You don't need a particularly sophisticated phone to drop you right in it. Simple things like call history (regularly receive calls from lots of people known to be drug addicts? regularly make calls to one person who the police have had suspicions of being higher up the chain of command for some time?) can tell you a lot of interesting things.
Obviously they're not proof of anything but they help build up a case, which is what the police are meant to do.
You need to sit down and work out how much the lack of a testing framework is costing you right now. Which means you need to figure out a way to estimate how many bugs you're seeing (should be easy enough - you do at least have bug tracking?), how many are silly little bugs that keep on re-cropping-up and how many wouldn't exist (or would have been squashed once and for all a long time ago) with a proper test suite.
Then you work out how much they're costing. Every person costs money - in salary, benefits etc. So you work out how many man-hours are wasted re-fixing these bugs, encountering them in the first place when they shouldn't exist any more.
Another question that significantly impacts cost: how do your clients feel about it? Do your clients use the quality of it as a gauge to estimate what your other products are like? What sort of an advert is that for your company? Much of this you may have to fudge unless you have access to sales figures.
This lot gives you an idea of how much the product is costing you in terms of lost revenue that you could potentially get back.
Then you work out how many man-hours will be taken in developing a proper test suite. Will you want to buy a commercial product for some of this or will you roll your own? How much would the commercial product cost? Bear in mind that every hour spent on the suite is an hour not spent on something else, so if your company is running a reasonably tight ship (who isn't these days?), something will have to give.
Once you've got all those numbers added up, you have a good idea of how much it'll cost to get that revenue back. Bear in mind you won't get 100% of it back - you may never see more than a fraction back - so if the cost to fix is more than - or even in the same ballpark as the lost revenue - you'll be unlikely to get it back and so you can't make the business case. This is something you'll have to accept from the moment you start to do the arithmetic - it may never add up, and if it doesn't - you were mistaken. Put it behind you and worry about something else.
Indeed. You know what the easiest way to fuck with OS X is?
Treat it like Windows and install all the extras you'd want on Windows - even where equivalent functionality is already built in on OS X.
A couple of years ago I saw a MacBook Air that my US colleagues had purchased and done exactly that with. Even removing Adobe Reader sped it up no end.
I remember learning the correct date formulas in the first semester. What's so hard about them?
I think most of these bugs come about in the conversion between internal time storage (which is probably something simple like "seconds since the epoch") and the UI layer. Getting the number of days in the year is easy, but how do you then deal with things like timezones? What if the phone's moved timezone since the alarm was set? Then you have things like Daylight Saving (which varies according to where you are in the world - some countries don't observe it at all, others don't all observe it at the same dates).
Put it this way, if you wanted an example of something with real-life application that on the face of it looks simple but in reality is absolutely chock-full of corner cases for you to make mistakes in, you couldn't do much better than something date/time based.
Thing is, in order to get a sensible answer you either need fantastic Google-fu (I didn't even know there was a USB battery charging spec which went into that level of detail) or you need to post messages on/. suggesting that Terrible Things Might Happen in order to encourage people who know what they're talking about out of the woodwork.
Google don't provide the technical support, the handset vendors and operators do. And they're in an industry which typically doesn't provide much in the way of significant software updates once their product is released, preferring to dedicate developer time to working on the Next Big Thing.
OTOH, Google are quite used to being able to ship beta products and fix them with later updates.
Put it this way, I've got an Android handset. It's great as far as it goes, but I keep finding irritating bugs which simply shouldn't exist in anything that's production quality. Things like "Address book shows numbers if I scroll through entries and choose the relevant one, but not if I search".
I need to go back to my operator, but I'm fairly sure they'll reload it with the latest version of the firmware then wash their hands of the matter - if it turns out I've got it set up in such a fashion as to make the bugs come about, I have no doubt that'll be my problem. Bugger the exorbitant cost, my next phone will be an iPhone 4. I'm sure it'll have foibles of its own, but they're unlikely to be in the basic usage.
You are asking me to ascribe super-human self awareness skills to my surgeon. A man I may only have spoken with for a brief period prior to any procedure.
Sorry, no. Not gonna happen. Mistakes have been made and people have died precisely because of this strange idea that years training to be a medic somehow allows the surgeon, doctor or whatever to transcend normal human foibles and reach some semi-divine state. The whole point of putting procedures in place is to deal with easily recognisable, preventable causes of mistakes, which are inevitable borne of a recognition that nobody - no matter what their level of training - is that smart.
The best solution is for even dumb chargers to implement the power negotiation spec.
Would require significantly more logic on the PSU than any manufacturer would stomach. Furthermore, seeing as the maximum current draw for USB is 500mA, I wonder if the power negotiation spec even allows for negotiating more?
if phone from Vendor A draws 800mA and your PSU is rated at 500mA - well, if it's been designed without any sort of protectionand it is CE marked
Someone is gouing to have to spend some time in cell block number 9.
Well and good, but doesn't replace my charger. Assuming the charger that blows is the one that shipped with my phone (as opposed to a universal one), I'm pretty sure it'd take at the very least the threat of small claims court to get it replaced. Not the end of the world, but a PITA nevertheless.
Bet you anything you like the major handset vendors are still writing in their instruction manuals something along the lines of "Do not use other chargers to charge this device. Failure to follow this may damage your device, any such damage will not be repaired under warranty."
But, there have been cases where the suspected DUI requests for a proper blood test (to test the blood alcohol level), is denied, and attacks the functionality, operation, or calibration of the device. Can't remember which state it was, but one required the source code of the breathalyzer used to be examined by an expert and it was riddled with rounding errors and artificial boundaries and lots of cases got thrown out.
Heh. Can't see that approach getting terribly far in the UK - they really don't like people attacking equipment which has been approved (and therefore effectively declared accurate by fiat).
Having said that, if you get a blood test (likely in borderline cases), you can keep part of the sample to have analysed yourself. If you're way over the limit though, the breath machine at the police station is enough to convict you.
The whole point about establishing procedures like "At least 8 hours between shifts" is because nobody - not even a surgeon - is immune to making silly mistakes, particularly when tired.
Even with all the disclaimers in the world, deaths don't reflect well on hospitals.
You know how you can be feeling fine, running on adrenaline long after you should have got some sleep? Thinking "This is great, I'm the king of the world"? Then it suddenly hits you and you're ready to collapse.
Now, how do you feel about your surgeon hitting that wall when he's up to his elbows in your guts?
Does the spec detail exactly how a device wanting more than 100mA of power gets it when it's plugged into an adaptor rather than a computer? IIRC, the USB spec states that such requirements must be negotiated with the computer.
A little research suggests that this is simple - the PSU shorts the data lines, the phone recognises this and draws whatever current it needs. But AFAICT, if phone from Vendor A draws 800mA and your PSU is rated at 500mA - well, if it's been designed without any sort of protection (quite possible on a cheap & nasty adaptor) - that's the end of that.
Which, at its heart, is a fundamental violation of basic constitutional rights. The right of freedom of movement means nothing if it is restricted to only certain means of travel.
That's something we could debate for a very long time. When the constitution was written, it would have been damn hard work for a drunk driver (who would have been driving a horse & cart) to take out much more than himself and his passengers - and I daresay even that would have been rather harder than it is to crash a car. For one thing, a horse has a certain degree of intelligence not found in an internal combustion engine - I've never tried driving a horse & cart but I imagine if the horse felt that the load was unstable and likely to topple over at a particular speed or on a section of road, no amount of persuasion would get it to go faster.
Inevitably you wind up having to add "ifs" and "buts" to 200 year old legal documents. There wouldn't be much point in allowing prior legal decisions to carry any weight if you demand that every single one of those ifs and buts be formally enumerated as an amendment.
You're obviously against these DUI checks. Go ahead and make a coherent case for point of view.
You're asking the wrong question.
When a government wants more power, the correct response is never "Why not?". The correct question is "Why? What benefit does this offer society?". And possibly "Could a similar aim be achieved in a less invasive manner?".
I would argue that the benefit offered to society is fewer drink drivers on the road. But I'd also argue that alcoholics (like any sort of drug addict) can be sneaky and so rather than having checkpoints at a few known locations (and they will be known before long), it'd be more effective and less intrusive to set up the law such that erratic driving is sufficient probable cause for a breath test, failing the breath test is not enough to get you convicted but is enough to get you dragged back to the police station for a more accurate test. Oh yes, and punishments for drink driving actually mean something.
Of course, doing all this means putting forward legislation, debating it, watching it get watered down (which it always will), voting on it and then dealing with the inevitable legal challenges when you stop someone who has the resources to fight it legally every step of the way. This is a hell of a lot quicker.
(I should add IMV it makes more sense to do the legal thing I've already outlined - easier to defend any legal challenges, puts a formal framework in place so nobody can claim their rights have been infringed and gives the opportunity to tighten up the punishment so it actually sticks).
Non-amplified line out for docking purposes. FM radio aerial. Does the remote control need a full USB stack? My guess would be no, there's too many spectacularly cheap chinese knock-offs for that to be the case.
I suspect people refuse the breath test to buy time. It'll take a half hour to drag you to the police station, and maybe longer to get the blood test arranged, and by then your blood alcohol level might be lower?
Don't know how it works in the US, but in the UK they simply look at a chart of how quickly alcohol is typically broken down and work backwards from the blood test results, the time the blood was drawn and the time you were stopped.
Obviously if you happen to have some kind of medical condition which would mess with those numbers yet still leave you perfectly safe to drive, you've got a defence. 99% of people don't.
On the face of it this seems perfectly logical. Terrorists note that swarthy arabic types are getting more attention, terrorists start to recruit Swedish blondes with pneumatic breasts.
Surely in that case, then virtualbox is perfect? Operating systems in your operating systems (yo dawg).
I should have added "aren't shipped as something that works, instead requiring you to spend a lot of time messing around with and ultimately babysitting them. So much so that in any business smaller than "absolutely massive", it's really hard to find any real benefits for the amount of work involved. Yet if you were to go to the people developing the product, you'd think they had the software equivalent of the Second Coming of the Messiah."
Most virtualisation apps these days JFW. Which immediately disqualifies them from "enterprise" status. Xen (or maybe KVM) in any form other than one of the many pre-cooked "boot from this CD, hit install then point a web browser at the IP address you're given" versions, however, qualifies quite nicely.
Haven't had a need to, to be perfectly honest. Most of the hardware dumb-terminal solutions pretty much require you to run the manufacturer's image for any sort of support. They generally have at least one bit of sufficiently exotic hardware that you can't just throw a bog-standard Linux kernel and X at them.
I was aware of things like LTSP, but I always considered it fairly niche. Had no idea that someone had actually put together a rather more useful system.
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That's probably for the chip, before it's soldered onto a DIMM, before it's even left the factory.
You'd be amazed how much money needs to be spent to turn it into something you can actually plug into your PC.
You don't need a particularly sophisticated phone to drop you right in it. Simple things like call history (regularly receive calls from lots of people known to be drug addicts? regularly make calls to one person who the police have had suspicions of being higher up the chain of command for some time?) can tell you a lot of interesting things.
Obviously they're not proof of anything but they help build up a case, which is what the police are meant to do.
You need to sit down and work out how much the lack of a testing framework is costing you right now. Which means you need to figure out a way to estimate how many bugs you're seeing (should be easy enough - you do at least have bug tracking?), how many are silly little bugs that keep on re-cropping-up and how many wouldn't exist (or would have been squashed once and for all a long time ago) with a proper test suite.
Then you work out how much they're costing. Every person costs money - in salary, benefits etc. So you work out how many man-hours are wasted re-fixing these bugs, encountering them in the first place when they shouldn't exist any more.
Another question that significantly impacts cost: how do your clients feel about it? Do your clients use the quality of it as a gauge to estimate what your other products are like? What sort of an advert is that for your company? Much of this you may have to fudge unless you have access to sales figures.
This lot gives you an idea of how much the product is costing you in terms of lost revenue that you could potentially get back.
Then you work out how many man-hours will be taken in developing a proper test suite. Will you want to buy a commercial product for some of this or will you roll your own? How much would the commercial product cost? Bear in mind that every hour spent on the suite is an hour not spent on something else, so if your company is running a reasonably tight ship (who isn't these days?), something will have to give.
Once you've got all those numbers added up, you have a good idea of how much it'll cost to get that revenue back. Bear in mind you won't get 100% of it back - you may never see more than a fraction back - so if the cost to fix is more than - or even in the same ballpark as the lost revenue - you'll be unlikely to get it back and so you can't make the business case. This is something you'll have to accept from the moment you start to do the arithmetic - it may never add up, and if it doesn't - you were mistaken. Put it behind you and worry about something else.
Indeed. You know what the easiest way to fuck with OS X is?
Treat it like Windows and install all the extras you'd want on Windows - even where equivalent functionality is already built in on OS X.
A couple of years ago I saw a MacBook Air that my US colleagues had purchased and done exactly that with. Even removing Adobe Reader sped it up no end.
I remember learning the correct date formulas in the first semester. What's so hard about them?
I think most of these bugs come about in the conversion between internal time storage (which is probably something simple like "seconds since the epoch") and the UI layer. Getting the number of days in the year is easy, but how do you then deal with things like timezones? What if the phone's moved timezone since the alarm was set? Then you have things like Daylight Saving (which varies according to where you are in the world - some countries don't observe it at all, others don't all observe it at the same dates).
Put it this way, if you wanted an example of something with real-life application that on the face of it looks simple but in reality is absolutely chock-full of corner cases for you to make mistakes in, you couldn't do much better than something date/time based.
It is, isn't it? I'm given to understand the iPhone is just as bad, albeit in different (and usually more subtle) ways.
I've been wondering this for some time.
Thing is, in order to get a sensible answer you either need fantastic Google-fu (I didn't even know there was a USB battery charging spec which went into that level of detail) or you need to post messages on /. suggesting that Terrible Things Might Happen in order to encourage people who know what they're talking about out of the woodwork.
I chose the latter.
Google don't provide the technical support, the handset vendors and operators do. And they're in an industry which typically doesn't provide much in the way of significant software updates once their product is released, preferring to dedicate developer time to working on the Next Big Thing.
OTOH, Google are quite used to being able to ship beta products and fix them with later updates.
Put it this way, I've got an Android handset. It's great as far as it goes, but I keep finding irritating bugs which simply shouldn't exist in anything that's production quality. Things like "Address book shows numbers if I scroll through entries and choose the relevant one, but not if I search".
I need to go back to my operator, but I'm fairly sure they'll reload it with the latest version of the firmware then wash their hands of the matter - if it turns out I've got it set up in such a fashion as to make the bugs come about, I have no doubt that'll be my problem. Bugger the exorbitant cost, my next phone will be an iPhone 4. I'm sure it'll have foibles of its own, but they're unlikely to be in the basic usage.
You are asking me to ascribe super-human self awareness skills to my surgeon. A man I may only have spoken with for a brief period prior to any procedure.
Sorry, no. Not gonna happen. Mistakes have been made and people have died precisely because of this strange idea that years training to be a medic somehow allows the surgeon, doctor or whatever to transcend normal human foibles and reach some semi-divine state. The whole point of putting procedures in place is to deal with easily recognisable, preventable causes of mistakes, which are inevitable borne of a recognition that nobody - no matter what their level of training - is that smart.
The best solution is for even dumb chargers to implement the power negotiation spec.
Would require significantly more logic on the PSU than any manufacturer would stomach. Furthermore, seeing as the maximum current draw for USB is 500mA, I wonder if the power negotiation spec even allows for negotiating more?
oops, you're quite right.
My fault for trying to write cohesive english first thing in the morning on New Years' Day.
if phone from Vendor A draws 800mA and your PSU is rated at 500mA - well, if it's been designed without any sort of protection and it is CE marked
Someone is gouing to have to spend some time in cell block number 9.
Well and good, but doesn't replace my charger. Assuming the charger that blows is the one that shipped with my phone (as opposed to a universal one), I'm pretty sure it'd take at the very least the threat of small claims court to get it replaced. Not the end of the world, but a PITA nevertheless.
Bet you anything you like the major handset vendors are still writing in their instruction manuals something along the lines of "Do not use other chargers to charge this device. Failure to follow this may damage your device, any such damage will not be repaired under warranty."
But, there have been cases where the suspected DUI requests for a proper blood test (to test the blood alcohol level), is denied, and attacks the functionality, operation, or calibration of the device. Can't remember which state it was, but one required the source code of the breathalyzer used to be examined by an expert and it was riddled with rounding errors and artificial boundaries and lots of cases got thrown out.
Heh. Can't see that approach getting terribly far in the UK - they really don't like people attacking equipment which has been approved (and therefore effectively declared accurate by fiat).
Having said that, if you get a blood test (likely in borderline cases), you can keep part of the sample to have analysed yourself. If you're way over the limit though, the breath machine at the police station is enough to convict you.
The whole point about establishing procedures like "At least 8 hours between shifts" is because nobody - not even a surgeon - is immune to making silly mistakes, particularly when tired.
Even with all the disclaimers in the world, deaths don't reflect well on hospitals.
You know how you can be feeling fine, running on adrenaline long after you should have got some sleep? Thinking "This is great, I'm the king of the world"? Then it suddenly hits you and you're ready to collapse.
Now, how do you feel about your surgeon hitting that wall when he's up to his elbows in your guts?
Does the spec detail exactly how a device wanting more than 100mA of power gets it when it's plugged into an adaptor rather than a computer? IIRC, the USB spec states that such requirements must be negotiated with the computer.
A little research suggests that this is simple - the PSU shorts the data lines, the phone recognises this and draws whatever current it needs. But AFAICT, if phone from Vendor A draws 800mA and your PSU is rated at 500mA - well, if it's been designed without any sort of protection (quite possible on a cheap & nasty adaptor) - that's the end of that.
if x-raying some guy to check him for explosives guarantees me a safe flight, i say ZAP AWAY!
But it doesn't.
In fact, it probably does more harm than good because it fosters a false sense of security.
Which, at its heart, is a fundamental violation of basic constitutional rights. The right of freedom of movement means nothing if it is restricted to only certain means of travel.
That's something we could debate for a very long time. When the constitution was written, it would have been damn hard work for a drunk driver (who would have been driving a horse & cart) to take out much more than himself and his passengers - and I daresay even that would have been rather harder than it is to crash a car. For one thing, a horse has a certain degree of intelligence not found in an internal combustion engine - I've never tried driving a horse & cart but I imagine if the horse felt that the load was unstable and likely to topple over at a particular speed or on a section of road, no amount of persuasion would get it to go faster.
Inevitably you wind up having to add "ifs" and "buts" to 200 year old legal documents. There wouldn't be much point in allowing prior legal decisions to carry any weight if you demand that every single one of those ifs and buts be formally enumerated as an amendment.
You're obviously against these DUI checks. Go ahead and make a coherent case for point of view.
You're asking the wrong question.
When a government wants more power, the correct response is never "Why not?". The correct question is "Why? What benefit does this offer society?". And possibly "Could a similar aim be achieved in a less invasive manner?".
I would argue that the benefit offered to society is fewer drink drivers on the road. But I'd also argue that alcoholics (like any sort of drug addict) can be sneaky and so rather than having checkpoints at a few known locations (and they will be known before long), it'd be more effective and less intrusive to set up the law such that erratic driving is sufficient probable cause for a breath test, failing the breath test is not enough to get you convicted but is enough to get you dragged back to the police station for a more accurate test. Oh yes, and punishments for drink driving actually mean something.
Of course, doing all this means putting forward legislation, debating it, watching it get watered down (which it always will), voting on it and then dealing with the inevitable legal challenges when you stop someone who has the resources to fight it legally every step of the way. This is a hell of a lot quicker.
(I should add IMV it makes more sense to do the legal thing I've already outlined - easier to defend any legal challenges, puts a formal framework in place so nobody can claim their rights have been infringed and gives the opportunity to tighten up the punishment so it actually sticks).
Isn't erratic driving is sufficient "probable cause" for a roadside breath test?
Non-amplified line out for docking purposes. FM radio aerial. Does the remote control need a full USB stack? My guess would be no, there's too many spectacularly cheap chinese knock-offs for that to be the case.
I suspect people refuse the breath test to buy time. It'll take a half hour to drag you to the police station, and maybe longer to get the blood test arranged, and by then your blood alcohol level might be lower?
Don't know how it works in the US, but in the UK they simply look at a chart of how quickly alcohol is typically broken down and work backwards from the blood test results, the time the blood was drawn and the time you were stopped.
Obviously if you happen to have some kind of medical condition which would mess with those numbers yet still leave you perfectly safe to drive, you've got a defence. 99% of people don't.
On the face of it this seems perfectly logical. Terrorists note that swarthy arabic types are getting more attention, terrorists start to recruit Swedish blondes with pneumatic breasts.
So where are all the Swedish suicide blondes?
Surely in that case, then virtualbox is perfect? Operating systems in your operating systems (yo dawg).
I should have added "aren't shipped as something that works, instead requiring you to spend a lot of time messing around with and ultimately babysitting them. So much so that in any business smaller than "absolutely massive", it's really hard to find any real benefits for the amount of work involved. Yet if you were to go to the people developing the product, you'd think they had the software equivalent of the Second Coming of the Messiah."
Most virtualisation apps these days JFW. Which immediately disqualifies them from "enterprise" status. Xen (or maybe KVM) in any form other than one of the many pre-cooked "boot from this CD, hit install then point a web browser at the IP address you're given" versions, however, qualifies quite nicely.
Haven't had a need to, to be perfectly honest. Most of the hardware dumb-terminal solutions pretty much require you to run the manufacturer's image for any sort of support. They generally have at least one bit of sufficiently exotic hardware that you can't just throw a bog-standard Linux kernel and X at them.
I was aware of things like LTSP, but I always considered it fairly niche. Had no idea that someone had actually put together a rather more useful system.