Crazy ants take on fire ants and win - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/02/crazy-ants-take-on-fire-ants-and-win/ <comment><USER2> If you didn't read the NYT's magazine article from last year, "There's a Reason They Call Them 'Crazy Ants'", you should check it out:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/magazine/crazy- ants.html?p...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/magazine/crazy- ants.html?pagewanted=all)

One of the most memorable things I've read all last year

> _They arrived at Mike the Hog-a-Nator's house a few months after he first > saw them at the cardiologist's office. One day his air conditioning stopped > working. A musty smell seeped from the vents in his living-room floor. So he > powered up his Shop-Vac to clear them. By the time he was done, he'd sucked > out five gallons of ants._

Soon he and his wife were waking up to find vast, frantic networks of ants zipping around the kitchen floor in all directions. When the picture on their 50-inch box television started flickering, Mike took off the back panel and found the guts throbbing with ants. He got rid of the television.

Outside, dead ants began pooling around the base of the house in heaps so high that they looked like discarded coffee grounds. (It's common in Texas these days for a person who is shown one of these heaps of dead ants to take several seconds to realize that the solid surface he or she is scanning for ants actually is the ants.) Mike laid out poison, generating more heaps of dead ants. But new ants merely used those dead ants as a bridge over the poison and kept streaming inside.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link. Its a fascinating, if somewhat scary, story to contemplate. We fight off waves of so-called 'argentinian' ants (small ants alleged to be native to Argentina) but they tend to be controllable with sugar bait traps.

Like others who commented on that story and have posted elsewhere the attraction to electricity is interesting as well. And given their reproductive rates, one wonders about their use as a feedstock for a bio-fuel process. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _They used nail polish to seal the acidopore of one group of crazy ants, and simply sham-treated a second control group. After coming into contact with fire ant venom, the crazy ants with the sealed acidopores—which could not secrete any chemical defenses—had a survival rate of just 48 percent, whereas 98 percent of the control group survived. Clearly, something originating from the acidopore was increasing the survival of ants covered in venom._

Should we give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the nail polish can't cause that effect?

edit: having now read the paper, there was no mortality in controls with their acidopore sealed with nail polish.

</comment><comment><USER5> "By testing crazy ant secretions, the researchers found that the life-saving substance was actually formic acid from the crazy ants' own venom."

That quote reminded me of "The Ant" by Ogden Nash, which ends:

Would you be calm and placid

If you were full of formic acid?

<comment><USER6> Formic acid, whose name comes from the Latin word for ant, formica [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formic_acid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formic_acid)

So yeah, Formic acid means "Ant acid" really, and that's what hurts.

<comment><USER7> Weird, I took an antacid and it was good.

<comment><USER8> *eyeroll :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "When threatened, fire ants inject or dab their enemy"

NO. They bite you regardless of being threatened that's what makes them so damn evil. They bite everything that can be bitten. If just one gets in your house and climbs on your couch it will bite your leg just for the hell of it. That's why every time I see a fire ant mound I pour rubbing alcohol down it. I have a big respect for normal ants, they're hard workers, but fire ants are from hell.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well that explains these two videos from my house this week!

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/vkhkwk0w7wkzug2/MOV_0387.MOV.mov](https://www.dropbox.com/s/vkhkwk0w7wkzug2/MOV_0387.MOV.mov) [https://www.dropbox.com/s/6qh83sq8hrpoarx/IMG_0555.MOV-1.mov](https://www.dropbox.com/s/6qh83sq8hrpoarx/IMG_0555.MOV-1.mov)

These ants are all over my place right now and it is disgusting.

We had an exterminator come out yesterday and he said that he had never seen anything like this before. Hoping what he did will work.

If anyone on here has suggestions, I really want these things out of my place.

<comment><USER11> Also, there are some white granules/powder that ants consider tasty and take to their nests. In a moist and warm nest the substance produces carbon dioxide which suffocates the colony. I think it's sugar mixed with baking soda. You can also use it to destroy nests around your house.

<comment><USER12> I thought it was fine-granule sugar mixed with boric acid.

<comment><USER13> boric acid works like a charm (just draw the lines using the chalk if feeling like powder is too inconvenient). And it is non toxic. Why would people try anything else, usually some poison, and/or pay to exterminator, etc... ?

<comment><USER14> From personal experience, I've tried all of these and none of them work well, or quickly.

I've used boric acid, baking soda, and everything else. Even chalk. And had ants just step over them, not care, nor disappear (at least not within 1 month or so).

Tried the sugar trick, too (different house). And nothing.

I didn't call an exterminator but I did lay down boric acid and baking soda and used white vinegar as well to deter them. It took a month or so but they did disappear eventually.

Also, my user name.

<comment><USER13> interesting, just googled:

[http://homeguides.sfgate.com/homemade-ant-killer-boric- acid-...](http://homeguides.sfgate.com/homemade-ant-killer-boric- acid-74569.html)

"Boric acid ant killers aren't effective against all species of ant. They work best against ants that are a nuisance in your home, such as the Argentine ant, the Pharoah ant and the odorous house ant. These ants are small and usually black or reddish-black, often called sugar ants. Other ants that normally stay outdoors, such as harvester ants or fire ants, aren't as receptive to boric acid ant baits."

we lived through the series of apartments in the Valley, and boric acid carried us through even though neighbors were heavily infested with ants/roaches. The ants were small black ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> at the end of the article: "Related PSA: crazy ants are attracted to electronics. So if you're a technology lover living in the southeastern US, watch your computers and appliances because these tiny invaders are headed your way."

If I remember right, these things are basically worse overall than the fire ants because they can really screw up the infrastructure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I thought the article odd in that it didn't talk about if crazy ants were preferred to fire ants in general.

<comment><USER16> The general opinion among others I know here in SE Texas was "Yes! Fire ants are going down! Wait a second..."

Dealing with fire ants was pretty much a way of life, and sure it's great that the fire ants are down (and now fleas are up!), but we don't really have any good OTC treatments for raspberry ants, and the sight of a handful of them is enough to stir a little fear in a homeowner's heart.

At least down here, no one wants the raspberry ants either. You knew that if you poisoned every fire ant mound in your yard each time one popped up, you were generally ok (and would have a bit less labor if your neighbors did the same), raspberry ants? Sheesh - all you can do is call the exterminator and hope they can make a dent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is weird watching two ants fight. Mammals it is pretty easy to understand what they are trying to do, hit eachother or bite eachother or something.

But ants? It just kind of looks like they are crawling on eachother. I have no idea how one ant bests another in ant-on-ant combat. Kind of cool

<comment><USER18> Hives are some of natures coolest entities. They do things in aggregate.

So much of what these little creatures do is senseless individually, and clever in mass. I like them. Shame they're such a pain in the ass.

<comment><USER19> Along those lines, there is a species of bees that works in unison to kill huge hornets by simply enveloping them and using body heat to cook them, which works thanks to a 4-degree difference in each species' maximum survivable temperature.

(Video warning: Lots of bees, hornets, and some flashing lights that may affect epileptic viewers.)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6m40W1s0Wc#t=22](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6m40W1s0Wc#t=22)

<comment><USER20> Slight correction (or maybe just clarification) is that the ball of bees generate a temperature of around 47c not just because that's their body temperature, but by vibrating muscles very fast to heat it up. Pretty incredible what nature comes up with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sounds straight out of Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow's Rapture of the Nerds - scary!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds)

</comment><comment><USER22> Well, I recently had my cable demarcation box colonized by fire ants, so if tawny crazy ants are worse, maybe I should just move now.

<comment><USER23> I had my driveway gate control box invaded by regular ants (Argentine I think), along with some mysterious cocoons that made it malfunction. It was easy to get the ants to leave, but repairing the controller was a lot harder.

Gross pictures here: [http://www.righto.com/2010/08/getting-literal-bugs-out- of-dr...](http://www.righto.com/2010/08/getting-literal-bugs-out-of- driveway.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why are they "attracted to electronics"? Could one build a trap of sourts that lures them towards some junk electronics and then kills them there (electricity or whatever one can think of)

<comment><USER25> > Why are they "attracted to electronics"?

I've heard they eat the insulation on the wires. This was a issue in Texas during the (later cancelled) Superconducting Supercollider project -- the ants kept eating the insulation off the wires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> For me, these "crazy" ants demonstrate a risky but valuable startup lesson for certain industries: Think about the biggest weapon your huge competitor has and use the _same_ thing to fight them, they'll be unprepared. Rather than running away from the fire ants venomous sting, as any sane creature would do, they've developed a way to go right at it and nullify one of its biggest advantages. Caution: you will need a "secret sauce", like these guys do.

Obligatory pg reference that's related: "We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors to follow us over difficult ground. "

<comment><USER27> "Garbage trucks full of money" isn't the biggest weapon our competitor has, it's like #4 or #5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Everything I've read says that no known normal ant baits or sprays work on crazy ants, but what do they eat? Surely the ants eat something, and that something can be poisoned.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yet another reason to stay away from the southeast.

</comment><comment><USER30> >Related PSA: crazy ants are attracted to electronics. So if you're a technology lover living in the southeastern US, watch your computers and appliances because these tiny invaders are headed your way.

Wait what? How/why are ants attracted to electronics?

<comment><USER25> > Wait what? How/why are ants attracted to electronics?

It's an open question. During the (later cancelled) Superconducting Supercollider project in Texas, ants kept invading and eating the insulation off the cables:

[http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/15/us/fire-ants-to-make- build...](http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/15/us/fire-ants-to-make-building-of- atom-smasher-no-picnic.html) (1988)

Quote: "Researchers who hope to study the secrets of nature at the Government's planned $4.4 billion atom smasher may first need protection from a venomous ant with a penchant for munching its way through underground cables."

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> A few years ago I had an old Thinkpad which I had not used in a few months when one day I decided to fire it up, but when I opened the lid it was an ant farm!

Not sure of the ant variety, but I'm in Hawai'i and we have little red fire ants in some areas.

</comment><comment><USER32> Reminds me of Leiningen Versus the Ants [http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html](http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> Does anything eat these ants in South America?

<comment><USER34> And then we had to send in snake eating gorillas to take care of the needle snakes, and then when wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death. No problem.

<comment><USER33> I was asking about their original home area, surely something there has figured out how to limit their numbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I have seen fast moving ants in Iranian desert called loot desert, in eastern central Iran which do not have marching line up like most smaller ants, and their venom kill other smaller ants in less than a minute, if a man is bit by them the place of bite goes red and irritating for 24 hours.</comment>


The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union Mapped the World - <AUTHOR> https://redatlasbook.com/ <comment><USER2> Here's a Soviet map of the San Francisco Bay Area:

[https://i.imgur.com/BxDJC6f.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/BxDJC6f.jpg) (direct link)

[https://imgur.com/a/FiEGm](https://imgur.com/a/FiEGm) (Imgur page in case the above doesn't work)

The map appears to date from the early 1970s: Highway 280 is there but appears to have Cañada Road routing from before the ridge freeway was finished. Or I could be misreading that part of the map and it is from later, maybe the 1980s?

It's interesting how many inaccuracies there are. Living in Menlo Park, I checked a few local landmarks. Palo Alto Airport is in the right place, but where is San Carlos Airport? They seem to have moved it across the street from Facebook!

And note the airport near where 280 and Highway 92 cross.

The map is also very hard to read. Look at Highway 101. Unlike 280, it's mostly in white, but if you follow it through Redwood City just north of Woodside Road (Highway 84), it looks like 101 is routed along Veterans Boulevard - which was bypassed years before this map was made. If you look again, there is a brown stretch that is close to the actual freeway alignment.

Then follow 280 down into Los Altos, where it changes from brown to white as it approaches Cupertino and into San Jose. This bit of randomly swapping freeway colors between brown and white seems to be a common theme.

Many of the local streets are recognizable but have a very approximate hand- drawn look to them. I'll be curious to hear what anyone else notices in their neighborhood.

This is easily the most interesting, and worst quality, map of the Bay Area I've seen. I wonder why it has so many little things wrong, when they could have simply sent a spy into any local gas station to buy an accurate, well drawn, and easy to read road map?

<comment><USER3> > spy into any local gas station to buy an accurate, well drawn, and easy to > read road map?

How do you know that it is accurate?

<comment><USER4> At least it will be accurate where normal people usually drive--otherwise those normal people would complain.

<comment><USER5> Before GPS, it was mostly the topology that mattered to motorists, but the military probably wanted accurate coordinates on everything.

<comment><USER4> True! Of course topology includes getting the petrol station on the right side of the road.

I even heard of some maps with a 'sliding scale' that eg has the city centre larger. You can't even do that on a flat piece of paper without serious distortions in your coordinates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I remember a talk from a map librarian who said that the Soviets didn't just copy western maps, as they often had more detail and unique elements that the western maps didn't have. One thing, for example was the heights of bridges, and widths of roads.

You might want to jump straight into the examples: [https://redatlasbook.com/cityplans](https://redatlasbook.com/cityplans)

Flash is needed though...

<comment><USER6> Makes sense about the bridges and roads thing. You need to know that for tanks. Even today in Germany you'll see tiny bridges crossing a stream, a sign right by that says "this bridge rated for 70,000 pounds" (so can hold multiple tanks at once).

<comment><USER7> Is that literally true? I would have expected Germans to rate their bridges in tons, not pounds/pfund.

<comment><USER8> I live in Germany and have never seen a sign using pounds, only tons.

<comment><USER9> Read the German Wikipedia article on the subject which shows German signs in short tons (non-metric unit): [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militärische_Lastenklasse](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militärische_Lastenklasse)

<comment><USER10> The class numbers only roughly correspond to weight, so you could just as well consider them metric tons (1000 kg).

<comment><USER9> You definitely can't consider them metric tons. If the bridge you're about to cross has a maximum advertised load of 120 sh tn and you consider it safe to drive your 120 m tn vehicle over the bridge on the basis of that you're going to be putting a 132.3 m tn load on the bridge, or roughly 10% more than it's rated for.

<comment><USER10> As I said above, these signs do _not_ show a literal maximum weight. They show a _load class_.

<comment><USER9> Right, I was overly simplifying. I meant to say a 120 sh ton MLC-calculated weight, not a vehicle that's exactly 120 tons since as the article goes into the class needs to take into account axle count etc.

What I don't understand is your claim that "you could just as well consider them metric tons". These are short tons with caveats, i.e. the eventual number depends on more than just the raw weight, but the raw weight is one aspect of the calculation.

So if you were to make that calculation on the basis of metric instead of lbs how aren't you going to introduce something like a 10% error in the MLC you come up with?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wired did an article on this topic: [https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret- cold-war-maps/](https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/)

</comment><comment><USER12> > This is the never-before-told story of the world's most comprehensive > mapping endeavour

Is it? Arguably, the mapping efforts of Google and others have reached further and collected more and more accurate data (street view, lidar, etc.).

<comment><USER13> Check Amap, they have coloured 3d maps of all global cities with photo textures.

[http://www.navibiz.com.cn/e/NewsFocus/nf-123-02.html](http://www.navibiz.com.cn/e/NewsFocus/nf-123-02.html)

<comment><USER4> Interesting.

For what it's worth: Google Earth (and Google Maps) have 3d buildings and vegetation etc now, too.

(But I wonder whether it's based on new data, or they just use machine learning to guess the 3d shapes from the 2d data they already had.)

<comment><USER13> in case of autonavi, their 3d maps are human modeled and textured just like a giant 3d game

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> However civilian maps were deliberately obfuscated in the Soviet Union. [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide- admits-m...](http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/03/world/soviet-aide-admits-maps- were-faked-for-50-years.html?mcubz=0)

</comment><comment><USER15> This site has some great links: [https://sovietmaps.com/resources](https://sovietmaps.com/resources)

</comment><comment><USER16> Meanwhile, the SR71 made pictures</comment>


Introduction to Linguistics for Natural Language Processing - <AUTHOR> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1112/L100/introling.pdf

<comment><USER2> Aside - We need a replacement for scribd.

Just yesterday I was forced to take SCREENSHOTS of a 15 page doc because the save button was greyed out. Why? why even give uploaders the option? /rage

<comment><USER3> <http://docs.google.com/gview>

Use their form or add "?url=..." e.g. [http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/tea...](http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1112/L100/introling.pdf)

Scribd is unlikely to be replaced here, as it's a YC startup <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1326047> It improved enormously a while back (a year or so ago?), but now it's gotten worse again. (e.g. for me it adds the UI twice, and it's terribly slow - it's utterly unusable. I immediately back out whenever a search brings me to it). It's a pity, because the problem it sets out to solve is still a real one (reading pdf's online).

<comment><USER4> That sounds terrible. If you have time, would you mind emailing me (email@example.com)? I'd like to get that reproduced and fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's the uploader who decides to now make the document downloadable? Copyrights maybe...?</comment>


I love typography - Choosing typefaces (a few guidelines) - <AUTHOR> http://ilovetypography.com/2008/04/04/on-choosing-type/

<comment><USER2> I share your love of typography. At some point, we might even see more aural typography (sound fonts) in screen readers. Imagine the difference between a text read out loud by Christopher Walken vs. Audrey Hepburn...

</comment><comment><USER3> Important topic, worthless post.

<comment><USER4> Because?

<comment><USER5> The article basically says: "Typography is subjective. There are no rules -- especially regarding serif and sans-serif fonts. Look at your design on the screen and on paper. If it looks bad, change it." This advice seems self- evident and unhelpful to me.

Here are the three points in the article that I think are genuinely helpful:

\- Times New Roman works better in narrow columns than wide columns.

\- Some fonts look good on screen and bad on paper, and vice versa.

\- Lighter fonts work better with small margins, blacker fonts work better with large margins.

The article seems quite long for relatively little content.

<comment><USER4> Consider that you aren't his audience; his is a blog constellation that includes mostly young and amateur designers, where the notion of whether there are hard-and-fast rules for setting in serif or sans is in dispute. Lots of good programming posts are similarly unintelligible to people who don't code.

Consider also that the notion of typesetting that he's discussing is different than yours: if you're a typical Hacker News reader, you want to know how to make a good looking web app template. A designer often gets many weeks for a single project, during which they may be working with the final content, and may very well print out several roughs and tack them to the wall to look at.

The post quotes Bringhurst, and if you haven't already, you should go buy that book immediately. It's one of those rare books that manages to marry craft and science with evocative writing; compare, favorably, to Graham's "coiled up" functional programs stretched painfully into imperative code from On Lisp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> +1 for the design</comment>


How to Keep a Job Search Going Through the Holidays - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smartbear.com/careers/how-to-keep-a-job-search-going-through-the-holidays/ <comment><USER2> I never understood the logic around "no one hires during holidays". My own brother spouts this crap and I got him hired to a job in December.

In more than 80% of my jobs over ~15 years, I was hired in November/December/January. Each time I started the process in November/December.

Their loss is my gain.

Edit: A couple of jobs back, my first day on the job was also the day of the company Christmas party. Nobody really told me about dress code and I wore a suit, which made me stick out for being overdressed. This was fantastically to my advantage and I met a ton of people on my first day and made very good impressions. Food for thought.

<comment><USER3> _> >I never understood the logic around "no one hires during holidays"._

Anecdotal: I just got a phone call from a recruiter less than 3 hrs ago. :p If anyone here wants to work in Walnut Creek California, 6 months contract to hire, management position & writing shell scripts to extract csv files and send them to an Oracle DB ...let me know? Yeah, not the most exciting/challenging work. I think this recruiter got my info back when I was just starting out.

Another anecdotal: It's my experience that companies(at least start-ups) seem to have all the important HR/Payroll people taking sporadic vacations during holiday season so the hiring-paperwork can't be done. I once was "offered" a job in December, but they couldn't officially bring me on board because the CEO(who liked to meet all new hires before approval) and key HR/Payroll people were on vacation in Switzerland or something until late January.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not just vacations, I think. On a few occasions I "had the job" before the end of the year, but it started in January because that's when the budget started.

OTOH going into Christmas knowing you have a gig is a lot better than it might be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is nice to hear, I suppose. I just separated from a company due to failure to pay/contract term violations and been thinking the odds of me finding gainful employment would be pretty low or non-existent until late Jan.

Still seems like its going to be an upward climb as my normal places to look for python and or backend dev are somewhat sparse right now.

</comment><comment><USER5> My experience from the other side matches the article -- we're hiring (Software Engineers, Edinburgh, UK, I'm sure you can work out a suitable email address by looking at my profile) but there don't seem to be as many people looking for employment at this time of year.</comment>


How NASA writes 'perfect' software (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html?page=0%2C0

<comment><USER2> I spent some time working with the people at the advanced computation group there. It was a short time, and it was all in the formal systems/automatic analysis area, so this is a summary of what I picked up within my limited view...

The thing is that software's taken at a very different angle from there as in most parts.

First, the ones who know exactly what's supposed to happen aren't software people, they're engineers who don't write code. At least not real-time embedded control code.

Second, there are too many different people who's interests come together in the same codebase. I.E. lots of different engineering disciplines at once. Each one has their own work to do separate from the programming. You can get specifications & equations out of them, but the code's a different group.

Third, the need for high assurance is important. Note the word 'Assurance.' If something bad happens at Nasa, there's a lot of news and possibly a statement by The President. Being that this is a government agency building stuff, it's going to have similar problems to DoD agencies building stuff. That is, an incredible amount of the project will be spent to reduce the variability of the project. Even if the sum cost is many [, many]* times the likely variance.

The main space they have to work with is in mechanized assurance systems. Sadly, the formal systems out there aren't terribly evolved, as most people just test & debug their systems to get it right.

As for contributions to software, or lessons learned, there are some very good experiences & things learned for people who want to build better tools to make this stuff easier. E.g. higher-level languages that look more like Matlab than embedded C (don't get me started on Matlab-C converter). Stuff where you can be sure that no matter what instruction sequences you give to a robotic arm, that it never ends up in a position where one of joints is locked.

When I was there, the attempt was natural language to CSP traces, to be run through a theorem prover there later. We had a total of two grad students working on it over a summer, after an initial prototype was written earlier.

As other posts on HN have mentioned, and as one can surmise from the chatter about Nasa, it's costs are very closely looked at by a lot of people -- many who don't understand/know/care about the specific problems Nasa's got. That creates a whole new set of problems. Being observed under a microscope and then being hit for everything a nontechnical senator can get political points for hitting you for will make you start working in pretty strange ways.

<comment><USER3> Would you say the development process fit something like the waterfall model?

It sounds from the article like it's a very waterfally method, but they can get away with it because they don't have the same constraints and lack of clear specifications that most software does.

<comment><USER2> Can't tell you. Different projects act differently, and I was just a lowly grad student in a small research group for a small period of time.

At some level, you can't do full-on iterations when you have only 1 launch. But, you can certainly do iterations that each end in tests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"This software is bug-free"_

You can't show a program to bug free. You can't prove a negative.

 _"the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors."_

Translation: in each of the last three versions, only one error _was found_ , in the last 11 versions, only 17 errors _were found_.

 _"the shuttle group now finds 85% of its errors before formal testing begins, and 99.9% before the program is delivered"_

In order to know you've found x% of the errors in a program, don't you have to have already found 100% of them? If I find 9 errors in a program, how can I know that I've found 90% of the errors unless I also know that there are 10 errors in it?

A lot of what the author says sounds impressive, but I'd argue a lot of it is either wrong or not even wrong (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong>). Even granting the author some artistic license, he's going pretty overboard in a lot of his claims.

I'm sure the software produced by this group is less error-prone than your typical desktop or web app, but it doesn't sound like they're writing innovative software either. Most of what they do sounds like either mathematical calculations or driving hardware devices. Both areas which seem to me to be pretty well explored at this stage.

<comment><USER5> I would disagree with this. I'm not an expert in this field at all, but from what I've read, the software they write is tested to the point where every single possible input is tested for its assumed output on every subsystem. They write software that is mathematically proven to not fail.

<comment><USER4> My only point of reference for how they work is, admittedly, this article. I'm far from knowledgeable about formal methods but, in my understanding, if they're writing provably correct programs the code should, by definition, contain no 'errors'. (That is, it should always "do the thing right". There's no guarantee they've designed it to "do the right thing". Design errors may be exactly what the article is talking about.)

I'm not sure exactly what you mean when you say "every single possible input is tested". I would claim that this is not only impractical but impossible. The range of possible inputs to a system is infinite. This may sound pedantic, but in my experience as a software tester all sorts of failures often pop up when you look even slightly outside the range of values that seems sensible/likely/exhaustive for a given input.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Single page version: <http://www.fastcompany.com/node/28121/print>

</comment><comment><USER7> I work on a project for a Japanese university which is of comparable complexity, at least in kloc size, to the Space Shuttle.

It most definitively does not have only one bug in it per release.

However, and this is a pretty key concept: we don't bill them half a billion a year for it. (Not everybody, after all, has access to a virtually unlimited slush fund whose primary purpose is to line the pockets of defense contractors in a PR-friendly way.)

<comment><USER8> _And money is not the critical constraint: the groups $35 million per year budget_

I think you may have gotten your numbers confused. They get $35m for a group of 260 people to write the software, not half a billion.

<comment><USER7> Ugh, my bad. After a 16 hour day in the salt mines I was not doing math right.

I spent it, incidentally, supervising an outsourcing team which can't read the language the project is written in -- I kid you not, I actually had to say "Thank you for your inquiry about unknown red text under the login screen. The red text you have circled is not an error message. It is a weather report. The text is red because the forecast is potentially lethal. Closing as 'By Design'."

<comment><USER9> I have to ask. What kind of weather is potentially lethal, and common enough that your software accounts for it?!

<comment><USER7> Ever wondered to yourself "Hey, why am I using Japanese words for typhoon and tsunami?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "John Munson, a software engineer and professor of computer science at the University of Idaho, is not quite so generous. 'Cave art,' he says. 'It's primitive. We supposedly teach computer science. There's no science here at all.'"

I'll give him his clever phrase, despite being technically false. What we create with our knowledge of computer science (our programming) is not the same thing as computer science itself.

This is an interesting way to think about programming, though. Compare it, for instance, to metalworking. The craft itself, clearly, is distinct from the science of metallurgy, but at the same time they have evolved alongside each other. I wonder if programming and computer science will go through a similar progression. As metalworkers just were learning to manipulate metal, we bit- twiddled and hand-assembled; as metalworkers evolved their tools and meticulously forged their creations, we created compilers but still hand-coded our programs. The next big step in metalworking was the automation of their craft via factories; is this way code will go as well? Will we simply guide computers as they produce their own code? And what advances in computer science would be necessary for this to happen?

Edit: Please forgive me if my history of metalworking is slightly incorrect, I just realized I mostly pulled it out of my ass.

<comment><USER3> Pseudocode-to-realcode converter, or something vaguely like it.

Honestly, we are already on our way there thanks to the popularity of 'expressive' languages like Python, Ruby, etc. I don't think the transition will happen overnight or anything.

By 2050 we might end up just coding everything in a very powerful dialect of Lisp.

<comment><USER10> Well, obviously we're progressing in terms of the ratio of human work to computer work, but I was thinking of a program that, rather than taking actual algorithms, takes specifications, and not exact ones like Prolog and the like require--some sort of natural language processing/artificial intelligence kind of thing that understands something like "I want a Firefox extension that will automatically do...". Of course, it would have to have knowledge about different protocols/methods/algorithms/etc., and we'd have to give it that knowledge manually at first, and sometimes you'd probably have to work with it, especially in the development of new algorithms. There would probably still require some significant work to put a non-trivial program together, but it would mean a lot less learning UI libraries, putting together basic systems (I'm thinking of games especially here), etc.

This isn't to say you couldn't put together programs manually still, of course --it'll always be fun. But you could get rid of most of the tedious bits. Also, Lisp (or something Lisp-y) seems like the most likely candidate for putting code together this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Also, for those who don't notice. This article is 12 years old. It doesn't take anything away from the article, but I first read it three years ago and got excited about the topic before I noticed that it was a bit aged.

</comment><comment><USER12> Let's not forget Richard P.Gabriel (Lisp meister)'s view of this 'square' behaviour: <http://www.dreamsongs.com/MobSoftware.html>

<comment><USER4> I really enjoyed that essay; might I suggest you post it as its own item (if it's not already well known amongst the crowd here)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I remember hearing stories in undergrad about code written on paper and mercilessly reviewed so that it would work perfectly the first time it was compiled. Can't remember the specifics and may have been an urban legend -- but this is the closest thing I've seen recently.

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't be surprised if this was done back when things were coded on punch cards and submitted for overnight processing. Iteration then was very time expensive so it would have made sense to check and re-check as much up front as possible.

<comment><USER15> My father (who graduated with a BS in EE in 1970), said he was only allowed one hour of computer time a week, so the students did everything by hand, including scouring for bugs, before they got near a keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This totally reminds me of "The Other Half of Artists Ship" <http://www.paulgraham.com/artistsship.html>

pg: "It's natural for organizations to learn from mistakes. The problem is, people who propose new checks almost never consider that the check itself has a cost."

FTA: "The process is so pervasive, it gets the blame for any error -- if there is a flaw in the software, there must be something wrong with the way its being written, something that can be corrected. [...] Does a question need to be added to a checklist?"

</comment><comment><USER17> I've seen a pattern: "How do they do it? Because they have to."

This seems to apply to many areas of life. Create an environment in which failure is simply not an option and no one will choose that option.

</comment><comment><USER18> I remember discussing with a friend of mine who, at the time, was a recent hiree to Boeing. After a few months(!) of introduction and systems learning, he was tasked with writing a small portion of code. I don't remember the specifics, but it was a very specific task (e.g., "write code to display the fuel level in liters.)

After a day or so, he turned in his code (something like 30 lines) and was chastised for having done too much. "What are you trying to kill people?!?"

Turns out the regular output of their developers was something like 5-10 lines of code per day, and only certain days of the week. Finished products were peer reviewed before being QAd.

At the time, I was just learning early Ruby, and getting used to the concepts of rapid development, and it seemed so strange. Of course, if my webapp breaks, there aren't any lives on the line.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's an expensive way to write software.

Modern AAA computer games have at least double the code size, are produced in a fifth of the time, for the price of roughly 1 year of the NASA group's budget.

This is why we need NewSpace. It would actually be better to fail more often and more cheaply.

Of course, that's impossible for a Congressionally-funded organization.

<comment><USER20> it's always easy for somebody outside the dance to judge.

newspace what?

more thoughtful comments wouldn't hurt anyone because otherwise it feels I am reading some fantasy or something.

<comment><USER19> NewSpace as in:

SpaceX, XCOR Aerospace, Scaled Composites, Armadillo Aerospace, etc.

My comment was actually based on lurking in on discussion with rocketeers who have worked both inside and outside the government.

As someone who's only worked in relatively small, private-sector software companies, it's been very eye-opening to get an insight into how and why government managers make their decisions.</comment></comment></comment>


OneWeb files for bankruptcy - <AUTHOR> https://www.oneweb.world/media-center/oneweb-files-for-chapter-11-restructuring-to-execute-sale-process <comment><USER2> I don't think it's exactly fair of them to blame "financial impact and market turbulence related to the spread of COVID-19" for their bankruptcy. The history of space industry is full of companies that ran out of money when attempting to launch massive satellite constellations.

And let's be frank, an attempt to out-compete SpaceX on mass satellite production and cheap launches was doomed to fail.

<comment><USER3> Almost all bankruptcies in the next two years are going to blame COVID-19. "It wasn't us, it was the $external_factor" is a way for management to avoid blame. In some cases (restaurants especially) the health crisis has wrecked businesses that have been profitable for many years and the external factor is legitimately the main cause. In other instances, the company was already headed toward bankruptcy and the virus is just the straw that broke the camel's back.

<comment><USER4> This is highly opinionated, since I don't know Greg Wyler at all, but I do remember his Terracom broadband satellite effort in Rwanda, which looked noble at first, but was more a pretext to pay himself a generous salary, than doing anything.

So when he started OneWeb and then Ob3 (or vice-versa) I was skeptical. Now, reading about OW, and how it was mostly a middleman, I would say I am not surprised at all that he would pull this one and blame a virus. With chapter 11 he gets to protect his equity and compensation

I expect him to rebound, with even better compensation.

<comment><USER5> I've know and seen Wyler's work in Rwanda first hand and seen the impact it has had on my villages and schools around the country, having lived there for a time in the mid 2000s. I have no knowledge of the financials of Terracom or the success of it's business model but I'm curious to know more about what exactly made you say that this was all a pretext to enrich himself?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've met some of the senior executives at OneWeb, and think highly of them.

My understanding is that from day one they were under pressure from Softbank and other backers to spend the initial capital aggressively -- to secure spectrum as quickly as possible, build out ground stations as quickly as possible, build out global operations as quickly as possible, and start launching satellites as quickly as possible -- with the implicit assumption that there would be additional capital available to get the company to launch.

The team, to its credit, accomplished pretty much everything they set out to do on an accelerated schedule, but then, when they needed additional capital to finish the build-out and launch... the additional capital they had been counting on failed to materialize on reasonable terms.

Many people working at OneWeb surely feel shortchanged.

<comment><USER7> > _My understanding is that from day one they were under pressure from > Softbank and other backers to spend the initial capital aggressively_

Totally agree. This isn't a Covid-19 story. It's another SoftBank story.

The SoftBank-fuelled impatience led to strategic blunders including premature spectrum accumulation, vendor lock-in with Airbus, launch services lock-in with legacy providers and over hiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So this will be the final OneWeb constellation: [https://space- search.io/?search=OneWeb](https://space-search.io/?search=OneWeb)

(shamelessly plugging my own website here)

Such a shame about OneWeb though, met some of them at a conference in Spain just a month ago, where the elephant in the room was StarLink already.

<comment><USER9> How do they deploy evenly spaced sattelites on the same orbit?

<comment><USER8> You can launch them all at once on a sort of dispenser system. Then after they are separated they are on the exact same orbit. By increasing or decreasing that orbit height by just a tiny bit they will speed up or down and start to disperse. Over multiple days/weeks they will start to disperse across that orbit. Once they are all spaced to the position where they want them they move up/down again to the exact orbit to maintain position. Maybe later in the year I'll make an animation about it, because initially it is a bit counter intuitive but once you get it it makes a lot of sense :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ariane 6 first flight was planned to bring OneWeb satellites in space.

If they can't launch them, I wonder what will be the payload of the first Ariane 6.

<comment><USER11> To be honest I really can't see what exactly the Ariane 6 does better then Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy. I can not see how it has any chance in a commercial market, they will have to get government launches, but there are not enough.

Ariane 6 was a response to Falcon 9 first generation, and they designed it to compete with a Falcon 9 from 4 years ago, Falcon 9 is a different beast now.

Even launching 2 huge satellites is not gone work because there are fewer of those launches, and Falcon Heavy is getting a bigger fairing that could do that too.

<comment><USER12> Ariane 6 only makes sense if you view launch capability as a matter of national security.

<comment><USER11> Given that most nations in Europe are happy to launch on US rockets (as the Germans did), that really basically means the national security of France.

Seems to me its more of a jobs program that claims 'national security' as a reason.

<comment><USER13> A "jobs program" that would have kept (more) manufacturing capacity of surgical masks in-country seems like it would have been a very good thing right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is also a hammer blow to Soyuz and the European launchers. Payloads are becoming very scarce.

<comment><USER15> I wonder what the Soyuz folks are going to do with 18 half-paid-for, partially-built rockets?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> More information at this link from the Financial Times. There are only a few dozen people left working their now.

[https://amp-ft-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.ft.com/content...](https://amp- ft- com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.ft.com/content/8695c459-effd-4b54-8d96-69d8e614f6b4)

<comment><USER17> That link is an abomination while also being paywalled. The proper link is this:

[https://www.ft.com/content/8695c459-effd-4b54-8d96-69d8e614f...](https://www.ft.com/content/8695c459-effd-4b54-8d96-69d8e614f6b4)

...but also paywalled. This one is not:

[https://archive.ph/OynEo](https://archive.ph/OynEo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wonder if space x would buy them... wonder how much of a difference between their current satellites and one webs there is...

<comment><USER19> Oneweb's satellites are 'bent pipes', which means they don't decode/route the data. They act like a mirror just reflecting signals back.

That used to be a great design when satellites were expected to last 30 years, and the 'bent pipe' design meant data compression, encoding, error correction and modulation could be upgraded without changing the satellite hardware.

In today's world where satellites are lower, cheaper and only last ~5 years, it makes more sense for the satellite to be able to decode and route data, which gives it a significant capacity boost for the same power and spectrum usage (since you aren't amplifying and forwarding noise). Phased arrays with hundreds or thousands of beams also don't work well with the bent pipe architecture, since cross-talk between streams is hard to reduce.

<comment><USER20> I wonder what happens with the satellites. Are they just expected to decay?

<comment><USER8> The FT article I think claims that after the bankruptcy there will remain a small team to maintain them for now. Don't know if the plan is to de-orbit them, maybe there are still some stakeholders interested in running some experiments on them...

<comment><USER12> It's Chapter 11 which means that they hope to maintain OneWeb as a viable business.

Only if they convert to Chapter 7 would it mean they've given up on the business completely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Another SoftBank fiasco.

</comment><comment><USER22> TL;DR

"Since the beginning of the year, OneWeb had been engaged in advanced negotiations regarding investment that would fully fund the Company through its deployment and commercial launch. While the Company was close to obtaining financing, the process did not progress because of the financial impact and market turbulence related to the spread of COVID-19."

</comment><comment><USER23> So who will buy their assets for pennies on the dollar and keep going?

<comment><USER15> The asset isn't a working constellation, it's one which is allegedly halfway there. History says that the constellations that successfully emerged from bankruptcy were the ones that had proof that they worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> You would have thought that Iridium would have been a cautionary tale. The first company went bk in 1999, losing $6 billion, and it could only make money when the buyer bought it for $35 million and didn't have to pay for the capital assets.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications)

<comment><USER25> Except Iridium recently launched an entire new generation of satellites to replace their old one, and it is expected to be profitable. Likewise, lots of people expect SpaceX to make a killing on Starlink.

There were good reasons to be skeptical of OneWeb, but "consumer satellite communication companies have gone bankrupt before" is not one of them.

<comment><USER26> > lots of people expect SpaceX to make a killing on Starlink

What lots of people expect is kind of irrelevant... OneWeb going bankrupt suggests that profit margins will be low at best, negative at worst. Cheaper launch cost is not enough to change the business from to non-viable to hugely profitable.

Who will be the customers of Starlink? Internet is a commodity for the average person, you can't make money in that market. This leaves special cases such as abandoned areas, airlines, ships, but that market is much smaller and it's unclear whether it can feed the massive capital costs of Starlink: launches, satellites, ground stations.

Edit: Providing service to ships in the ocean could be a problem, because of the lack of ground stations.

<comment><USER27> > Internet is a commodity for the average person, you can't make money in that > market.

This assumes that razor thin margins are bad, which is usually a safe assumption but in the case of Starlink, I say it's not open minded enough.

To boot Starlink online requires a minimum cost for service area (sats), but once you've got that area booted, onboarding new customers is trivial (vs laying fiber, cable, digging holes).

The user terminal is for each individual - "Looks like a thin, flat, round UFO on a stick."[0]

If you were offered $40 per Gb/s would you switch, 30? 20?

Personally I would switch because it's simply not f'ing Comcast.

[0] [https://www.businessinsider.sg/spacex-starlink-user- terminal...](https://www.businessinsider.sg/spacex-starlink-user-terminal- flat-round-ufo-stick-elon-musk-2020-1?r=US&IR=T)

<comment><USER28> Doesn't work like that. Each starlink satellite has capacity of 20gig/sec. Assume that only 1 or 2 of the sats will be over a major metro area at any one time - that's 40gig/sec total capacity. That's only ~5,000 HD netflix streams at once (even less for 4K).

It will soon become totally overloaded. A city like NYC probably has home/office bandwidth use of 40gig/sec per a few city blocks, nevermind the whole metro area.

It's not going to work as a home internet replacement if you already have fibre or cable service. Furthermore, fibre and cable can be upgraded easily by putting new equipment on each side (even cable internet has went from 40mbit/sec to 10gig/sec - fibre has even more capacity).

Elon himself has admitted that it won't work in cities for this reason.

<comment><USER29> Yes, but cities have FTTH, rural areas have.. often times nothing that approaches >5 Mbps.

<comment><USER28> Yes, of course. But how big of a market is that really? I imagine the market is actually pretty small, considering a lot of rural areas have semi-workable 4G coverage, and others have small wireless p2p ISPs.

My point wasn't that it doesn't make sense whatsoever, it's just that it is going to be a niche solution. Considering the insane capex of getting the sats in space, if the market is too niche, will it be able to pay back the capex costs?

<comment><USER29> > But how big of a market is that really?

You can't know until you do extensive market research.

>a lot of rural areas have semi-workable 4G coverage

Yes, but also extremely restrictive data caps and expensive overage fees per kilobyte.

>small wireless p2p ISPs

Yes, that would be the biggest competition to LEO satellite broadband. However, PTMP (point to multipoint) WISP requires line of sight and expensive CPEs to reach speeds over 20 Mbps for more than 1-2 km (0.6-1.2 miles). There is still shared capacity, and RF noise problems (as with satellites).

>it is going to be a niche solution

Unfortunately, yes. And if it ever gets anywhere near to being profitable and threatening the traditional fixed access telcos, they'll just spend some pennies (compared to revenue), lay fiber to most of the residences, and do a mix of FTTH and FTTC (VDSL2 with profile 35b for up to 50 Mbps at 1km (0.6 miles) or 350 Mbps at 100 m (0.06 miles)) to save costs for users who have good-enough-quality twisted pair telephone lines but are too far from the DSLAM to get good speeds.

VDSL2 is quite servicable, it is unclear to me why is it so underutilized in the USA. DSL is a dedicated service, since the telephone line isn't shared with multiple people nor multiplexed in any way, so it provides a very stable connection, if the speed is conservatively set per the line's maximum length.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Spacex could be in trouble too.

[http://tmfassociates.com/blog/2020/03/21/why-spacex- desperat...](http://tmfassociates.com/blog/2020/03/21/why-spacex-desperately- needs-a-government-bailout/)

<comment><USER31> Don't spread rumors. This was thoroughly debunked on r/Spacex.

[https://pay.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/fmp7sv/why_spacex_d...](https://pay.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/fmp7sv/why_spacex_desperately_needs_a_government_bailout/)

<comment><USER12> Yes, that's far from a credible source. However SpaceX's latest round ([https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/09/spacex- raising-500-million-i...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/09/spacex- raising-500-million-in-new-funding-for-elon-musks-company.html)) has not yet closed and undoubtedly due to the situation some of the investors in that round are getting itchy feet.

I have no doubt that SpaceX can raise (I'd invest), but that $36B valuation might be in trouble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think this is bad news for SpaceX as well. Investors are going to be very reluctant to give more money to Musk.

<comment><USER33> These days most investors would probably look only at developments in the medical field; Covid19 is affecting just about every business everywhere.

<comment><USER34> Telecoms businesses are doing quite well too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Key bits; almost ready; then Corona came: "To date, the Company has successfully launched 74 satellites as part of its constellation, secured valuable global spectrum, begun development on a range of user terminals for a variety of customer markets, has half of its 44 ground stations completed or in development, and performed successful demonstrations of its system with broadband speeds in excess of 400 Mbps and latency of 32 ms."

<comment><USER19> 74 out of 648 required for full service...

They're 10% complete... And they are launching on Soyuz, which isn't exactly cheap when they need to do another 16 launches...

<comment><USER24> > they are launching on Soyuz, which isn't exactly cheap

Exactly. Musk started making rockets when Russia wouldn't sell them on reasonable terms. The closer OneWeb got to finishing their constellation, the higher the bids would've been.

<comment><USER15> OneWeb bought 21 Soyuz launches at once, which is enough for the initial constellation.

<comment><USER24> That was smart, wonder if they can get a refund. :)

<comment><USER15> When you buy a rocket launch, usually there are progress payments as the rocket is built. And if you stop paying, you forfeit the payment. So likely there's nothing to be refunded... and the rocket maker is stuck with 18 partially-assembled rockets. Which is an entire year of launches for Soyuz.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Build the Linux Kernel and Busybox for ARM and Run Them on QEMU - <AUTHOR> https://www.centennialsoftwaresolutions.com/blog/build-the-linux-kernel-and-busybox-for-arm-and-run-them-on-qemu <comment><USER2> Big parts of this article won't render, because of CORS issues.

<comment><USER3> Also, requires javascript to load the text. Bleh.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bleh...I know. Wix. Need a better platform. Sorry its hard to work with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My entire browser froze for 10 seconds while trying to load this page. 323 requests and 5.9 MB later, I get a broken page where 90% of the content appears to be missing.

Edit: Oh lord, all of those text portions are iframes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted a PDF of the content here: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M1o8IW- dV4fEeLeLDWeMgsVw4DN...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M1o8IW- dV4fEeLeLDWeMgsVw4DNEkWcW/view?usp=sharing) in case its useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article is unreadable in Chrome, parts of the page are simply not rendered. If you really want to read it, try Firefox.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry guys. I'm using Wix. Been putting off moving to a more performant platform, its probably time.</comment></comment>


EA Apologizes For SimCity Disaster, Says It Was "Dumb".. - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/09/ea-apologizes-for-simcity-disaster-says-it-was-dumb-and-offers-free-game-to-players/ <comment><USER2> I love PR-speak.

> Some people are still experiencing response and stability problems that > we're working fast to address.

We have redefined the word _fast_.

> The consensus among critics and players is that this is fundamentally a > great game.

I know you'll play it, no matter how terrible your experience is.

> But this game is made to be played online.

This game is DRMed.

(And etched beneath in faint pencil:)

I expect that EA will focus on online games from now on. If you want offline games, you'll have to rely on Minesweeper.

> We're going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio.

DRMs ensure that you don't play a game for free. Since DRMs failed to work this time, you get to play a game for free. Like Bill said, "As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours."

Except for Mac users. We couldn't care less if we tried.

> SimCity is a GREAT game and the people who made it are incredibly proud.

Understandably, they're mad at us. We had ONE JOB and we failed to make the log-in scale.

<comment><USER3> _> > Some people are still experiencing response and stability problems that we're working fast to address.

>We have redefined the word fast._

Sometimes I am really surprised by the responses to companies here. It seems like people never had a job or forgot the experience. Companies are not abstract entities that make things happen and only do PR: people work there.

A large portion of HN is likely engineers of some sort or someone very close to them and yet you don't believe EA's engineers are _scrambling_ , maybe pulling all nighters to fix this. All you see is PR being slow to respond. PR are not the ones working fast to fix the issue.

(I don't work at EA and I don't know anyone who does, I don't even play games)

<comment><USER4> It should be trivial to make a patch with an offline mode, if they've followed good network programming practice.

[edit] "It should be relatively easy" might be more accurate. It would not be good engineering to create a single-player mode that doesn't degrade gracefully when the network connection is absent.

<comment><USER3> _> It should be trivial_

This is another statement that always surprises me when said by an engineer instead of an exec.

<comment><USER5> In both cases it is a statement made by someone who doesn't understand what they are talking about. (EDIT) to avoid being needlessly trite: because if someone does know what they are talking about then they would say it _is_ trivial. "It should be trivial" means you are just making stuff up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Honestly I think people should stop saying anyone bought this game at all. They leased it. At some point in the future, EA is going to decide that the cost of running the servers outweighs the benefits of keeping them online, and they're going to shut them off.

Have EA made any promises regarding the expected life of this game?

<comment><USER7> You raise a very interesting point.

I still play the original SimCities from time to time. It's sad to think that modern games might not be around in a decade or two for us to enjoy - even if just for reminiscing.

<comment><USER8> Indie games might still be around even then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's an interesting comment [1] by a fella called kodemunkee at TechCrunch. Is there any truth to this?

> This is definitely an "unmitigated disaster". What nobody's seemed to > realize about EA's offer to give away a free Origin game is this: EA can > write off the games they give away in dealing with this debacle as a tax > write-off at full "market" value (on the Origin market, anyhow) even though > they cost only pennies to deliver to you. In addition, the $20 coupon for > another Origin game that was given to those who bought the game through > Origin will also be used as a write-off against the $50+ the game went > against. If we assume that the value of the games that they will offer for > their "apology" will be around $35-40, then they will have effectively > written off the entire purchase price of SimCity in "promotional" and > "apology" give-aways, thus turning the aforementioned "unmitigated disaster" > into EA's most profitable quarter ever. This is not just consumer fraud, > it's tax evasion.

[1]: <http://fyre.it/QUB0pP.4>

<comment><USER9> If by interesting you mean 'boring conspiracy theory'. Even if EA were the most evil company in the world, sacrificing a valuable franchise in order to marginally improve this quarters profit would still make no sense.

<comment><USER6> I'm not saying they fucked up the SimCity launch on purpose, don't be ridiculous. I'm asking if they can indeed write off the full retail price of the games they give away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The only reasonable apology is to end the always-on connection DRM, and update the game to work without it. Anything less than that I see an insult to their customers.

<comment><USER11> This isn't to do with the always-on DRM. EA drastically underestimated the number of players who would want to play the game, and they don't have sufficient server capacity. (This has happened in the past at peak times with games like World of Warcraft, EVE, etc.)

A proportional response would be to allow users to refund the game, since this is a quality issue and is clearly out of the players' control; and to rapidly expand their server capacity until they have enough for everyone.

(I'm not an advocate for DRM, just proportionality.)

<comment><USER12> Of course it's to do with it. If it had a traditional single-player architecture, there would be no issues at all.

<comment><USER11> You're failing to draw a distinction between always-on DRM and multiplayer server capacity. Look at what you just said:

> Of course it's to do with [DRM]. If it [was a single player game], there > would be no issues at all.

The two are unrelated. If it was a single player game we wouldn't be having these issues... because it wouldn't need server capacity to play, which is nothing to do with DRM. It could still have always-on DRM.

<comment><USER13> Fact is that DRM is the real reason why the game is heavily multiplayer. Older versions were always single player and there is no reason they couldn't at least have implemented this mode in the new game other than having an excuse to put some of the logic on a server to thwart piracy. And that is what is causing the current problems.

<comment><USER14> > Fact is that DRM is the real reason why the game is heavily multiplayer

Perhaps. I had be interested in your sources for this fact though. Otherwise it feels like opinion being stated as fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Am I the only one who thinks people are overreacting? Seems like the whole Internet is on fire over a game, even HN is infected. Servers had a little trouble, but what I'm hearing it's stable now. So why not just wait or buy the game a few days later and be fine?

And if you're really convinced the online requirement is just glorified DRM and EA is evil anyway, don't buy the game. Problem solved! There are really more important things to worry about.

<comment><USER16> It's mainly the nature of the game. With World of Warcraft you kind of know what you are getting into. But pretend you are just a dude walking around BestBuy, you pick up SimCity on launch day to bring back fond childhood memories. You take it home, install it on your computer, and it basically does not work (with no explanations besides it can't connect and sometimes worse then that) for 4 days. It was just an unbelievably bad launch for something that doesn't really use online that much in the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The problem wasn't a capacity planning issue, the problem was putting DRM in the game. Period. This is the message they aren't getting, and luckily this time I was too busy to buy a copy, so I wont.

<comment><USER18> People don't care about DRM, and if EA hadn't had capacity issues then there wouldn't have been any complaints about DRM.

It's really depressing but that's how it is, and if you think otherwise then you're deluded.

<comment><USER17> I am a people, and I care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This won't satisfy the user base. People can get their city-building fix from other sources and EA knows this (and in a way the network requirement of SimCity is hopium that this game can act more like the facebook city builder games).

It seems unlikely and would be a huge development investment, but the best thing for EA & their shareholders is to do a 180 and change the game to single-player w/o DRM.

I wonder if the engineers have prepared ahead of time for a DRM-less version (knowing of the potential for the fiasco).

</comment><comment><USER20> Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5347289>

</comment><comment><USER21> Gaming business is similar to narcobusiness in some regards. No matter the experience customers NEED to have their dose.</comment>