Yep, this is the classic Cold War battle of affordability.
Sure the Russians *could* develop weapons which would destroy the US but it bankrupts the country--destroying the Soviet Union.
North Korea can't sustainably develop Nuclear Weapons let alone hypersonic delivery methods. If they did have to spend the money on hypersonic warheads... we would win by default since they would starve to death.
Sure China/Russia could replace their obsolete ICBMs with hypersonic missiles in the not too distant future but that means they would have to spend hundreds of billions on R&D and manufacturing. They can't afford it. Or if they do decide they can afford it... we win by forcing them to spend the money.
Not to mention by the time we have hypersonic missiles we'll have megawatt class lasers field ready.
This is just so that they can ensure you are doing what your post says you're doing. This is so that if they audit you they can actually verify your balances and ensure you aren't just hiding money from the IRS. Bank accounts are subpoena'ble records, they aren't private. But subpoenaing international records is tricky--hence treaties.
Whoa, there's reason to give the Healthcare.gov developers a hard time. But Accenture to be fair has been on the job what... 2 weeks? You can't turn around a 3 year project in 2 weeks.
Presumably only one person wins. If it's a task that the average security researcher could accomplish ($150k is not a very high wage). Then you have to estimate how many *other* people will enter. You also have to estimate that all 'average' security researchers will be equally successful.
That means you spend $150k and you are 1 of let's say 1,000 entrants and your average payout is $150 for a year's work. About 2 hours of your hourly rate. Even if you were only one of 100 contestants then your payout is $1,500 which means unless you finish it in about a day's work it's not worth your time to win.
This is why I never enter contests. Even if I'm amazingly qualified there are undoubtedly at least 10 other amazingly qualified entrants. That means I have to compete in 10 contests in which I'm amazingly qualified to statistically get paid. Even blockbuster winnings like $200,000 suddenly look iffy when the value proposition is for say 3 months of work for $20k. Now you might say "Wow $80k a year sounds like a nice project living to me!"
But in most industries if $80k is appealing per year, you aren't going to be competitive so you'll be winning $0 in prizes. Generally the only way you'll "win" from a financial standpoint is if the price is very large, it's awarded to all winners (see bounties), you're damn near certain you'll win or you live in a developing country with a very low cost of living and can't freelance with a company that pays you better.
I've been on both sides of this as well before. I can't recommend just talking to the previous developer enough.
I once had a project where I thought I had simply mocked up the basic functionality well enough to hand off to a contractor in order for them to see a working prototype and develop a new solution. Unfortunately instead of looking at the code and just saying "hey, we thought we could use more of your prototype and we need to revise our estimate" they took 6 months and tens of thousands of dollars before essentially saying that they were only half done. Needless to say we haven't worked with them before.
I've also done this from the other end where I've picked up work, immediately realized that it was less fleshed out than I had anticipated, gone back to the company and said "I thought I could do this in _____X Time but now I see that some of my assumptions were wrong. I can still do this but it'll take double the time I estimated. Do you want me to proceed or re-evaluate the scope and/or contract." I ended up getting the job with a modified scope of work (shrunk) and an increased time frame and everybody was happy.
If you muck along in this job and aren't honest with your boss you're going to get your ass handed to you and for good reason. If you communicate to them up front what is going on then they can make high-level decisions on what's important, whether they want to proceed at all for the new budget or if they'll just dismiss your concerns (at which point you quit and/or are let go for not living up to your original estimates).
I've also been the developer who created something, got it working knowing full well it would have to be completely re-written from the ground up. That's not an indictment of me as a developer, sometimes you just have to write shitty programs to rapidly work out how it *should* work. It's very likely someone wrote an app very quickly--it met the client demands but was purpose built for one solution. Talking to the developer will let you know if that's the case at which point they probably have some great insights on how "they wish they had developed it". Imagine if someone came up to you and said "hypothetically if you were to start from scratch how would you have architected this feature differently?" Only a complete blow hard wouldn't have pages and pages of 20/20 hindsights.
On the other hand I've also created things and handed them off only to have some freelancer completely bork the job. They complained that it wasn't a routine task like I had indicated--which when I looked at their solution was true. The way they were trying to solve it was extremely a-typical and back-asswards. I ended up doing it myself and we didn't use that freelancer again. The lesson in that instance was if you think it's convoluted then maybe they see an obvious solution but you don't. Don't just turn in a half-assed solution later, admit you don't see a clear path to success and maybe they have some special knowledge (or just general competence) that can ensure you succeed.
Ultimately I almost never see people deliberately setting out to screw a project. They want to succeed far more than you want it to succeed. After all it's their money.
I don't really care if it's backed by a material value myself. After all Gold is also only worth what you value it at as well. I trust the value of the USD for instance more than the value of Diamonds.
What's great about the US is that we welcome people from all countries and backgrounds. We should be proud of our multi-culturalism unlike the exclusionary Chinese pride that everything can be done by the Chinese.
We're proud of our pragmatism and pointing out the failures of blind nationalism trumping all else. The Mars Rover was first and foremost a nationalist chest bumping to prop up a political regime--and a scientific mission second. That's not unlike the cold war but at least in the cold war we weren't at all ashamed of bringing in the best (from Russia) to work with us and design our program.
This was my thought exactly. Even if you went with Linux... it's not like Linux kernels are necessarily supported indefinitely for free either. In fact, how long a Linux release is supported can't even be codified without going to a third party. If you go to Microsoft and say "we need support for 20 years" you can count on receiving that support that you've signed into a contract. If you get Open Source software the way that many posters here seem to be alluding to, aka, free. Then you have no idea how long exactly maintenance will last and how long people will continue to back-port patches or answer your forum questions.
If you go with Microsoft you'll pay Microsoft. If you go with Red Hat you'll pay Red Hat probably about the same. Either way you need someone willing to assure you that they'll have a team of knowledgeable engineers maintaining and supporting your project for a specific contract duration. Even if you had access to the code you would be wasting your time changing it instead of hopefully an expert in that specific sub-system able to do it in 1/4 the time.
Snorkel would be too long to breath through. You would need a compressor. I would be worried though about Chlorine gas being extracted by these gills (assuming they were even physically possible to work).
Well it's all around a strange comparison because Microsoft also makes Phones, it used to make MP3 players, it also makes the Xbox which runs on windows and there are tons of embedded windows devices that aren't "PCs". So if we're comparing Microsoft to Apple then Windows phone should be included as should Xbox etc.
Generally developers focus on only a handful (or one) platform depending on the difficulty of development. The OS is less important than the software for most things. If my OS and no programs to run it would be a lonely world. If I had an OS and every program available it would be superior to a far superior operating system. At work we have an application critical to our operation that is windows only. Therefore Windows is the best OS. We would prefer OSX to die so that a couple applications we would *like* to have would be developed for Windows instead of OSX.
The reason windows sales figures are falling is because of the ipad. I know lots of 'norms' who are buying ipads. I don't know of anyone who hasn't bought a PC because of Windows 8.
As to why I like metro? Because I can finally out of the box split of the desktop and have full screen maximized windows, and other apps. It's like Windows 7's SNAP but actually tiled windowing so that I can keep my email and chat clients open all day on one monitor while working on the rest of the desktop without having to constantly resize windows to keep from overlapping.
I also like the start menu because instead of a 1D list you can have a 2D grid. 2D grid has 4x the amount of real-estate. It's substantially better in my opinion. I also have a touch screen laptop at home now and just touching the screen is way easier than using a touchpad to move a cursor. I see a link, I touch it. Done. SOOOO much better. And even on the "desktop" side of things laptops were already outselling traditional desktops years ago. So on tablets, laptops and desktops Windows 8 is better. Different, yes, but better.
I also like being able to just go up to the hot corner, and hit share -> Facebook to share a website I'm reading. Or to be able to multi-task on a tablet unlike iOS. Or to be able to format a desktop, install windows and have my metro apps automatically re-install--restoring my system back to nearly the last computer's state. I also like how the Windows Store auto-updates applications without 100 different updating apps running in my task bar. The list goes on. Windows 8 is a vast improvement on 7.
Bad people do bad things with inanimate objects. Talk about the REAL problem, (idiots) not the object.
Except that more than twice every day a car grants me a huge benefit, greatly improving my quality of life. If cars served no purpose except for drunk idiots to run people over I would happily advance a ban on their sale. Bad people do bad things, but bad people do far worse things when they are heavily armed. This wouldn't have made the news if some dumb ass ex-cop punched a guy in the movie theater for texting. In fact he would probably get many congratulations. The availability and glorification though of said inanimate object escalated this situation from a bad person doing a bad thing, to loss of human life.
You're substantially more likely to die if you carry a firearm than those who don't carry, so don't give me that bullshit of self defense either. The outcome of widely available firearms is more innocent people dying.
If you put a high powered microphone to a safe, pick the lock and then rifle through the contents to see if they're valuable... it's not your fault it was possible for you to break in.
I can think of some situations where you don't even have to use facial recognition per say. If you're in a vehicle and the system detects an RPG fired at you. It's pretty easy to distinguish "RPG" from background noise. It should also be relatively easy to detect the 'source' and immediately return fire.
If firing an RPG is a guaranteed way to get hit with several belts of radar/IR guided 50 caliber machine gun fire--you might have a really hard time finding people willing to pull the trigger. Similarly a return-fire system could probably identify and instantly return precise fire at a sniper faster than they could take cover or even theoretically before the first bullet hit its target.
Incompetent management, grandstanding, petty interdepartmental feuds, smothering regulations and endless meetings. If I could sum up the entire experience in a single word it would be this: frustration.
Yeah but what about your time in Government? That sounds like almost every organization I've ever worked with except for my current one. Sure they call it "policy" instead of regulation" but otherwise I think pretty much all large organizations operate on the same playbook of dysfunction.
Groupon is mostly replacing direct-marketing cold callers. Groupon's employees aren't knowledge workers, they're people calling up local businesses to convince them to offer a Groupon.
When I was driving around an '86 golf I was considering upgrading the engine since the old VWs made that a trivial affair. I'm sorry to report that you can buy a brand new engine for a few thousand dollars. It's rarely "the engine" which gives out in a car. It starts with the door handles breaking off, the dash getting smashed, the bumper starting to rust and then you get into the really expensive stuff like transmission and random engine bits.
If you just want to drive the same car with a well running engine block you could reach your half million miles for about an extra $3k today.
Slashdot Mirror
They might themselves be blind, but the stealth UAV or satellite overhead could be providing real-time telemetry.
Yep, this is the classic Cold War battle of affordability.
Sure the Russians *could* develop weapons which would destroy the US but it bankrupts the country--destroying the Soviet Union.
North Korea can't sustainably develop Nuclear Weapons let alone hypersonic delivery methods. If they did have to spend the money on hypersonic warheads... we would win by default since they would starve to death.
Sure China/Russia could replace their obsolete ICBMs with hypersonic missiles in the not too distant future but that means they would have to spend hundreds of billions on R&D and manufacturing. They can't afford it. Or if they do decide they can afford it... we win by forcing them to spend the money.
Not to mention by the time we have hypersonic missiles we'll have megawatt class lasers field ready.
This is just so that they can ensure you are doing what your post says you're doing. This is so that if they audit you they can actually verify your balances and ensure you aren't just hiding money from the IRS. Bank accounts are subpoena'ble records, they aren't private. But subpoenaing international records is tricky--hence treaties.
Whoa, there's reason to give the Healthcare.gov developers a hard time. But Accenture to be fair has been on the job what... 2 weeks? You can't turn around a 3 year project in 2 weeks.
Presumably only one person wins. If it's a task that the average security researcher could accomplish ($150k is not a very high wage). Then you have to estimate how many *other* people will enter. You also have to estimate that all 'average' security researchers will be equally successful.
That means you spend $150k and you are 1 of let's say 1,000 entrants and your average payout is $150 for a year's work. About 2 hours of your hourly rate. Even if you were only one of 100 contestants then your payout is $1,500 which means unless you finish it in about a day's work it's not worth your time to win.
This is why I never enter contests. Even if I'm amazingly qualified there are undoubtedly at least 10 other amazingly qualified entrants. That means I have to compete in 10 contests in which I'm amazingly qualified to statistically get paid. Even blockbuster winnings like $200,000 suddenly look iffy when the value proposition is for say 3 months of work for $20k. Now you might say "Wow $80k a year sounds like a nice project living to me!"
But in most industries if $80k is appealing per year, you aren't going to be competitive so you'll be winning $0 in prizes. Generally the only way you'll "win" from a financial standpoint is if the price is very large, it's awarded to all winners (see bounties), you're damn near certain you'll win or you live in a developing country with a very low cost of living and can't freelance with a company that pays you better.
I've been on both sides of this as well before. I can't recommend just talking to the previous developer enough.
I once had a project where I thought I had simply mocked up the basic functionality well enough to hand off to a contractor in order for them to see a working prototype and develop a new solution. Unfortunately instead of looking at the code and just saying "hey, we thought we could use more of your prototype and we need to revise our estimate" they took 6 months and tens of thousands of dollars before essentially saying that they were only half done. Needless to say we haven't worked with them before.
I've also done this from the other end where I've picked up work, immediately realized that it was less fleshed out than I had anticipated, gone back to the company and said "I thought I could do this in _____X Time but now I see that some of my assumptions were wrong. I can still do this but it'll take double the time I estimated. Do you want me to proceed or re-evaluate the scope and/or contract." I ended up getting the job with a modified scope of work (shrunk) and an increased time frame and everybody was happy.
If you muck along in this job and aren't honest with your boss you're going to get your ass handed to you and for good reason. If you communicate to them up front what is going on then they can make high-level decisions on what's important, whether they want to proceed at all for the new budget or if they'll just dismiss your concerns (at which point you quit and/or are let go for not living up to your original estimates).
I've also been the developer who created something, got it working knowing full well it would have to be completely re-written from the ground up. That's not an indictment of me as a developer, sometimes you just have to write shitty programs to rapidly work out how it *should* work. It's very likely someone wrote an app very quickly--it met the client demands but was purpose built for one solution. Talking to the developer will let you know if that's the case at which point they probably have some great insights on how "they wish they had developed it". Imagine if someone came up to you and said "hypothetically if you were to start from scratch how would you have architected this feature differently?" Only a complete blow hard wouldn't have pages and pages of 20/20 hindsights.
On the other hand I've also created things and handed them off only to have some freelancer completely bork the job. They complained that it wasn't a routine task like I had indicated--which when I looked at their solution was true. The way they were trying to solve it was extremely a-typical and back-asswards. I ended up doing it myself and we didn't use that freelancer again. The lesson in that instance was if you think it's convoluted then maybe they see an obvious solution but you don't. Don't just turn in a half-assed solution later, admit you don't see a clear path to success and maybe they have some special knowledge (or just general competence) that can ensure you succeed.
Ultimately I almost never see people deliberately setting out to screw a project. They want to succeed far more than you want it to succeed. After all it's their money.
I don't really care if it's backed by a material value myself. After all Gold is also only worth what you value it at as well. I trust the value of the USD for instance more than the value of Diamonds.
One thing I've always wondered is whether or not you could just carry on an internal dialog to defeat them.
Q: "Is your name John Smith?"
Internal Q: "Are you a murderer?"
Answer: "Yes."
"Were you at the scene of the crime?"
"Is your name John Smith?"
"No."
Q: "Are you 20 years old?"
QI:"Is the sky green?"
A: Yes.
You would be lying no matter what. You're just lying to every internal questions.
If you have a masters I say yes. Otherwise, only if you can convince someone in Alabama to leave. :D
What's great about the US is that we welcome people from all countries and backgrounds. We should be proud of our multi-culturalism unlike the exclusionary Chinese pride that everything can be done by the Chinese.
We're proud of our pragmatism and pointing out the failures of blind nationalism trumping all else. The Mars Rover was first and foremost a nationalist chest bumping to prop up a political regime--and a scientific mission second. That's not unlike the cold war but at least in the cold war we weren't at all ashamed of bringing in the best (from Russia) to work with us and design our program.
"Can you instruct someone how to make an origami 'cootie catcher' with just words?" -- LivingSocial, Consumer Advocate interview.
I could honestly give a snarky answer to this. I had to do this 2 months ago at work for a project. My approach was:
To the office: "Does anyone here know how to make an Origami Fortune Teller?"
Intern: "I do."
Me: "Great. Please make me one approximately 10" wide."
It was closer to 8" but I fell like my instructions were pretty well followed.
I was thinking:
"To stab anyone who plays rock."
This was my thought exactly. Even if you went with Linux... it's not like Linux kernels are necessarily supported indefinitely for free either. In fact, how long a Linux release is supported can't even be codified without going to a third party. If you go to Microsoft and say "we need support for 20 years" you can count on receiving that support that you've signed into a contract. If you get Open Source software the way that many posters here seem to be alluding to, aka, free. Then you have no idea how long exactly maintenance will last and how long people will continue to back-port patches or answer your forum questions.
If you go with Microsoft you'll pay Microsoft. If you go with Red Hat you'll pay Red Hat probably about the same. Either way you need someone willing to assure you that they'll have a team of knowledgeable engineers maintaining and supporting your project for a specific contract duration. Even if you had access to the code you would be wasting your time changing it instead of hopefully an expert in that specific sub-system able to do it in 1/4 the time.
Snorkel would be too long to breath through. You would need a compressor. I would be worried though about Chlorine gas being extracted by these gills (assuming they were even physically possible to work).
Well it's all around a strange comparison because Microsoft also makes Phones, it used to make MP3 players, it also makes the Xbox which runs on windows and there are tons of embedded windows devices that aren't "PCs". So if we're comparing Microsoft to Apple then Windows phone should be included as should Xbox etc.
Generally developers focus on only a handful (or one) platform depending on the difficulty of development. The OS is less important than the software for most things. If my OS and no programs to run it would be a lonely world. If I had an OS and every program available it would be superior to a far superior operating system. At work we have an application critical to our operation that is windows only. Therefore Windows is the best OS. We would prefer OSX to die so that a couple applications we would *like* to have would be developed for Windows instead of OSX.
The reason windows sales figures are falling is because of the ipad. I know lots of 'norms' who are buying ipads. I don't know of anyone who hasn't bought a PC because of Windows 8.
As to why I like metro? Because I can finally out of the box split of the desktop and have full screen maximized windows, and other apps. It's like Windows 7's SNAP but actually tiled windowing so that I can keep my email and chat clients open all day on one monitor while working on the rest of the desktop without having to constantly resize windows to keep from overlapping.
I also like the start menu because instead of a 1D list you can have a 2D grid. 2D grid has 4x the amount of real-estate. It's substantially better in my opinion. I also have a touch screen laptop at home now and just touching the screen is way easier than using a touchpad to move a cursor. I see a link, I touch it. Done. SOOOO much better. And even on the "desktop" side of things laptops were already outselling traditional desktops years ago. So on tablets, laptops and desktops Windows 8 is better. Different, yes, but better.
I also like being able to just go up to the hot corner, and hit share -> Facebook to share a website I'm reading. Or to be able to multi-task on a tablet unlike iOS. Or to be able to format a desktop, install windows and have my metro apps automatically re-install--restoring my system back to nearly the last computer's state. I also like how the Windows Store auto-updates applications without 100 different updating apps running in my task bar. The list goes on. Windows 8 is a vast improvement on 7.
Yeah, I don't think the editors know what Rotoscoping is. :P
Maybe "Rotomation" which is a process for matching 3D geometry to footage but that's not usually (if at all) used for rotoscoping.
Bad people do bad things with inanimate objects. Talk about the REAL problem, (idiots) not the object.
Except that more than twice every day a car grants me a huge benefit, greatly improving my quality of life. If cars served no purpose except for drunk idiots to run people over I would happily advance a ban on their sale. Bad people do bad things, but bad people do far worse things when they are heavily armed. This wouldn't have made the news if some dumb ass ex-cop punched a guy in the movie theater for texting. In fact he would probably get many congratulations. The availability and glorification though of said inanimate object escalated this situation from a bad person doing a bad thing, to loss of human life.
You're substantially more likely to die if you carry a firearm than those who don't carry, so don't give me that bullshit of self defense either. The outcome of widely available firearms is more innocent people dying.
If you put a high powered microphone to a safe, pick the lock and then rifle through the contents to see if they're valuable... it's not your fault it was possible for you to break in.
I can think of some situations where you don't even have to use facial recognition per say. If you're in a vehicle and the system detects an RPG fired at you. It's pretty easy to distinguish "RPG" from background noise. It should also be relatively easy to detect the 'source' and immediately return fire.
If firing an RPG is a guaranteed way to get hit with several belts of radar/IR guided 50 caliber machine gun fire--you might have a really hard time finding people willing to pull the trigger. Similarly a return-fire system could probably identify and instantly return precise fire at a sniper faster than they could take cover or even theoretically before the first bullet hit its target.
Incompetent management, grandstanding, petty interdepartmental feuds, smothering regulations and endless meetings. If I could sum up the entire experience in a single word it would be this: frustration.
Yeah but what about your time in Government? That sounds like almost every organization I've ever worked with except for my current one. Sure they call it "policy" instead of regulation" but otherwise I think pretty much all large organizations operate on the same playbook of dysfunction.
Groupon is mostly replacing direct-marketing cold callers. Groupon's employees aren't knowledge workers, they're people calling up local businesses to convince them to offer a Groupon.
When I was driving around an '86 golf I was considering upgrading the engine since the old VWs made that a trivial affair. I'm sorry to report that you can buy a brand new engine for a few thousand dollars. It's rarely "the engine" which gives out in a car. It starts with the door handles breaking off, the dash getting smashed, the bumper starting to rust and then you get into the really expensive stuff like transmission and random engine bits.
If you just want to drive the same car with a well running engine block you could reach your half million miles for about an extra $3k today.
Quake 3 raytraced though would shine.