Every New Yorker knows not to park in front of a fire hydrant. The question is raised by the practice of making a "protected" bicycle lane (on multilane streets) by changing the "parking" lane into a bicycle lane and changing the first traffic lane into a "parking" lane through painted indicators. It is not obvious that parking in the new parking lane is still considered parking in front of the hydrant. It makes practical sense that a hose would go across that space when needed, but it is is marked as parking and is no longer clearly adjacent to, or blocking access to, the hydrant.
The purpose of that particular parking rule is fire safety (through access to the hydrants). There is no excuse for poor markings.
Therein lies the whole problem with the paradigm, truth be told - originally, embedded devices didn't communicate with jack shit - you unpacked it, turned it on, maybe configured it, and then you forget that it existed until it broke (at which time the vendor/contractor sent someone out to fix it), or got replaced.
Um m m m m . . . what's the problem with this paradigm? The holy grail of any device, from wiring to pipe to an active device, is that I install it and forget that it exists. Maybe even hide it inside a wall or something. Well, yes, maybe I have to replace the water heater every 10 years or so, and clean out the heating system burners a little more often. If the sunrise-and-DST-correcting timer on my entryway light "just works" as long as the wiring does, so much the better.
To me, the problem is more with the IOT concept; do I really need or want my entryway timer to be reporting its status anywhere, or be accessible from anywhere other than the light switch? Yes, it's cool that my computer could blink the light in morse code . . . but why?
Proportionally less curve in a movie screen as compared to the size of the room and the viewing angles. And yes, the screen is distorted for viewers seated towards the sides - but again. due to the lower proportional curvature, more of the screen remains clear (and the "sweet spot" in the center is wider).
We have watched the extended editions of the LOTR trilogy about once a year (sort of replacing the old Wizard of Oz annual broadcast). We have probably gone through the entire Harry Potter series more than five times. And both sets have been lent to others. I *like* having my own copy, with no connections, with no oversight, lendable, playable at other locations.
.... [goal:] combine groups of 1, 2, 3, and 4 fish in order to form groups of 5 fish. The iPad tells me that she has yet to master this skill because her solution is to combine all the fish into one big group of 10 and then split the group in half, getting two groups of 5.
I find this very interesting because it's not about "rightness" or "wrongness" so much as "satisfying the specific conditions". Clearly your daughter's solution is valid; equally clearly the game is looking for the player to select exactly the two groups without considering total sums (that is, the 1+4 and 2+5). This demonstrates how much depends on clear communication and specifications, even in a supposedly exact subject as arithmetic. Does the game make the goal clear? Does the player clearly understand what the game is asking for? And most important, considering we're dealing with an educational game aimed at 4-year-olds, does the player CARE about the exact goal (or is the player content to "play")?
So an unpredictable change happened, a new energy source was discovered and changed things.
I would put it differently: An unpredictable change happened, and some people raised their risk tolerance for side effects (as long as they weren't living in the affected area) to avoid making less money.
As I understand it, the idea of fracking is to make more cracks in the rock so the oil can be extracted. The exact position of the cracks is unpredictable and, even better, unmapped after the fact. Unfortunately, the ground water that humans wind up drinking through wells *also* goes through cracks in the rock, which are also currently unmapped; so nobody can predict where the new and old cracks might intersect, and which water sources might become polluted, and how far downstream that pollution will carry. It's as random and widespread as strip-mining or mountaintop-removal or combustion products belched into the sky, but hidden underground (at least until it shows up in your well water). And it CAN'T be undone or fixed if it goes wrong. Crack the rock randomly upstream of a major population center - like the New York Catskills which are the watershed for New York City's 8 million people? What's the risk/reward on that? One bad crack and you're feeding hydraulic fluid and shale oil to EVERYONE, especially those who can't afford to switch to bottled water.
The money was never there, it was only the assumption of future money.
An interesting side-note: In economics and finance, particularly as it relates to the stock market, the "assumption of future money" seems to be regarded as a complete commitment - for the BIG players. Yet when it comes to the small players, like people whose pensions are unfunded, "assumption of future money" that was supposedly guaranteed by contract is considered disposable. . . . at least, by the BIG players (I'm looking at Chris Christie today, and all of the "overfunded pension" raiders going back to the 1990s).
But wouldnt it be better if we all just quit buying this crap until they got the message and built something we wanted?
Yes. Unfortunately, as with so many other areas, the "votes" are the purchases, and we only get to vote on the options we are presented. The typical supermarket example: There is so much shelf space taken up with a dozen different sizes of the two most popular product in each category that there are few other options. Then when you ask why your favorite other option was discontinued, the store says that it wasn't selling as much as the popular brand, and they don't seem to see this as circular reasoning.
But the "anticircumvention law" is anticompetitive and against pretty much all legal precedent prior to DMCA.
Yes. That's why the industry that depends on DRM begged, bribed, lied, and weaseled that law through Congress. Since all precedent said "If you bought it, it's yours", they had to create new law that says "What you thought was an outright purchase, and looked in all ways like a traditional outright purchase, was not."
"All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again." Though probably the first time it was the last-minute waste dump out from the departing ship . . .
That's part of the problem. Architecture is not piling bricks and nailing boards, it's physics and math. Automotive engineering isn't driving cool cars, it's *designing* cool cars. And most of the crap software around is precisely because people slapped some code together without design and engineering and planning and logic.
Mark Twain wrote a scathing essay titled "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" which discusses "nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction–some say twenty-two", and mentions 18 in detail. Of course it's all an excuse to bash another author's writing, but there is a germ of truth behind it. Think of variables as "characters" in the "tale" being told (perhaps a user story?).
http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/l...
OpenWRT is so fucking easy to install and configure (easier than some consumer out-of-the-box experiences, even) that there really is no excuse if you expect a secure local network.
No. It's not. To you, or the typical computer tech-savvy/. reader, maybe; but we're not average consumers. My father-in-law is well above average in that he bought a Linksys router rather than depend on the FIOS installed default, and he actually changed the password, but he's not going to reflash it any more than I'm going to rebore my car engine's cylinders with a hand drill. And the various older neighbors who I assist with network stuff, who think the Internet is broken if a web site changes its format, would have no clue whatever.
The REAL question we should all be asking is, If OpenWRT can be so much better, then why is the commercial stuff *not* better?
Mod parent up. This goes all the way back to the 1950s or 60s; people used children and young teens as drug and stolen goods carriers because they would never get in trouble. Add to this calling a 16-year old a "boy", legally a "child" - at 16 I was almost the same size and strength as when I took my draft physical two years later.
... CCTV footage at the time of the call until you get a shot of their face...
Which is why da yout' of today seems to like wearing hooded sweatshirts *with* baseball caps as they walk around the (indoor) mall. Of course, if one reacts with suspicion to someone dressed thusly, one is clearly being prejudiced and/or racist and/or classist, and any attempt at regulation insisting that a face be visible is clearly religious oppression against religions that insist half their population must be invisible.
Spoofing is not necessarily bad, and mail servers are supposed to forward anonymously. I worked in phone systems. It is clearly acceptable to spoof to an alternate line that you own; for example, every phone can have its own DID number, but the caller ID is spoofed to the published/advertised "receptionist" number. Next level out: a contract house doing phone service may be spoofing the receptionist number of the company they are working for rather than their own number; it's fake, but it's not fraud, more like a consultant representing himself as working "for" (rather than "on behalf of") a client. It's a slippery slope.
That's only because you didn't live in New York City, where false fire alarms and sending police to someone else's house for a "domestic" call were considered entertainment in certain quarters back in the day. Admittedly, they were less likely to show up with military weapons then.
I don't think anyone is holding it up as a principle of "good" design; it is being held up as an example of "simple, functional, gets-the-job-done" design. Like a Shaker chair - there's exactly enough there to be a chair, nothing extra, nothing less.
Every business transaction requires a seller and a buyer, an item and a payment. Are you paying Google for your Gmail? Thought not; neither am I. So if we're not the buyers, and we're not selling anything, and we aren't the payment, then we must be the item being sold Each of us is another pair of eyes to look at advertisements. It's such a clever business model - so much simpler than television or magazines, with no need to produce entertainment in any form; no need to expend money producing *anything*. The user base comes to the site to read the emails that the user base itself is sending each other, and all Gmail has to do is store it. And the typical email is nowhere near as expensive to store and transmit as, say, a user video on Youtube. Not to mention the useful information and metadata that the user base is happy to enter in their contact lists and status updates.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they didn't respond to "a citizen", they responded to lots of publicity.
Every New Yorker knows not to park in front of a fire hydrant. The question is raised by the practice of making a "protected" bicycle lane (on multilane streets) by changing the "parking" lane into a bicycle lane and changing the first traffic lane into a "parking" lane through painted indicators. It is not obvious that parking in the new parking lane is still considered parking in front of the hydrant. It makes practical sense that a hose would go across that space when needed, but it is is marked as parking and is no longer clearly adjacent to, or blocking access to, the hydrant.
The purpose of that particular parking rule is fire safety (through access to the hydrants). There is no excuse for poor markings.
Therein lies the whole problem with the paradigm, truth be told - originally, embedded devices didn't communicate with jack shit - you unpacked it, turned it on, maybe configured it, and then you forget that it existed until it broke (at which time the vendor/contractor sent someone out to fix it), or got replaced.
Um m m m m . . . what's the problem with this paradigm? The holy grail of any device, from wiring to pipe to an active device, is that I install it and forget that it exists. Maybe even hide it inside a wall or something. Well, yes, maybe I have to replace the water heater every 10 years or so, and clean out the heating system burners a little more often. If the sunrise-and-DST-correcting timer on my entryway light "just works" as long as the wiring does, so much the better.
To me, the problem is more with the IOT concept; do I really need or want my entryway timer to be reporting its status anywhere, or be accessible from anywhere other than the light switch? Yes, it's cool that my computer could blink the light in morse code . . . but why?
Proportionally less curve in a movie screen as compared to the size of the room and the viewing angles. And yes, the screen is distorted for viewers seated towards the sides - but again. due to the lower proportional curvature, more of the screen remains clear (and the "sweet spot" in the center is wider).
We have watched the extended editions of the LOTR trilogy about once a year (sort of replacing the old Wizard of Oz annual broadcast). We have probably gone through the entire Harry Potter series more than five times. And both sets have been lent to others. I *like* having my own copy, with no connections, with no oversight, lendable, playable at other locations.
Is the USA really incapable of producing any of these drugs locally? Have we become that technologically backward?
.... [goal:] combine groups of 1, 2, 3, and 4 fish in order to form groups of 5 fish. The iPad tells me that she has yet to master this skill because her solution is to combine all the fish into one big group of 10 and then split the group in half, getting two groups of 5.
I find this very interesting because it's not about "rightness" or "wrongness" so much as "satisfying the specific conditions". Clearly your daughter's solution is valid; equally clearly the game is looking for the player to select exactly the two groups without considering total sums (that is, the 1+4 and 2+5). This demonstrates how much depends on clear communication and specifications, even in a supposedly exact subject as arithmetic. Does the game make the goal clear? Does the player clearly understand what the game is asking for? And most important, considering we're dealing with an educational game aimed at 4-year-olds, does the player CARE about the exact goal (or is the player content to "play")?
So an unpredictable change happened, a new energy source was discovered and changed things.
I would put it differently: An unpredictable change happened, and some people raised their risk tolerance for side effects (as long as they weren't living in the affected area) to avoid making less money.
As I understand it, the idea of fracking is to make more cracks in the rock so the oil can be extracted. The exact position of the cracks is unpredictable and, even better, unmapped after the fact. Unfortunately, the ground water that humans wind up drinking through wells *also* goes through cracks in the rock, which are also currently unmapped; so nobody can predict where the new and old cracks might intersect, and which water sources might become polluted, and how far downstream that pollution will carry. It's as random and widespread as strip-mining or mountaintop-removal or combustion products belched into the sky, but hidden underground (at least until it shows up in your well water). And it CAN'T be undone or fixed if it goes wrong. Crack the rock randomly upstream of a major population center - like the New York Catskills which are the watershed for New York City's 8 million people? What's the risk/reward on that? One bad crack and you're feeding hydraulic fluid and shale oil to EVERYONE, especially those who can't afford to switch to bottled water.
The money was never there, it was only the assumption of future money.
An interesting side-note: In economics and finance, particularly as it relates to the stock market, the "assumption of future money" seems to be regarded as a complete commitment - for the BIG players. Yet when it comes to the small players, like people whose pensions are unfunded, "assumption of future money" that was supposedly guaranteed by contract is considered disposable. . . . at least, by the BIG players (I'm looking at Chris Christie today, and all of the "overfunded pension" raiders going back to the 1990s).
But wouldnt it be better if we all just quit buying this crap until they got the message and built something we wanted?
Yes. Unfortunately, as with so many other areas, the "votes" are the purchases, and we only get to vote on the options we are presented. The typical supermarket example: There is so much shelf space taken up with a dozen different sizes of the two most popular product in each category that there are few other options. Then when you ask why your favorite other option was discontinued, the store says that it wasn't selling as much as the popular brand, and they don't seem to see this as circular reasoning.
" I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further. "
But the "anticircumvention law" is anticompetitive and against pretty much all legal precedent prior to DMCA.
Yes. That's why the industry that depends on DRM begged, bribed, lied, and weaseled that law through Congress. Since all precedent said "If you bought it, it's yours", they had to create new law that says "What you thought was an outright purchase, and looked in all ways like a traditional outright purchase, was not."
"All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again." Though probably the first time it was the last-minute waste dump out from the departing ship . . .
That's part of the problem. Architecture is not piling bricks and nailing boards, it's physics and math. Automotive engineering isn't driving cool cars, it's *designing* cool cars. And most of the crap software around is precisely because people slapped some code together without design and engineering and planning and logic.
The same can be said about many coders, and I do NOT cut them some slack if their code is going in my project. :-)
Mark Twain wrote a scathing essay titled "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" which discusses "nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction–some say twenty-two", and mentions 18 in detail. Of course it's all an excuse to bash another author's writing, but there is a germ of truth behind it. Think of variables as "characters" in the "tale" being told (perhaps a user story?). http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/l...
Step 0. I'm running Tomato, because (like the typical /. reader) I have an effing clue.
OpenWRT is so fucking easy to install and configure (easier than some consumer out-of-the-box experiences, even) that there really is no excuse if you expect a secure local network.
No. It's not. To you, or the typical computer tech-savvy /. reader, maybe; but we're not average consumers. My father-in-law is well above average in that he bought a Linksys router rather than depend on the FIOS installed default, and he actually changed the password, but he's not going to reflash it any more than I'm going to rebore my car engine's cylinders with a hand drill. And the various older neighbors who I assist with network stuff, who think the Internet is broken if a web site changes its format, would have no clue whatever.
The REAL question we should all be asking is, If OpenWRT can be so much better, then why is the commercial stuff *not* better?
Mod parent up. This goes all the way back to the 1950s or 60s; people used children and young teens as drug and stolen goods carriers because they would never get in trouble. Add to this calling a 16-year old a "boy", legally a "child" - at 16 I was almost the same size and strength as when I took my draft physical two years later.
... CCTV footage at the time of the call until you get a shot of their face...
Which is why da yout' of today seems to like wearing hooded sweatshirts *with* baseball caps as they walk around the (indoor) mall. Of course, if one reacts with suspicion to someone dressed thusly, one is clearly being prejudiced and/or racist and/or classist, and any attempt at regulation insisting that a face be visible is clearly religious oppression against religions that insist half their population must be invisible.
Spoofing is not necessarily bad, and mail servers are supposed to forward anonymously. I worked in phone systems. It is clearly acceptable to spoof to an alternate line that you own; for example, every phone can have its own DID number, but the caller ID is spoofed to the published/advertised "receptionist" number. Next level out: a contract house doing phone service may be spoofing the receptionist number of the company they are working for rather than their own number; it's fake, but it's not fraud, more like a consultant representing himself as working "for" (rather than "on behalf of") a client. It's a slippery slope.
Oh, the technique was totally new, because it involved "with a computer".
That's only because you didn't live in New York City, where false fire alarms and sending police to someone else's house for a "domestic" call were considered entertainment in certain quarters back in the day. Admittedly, they were less likely to show up with military weapons then.
I don't think anyone is holding it up as a principle of "good" design; it is being held up as an example of "simple, functional, gets-the-job-done" design. Like a Shaker chair - there's exactly enough there to be a chair, nothing extra, nothing less.
Every business transaction requires a seller and a buyer, an item and a payment. Are you paying Google for your Gmail? Thought not; neither am I. So if we're not the buyers, and we're not selling anything, and we aren't the payment, then we must be the item being sold Each of us is another pair of eyes to look at advertisements. It's such a clever business model - so much simpler than television or magazines, with no need to produce entertainment in any form; no need to expend money producing *anything*. The user base comes to the site to read the emails that the user base itself is sending each other, and all Gmail has to do is store it. And the typical email is nowhere near as expensive to store and transmit as, say, a user video on Youtube. Not to mention the useful information and metadata that the user base is happy to enter in their contact lists and status updates.