It could be the visuals on The Martian were so good, they were almost invisible. My suspension of disbelief was maintained throughout the whole movie - it looked like it was shot on location, and they never delivered anything that didn't look like NASA has been showing us since VIKING. And it didn't hurt that Matt Damon was able to pull it off magnificently, convincing everyone that his veins were filled with The Right Stuff. If those events ever happened in reality, this movie could plausibly stand in as a documentary, it was that believable.
With Fury Road, the stunts were absolutely amazing -- far and away the best stuntwork I have ever seen. But they were stunts performed strictly to be cool looking stunts. A story that abysmal could only have been written specifically to justify the stunts: "Show unbelievably ridiculous world ruled by even more ridiculous comic-book tyrant. Ragtag band of misfits drive away to promised land. Fight awesome battles against long odds. Discover promised land not as advertised. Fight even more awesome battles against even longer odds. Return victorious. Drop mic and walk off."
But sometimes you just want to see cool looking stunts, so you give them an award anyway.
how color accurate are pc, mac and tablet display colors?
answer: TOTALLY NOT THE SAME. even on the same model.
Which is why you do field testing.
It doesn't matter now recently you calibrated your reference monitor, the resolution you display them at, or how precise your systems are in the lab. It doesn't matter if Google put in 0x0000FF and Joe Sixpack's crappy old VGA CRT displayed red text. By putting the changes out in front of millions of users, they got the average of all the devices and all the users. The color each specific monitor displays isn't important - what the entire collection of users responded to most is what's important.
That's so true, and not understood by most people. Gyms full of judgmental people (aka "meet markets") are a huge problem with obese people who are simply trying to get to a healthier weight.
If dealing with the preening bodybuilders is a problem, I'd suggest joining a little 24-hour gym, one with a room full of machines, weights, and nothing else; the kind you might find in any random strip mall. Many don't even have locker rooms, which helps avoid another uncomfortable situation. Most are fairly empty at certain times of the day, so you can find a schedule to work out without the stares. As a bonus, without all the fancy amenities, the costs of membership are an order of magnitude less than the shiny, chrome plated gyms. If you need help, most will have a bulletin board posted with phone numbers of personal trainers you can call to help you establish a workout routine.
These places typically don't have organized classes, and they won't provide external sources of motivation; you have to bring that yourself. But honestly, if you're not self-motivated it's unlikely you'll stick with it regardless of what classes they offer.
I have purchased a couple of well-equipped Lenovo laptops, and it's amazing just how awful their shovelware makes those big honkin' machines perform. I may not know what all that software is doing, but I do know they soak up CPU cycles like it's their last day on earth. Then I make sure it is their last day on earth.
The most frustrating thing about it is that when you pay that much for a higher-end computer, they feel they still have the right to shovel all that shitware onto your box so they can squeeze another lousy $20 bounty out of the sale. They're paying for it, though - I've been recommending friends and family avoid Lenovo, and so far they've lost thousands of dollars worth of our business. Enjoy your $20, Lenovo. Buy yourselves a couple of beers, then go beat up your finance guy who thinks that shovelware is a smart business plan.
Presumably Target and Walmart are in every state and yet they manage to figure out what to charge tax on and at what percentage.
Target and Walmart can afford to staff a five-person legal team to comb through all those laws; but I'm sure they would rather spend that money on something more profitable. Joe's Online House Of Plus Sizes of Muncie, Indiana, cannot.
So according to you, I have to know every tax law in every jurisdiction in this country, and apply that knowledge to classify every single item in my database. I also have to keep track of every new law in every jurisdiction, in case they pass a new sales tax, and then I have to identify and reclassify every impacted item. The cost of a legal team capable of doing this work would cripple a small-to-medium sized retailer. The price of hiring a service to manage my item data tax codes would more than eat up today's profit margins.
All this, just so I have the privilege of paying the mailing costs to send out a thousand tiny checks every month to the various municipalities whose residents ordered from me.
If you still think it's either cheap or easy, I don't think you've ever had to deal with this particular problem.
If only we had some kind of calculating device that could reference a table of tax rates updated on a regular basis...
If that's all it took...
Let's say you are shipping a fluorescent yellow vest from California to Minnesota. In Minnesota, clothing is not taxable, but safety equipment is. Do you collect tax on it? Does their state consider it clothing or safety equipment? Add a pair of reading glasses to their order. Minnesota taxes general merchandise at one rate, while medical devices are taxed at a much lower rate. Which rate do you choose? Or are glasses considered clothing, because you wear them? What about a boxed set of grill accessories that includes a fork, a spatula, an apron, and an oven mitt?
Now ship a swimsuit to Pennsylvania. Clothing is taxable there, but sporting goods are not. Is swimwear taxable there? How does your cart service even know if it's a swimsuit when your online site only knows the product as Item#123456?
Next, ship a bicycle fender to a Houston, Texas, address. The law says you pay a higher tax rate if there is a public bus stop on your block. What tax rate do you charge?
Ship another fender to a Colorado address. They not only have sales taxes, but they have fees on some items, because some politician vowed not to raise taxes, but made no such promises about fees. Do you collect those fees on a fender? Do you charge sales taxes on those fees?
Do you charge tax on the shipping? That depends on whether you are shipping as a service to the customer (services are taxable in some states), or if you're shipping it because you don't stock the product in their state (a business expense.). Do you charge shipping taxes at the rate of the point of origin, or at the rate of the destination? To which state do you send the money?
In all these states, anyone doing business in their borders has to answer these questions because it's their law. Do I have to know every law in every town in America?
The states are a mess of thousands of such stupid and incompatible laws, each passed on behalf of some corrupt politician's crony. Never think it's easy just because it seems like simple math.
They've been trying to sell internet fridges for a decade. They're not selling enough to see them on display in the big-box stores. Ditto with washers, dryers, ovens, and air conditioners.
For energy savings from ACs, it's easier to just use a timer or the on/off switch.
Sorry to break the news to you, but I bought my WiFi equipped washer and dryer right off the sales floor, after having tested the connectivity and downloading the app to my smart phone. All four appliance stores I shopped at had different makes and models with connectivity. I ended up buying from a big box retailer anyway, as their offerings best matched my needs. But even the two smaller local retailers had devices with connectivity on display. (Hint: After installation, I discovered that Samsung's SmartHome ecosystem sucks horribly. Do not buy their gear.) For the extra money, I wanted an alert letting me know when the load is done so I can go downstairs and fold the clothes before they wrinkle. Should the device have a detectable service condition, I can also have the technician SSH into it and figure out what's wrong without setting up an appointment. The rest of the connectivity options are quite useless. And Samsung's UX is worse than abysmal; again, do not buy a Samsung SmartHome device.
For HVAC, I installed a Honeywell WiFi thermostat. It's not great, I think Trane has better options, but at least it's not as locked-in to Google's cloud as Nest.
Rheem has a plug-in controller for their water heaters. Very reasonably priced at Home Depot. I bought it for the remote water leak alert feature, but the connectivity is also nice for scheduling vacations and having hot water when I return. It was also the easiest of these devices to set up.
Craftsman has a remote for garage door openers. I have weird paranoia about driving off and leaving the door open, so I have it send me alerts when it opens and closes. It gives me peace of mind; but it's also come in handy to remotely let in visitors and workmen, or to let myself in the house after a walk without carrying a keyring or anything but my phone.
I have an ATMega-based OpenSprinkler on line. Very handy out in the yard when testing and blowing out the system, but the real benefit comes from its ability to use the current weather forecast and conditions to control the amount of water applied to each zone.
I also have an entire Z-wave network of switches, sensors, and devices. All this on top of the expected nerd-sized collection of computers, laptops, tablets, watches, and wearables.
So yes, I understand the connected device market quite well. It's all built from off-the-shelf components, none of it was special order (apart from the OpenSprinkler.) I also know I'm not a typical consumer, but I assure you I am not alone in purchasing any of this gear, or the stores wouldn't carry it.
Smart people will figure that the price has been padded by far more than $250, and negotiate based on that, not some phony discount.
Same problem: your perspective (or that of whatever you deem to be "smart people") isn't the perspective of the masses. The devices are indeed popular in some demographics, just not in yours.
I haven't noticed anyone using a fitbit or an apple watch or whatever
That's primarily because fitness trackers are mostly passive monitoring devices, not "things to use." Someone could be checking their steps on their smart phone but you wouldn't notice anything different from someone checking Facebook or reading texts. And Apple Watch is still an expensive luxury item; exact sales numbers aren't published but estimates are such that less than 3% of Americans could have them.
nobody I know is demanding internet fridges or toasters or air conditioners or fridges. Even the ones with smart TVs just watch whatever's on cable or satellite. Samrtphones and tablets offer enough to occupy those who feel they need more internet content.
Of course people are demanding them. Fitbit has sold tens of millions of devices; LG, Samsung, Westinghouse, etc., all sell wifi enabled washers, dryers, fridges, ovens, and air conditioners.* They may not have sold any to you or your peers, but if you want to understand why people buy them, you absolutely won't find the answers from the people who aren't buying them. Look at it from a very broad imagining of many other people's perspectives and resources, not just from your own narrow viewpoint or your immediate circle of acquaintances. For example, I cannot understand why someone would spend $200+ on tennis shoes, nor do I know or hang out with anyone who is proud of their $200+ tennis shoes, but that doesn't mean there isn't a large body of people who spend many hundreds of dollars on them. I don't have to understand or even agree with their reasons in order to acknowledge that their reasons exist.
* If you're interested in 'why', some reasons may include personal fitness, workplace fitness programs, convenience, energy savings, early adopters, peer pressure/status, high disposable income, and all the other usual reasons people spend money on stuff. If you're interested in 'why not', it's because most of the smart-home applications are proprietary and just plain suck.
You would have to pay me to wear any sort of smart device without a serious medical reason.
I'm afraid you hold a minority opposing viewpoint in a vast sea of people who already sell their health data in exchange for a discount on yogurt, or a "badge" they can post to Facebook. Try not to look at this from your personal perspective - try to see how the general population has embraced these devices. Then figure out how those people might react if you said "hey, if you run this heart-rate app while you take our car for a 5 minute test drive, we'll give you a $250 discount on any car in the lot!"
You're already saying you'll sell your data. Now we're just haggling over price.
What I don't get is that most 'wearables' don't have location sensors. A Fitbit or Vivofit may have accelerometers, but they have no GPS and no inertial guidance system. The Apple Watch gets its location data from its paired iPhone, which is already in frequent contact with a bunch of marketing companies; this is true regardless of the existence of a paired Apple Watch.
I assume these people are thinking there's some way to monetize heart-rate and/or motion data, but the attached article doesn't claim what that scheme might be. Maybe having an accelerated heartbeat in the presence of an iBeacon near a car dealer's display will tell the marketers which cars are perceived as most exciting, but any auto dealer or car salesman can tell that without needing a pulse check!
People are people; there is nothing significantly different in human nature between Chinese and Americans. Given the opportunity, Chinese teenagers will sit on the couch, play video games, and consume junk food at the same rates as American teens. So given similar availability to a steady food supply, and enough wealth allowing their parents to provide leisure time to offspring, we shouldn't be surprised to see roughly the same rates of childhood obesity.
I see this as a way of indirectly measuring food security. It's another indicator of China's wealth, and confirmation that the money the West is sending to their factories is starting to trickle down from the oligarchs to the average citizens. When China's rates of obesity approach those of people in the USA, it'll indicate a similar level of food security. It's much more believable than their official Party-issued reports of economic success.
Of course, this could also be a sinister plot by the Communist Party to manipulate the West. "We need 30% of children to become fat so the American spies believe their parents are successful. Double sugar production, and decrease the price of Doritos by 50%!" They are masters at playing the long game.
Correct. Citizens United isn't the root problem. The real problem is the corruption system that is currently in place works around the normal patterns of bribery. In Congress today, favors are granted long before the bribes are paid. Congressmen give away favors to corporations freely, secure in the knowledge that someone with lots of money will hire them as a lobbyist or consultant after they retire. Because this system is so successful, it encourages extra bonus corruption - if a Congressman grants favors to 10 companies, the chances are pretty good that one of the 10 will hire him. If he grants favors to 100 companies, he can be sure of it.
What we need from Congress is accountability. Keep tabs of votes that favor corporations, organizations, or special interests. After retiring from Congress, keep track of ex-members who go into lobbying or somehow get paid by organizations that received favorable laws while they were in office, and nullify their votes on the legislation after the fact. If the number of nullified votes drops the count below whatever majority was required to pass them, nullify the laws. If you voted in favor of three or more laws that were later nullified through this act, you win a felony corruption charge.
If you're a congressman who wants to retire with confidence in your voting record, you have a couple of safe paths: you can always recuse yourself from the votes that would favor big corporations; or you can retire on a minimum wage job as a fry cook.
I'm a strong advocate of constructive code reviews that provide useful feedback, while leaving the egos and personal stuff out.
Is "I don't like this variable name" constructive feedback?
Part of it depends on your coding standards. The first standard on our list is from Scott Myers: "Don't sweat the small stuff." Other teams have really strong naming conventions, and as a member of those teams, you'd be expected to follow their standards. In our team we rely on mature discussion, and a comment phrased like that is not very mature.
Is "I think it would be more readable if you did [equivalently-readable alternative]" constructive feedback?
Sure! I'd read what the reviewer wrote because they may be confused by my original choices. I'm certainly not always right, and I can't accurately judge what someone else might find readable. Does that mean I'd change my code? Maybe.
Are "readability" regimes backed by armies of style guide Mandarins constructive feedback, or are they hazing? How about a reviewer who has readability saying "I approve this for the code review, but not for readability," are they being constructive? or are they insulting you, contributing to your hazing, and shirking their duty?
In general, I find that if you expect teams to do the right thing and behave maturely, they will deliver. The problem is when egos are brought into the reviews. Keep them from being personal, and settle them privately. If you're still having swarms of negative feedback on readability, maybe there really is a problem and the code is too complex. Break it up into simpler methods. Use polymorphism instead of switch statements. Use explaining variables instead of magic numbers. There are a lot of refactorings that can help.
What about saying "does this have test coverage?" when the request is outside the team's historical norm and the reviewer has no responsibility for scheduling your time?
Automated test coverage is a requirement for successfully iterating rapidly and deploying frequently; it's a core requirement of Agile. If a team historically doesn't have automated testing, is it wrong for the new guy to wonder why the team is not following modern development practices? When is the right time to introduce something new? Also, look at your review process, and who you invite. Don't extend review invitations outside of the team, unless you really need the opinions of a specific subject matter expert.. Especially don't invite the company's notorious "style Mandarins".
I find reviewers look for nits and try to mark your code as theirs. They can write it the way they want to when they're writing it.
This is another occurrence when getting a team to agree to coding standards can help settle the disputes. If it's a nit, it's either in violation of the terms the team agreed to, or you can tell the reviewer "it's not in the standards, and I don't think this is a bad way to do it".
I'm not saying we shouldn't do code reviews. I'm saying how much of this are you going to punt to "solve your team issues"? The code reviews are creating the team issues.
I can't fix your broken team. What I can do is tell you that when you do reviews well, when everyone matures to the point where they can leave their egos at the door, they can help bring a team together, and leave you all with better code at the end of the day. If you're trying to make a change, this is a good place where you can lead by example.
Code reviews as they are actually done are adversarial motivation and only escape becoming completely dickish by rare and heroic good character.
Wow, I'm sorry to hear that your team operates that way. Good behavior should be expected, and shouldn't be rare or heroic. That would definitel
I agree with most of your user interface principles, except for the the "fifth grade reading level" one. You might have a point, but I really don't like talking down to grown-ass adults.
That's actually when I really learned this lesson. I was opposed to these changes for exactly the same reasons you are, because all I saw was that we were introducing colloquialisms, slang, and generally poor English. I thought "if software ever talked to ME like this, I'd find it offensive." We deployed the new interface, and the clients loved it. The supervisors were able to get people trained quicker, and we received very few complaints. So when I'd call the supervisors about other issues, I'd ask their candid opinions. The people who felt like you and I did were generally older and better educated. But most recognized that our average employees; well, let's say we don't pay college professor wages to the people who operate the software. And a lot of the workers are not native English speakers; for them, the fewer words to interpret, the better. (There are other reasons the interface isn't multi-lingual.)
I've worked on software where I put a lot of thought into describing the error in clear, complete, accurate, and accessible terms, only to be told that the users aren't going to "even bother to read it because it's too long". In my view, the kind of people who object to error messages that are complete sentences and contain three-syllable words are the kind of people who won't read any error message under any circumstances, but whatever. "ERR 34: Bad srvc" it is. Choke on it.
We established a lot of rules for our error messages. The first rules were around avoiding as many error messages as possible, because if you can determine the user's intentions, just do it. If you are keeping track of packages going into a truck, and they scan the same package twice, so what? It's obvious they want to put it on the truck, so let it go through. Another rule was that you could only tell them "why" it's an error if it would help prevent repeated occurrences of the error. Our error messages have to be distinctive, so that the busy user don't have to carefully parse every character. The error messages have to be timely; they can't pop up at the end of a workflow because the user might have moved beyond the task that has the problem. And the error messages have to be non-threatening - you need the users to correct the issue and keep moving instead of worrying about their jobs. You don't want them to feel like they'll be punished for making an error; you don't want them to feel like they're being blamed. Just help them.
The last rule is that our error messages can NEVER display an error code. They can only display information that helps the user recover; they are not there for tech support. Average users won't pay attention anyway, and many report the wrong code, especially when there are subtle differences between codes like 80004005 and 80040005. If it comes to troubleshooting, the support staff are perfectly capable of looking at the log files and seeing the correct values of the error codes for themselves instead of relying on reports of dubious accuracy.
"Yes but as I'm not a moron I never thought of the user story from your perspective..."
I hope this was intended as a joke in poor taste.
Something really hard for some developers to understand is that our peer groups are usually not representative of our user base. We're used to hanging around with really bright people, people who apply logic to questions and use evidence to arrive at conclusions. When we forget that not everyone in the world is like that, we assume that everyone who touches our applications is smart, quick, logical, and willing to read instructions. In reality, we should be constantly aware that 50% of our users are literally below average (by definition, not because we think they're "morons".)
That means a lot of attention needs to be paid to User Experience. A few years ago we went through our application and made sure that every screen was at a 5th grade reading level. We made sure our users could be trained on the basic functions, features, and processes in less than half an hour. Error messages have to be focused on correcting the problem, not accusing the users of being "morons" and making a mistake, and not leaving them fearing punishment. And if a person runs into a feature that's difficult, frequently gives them error messages, or that takes them a long time to figure out, it's not their fault that the UI didn't help them. It's the UI that needs work.
I'm a strong advocate of constructive code reviews that provide useful feedback, while leaving the egos and personal stuff out. It's important for everyone to participate, to both give and receive feedback. First, you help your team improve your product. Second, you learn about the new sections of code; how the new functionality was implemented. That's important on a large product.
And then there's the one that many of the old guys overlook: nobody knows it all, so everyone can learn from anyone, including the new kid on the team. We can all see how technology and computers have evolved dramatically over the decades; it's a mistake to believe that software design and engineering hasn't been simultaneously evolving for the better.
I challenge you to turn 50 and then repeat your assertion that a large screen has anything to do with FOMO. I'm still using a small older iPhone, but every time i handle an iPhone 6+, I realize just how much less my eyes are strained using it. Many of my age-peers have swapped devices just to get the bigger display; every single one has said they'd never go back to a smaller display. This includes a Microsoftie who traded his corporate-flavored Lumia for a heretical iPhone 6+.
I've found my wife's iPhone 6+ fits all the same shirt and pants pockets that my old phone fits, so carrying it doesn't seem to be much of an issue. And she's always carried hers in her purse, where the bulk is unimportant.
That's not the limit. The Apple Watch is popular enough that there are dozens of apps out there already, but they're all way too hard to use. When you have a 38mm screen, you can only reliably recognize a very few gestures. Accurately pressing buttons is really hard (entering the unlock code on the tiny little keypad requires intense concentration and the fine motor skills of an 8 year old kid with a box of Lego bricks, something an adult rarely wants from a watch.)
It doesn't matter how good a watch app is, you still have to click and wobble around the watch's home screen to open it up, and that's just a silly amount of effort. Where any smart watch shines is in its connectivity, and in delivering alerts to the wearer. It takes no user effort to sound an alarm, so when a glance will tell you something important, that's a great app. But if you have to punch in a dozen tiny buttons to use it, it's going to suck no matter what it is.
I've never understood this, unless that's a forecast. In which case, surely you have to select how far in advance the forecast is. If not... well, that's just one of the many tasks that windows are good for.
You may live in an area where weather forecasts are unimportant, like southern California. Here in Minnesota, it can mean the difference between wearing a winter coat to go walking at noon, or biking to work in shorts. And the forecast face for the Apple Watch gives you 12 hours of predicted temperatures and weather as a series of hourly icons around the clock hands. It's a really useful display. (Like everything else on the Apple Watch, if you need extended forecast info, or more detail, it's easier to grab the phone and open the weather app.)
health data which is very useful during exercise
Personally, I've never really been convinced about that either. I mean I've played with health gadgets and they're neat and all, but ultimately, I don't need one to tell me I've been a lazy git and skipped an exercise session or taken the bus instead of walking.
There's a difference between a gamified motivational device, like the Fitbit, and a fitness tool that measures your heart rate. A device that measures your pulse can tell you if your workout is within the "cardio zone". If your pulse never reaches a certain rate, you're not actually benefiting your heart enough. And if your pulse exceeds your safe threshold, you risk all kinds of problems, including a heart attack. Competitive athletes know exactly what their target heart rate is by feel; but I'm just an ordinary schlub who can't tell when I enter or exit the zone, so a device like that really helps me. Fitness-dedicated watches (like Polars and Garmins) will vibrate to let you know if you're above or below your target range, so you can work harder or rest as needed. That's a feature that may entice me to buy an Apple Watch, because I don't like the chest strap with my Polar watch. On the minus side, fitness machines like treadmills can increase or decrease the workload to keep you in your desired zone, but they only receive signals from the chest straps, not the fitness bands. And then there's the difference between Polar heart signals and ANT+ signals, meaning a Garmin may follow the most open standards but be the least connected of all. Sigh.
And yes, my wife uses her watch motivationally, like a Fitbit. She stands up and moves around every hour (seems to be some kind of popular woo-woo health thing), and gets her 10,000 steps per day. I expect that will eventually wear off, but she's kept her Fitbit going for three or four years now. (Yes, she still wears a Fitbit even though she has an Apple Watch. Please don't ask me to rationalize that one!:)
I wouldn't say it's junk. My wife loves hers. Like a smartphone provides a subset of a full computer's functionality, a smart watch provides its own small set of functionality. The primary functions are really useful: time and weather at a glance; reliable notification of a phone call or SMS message in a noisy environment; health data which is very useful during exercise; Siri; and Apple Pay. Is that worth more than the cost of an iPhone? Different question.
It also shows its lack of ability in the "apps" available. Just because you can produce a "tap 17 tiny buttons in the arcane sequence and you can view the state of your coffee pot" app won't ever make it a useful or practical app. And the non-primary functions that might be of value still require some form of setup, like telling the watch you want driving directions to be signaled on your wrist.
Some of this is first-gen product limitations; some of it is inherent to a small form-factor device that simply doesn't have an interface matched to the size of human fingers. What that says to me is it's overpriced for what it can do - that doesn't make it junk, but it means they aren't going to sell like smartphones.
Slashdot Mirror
Me too.
It could be the visuals on The Martian were so good, they were almost invisible. My suspension of disbelief was maintained throughout the whole movie - it looked like it was shot on location, and they never delivered anything that didn't look like NASA has been showing us since VIKING. And it didn't hurt that Matt Damon was able to pull it off magnificently, convincing everyone that his veins were filled with The Right Stuff. If those events ever happened in reality, this movie could plausibly stand in as a documentary, it was that believable.
With Fury Road, the stunts were absolutely amazing -- far and away the best stuntwork I have ever seen. But they were stunts performed strictly to be cool looking stunts. A story that abysmal could only have been written specifically to justify the stunts: "Show unbelievably ridiculous world ruled by even more ridiculous comic-book tyrant. Ragtag band of misfits drive away to promised land. Fight awesome battles against long odds. Discover promised land not as advertised. Fight even more awesome battles against even longer odds. Return victorious. Drop mic and walk off."
But sometimes you just want to see cool looking stunts, so you give them an award anyway.
Interesting that 2 of the first 3 search results for black returned hits on the Black Panthers.
Well, the title does say 'radical change'.
how color accurate are pc, mac and tablet display colors?
answer: TOTALLY NOT THE SAME. even on the same model.
Which is why you do field testing.
It doesn't matter now recently you calibrated your reference monitor, the resolution you display them at, or how precise your systems are in the lab. It doesn't matter if Google put in 0x0000FF and Joe Sixpack's crappy old VGA CRT displayed red text. By putting the changes out in front of millions of users, they got the average of all the devices and all the users. The color each specific monitor displays isn't important - what the entire collection of users responded to most is what's important.
That's so true, and not understood by most people. Gyms full of judgmental people (aka "meet markets") are a huge problem with obese people who are simply trying to get to a healthier weight.
If dealing with the preening bodybuilders is a problem, I'd suggest joining a little 24-hour gym, one with a room full of machines, weights, and nothing else; the kind you might find in any random strip mall. Many don't even have locker rooms, which helps avoid another uncomfortable situation. Most are fairly empty at certain times of the day, so you can find a schedule to work out without the stares. As a bonus, without all the fancy amenities, the costs of membership are an order of magnitude less than the shiny, chrome plated gyms. If you need help, most will have a bulletin board posted with phone numbers of personal trainers you can call to help you establish a workout routine.
These places typically don't have organized classes, and they won't provide external sources of motivation; you have to bring that yourself. But honestly, if you're not self-motivated it's unlikely you'll stick with it regardless of what classes they offer.
About the same time they fill a house with popcorn and figure out how to use the laser to pop it all.
I have purchased a couple of well-equipped Lenovo laptops, and it's amazing just how awful their shovelware makes those big honkin' machines perform. I may not know what all that software is doing, but I do know they soak up CPU cycles like it's their last day on earth. Then I make sure it is their last day on earth.
The most frustrating thing about it is that when you pay that much for a higher-end computer, they feel they still have the right to shovel all that shitware onto your box so they can squeeze another lousy $20 bounty out of the sale. They're paying for it, though - I've been recommending friends and family avoid Lenovo, and so far they've lost thousands of dollars worth of our business. Enjoy your $20, Lenovo. Buy yourselves a couple of beers, then go beat up your finance guy who thinks that shovelware is a smart business plan.
Presumably Target and Walmart are in every state and yet they manage to figure out what to charge tax on and at what percentage.
Target and Walmart can afford to staff a five-person legal team to comb through all those laws; but I'm sure they would rather spend that money on something more profitable. Joe's Online House Of Plus Sizes of Muncie, Indiana, cannot.
So according to you, I have to know every tax law in every jurisdiction in this country, and apply that knowledge to classify every single item in my database. I also have to keep track of every new law in every jurisdiction, in case they pass a new sales tax, and then I have to identify and reclassify every impacted item. The cost of a legal team capable of doing this work would cripple a small-to-medium sized retailer. The price of hiring a service to manage my item data tax codes would more than eat up today's profit margins.
All this, just so I have the privilege of paying the mailing costs to send out a thousand tiny checks every month to the various municipalities whose residents ordered from me.
If you still think it's either cheap or easy, I don't think you've ever had to deal with this particular problem.
If only we had some kind of calculating device that could reference a table of tax rates updated on a regular basis...
If that's all it took...
Let's say you are shipping a fluorescent yellow vest from California to Minnesota. In Minnesota, clothing is not taxable, but safety equipment is. Do you collect tax on it? Does their state consider it clothing or safety equipment? Add a pair of reading glasses to their order. Minnesota taxes general merchandise at one rate, while medical devices are taxed at a much lower rate. Which rate do you choose? Or are glasses considered clothing, because you wear them? What about a boxed set of grill accessories that includes a fork, a spatula, an apron, and an oven mitt?
Now ship a swimsuit to Pennsylvania. Clothing is taxable there, but sporting goods are not. Is swimwear taxable there? How does your cart service even know if it's a swimsuit when your online site only knows the product as Item#123456?
Next, ship a bicycle fender to a Houston, Texas, address. The law says you pay a higher tax rate if there is a public bus stop on your block. What tax rate do you charge?
Ship another fender to a Colorado address. They not only have sales taxes, but they have fees on some items, because some politician vowed not to raise taxes, but made no such promises about fees. Do you collect those fees on a fender? Do you charge sales taxes on those fees?
Do you charge tax on the shipping? That depends on whether you are shipping as a service to the customer (services are taxable in some states), or if you're shipping it because you don't stock the product in their state (a business expense.). Do you charge shipping taxes at the rate of the point of origin, or at the rate of the destination? To which state do you send the money?
In all these states, anyone doing business in their borders has to answer these questions because it's their law. Do I have to know every law in every town in America?
The states are a mess of thousands of such stupid and incompatible laws, each passed on behalf of some corrupt politician's crony. Never think it's easy just because it seems like simple math.
I just want to see how big the plastic treasure chest is that lets that many bubbles out!
They've been trying to sell internet fridges for a decade. They're not selling enough to see them on display in the big-box stores. Ditto with washers, dryers, ovens, and air conditioners.
For energy savings from ACs, it's easier to just use a timer or the on/off switch.
Sorry to break the news to you, but I bought my WiFi equipped washer and dryer right off the sales floor, after having tested the connectivity and downloading the app to my smart phone. All four appliance stores I shopped at had different makes and models with connectivity. I ended up buying from a big box retailer anyway, as their offerings best matched my needs. But even the two smaller local retailers had devices with connectivity on display. (Hint: After installation, I discovered that Samsung's SmartHome ecosystem sucks horribly. Do not buy their gear.) For the extra money, I wanted an alert letting me know when the load is done so I can go downstairs and fold the clothes before they wrinkle. Should the device have a detectable service condition, I can also have the technician SSH into it and figure out what's wrong without setting up an appointment. The rest of the connectivity options are quite useless. And Samsung's UX is worse than abysmal; again, do not buy a Samsung SmartHome device.
For HVAC, I installed a Honeywell WiFi thermostat. It's not great, I think Trane has better options, but at least it's not as locked-in to Google's cloud as Nest.
Rheem has a plug-in controller for their water heaters. Very reasonably priced at Home Depot. I bought it for the remote water leak alert feature, but the connectivity is also nice for scheduling vacations and having hot water when I return. It was also the easiest of these devices to set up.
Craftsman has a remote for garage door openers. I have weird paranoia about driving off and leaving the door open, so I have it send me alerts when it opens and closes. It gives me peace of mind; but it's also come in handy to remotely let in visitors and workmen, or to let myself in the house after a walk without carrying a keyring or anything but my phone.
I have an ATMega-based OpenSprinkler on line. Very handy out in the yard when testing and blowing out the system, but the real benefit comes from its ability to use the current weather forecast and conditions to control the amount of water applied to each zone.
I also have an entire Z-wave network of switches, sensors, and devices. All this on top of the expected nerd-sized collection of computers, laptops, tablets, watches, and wearables.
So yes, I understand the connected device market quite well. It's all built from off-the-shelf components, none of it was special order (apart from the OpenSprinkler.) I also know I'm not a typical consumer, but I assure you I am not alone in purchasing any of this gear, or the stores wouldn't carry it.
Don't tell me they aren't for sale.
Smart people will figure that the price has been padded by far more than $250, and negotiate based on that, not some phony discount.
Same problem: your perspective (or that of whatever you deem to be "smart people") isn't the perspective of the masses. The devices are indeed popular in some demographics, just not in yours.
I haven't noticed anyone using a fitbit or an apple watch or whatever
That's primarily because fitness trackers are mostly passive monitoring devices, not "things to use." Someone could be checking their steps on their smart phone but you wouldn't notice anything different from someone checking Facebook or reading texts. And Apple Watch is still an expensive luxury item; exact sales numbers aren't published but estimates are such that less than 3% of Americans could have them.
nobody I know is demanding internet fridges or toasters or air conditioners or fridges. Even the ones with smart TVs just watch whatever's on cable or satellite. Samrtphones and tablets offer enough to occupy those who feel they need more internet content.
Of course people are demanding them. Fitbit has sold tens of millions of devices; LG, Samsung, Westinghouse, etc., all sell wifi enabled washers, dryers, fridges, ovens, and air conditioners.* They may not have sold any to you or your peers, but if you want to understand why people buy them, you absolutely won't find the answers from the people who aren't buying them. Look at it from a very broad imagining of many other people's perspectives and resources, not just from your own narrow viewpoint or your immediate circle of acquaintances. For example, I cannot understand why someone would spend $200+ on tennis shoes, nor do I know or hang out with anyone who is proud of their $200+ tennis shoes, but that doesn't mean there isn't a large body of people who spend many hundreds of dollars on them. I don't have to understand or even agree with their reasons in order to acknowledge that their reasons exist.
* If you're interested in 'why', some reasons may include personal fitness, workplace fitness programs, convenience, energy savings, early adopters, peer pressure/status, high disposable income, and all the other usual reasons people spend money on stuff. If you're interested in 'why not', it's because most of the smart-home applications are proprietary and just plain suck.
You would have to pay me to wear any sort of smart device without a serious medical reason.
I'm afraid you hold a minority opposing viewpoint in a vast sea of people who already sell their health data in exchange for a discount on yogurt, or a "badge" they can post to Facebook. Try not to look at this from your personal perspective - try to see how the general population has embraced these devices. Then figure out how those people might react if you said "hey, if you run this heart-rate app while you take our car for a 5 minute test drive, we'll give you a $250 discount on any car in the lot!"
You're already saying you'll sell your data. Now we're just haggling over price.
What I don't get is that most 'wearables' don't have location sensors. A Fitbit or Vivofit may have accelerometers, but they have no GPS and no inertial guidance system. The Apple Watch gets its location data from its paired iPhone, which is already in frequent contact with a bunch of marketing companies; this is true regardless of the existence of a paired Apple Watch.
I assume these people are thinking there's some way to monetize heart-rate and/or motion data, but the attached article doesn't claim what that scheme might be. Maybe having an accelerated heartbeat in the presence of an iBeacon near a car dealer's display will tell the marketers which cars are perceived as most exciting, but any auto dealer or car salesman can tell that without needing a pulse check!
People are people; there is nothing significantly different in human nature between Chinese and Americans. Given the opportunity, Chinese teenagers will sit on the couch, play video games, and consume junk food at the same rates as American teens. So given similar availability to a steady food supply, and enough wealth allowing their parents to provide leisure time to offspring, we shouldn't be surprised to see roughly the same rates of childhood obesity.
I see this as a way of indirectly measuring food security. It's another indicator of China's wealth, and confirmation that the money the West is sending to their factories is starting to trickle down from the oligarchs to the average citizens. When China's rates of obesity approach those of people in the USA, it'll indicate a similar level of food security. It's much more believable than their official Party-issued reports of economic success.
Of course, this could also be a sinister plot by the Communist Party to manipulate the West. "We need 30% of children to become fat so the American spies believe their parents are successful. Double sugar production, and decrease the price of Doritos by 50%!" They are masters at playing the long game.
Correct. Citizens United isn't the root problem. The real problem is the corruption system that is currently in place works around the normal patterns of bribery. In Congress today, favors are granted long before the bribes are paid. Congressmen give away favors to corporations freely, secure in the knowledge that someone with lots of money will hire them as a lobbyist or consultant after they retire. Because this system is so successful, it encourages extra bonus corruption - if a Congressman grants favors to 10 companies, the chances are pretty good that one of the 10 will hire him. If he grants favors to 100 companies, he can be sure of it.
What we need from Congress is accountability. Keep tabs of votes that favor corporations, organizations, or special interests. After retiring from Congress, keep track of ex-members who go into lobbying or somehow get paid by organizations that received favorable laws while they were in office, and nullify their votes on the legislation after the fact. If the number of nullified votes drops the count below whatever majority was required to pass them, nullify the laws. If you voted in favor of three or more laws that were later nullified through this act, you win a felony corruption charge.
If you're a congressman who wants to retire with confidence in your voting record, you have a couple of safe paths: you can always recuse yourself from the votes that would favor big corporations; or you can retire on a minimum wage job as a fry cook.
There's a lot here to fix.
I'm a strong advocate of constructive code reviews that provide useful feedback, while leaving the egos and personal stuff out.
Is "I don't like this variable name" constructive feedback?
Part of it depends on your coding standards. The first standard on our list is from Scott Myers: "Don't sweat the small stuff." Other teams have really strong naming conventions, and as a member of those teams, you'd be expected to follow their standards. In our team we rely on mature discussion, and a comment phrased like that is not very mature.
Is "I think it would be more readable if you did [equivalently-readable alternative]" constructive feedback?
Sure! I'd read what the reviewer wrote because they may be confused by my original choices. I'm certainly not always right, and I can't accurately judge what someone else might find readable. Does that mean I'd change my code? Maybe.
Are "readability" regimes backed by armies of style guide Mandarins constructive feedback, or are they hazing? How about a reviewer who has readability saying "I approve this for the code review, but not for readability," are they being constructive? or are they insulting you, contributing to your hazing, and shirking their duty?
In general, I find that if you expect teams to do the right thing and behave maturely, they will deliver. The problem is when egos are brought into the reviews. Keep them from being personal, and settle them privately. If you're still having swarms of negative feedback on readability, maybe there really is a problem and the code is too complex. Break it up into simpler methods. Use polymorphism instead of switch statements. Use explaining variables instead of magic numbers. There are a lot of refactorings that can help.
What about saying "does this have test coverage?" when the request is outside the team's historical norm and the reviewer has no responsibility for scheduling your time?
Automated test coverage is a requirement for successfully iterating rapidly and deploying frequently; it's a core requirement of Agile. If a team historically doesn't have automated testing, is it wrong for the new guy to wonder why the team is not following modern development practices? When is the right time to introduce something new? Also, look at your review process, and who you invite. Don't extend review invitations outside of the team, unless you really need the opinions of a specific subject matter expert.. Especially don't invite the company's notorious "style Mandarins".
I find reviewers look for nits and try to mark your code as theirs. They can write it the way they want to when they're writing it.
This is another occurrence when getting a team to agree to coding standards can help settle the disputes. If it's a nit, it's either in violation of the terms the team agreed to, or you can tell the reviewer "it's not in the standards, and I don't think this is a bad way to do it".
I'm not saying we shouldn't do code reviews. I'm saying how much of this are you going to punt to "solve your team issues"? The code reviews are creating the team issues.
I can't fix your broken team. What I can do is tell you that when you do reviews well, when everyone matures to the point where they can leave their egos at the door, they can help bring a team together, and leave you all with better code at the end of the day. If you're trying to make a change, this is a good place where you can lead by example.
Code reviews as they are actually done are adversarial motivation and only escape becoming completely dickish by rare and heroic good character.
Wow, I'm sorry to hear that your team operates that way. Good behavior should be expected, and shouldn't be rare or heroic. That would definitel
I agree with most of your user interface principles, except for the the "fifth grade reading level" one. You might have a point, but I really don't like talking down to grown-ass adults.
That's actually when I really learned this lesson. I was opposed to these changes for exactly the same reasons you are, because all I saw was that we were introducing colloquialisms, slang, and generally poor English. I thought "if software ever talked to ME like this, I'd find it offensive." We deployed the new interface, and the clients loved it. The supervisors were able to get people trained quicker, and we received very few complaints. So when I'd call the supervisors about other issues, I'd ask their candid opinions. The people who felt like you and I did were generally older and better educated. But most recognized that our average employees; well, let's say we don't pay college professor wages to the people who operate the software. And a lot of the workers are not native English speakers; for them, the fewer words to interpret, the better. (There are other reasons the interface isn't multi-lingual.)
I've worked on software where I put a lot of thought into describing the error in clear, complete, accurate, and accessible terms, only to be told that the users aren't going to "even bother to read it because it's too long". In my view, the kind of people who object to error messages that are complete sentences and contain three-syllable words are the kind of people who won't read any error message under any circumstances, but whatever. "ERR 34: Bad srvc" it is. Choke on it.
We established a lot of rules for our error messages. The first rules were around avoiding as many error messages as possible, because if you can determine the user's intentions, just do it. If you are keeping track of packages going into a truck, and they scan the same package twice, so what? It's obvious they want to put it on the truck, so let it go through. Another rule was that you could only tell them "why" it's an error if it would help prevent repeated occurrences of the error. Our error messages have to be distinctive, so that the busy user don't have to carefully parse every character. The error messages have to be timely; they can't pop up at the end of a workflow because the user might have moved beyond the task that has the problem. And the error messages have to be non-threatening - you need the users to correct the issue and keep moving instead of worrying about their jobs. You don't want them to feel like they'll be punished for making an error; you don't want them to feel like they're being blamed. Just help them.
The last rule is that our error messages can NEVER display an error code. They can only display information that helps the user recover; they are not there for tech support. Average users won't pay attention anyway, and many report the wrong code, especially when there are subtle differences between codes like 80004005 and 80040005. If it comes to troubleshooting, the support staff are perfectly capable of looking at the log files and seeing the correct values of the error codes for themselves instead of relying on reports of dubious accuracy.
"Yes but as I'm not a moron I never thought of the user story from your perspective..."
I hope this was intended as a joke in poor taste.
Something really hard for some developers to understand is that our peer groups are usually not representative of our user base. We're used to hanging around with really bright people, people who apply logic to questions and use evidence to arrive at conclusions. When we forget that not everyone in the world is like that, we assume that everyone who touches our applications is smart, quick, logical, and willing to read instructions. In reality, we should be constantly aware that 50% of our users are literally below average (by definition, not because we think they're "morons".)
That means a lot of attention needs to be paid to User Experience. A few years ago we went through our application and made sure that every screen was at a 5th grade reading level. We made sure our users could be trained on the basic functions, features, and processes in less than half an hour. Error messages have to be focused on correcting the problem, not accusing the users of being "morons" and making a mistake, and not leaving them fearing punishment. And if a person runs into a feature that's difficult, frequently gives them error messages, or that takes them a long time to figure out, it's not their fault that the UI didn't help them. It's the UI that needs work.
I'm a strong advocate of constructive code reviews that provide useful feedback, while leaving the egos and personal stuff out. It's important for everyone to participate, to both give and receive feedback. First, you help your team improve your product. Second, you learn about the new sections of code; how the new functionality was implemented. That's important on a large product.
And then there's the one that many of the old guys overlook: nobody knows it all, so everyone can learn from anyone, including the new kid on the team. We can all see how technology and computers have evolved dramatically over the decades; it's a mistake to believe that software design and engineering hasn't been simultaneously evolving for the better.
It compiled cleanly, so he shipped it.
I challenge you to turn 50 and then repeat your assertion that a large screen has anything to do with FOMO. I'm still using a small older iPhone, but every time i handle an iPhone 6+, I realize just how much less my eyes are strained using it. Many of my age-peers have swapped devices just to get the bigger display; every single one has said they'd never go back to a smaller display. This includes a Microsoftie who traded his corporate-flavored Lumia for a heretical iPhone 6+.
I've found my wife's iPhone 6+ fits all the same shirt and pants pockets that my old phone fits, so carrying it doesn't seem to be much of an issue. And she's always carried hers in her purse, where the bulk is unimportant.
That's not the limit. The Apple Watch is popular enough that there are dozens of apps out there already, but they're all way too hard to use. When you have a 38mm screen, you can only reliably recognize a very few gestures. Accurately pressing buttons is really hard (entering the unlock code on the tiny little keypad requires intense concentration and the fine motor skills of an 8 year old kid with a box of Lego bricks, something an adult rarely wants from a watch.)
It doesn't matter how good a watch app is, you still have to click and wobble around the watch's home screen to open it up, and that's just a silly amount of effort. Where any smart watch shines is in its connectivity, and in delivering alerts to the wearer. It takes no user effort to sound an alarm, so when a glance will tell you something important, that's a great app. But if you have to punch in a dozen tiny buttons to use it, it's going to suck no matter what it is.
weather at a glance
I've never understood this, unless that's a forecast. In which case, surely you have to select how far in advance the forecast is. If not... well, that's just one of the many tasks that windows are good for.
You may live in an area where weather forecasts are unimportant, like southern California. Here in Minnesota, it can mean the difference between wearing a winter coat to go walking at noon, or biking to work in shorts. And the forecast face for the Apple Watch gives you 12 hours of predicted temperatures and weather as a series of hourly icons around the clock hands. It's a really useful display. (Like everything else on the Apple Watch, if you need extended forecast info, or more detail, it's easier to grab the phone and open the weather app.)
health data which is very useful during exercise
Personally, I've never really been convinced about that either. I mean I've played with health gadgets and they're neat and all, but ultimately, I don't need one to tell me I've been a lazy git and skipped an exercise session or taken the bus instead of walking.
There's a difference between a gamified motivational device, like the Fitbit, and a fitness tool that measures your heart rate. A device that measures your pulse can tell you if your workout is within the "cardio zone". If your pulse never reaches a certain rate, you're not actually benefiting your heart enough. And if your pulse exceeds your safe threshold, you risk all kinds of problems, including a heart attack. Competitive athletes know exactly what their target heart rate is by feel; but I'm just an ordinary schlub who can't tell when I enter or exit the zone, so a device like that really helps me. Fitness-dedicated watches (like Polars and Garmins) will vibrate to let you know if you're above or below your target range, so you can work harder or rest as needed. That's a feature that may entice me to buy an Apple Watch, because I don't like the chest strap with my Polar watch. On the minus side, fitness machines like treadmills can increase or decrease the workload to keep you in your desired zone, but they only receive signals from the chest straps, not the fitness bands. And then there's the difference between Polar heart signals and ANT+ signals, meaning a Garmin may follow the most open standards but be the least connected of all. Sigh.
And yes, my wife uses her watch motivationally, like a Fitbit. She stands up and moves around every hour (seems to be some kind of popular woo-woo health thing), and gets her 10,000 steps per day. I expect that will eventually wear off, but she's kept her Fitbit going for three or four years now. (Yes, she still wears a Fitbit even though she has an Apple Watch. Please don't ask me to rationalize that one! :)
I wouldn't say it's junk. My wife loves hers. Like a smartphone provides a subset of a full computer's functionality, a smart watch provides its own small set of functionality. The primary functions are really useful: time and weather at a glance; reliable notification of a phone call or SMS message in a noisy environment; health data which is very useful during exercise; Siri; and Apple Pay. Is that worth more than the cost of an iPhone? Different question.
It also shows its lack of ability in the "apps" available. Just because you can produce a "tap 17 tiny buttons in the arcane sequence and you can view the state of your coffee pot" app won't ever make it a useful or practical app. And the non-primary functions that might be of value still require some form of setup, like telling the watch you want driving directions to be signaled on your wrist.
Some of this is first-gen product limitations; some of it is inherent to a small form-factor device that simply doesn't have an interface matched to the size of human fingers. What that says to me is it's overpriced for what it can do - that doesn't make it junk, but it means they aren't going to sell like smartphones.