to be augmented but really we're talking about a fairly simple web app with extremely low load requirements.
More to the point of the OP's question, as you say there's a fine line here. Too many OTS solutions try to be the kitchen sink and so customizing them to your use ends up being more dev than creating the whole thing yourself. This use-case seems trivial enough that you would essentially want to say: Either what I'm buying from you works truly OTS or I'll build my own. Look at the cost of modification as your deciding factor. I used to work for an organization who had a bunch of in house software. Various CRM tasks were handled by this software and at least reasonably well. At some point a suit decided that instead of asking us for some more features he needed to ditch what was already working and buy ACT CRM. The modification development required by us to bring ACT even back to par with what it was replacing was significantly higher than it would have cost us to just add the features they wanted. This could be more of a specific dig on ACT than a general case but seems to happen a lot. The described non-profit seems to be in the similar boat of already having a custom solution so why throw it away when it just needs some mods?
Oh my I have a fan! Too bad they are shy and remain anonymous... Only someone with a personal vendetta OR a true fanboi would get so worked up over that innocuous comment. Guess I hit a little too close to home.
That method is working fine here for at least one particular grocery store. A large regional grocer named Lund's does this at a number of their stores. Of course the stores they are using it in have a certain dynamic and layout that seems to compliment its use.
Other than grocery:
Best Buy uses this method during the Christmas Season and seems to be expanding that to other times of the year when they are busy.
Local Electronics/Computer shop Microcenter has done this since they opened.
The bathrooms in our stadiums end up working this way.
Definitely works well... not sure why others aren't catching on.
"Hey Baby! My space-time curvature deviates from the standard model... wanna come back to my place and distort physics??"
...also:
Can't speak for the development community at large but I have yet to work in either a purely Agile OR a purely Waterfall project yet. Every one has been a balance of both and it has worked quite well so this research seems stale to me.
Given I've "only" been in the development world for 15 years I missed Waterfall's heyday (Thank Jebus) but its not like the switch flipped all the way over. Agile and a variety of other procedural breakthroughs just add to the development toolbox from which to pick the best style for each team and project.
Damn... you beat me to it.
M$ should sue for copying their idea!
Um... "Yes."
The retina display is a "brand" for Apple. The term was supposed to imply that the display's ppi was great enough that your eye couldn't perceive any improvement with better. Of course it was shown pretty soon after that they were wrong BUT the measure is fairly close and they stuck with the name.
My new Dell has a less snappy name for its display "QHD+" but I'm not complaining since it has a noticeably higher PPI than Retina (as well as supposedly better tech for a brighter image at that rez)
This may show a couple different things:
1) IQ may be (possibly is) a terrible way to measure what makes an Einstein. Specifically the concept of creativity is complicated. There has been a bunch of research / analysis in this area with most of what I'm seeing saying an IQ test can indicate creativity but not purely the score but with in-depth analysis of how the different questions are answered (subtle).
2) There are a lot of geniuses dying on the vine for the unlucky habit of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
3) A genius may or may not choose to exercise their abilities in the way Einstein did. Many a genius would be pretty smart to be able to live their life in peace without the struggle. Apply your genius to a worthy goal of spending the rest of your life on a beach :-)
SO... is the OP actually saying we need more "contributing" geniuses?
Ya... I was working at a company about a decade ago that was purchased. When the new bosses came in they handed us a bunch of paperwork to sign including a non-compete which we hadn't had previously. It had explicit language that said any thing we created on or off clock at work or at home was theirs expressly. I refused to sign and urged my coworkers similarly. At some point I ended up on a conference call with the legal team at overlord corporate negotiating an alternate version of the contracts which all technical staff at my firm ended up signing instead of the original. Fun moment in my career for sure.
As for IP and employment it can be very lucrative. My most recent previous employer had at least a few employees on staff who's primary job responsibility was to keep their IP in house. They collected nice fat paychecks to do very little (essentially support for implementations and debugging of potential issues with the patented algorithms). The key is knowing the value of your IP to your potential employer and take no less than everything they are willing to compensate for it without actually giving up ownership.
Nah.. I think that's more common than that. I fly delta almost exclusively and they don't seem to mind at all (especially since on most flights you're watching a video anyway unless the video system is broken which happens a lot)
I've refused to follow the stow electronics rule just about as long as I've had electronics to stow. I've gone as far as to push the flight attendants for an actual *reason why we had to stow and only got one good answer (other than because I told you to) *ever. "If we have a problem during takeoff or landing your headphone/cords will interfere with the ability to quickly clear the seats/aisle" not that that dissuaded me.
Of course I also refuse to wear my seat belt. In the nearly half million miles I've flown that's only been an issue once and that was just sliding forward on a particularly hard landing (which I compensate for with the extremely challenging action of not having my feet tucked under me on landing) Aside from the dramatic scene in "Flight" where he barrel rolls the plane there are very few scenarios where that little strap is going to save me from whatever calamity we're going through.
Anyway... flying for me is like riding a bus these days (especially with TSA pre-approved to save the hassle going through security) so much like just about everyone on the bus I really only want to be interrupted by the crew on my way on and off the bus.
Yeah and part B SnapChat pics are *really small... low rez and tiny so you can fit a lot in a little.
Get off my lawn!!!