nothing more than a big, honkin' amplifier and a spark plug
So your $100 GPS jammer needs a $1M of specialised missile to knock it out. That's OK if you're just talking about 1's or 10's but with that sort of asymmetry in the costs my money would be on the side of the cheap but disposable countermeasure.
NK would only need to spend $1M to make the cost of merely the first phase of an act of aggression far to expensive to continue with. Even if american actually had enough missiles (and the ability to fire them all without taking unacceptable casualties) in the first place.
and all you see out your window is the green perimeter
Block up the windows.
Office workers should consider themselves bloody lucky to either have a window to stare out of, or enough time away from doing their work to make one worthwhile. Isn't the desktop image on their monitors enough?
There are two commpeting forces at play here. Three if you include the people responsible for the budget.
The first and most obvious group is the scientists who first proposed the telescope and want to use it.
The second group are the people contracted to build it. These are the ones with all the power and the most to lose. Once the JWST is finished and launched they are (mostly) out of as job. As a consequence they have a selfish interest in making the design,development, testing and integration take as long as possible - simply to preserve their jobs and income. Now that's a fairly extreme description. I'm (almost) sure that nobody actually goes out of their way to sabotage it, or malinger. It's just that as with any project, there's always the possibility to improve things: tweak the spec. here, add another 0.05dB to a noise margin there... and so it goes on; With no hard and fast deadline in the offing, there's nobody to say "it's absolutely got to be finished by <date>". Military projects in peacetime suffer exactly the same project creep and delays, for exactly the same reason.
The deadline is the key - that's why the moon landings happened on time. That's why wartime projects (when people are dying for lack of a solution) turbo-charge innovation. The JFDI attitude is paramount and without a launch date to work towards (or at least without a credible one, that absolutely MUST be met) the contractors are always going to be suggesting improvements, not overcoming delays and problems and finding more expensive options for problems.
The people who want it on the cheap have been gluing aluminium foil to cardboard - per. the designs over the past decade.
All the author is trying to do is impress us that he/she/it is old enough to drink. That falls down flat as all the beer reference says is they're not old enough to know a decent brew.
If you're looking for a logical reason for any change to schooling methods, standards or practices ask whether it makes the teachers' day any easier. If it does, that's almost certainly the reason it was introduced - irrespective of the effect on the childrens' education. If it doesn't make the work easier or the teaching skills level more basic or the schooling system cheaper (leaving out salary costs) then it was probably a mistake or someone wanting to make a political point.
Any effect on the childrens' education is either random variation, unmeasurable or just a side-effect of the real drivers for change.
But there is a shortage of people willing to work for the rates that companies want to pay.
The problem is one of expectations. Most adults in the english-speaking world have a self-image of a nice big house, medical care, a partner, alimony, some kids, a pension, a dog, foreign holidays and a car for everyone (except maybe the dog). To support that lifestyle needs a certain, high, level of income.
However those very same people will baulk at paying for goods designed, developed and manufactured by workers who share that aspiration. They all want cheap stuff - and plenty of it. To satisfy that demand and price-point, the manufacturers can only afford to pay their employees enough for a bicycle, rice and vegetables and a family TV set.
UK companies do the vast majority of their recruitment through employment agencies - usually specialist ones where at least one of the staff can at least spell 'C' (though none can spell 'Perl'), even though none of them actually know what it is.
That allows the employers to keep their hands clean, disavowing an knowledge of the dirty practices that the agencies use every day: lying to candidates, fabricating vacancies (bait and switch), age/gender/race/disability discrimination and salary "negotiations" (see lying to candidates) all on the basis of "we don't think you'd fit in" or "that vacancy's been filled".
If you do leave your age off your CV, or "mistype" it down by 10 or 15 years, you'll get interviews but no offers on the basis that you lied on your application. If you put in a tru age of 40+ you won't even get an acknowledgement email - and if you phone up, you'll be fobbed off.
The agencies act as the gatekeeper. Most companies won't recruit directly and agencies come and go with such fleeting regularity that you can't nail a complaint to them - just like cowboy builders go bankrupt every few years to avoid liability for shoddy work - though oddly, they always seem to employ the same names and "type" of staff.
To see if there is an age bias, just look at the profile of the current employees. Although software development / support / design has been mainstream since the early 80's, few of the technical staff in any major organisation are over 35. That can't possibly be because all the older ones have been promoted (they haven't, the age of the supervisors is similar). it's simply that the staff who did start out in the 80's or 90's have largely been tossed on the scrapheap, or somehow don't meet the "fit in" criteria for vacancies.
on the phone side they have consistently supported phones for 3 or more years
Though they were still selling the iphone 3g well into 2010 - only to "desupport" it when ios 4.3 came out less than a year later. So the trick seems to be: choose products that look like success and THEN buy them ASAP, as they can have a very, very short supported life if you leave it too long.
New products are being pulled from shelves only weeks after a lackluster release
So now people will think: I'm not going to buy this new product in case they pull it, and I can't get support any more - or a software update - or a bug-fix.
Once this becomes the established pattern, everyone will defer their purchases until at least version 2 (as most wise buyers do these days, anyway) just to see if the product has got a future. If products get pulled because nobody buys them - because they're all waiting to see if anyone *else* buys it, then the whole industry is in a downward spiral. The only way out would be to start applying serious bribes to reviewrs, if that doesn't already happen.
you should always look for evidence that something DID happen
True, but since this entire topic (that Earth could have seeded Europa) is conjecture, a little more doesn't hurt. And since we know there's life on Earth wondering where it came from is more fruitful.
Now, if you could just explain the small problem of how micropayments are too expensive for the phone companies but will not be too expensive for web sites, your argument will be all set.
Regards.
Per line #1 Some time in the next 10 years somebody will crack the "problem" of micropayments HTH
Nothing could be simpler: phone companies don't have the abilty to handle micropayments. It's too expensive for them to meter each call and to bill them individually, hence the flat rate billing.
The first provider of commodity content to demand payment, will merely be the first to go out of business
We already have paywalls around some newspapers. Sure, the number of hits they get is down a lot, but the revenue per paying customer is much higher. So far some have gone down the tubes, but a lot more advertising-funded ones are considering taking the plunge. When micropayments are viable, that trickle will become a flood. I can see that the 0.01p that websites get per micropaid hit will be much more preferable than the 0.0001p per "free" hit with advertising. In the long term, it will lead to more websites and better revenue, not less.
Some time in the next 10 years somebody will crack the "problem" of micropayments: fractions of a penny. Once that happens then pretty much every website will cost something to visit - the commercial imperatives are too high for it to be otherwise. Apps will also charge on a per-use basis, rather than a buy once and use forever principle.
Once sites can charge 0.05p for a visitor to view a page, both the need for advertisers and the attraction they offer will become obsolete. Websites will make their money directly, and the iron grip around their testicles will pass from the search engines that pass them advertising eyeballs, to the brokers that process their micropayments - though there will be huge battles between the old regime: of Google and it's friends and the newcomers, from wherever they come.
I would expect the transition to be particularly painful, especially during the time when there are two iron-grips (one on each 'nad?) pulling in different directions. The resolution will come when part of the micropayment can be passed on to the referrer - whether search engine or linking site, in lieu of their lost advertising revenue - though we can expect the landscape of the 202x's to be a lot different, in terms of which companies are dominant.
All accountants do is measure some metrics, convert those measurements into a dollar value in a sort of "normalisation" process and then seek to maximise that value.
That's fine. So long as the things they assign monetary value to are real (not necessarily tangible, but aren't simply fictional or some sort of trick/device) and the valuation process makes sense. The problem with software is that it's not well matched to this measuring / valuing / optimising mechanism.
if the software industry is to thrive, something has to give. It probably won't be the way accountancy works - as it's too successful (or maybe just entrenched) in all other branches of industry. Obviously it evolves and accounting rules and practices change, but until the world of software development finds a way to produce inputs that the accountants can deal with, we're stuck trying to justify our existence in a world that can't value what we do.
We think we're pretty good at "doing" software. That because it's been around for 50 or more years, we've basically got it cracked and we know all the problems.
We don't
If we were to liken the software "revolution" to the change that the world saw when printing was invented/developed/popularised, we're not at the end of that process - we're still futzing around trying to design workable printing presses and wondering why our ink doesn't stick to the dried leaves we call paper.
Software isn't a process that we've mastered, we've barely started to use it. Hell, we don't even have a functional language to write our stuff in: one that deals with the abstractions and realities of the world we live in, as the spoken and written languages we use everyday allow us to communicate with each other..
management simply does not have any appreciation or understanding of good coding practices
There are no measures - just like there is no objective measurement of good prose. As a consequence management places value on things that it CAN measure: cost, time, manpower, bugs, lines of code. What all this means is that without any way to measure what is "good" code, or to quantify its "goodness" all the coding practices are really just as much hot air as any other management fad.
Back to the reason why developers are considered 2nd class citizens (actually, fourth class: customers are second class citizens, prospective customers are first class and suppliers are third class). The reason is that they produce nothing with any measurable value. Sure the software they write SOMETIMES adds to a company's profits, but the link between a specific piece of code and a line in the P&L is tenuous at best and non-existent most of the time. If you want to improve your worth (to the company, to society, to yourself) come up with a way of demonstrating the hard-currency value of your code: how handling a particular exception is worth $500 and how reading that input data is worth $2000. When you can do that, there's be some value to employing developers - until then, they're just a cost item.
If this way or working is so good, why hasn't someone, somewhere added it their pool of obvious and trivial patents? since so many organisations make their living from peeing in the pool of knowledge, this would seem to be an obvious candidate.
I don't know how many people will be able to afford such a trip, outside of Las Vegas, Hollywood, Cupertino, Redmond, and few retirees,
On the Forbes' list of billionaires, only 7 of the top 20 are americans. So presumably the majority of people that services like this are intended for will not be american nationals, either. To only consider one (5% of the world's population) country as the potential client-base is incredibly parochial and I'm sure the space travel industry won't make that mistake.
Does it count as "insider" trading if the same information is available to everyone?
What would be interesting and extremely valuable (and open to manipulation, even by the tweeter if they became aware they were an indicator) is to come up with a "hot list" of people who's tweets had some sort of correlation with market movements. Whether you'd have to go further and demonstrate direct causality (maybe the CEO's children: we're going on a long cruise / no ski-ing holiday this year) would be an interesting question.
If anyone could pull this off, they'd make a fortune until someone, somewhere made it illegal. I guess the trick would be to not tell people how you did it - though that WOULD lead to charges of insider trading.
I understand your idea, but it mistakes meeting someone with knowing them. Just like Facebook males the mistake of calling people "friends" just because they have something (imaginary or real) in common. While you might think you "know" the queen, just because you've met her there's no reciprocity in the relationship - she does not know you. So the premise falls down.
We have ideas, we just can't exploit them
on
The Post-Idea World
·
· Score: 2
All the good ideas have already been patented. Try doing anything innovative and some lawyer, somewhere will tie you up in litigation until the sun goes cold or you run out of money.
England (officially London, but events are spread all over the place) hosts the 2012 Olympics and the government must be scared spitless that there will be a repeat of last weeks "minor difficulties" either during or in the run-up to the games, when all the world's media will be present and reporting live. They don't really care that a bunch of shops got burned and others looted, sicne there's no election for some years - but they do care about their world image.
I think we can therefore say fairly accurately that there will be massive restrictions on the freedoms that citizens have, to ensure there is no possibility of any disruptions to the two weeks of running and jumping next summer (plus the paralymics, of course). The only question is: how much of that security clampdown will ever make it into the press?
a conversation with someone there actually impairs you far less than a conversation on the phone
Kinda depends how you do it. Several people I know appear to require eye contact with the person they are talking to, face-to-face. So while they may be hopelessly impaired while talking on the phone and driving, at least their eyes are on the road. When they are talking to someone in the passenger seat they are (most times) looking AT THAT PERSON and not at the road at all. I once had a particularly scary ride with one of these individuals who was carrying on a conversation with the person in the back seat.....
Slashdot Mirror
nothing more than a big, honkin' amplifier and a spark plug
So your $100 GPS jammer needs a $1M of specialised missile to knock it out. That's OK if you're just talking about 1's or 10's but with that sort of asymmetry in the costs my money would be on the side of the cheap but disposable countermeasure.
NK would only need to spend $1M to make the cost of merely the first phase of an act of aggression far to expensive to continue with. Even if american actually had enough missiles (and the ability to fire them all without taking unacceptable casualties) in the first place.
and all you see out your window is the green perimeter
Block up the windows.
Office workers should consider themselves bloody lucky to either have a window to stare out of, or enough time away from doing their work to make one worthwhile. Isn't the desktop image on their monitors enough?
There are two commpeting forces at play here. Three if you include the people responsible for the budget.
The first and most obvious group is the scientists who first proposed the telescope and want to use it.
The second group are the people contracted to build it. These are the ones with all the power and the most to lose. Once the JWST is finished and launched they are (mostly) out of as job. As a consequence they have a selfish interest in making the design,development, testing and integration take as long as possible - simply to preserve their jobs and income. Now that's a fairly extreme description. I'm (almost) sure that nobody actually goes out of their way to sabotage it, or malinger. It's just that as with any project, there's always the possibility to improve things: tweak the spec. here, add another 0.05dB to a noise margin there ... and so it goes on; With no hard and fast deadline in the offing, there's nobody to say "it's absolutely got to be finished by <date>". Military projects in peacetime suffer exactly the same project creep and delays, for exactly the same reason.
The deadline is the key - that's why the moon landings happened on time. That's why wartime projects (when people are dying for lack of a solution) turbo-charge innovation. The JFDI attitude is paramount and without a launch date to work towards (or at least without a credible one, that absolutely MUST be met) the contractors are always going to be suggesting improvements, not overcoming delays and problems and finding more expensive options for problems.
All the author is trying to do is impress us that he/she/it is old enough to drink. That falls down flat as all the beer reference says is they're not old enough to know a decent brew.
If you're looking for a logical reason for any change to schooling methods, standards or practices ask whether it makes the teachers' day any easier. If it does, that's almost certainly the reason it was introduced - irrespective of the effect on the childrens' education. If it doesn't make the work easier or the teaching skills level more basic or the schooling system cheaper (leaving out salary costs) then it was probably a mistake or someone wanting to make a political point.
Any effect on the childrens' education is either random variation, unmeasurable or just a side-effect of the real drivers for change.
But there is a shortage of people willing to work for the rates that companies want to pay.
The problem is one of expectations. Most adults in the english-speaking world have a self-image of a nice big house, medical care, a partner, alimony, some kids, a pension, a dog, foreign holidays and a car for everyone (except maybe the dog). To support that lifestyle needs a certain, high, level of income.
However those very same people will baulk at paying for goods designed, developed and manufactured by workers who share that aspiration. They all want cheap stuff - and plenty of it. To satisfy that demand and price-point, the manufacturers can only afford to pay their employees enough for a bicycle, rice and vegetables and a family TV set.
UK companies do the vast majority of their recruitment through employment agencies - usually specialist ones where at least one of the staff can at least spell 'C' (though none can spell 'Perl'), even though none of them actually know what it is.
That allows the employers to keep their hands clean, disavowing an knowledge of the dirty practices that the agencies use every day: lying to candidates, fabricating vacancies (bait and switch), age/gender/race/disability discrimination and salary "negotiations" (see lying to candidates) all on the basis of "we don't think you'd fit in" or "that vacancy's been filled".
If you do leave your age off your CV, or "mistype" it down by 10 or 15 years, you'll get interviews but no offers on the basis that you lied on your application. If you put in a tru age of 40+ you won't even get an acknowledgement email - and if you phone up, you'll be fobbed off.
The agencies act as the gatekeeper. Most companies won't recruit directly and agencies come and go with such fleeting regularity that you can't nail a complaint to them - just like cowboy builders go bankrupt every few years to avoid liability for shoddy work - though oddly, they always seem to employ the same names and "type" of staff.
To see if there is an age bias, just look at the profile of the current employees. Although software development / support / design has been mainstream since the early 80's, few of the technical staff in any major organisation are over 35. That can't possibly be because all the older ones have been promoted (they haven't, the age of the supervisors is similar). it's simply that the staff who did start out in the 80's or 90's have largely been tossed on the scrapheap, or somehow don't meet the "fit in" criteria for vacancies.
this much effort is excessive
Oh let the guy fantasize that he's Johnny Mnemonic or whatever. It's preferable to playing with guns and pretending he's The Terminator
on the phone side they have consistently supported phones for 3 or more years
Though they were still selling the iphone 3g well into 2010 - only to "desupport" it when ios 4.3 came out less than a year later. So the trick seems to be: choose products that look like success and THEN buy them ASAP, as they can have a very, very short supported life if you leave it too long.
New products are being pulled from shelves only weeks after a lackluster release
So now people will think: I'm not going to buy this new product in case they pull it, and I can't get support any more - or a software update - or a bug-fix.
Once this becomes the established pattern, everyone will defer their purchases until at least version 2 (as most wise buyers do these days, anyway) just to see if the product has got a future. If products get pulled because nobody buys them - because they're all waiting to see if anyone *else* buys it, then the whole industry is in a downward spiral. The only way out would be to start applying serious bribes to reviewrs, if that doesn't already happen.
you should always look for evidence that something DID happen
True, but since this entire topic (that Earth could have seeded Europa) is conjecture, a little more doesn't hurt. And since we know there's life on Earth wondering where it came from is more fruitful.
If it's easier for rocks to come sunward, then does that mean there's a chance that life-bearing rocks from Europa could have seeded the Earth.
Now, if you could just explain the small problem of how micropayments are too expensive for the phone companies but will not be too expensive for web sites, your argument will be all set.
Regards.
Per line #1 Some time in the next 10 years somebody will crack the "problem" of micropayments HTH
Please compare and contrast ...
Nothing could be simpler: phone companies don't have the abilty to handle micropayments. It's too expensive for them to meter each call and to bill them individually, hence the flat rate billing.
The first provider of commodity content to demand payment, will merely be the first to go out of business
We already have paywalls around some newspapers. Sure, the number of hits they get is down a lot, but the revenue per paying customer is much higher. So far some have gone down the tubes, but a lot more advertising-funded ones are considering taking the plunge. When micropayments are viable, that trickle will become a flood. I can see that the 0.01p that websites get per micropaid hit will be much more preferable than the 0.0001p per "free" hit with advertising. In the long term, it will lead to more websites and better revenue, not less.
Some time in the next 10 years somebody will crack the "problem" of micropayments: fractions of a penny. Once that happens then pretty much every website will cost something to visit - the commercial imperatives are too high for it to be otherwise. Apps will also charge on a per-use basis, rather than a buy once and use forever principle.
Once sites can charge 0.05p for a visitor to view a page, both the need for advertisers and the attraction they offer will become obsolete. Websites will make their money directly, and the iron grip around their testicles will pass from the search engines that pass them advertising eyeballs, to the brokers that process their micropayments - though there will be huge battles between the old regime: of Google and it's friends and the newcomers, from wherever they come.
I would expect the transition to be particularly painful, especially during the time when there are two iron-grips (one on each 'nad?) pulling in different directions. The resolution will come when part of the micropayment can be passed on to the referrer - whether search engine or linking site, in lieu of their lost advertising revenue - though we can expect the landscape of the 202x's to be a lot different, in terms of which companies are dominant.
All accountants do is measure some metrics, convert those measurements into a dollar value in a sort of "normalisation" process and then seek to maximise that value.
That's fine. So long as the things they assign monetary value to are real (not necessarily tangible, but aren't simply fictional or some sort of trick/device) and the valuation process makes sense. The problem with software is that it's not well matched to this measuring / valuing / optimising mechanism.
if the software industry is to thrive, something has to give. It probably won't be the way accountancy works - as it's too successful (or maybe just entrenched) in all other branches of industry. Obviously it evolves and accounting rules and practices change, but until the world of software development finds a way to produce inputs that the accountants can deal with, we're stuck trying to justify our existence in a world that can't value what we do.
We don't
If we were to liken the software "revolution" to the change that the world saw when printing was invented/developed/popularised, we're not at the end of that process - we're still futzing around trying to design workable printing presses and wondering why our ink doesn't stick to the dried leaves we call paper.
Software isn't a process that we've mastered, we've barely started to use it. Hell, we don't even have a functional language to write our stuff in: one that deals with the abstractions and realities of the world we live in, as the spoken and written languages we use everyday allow us to communicate with each other..
management simply does not have any appreciation or understanding of good coding practices
There are no measures - just like there is no objective measurement of good prose. As a consequence management places value on things that it CAN measure: cost, time, manpower, bugs, lines of code. What all this means is that without any way to measure what is "good" code, or to quantify its "goodness" all the coding practices are really just as much hot air as any other management fad.
Back to the reason why developers are considered 2nd class citizens (actually, fourth class: customers are second class citizens, prospective customers are first class and suppliers are third class). The reason is that they produce nothing with any measurable value. Sure the software they write SOMETIMES adds to a company's profits, but the link between a specific piece of code and a line in the P&L is tenuous at best and non-existent most of the time. If you want to improve your worth (to the company, to society, to yourself) come up with a way of demonstrating the hard-currency value of your code: how handling a particular exception is worth $500 and how reading that input data is worth $2000. When you can do that, there's be some value to employing developers - until then, they're just a cost item.
If this way or working is so good, why hasn't someone, somewhere added it their pool of obvious and trivial patents? since so many organisations make their living from peeing in the pool of knowledge, this would seem to be an obvious candidate.
I don't know how many people will be able to afford such a trip, outside of Las Vegas, Hollywood, Cupertino, Redmond, and few retirees,
On the Forbes' list of billionaires, only 7 of the top 20 are americans. So presumably the majority of people that services like this are intended for will not be american nationals, either. To only consider one (5% of the world's population) country as the potential client-base is incredibly parochial and I'm sure the space travel industry won't make that mistake.
Does it count as "insider" trading if the same information is available to everyone?
What would be interesting and extremely valuable (and open to manipulation, even by the tweeter if they became aware they were an indicator) is to come up with a "hot list" of people who's tweets had some sort of correlation with market movements. Whether you'd have to go further and demonstrate direct causality (maybe the CEO's children: we're going on a long cruise / no ski-ing holiday this year) would be an interesting question.
If anyone could pull this off, they'd make a fortune until someone, somewhere made it illegal. I guess the trick would be to not tell people how you did it - though that WOULD lead to charges of insider trading.
I understand your idea, but it mistakes meeting someone with knowing them. Just like Facebook males the mistake of calling people "friends" just because they have something (imaginary or real) in common. While you might think you "know" the queen, just because you've met her there's no reciprocity in the relationship - she does not know you. So the premise falls down.
All the good ideas have already been patented. Try doing anything innovative and some lawyer, somewhere will tie you up in litigation until the sun goes cold or you run out of money.
England (officially London, but events are spread all over the place) hosts the 2012 Olympics and the government must be scared spitless that there will be a repeat of last weeks "minor difficulties" either during or in the run-up to the games, when all the world's media will be present and reporting live. They don't really care that a bunch of shops got burned and others looted, sicne there's no election for some years - but they do care about their world image.
I think we can therefore say fairly accurately that there will be massive restrictions on the freedoms that citizens have, to ensure there is no possibility of any disruptions to the two weeks of running and jumping next summer (plus the paralymics, of course). The only question is: how much of that security clampdown will ever make it into the press?
a conversation with someone there actually impairs you far less than a conversation on the phone
Kinda depends how you do it. Several people I know appear to require eye contact with the person they are talking to, face-to-face. So while they may be hopelessly impaired while talking on the phone and driving, at least their eyes are on the road. When they are talking to someone in the passenger seat they are (most times) looking AT THAT PERSON and not at the road at all. I once had a particularly scary ride with one of these individuals who was carrying on a conversation with the person in the back seat .....