Are these guys being a liiiiiiiitle economical with the truth here.
I realise that mobile phones are dropping in price all the time, but to buy a phone from a store that has GPS built in...... for $50? Did they accidentally drop a "0" off the end of that price?
If you're happy to have your teen's driving monitored, why would you not be happy to have your own monitored in the same way?
Don't be a hypocrite and treat people with the same level of respect (and privacy) that you expect yourself. I'm sure your parents didn't baulk at the extra insurance premiums when you started to drive their car.
A lot of them either arrived during the 60's or their parents did - and they were born in america. Very few people living in the USA today are related to or descended from anyone who's journey there was any riskier than booking passage and surviving a steamship journey in the 19th or 20th centuries.
In their personal lives, they willingly spend great amounts of money to reduce their own, person risk - and that of their familes, too. Why should they not afford the same standards of safety to their ermployees and subordinates?
If the benefits from your particular mission are small - maybe negligible, such as simply a P.R. exercise, or to fulfill some political posturing, then it's right that people's lives should not be put at risk. However, if the rewards are great - such as diverting a killer asteroid, then the amount of "acceptable" (that's to the people on the mission, not those who stand to benefit) risk is far greater - and the people who undertake them or volunteer should be considered heroes.
What NASA trying to reduce the amount of life-risk tells us, is that they don't consider their missions to be particularly important. Let's face it: they're right. Nothing they've done has saved the world. Nothing they plan to do will really have much effect on humanity - apart from some temporary fame-by-association for some transient politicians. Most of the things we are made aware of come from unmanned missions and satellite data - not from having people floating around, building a space-station for 20 years.
If they didn't invest in SPARC/Solaris, all their potential customers would run - probably to the very competitors who are likely to buy that part of the business. However, by putting in a small amount of cash, they can appear to be keeping those lines alive, thereby making them worth selling. If they didn't, the brands would die within a year and the money spent on their valuation / acquisition, would have been wasted. So this way, a small amount gambled now could lead to a bigger payback when the business is sold off. Simples.
Someone I used to work withg came back from lunch looking very pleased with himself (and not for the usual reasons!). As he had been accosted by a market researcher in town, who had offered him a chocolate bar in return for divulging his password. Like any sound-minded individual he immediately consented, made up a "password" on the spot and told the young lady that was his password. Got his chocolate and went on his way.
Later, when the report was published, it turned out that a "shocking" 70% of the people interviewed would "sell" their password for a cheap bar of chocolate (the comparison with 30 pieces of silver was never far away). The more surprising thing was that 30% of the interviewees didn't have the wit, or maybe the dishonesty to do what everyone else had, and just make a completely untestable claim that an arbitrary word was their password.
I would suspect that a large proportion of "credit card" information is, like cold calling data, either made up and sold by weight, or is old, obsolete data that's years out of date and includes old, canceled card details, voided personal information and addresses that were moved away from years ago. That's the real reason it's sold so cheap - it's all bogus and the real mugs aren't the people who's details are traded, but the suckers who buy it.
By making up online personas and then selling them? Norton reckoned my online worth was $32 - just by clicking on my age range and taking all the other default values. That's about $32 for 30 seconds work. I could do that for a living. It's just a pity that Norton haven't taken this to it's logical conclusion and offered to join up people with onlibe identities and the (other) people who would pay for them.
Of course, if they did, they'd find that:
* there was almost no-one willing to pay for this
* they would pay nothing like the Norton valuation
and therefore expose the complete and utter BULL behind this mind-numbingly DUMB idea. I'd even be happy for Norton to take a 10% finders fee - I'd still make a pile.
The Norton Online Risk Calculator, unveiled within a microsite to coincide with the launch of Norton 2010,
All it does is make people anxious about unmeasurable quantities of unknown worth, arbitrarily estimated in an obscure manner with no basis in fact or reality.
Treat it like astrology not security.
This could work well for the elderly who just don't want to deal with all the crap that comes with owning a computer.
Many, many elderly and not so elderly manage to avoid all these hassles very simply: they don't have a computer.
It might come as a shock, but computers simply don't count as one of life's necessities. Food: yes, water: yes, Electricity? yes. Housing? yes A home PC and/or internet comes waaaay down the list of appliances for most people, somewhere below a refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, phone and TV but above electric can-opener or waffle maker - though some might argue about the waffle maker.
It's only people who have all the comforts of modern life who "need" a PC or internet connection.
This guy seems to have missed the point. From The Guardian's piece:
That's how I use Amazon's S3 cloud storage: not as an unreliable and slow hard drive, but as a store for encrypted backups of my critical files,
So far as I can seem that's nothing like cloud computing. That's merely offline storage (and not a very good way to back stuff up, anyway). Although the story has a headline about cloud computing, no-one seems to have told the author - who's fixated on online storage, maybe he doesn't understand the term?
. Personally I can keep all my critical stuff on a couple of (encrypted or not) 4GB USB sticks. One at home, one elsewhere. Trusting all your stuff to one, single commercial entity - and only having access to it when you're on an internet connection - is nobody's idea of clever, or sensible.
The point about cloud computing is that it's not for provate individuals - it's for large, commercial organisations to commoditise CPU cycles and ship their stuff around the world, buying up spare capacity in a spot market and having their number-crunching done cheaper than if they had to run a data centre themselves. The big problem comes with having to trust each of your hosting organisations with the security of your data, resolving conflicts of interest and being able to guarantee that not a single one of the "cloud" sys-admins is on the take - and won't sell your data. That's a big ask.
Cars (100+ years ago), other means of transport: similar. Electricity to the home, pretty much finished during the 1930's. Radio / TV etc. The only truly new and innovative products we have now are mobile phones - and I've had mine (not the same one, you understand) for over 20 years.
However there has been a lot of innovation around the edges of our society - since the big bit in the middle is pretty much complete. Just look at medical technology. Brain / body scanners were invented 30 years ago and have therefore only recently become mainstream / ubiquitous. Just about every type of medical operation has been massively overhauled since my birth (also in 1956). For example: have a heart attack in the early 1960's and there was almost no possible medical intervention, except to take things easy for the rest of your life - however long that would turn out to be.
Similarly technology used in cars and aircraft. Although the basic tech. has been around for a long time, the safety, economy and performance of vehicles has increased a lot due to the introduction of microprocessors, CAD and automated production. These are all things that happen around the edges - not in the mainstream. The same can be said for agriculture, employment (where are the offices full with rows of typists and ledger clerks?), entertainment: cinemas? just as they have always been - but CGI films - that's brand new.
So in summary, there is just as much innovation as there has always been. However, now it's under the cover and around the edges: making things we've always taken for granted so much better.
Not funny, true. Someone should have a word with the person who modded that "funny". Maybe when they stop to think, they'll realise that.Hopwfully the next modder will change it to insightful.
Drug companies also spend many times their development budgets on advertising and marketing. Why? Because when you have a generic product, your market share is pretty much proportional to your advertising spend. Provided you spend your advertising budget wisely, and targeting the correct groups (which is why successful advertising people get paid a lot - they *do* make it pay), your returns will increase in proportionately. The Asprin market - where the ingredients and quantity of *everybody's* product is regulalted by law (at least in this country, foreign parts may do things differently) is a textbook example, used in degree-level marketing courses for how to increase the share of a generic product.
I would suspect the games market is similar to generic pharma. Lots of products, all very similar (at least until you rip the wrapper off), all totally dependent on good reviews from tame reviewers (who have to be kept tame - at a high price), where real-estate in gamer magazines, floorspace in shops and banner ads on the 'net are the primary ways of getting your stuff sold, in preference to the other guy's.
While their altruism is to be applauded: working to preserve people's privacy, I would find this "concern" over Google books more credible if it wasn't being advocated by one of the groups of workers who stand to lose the most from having a vast body of literature made easily available to individuals (or as librarians might call them: customers) without having to go to their local library.
This sounds to me like nothing more than the librarians trying to keep their jobs. While I don't disagree with that, I would appreciate it if they wouldn't take us for fools and try to wrap this up as some sort of "mission" they're on. Some honesty and transparency would get them more support.
You can't get people to believe a £20 book, when a £1000 course tells them otherwise.
It's a sad fact about consultancy and training courses, that the higher the price the more they are believed. They aren't necessarily better - or wrose. However by dint of paying more, you have to go along with the advice given, no matter how outlandish, faddish or nonsensical - otherwise the money has been wasted. Since this is _real_ money, rather than the "funny money" used for project accounting and valuing employees' time, it actually counts for something and has real, live value. Far better for a manager to adopt the conclusions from a piece of consultancy and waste thousands (millions?) on a failed project, than to be seen ignoring that high-priced advice and still having a failed project. (Which, if he/she had to go "outside" for advice or skills is likely, as he/she can't be a very good P.M. in that case).
You're right however. TMMM lists pretty much all of the problems of (and gives solutions to) most software development projects. What this tells us is that the basic issues and therefore the underlying difficulties haven't changed much since <slides over to bookshelf to get publication date >... 1975 which tells you all yo need to know about all the different methodologies since then,
It's a term in Rugby Football (like american football, but without all the protection, padding etc. i.e. for _real_ men).
The term is used when 8 of the players from each side, in a 3 - 4 - 1 formation, bend down in a roughly circular pattern. The two at the front sides from each team support the "hooker" who' job it is to get the ball backwards (hooking it with his foot) to his own team.
Meanwhile all the other members of his side of the scrum, try surreptitiously to beat up the other team - under cover of the "scrum", without the referee noticing. It's a very physical, bruising way of achieving possession, but an art form to get right.
On agile programming, it's roughly the same - except there's no ball and no referee - and there aren't really teams - everyone's looking out for themselves.
You've got a development team. The senior members have been promoted to team leaders.
No matter how you want to spin this, or wrap it up with neologisms, it's the same old stuff, with the same old problems and (it seems) the same old organisation - just with different names. In the end you (or your team / scrum call it what you will) still has ti turn out a product. Those who help get the praise, those who hinder get the promotions:-(
Just like every development methodology before it - and no doubt, the ones to come - if you have talented people, they'll get the work done. If you have indolent people, no techniques: agile or not, will help you. Stop worrying about scrums, roles and all that malarkey - get on with the job of developing your product.
Everyone in a company has problems to overcome. How you deal with them is the olny measure of your worth.
What he was talking about was a limitation in the documentation of the code - not the code itself. The workaround to the documentation problem was to "prohibit" the use of GOTO statements. These days things have moved on. We have much better tools for tracing code execution and keeping tabs on the software environment. These make the fashion for avoiding GOTOs obsolete as the problem has (effectively) gone away - if it even ever existed at all, except in the minds of a few ivory-tower types who were more concerned with having pretty looking constructs than workable and efficient software.
Sadly, software courses are taught by academics who "don't get out much" and probably haven't written a whole lot of real-world code. They are herd animals, much more concerned with their own academic reputations than educating students in the practicalities of the real world (which most of them know little about). Since the next generation of lecturers is taught by the last generation, once an old-wives-tale like this gets into the meme-ome, it's very hard to shift it - despite all the evidence and experience that shows it to be completely bogus.
Recite the mantra "gotos are bad" without even knowing the background - or the limitations of why so many people parrot this unenlightened and frankly ignorant diktat.
When you're writing code for embedded microprocessors, there is no nice, warm, run-time environment. When your code gets to the end of main() what does it do? It certainly doesn't return to the operating system (what operating system? there is NONE, just the code you write, yourself) with an error or success value. it just carries on, executing whatever random noise was left in the eprom from it's manufacture.
Under these circumstances, having a GOTO is not merely permissable, it's pretty much mandatory to get back to the beginning of your execution again. If you have been so brainwashed that your fingers are physically (apologies to people without fingers, please excuse the insensitivity) incapable of typing those 4 letters you can use other constructs, such as while(1) {... } but the effect is the same and may even create the same code. So don't kid yourself that GOTOs are bad, or even that they don't exist. They are one of the world's most useful, misunderstood and maligned instructions that EVERY processor has.
Learn to love them and make it a personal goal to write at least one GOTO loop a day
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't cringe when ...
Why the hell not - any single one of these would be a show-stopper for normal customers on any other phone product.
Oh, right. Not new then. When the article said "off the shelf" I just assumed all their stuff was store-bought. I stand corrected.
I realise that mobile phones are dropping in price all the time, but to buy a phone from a store that has GPS built in ...... for $50? Did they accidentally drop a "0" off the end of that price?
on a rainy day at Caddo Mills, Texas ...
Surely that alone invalidates a simulated moon landing? (as would any cross winds)
If you're happy to have your teen's driving monitored, why would you not be happy to have your own monitored in the same way? Don't be a hypocrite and treat people with the same level of respect (and privacy) that you expect yourself. I'm sure your parents didn't baulk at the extra insurance premiums when you started to drive their car.
In their personal lives, they willingly spend great amounts of money to reduce their own, person risk - and that of their familes, too. Why should they not afford the same standards of safety to their ermployees and subordinates?
What NASA trying to reduce the amount of life-risk tells us, is that they don't consider their missions to be particularly important. Let's face it: they're right. Nothing they've done has saved the world. Nothing they plan to do will really have much effect on humanity - apart from some temporary fame-by-association for some transient politicians. Most of the things we are made aware of come from unmanned missions and satellite data - not from having people floating around, building a space-station for 20 years.
If they didn't invest in SPARC/Solaris, all their potential customers would run - probably to the very competitors who are likely to buy that part of the business. However, by putting in a small amount of cash, they can appear to be keeping those lines alive, thereby making them worth selling. If they didn't, the brands would die within a year and the money spent on their valuation / acquisition, would have been wasted. So this way, a small amount gambled now could lead to a bigger payback when the business is sold off. Simples.
Someone I used to work withg came back from lunch looking very pleased with himself (and not for the usual reasons!). As he had been accosted by a market researcher in town, who had offered him a chocolate bar in return for divulging his password. Like any sound-minded individual he immediately consented, made up a "password" on the spot and told the young lady that was his password. Got his chocolate and went on his way.
Later, when the report was published, it turned out that a "shocking" 70% of the people interviewed would "sell" their password for a cheap bar of chocolate (the comparison with 30 pieces of silver was never far away). The more surprising thing was that 30% of the interviewees didn't have the wit, or maybe the dishonesty to do what everyone else had, and just make a completely untestable claim that an arbitrary word was their password.
I would suspect that a large proportion of "credit card" information is, like cold calling data, either made up and sold by weight, or is old, obsolete data that's years out of date and includes old, canceled card details, voided personal information and addresses that were moved away from years ago. That's the real reason it's sold so cheap - it's all bogus and the real mugs aren't the people who's details are traded, but the suckers who buy it.
Of course, if they did, they'd find that:
* there was almost no-one willing to pay for this
* they would pay nothing like the Norton valuation
and therefore expose the complete and utter BULL behind this mind-numbingly DUMB idea. I'd even be happy for Norton to take a 10% finders fee - I'd still make a pile.
The Norton Online Risk Calculator, unveiled within a microsite to coincide with the launch of Norton 2010,
All it does is make people anxious about unmeasurable quantities of unknown worth, arbitrarily estimated in an obscure manner with no basis in fact or reality. Treat it like astrology not security.
That's nothing. I was trapped in a lift once. I had to wait 15 years for mobile phones to be developed and deployed before I could call for help.
This could work well for the elderly who just don't want to deal with all the crap that comes with owning a computer.
Many, many elderly and not so elderly manage to avoid all these hassles very simply: they don't have a computer.
It might come as a shock, but computers simply don't count as one of life's necessities. Food: yes, water: yes, Electricity? yes. Housing? yes A home PC and/or internet comes waaaay down the list of appliances for most people, somewhere below a refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, phone and TV but above electric can-opener or waffle maker - though some might argue about the waffle maker.
It's only people who have all the comforts of modern life who "need" a PC or internet connection.
That's how I use Amazon's S3 cloud storage: not as an unreliable and slow hard drive, but as a store for encrypted backups of my critical files,
So far as I can seem that's nothing like cloud computing. That's merely offline storage (and not a very good way to back stuff up, anyway). Although the story has a headline about cloud computing, no-one seems to have told the author - who's fixated on online storage, maybe he doesn't understand the term?
. Personally I can keep all my critical stuff on a couple of (encrypted or not) 4GB USB sticks. One at home, one elsewhere. Trusting all your stuff to one, single commercial entity - and only having access to it when you're on an internet connection - is nobody's idea of clever, or sensible.
The point about cloud computing is that it's not for provate individuals - it's for large, commercial organisations to commoditise CPU cycles and ship their stuff around the world, buying up spare capacity in a spot market and having their number-crunching done cheaper than if they had to run a data centre themselves. The big problem comes with having to trust each of your hosting organisations with the security of your data, resolving conflicts of interest and being able to guarantee that not a single one of the "cloud" sys-admins is on the take - and won't sell your data. That's a big ask.
Cars (100+ years ago), other means of transport: similar. Electricity to the home, pretty much finished during the 1930's. Radio / TV etc. The only truly new and innovative products we have now are mobile phones - and I've had mine (not the same one, you understand) for over 20 years.
However there has been a lot of innovation around the edges of our society - since the big bit in the middle is pretty much complete. Just look at medical technology. Brain / body scanners were invented 30 years ago and have therefore only recently become mainstream / ubiquitous. Just about every type of medical operation has been massively overhauled since my birth (also in 1956). For example: have a heart attack in the early 1960's and there was almost no possible medical intervention, except to take things easy for the rest of your life - however long that would turn out to be.
Similarly technology used in cars and aircraft. Although the basic tech. has been around for a long time, the safety, economy and performance of vehicles has increased a lot due to the introduction of microprocessors, CAD and automated production. These are all things that happen around the edges - not in the mainstream. The same can be said for agriculture, employment (where are the offices full with rows of typists and ledger clerks?), entertainment: cinemas? just as they have always been - but CGI films - that's brand new.
So in summary, there is just as much innovation as there has always been. However, now it's under the cover and around the edges: making things we've always taken for granted so much better.
solar cell generates power for the robot and delivers 3.6 V to the unit, which is enough for it to walk
... at night, when it's cloudy or indoors
So that rules out a great deal of the times and places where people are. What exactly are the users of these things expecting to spy on?
Not funny, true. Someone should have a word with the person who modded that "funny". Maybe when they stop to think, they'll realise that.Hopwfully the next modder will change it to insightful.
I would suspect the games market is similar to generic pharma. Lots of products, all very similar (at least until you rip the wrapper off), all totally dependent on good reviews from tame reviewers (who have to be kept tame - at a high price), where real-estate in gamer magazines, floorspace in shops and banner ads on the 'net are the primary ways of getting your stuff sold, in preference to the other guy's.
... read "privacy" as "piracy"?
This sounds to me like nothing more than the librarians trying to keep their jobs. While I don't disagree with that, I would appreciate it if they wouldn't take us for fools and try to wrap this up as some sort of "mission" they're on. Some honesty and transparency would get them more support.
It's a sad fact about consultancy and training courses, that the higher the price the more they are believed. They aren't necessarily better - or wrose. However by dint of paying more, you have to go along with the advice given, no matter how outlandish, faddish or nonsensical - otherwise the money has been wasted. Since this is _real_ money, rather than the "funny money" used for project accounting and valuing employees' time, it actually counts for something and has real, live value. Far better for a manager to adopt the conclusions from a piece of consultancy and waste thousands (millions?) on a failed project, than to be seen ignoring that high-priced advice and still having a failed project. (Which, if he/she had to go "outside" for advice or skills is likely, as he/she can't be a very good P.M. in that case).
You're right however. TMMM lists pretty much all of the problems of (and gives solutions to) most software development projects. What this tells us is that the basic issues and therefore the underlying difficulties haven't changed much since <slides over to bookshelf to get publication date > ... 1975 which tells you all yo need to know about all the different methodologies since then,
Meanwhile all the other members of his side of the scrum, try surreptitiously to beat up the other team - under cover of the "scrum", without the referee noticing. It's a very physical, bruising way of achieving possession, but an art form to get right.
On agile programming, it's roughly the same - except there's no ball and no referee - and there aren't really teams - everyone's looking out for themselves.
No matter how you want to spin this, or wrap it up with neologisms, it's the same old stuff, with the same old problems and (it seems) the same old organisation - just with different names. In the end you (or your team / scrum call it what you will) still has ti turn out a product. Those who help get the praise, those who hinder get the promotions :-(
Just like every development methodology before it - and no doubt, the ones to come - if you have talented people, they'll get the work done. If you have indolent people, no techniques: agile or not, will help you. Stop worrying about scrums, roles and all that malarkey - get on with the job of developing your product.
Everyone in a company has problems to overcome. How you deal with them is the olny measure of your worth.
What he was talking about was a limitation in the documentation of the code - not the code itself. The workaround to the documentation problem was to "prohibit" the use of GOTO statements. These days things have moved on. We have much better tools for tracing code execution and keeping tabs on the software environment. These make the fashion for avoiding GOTOs obsolete as the problem has (effectively) gone away - if it even ever existed at all, except in the minds of a few ivory-tower types who were more concerned with having pretty looking constructs than workable and efficient software.
Sadly, software courses are taught by academics who "don't get out much" and probably haven't written a whole lot of real-world code. They are herd animals, much more concerned with their own academic reputations than educating students in the practicalities of the real world (which most of them know little about). Since the next generation of lecturers is taught by the last generation, once an old-wives-tale like this gets into the meme-ome, it's very hard to shift it - despite all the evidence and experience that shows it to be completely bogus.
When you're writing code for embedded microprocessors, there is no nice, warm, run-time environment. When your code gets to the end of main() what does it do? It certainly doesn't return to the operating system (what operating system? there is NONE, just the code you write, yourself) with an error or success value. it just carries on, executing whatever random noise was left in the eprom from it's manufacture.
Under these circumstances, having a GOTO is not merely permissable, it's pretty much mandatory to get back to the beginning of your execution again. If you have been so brainwashed that your fingers are physically (apologies to people without fingers, please excuse the insensitivity) incapable of typing those 4 letters you can use other constructs, such as while(1) {... } but the effect is the same and may even create the same code. So don't kid yourself that GOTOs are bad, or even that they don't exist. They are one of the world's most useful, misunderstood and maligned instructions that EVERY processor has.
Learn to love them and make it a personal goal to write at least one GOTO loop a day