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Comment Re:You need to research that? (Score 1) 141

It's harder to riot when you have a job.

It's easier to have a job (at least, in a manufacturing sector) when you don't approve the Trans Pacific Partnership, or ask for the ability to fast track it. IT's also easier to have a job when your government imposes tariffs on nations like China, based on environmental and labor standards that are enforced locally, such that it makes no sense to offshore the manufacturing sector in the first place.

That said, I think that most inner city teens wouldn't have jobs, even if that discrepancy were corrected, since the value of the labor of an inner city teen is less than the current minimum wage. So you'd hire someone whose labor is equal to or more valuable than the minimum wage for those jobs instead, like an out of work adult.

Comment The article is not about *stopping* riots.... (Score 2) 141

The article is not about *stopping* riots.... it's about *predicting* them, so you know where to set up the news vans, and you know where to go to be on camera so you can demonstrate that you are a "community leader".

If you actually *stopped* the riots, it'd be a hell of a slow news day, and you'd have to run human interest stories about the baby ducks who've infested some guys swimming pool, or stories about cats.

Comment Re:How about... (Score 1) 403

How about "Emergency services personnel can't use a pulse oximetry device on your tattooed skin in order to save your life following a car accident"?

Don't most pulse oximeters work by shining a certain frequency of light through fingernails?

No. They shine through the pad of the fingertip to the blood vessels there. Otherwise they would not work on people wearing nail polish.

Comment Re:How about... (Score 1) 403

How about "Emergency services personnel can't use a pulse oximetry device on your tattooed skin in order to save your life following a car accident"?

The device that's being interfered with is a pretty standard non-invasive pulse ox device that happens to be built into the watch.

Maybe the paramedics should use a standard finger pulse-ox meter instead of an iWatch.

The iWatch is not a certified medical device. I am specifically talking about standard pulse ox on someone who has done something like this to their fingers:

http://blog-cdn.tattoodo.com/w...

If people are going to tattoo their wrists and faces, they are sure as hell going to do their fingers.

Comment Re:Well... (Score 1) 108

With some optimism that might only be thousands of years rather than hundreds of Millions.

But it's only necessary for Earth to be uninhabitable for a short time to end the Human race. And that can happen due to man or nature, today. If people aren't somewhere else during that process, that's the end.

Comment Re:I agree. (Score 1) 636

The real problem here is that IT is regarded as something like a janitorial service, rather than an integral business function.

You presume that Disney had only 125 total IT staff in the first place, and laid all of them off. From my reading of things, they laid off only the janitorial service type IT people, and kept the rest of them in house.

Comment Re:How about other watches/fitness trackers? (Score 1) 403

It's the color of LED that they use in the sensors. This has been a known issue since the FitBit hit the market with green LEDs a couple of years ago. Other smart watch vendors, like Samsung, learned the lesson and used other colors so have no problem. Apple, being Apple, seems to have decided that they were somehow "pioneers" in this market and didn't bother to do any actual research on what works for existing devices.

It's the color of LED that they use in the sensors. This has been a known issue since the FitBit hit the market with green LEDs a couple of years ago. Other smart watch vendors, like Samsung, learned the lesson and used other colors so have no problem.

If you tattoo your fingers, it will interfere with pulse ox devices. This is well known in the medical community. They generally work around it by using a different model and clipping it to your ear, scrotum, or some other place that doesn't have ink.

If you have inked yourself all over, they insert an optical catheter to take the measurements directly, or resort to semi-frequent blood draws.

This is what you get when you integrate an off-the shelf medical sensor into a wearable device not intended or certified to do medical things, and then don't have alternatives when someone has managed to screw with the ability of the sensor to operate by decorating themselves like a Christmas tree.

Comment Re:Straitlaced Engineers (Score 1) 403

This is exactly my problem with Apple and many other product designers.

Yeah, most capacitive coupling (read as "nearly any touch sensitive device") doesn't work with gloves, unless they are specially made.

It also doesn't work with artificial limbs, which I think is probably a more important issue.

You can modify an artificial limb pretty trivially to make it work, just as you can modify a glove pretty trivially to make it work. I helped someone modify their Boch's artificial arms to allow them to use the touchpad on their IBM Thinkpad (also capacitively coupled). I declined to patent the modifications, and instead disclosed them into the public domain.

Comment How about... (Score 0) 403

I hardly think "Can't use an Apple Watch" ranks very highly on the list of reasons not to get a tattoo since there's such an easy workaround -- don't buy an apple watch.

How about "Emergency services personnel can't use a pulse oximetry device on your tattooed skin in order to save your life following a car accident"?

The device that's being interfered with is a pretty standard non-invasive pulse ox device that happens to be built into the watch.

Comment I agree. (Score 4, Informative) 636

I agree.

If you follow the second order links down to what Disney actually did, they outsourced their IT to a contracting agency.

When they did this, they laid off 125 full time employees in the process, and between three of the contracting agencies providing the services to replace them, there were apparent;y 65 H1-B applications in the last 3 years. Presumably, not all 65 went to Disney, because the contracting agencies contract services out to companies other than Disney. In fact, a vast number of dark data center porn and shopping sites are located in that area of the country, down by Los Angeles, where the majority of that kind of content is produced.

What this story is actually about, is complaining that the full time workers were replaced with contractors, some of whom were probably in the U.S. working for the contracting agencies on either H1 or L1 visas.

The summary is a gross misrepresentation of the facts here, and going with a contracting agency is a valid mechanism for ensuring "Just In Time" capability, without over-employing in order to handle upsurges in workloads. It's how janitorial and security services are handled (when you have a large company event, you have the contracted agencies put on more security people for the event itself, and added janitorial people post-event to clean up afterward.

That said, the usual route a decent company will follow when out-sourcing to a local agency, as opposed to off-shoring the work entirely, is to require that the contracting agency hire a certain percentage of the workers that are being laid off to replace them with contractors. This has the effect of ensuring continuity of service, providing a built-in mentoring capability to the contracting agency for the processes and procedures being contracted out, and in general providing continuity of employment for at least some of their existing staff.

It falls under the category of "Not Being Dickish About Switching Over To Contractors".

But the idea that they should not be switching over to contractors at all, for something like IT services, which are generally modular, replicable, and have uniformly applicable skill sets, if what you are spending your time doing is pulling wires, spinning up VMs, installing system software on replacement desktop/laptop machines, and so on, is patently absurd. These are "cog jobs", where any sufficiently skilled cog can replace any other sufficiently skilled cog in the machine, and you probably won't lose a marching step over the replacement.

That, and surge scalability, make them rather ideal for out-sourcing.

Frankly, I'm surprised companies like RackSpace are renting out their IT people, rather than forcing everyone to live on RackSpace racks; it's a pretty ideal scenario for them, in terms of profit per employee, and gives them buffer for their own internal surge scalability issues. They get borrowable capacity, and other people pay to maintain that capacity at a certain level.

Add the fact that a lot of deployment is on OpenStack with standard deployment tools, no matter if you're working on your cloud or working on someone else's cloud: all the tools are the same, so all the skills are pretty much transferrable.

This is kind of what happens when you sufficiently commoditize an industry through standardization.

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