The article you linked to was honest buy mentioning that the paper was written by someone well known for advocacy of solar. Kudos to the journalist on that.
The author of the headline, who typically isn't the person who wrote the article, didn't do so well at all. The headline does not match what the article says, or what the study says. What study says that's related to the headline is this:
If we had enough wind and power plants to cover 150% our energy needs (based on nameplate rating)...
And we got rid of the safety of separate power grids..
And we had magical storage...
Then we could get 80%-90% of our energy from wind and solar.
So in other words, "if we had 50% more solar and wind than we need, we'd have almost as much as we need".
The point of thr study was to determine what ratio of wind vs solar would be needed to balance night vs day. No attempt was made to consider when either was possible, much less feasible.
Rewriting the headline to match the article:
If solar and wind could power the US, it could almost power the US
> But you shouldn't use fallacious arguments against solar out of your support for nuclear. It's possible (and logical) to support both.
I said we should use both. When the weather cooperates, make use of it.
> It looks like we spend about $250B / yr on energy infrastructure.
Yes, total global investment by all of the world's oil companies, governments, etc is about $250 billion. Which you then divided into *federal tax dollars* spent on solar in the US alone. Apples divided by oranges equals fruit salad. Speaking of specious arguments.
Btw 3% is probably significantly overstating it. Here the Energy Information Administration reports 0.4%. https://www.eia.gov/totalenerg...
Estimates vary to as high as 3% of energy production, so I was being generous to solar.
Yes, it does make sense for insurance to cover preventative care and checkups, because it did reduce overall costs. That's why they did it.
> guess we would need to employ some actuaries to figure out how
Yes, the insurance industry employed a lot of actuaries to figure that stuff out.
> at the very least all of the paperwork and forms should be standardized if we are gong to have a mess of different insurance and HMO systems out these.
You don't have separate car companies for each state, you don't have different standards for cell phones or beef in each state, where companies can only sell cars or phones or beef in their home state. How we use and interact with cars is pretty nuch standardized across the country because the same cars are sold everywhere, with Toyota's Texas plant competing with Ford's Chicago plant. Why in world don't let insurance or health plans be sold across state lines. A Texas company should be competing with a Florida company to offer the best deal (and the most convenient online, paperless experience).
By the way, after spending a trillion dollars in federal tax money (and more in state taxes), the US gets less than 3% of our energy from solar. So it has not worked.
According the Government Accountability Office, you the taxpayer spend about $40 billion / year on 345 different federal initiatives supporting solar energy research and deployment. Total spent over the years is more than a TRILLION dollars. You're saying this trillion dollars actually has NOT been spent on trying to get it to work, everyone has just been sitting on their hands waiting for a miracle? Maybe the trillion dollars went from the taxpayer to the corporations and then back to the politicians who approved it, in the form of campaign donations?
You're about half right. Solar happens to be the label one political party put on their slush funds; I particular millions of dollars ended up literally in Al Gore's pocket.
Either way, whatever we've been doing, we've been doing it for 70 years and it hasn't solved the problem. Electricity still comes from fossil fuels, including coal. So it's time to do something different, something based on what we can actually do rather than just hoping. We can continue to hope, but while we hope we need to implement the best solutions we have today.
It's no coincidence that Greenpeace has that name, Green Peace. The early environmental movement was very much intertwined with the anti-war, anti-military movement, at a time with nuclear weapons were one of the major issues of the day. The Peace side of Greenpeace was churning out information / propagada against nuclear research and facilities because of nuclear weapons. You couldn't have Greenpeace both promoting nuclear energy and using scare tactics about nuclear research such as creating confusion between the slow, long-lived elements vs the fast ones that release enough energy to be dangerous. That legacy lasted a long time.
A lot of leading environmentalists are coming around, though, such as one of the founders of Greenpeace:
As the parent mentioned, solar and wind compliment nuclear very nicely. Both solar and wind are great - when the weather is right at the moment. When the weather isn't right, at night for example, nuclear is the very best, cleanest way to have your base.
For 70 years now we've been trying to find ways solar electric work on a nationwide scale, particularly working on the storage problem. All the while we've been running oal burning plants while hoping for a revolutionary discovery in energy storage. It can work fine for a hunting cabin (just a little expensive), but after seventy years of burning coal while waiting for solar, we're still nowhere near the kind of revolutionary discoveries needed for something on the scale of powering the United States or Japan. The amount of energy is just so vast. As an example, pumped hydro storage sufficient to get the US through a large winter storm system would require flooding from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, nearly half the country.
If we want to not only replace the existing uses of electricity, but also power all of our cars and trucks from electricity, and industry such as steel and aluminum, we're going to need a lot more electricity. Dependable power for transportation can come from either fossil fuels or nuclear, because you can't have the entire state shut down due it's cloudy this week. You can use solar electric during sunny weeks, but food needs to be delivered to stores during storm season too, and Seattle's cloudy season.
People are starting to come around. I don't think we'll have to keep using mostly fossil fuels for another seventy years while hoping fot a miracle. We can wait for the miracle while drastically cutting CO2 emissions with nuclear.
PS - Before you reply, be warned I know the gimmicks of dividing *electricity* usage (not vehicles or any other use of energy) by energy usage. Apple divided by orange is a useless number. I'll call you out on it, so don't bother trying to post a BS stat that conflates energy and electricity.
I'll also call you out on it if you try the propaganda of conflating long half-life elements which release energy slowly, over a long time, like a candle, vs short half-life elements that release it quickly like a firecracker. Energy released quickly is dangerous - for a short time, then it's done.
I was going to list two more propaganda techniques I'll call you out on, but let's just summarize with this: I've studied for 30 years. I've written a comprehensive energy plan for the United States. I know the tricks, and I'll call you put if you try to use them.
If you want social platforms like Facebook and Slashdot to be RESPONSIBLE for what people post, they aren't going to be responsible for stuff they haven't screened and approved. In the US, we don't want Slashdot to only show comments that have been approved by their staff. Thus, they aren't responsible for the content.
A middle ground we're seeing now I when a forum / platform is informed that a particular person has a pattern and practice of posting unlawful or patently offensive content, they can choose not to associate with that user any more. Slashdot could ban user ABC without needing to approve every post everyone makes (if we didn't have ACs).
You can build on your knowledge that one main thing you focus on - a SQL server admin at one company can be a SQL server admin at the next company. A lot of the other stuff is different between companies. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
That is, unless perhaps you are VERY strategic in your company, working on getting assigned to another team that works on something that the other company uses.
Moving around is one way to be introduced to different skills (though not excel in any). You get also get security in your career by just doing some planning an which company or companies you'd like to move to, without actually making the move until it's necessary. I don't want to to to re-type everything I typed out yesterday, so here are more details on what I do in order to always have a "better" job kinda lined lined up: https://slashdot.org/comments....
I'm sorry that happened to you. Sounds like it was, and is, pretty rough. I hope something like that never happens to you again.
To avoid really bad things happening, it might be helpful to be very clear about the cause.
Hurricanes happen. Businesses get destroyed. Laws like HIPPA and GDPR change industries so that some products and even companies no longer fit, or the changes give new competitors an opportunity. Technology changes, major contracts get cancelled. Any product or company can become infeasible at any time. Even large companies can fail quickly. No job is guaranteed to stay the same or stay around, no matter how much your employer might want it to.
> However, since my skills were very very specific to my employer - because I was so loyal - they weren't transferable
I believe you've misdiagnosed the cause. You didn't end up with only skills that are useful only to one part of one business because you were loyal. You put yourself in a position where you'd eventually become unemployable either because: A) you were unaware that change happens, major change, unpredictably Or B) You were short-sighted
Knowing that things WILL change, that whatever product you work with or work on will eventually get cancelled, someone thinking long term could do a few things:
Think about what job you'd like to have in five years, assuming you need to make a move.
Look over related job ads and note which skills employers look for.
Make a list of the skills you're missing.
Find opportunities within your company, in open source, or volunteering to learn the skills you're missing.
Had you been prepared for the fact that at some point your company will be gone, and that could be because of an accounting scandal *tomorrow*, you wouldn't be screwed whatever happens.
Setting yourself up for catastrophe if your job ever changes isn't loyalty, it's short-sighted.
I keep my list of needed skills in Wunderlist. Actually I have two lists of job requirements to work on. One is skills that show up often in the want ads for my industry. The other list is what my two target companies are looking for. I'm loyal to my employer - I don't stab them in the back and I don't intend to leave any time real soon. I've ALSO thought about what happens when eventually I do need a new job, what work I want to do, and for which company. Boeing and Lockheed Martin fit what I'm looking for, so I'm keeping an eye out for opportunities to learn the things Boeing wants people to know.
Perhaps I'll be at my current employer for the next three years. If so, I'll then walk into a Boeing interview saying "yes, for each skill you want, I have at least three years of experience in each one". (Obviously these aren't skills that ONLY apply to Boeing - Lockheed is looking for many of the same skills, as is Bell Helicopter).
PS - if anyone works in IT or software development at those companies, particularly information security, I'd love to talk to you.
Absolutely agreed. Many years ago, I had built enough web UOs which tied to a database back end, thay i went ahead and built framework and template system to automate generating the data-centric one. With just a few customization rules added to the configuration table, I could have a decent view of the software's internal model competed within a couple hours. (Good generic CSS also helped with this.)
After creating the data-centric UI I a couple hours, we could then build the task-centric side for common workflows.
In my experience, applications that have enough different features an complexity to really be a problem often support doing several different tasks. Often it can be made much more usable by designing a UI around the distinct jobs one can do using the software, a UI based on workflow. I'm not going to say wizards exactly, but UI flows designed for specific tasks the user wants to accomplish.
The UI often represents the underlying underlying data rather than the tasks. You know for sure that you have this kind of UI if it has different sections for different kinds of objects. Of these different kinds of objects map to different table in your database, you definitely have a data-centric UI instead of a task-centric one.
My server backup software originally had a data-centric UI. It was basically alot like managing hosting accounts. It had a page for servers - listing, adding, removing, and editing them. It had a page for DNS names - adding, removing, and editing them. There were a couple other pages like that, for manahaing the objects in the application. That worked great for me. Users didn't like it.
We added another UI that started with this page: Add a new server Restore file or server Manage billing Other tasks
Clicking "add a new server" took the user through the steps of adding a new server - including any domain names related to that server. Clicking "restore a file or server" took them through the steps to do that. At each step, the only saw the options relevant to that step.
The task-centric model is a great way to manage complexity. The data-centric UI can also be useful at times, but it's inherently more difficult to learn and use in many cases. Some applications warrant having both options. We kept both for the server backup system. Customers used the task-centric, wizard-like UI for common tasks. For less-common tasks, the data-centric UI was more flexible.
Also, if someone gets sick shortly after lunch, they are likely to blame lunch; it's more likely causd by breakfast several hours before. Here's a chart from the FDA showing typical onset times for various bacteria. Rarely would one get sick within an hour. More likely the cause would be YESTERDAY'S dinner.
That sounds to me almost like saying "glue is more effective than wheels", they are for different purposes.
Government oversight of a hotel or restaurant is supposed to make see if they meet basic health and fire codes. The health department wants the food to be safe. Reviews tell you if the good is delicious.
> And the jury (who have absolutely no clue how to tell which expert is reliable)
The best experts will explain to the jury how they can look at the evidence and draw conclusions, rarher than just proclaiming a conclusion.
As one example, a blood spatter expert can demonstrate, either live or on video, that slinging a wet sponge at high speed leaves a pattern of very small droplets, while carrying it or slinging it slowly let's much larger drops form. The jury can then see for themselves whether the crime scene has tiny droplets (high speed) or large drops (low speed). Thr expert can show that at low speed the drops make circles on the surface, at high speed they streak as the impact the surface.
If the experts show and and explain, rather than tell, the jury can see for for themselves how things actually work.
That's something that was said over and over again in my private investigator and security officer training.
You DON'T tell the client "yes I caught your spouse cheating on you with his ex". You write notes as its happening if possible saying "I observed a white sedan park near 124 Oak Street". It's possible that the car isn't the subject's car, it only looks similar. It's possible that the suspected companion doesn't currently live at that address. It's possible that the subject went there to meet with his ex-brother-in-law about a business deal. You report only what you directly observe.
I'm going to agree with you in part and disagree in part.
> Isn't this one of the basic ideas behind free markets. The invisible hand at work. Why should we assume that what someone from a third world country needs is a cow.
One should certainly at least ASK someone what they need and want before spending a lot of money getting them something that they might not even want.
There can also be an arrogance among certain communities in the west where think they know better what people need. They feel sorry for people in a condescending way. I've encountered that with my daughter. "Poor little black girl needs my help" kind of crap, when what she needs is for them to get out of the way and shut the F up.
> I think avoiding cash is based on people's general tendency to want to control others. Don't want them to do something with their charity that they don't approve of with the money.
For many years my largest area of giving was helping alcoholics and drug addicts. I've put in a lot of my time and my money helping people get clean and start a new life. Some people decide to spend their money buying themselves a new car, some special their time gardening. I decide rather than buying myself a new car, I'd rather help someone who is in a desperate situation get treatment. I don't use my money to buy myself Starbucks and I don't use it to buy them heroin. I make those decisions because I am responsible for controlling how I spend my resources, not because I want to control other people.
If someone doesn't want to be sober, that's their business. I have no interest in forcing them go to treatment. I won't use my money to give them for crack and meth because I'm responsible for how I spend my money.
As someone else pointed out, in Africa and Central America, donated cash is sometimes used to buy machine guns and land mines. If I choose to use my resources to buy food to share, not land mines, that means I'm being responsible with my resources, not trying to control someone else. I'll never force someone to eat the food I bought to share, only offer it to them.
Thanks for that example. That's exactly what I mean - saying that would be both wrong and you'd be a jerk, plus you threw in stupid as well. Perfect example of how to sound like a loser.
A) It's okay to be wrong. None of us knows everything. B) We'll tolerate being an asshole when you're pointing out something stupid.
BUT you have to pick one or the other. Don't be an asshole and be wrong at the same time. Calling someone dumb while "correcting" their true statement with your own goof isn't a good look. Don't be an asshole when you don't know what you are talking about.
I get how the general theory is supposed to work. Also, this idea has me thinking:
We know that radio waves or other electromagnetic waves bounce off surfaces, in a way that an antenna can only barely detect the general direction of a large object. Can a device makes sense of refected electromagnetic waves in order to see high resolution detail? Well, ever heard of a camera - or eyes? Visible light is electromagnetic waves just like radio, only at a different frequency. So in theory there's no reason this wouldn't work THEORETICALLY.
The walls are transparent to the wavelengths involved. Cameras can see through transparent things. So you just need a camera responds to those wavelengths. Infrared cameras are common.
Cameras consist of basically two parts - a large number of light-sensing pixels, and a lens to focus that blurry reflection. Interesting thing is, none of the devices I've heard about have more than one or a few recieve - pixels. You'd expect high resolution would need a bunch of little sensors. I also haven't seen a focusing device serving the same purpose as a lens. Interesting that they are all building a camera that doesn't have either of the two main parts which make up a camera.
Also it seems to me that if this idea really works, using basically Wi-Fi parts, and it has been developed to the point of sensing the tiny motion of breathing, I'm surprised some tinkerer hasn't made a really crude model from a couple of old wireless cards or routers. Something that can detect that big pipe full of water that's inside the wall, behind just one layer of drywall. If the concept works, that's should be a super simple, cheap implementation of the idea. Anyone done that yet? Not that I've seen.
Slashdot Mirror
The article you linked to was honest buy mentioning that the paper was written by someone well known for advocacy of solar. Kudos to the journalist on that.
The author of the headline, who typically isn't the person who wrote the article, didn't do so well at all. The headline does not match what the article says, or what the study says. What study says that's related to the headline is this:
If we had enough wind and power plants to cover 150% our energy needs (based on nameplate rating) ...
And we got rid of the safety of separate power grids..
And we had magical storage...
Then we could get 80%-90% of our energy from wind and solar.
So in other words, "if we had 50% more solar and wind than we need, we'd have almost as much as we need".
The point of thr study was to determine what ratio of wind vs solar would be needed to balance night vs day. No attempt was made to consider when either was possible, much less feasible.
Rewriting the headline to match the article:
If solar and wind could power the US, it could almost power the US
> But you shouldn't use fallacious arguments against solar out of your support for nuclear. It's possible (and logical) to support both.
I said we should use both. When the weather cooperates, make use of it.
> It looks like we spend about $250B / yr on energy infrastructure.
Yes, total global investment by all of the world's oil companies, governments, etc is about $250 billion. Which you then divided into *federal tax dollars* spent on solar in the US alone. Apples divided by oranges equals fruit salad. Speaking of specious arguments.
Btw 3% is probably significantly overstating it.
Here the Energy Information Administration reports 0.4%.
https://www.eia.gov/totalenerg...
Estimates vary to as high as 3% of energy production, so I was being generous to solar.
Yes, it does make sense for insurance to cover preventative care and checkups, because it did reduce overall costs. That's why they did it.
> guess we would need to employ some actuaries to figure out how
Yes, the insurance industry employed a lot of actuaries to figure that stuff out.
> at the very least all of the paperwork and forms should be standardized if we are gong to have a mess of different insurance and HMO systems out these.
You don't have separate car companies for each state, you don't have different standards for cell phones or beef in each state, where companies can only sell cars or phones or beef in their home state. How we use and interact with cars is pretty nuch standardized across the country because the same cars are sold everywhere, with Toyota's Texas plant competing with Ford's Chicago plant. Why in world don't let insurance or health plans be sold across state lines. A Texas company should be competing with a Florida company to offer the best deal (and the most convenient online, paperless experience).
By the way, after spending a trillion dollars in federal tax money (and more in state taxes), the US gets less than 3% of our energy from solar. So it has not worked.
According the Government Accountability Office, you the taxpayer spend about $40 billion / year on 345 different federal initiatives supporting solar energy research and deployment. Total spent over the years is more than a TRILLION dollars. You're saying this trillion dollars actually has NOT been spent on trying to get it to work, everyone has just been sitting on their hands waiting for a miracle? Maybe the trillion dollars went from the taxpayer to the corporations and then back to the politicians who approved it, in the form of campaign donations?
You're about half right. Solar happens to be the label one political party put on their slush funds; I particular millions of dollars ended up literally in Al Gore's pocket.
Either way, whatever we've been doing, we've been doing it for 70 years and it hasn't solved the problem. Electricity still comes from fossil fuels, including coal. So it's time to do something different, something based on what we can actually do rather than just hoping. We can continue to hope, but while we hope we need to implement the best solutions we have today.
It's no coincidence that Greenpeace has that name, Green Peace. The early environmental movement was very much intertwined with the anti-war, anti-military movement, at a time with nuclear weapons were one of the major issues of the day. The Peace side of Greenpeace was churning out information / propagada against nuclear research and facilities because of nuclear weapons. You couldn't have Greenpeace both promoting nuclear energy and using scare tactics about nuclear research such as creating confusion between the slow, long-lived elements vs the fast ones that release enough energy to be dangerous. That legacy lasted a long time.
A lot of leading environmentalists are coming around, though, such as one of the founders of Greenpeace:
http://ecosense.me/2017/01/17/...
http://ecosense.me/2017/01/18/...
As the parent mentioned, solar and wind compliment nuclear very nicely. Both solar and wind are great - when the weather is right at the moment. When the weather isn't right, at night for example, nuclear is the very best, cleanest way to have your base.
For 70 years now we've been trying to find ways solar electric work on a nationwide scale, particularly working on the storage problem. All the while we've been running
oal burning plants while hoping for a revolutionary discovery in energy storage. It can work fine for a hunting cabin (just a little expensive), but after seventy years of burning coal while waiting for solar, we're still nowhere near the kind of revolutionary discoveries needed for something on the scale of powering the United States or Japan. The amount of energy is just so vast. As an example, pumped hydro storage sufficient to get the US through a large winter storm system would require flooding from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, nearly half the country.
If we want to not only replace the existing uses of electricity, but also power all of our cars and trucks from electricity, and industry such as steel and aluminum, we're going to need a lot more electricity. Dependable power for transportation can come from either fossil fuels or nuclear, because you can't have the entire state shut down due it's cloudy this week. You can use solar electric during sunny weeks, but food needs to be delivered to stores during storm season too, and Seattle's cloudy season.
People are starting to come around. I don't think we'll have to keep using mostly fossil fuels for another seventy years while hoping fot a miracle. We can wait for the miracle while drastically cutting CO2 emissions with nuclear.
PS -
Before you reply, be warned I know the gimmicks of dividing *electricity* usage (not vehicles or any other use of energy) by energy usage. Apple divided by orange is a useless number. I'll call you out on it, so don't bother trying to post a BS stat that conflates energy and electricity.
I'll also call you out on it if you try the propaganda of conflating long half-life elements which release energy slowly, over a long time, like a candle, vs short half-life elements that release it quickly like a firecracker. Energy released quickly is dangerous - for a short time, then it's done.
I was going to list two more propaganda techniques I'll call you out on, but let's just summarize with this:
I've studied for 30 years. I've written a comprehensive energy plan for the United States. I know the tricks, and I'll call you put if you try to use them.
On care anyone is curious what a $110 million painting looks like:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
That's one of the most expensive paintings ever auctioned. The artist died of a drug overdose at the age of 27.
If you want social platforms like Facebook and Slashdot to be RESPONSIBLE for what people post, they aren't going to be responsible for stuff they haven't screened and approved. In the US, we don't want Slashdot to only show comments that have been approved by their staff. Thus, they aren't responsible for the content.
A middle ground we're seeing now I when a forum / platform is informed that a particular person has a pattern and practice of posting unlawful or patently offensive content, they can choose not to associate with that user any more. Slashdot could ban user ABC without needing to approve every post everyone makes (if we didn't have ACs).
You can build on your knowledge that one main thing you focus on - a SQL server admin at one company can be a SQL server admin at the next company. A lot of the other stuff is different between companies. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
That is, unless perhaps you are VERY strategic in your company, working on getting assigned to another team that works on something that the other company uses.
Moving around is one way to be introduced to different skills (though not excel in any). You get also get security in your career by just doing some planning an which company or companies you'd like to move to, without actually making the move until it's necessary. I don't want to to to re-type everything I typed out yesterday, so here are more details on what I do in order to always have a "better" job kinda lined lined up:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
I'm sorry that happened to you. Sounds like it was, and is, pretty rough. I hope something like that never happens to you again.
To avoid really bad things happening, it might be helpful to be very clear about the cause.
Hurricanes happen. Businesses get destroyed. Laws like HIPPA and GDPR change industries so that some products and even companies no longer fit, or the changes give new competitors an opportunity. Technology changes, major contracts get cancelled. Any product or company can become infeasible at any time. Even large companies can fail quickly. No job is guaranteed to stay the same or stay around, no matter how much your employer might want it to.
> However, since my skills were very very specific to my employer - because I was so loyal - they weren't transferable
I believe you've misdiagnosed the cause. You didn't end up with only skills that are useful only to one part of one business because you were loyal. You put yourself in a position where you'd eventually become unemployable either because:
A) you were unaware that change happens, major change, unpredictably
Or
B) You were short-sighted
Knowing that things WILL change, that whatever product you work with or work on will eventually get cancelled, someone thinking long term could do a few things:
Think about what job you'd like to have in five years, assuming you need to make a move.
Look over related job ads and note which skills employers look for.
Make a list of the skills you're missing.
Find opportunities within your company, in open source, or volunteering to learn the skills you're missing.
Had you been prepared for the fact that at some point your company will be gone, and that could be because of an accounting scandal *tomorrow*, you wouldn't be screwed whatever happens.
Setting yourself up for catastrophe if your job ever changes isn't loyalty, it's short-sighted.
I keep my list of needed skills in Wunderlist. Actually I have two lists of job requirements to work on. One is skills that show up often in the want ads for my industry. The other list is what my two target companies are looking for. I'm loyal to my employer - I don't stab them in the back and I don't intend to leave any time real soon. I've ALSO thought about what happens when eventually I do need a new job, what work I want to do, and for which company. Boeing and Lockheed Martin fit what I'm looking for, so I'm keeping an eye out for opportunities to learn the things Boeing wants people to know.
Perhaps I'll be at my current employer for the next three years. If so, I'll then walk into a Boeing interview saying "yes, for each skill you want, I have at least three years of experience in each one". (Obviously these aren't skills that ONLY apply to Boeing - Lockheed is looking for many of the same skills, as is Bell Helicopter).
PS - if anyone works in IT or software development at those companies, particularly information security, I'd love to talk to you.
Absolutely agreed. Many years ago, I had built enough web UOs which tied to a database back end, thay i went ahead and built framework and template system to automate generating the data-centric one. With just a few customization rules added to the configuration table, I could have a decent view of the software's internal model competed within a couple hours. (Good generic CSS also helped with this.)
After creating the data-centric UI I a couple hours, we could then build the task-centric side for common workflows.
In my experience, applications that have enough different features an complexity to really be a problem often support doing several different tasks. Often it can be made much more usable by designing a UI around the distinct jobs one can do using the software, a UI based on workflow. I'm not going to say wizards exactly, but UI flows designed for specific tasks the user wants to accomplish.
The UI often represents the underlying underlying data rather than the tasks. You know for sure that you have this kind of UI if it has different sections for different kinds of objects. Of these different kinds of objects map to different table in your database, you definitely have a data-centric UI instead of a task-centric one.
My server backup software originally had a data-centric UI. It was basically alot like managing hosting accounts. It had a page for servers - listing, adding, removing, and editing them. It had a page for DNS names - adding, removing, and editing them. There were a couple other pages like that, for manahaing the objects in the application. That worked great for me. Users didn't like it.
We added another UI that started with this page:
Add a new server
Restore file or server
Manage billing
Other tasks
Clicking "add a new server" took the user through the steps of adding a new server - including any domain names related to that server. Clicking "restore a file or server" took them through the steps to do that. At each step, the only saw the options relevant to that step.
The task-centric model is a great way to manage complexity. The data-centric UI can also be useful at times, but it's inherently more difficult to learn and use in many cases. Some applications warrant having both options. We kept both for the server backup system. Customers used the task-centric, wizard-like UI for common tasks. For less-common tasks, the data-centric UI was more flexible.
Someone did the math for us.
https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
I wish I had mod ooints to mod up the parent.
Also, if someone gets sick shortly after lunch, they are likely to blame lunch; it's more likely causd by breakfast several hours before. Here's a chart from the FDA showing typical onset times for various bacteria. Rarely would one get sick within an hour. More likely the cause would be YESTERDAY'S dinner.
https://www.fda.gov/food/resou...
That sounds to me almost like saying "glue is more effective than wheels", they are for different purposes.
Government oversight of a hotel or restaurant is supposed to make see if they meet basic health and fire codes. The health department wants the food to be safe. Reviews tell you if the good is delicious.
> And the jury (who have absolutely no clue how to tell which expert is reliable)
The best experts will explain to the jury how they can look at the evidence and draw conclusions, rarher than just proclaiming a conclusion.
As one example, a blood spatter expert can demonstrate, either live or on video, that slinging a wet sponge at high speed leaves a pattern of very small droplets, while carrying it or slinging it slowly let's much larger drops form. The jury can then see for themselves whether the crime scene has tiny droplets (high speed) or large drops (low speed). Thr expert can show that at low speed the drops make circles on the surface, at high speed they streak as the impact the surface.
If the experts show and and explain, rather than tell, the jury can see for for themselves how things actually work.
That's something that was said over and over again in my private investigator and security officer training.
You DON'T tell the client "yes I caught your spouse cheating on you with his ex". You write notes as its happening if possible saying "I observed a white sedan park near 124 Oak Street". It's possible that the car isn't the subject's car, it only looks similar. It's possible that the suspected companion doesn't currently live at that address. It's possible that the subject went there to meet with his ex-brother-in-law about a business deal. You report only what you directly observe.
This is San Francisco, where what counts is that you had good intentions. Actual consequences of your actions? Consequences smaushcequences.
Free the minks!
âSan Francisco Gets Its First Cashierless Store"
First, eh. Texas has had cashierless stores for a hundred years. We call them "vending machines".
I'm going to agree with you in part and disagree in part.
> Isn't this one of the basic ideas behind free markets. The invisible hand at work. Why should we assume that what someone from a third world country needs is a cow.
One should certainly at least ASK someone what they need and want before spending a lot of money getting them something that they might not even want.
There can also be an arrogance among certain communities in the west where think they know better what people need. They feel sorry for people in a condescending way. I've encountered that with my daughter. "Poor little black girl needs my help" kind of crap, when what she needs is for them to get out of the way and shut the F up.
> I think avoiding cash is based on people's general tendency to want to control others. Don't want them to do something with their charity that they don't approve of with the money.
For many years my largest area of giving was helping alcoholics and drug addicts. I've put in a lot of my time and my money helping people get clean and start a new life. Some people decide to spend their money buying themselves a new car, some special their time gardening. I decide rather than buying myself a new car, I'd rather help someone who is in a desperate situation get treatment. I don't use my money to buy myself Starbucks and I don't use it to buy them heroin. I make those decisions because I am responsible for controlling how I spend my resources, not because I want to control other people.
If someone doesn't want to be sober, that's their business. I have no interest in forcing them go to treatment. I won't use my money to give them for crack and meth because I'm responsible for how I spend my money.
As someone else pointed out, in Africa and Central America, donated cash is sometimes used to buy machine guns and land mines. If I choose to use my resources to buy food to share, not land mines, that means I'm being responsible with my resources, not trying to control someone else. I'll never force someone to eat the food I bought to share, only offer it to them.
Thanks for that example. That's exactly what I mean - saying that would be both wrong and you'd be a jerk, plus you threw in stupid as well. Perfect example of how to sound like a loser.
I guess GP hadn't heard the rules:
A) It's okay to be wrong. None of us knows everything.
B) We'll tolerate being an asshole when you're pointing out something stupid.
BUT you have to pick one or the other. Don't be an asshole and be wrong at the same time. Calling someone dumb while "correcting" their true statement with your own goof isn't a good look. Don't be an asshole when you don't know what you are talking about.
I get how the general theory is supposed to work. Also, this idea has me thinking:
We know that radio waves or other electromagnetic waves bounce off surfaces, in a way that an antenna can only barely detect the general direction of a large object. Can a device makes sense of refected electromagnetic waves in order to see high resolution detail? Well, ever heard of a camera - or eyes? Visible light is electromagnetic waves just like radio, only at a different frequency. So in theory there's no reason this wouldn't work THEORETICALLY.
The walls are transparent to the wavelengths involved. Cameras can see through transparent things. So you just need a camera responds to those wavelengths. Infrared cameras are common.
Cameras consist of basically two parts - a large number of light-sensing pixels, and a lens to focus that blurry reflection. Interesting thing is, none of the devices I've heard about have more than one or a few recieve - pixels. You'd expect high resolution would need a bunch of little sensors. I also haven't seen a focusing device serving the same purpose as a lens. Interesting that they are all building a camera that doesn't have either of the two main parts which make up a camera.
Also it seems to me that if this idea really works, using basically Wi-Fi parts, and it has been developed to the point of sensing the tiny motion of breathing, I'm surprised some tinkerer hasn't made a really crude model from a couple of old wireless cards or routers. Something that can detect that big pipe full of water that's inside the wall, behind just one layer of drywall. If the concept works, that's should be a super simple, cheap implementation of the idea. Anyone done that yet? Not that I've seen.