It will be easy to keep good beta testers, they are the ones who survive because they are so good at dodging. The trick is recruiting new beta testers, and keeping them around long enough to become good beta testers.
As your code improves, it will increasingly weed out the beta testers who are not quite good enough. The really good beta testers will improve as your code improves, and will take your improvments as just the motivation they need to keep on improving.
Your product will be ready for release when you run out of beta testers.
I had a boss, who had six developers working for him, and three of us were working on the same project, a replacement for our existing system. Me, working in one office, another guy who worked from home, and another guy in a different office. None of us saw each other daily and it wasn't until a month or two later that we found he had all three of us working on different variations of the same project. I guess you could say he was paranoid and secretive.
What do you do if you're 3 miles from home and your car runs out of gas? What do you do if you're 3 miles from home and your bicycle gets a flat you can't fix? What do you do if you're 3 miles from home and your shoe falls apart?
And I have read of controversy even with what Marconi did, apparently he used someone else's wizardry and claimed it as his own. However, he did publicize it, or market as we say nowadays, which neither Tesla (you need to watch your spelling, you got it right once out of three tries) nor the other forgotten nobody did. Whether that actually spread its use much faster is another question too.
Anyone interested in this will also like The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage, Walker and Company NY, ISBN 0802713424. It's a slim volume about the wired telegraph, with fascinating parallels to the internet's early years. Here is the Books-A-Million link.
No one can say what the Vietnamese government would have been like if the French hadn't insisted on resuming colonial control in 1945, which was when the Vietnamese switched from fighting Japanese occupiers to fighting the French who had American assistance. The only assistance they could get was from the communists, so of course they took it, just as our own war against a colonial master was assisted by the French, who we were at war with just a few years later. To ignore all that is about as ridiculous as possible. A whole lot of the crap that has gone on in Vietnam is directly attributable to the natives trying to shake off colonial powers. We appointed ourselves their saviors, they did not ask for our help or want it. To claim that the South Vietnamese government was in any way better than the north is a sure sign of someone who knows nothing.
There was absolutely no rational reason for us to be there. The first torpedo boat attack on our destroyers was a direct result of our destroyers backing up a South Vietnamese attack on the north, and would not have occurred if we hadn't been attacking them to start with. The second attack, which triggered the congressional resolution which started the massive US involvement, was a complete fabrication and never happened.
And the US isn't controlling things in Iraq, wow that is news to just about everybody else in the world.
Why don't you check out what it means to be the controlling power in Iraq, to be the occupier? How you can claim we aren't the controlling power is beyond me.
Of course, I do not expect you to understand this.
Job creation is running at a tenth of what it needs to keep up with population growth. The unemployment rate is dropping because they don't count people who have fallen off the unemployment insurance dole; they "are no longer looking for work" because they have given up and taken crap jobs. Hardly counts as a true decrease in unemployment.
Also that year, Grace Hopper, an admiral in the U.S. Navy, recorded the first computer "bug" -- a moth stuck between the relays of a pre-digital computer.
The computer was digital, it just used relays instead of integrated circuits. It wasn't stuck between relays, it was stuck in a relay.
And while I'm at it, a nitpick. She wasn't an admiral until much later.
I was off by a factor of ten. The current estimates for Mars and the moon are somewhere near 1 trillion dollars. Your value of $400 million means the difference is 2500 times. We could send 2500 robots to the moon for the price of sending humans. Factor in that only 1/3 or so actually get there intact, and you still have 800 robot missions. Now that 1 trillion dollar figure was for 30 years worth of support, design, etc etc etc. Let's see, 30 years = 360 months. Gosh, we could send a robot every two weeks for the same amount as a few humans.
Those few humans won't have near the exploration capacity of a new rover every two weeks. There won't be any risk to life, no humans being stranded or losing suit pressure or having a rocket blow up or fail to ignite.
But humans have one advantage. Considering NASA's piss poor record of destroying working orbital observatories because they'd rather launch a new one than pay for the data collection of the working existing one, it's better to have a few humans sending back paltry amounts of data than so many rovers, you just know NASA would abandon each rover two weeks later when the next one landed rather than keep them all running and having to collect and store all that data.
Now let's conside the word "speculation" as you attempted to use it. Especially look at that wondrously speculative second paragraph of your own. No facts, no references, just pure b.s. speculation, far exceeding any of my own.
Two humans could have done everything the two current probes have done in the past two months in a few hours tops. -- Care to back that up?
they would produce tens of thousands of times the scientific data that machines would. -- Care to back that up?
Space tourism will need to follow government sponsored missions. -- You lost me there. Care to explain yourself?
This is a public works project that at this point can only be undertaken by a government entity. -- Is this shooting yourself in the foot? Public works project? Which, tourism or data collection? Is this some rationalization as to why either is necessary?
Once we get the proper hang of it, private industry will be able to take advantage. -- More govt knows best malarkey. Care to back it up?
Bang for the buck
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I want the most megabytes for my buck
Then you want the unmanned missions. Google around for it. You will be amazed at the huge disparity in costs, manned vs unmanned. Absolutely all science done on the space station or any manned platform could have been done by robots (other than science on humans in space). Every science claim that NASA has made by humans in space could have been done by robots or on the ground. Even their big perfect crystal claims have been shown to be overblown, they never made crystals in space that could not have been made on the ground or by machines in space.
As for cost, look at these rovers, what, $200M each or both? A manned mission would be a hundred times as expensive, and altho it might well return more data, it would not necessarily return a lot more useful data. A hundred signs of ancient water is not much more convincng than the few found by the rovers.
If you want bang for the buck, you want machines.
Now me, the only reason that I think proper for humans in space is adventure and tourism. All that guff about spreading to a different planet or star to have redundancy in case of a comet disaster wiping us out, well great, it ain't going to happen on the current crop of expensive launchers, it's going to happen because tourists flood the orbital hotels and cities and want to take trips to Mars, not because a few humans take a long expensive "science" trip.
I heard it, I heard it, I heard it on the X... ZZ Top
Used to listen to Wolfman Jack when I was a kid in Northern California, and only much later found out it was probably his extra powerful station just across the border in Mexico.
The flame was not a hydrogen flame. The airship settled to the ground from hydrogen escaping, not burning. No doubt some burned, but the damage was done by the skin burning, not the hydrogen.
You said "surreptitiously"... how do you know it hasn't been done? Maybe just one of the good guys floating around can't clean up PCs faster than the bad guys release new viruses.
This one is to be flown by a single pilot, so it has a jet engine to make it faster, but they still expect it to take 3 days. I don't know how much auto pilot they expect to use, but it won't be nearly as much an achievement if they use it at all. That would almost turn it into nothing but a drone.
40 million lines of code, like a space shuttle, there's a wonderful analogy. Glad you picked something as unreliable and misdesigned and overblown, pretty much sums it up.
From day one, M$ has been bragging the SQL Server would drive the big boys out of business. Every release was the killer release. Every release bragged how much better it was than the previous release.
Sort of like those two accident commissions. Each time, NASA was going to make the fixes necessary to make the shuttle worthwhile. Each fix made it so much better and safer than the previous.
Seems like the same old, same old. In both cases, the individual engineers would love to do a great job, but management is driven by PR rather than engineering.
I guess you made a better comparison than you realized.
It probably varies by state, but community property only applies to the increase in value. If the company is woth $100K when you marry, and $120K when you divorce, community property only splits the $20K increase.
My own divorce showed up this and one other oddity. She provided the down payment on the house, I provided the monthly payments, yet her down payment counted as a gift to community property because it was BEFORE the marriage, and would have counted as her own money if we had bought the house AFTER marriage. Two lawyers told me the same thing.
I believe there have been numerous cases where some lawyer tried to argue that bad work contracts were voluntary servitude and therefore legal, and they were thrown out on their ear. Voluntary != forever. You can't sign away your rights in any contract. Even lesser rights cannot be signed away in, for instance, rental agreements.
Osama on a mule and foot is still eluding the US, the Iraqi guerrelas are either on foot or on mule, they continue to pester the US, whereas the Iraqi army, with trucks and tanks and other machines, was pulverized quickly.
Furthermore, empires today are built on economics, not military. It's bogus to even think of conquering western Europe, Japan, many of the small Asian countries, the US, Russia... think of the Korean peninsula. If the north were to try to conquer the south, they would destroy its usefulness. Heh heh, if you want to think about something bizarre, think of the south surrendering as is to the north... they would assimilate the north so fast, Dear Leader's head would spin as fast as his father in his grave.
Military might is only useful against dirt poor countries, and even then only in a limited sense.
It's obvious that not just the draft, but even enlisting, is a form of slavery, and by all rights ought to be declared unconstitutional. No other job lets you sign a contract whereby you can't quit your job for four years. It's one thing to say you can't walk away in the middle of a firefight, but when you can't even walk away in peacetime, it's just slavery by a different name.
Yet courts have consistently ruled that military necessity trumps the constitution. I figure sooner or later that will change, and I for one will be glad for it, but it won't happen any time soon.
Furthermore, why does everyone think the draft was ok, even necessary, during WW II? Seems to me, if a war is popular, you don't need the draft. It's only unpopular wars that you have to force people to join the army by threat of going to prison. I'd much rather have the threat of soldiers quitting be the main protection against unpopular wars. Get rid of that 4 year slavery signup, get rid of the draft.
(I volunteered for 4 years in the navy, many years ago, had a great time floating around the Pacific, just in case anyone thinks it pertinent.)
The more he slides under Microsoft's spell, the more I distrust his pronouncements. It's as if he thinks he alone has discovered the magic potion that will allow him to befriend Microsoft with groveling and flattery such that they will actually respect him and not pull the rug out from under him. Why he should be the one exception in all their history is beyond me.
I have pretty much come to the conclusion that if Miguel says it is so, it ain't.
Slashdot Mirror
It will be easy to keep good beta testers, they are the ones who survive because they are so good at dodging. The trick is recruiting new beta testers, and keeping them around long enough to become good beta testers.
As your code improves, it will increasingly weed out the beta testers who are not quite good enough. The really good beta testers will improve as your code improves, and will take your improvments as just the motivation they need to keep on improving.
Your product will be ready for release when you run out of beta testers.
I had a boss, who had six developers working for him, and three of us were working on the same project, a replacement for our existing system. Me, working in one office, another guy who worked from home, and another guy in a different office. None of us saw each other daily and it wasn't until a month or two later that we found he had all three of us working on different variations of the same project. I guess you could say he was paranoid and secretive.
What do you do if you're 3 miles from home and your car runs out of gas? What do you do if you're 3 miles from home and your bicycle gets a flat you can't fix? What do you do if you're 3 miles from home and your shoe falls apart?
And I have read of controversy even with what Marconi did, apparently he used someone else's wizardry and claimed it as his own. However, he did publicize it, or market as we say nowadays, which neither Tesla (you need to watch your spelling, you got it right once out of three tries) nor the other forgotten nobody did. Whether that actually spread its use much faster is another question too.
Anyone interested in this will also like The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage, Walker and Company NY, ISBN 0802713424. It's a slim volume about the wired telegraph, with fascinating parallels to the internet's early years. Here is the Books-A-Million link.
No one can say what the Vietnamese government would have been like if the French hadn't insisted on resuming colonial control in 1945, which was when the Vietnamese switched from fighting Japanese occupiers to fighting the French who had American assistance. The only assistance they could get was from the communists, so of course they took it, just as our own war against a colonial master was assisted by the French, who we were at war with just a few years later. To ignore all that is about as ridiculous as possible. A whole lot of the crap that has gone on in Vietnam is directly attributable to the natives trying to shake off colonial powers. We appointed ourselves their saviors, they did not ask for our help or want it. To claim that the South Vietnamese government was in any way better than the north is a sure sign of someone who knows nothing.
There was absolutely no rational reason for us to be there. The first torpedo boat attack on our destroyers was a direct result of our destroyers backing up a South Vietnamese attack on the north, and would not have occurred if we hadn't been attacking them to start with. The second attack, which triggered the congressional resolution which started the massive US involvement, was a complete fabrication and never happened.
And the US isn't controlling things in Iraq, wow that is news to just about everybody else in the world.
Why don't you check out what it means to be the controlling power in Iraq, to be the occupier? How you can claim we aren't the controlling power is beyond me.
Of course, I do not expect you to understand this.
Job creation is running at a tenth of what it needs to keep up with population growth. The unemployment rate is dropping because they don't count people who have fallen off the unemployment insurance dole; they "are no longer looking for work" because they have given up and taken crap jobs. Hardly counts as a true decrease in unemployment.
You've been watching reruns again, haven't you?
Could you supply some parentheses please?
Also that year, Grace Hopper, an admiral in the U.S. Navy, recorded the first computer "bug" -- a moth stuck between the relays of a pre-digital computer.
The computer was digital, it just used relays instead of integrated circuits. It wasn't stuck between relays, it was stuck in a relay.
And while I'm at it, a nitpick. She wasn't an admiral until much later.
I was off by a factor of ten. The current estimates for Mars and the moon are somewhere near 1 trillion dollars. Your value of $400 million means the difference is 2500 times. We could send 2500 robots to the moon for the price of sending humans. Factor in that only 1/3 or so actually get there intact, and you still have 800 robot missions. Now that 1 trillion dollar figure was for 30 years worth of support, design, etc etc etc. Let's see, 30 years = 360 months. Gosh, we could send a robot every two weeks for the same amount as a few humans.
Those few humans won't have near the exploration capacity of a new rover every two weeks. There won't be any risk to life, no humans being stranded or losing suit pressure or having a rocket blow up or fail to ignite.
But humans have one advantage. Considering NASA's piss poor record of destroying working orbital observatories because they'd rather launch a new one than pay for the data collection of the working existing one, it's better to have a few humans sending back paltry amounts of data than so many rovers, you just know NASA would abandon each rover two weeks later when the next one landed rather than keep them all running and having to collect and store all that data.
Now let's conside the word "speculation" as you attempted to use it. Especially look at that wondrously speculative second paragraph of your own. No facts, no references, just pure b.s. speculation, far exceeding any of my own.
Two humans could have done everything the two current probes have done in the past two months in a few hours tops. -- Care to back that up?
they would produce tens of thousands of times the scientific data that machines would. -- Care to back that up?
Space tourism will need to follow government sponsored missions. -- You lost me there. Care to explain yourself?
This is a public works project that at this point can only be undertaken by a government entity. -- Is this shooting yourself in the foot? Public works project? Which, tourism or data collection? Is this some rationalization as to why either is necessary?
Once we get the proper hang of it, private industry will be able to take advantage. -- More govt knows best malarkey. Care to back it up?
I want the most megabytes for my buck
Then you want the unmanned missions. Google around for it. You will be amazed at the huge disparity in costs, manned vs unmanned. Absolutely all science done on the space station or any manned platform could have been done by robots (other than science on humans in space). Every science claim that NASA has made by humans in space could have been done by robots or on the ground. Even their big perfect crystal claims have been shown to be overblown, they never made crystals in space that could not have been made on the ground or by machines in space.
As for cost, look at these rovers, what, $200M each or both? A manned mission would be a hundred times as expensive, and altho it might well return more data, it would not necessarily return a lot more useful data. A hundred signs of ancient water is not much more convincng than the few found by the rovers.
If you want bang for the buck, you want machines.
Now me, the only reason that I think proper for humans in space is adventure and tourism. All that guff about spreading to a different planet or star to have redundancy in case of a comet disaster wiping us out, well great, it ain't going to happen on the current crop of expensive launchers, it's going to happen because tourists flood the orbital hotels and cities and want to take trips to Mars, not because a few humans take a long expensive "science" trip.
I heard it, I heard it, I heard it on the X ... ZZ Top
Used to listen to Wolfman Jack when I was a kid in Northern California, and only much later found out it was probably his extra powerful station just across the border in Mexico.
1. $
2. $
3. ???
4. $$$$$
The flame was not a hydrogen flame. The airship settled to the ground from hydrogen escaping, not burning. No doubt some burned, but the damage was done by the skin burning, not the hydrogen.
You said "surreptitiously" ... how do you know it hasn't been done? Maybe just one of the good guys floating around can't clean up PCs faster than the bad guys release new viruses.
This one is to be flown by a single pilot, so it has a jet engine to make it faster, but they still expect it to take 3 days. I don't know how much auto pilot they expect to use, but it won't be nearly as much an achievement if they use it at all. That would almost turn it into nothing but a drone.
40 million lines of code, like a space shuttle, there's a wonderful analogy. Glad you picked something as unreliable and misdesigned and overblown, pretty much sums it up.
From day one, M$ has been bragging the SQL Server would drive the big boys out of business. Every release was the killer release. Every release bragged how much better it was than the previous release.
Sort of like those two accident commissions. Each time, NASA was going to make the fixes necessary to make the shuttle worthwhile. Each fix made it so much better and safer than the previous.
Seems like the same old, same old. In both cases, the individual engineers would love to do a great job, but management is driven by PR rather than engineering.
I guess you made a better comparison than you realized.
It probably varies by state, but community property only applies to the increase in value. If the company is woth $100K when you marry, and $120K when you divorce, community property only splits the $20K increase.
My own divorce showed up this and one other oddity. She provided the down payment on the house, I provided the monthly payments, yet her down payment counted as a gift to community property because it was BEFORE the marriage, and would have counted as her own money if we had bought the house AFTER marriage. Two lawyers told me the same thing.
Community property is not at all intuitive.
Thank you for stating the case so much better than I :-)
I believe there have been numerous cases where some lawyer tried to argue that bad work contracts were voluntary servitude and therefore legal, and they were thrown out on their ear. Voluntary != forever. You can't sign away your rights in any contract. Even lesser rights cannot be signed away in, for instance, rental agreements.
Osama on a mule and foot is still eluding the US, the Iraqi guerrelas are either on foot or on mule, they continue to pester the US, whereas the Iraqi army, with trucks and tanks and other machines, was pulverized quickly.
... think of the Korean peninsula. If the north were to try to conquer the south, they would destroy its usefulness. Heh heh, if you want to think about something bizarre, think of the south surrendering as is to the north ... they would assimilate the north so fast, Dear Leader's head would spin as fast as his father in his grave.
Furthermore, empires today are built on economics, not military. It's bogus to even think of conquering western Europe, Japan, many of the small Asian countries, the US, Russia
Military might is only useful against dirt poor countries, and even then only in a limited sense.
It's obvious that not just the draft, but even enlisting, is a form of slavery, and by all rights ought to be declared unconstitutional. No other job lets you sign a contract whereby you can't quit your job for four years. It's one thing to say you can't walk away in the middle of a firefight, but when you can't even walk away in peacetime, it's just slavery by a different name.
Yet courts have consistently ruled that military necessity trumps the constitution. I figure sooner or later that will change, and I for one will be glad for it, but it won't happen any time soon.
Furthermore, why does everyone think the draft was ok, even necessary, during WW II? Seems to me, if a war is popular, you don't need the draft. It's only unpopular wars that you have to force people to join the army by threat of going to prison. I'd much rather have the threat of soldiers quitting be the main protection against unpopular wars. Get rid of that 4 year slavery signup, get rid of the draft.
(I volunteered for 4 years in the navy, many years ago, had a great time floating around the Pacific, just in case anyone thinks it pertinent.)
Look at the little air filters on them.
Look at the operating specs, where they are only certified up to a certain altitude.
Hard drives ARE NOT SEALED.
The more he slides under Microsoft's spell, the more I distrust his pronouncements. It's as if he thinks he alone has discovered the magic potion that will allow him to befriend Microsoft with groveling and flattery such that they will actually respect him and not pull the rug out from under him. Why he should be the one exception in all their history is beyond me.
I have pretty much come to the conclusion that if Miguel says it is so, it ain't.