So make it clear to the advertising networks that you want a "still image only" option. That'll be a huge improvement even if you're still using their JS to display it. And since a lot of them now seem to pay mostly per click (rather than per view), there's no need (or excuse) to offer a lower payout for banner-only ads.
The numbers were a bit off but not that much: cars (driving and riding) account for almost 75% of traffic in the Netherlands by kilometer, public transport is 11%. Biking / walking is another 11%, and 5% "other", whatever the hell that is. Source. Looking at commuters, around 5% of them take the train to work as opposed to 60% going by car (no numbers for other modes of public transport but it's likely not a large amount given the earlier stats)
I think you got the wrong idea about transport in Europe. Many regions have excellent public transport, with a dense network of various modes of transport offering frequent service. But even here in the Netherlands with an extremely dense public transport network, there are few people who are happy (or able) to take public transport and not have a car. In the west part of the country, many trains and buses will be jam packed during rush hour, the railway company has trouble adding more cars to the trains and the track is almost at capacity even with state of the art signalling and routing in place. And public transport still doesn't handle a 10th of the number of people commuting by car. It certainly is a lot easier to get around without a car in Europe than it is in the US on average, but the idea that public transport can replace cars is just silly.
Proper appreciation of SF requires actually reading some. Back in high school we got quite a bit of schooling in (Dutch) literature; the textbooks did briefly cover SF but you could tell that the authors hadn't read any. Their description of SF boiled down to a very small handful of notable works, the rest being rockets, chemicals and talking squid. The teachers (language majors mostly) likewise hadn't read any. Critics of literature and the guys who nominate books for literary awards probably don't read a lot of SF either, so they don't know the subgenres, which works to pick up and which ones to avoid... so even if they do read an SF book or two, they are likely not going to be much impressed.
Every phone is going to be a compromsie. But in this case it's a choice between missing a few useful but non-essential features, or having those features on a device that, given my requirements, sucks donkeyballs otherwise.
There's that old meme again: Apple users are fanbois who are loyal to a fault, or fashionistas who only care about the appearance of the device, or worse: about the impression it makes on others.
I own both Android and iOS devices, and personally I think that Android sucks, in terms of performance, ease of use, and software development. Sure, I can't manage my files on iOS like I can on Android, nor do a bunch of other clever stuff, but that's like saying I can't transport a sofa in my convertible: it's true but it's something I very rarely need to do. I can probably improve my experience on Android by removing some crapware and installing some 3rd party stuff, but I can't be arsed, and why should I? I do miss a few useful features that Apple can't offer or simply won't because they're dicks; I don't care much for Apple's business practises or fiscal policies, but their devices work very well for me. iOS may be a walled garden but it's a very pretty one, it had a competent gardener, and from where I am sitting I can't even see the walls. For my daily phone, Apple is the only choice that makes (common) sense.
As for hardware issues, I have had 2 Apple phones fail on me and 2 Android devices (but I own twice the nr of Apple devices). And in none of those cases did I get a replacement or free repair out of warranty
"Toothbrush test" is still a weird name. I suspect the real criterium is "stuff used daily by billions that we can rape six ways from Sunday for data". A toothbrush provides no data. Maybe that smart vibrator is more their market... though that makes for a decidedly worse name for their test.
Homekit do not offer a home server just yet; at this time, what Apple and Google offer is not Home Automation but merely remote control. Also, note what GP wrote:
- Thermostats of all varieties, including the dumb kind
(Emphasis mine)
That's the weakness of Apple's (and many others') HA offering: they are not designed for easy interoperability. Apple do not even allow bridging to non-HomeKit equipment if it communicates by WiFi, they want to force you to do buy equipment supporting their own stack. That device for reading Dutch smart power meters? Can't use it. That weird WiFi enabled thermostat for your jacuzzi? Can't use it. Go pester the manufacturer for a HomeKit version. Contrast that with a HA platform like Vera; whatever its other shortcomings, it was designed for interoperability, and writing plugins for equipment is easy and encouraged.
If you want to be considered to be "serious about home automation", at the very least you need to have a HA server in your lineup, and design for interoperability. Because I can pretty much guarantee that no stack will support every device that a typical user will want to control when they move beyond simply remotely controlling their lights.
This. I have a fairly extensive home automation setup, and that includes cameras (some with mics), but none of this equipment is connected directly to the internet. Anything that requires internet access is not racing across my threshold.
Regarding Alexa-like devices, I am going to hold off on those until the speech recognition is performed on the device itself, with no audio being transmitted to the mothership. And then I will still only use them for local control, and isolate them from the outside world.
That shift is already happening, on both ends. Look at the per capita emissions of each country. In the US, Europe (including Eastern Europe), emissions have been dropping steadily since the 90s and are still dropping. Those in India and China are seeing a sharp increase, though they are still well below US levels. In the 90s, a US citizen produced almost 25x the amount of CO2 of someone from India. Today, it's "only" 9x. China emits more CO2 per capita than the EU average (Source, see page 31).
The lesson here is that it appears that we can actually reduce our emissions significantly without radical changes to our lifestyle, and that developing nations can have a level of prosperity similar to ours without necessarily breaking the planet. Not that we should sit back and relax, quite the contrary, but we shouldn't let ourselves be scared into "radical" solutions either.
Building with openness and interoperability in mind = nice
Contributing to FOSS community = fluffy
Building your own service "stack" = cool
Pressuring vendors to support your stack exclusively = dick move
If one thing is clear about these (so called) AI assistants, is that they can provide enormous amounts of incredibly juicy data. And it looks like Google wants all of it.
With decent garbage collection, developers won't have to bother. I notice the difference between developing for iOS and Android. In iOS, memory management is almost a non-issue. You still need to know what you're doing and how things work when you run into a memory leak or unexpected shortage of memory, but in your day to day code you will very rarely have to keep anything memory related in mind. Android is an entirely different matter. When I build a memory intensive screen in Xamarin (in c#), it usually is one hour to write the xaml, one hour to wire things up to the data source and get things to run... and two days to get it to perform on Android and plug the memory leaks. I am sure an experienced Android dev can make it work much faster, but whether it takes an hour or a day, it is wasted effort that in this day and age ought to be spent on developing functionality rather than doing housekeeping that the system ought to be doing.
A few weeks may be all it takes. Not in a zombie apocalypse, sure, but suppose there's a large natural disaster, power and supplies are interrupted, roads inaccessible, government has their hands full and chaos ensues. In this scenario, order will be restored at some point, but until then it'll be nice to have a well stocked hideout. With some gun, in case looters are to be expected (and the longer before order is restored, the more likely they will be to appear)
Common wisdom (amongst MBA types anyway) is to outsource things like shipping to external companies who are experts in that field. Reasons for doing it yourself are: the existing services suck, you think you can do better (which may be the case, what with their research into delivery by drone), or doing it yourself gives you a competitive edge for other reasons. Your suggestion may be one of those other reasons. Once this service is in place, they are in a good position to offer free shipping on anything. And that will make a real difference.
Where did I write about crawling up Putin's arse? I was talking about those people being jealous of Putin's ability to rule more or less absolute, without bothersome voters or national governents to deal with. Given some of the things those guys have said and done, it doesn't take a far stretch of the imagination to believe that.
I misspelled "Druncker" on purpose because he is. The rest you can put down to laziness or incompetence if you want, but for what we pay into the EU, I have earned the right to spell their names any way I damn well please.
Meh. The likes of Schultz, Druncker and Verhofstad only dream of being Putin, and may strive to achieve some of the particular aspects of Putin's rule. Putin actually is Putin.
Yeah I don't see them much anymore, come to think of it. Most restaurants I go to these days seem to use the "reservation or GTFO" queueing mechanism, with maybe 1 or 2 walk-on parties waiting for a table. Not worth investing in beeping coasters or self driving chairs for.
With those foldable propellors it looks a lot more portable too: not just small, but safe to carry around in a backpack or bag without breaking. The price is pretty good too... $749 without remote; less than I've paid for mini RC helicopters (of the hobby variety rather than the toy ones) and this thing can do a hell of a lot more.
Or do what some restaurants already do (I first saw this in Tokyo): they hand out a small pager-like device that buzzes when your turn comes, as well as (an estimated) 5 minutes beforehand. No need to stand or sit anywhere in particular, you can go to a nearby bar for drinks while you wait for your table.
Of course some venues (certain restaurants, clubs, Apple stores) want a highly visible queue outside, it's good avertising.
The integration is the selling point (for the decision makers, anyway). It's what differentiates it from other standalone solutions for what SP is trying to be. And that's the funny thing: SP is trying to be a lot of things. Document management: does a sucky job and misses basic features that our 15 year old software did have. Wikis: dear god, you're better off with MediaWiki and a couple of good plugins. Message boards: sort of work, but again misses a lot of basic stuff (such as rules-based community management): they are a nightmare to maintain. Team Wikis: this part actually does work... once your users understand the idiotic menus. A lot of them came begging for a Confluence team space instead.
You can make SP work reasonably well (I've seen it), but it takes a lot of work. And it takes some serious iron to run compared to the competition. My advice to anyone considering using SP in medium / large organisations: don't. Go with separate solutions that cost less, are cheaper to run, are a hell of a lot better, and way easier to use. Forget about the integration... or pay a couple of consultants to build a bespoke interface in places where it makes sense. Sounds expensive, but in the long run it'll cost peanuts compared to SP.
It's very well suited for certain work-related stuff as well. Virtual town hall sessions. Community-based support, especially for services where a lot of new things are happening (so users will want to subscribe to the group and remain informed). Virtual, cross-departmental team spaces. Communities of Practice. I've been involved in setting up Yammer and coaching community managers at my last client, and we've experimented with a great many use cases. Most successful cases were in the category of fast-paced, low threshold, opt-in, geographically spread out communities sharing information of temporary value. The low-threshold aspect is a definite plus in some cases, especially people new to the company find Yammer a lot less scary to contribute to than, say, message boards.
The challenges: you need active community management to keep people engaged, and when I was using it there were little or no curation tools, poor search, poor statistics to help community managers (there was a paid 3rd party option which was ridiculously overpriced), and no way to extract valuable information for storage in longer-term media (Wikis, Sharepoint or whatever)
Yammer can add real business value (in addition to the not to be underestimated value of the watercooler effect, i.e. non-business related groups) but it is not free either; don't expect anything to happen if you just roll out the tool and walk away.
Slashdot Mirror
So make it clear to the advertising networks that you want a "still image only" option. That'll be a huge improvement even if you're still using their JS to display it. And since a lot of them now seem to pay mostly per click (rather than per view), there's no need (or excuse) to offer a lower payout for banner-only ads.
The numbers were a bit off but not that much: cars (driving and riding) account for almost 75% of traffic in the Netherlands by kilometer, public transport is 11%. Biking / walking is another 11%, and 5% "other", whatever the hell that is. Source. Looking at commuters, around 5% of them take the train to work as opposed to 60% going by car (no numbers for other modes of public transport but it's likely not a large amount given the earlier stats)
I think you got the wrong idea about transport in Europe. Many regions have excellent public transport, with a dense network of various modes of transport offering frequent service. But even here in the Netherlands with an extremely dense public transport network, there are few people who are happy (or able) to take public transport and not have a car. In the west part of the country, many trains and buses will be jam packed during rush hour, the railway company has trouble adding more cars to the trains and the track is almost at capacity even with state of the art signalling and routing in place. And public transport still doesn't handle a 10th of the number of people commuting by car. It certainly is a lot easier to get around without a car in Europe than it is in the US on average, but the idea that public transport can replace cars is just silly.
Proper appreciation of SF requires actually reading some. Back in high school we got quite a bit of schooling in (Dutch) literature; the textbooks did briefly cover SF but you could tell that the authors hadn't read any. Their description of SF boiled down to a very small handful of notable works, the rest being rockets, chemicals and talking squid. The teachers (language majors mostly) likewise hadn't read any. Critics of literature and the guys who nominate books for literary awards probably don't read a lot of SF either, so they don't know the subgenres, which works to pick up and which ones to avoid... so even if they do read an SF book or two, they are likely not going to be much impressed.
Every phone is going to be a compromsie. But in this case it's a choice between missing a few useful but non-essential features, or having those features on a device that, given my requirements, sucks donkeyballs otherwise.
There's that old meme again: Apple users are fanbois who are loyal to a fault, or fashionistas who only care about the appearance of the device, or worse: about the impression it makes on others.
I own both Android and iOS devices, and personally I think that Android sucks, in terms of performance, ease of use, and software development. Sure, I can't manage my files on iOS like I can on Android, nor do a bunch of other clever stuff, but that's like saying I can't transport a sofa in my convertible: it's true but it's something I very rarely need to do. I can probably improve my experience on Android by removing some crapware and installing some 3rd party stuff, but I can't be arsed, and why should I? I do miss a few useful features that Apple can't offer or simply won't because they're dicks; I don't care much for Apple's business practises or fiscal policies, but their devices work very well for me. iOS may be a walled garden but it's a very pretty one, it had a competent gardener, and from where I am sitting I can't even see the walls. For my daily phone, Apple is the only choice that makes (common) sense.
As for hardware issues, I have had 2 Apple phones fail on me and 2 Android devices (but I own twice the nr of Apple devices). And in none of those cases did I get a replacement or free repair out of warranty
"Toothbrush test" is still a weird name. I suspect the real criterium is "stuff used daily by billions that we can rape six ways from Sunday for data". A toothbrush provides no data. Maybe that smart vibrator is more their market... though that makes for a decidedly worse name for their test.
- Thermostats of all varieties, including the dumb kind
(Emphasis mine) That's the weakness of Apple's (and many others') HA offering: they are not designed for easy interoperability. Apple do not even allow bridging to non-HomeKit equipment if it communicates by WiFi, they want to force you to do buy equipment supporting their own stack. That device for reading Dutch smart power meters? Can't use it. That weird WiFi enabled thermostat for your jacuzzi? Can't use it. Go pester the manufacturer for a HomeKit version. Contrast that with a HA platform like Vera; whatever its other shortcomings, it was designed for interoperability, and writing plugins for equipment is easy and encouraged.
If you want to be considered to be "serious about home automation", at the very least you need to have a HA server in your lineup, and design for interoperability. Because I can pretty much guarantee that no stack will support every device that a typical user will want to control when they move beyond simply remotely controlling their lights.
I was expecting a simple sine wave or harsh square wave sound, but the sound is surprisingly pleasant. It sounds like someone practising the cello.
That's a good question. I don't know; at least here in the Netherlands the drop doesn't seem to be due to industry moving to China. (Source)
This. I have a fairly extensive home automation setup, and that includes cameras (some with mics), but none of this equipment is connected directly to the internet. Anything that requires internet access is not racing across my threshold.
Regarding Alexa-like devices, I am going to hold off on those until the speech recognition is performed on the device itself, with no audio being transmitted to the mothership. And then I will still only use them for local control, and isolate them from the outside world.
That shift is already happening, on both ends. Look at the per capita emissions of each country. In the US, Europe (including Eastern Europe), emissions have been dropping steadily since the 90s and are still dropping. Those in India and China are seeing a sharp increase, though they are still well below US levels. In the 90s, a US citizen produced almost 25x the amount of CO2 of someone from India. Today, it's "only" 9x. China emits more CO2 per capita than the EU average (Source, see page 31).
The lesson here is that it appears that we can actually reduce our emissions significantly without radical changes to our lifestyle, and that developing nations can have a level of prosperity similar to ours without necessarily breaking the planet. Not that we should sit back and relax, quite the contrary, but we shouldn't let ourselves be scared into "radical" solutions either.
Building with openness and interoperability in mind = nice
Contributing to FOSS community = fluffy
Building your own service "stack" = cool
Pressuring vendors to support your stack exclusively = dick move
If one thing is clear about these (so called) AI assistants, is that they can provide enormous amounts of incredibly juicy data. And it looks like Google wants all of it.
With decent garbage collection, developers won't have to bother. I notice the difference between developing for iOS and Android. In iOS, memory management is almost a non-issue. You still need to know what you're doing and how things work when you run into a memory leak or unexpected shortage of memory, but in your day to day code you will very rarely have to keep anything memory related in mind. Android is an entirely different matter. When I build a memory intensive screen in Xamarin (in c#), it usually is one hour to write the xaml, one hour to wire things up to the data source and get things to run... and two days to get it to perform on Android and plug the memory leaks. I am sure an experienced Android dev can make it work much faster, but whether it takes an hour or a day, it is wasted effort that in this day and age ought to be spent on developing functionality rather than doing housekeeping that the system ought to be doing.
A few weeks may be all it takes. Not in a zombie apocalypse, sure, but suppose there's a large natural disaster, power and supplies are interrupted, roads inaccessible, government has their hands full and chaos ensues. In this scenario, order will be restored at some point, but until then it'll be nice to have a well stocked hideout. With some gun, in case looters are to be expected (and the longer before order is restored, the more likely they will be to appear)
Common wisdom (amongst MBA types anyway) is to outsource things like shipping to external companies who are experts in that field. Reasons for doing it yourself are: the existing services suck, you think you can do better (which may be the case, what with their research into delivery by drone), or doing it yourself gives you a competitive edge for other reasons. Your suggestion may be one of those other reasons. Once this service is in place, they are in a good position to offer free shipping on anything. And that will make a real difference.
Where did I write about crawling up Putin's arse? I was talking about those people being jealous of Putin's ability to rule more or less absolute, without bothersome voters or national governents to deal with. Given some of the things those guys have said and done, it doesn't take a far stretch of the imagination to believe that.
I misspelled "Druncker" on purpose because he is. The rest you can put down to laziness or incompetence if you want, but for what we pay into the EU, I have earned the right to spell their names any way I damn well please.
Meh. The likes of Schultz, Druncker and Verhofstad only dream of being Putin, and may strive to achieve some of the particular aspects of Putin's rule. Putin actually is Putin.
Yeah I don't see them much anymore, come to think of it. Most restaurants I go to these days seem to use the "reservation or GTFO" queueing mechanism, with maybe 1 or 2 walk-on parties waiting for a table. Not worth investing in beeping coasters or self driving chairs for.
With those foldable propellors it looks a lot more portable too: not just small, but safe to carry around in a backpack or bag without breaking. The price is pretty good too... $749 without remote; less than I've paid for mini RC helicopters (of the hobby variety rather than the toy ones) and this thing can do a hell of a lot more.
Or do what some restaurants already do (I first saw this in Tokyo): they hand out a small pager-like device that buzzes when your turn comes, as well as (an estimated) 5 minutes beforehand. No need to stand or sit anywhere in particular, you can go to a nearby bar for drinks while you wait for your table.
Of course some venues (certain restaurants, clubs, Apple stores) want a highly visible queue outside, it's good avertising.
The integration is the selling point (for the decision makers, anyway). It's what differentiates it from other standalone solutions for what SP is trying to be. And that's the funny thing: SP is trying to be a lot of things. Document management: does a sucky job and misses basic features that our 15 year old software did have. Wikis: dear god, you're better off with MediaWiki and a couple of good plugins. Message boards: sort of work, but again misses a lot of basic stuff (such as rules-based community management): they are a nightmare to maintain. Team Wikis: this part actually does work... once your users understand the idiotic menus. A lot of them came begging for a Confluence team space instead.
You can make SP work reasonably well (I've seen it), but it takes a lot of work. And it takes some serious iron to run compared to the competition. My advice to anyone considering using SP in medium / large organisations: don't. Go with separate solutions that cost less, are cheaper to run, are a hell of a lot better, and way easier to use. Forget about the integration... or pay a couple of consultants to build a bespoke interface in places where it makes sense. Sounds expensive, but in the long run it'll cost peanuts compared to SP.
The first taste won't exactly make you come back for more, trust me.
It's very well suited for certain work-related stuff as well. Virtual town hall sessions. Community-based support, especially for services where a lot of new things are happening (so users will want to subscribe to the group and remain informed). Virtual, cross-departmental team spaces. Communities of Practice. I've been involved in setting up Yammer and coaching community managers at my last client, and we've experimented with a great many use cases. Most successful cases were in the category of fast-paced, low threshold, opt-in, geographically spread out communities sharing information of temporary value. The low-threshold aspect is a definite plus in some cases, especially people new to the company find Yammer a lot less scary to contribute to than, say, message boards.
The challenges: you need active community management to keep people engaged, and when I was using it there were little or no curation tools, poor search, poor statistics to help community managers (there was a paid 3rd party option which was ridiculously overpriced), and no way to extract valuable information for storage in longer-term media (Wikis, Sharepoint or whatever)
Yammer can add real business value (in addition to the not to be underestimated value of the watercooler effect, i.e. non-business related groups) but it is not free either; don't expect anything to happen if you just roll out the tool and walk away.