Re: He's not being paid?
Well that is the Google model. You offer the service "free" and make a fortune selling the 'customer'...
1944 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
I think not. The IT, which is supposed to be there to help people do their jobs better, went down so badly with the users that 10% of them resigned? Goodness knows Social services IT systems vary from mediocre to dreadful, but even so that's pretty special. And yes, I am aware that one big issue with Social Services IT systems is that they are all too often designed to help the management do their job with no consideration of the staff at all, but that too is a failure of the overall IT delivery.
No, calling your user base dumb fucks is diagnostic of an industry that has completely lost the plot. If your products aren't fit for the mass population as it exists then by definition they aren't fit for the mass market.
An industry which believes that if its too difficult or too expensive to deliver a satisfactory service whilst still making a tiny minority rich then they should be allowed to deliver rubbish, ignore the law or be socially irresponsible.
Something of a rare bird.
The scenario of an organisation where middle management do absolutely nothing when a temp's contract expires is utterly familiar. Its very easy to imagine a desire to automate the process of disabling accounts where a contract hasn't been renewed. I've too often seen a hundred or so completely redundant accounts clogging up the system and providing security holes, or maybe even worse the account being left active and used by successive temps, so the details on the account have no relations whatsoever to the person actually using it.
No doubt the system also generated reports of accounts disabled and so on, but its easy to write a report, hard to get any b*****r to read it. Everything that happened to disable accounts and access seems reasonable to me for a company attempting to run a reasonably tight ship. I also bet there was a rehire procedure - its an obvious enough function, but what's the betting no-one ever studied the documentation and they hadn't actually used it?
This highlights one of the troubles of efficient automation, also exemplified by AF447 and the Uber cyclist slaughter - when people rely on efficient automation it can be very hard to work out when its time to switch it off and go back to manual.
Something bizarre was going on, and I think we're getting half a story (as ever). I don't see merely high humidity causing that amount of failure. I idly wonder if some sort of local cooling device in the racks had water condensing on it in such quantities it was overflowing into the IT kit.
> a driver in a driver seat doing nothing for hours on end and expect them to react as if they had been
> driving for all that time. That is an unreasonable expectation to start with
Its a perfectly reasonable expectation if they are trained and skilled and paid accordingly. We expect exactly that of pilots.
Now I think about it the safety driver should probably be recording a continuous commentary of what's happening on the road and how well the car is reacting to it, which would both keep them alert and provide more feedback on the system. That would require someone who can actually produce a useful evaluation though.
However I imagine what Uber are doing is employing minimum wage peons, and recording video from the car and only examining special events back in the office.
On what we've heard here it certainly sounds as if the driver bears a heavy responsibility, but the underlying culture needs looking at too.
This being Uber, its a fair bet their 'safety drivers' are minimum wage peons, when actually they need to be highly skilled with very fast reactions because their job is to evaluate when action is needed and take it as late as possible.
Similarly the authorities will need to know if the drivers are just told to go out and sit there. or whether they are specifically briefed before each journey with a test plan.
And ye, as in the above, the authorities will also want to look at to what extent Uber monitor that their safety drivers are doing exactly that, and not sitting their watching videos. Bearing in mind the demands of the role it would not be inappropriate for the drivers to be banned from taking phones with them. Its hard to imagine an aviation test pilot having their phone with them!
Big advertising (my sponsors) think that it will be too much hassle to try and stop theft, so we should make it legal. If the law gets put in place the capability will follow as if by magic. If there are no restrictions the man will always say its impossible to implement. As ever, think Mandy Rice-Davies.
That would be nice if the meatsacks actually did. Unfortunately, as is clearly demonstrated every time there's poor visibility, the average driver is not safe on the road either.
The sad reality is that an automated car will not be "safe" at the current level of technology. But a manual car is not safe either. The simple fact that the crash attenuator had already been destroyed by a human driver demonstrates that.
Its not a choice between an imperfect technology that kills 50 people a year and no deaths, that's easy. Its a choice between the imperfect technology and 200 deaths a year caused by human drivers. The other question that could be asked - and will be in some readers life time I predict - is how many people, many of them entirely innocent 3rd parties, must die because we permit manually controlled cars?
I think there's probably an age thing going on here. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and my father was in the flying business then. My default understanding of an autopilot is something that flies the plane straight and level when there's nothing difficult going on, and needs to be overruled for take off, landing, evading Messerschmitts or Migs and anything else difficult. That fits the Tesla offering reasonably pretty accurately. I think of autoland and so on as extra capabilities above and beyond the autopilot.
Clearly a younger generation is thinking differently, and we have a cultural gap. For them, it seems, autopilot is not the right word.
But as a techie too, its much easier to work with 12 digit decimal numbers than 32 digit hex. You can fix the one in your mind, less so the other. But it was RFC1597 that killed fast IPV6 adoption. RFC1597/1918 also forces a number of convenient security practices, and also effectively prohibits a number of foolish practices, which is a useful weapon for techies seeking to impose good practise on management. So all in all sticking with IP4 generally suits the techies as well as the suits.
Whether false positives are a problem depends what you do with them. If an airborne Laser zaps the unfortunate victim to a greasy smut, that's a problem. However if the false positive then goes to a further level of checking and is discarded without the subject ever being aware of it or the misidentification recorded then its no big deal.
City and Guilds College (Engineering) and the Royal College of Science (eg Physics) were merged in 1907 (also with the Royal School of Mines) into Imperial College, so Messrs Mather and Tucker would be from the same campus, but rather different parts of the organisation - the constituent colleges retained a fair degree of independence.
You don't know boat ownership. Buying a boat is very cheap, people almost give ratty old boats away... If people fancy the idea of speeding round the water with the wind in their hair and bikini clad beauties on the foredeck it seems like a very good deal. But what the new owners find out very soon is that owning and running a ratty cheap boat is even more expensive than owning and running a new flash expensive boat, and so its soon back on the market very cheap, and hey, you can hardly give them away, the cost of disposing it legally is about twice what you paid for the boat and the wife is whinging about the lump on the drive and...
Another rather revealing observation can be if you inspect a number of facilities. At one large company I worked it I was struck by the variation in facilities between the areas which were close to executives' offices and those that were nearer the 'oi polloi areas. Also interesting was the difference in cleanliness of various facilities towards the end of the day. With all facilities being cleaned under the same contract it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that some services were, well, less social than others.
Well an AI that slams on the anchors every time a plastic bag blows across the motorway is going to cause some horrendous rear end pileups, bearing in mind how all the meatsacks drive dangerously close. So you can see the issue. There's definitely a very big risk in false positives. That being said this should still never have happened. The problem, more than anything else, seems to be with the monitoring driver. Project doesn't seem ready for minimum wagers who spend more time on the phone than watching the road, but that's not the Uber way...
Its more often told as screwing down the safety valve to increase boiler pressure and therefore power.
I do know that tamper-proof safety valves were being commonly fitted by the end of the 19thC.
Here's an accident report which blames the driver for tampering with the safety valves.
http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/BoT_Bray1872.pdf
I dunno, back in the 70s I was stopped and searched every couple of weeks and I was white, middle class and lived in suburban Surrey. I assumed I was targeted because I had longish hair, rode a bicycle home late at night and, frankly, that the cops were bored and had nothing else to do.
Big advertising is acting very like a fence.
They are receiving stolen property and selling it on at a huge profit. And, just like householders who have had their property stolen, its impractical and ridiculously expensive for the householders to go round all the retailers of "Oh, is it stolen, we had no idea" goods and try and retreive their property.
Well yes. Its funny how often people forget that crude oil is a natural product so of course there are bacteria that eat it: there are bacteria that will have a go at practically anything.
But for all the doom doom about it escaping, we have a world full of bacteria, fungi, insects and goodness knows what else that happily eat wood, and we manage to live with it quite happily.
Incidentally I am very unsure about this "Plastic lasts thousands of years" stuff. I'm 30 plus years out of date now, but when I was briefly in the industry the problem that was always exercising us was stopping the stuff breaking down ion its own.
I suppose if due diligence auditing had to be of sufficient depth to uncover a determined fraud that was good enough to be hidden from the company's own auditors, then the due diligence auditing would be so expensive as to render most deals and takeovers impractical, and in that case executives would have to revert to making a reasonable income running their companies better instead of making megabucks from the deals. And that would *never* do...
Oh come on, every damn company in the world is on the cheap initial purchase, expensive parts game. For sure the manufacturers would like to eliminate all competition so they can minimise the purchase price and make a good living on consumables. Like it or not that's standard business pricing these days.
Having said that I'm also completely in line with the companies too. If you pay xyz manufacturing a premium price so all your parts and spares are very tight QC and low tolerance, and then the customer fits crap that you would never pass for use, and then you have to fix it, that's going to be pretty galling. Seen quite a few problems failures caused by second rate pattern parts in my time in the bike trade.
Short of legislation to enforce the same profit margin on new kit and spares though I haven't got a clue what the solution is, especially as any such legislation would be a major vote loser since it would put headline prices up.
The language got them busted?
So next time your marketingdroids want to hype up a straightforward customer communication in the usual exaggerated buzzword b******x, tell them to remember the Post Office's fine and b*****r off.
I have a very limited sympathy for the mailmen, in that they were apparently trying to avoid being accused of putting their price cut notification in the usual beware of the leopard branded filing cabinet, but I have little doubt from the report that the marketing morons said, "Yipee, here's our chance to send a marketing message to the opt outs", and seized on it with glee.
[there you are pedants, yes I carelessly typed BT instead of Post Office. Bite me.]
is staggering. I run a sports club website, and my front page uses/used the graph api to grab (read only) the contents of *public* posts on the *public* group so that those who steer clear of the Z monster can see what's been posted there, and those who can only use it have some avenue of communication outside their ghetto.
I spent yesterday struggling with their appalling documentation and notification to try and find out exactly what they've broken and what if anything I can do about it, and basically just wasted the day. I can screen scrape it of course, but it will be a lot of effort to clear out all the nonsense and structure what I get back properly.
We made a king sized mistake back in the day when we sold our mojo to the advertising industry in the foolish belief that advertising meant everything was free, but I'm damned if I know how we can extract ourselves. The belief that nothing on the net needs paying for is just too deeply rooted...
At the start of my IT career data entry to the major business systems was done by trained typists who could type quickly, easily and accurately. By the end of my career large quantities of that data entry was done by managers who could do none of those at a vastly greater hourly rate...
There's nothing retrospective going on at all. They are making a request in the present for something that exists in the present.
Retrospective would be fining Microsoft for not handing over the data before the new law came into force. Now the new law is in force companies and people are now required to comply with it.