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Government

Federal HQ Buildings Only Used At 25% of Capacity (techtarget.com) 52

Posted by BeauHD from the times-they-are-a-changin' dept.
dcblogs writes: According to federal officials at a U.S. House hearing Thursday, the monumental federal buildings in Washington are largely empty, with some agencies using 25% or less of their headquarters' building capacity on average. The government owns some 511 million of square feet of office space, and capacity problems open the door to the possibility of conversions to housing or commercial uses. Commercial reuse has happened before. In 2013, the General Services Administration leased the Old Post Office Building at 1100 Pennsylvania Ave., to the Trump organization for a hotel.

"The taxpayer is quite literally paying to keep the lights on even when no one is home," said Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who chairs the infrastructure subcommittee meeting. The blame for the low utilization has several causes: a shift to hybrid work, out-of-date buildings that waste space, and designs before technology reduced the need for certain types of workers. The Republicans want federal workers to return to offices and reduce telecommuting to at least pre-pandemic levels. In February, the House passed H.R. 139, the Stopping Home Office Work's Unproductive Problems Act of 2023 -- or the Show Up Act -- requiring agencies to revert to 2019 pre-pandemic telework policies. A companion bill, S. 1565, is pending in the Senate. It has six Republican sponsors but no Democrats.
Robotics

An Enormous Animatronic Dragon Caught on Fire at Disneyland (ocregister.com) 47

Posted by EditorDavid from the flash-mountain dept.
"Thousands of stunned guests were on hand Saturday night to watch a Disneyland malfunction for the ages," writes SFGate — when a 45-foot-tall animatronic dragon burst into flames, and continued burning for several minutes in front of the stunned crowd.

SFGate reports: The fire occurred during the 10:30 p.m. performance of Fantasmic, a show staged on the Rivers of America. The elaborate show uses ships, barges, projections on the water and fire effects to tell the story of Mickey Mouse's dreams and nightmares. Near the end of the show, the dragon form of Maleficent from "Sleeping Beauty," emerges from the island.

The big finale went awry Saturday, and flames engulfed the entire dragon. Video taken by shocked spectators shows the fire beginning on the dragon's face and rapidly spreading down its body as chunks of flaming debris fall to the ground. Smoke and heavy flames billow from the prop as firefighters begin hosing down the dragon. The remainder of the show was canceled, and guests were escorted out of the immediate area...

The dragon, one of the most memorable parts of Disneyland's beloved nighttime spectacular, has jokingly been referred to as Murphy, a reference to Murphy's law. Over the decades, it's been part of countless malfunctions and mishaps, although none quite so destructive as this. Though it is supposed to breathe fire, there are times when the effect doesn't work at all.
"Disneyland employees armed with garden hoses and fire extinguishers were no match for the inferno," reports the Orange County Register. "The dragon's head erupted into a fireball and a flamethrower effect from the dragon's mouth shot directly toward the stage, according to MiceChat."

The newspaper has a picture of the charred mechanical skeleton that was still lying on the ground Sunday on Tom Sawyer Island — and a 146-second video of the blaze. (Apparently realizing they're witnessing an unplanned fire, one spectator can be heard telling another one wryly, "Happy birthday, Danny.")

"Some spectators thought it was part of the show," reports the New York Times. One visitor told the newspaper, "My sister and I were talking about how it was impressive. I was like, 'Man, they can set that head on fire and it just stays perfectly intact?' So we were kind of amazed at Disney at first..."

When interviewed by the Associated Press, Ryan Laux, a frequent Disneyland visitor, "said Mickey vanished from the stage as soon as the dragon's head became engulfed in flames."

Then a voice over a loudspeaker announced the show wouldn't continue "due to unforeseen circumstances..." (as heard in the video). "We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause — and hope you enjoy the rest of your evening here at Disneyland. Once again, this performance cannot continue due to unforeseen circumstances. Thank you." At that moment the head burst into more flames, some members of the audience gasped in unison — and the announcement continued playing in Spanish. ("No podemos continuar con este presentacion...") Then cheery banjo music began playing.

At least six workers were eventually treated for smoke inhalation from the burning dragon prop, reports the New York Times.

In a statement Disney said they were now "temporarily suspending fire effects" in "select" shows in their parks around the world — "out of an abundance of caution."

Comment Re:OT, does anyone know if the liability shield (Score 1) 71

by DrusTheAxe (#60858676) Attached to: US Relief Package Provides $7 Billion for Broadband
>Instead, during a shutdown money should be given to employers to keep the business in the black and to ensure they don’t need to cut jobs. Ahhh. Trickle down economics. Nice but *it* *does* *not* *work* 30+ years of large scale 'experiments' have repeatedly demonstrated the only thing it's good for is lining the pockets of the wealthy and corporations. Subsidizing labor indirectly by paying employers to retain labor just pisses away $. Businesses thrive on *DEMAND*. Direct subsidies to citizens is the most effective solution, for people people *and* businesses. But thanks for playing

Comment Re:End the H1b program (Score 1) 492

by DrusTheAxe (#50344251) Attached to: Trump Targets the Abuse of H-1B Visas
H1-B abuses are well documented. You also forgot to mention how they also inflict downward pressure on everyone else in the industry, so even if you're not directly competing with H1-B folks they are indirectly (and notably) negatively impacting your wages. I won't bother citing references, just look through Slashdot comments along this pops up about every month. The ruling class has fiscal incentives to overlook the problems. Trump may be a lot of things, but if he does win the election it'll be interesting to see if he actually calls a spade a spade and pushes to change the H1-B rigging of the game.

Comment Re:What about C++? (Score 1) 583

by DrusTheAxe (#34224648) Attached to: The Coming War Over the Future of Java

C++ doesn't really have compile-time encapsulation

You mean BINARY encapsulation. C++ doesn't have an ABI, or strong guarantees about source-to-binary compatibility; never did.

C++ also doesn't have run-time encapsulation or really any serious run-time error checking that you don't do yourself

You're talking about bounds-checking and the like. That's not run-time encapsulation.

some people are working on problems that aren't performance-critical and would prefer a language that doesn't pound nails through our dicks. (if it doesn't have encapsulation, why do they call it "object oriented?")

C++ isn't a great APPLICATION language. Never was. But it beat the alternatives. Java arose as a 'modern COBOL' (essentially) which is one reason it's so widespread - most people build APPLICATIONS, they don't so SYSTEMS programming. Nowadays you have options, of which C++ is but one.

(if it doesn't have encapsulation, why do they call it "object oriented?")

Are you a Smalltalk developer? Clearly not, or you'd be railing instead of inquiring...

C++'s exception support is hilariously broken. 1) If you've allocated some memory for an object, and then you throw an exception, you don't have that pointer anymore

What are you smoking? What's allocated, the exception or the surrounding object? If the exception, why are you throwing something involving the heap? If the surrounding code, learn what try{} and catch{} are for.

implement garbage collection yourself; C++ weenies call this "RAII" and if they're really far down the rabbit hole they sometimes don't even realize that it's just them implementing shitty reference-counting garbage collection.

Wow. You're clearly not an experienced C++ programmer. * RAII means using constructors and (more importantly) destructors for auto-magic cleanup on exit of scope. Java can't do this due to lack of DETERMINISTIC destruction. C# can do it with Disposing. Python can (now, sorta) do this with 'with'. Other languages can do the idiom too. RAII != Garbage Collection. * reference-counting GC? Well, OK, if you say "refcnt=1". Kinda perverse way to put it.

2) You can't throw exceptions in destructors.

Yes. C++ supports EH, but has some weaknesses if you try to use it pervasively. The Standard C++ Library tries to compensate, but it's hard to live in a pure-EH C++ world (for non-trivial code). Shrug. Nothing's perfect. Which language would you hold up as the pinnacle of EH, and has no other compensating warts? Java? C#? Perl? Eiffel? Smalltalk? D?

3) In every major compiler I've used, exception handling support is implemented in such a way that it slows down every function call you make

EH blocks are cheap to construct (try), they're costly to use (catch). This is universally true of pretty much every language supporting EH. That's why you use EH for *exceptional* conditions and not normal control flow. If EH is slowing down every function call, you're using it wrong.

I mean you can't even get a goddamn stack trace out of them

You can. I've done it. But not with just the stock compiler; you need some platform-specific support. OTOH, you don't pay the perf overhead of tracking stack frames so you an provide a call stack, in case the developer wants to get at one.

You can throw arbitrary objects, but the catcher can't figure out what the hell the object is because of C++'s lack of reflection.

Ever hear of RTTI? dynamic_cast? You betray your ignorance.

C++, in an effort to be sort-of compatible with C (except where it's not compatible with C, which makes you wonder why they bothered in the first place)

You obviously are rather new the programming. C compatibility was (and is) important for C++ success, to provide a bridge for C developers and libraries to use C++ w/o throwing away every single piece of knowledge and code first. If that 'bridging' wasn't important we'd all be using Eiffel or Oberon or something more exotic. And C got quite a few things right; why should C++ discard them when it can embrace them.

So you have C++ templates, but you still need to deal with C macros.

They don't solve the same problems. Using one instead of the other is only partially successful.

You have std::vectors, but you still need to deal with arrays.

Because std:vector is so much more effective and can totally replace arrays... When was vector created? C++ successfully was in use before that. Do you know what C++98 is? Do you know why it was delayed from ~93? Do you know who Alex Stepanov is? Zortech C++? Glockenspiel? C++ with Classes? And even if you supplanted arrays with vectors, that may not bother you but the array bounds checking overhead is an issue for some. If that doesn't fit your needs that's fine, there's plenty of languages to choose from, please do so. But don't expect others to be satisfied with your more narrowly defined needs and acceptable tradeoffs.

You have std::string and char*, and neither is particularly good.

You won't get much argument from me on std::basestring (let's call a spade a spade - or do you have no need for Unicode?). I find several key design points and missing functionality (trim, anyone?) exceedingly annoying and confining. If I wanted a totally protected smothering environment I'd go use Java or something.

Making things even funnier, C++ doesn't like to use its new features and prefers the C stuff

So we should invalidate 30+ years of existing code and knowledge, because you want a different more mothering language? Yeah. That's a real popular approach to take. There are languages closer to your desired feature set. Use them if they better suit your needs and temperament.

the standard iostream is pants-on-head retarded

Not too much argument here. Better than pre-C++98, but. Java got it much righter. Of course, Java had the benefit of learning from C++ on this one. I'd be shocked if Java didn't do it better. As for printf, yeah, that's a shame. The type-safety is nice, as is the extensibility but the behavior and usability are (IMO) pretty poor compared to printf. P.S. You forgot to mention printf vs. cout in multi-threaded programs.

You send values like std::hex or std::setw(int) to set parameters, so when you grab a stream you don't really know what the fuck will happen.

I thought setw/etc only applied to the NEXT value, then got reset (which solves the stateful-what-is-the-state problem, at the cost of uglier syntax and usability).

The standard library is completely anemic.

I thought this was a focus for C++next. Bjarne has (in the past 10 years) lamented the lack of breadth of library behavior and wished 20-20 hindsight they'd done more. If that's the worst flaw it's a smashing success.

You can use...but which of the many, many mutually incompatible wrappers are you going to use? Is that wrapper still going to be maintained when you're working on your program a few years down the line?

So you want everything included in the language/standard library? Wow. That's hubris. Can you point to one language that does that, and is successful? Java? LOL. Just how many non-java.* packages does a non-trivial Java app use? Python? Not bad, given the breadth of the library (batteries included), but not quite complete. Improving constantly, but it wasn't long ago sqlite, etree and others were external libraries not included with the standard library.

The STL (and any other template-heavy code, particularly code that does a lot of operator overloading, too) also just loves to dump gigantic unintelligible multi-kilobyte error messages at the slightest provocation

This is a known weakness. Do you know what the ARM is? Do you know what Bjarne said about templates back then? It's been 25+ years and even he's still waiting. Shrug. Judicious use of templates works well. Deeply wallowing in them takes a certain level of committment, and acceptance of things like ugly error messages when things go really off track. What language has no like flaw?

it's not until you need to use it for a large codebase with lots of other people, some of whom have already moved on to other companies, that you realize what an unholy mess the language is.

LOL! Why do you think that's limited to c++? Ever picked up any large codebase you didn't write? Java? Especially throw in some Spring and Hibernate, if not EJB. Perl? Ever see a Ruby on Rails project? I can write shitty code in 30 languages. Apparently, so can many others... Writing functional, correct, performant, MAINTABLE code is HARD. Many lack the time or skill to do it. C++ is nowhere the worst offender. Quite the opposite. C++ is a tool. It can be quite powerful AND maintainable, in the right hands. Just because every 6 year old can't properly use a miter saw is no reason to say miter saws suck and no one should use them.

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