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I don't know where on earth you got those numbers for Houston from... that would be a world record by an amazing margin. Very few places to date have recorded wet bulb temps above 35 degrees.

I can only assume you are putting incorrect readings into the calculators.

Are you making sure to put the temperature at the time of the humidity reading, since they reach their maximums at very different times of the day. If you just put max temp and humidity readings for a day in you are going to be wildly wrong.

The mismatch is expectations about what would be known from sequencing DNA doesn't speak to the validity of the analogy but to the poor mental models about the reality of code, computation and systems we have.

Though I agree that the analogy doesn't really buy you much useful leverage when seeking useful understanding.

Software engineering isn't special in this regard. It happens in a lot of other domains. Software often doesn't have a lot of the constraints of other disciplines so effects like these are more pronounced.

I would characterize all the statements you made as false. Though it does depend on what your standards are.

Most of the critical things are done well enough, but that is a pretty low bar.

Even without the code differences just the connecting those services between panels is hard.

Your service life is also going to take a hit due to having a lot more of the most unreliable aspects in construction - a joint.

What do you think bathtubs, showers, sinks, taps, doors and most fittings are?

There is a ton of prefabrication in construction already. There are also large libraries of shared details.

Most of the bits that are not already prefabricated are the bits that don't have simple interfaces. Either to each other or to their surrounding environment.

I would say the biggest factor is that it is a very repetitive rectangular box.

Overall design and how it is detailed is the dominant factor in time it takes to build things.

Do I have lots of joints that have to be perfect or can they be rough cut and covered with trim?

Do things assembly easily without having to fiddle due to having the correct tolerances?

Cuts and joins are what take the most time. The less cuts and joins you have the cheaper and faster things will be. Also cuts and joins that have to be done to high tolerances take a lot longer.

It can actually be very problematic and difficult, depending how how easy the new slab location is to access now that you have a building in the way and presumably landscaping you want to preserve. This can end up adding a considerable amount of expense to a job compared to a bare site.

Depending on how you measure a lot of prefab construction you don't save time overall (design to finished) or end up with better quality. You also tend to up with buildings that will fail earlier due to having a lot more of the most risky components of any built form, joints.

I have hope that as designers and tools get better at dealing with the connection detailing and with material/assembly tolerances it will lead to better outcomes in the future.

I would really recommend watching "The Building Science of Prefabricated Construction". It does a good job of going over the realities of this form of construction.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIeZlCfweMo

For sure. I don't know how you overcome the inertia of our societies structure to head towards something that would likely be better for the majority of citizens. Which is a problem in many more domains that just civil works auctions.

I can see how the recommendation you mooted would improve incentives in some procurement domains. Large civil works isn't one of them however.

Oh for sure, I should probably add a non-profit driven caveat to the actors in the system.

I am not sure if you can implement a system that would work well when your actors are profit driven work that needs to be done can only be done exclusively by one entity at a time, and as a bonus that extra profit gives you more feedback into how the system operates. There aren't a lot of natural negative feedback to keep things under control in that system.

Especially if your goals are to reduce overhead.

It is most definitely a fair discussion to have, and the bidding/financing/contractual system for these projects really does need to change to have better incentives.

I just don't think your incentives would produce better outcomes, from my perspective it would make things worse.

The problem as I see it is you don't have to actively run it over budget in bad faith.

Even as an ethical actor you can only price what is specified. However, you can then use your knowledge about likely the real variances that will be needed and risk profile to place a bid that takes this into account to remove margin or discount the bid price.

That just wouldn't work for large civil projects for so many reasons.

It also seems like you are only trying to address the problem of people introducing needless variances as a way increasing profit.

Which is not the case being discussed here and I don't think it is major reason for cost overruns. They haven't requested an increase, they have found out that to satisfy the engineering requirements of the project that more work has to be done.

How do you specify the contract so the unknown unknowns can be priced into the bid and compared to each other. Given that resolving those unknowns costs about as much as the just doing the actual work.

It is definitely a system issue. Our contractual/financial system just doesn't work well when confronted with large complex projects that have enough variance and unknown unknowns. Since they really push to have everything committed to up front, with really basic rules around how to handle change and variance.

Let alone that we basically award this work one estimated number and the ability to get through a paper work hurdle.

If you start making those rules complex it becomes hard to compare bids to each other, since your bids are likely to become non-transitive based on the scenarios.

Cost plus is the normal way this is side stepped, but unless you have a system that is mostly ethical actors that can break down. And if you have all ethical actors pretty much any system will work...

Interestingly enough, the part number is not listed in the MX series datasheet. What is the PCB layout like, would you be able to splice in SMD diodes where they are needed :)

[1] http://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Cherry%20PDFs/MX%...

Have you tried digikey? They don't seem to have the exact part number you are seeking. But they do have MX1A-E1NW which is a similar part but without the internal diode. Not sure what impact this will have with the Kinesis keyboard however.

http://search.digikey.com/us/en/cat/switches/pushbutton/1114...

You could also arge that adopters 'sql style RDBMS' end up building a NoSQL datastore.

If you find you are using a lot of EAV, polymorphic associations, multicolumn attributes, trees, graphs it might be a better option to go down one the on of the many NoSQL routes. Key/Value, Column Stores, Document and Graph databases. Sometimes you can make huge gains in design simplicity because you persistance and/or queries map far more cleanly.

An interesting example of "NoSQL" on top of an "RDBMS" is Salesforce [1].

A huge upside to RDBMS in my view is that they are 'well understood' in production, and operations know how to deal with them.

It is a big design space out there, and you can make a lot of tradeoffs :)

[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/SalesForce-Multi-Tenant-A...

I don't think breakdowns would be much of an issue, for one they aren't complicated mechanical devices in the slightest, they seem to be even more minimal than a bicycle.

The difference between waiting a couple of hours for a crane one day every few months, seems like a good tradeoff against sitting in gridlock everyday or the risk of being run down by a car imho.

But yes I agree that humans are not rational and would not do it for petty reasons. Can easily solve the 'look at my legs' problem with opaque tubes :P

Depends how subversive he was trying to be I guess. I was thinking more around the query layer for bigtable etc. He probably would have known the stack top to bottom.

I am not sure this is a 'solvable' problem. You can mitigate by always working in pairs. But even that just reduces the potential for privacy breaches.

I got the impression that SRE basically have low level access to the storage stack. So wouldn't be subject to most of the normal application level logging that I would assume would red flag this behaviour pretty fast.

The only way to get around this is to have someone audit all their actions constantly, which you need someone equally or more familiar with the systems they are working with.

I think that is pretty impossible to implement that level of overview with humans, the best way to go normally is the 'buddy system' so no one can access a system unless they have a 'buddy' with them. Like the military do in nuclear weapon silos.

If you have a good bank, they should be limiting it to y wrong tries every x minutes, and have good fraud detection mechanisms in place. So the viability of brute forcing bank passwords should be rather low. So the risk looks rather minimal compared to the large scale exploitation that is possible with the other method.

I don't think we are in the target demographic for these 'features'. If you know how to structure queries, and can touch type the usefulness is greatly diminished.

However there are a lot of people out there that can't touch type and have to reformulate their query multiple times before they get 'acceptable' results. So Google instant actually has a meaningful increase of their iteration time, and thus enables them to find better results faster.

I wonder if they didn't want to do a Buzz in terms of making all your private information suddenly public, and might ease into features such as scrobbling over time. The amount of spam on there is probably their biggest problem at the moment. It is hard for me to objectively judge as my market segment isn't catered for at all in terms of features. It will be interesting to see what the rest of the population think of it. To me it feels far to much like it has been designed to drive consumption of 'popular' music and 'me too' buying.

EDIT: The top 10 pop chart artists all seem to have around 100k followers, will be interesting to see how it goes.

I wouldn't say everyone does that. I would just say that it is a artifact of the incremental nature of building a .emacs over many years, and isn't really worth refactoring.

Does not seem to provide any credible research that either position have an effect on innovation.

Basically seems to be trying to argue that because open source advocates that software developers don't read patents that we are incapable of understanding what is out there and where innovation needs to be done. (Since it is recommended that we don't since then we can be done for willful infringement)

He doesn't seem to believe in independent invention and sides with who gets their first should get be granted monopoly. Therefore he doesn't think copyright is a valid protection since he wants a enforced monopoly.

Doesn't seem to really understand the software landscape at large. Seems to be advocating an utopia enterprise vision where each component is created just once and everyone just uses that one. No reinvention, small refinements, or customisations needed.

The thing is that perfect anonymization implies that the dataset would be useless since by definition it would contain no information. If you can begin correlating data points with enough outside information you will be able to extract at least a shadow of the original information.

Sort of the uncanny valley for intelligence. It astounds me how many people don't trust programs/automations when it is almost provably better at performing a given task. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I don't think that moving servers is at all realistic option for google. I am much more worried about traffic logging at the isp than I am of what google records. However I will concede that because of the shear volume of data that google collects and retains it is a much is a worrying if they decide that it is ok for them to go dredging.

That doesn't sound like something that couldn't be bypassed already with just a tiny bit of hardware hacking.