I'd imagine some Varnish would probably have done enough.
I'd love to know what their general architecture is. I know "get some Cloudfront" or "get an Akamai contract" are solutions, but I'll bet this site gets a small base-load year-in, year-out and so doesn't really justify much expense. It'd be nice to know what architecture fails as much as what works.
As for BitTorrent - it's great and all, but it's not just a matter of "click the link, wait for the download" for most people. Perhaps it should be, but right now it's "download a client with a strange name, install it on your PC, don't install the Chrome toolbar, don't install the McAfee trial, bla bla" - way too much work for "just one download".
I'm not sure you'd need all of that for VR to be useful, although I'd agree that we're still no where near enough to be "good enough" for anything like a replacement of the real thing.
However, if it's a way to take a trip inside a human body, or walk about on Mars or whatever, then it's currently *better* than the real thing, in so much as you'll never do the real thing. One could also argue that (say) visiting Easter Island is "better" than going there because the environmental impact of going there is pretty big. It's of course no where near as good as going to the woods with a few pals (or your school class or whatever), making a fire and cooking marshmallows. I don't suppose it's really trying to replace doing that though, as doing that ought to be relatively easy.
Either way, give it another 20 years, and I'd imagine VR 'trips' would be something that kids in schools do from time to time. By then the specs will be closer to your list, and the content available will be more plentiful. A VR trip has to be better than no trip, but it might also displace real trips in some cases.
Seems pretty useful for getting stuff around town. I'm not sure how far they come from, but the trucks pulling up to the supermarket across the street where I used to live seemed to be coming pretty much constantly. They wouldn't stop for 2 hours, I'll grant you (probably less than an hour), but they'd still get some charge in that time. Stopping even 50% of those trucks spewing out diesel fumes would probably make a noticeable difference to air quality in the area.
Sure, the ones that do 200 miles to get where they're going aren't going to be replaced by this. They also need to be replaced by this sort of thing much less than the short-haul, inner-city traffic. So yeah, this won't replace every truck on the planet, but it doesn't need to.
Our hybrid Outlander makes a sort of whirring noise at low speeds so you can hear it coming. It's not one of the components making that noise - it's actually made deliberately and turned off once you're moving a bit quicker (when normal road noise is enough). It doesn't seem like lack of noise is a hard problem to solve.
As for headphones... I turn mine up a notch or two when I'm walking along main roads and down again when I get onto quieter roads. Again, seems like a solved problem.
What's not solved though is the dirt produced by ICE engines in trucks and buses. Electric's a nice step forward in that regard. Whether it works in all circumstances is besides the point - if it can move stuff around cities it'll be just fine. Outback road trains can continue to be diesel for a few decades more without any real harm done to anyone or anything, but stuff where people live needs taking care of in pretty short order.
GDRP and the-other-one-with-a-crappy-name are certainly getting a lot of places shitting the bed. It'll be interesting to see who gets prosecuted under these new rules first - and when that is.
Such insurance exists here in the UK. I think the business model is to take in high premiums, and pay out as few people as possible, and only pay a relatively small amount (although I may be wrong, but the number quoted to me for my contracting company was too high to be worth doing, and let's face it, I'm not much of an IT pro if I need such insurance;-) They pretty much just gave me a price, and didn't ask any real questions about my competence in such matters by the way - I guess they just looked at my small company and gave me a 'standard price'. If I was a mega-corp, they'd probably charge enough to actually care about competence and what due diligence I might have performed.
I liken it to holiday illness cover (which we also have). It turns out there's a loophole in the UK rules that mean you can pretty much just come home from holiday and make a claim on your insurance for the food poisoning you had. You don't really need any evidence as such, and you certainly don't need to have alerted the establishment which supposedly gave you the illness in the first place. Such insurance has been around for a long time, and I suspect the insurance companies have been collecting premiums for quite some time without ever really having any claims. However, now the lawyers have got ahold of it (yes, them again - doing "good" for humanity like always), the claims are getting silly. The insurance companies are passing some of their costs on to the establishments that supposedly caused the problem, and so, lots of unrelated holiday makers are now paying the price for the minority who keep claiming.
Rant aside, the insurance companies have been pushing for limits on payouts of this nature (and will probably get them too). I'd imagine the same will become true for 'cyber' insurance in a few years time too, once the lawyers get ahold of that as a means to fleece the public.
No, but they are much more likely to read Slashdot.
...and in fact their use of Mensa as the means of selection has about the same outcome as it would have been if they'd just picked/. readers. The only difference is that Mensa members could have slagged off the research as being too 'thin' because it picked a self-selected bunch of people with ideas above their station.
However, it adds some weight to the age-old notion that there's a thin line between genius and insanity.
...and so the popularist isolationism begins in the tech sector.
Trump wanted 'America first', he wanted to extricate America from as much of the rest of the world as possible, and this is just one way to do it. Good luck using the alternatives though - I predict "American's tech productivity drops 10% since October 2017".
I don't know how this goes down in Canada, but pretty much any planned stuff here in the UK ends up being a soulless, lifeless sort of thing. My problem with such places is that they never build in a cosy pub, or a cheap convenience store, or a kebab shop. Instead, they make a few commercial units and fill them with franchised chain places which have about the same atmosphere the inside of an Amazon warehouse. I mean, you can get a great apartment, maybe with a river view and a trendy kitchen, but try actually going to a supermarket to get some groceries - not so easy. You don't get parking space, because most people don't own cars, but you could really do with one because you're miles from anything useful. Try making a bit of noise one night with a few pals watching a game or something - nope, complaints from the neighbours.
Source: Swindon, Milton Keynes, the Docklands (London), soon-to-be Greenwich Peninsula (London), etc etc. Fine if all you want is a place to sleep, just don't think about eating, or actually living any sort of life there.
Not sure about Canada, but in the UK there's been a lot of 'clamping down' on this sort of thing (we have a media tax too, BTW). You can't actively assist in copyright infringement, and if the device is primarily used for copyright infringement, you can't sell it.
Now, if they could come up with a box that mostly shows legal streams, but has some back-door way to get to the illegal ones, then they might have a better chance. The trouble is, average-joe doesn't want such a box - they want all the illegal stuff or else they're happy with their TV as it is.
Back to this one in particular... what kind of hardware is that? I assume it's a rebadged something-or-other - any idea what? Also, the 'testimonials' sound pretty scary - people saying they spend $200/month on cable/subscriptions - that sounds like an awful lot. They must have really crappy TV there...
You'd be better off highlighting the issue to your manager each time it occurs. When s/he gets bored of you coming by to tell them of another incident (probably after 2-3, I'd imagine), start sending weekly summaries. Be sure to include how much of your time you're spending on non-coding activities such as mailing USB sticks or whatever. You may choose to present that time as a percentage of your total contracted working hours. Once they see 20% or something, it'll get sorted one way or another (but probably not in the way you're expecting or hoping for - so be ready for that).
...oh one more: anything you're not actively working on is legacy. Any legacy you have is a cost and a risk. If it's not making enough money to justify working on it, then kill it off (maybe not immediately, but make a plan to turn it off and then stick to your plan unless you can turn it around and work on it again).
...and just because Gartner says something is the "next big thing" or "revolutionary", or even that "67% of IT execs say they're going to adopt it in the next year" doesn't mean you should, and it definitely doesn't mean you should do nothing but this thing (whatever it is). This hold true for outsourcing, 'the cloud', agile, and many others.
On a different note, I'd say that for any software purchase over a few quid, you're going to be disappointed. Once the numbers start getting into the hundreds of thousands, you're not only going to be disappointed, you're also going to be stuck with the bloomin' thing for at least 3 more years. That might have a negative effect on recruitment, opportunity costs, or your ability to deliver on other priorities.
I've lost count of the number of "awesome new products" that companies I've worked for bought, and then had to backtrack on their aspirations once the limitations of the product became apparent. Some of them weren't even bought on the golf course - some went through some real evaluation first. The truth is though, you can't know what you need to know until you let your great unwashed masses at it - and once you mandate they must use it for all functions related to "X", they'll find all the flaws in your great decree in short order. If you're the Fearless Leader, you're best off encouraging it's use for X, whilst being very clear it was bought for Y. That way, if it sucks at "X" (and it probably does), then you don't look like such a dick. That's harder than it sounds when you've just spent an eye watering amount of the company's money on something though.
Yep, fsck 'em, I say. I've made a bit of money, and I'm 'pulling up the draw bridge' to make sure my neighbours, and definitely that grubby looking guy I see on the way to the shops don't get any of it. I mean, I know I'll never get any further up the ladder, because of the millionaires and billionaires all keeping all their money to themselves, but hey, at least that grubby guy down the street won't get any of mine.
"Punishing" the wealthy to give up a little more than they currently do doesn't really punish them. Most of the super-rich (people with multiple billions in personal wealth) wouldn't notice if you took a million dollars off them each year. It wouldn't affect their buying power, it wouldn't affect the output of their investments, and they won't materially suffer for it. In other words, what looks like a large amount of money here, makes almost no difference at all.
Shockingly, there are people who just happen to live somewhere very poor. They were born because their parents are so poor that if they don't have some kids to help out with the work around the house, they won't earn the few cents they need to buy a decent meal, or to fix the hole in the roof. They have to have quite a few kids because there's a good chance a couple of them will die during childhood due to disease and malnutrition, so it's not like they can just produce kids 'to order' either. Such people can't work themselves out of poverty in anything like a reasonable timeframe because they have near-zero income. That means they don't have any spare money to buy an extra bag of seeds to grow more crops, or to keep the goat alive for another year. If someone gives them an extra bag of seeds today, they go from a daily income of $1 to $1.01. That extra one cent can be used to increase their output next time around, and so on. In other words, a tiny amount of money here helps to dramatically accelerate the rate of 'wealth creation' in a vast number of people.
As for stuffing money in the mattress - that's effectively what the super-rich are doing. Their personal spending is massively outstripped by their income, and so more and more money is being removed from the economy and into their hands. They're not spending it all, and so the flows of money around the economy are reduced. Do too much of that, and you get a recession - which absolutely won't affect the super-rich as they move off-shore, making the problem even worse.
...and sure-up all the creaky wooden posts and planks holding up the roofs. It'll stop them collapsing later and causing subsidence at the surface.
Of course, what we'll probably end up doing is building monuments and stuff out of the carbon-rocks and filling the mines with concrete so we've got more CO2 to suck up later.
Google's UK operations are pretty small potatoes, but here they can choose from a few electricity companies that only sell 'green' electricity. Ecotricity are the biggest such provider, although I've personally switched to Bulb as they're more or less the same, but cheaper. Ecotricity are both retail and wholesale, and their wholesale part only builds 'green' power stations, and are paid for by profits from the retail part. What they can't generate themselves, they buy from elsewhere, so long as it's 'green' (but clearly, they can generate it themselves for less than they can buy it, so they're motivated to keep building power stations).
These companies pick and choose how many KW/h they buy from which generators. Whilst some of the electrons in my house, or in Google's office may have originally come from a nuclear, coal or gas power station, the same number of electrons are going to some other premises that made no such attempt to buy 'green'. As such, the lazy drive I just did to the supermarket (which I could have walked to) was entirely performed by green electricity in my electric car. The electricity I just used 'displaced' the equivalent by non-green sources.
I agree though, it's a bit tenuous to say "we generated X amount of electricity in the desert, but only used Y, so we have Z spare, which we 'traded' for some coal-power in Elbona". Whilst technically true, it doesn't exactly make Google seem any greener to the smog-infused people of Elbonia.
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century figured this one out. It makes you a bit camp, not at all muscly, but incredibly strong (even if you're "considered something of a weakling" on your home planet).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd imagine some Varnish would probably have done enough.
I'd love to know what their general architecture is. I know "get some Cloudfront" or "get an Akamai contract" are solutions, but I'll bet this site gets a small base-load year-in, year-out and so doesn't really justify much expense. It'd be nice to know what architecture fails as much as what works.
As for BitTorrent - it's great and all, but it's not just a matter of "click the link, wait for the download" for most people. Perhaps it should be, but right now it's "download a client with a strange name, install it on your PC, don't install the Chrome toolbar, don't install the McAfee trial, bla bla" - way too much work for "just one download".
...and for the foreigners who don't get that comment...
"They call us birds... we pick up worms"
Just wait until their robots start building robot-building robots ;-)
I'm not sure you'd need all of that for VR to be useful, although I'd agree that we're still no where near enough to be "good enough" for anything like a replacement of the real thing.
However, if it's a way to take a trip inside a human body, or walk about on Mars or whatever, then it's currently *better* than the real thing, in so much as you'll never do the real thing. One could also argue that (say) visiting Easter Island is "better" than going there because the environmental impact of going there is pretty big. It's of course no where near as good as going to the woods with a few pals (or your school class or whatever), making a fire and cooking marshmallows. I don't suppose it's really trying to replace doing that though, as doing that ought to be relatively easy.
Either way, give it another 20 years, and I'd imagine VR 'trips' would be something that kids in schools do from time to time. By then the specs will be closer to your list, and the content available will be more plentiful. A VR trip has to be better than no trip, but it might also displace real trips in some cases.
Seems pretty useful for getting stuff around town. I'm not sure how far they come from, but the trucks pulling up to the supermarket across the street where I used to live seemed to be coming pretty much constantly. They wouldn't stop for 2 hours, I'll grant you (probably less than an hour), but they'd still get some charge in that time. Stopping even 50% of those trucks spewing out diesel fumes would probably make a noticeable difference to air quality in the area.
Sure, the ones that do 200 miles to get where they're going aren't going to be replaced by this. They also need to be replaced by this sort of thing much less than the short-haul, inner-city traffic. So yeah, this won't replace every truck on the planet, but it doesn't need to.
Our hybrid Outlander makes a sort of whirring noise at low speeds so you can hear it coming. It's not one of the components making that noise - it's actually made deliberately and turned off once you're moving a bit quicker (when normal road noise is enough). It doesn't seem like lack of noise is a hard problem to solve.
As for headphones... I turn mine up a notch or two when I'm walking along main roads and down again when I get onto quieter roads. Again, seems like a solved problem.
What's not solved though is the dirt produced by ICE engines in trucks and buses. Electric's a nice step forward in that regard. Whether it works in all circumstances is besides the point - if it can move stuff around cities it'll be just fine. Outback road trains can continue to be diesel for a few decades more without any real harm done to anyone or anything, but stuff where people live needs taking care of in pretty short order.
GDRP and the-other-one-with-a-crappy-name are certainly getting a lot of places shitting the bed. It'll be interesting to see who gets prosecuted under these new rules first - and when that is.
Such insurance exists here in the UK. I think the business model is to take in high premiums, and pay out as few people as possible, and only pay a relatively small amount (although I may be wrong, but the number quoted to me for my contracting company was too high to be worth doing, and let's face it, I'm not much of an IT pro if I need such insurance ;-) They pretty much just gave me a price, and didn't ask any real questions about my competence in such matters by the way - I guess they just looked at my small company and gave me a 'standard price'. If I was a mega-corp, they'd probably charge enough to actually care about competence and what due diligence I might have performed.
I liken it to holiday illness cover (which we also have). It turns out there's a loophole in the UK rules that mean you can pretty much just come home from holiday and make a claim on your insurance for the food poisoning you had. You don't really need any evidence as such, and you certainly don't need to have alerted the establishment which supposedly gave you the illness in the first place. Such insurance has been around for a long time, and I suspect the insurance companies have been collecting premiums for quite some time without ever really having any claims. However, now the lawyers have got ahold of it (yes, them again - doing "good" for humanity like always), the claims are getting silly. The insurance companies are passing some of their costs on to the establishments that supposedly caused the problem, and so, lots of unrelated holiday makers are now paying the price for the minority who keep claiming.
Rant aside, the insurance companies have been pushing for limits on payouts of this nature (and will probably get them too). I'd imagine the same will become true for 'cyber' insurance in a few years time too, once the lawyers get ahold of that as a means to fleece the public.
No, but they are much more likely to read Slashdot.
...and in fact their use of Mensa as the means of selection has about the same outcome as it would have been if they'd just picked /. readers. The only difference is that Mensa members could have slagged off the research as being too 'thin' because it picked a self-selected bunch of people with ideas above their station.
However, it adds some weight to the age-old notion that there's a thin line between genius and insanity.
...or after cheaper car insurance. maybe? Yep, that's right, you get 10% discounts at a number of places because you're in Mensa.
...and so the popularist isolationism begins in the tech sector.
Trump wanted 'America first', he wanted to extricate America from as much of the rest of the world as possible, and this is just one way to do it. Good luck using the alternatives though - I predict "American's tech productivity drops 10% since October 2017".
...and soon it'll be empty mixed-use land.
I don't know how this goes down in Canada, but pretty much any planned stuff here in the UK ends up being a soulless, lifeless sort of thing. My problem with such places is that they never build in a cosy pub, or a cheap convenience store, or a kebab shop. Instead, they make a few commercial units and fill them with franchised chain places which have about the same atmosphere the inside of an Amazon warehouse. I mean, you can get a great apartment, maybe with a river view and a trendy kitchen, but try actually going to a supermarket to get some groceries - not so easy. You don't get parking space, because most people don't own cars, but you could really do with one because you're miles from anything useful. Try making a bit of noise one night with a few pals watching a game or something - nope, complaints from the neighbours.
Source: Swindon, Milton Keynes, the Docklands (London), soon-to-be Greenwich Peninsula (London), etc etc. Fine if all you want is a place to sleep, just don't think about eating, or actually living any sort of life there.
Not sure about Canada, but in the UK there's been a lot of 'clamping down' on this sort of thing (we have a media tax too, BTW). You can't actively assist in copyright infringement, and if the device is primarily used for copyright infringement, you can't sell it.
Now, if they could come up with a box that mostly shows legal streams, but has some back-door way to get to the illegal ones, then they might have a better chance. The trouble is, average-joe doesn't want such a box - they want all the illegal stuff or else they're happy with their TV as it is.
Back to this one in particular... what kind of hardware is that? I assume it's a rebadged something-or-other - any idea what? Also, the 'testimonials' sound pretty scary - people saying they spend $200/month on cable/subscriptions - that sounds like an awful lot. They must have really crappy TV there...
Way to go on the put-down. I think I'd be quite complimented if someone put me down like that. All I seem to get is "you're an idiot" though.
...advice almost guaranteed to get you fired.
You'd be better off highlighting the issue to your manager each time it occurs. When s/he gets bored of you coming by to tell them of another incident (probably after 2-3, I'd imagine), start sending weekly summaries. Be sure to include how much of your time you're spending on non-coding activities such as mailing USB sticks or whatever. You may choose to present that time as a percentage of your total contracted working hours. Once they see 20% or something, it'll get sorted one way or another (but probably not in the way you're expecting or hoping for - so be ready for that).
...oh one more: anything you're not actively working on is legacy. Any legacy you have is a cost and a risk. If it's not making enough money to justify working on it, then kill it off (maybe not immediately, but make a plan to turn it off and then stick to your plan unless you can turn it around and work on it again).
...and just because Gartner says something is the "next big thing" or "revolutionary", or even that "67% of IT execs say they're going to adopt it in the next year" doesn't mean you should, and it definitely doesn't mean you should do nothing but this thing (whatever it is). This hold true for outsourcing, 'the cloud', agile, and many others.
On a different note, I'd say that for any software purchase over a few quid, you're going to be disappointed. Once the numbers start getting into the hundreds of thousands, you're not only going to be disappointed, you're also going to be stuck with the bloomin' thing for at least 3 more years. That might have a negative effect on recruitment, opportunity costs, or your ability to deliver on other priorities.
I've lost count of the number of "awesome new products" that companies I've worked for bought, and then had to backtrack on their aspirations once the limitations of the product became apparent. Some of them weren't even bought on the golf course - some went through some real evaluation first. The truth is though, you can't know what you need to know until you let your great unwashed masses at it - and once you mandate they must use it for all functions related to "X", they'll find all the flaws in your great decree in short order. If you're the Fearless Leader, you're best off encouraging it's use for X, whilst being very clear it was bought for Y. That way, if it sucks at "X" (and it probably does), then you don't look like such a dick. That's harder than it sounds when you've just spent an eye watering amount of the company's money on something though.
Yep, fsck 'em, I say. I've made a bit of money, and I'm 'pulling up the draw bridge' to make sure my neighbours, and definitely that grubby looking guy I see on the way to the shops don't get any of it. I mean, I know I'll never get any further up the ladder, because of the millionaires and billionaires all keeping all their money to themselves, but hey, at least that grubby guy down the street won't get any of mine.
"Punishing" the wealthy to give up a little more than they currently do doesn't really punish them. Most of the super-rich (people with multiple billions in personal wealth) wouldn't notice if you took a million dollars off them each year. It wouldn't affect their buying power, it wouldn't affect the output of their investments, and they won't materially suffer for it. In other words, what looks like a large amount of money here, makes almost no difference at all.
Shockingly, there are people who just happen to live somewhere very poor. They were born because their parents are so poor that if they don't have some kids to help out with the work around the house, they won't earn the few cents they need to buy a decent meal, or to fix the hole in the roof. They have to have quite a few kids because there's a good chance a couple of them will die during childhood due to disease and malnutrition, so it's not like they can just produce kids 'to order' either. Such people can't work themselves out of poverty in anything like a reasonable timeframe because they have near-zero income. That means they don't have any spare money to buy an extra bag of seeds to grow more crops, or to keep the goat alive for another year. If someone gives them an extra bag of seeds today, they go from a daily income of $1 to $1.01. That extra one cent can be used to increase their output next time around, and so on. In other words, a tiny amount of money here helps to dramatically accelerate the rate of 'wealth creation' in a vast number of people.
As for stuffing money in the mattress - that's effectively what the super-rich are doing. Their personal spending is massively outstripped by their income, and so more and more money is being removed from the economy and into their hands. They're not spending it all, and so the flows of money around the economy are reduced. Do too much of that, and you get a recession - which absolutely won't affect the super-rich as they move off-shore, making the problem even worse.
Pff! Just put a screen and joystick in the boot and put Steve in there. No need for all those expensive network connections!
I've got to agree - but if you want truly horrific design from a rich company, look no further than ebay.
I had some of this material somewhere... now where did I put it?
(thank you, I'm here all week)
...and sure-up all the creaky wooden posts and planks holding up the roofs. It'll stop them collapsing later and causing subsidence at the surface.
Of course, what we'll probably end up doing is building monuments and stuff out of the carbon-rocks and filling the mines with concrete so we've got more CO2 to suck up later.
Google's UK operations are pretty small potatoes, but here they can choose from a few electricity companies that only sell 'green' electricity. Ecotricity are the biggest such provider, although I've personally switched to Bulb as they're more or less the same, but cheaper. Ecotricity are both retail and wholesale, and their wholesale part only builds 'green' power stations, and are paid for by profits from the retail part. What they can't generate themselves, they buy from elsewhere, so long as it's 'green' (but clearly, they can generate it themselves for less than they can buy it, so they're motivated to keep building power stations).
These companies pick and choose how many KW/h they buy from which generators. Whilst some of the electrons in my house, or in Google's office may have originally come from a nuclear, coal or gas power station, the same number of electrons are going to some other premises that made no such attempt to buy 'green'. As such, the lazy drive I just did to the supermarket (which I could have walked to) was entirely performed by green electricity in my electric car. The electricity I just used 'displaced' the equivalent by non-green sources.
I agree though, it's a bit tenuous to say "we generated X amount of electricity in the desert, but only used Y, so we have Z spare, which we 'traded' for some coal-power in Elbona". Whilst technically true, it doesn't exactly make Google seem any greener to the smog-infused people of Elbonia.
Well, it solves the problem of how that one person got left at the end of the Swingers night though.
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century figured this one out. It makes you a bit camp, not at all muscly, but incredibly strong (even if you're "considered something of a weakling" on your home planet).