Pricing.
...comparable to existing premium ride-hailing services.
So they don't have to pay a driver, but they're going to charge the same anyway.
My, naked corporate greed really has caught on over there, hasn't it?
9435 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
But the perceived capability gap is due to an elephant in the room.
The US is working on self powered hydrogen scramjet hypersonic vehicles, If and when they get those working, gliders become obsolete overnight. Powered hypersonic vehicles don't have that tell-tale ballistic missile launch to start them off.
What we have here is basically a MIRV warhead with better steering and reentry options.
Turned up to work early one day to find the duty operator fast asleep, on a high chair with his feet propped on the System/38 and said chair rocked back on its rear legs.
The word "precarious" seemed inadequate. Too good an opportunity to miss, so what to do.
Enter computer suite using keycode that I don't know. Tiptoe over to console. Dial 1 to enable, dial 2 to Lamp Test and hit load. Wind console alert volume to max. Tiptoe out.
SNDBRKMSG MSG('WAKEY WAKEY') TOMSGQ(QCONSOLE)
BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP "Wuh......ARRRGGHHH" <CRASH>
That required consultants.
Wurp, wurp! Pull Up!
Wurp wurp! Massive cost overrun approaching!
As soon as somebody decides that getting in consultants is a good idea, the wheels are off and it's time to pull the eject lever. The alternative is moving the contents of your bank account into the consultancy's bank account.
Elite was pure mono wireframe, I played it to death. The telly was colour, but the game wasn't.
I did see a BBC version that painted the wireframes with solid colour and very nice it was too. Trouble was it was on a machine with the second 6502 and the Z80 tube, which it required.
Also an actual, honest-to-god CUB monitor standing on a bridge containing two Winchester disks, which weren't required.
There is a real problem here.
If the correct and secure function of your web application relies on well behaved software hiding the easily visible source when told to, you should be fired and never be allowed to touch anything sensitive ever again.
As for the organisations running tests this way; you hired Mr quick 'n dirty to build it, look in the mirror for whose fault it is.
My favourite example of just how much of it is hype and bullshit is that there is an industry standard figure[1] for how much each soshal meejah "follower"[2] is worth to a company.
The reason? Proving that the lads' online bullshitting is actually of value as Yn >= X. [3]
[1] Presumably pulled out of an industry standard arsehole.
[2] Baaaaaa.
[3] Where Y is said bum-derived number, n is number of sheep and X is the advertising cost.
...you can take a four-year course in computer and never have a class in intellectual property,"
Try studying Law. You'll learn more about it than you ever wanted to know. This is like complaining that there's not enough about Jesus in Physics, Engineering, Mathematics, etc ad nauseum. License compatibility is for the legal eagles in procurement to wade through.
This very article just goes to illustrate what a bloody minefield of conflicting and competing terminology and licensing the whole Open Source field is. Almost as if the whole business were dreamed up by lawyers as a perpetual cash cow...
Also. If your unidentified object is moving slowly like, for instance, a balloon and your aircraft is clipping along at over 400mph, the length of time you get for a good look at whatever it is[1] is the square root of sod all.
Thus what you actually get is:
"WTF was that?"
"No idea. Looked a bit like a bloke wearing a jet pack."
"I'll call it in..."
[1] i.e. the time between "invisible dot" and "passed it".
My not giving a rat's arse about farceberk and my not giving a flying fuck what Apple does just coalesced into a magical, warm glow of meh.
Hopefully enough to get me through the day without my blood boiling at the latest round of eco-cobblers from Boris and co in lala land (formerly Scotland).
What could possibly go wrong on a project with vast scope, many stakeholders with different agendas, and an assumption of prompt data sharing?
I'm sure that this question has already been asked of the various companies tendering for the work to manage and build this massive project[1] and they've all provided a definitive answer of "Nothing at all".
[1] i.e. Infosys and some others to make it look like a competitive process if you squint a bit.
That one came up on Scott Adams' mailing list many years ago (i.e. well before "chip 'n pin", contactless, etc).
To cut a long story short, an IT bloke at a hospital bet a particularly annoying sales droid that he couldn't chuck his wallet clean through the hole in the "doughnut" from the doorway.
Turned out that he could and it was well worth $10 imagining how much fun he was going to have checking out of his hotel the following morning.
ProductionTest Servers.
I recall a long-running project finally coming to fruition. Many, many hours had been invested in test, migrating data from the old, production, system and then with the users filling in the gaps in the new, more puissant database.
Then into testing, fixing, parallel running, yadda, yadda, you get the picture.
Come the completion of this herculean effort, it was all deemed ready for live. Now there's only one of this thing, so there's no benefit whatsoever in doing a clean install to a new, production server. The test server is entirely adequate for the production tasks and so it is decided to put the test server live.
Huge success, trebles all round and party into the night.
Then the project close process runs and the Data Centre decommissions the project's allocated test servers.....(!) Oops.
What's the other big difference between a production and test server? Production servers have a backup schedule....(!!) Double oops and now they're fucked.
Actually 10 is quite good, very stable. Funny how so many people have some antiquated piece of software, written by Noah that they refuse to update / upgrade and then blame MS when it doesn't work on an OS version six or so above its original target...
That's a proper user excuse that is.
Can't remember which shite old tool from the Win 3.x days that W2K b0rked, but I do remember the grief we got upgrading to it as a result.
...take your head out of its gob.
What you have there is some actual, honest-to-god, by-a-known-artist "art" that's waaay more wall / display / saleroom friendly than pretty much everything ever produced by the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
And it only cost you $85k. You should be really bloody grateful.
Having my phone tell me where I've lost ${thing} sounds like a good idea, apart from one massive snag.
The only ${thing} that I really give enough of a toss about to spend money on being able to find it is, er, my phone.
This does seem to be a generic problem though. You try logging into your account from a handy machine to use the "find my phone" function when the 2FA login check on new devices requires the authenticator app on your phone(!) Found that one the hard way. Driving all the way home to log in, only to find that yes, your phone is indeed quite close to the machine you couldn't log in to really sucks, but not as much as driving all the way back to get it.
...How many contractors have been hit by this and what can they do to get paid?"...
Well, I suppose they could go back to the pre-IR35, umbrellaless days.
Bill directly, submit invoices and actually get paid some time after hell's frozen over, with sod-all chance of anything remotely like an apology or an interim payment.
Just remember, the "Good Old Days" had things like the Three Day Week, British Leyland cars, British Rail and GPO telephony in them.
See also: Rose tinted spectacles, repeating the mistakes of history.