I have to agree. While it's been nice to be able to ask my Alexa "How is the weather" before deciding if I need a jacket before taking the dog out, I've found that simply looking at my phone's home screen to see the temperature is easier and faster.
Alexa is helpful, however for more specific queries and especially "Routines" (where you can define your own commands with multiple things to be done when the command is spoken, such as turn on/off smart devices).
Refuse connections that include the user-agent string of the device that you are trying to block.
But of course that only works if the browser "properly" sets it's user-agent. You could just then change your user-agent to report itself as a windows computer and then there's nothing they can do (assuming they don't want to block all windows computers from accessing YouTube).
One of the things that I think should be present in trucks is something like an air suspension that dynamically adjusts the load and sorta keeps the angle of the truck correct and the ride height even and adjust the dampening in real-time. Because the challenge you have with any vehicle where there’s a big potential difference between the minimum and maximum load is that the suspension is always wrong and usually wrong by a lot.
So my guess is, that "dynamic air suspension" is his "game changing feature"
All I know is that the way responsive sites work right now are a constant problem for me, because they rearrange (or even worse, remove) page elements when I resize the window on a desktop. It is often the case that I intentionally resize windows to just show a specific part of a page, and responsiveness really interferes with that.
Ok, so you're making the window smaller on a desktop. I get how that would be frustrating, but generally people aren't doing that, they're simply loading the page on different sized screens and the developer / designer wants to ensure that the user can interact with the page properly at that size (usually without scrolling horizontally if it can be avoided. Unfortunately, the reality that designers will go with what works for most users, since it's impossible to be everything to every user.
I'm not sure how I can explain it any more clearly, but here goes: if the page is "locked", then the layout/contents of the page no longer change according to window size. If I make the window too small, I get scrollbars. In other words, I want to be able to turn off the "responsiveness" so that it stops getting in my way.
It might be possible (as a developer) to have the page stick with whatever size it initially loaded at. Theoretically it should be possible to do that by setting the "viewport" meta tag with width= and with no "initial-scale" set.
Even better, since I never really want a site to be "responsive" in the first place, would be some sort of option I can set that would make this persistent over time and the entire website so I don't have to keep hitting a button, but just a toggle button on each page would suffice.
If you could get your browser to always report the "width" and "device-width" values that it uses for rendering as the same static values, regardless of the physical dimensions of the window, you should be able to accomplish that on any site that you visit. It's possible that you could tweak browser settings to do this, but I wouldn't hold my breath either.
Seriously? 5,000 on staff for that thing? Something is seriously wrong here because I cannot imagine needing that many people for a project like this. What are all these folks doing? Certainly not just Alexa system development. What else are they doing?
I imagine that number includes the people working on all of those new hardware devices that they just announced yesterday, as well as all the QA, marketing, management and other support staff. Plus all the related stuff, like ensuring that the "smart hub" built into the new Echo Pro actually works with the 3rd party devices (i.e. lights, switches, plugs, thermostats, etc) and all the people that are adding the new "skills" to Alexa on a constant basis (well, at least the non-3rd party skills)
I really wish that sites would do one of two things: stop basing the "responsiveness" on the window dimensions
What would you base the responsiveness on if not the size available to the website? The whole point is to make it adjust the interface to take advantage on the available space (or lack thereof) across any range of devices using not just the pixel dimensions, but the physical size of the screen (i.e. is it a high-resolution screen on a smartphone which need to have buttons big enough to be used by fingers)
or give some sort of "lock" control to freeze the current layout.
This is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure exactly what you mean, can you elaborate with an example?
Arguably that's what you want, right? Why do I have to wait until all of the advertisements load before being able to scroll down to the content that I'm interested in? It might be one or two seconds slower in the final rendering on some pages, but that is probably irrelevant to most users.
Arguably, a lot of this is also controlled by how the page itself is coded. Good websites allow you to start interacting with the page immediately (well at least as soon as the minimum amount of stuff is loaded), and then load the rest of the page essentially "in the background", and progressively enhance the experience as the additional javascript, images, videos, advertisements and whatever else gets loaded.
From what I remember (it's now been a couple of years since I've worked with the twitter API), a lot of that is already in place, and things like URLs and retweets (as long as you use the actual RT feature and not just quote it) aren't counted against your 140 character limit, and neither are multi-byte characters.
The knock on effect is that software user interfaces have been reduced to pictograms to communicate the functionality.
And soon (if not already) most of those pictograms don't mean anything to a lot of people, they're just used to seeing them. For example, typically the icon for a "save" function is a floppy disk. When was the last time you actually saw a floppy disk in real life?
Even worse, pretty much every science fair project has to have a conclusion to get anywhere
While I agree with everything you said in regard to science fair projects, when I was in school it was a science and engineering fair. I built robots. I don't remember having to have a hypothesis, basically just a goal: I was trying to build something with certain capabilities.
Ironically, the title in the url (study-higher-minimum-wages-hasten-automation-job-losses) is more accurate than the actual title on the page (Study: Higher minimum wages bring automation and job losses). It seems reasonable to conclude that increasing the minimum wage will hasten job loses due to automation, but that's going to happen anyway.
They don't necessarily, but in most cases it probably is in response to the ad, and even if it's not they can attribute it to the ad for lack of any other data. After all, if they can show that a purchase was made in response to an ad that was purchased through Google, that will mean the company is more likely to advertise through Google in the future.
So it looks like this is supposed to solve the same "problem" that web components was created to solve, but without all of the interesting parts like CSS, Javascript, Shadow DOM, and (run-time) HTML imports...
I once had the CEO of the company I was working for at the time change the name of a field in my database table because he didn't like the name I had given it, and didn't tell me or anyone else about the change. I came into work the next day to find that the previously working code was no longer functioning.
Digging tunnels to help alleviate traffic congestion seems pretty unrealistic; the logistics of getting permission and avoiding any existing underground infrastructure seems like it would be a nightmare.
On the other hand, being able to efficiently dig tunnels seems like something that would be vital to building a colony on Mars...
I live in the Boston area, and I had a vehicle with a similar radar system for emergency braking for about 6 months. It beeped at and/or braked for me maybe half a dozen times during that period (so about once a month), and about half of those were actually instances where I might have actually gotten into an accident without it (one would have certainly been an accident, or very close to it).
So, it did a pretty good job, and wasn't providing false positives at a rate that would even approach annoying.
There are actually some "smartwatches" out there that are in fact standalone phones, which makes much more sense to me than something that has to be paired to your existing phone, though they all appear to be of dubious quality.
Here is one example:
https://www.amazon.com/Eversho...
You forgot one other main reason people run Windows: games. Steam has done a lot and there is an increasing number of games that'll run naively in Linux, but there are still a great many games (including most of the AAA titles) that only run in Windows.
I had a windows 10 update completely hose my system. It got stuck in a loop when booting up trying "auto fix" the problem, and absolutely none of the options in the recovery program helped. My wife's computer did the same thing several weeks before. My only option was to put my Windows 7 disk in it and reinstall from scratch. I haven't upgraded to windows 10 again (even though it keeps bugging me to do so several times a day).
And honestly, I don't really mind the ads on my Fire tablet. They're attractive ads (i.e. not ugly or overly obtrusive), and some times they're rather interesting, even though I've never actually purchased anything that was advertised that way.
If you're talking about "mobile websites" in the context of a separate page/site that mobile devices get redirected to, I'm completely in agreement. Those are garbage.
But what I think they are talking about here (since I skimmed the article and it mentioned web standards), is what is commonly referred to as "responsive design" (https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ui/responsive/fundamentals/?hl=en). It's the exact same website / webpage as the desktop "version", but some additional things are added to make it display / function properly on a mobile device. One such example is scaling things on smaller screens that have high resolutions to make them readable (so you don't have to constantly be zooming in and out to use the app.
And CSS does some really wonderful things now where you can display things differently depending on the size of the screen (i.e. on a desktop you might have several items laid out horizontally in columns, but on a mobile device they become stacked vertically instead)
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree. While it's been nice to be able to ask my Alexa "How is the weather" before deciding if I need a jacket before taking the dog out, I've found that simply looking at my phone's home screen to see the temperature is easier and faster.
Alexa is helpful, however for more specific queries and especially "Routines" (where you can define your own commands with multiple things to be done when the command is spoken, such as turn on/off smart devices).
How do you block a web browser?
Refuse connections that include the user-agent string of the device that you are trying to block.
But of course that only works if the browser "properly" sets it's user-agent. You could just then change your user-agent to report itself as a windows computer and then there's nothing they can do (assuming they don't want to block all windows computers from accessing YouTube).
One of the things that I think should be present in trucks is something like an air suspension that dynamically adjusts the load and sorta keeps the angle of the truck correct and the ride height even and adjust the dampening in real-time. Because the challenge you have with any vehicle where there’s a big potential difference between the minimum and maximum load is that the suspension is always wrong and usually wrong by a lot.
So my guess is, that "dynamic air suspension" is his "game changing feature"
What about a comedy spy tv show? Make a show with the worst spies possible, something similar to Johnny English or Frank Drebin.
So, Chuck?
All I know is that the way responsive sites work right now are a constant problem for me, because they rearrange (or even worse, remove) page elements when I resize the window on a desktop. It is often the case that I intentionally resize windows to just show a specific part of a page, and responsiveness really interferes with that.
Ok, so you're making the window smaller on a desktop. I get how that would be frustrating, but generally people aren't doing that, they're simply loading the page on different sized screens and the developer / designer wants to ensure that the user can interact with the page properly at that size (usually without scrolling horizontally if it can be avoided. Unfortunately, the reality that designers will go with what works for most users, since it's impossible to be everything to every user.
I'm not sure how I can explain it any more clearly, but here goes: if the page is "locked", then the layout/contents of the page no longer change according to window size. If I make the window too small, I get scrollbars. In other words, I want to be able to turn off the "responsiveness" so that it stops getting in my way.
It might be possible (as a developer) to have the page stick with whatever size it initially loaded at. Theoretically it should be possible to do that by setting the "viewport" meta tag with width= and with no "initial-scale" set.
Even better, since I never really want a site to be "responsive" in the first place, would be some sort of option I can set that would make this persistent over time and the entire website so I don't have to keep hitting a button, but just a toggle button on each page would suffice.
If you could get your browser to always report the "width" and "device-width" values that it uses for rendering as the same static values, regardless of the physical dimensions of the window, you should be able to accomplish that on any site that you visit. It's possible that you could tweak browser settings to do this, but I wouldn't hold my breath either.
It already exists (well, not the furby specifically): https://www.amazon.com/CogniTo...
Let's throw more developers at it! (management)
Seriously? 5,000 on staff for that thing? Something is seriously wrong here because I cannot imagine needing that many people for a project like this. What are all these folks doing? Certainly not just Alexa system development. What else are they doing?
I imagine that number includes the people working on all of those new hardware devices that they just announced yesterday, as well as all the QA, marketing, management and other support staff. Plus all the related stuff, like ensuring that the "smart hub" built into the new Echo Pro actually works with the 3rd party devices (i.e. lights, switches, plugs, thermostats, etc) and all the people that are adding the new "skills" to Alexa on a constant basis (well, at least the non-3rd party skills)
I really wish that sites would do one of two things: stop basing the "responsiveness" on the window dimensions
What would you base the responsiveness on if not the size available to the website? The whole point is to make it adjust the interface to take advantage on the available space (or lack thereof) across any range of devices using not just the pixel dimensions, but the physical size of the screen (i.e. is it a high-resolution screen on a smartphone which need to have buttons big enough to be used by fingers)
or give some sort of "lock" control to freeze the current layout.
This is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure exactly what you mean, can you elaborate with an example?
Arguably that's what you want, right? Why do I have to wait until all of the advertisements load before being able to scroll down to the content that I'm interested in? It might be one or two seconds slower in the final rendering on some pages, but that is probably irrelevant to most users.
Arguably, a lot of this is also controlled by how the page itself is coded. Good websites allow you to start interacting with the page immediately (well at least as soon as the minimum amount of stuff is loaded), and then load the rest of the page essentially "in the background", and progressively enhance the experience as the additional javascript, images, videos, advertisements and whatever else gets loaded.
From what I remember (it's now been a couple of years since I've worked with the twitter API), a lot of that is already in place, and things like URLs and retweets (as long as you use the actual RT feature and not just quote it) aren't counted against your 140 character limit, and neither are multi-byte characters.
The knock on effect is that software user interfaces have been reduced to pictograms to communicate the functionality.
And soon (if not already) most of those pictograms don't mean anything to a lot of people, they're just used to seeing them. For example, typically the icon for a "save" function is a floppy disk. When was the last time you actually saw a floppy disk in real life?
Even worse, pretty much every science fair project has to have a conclusion to get anywhere
While I agree with everything you said in regard to science fair projects, when I was in school it was a science and engineering fair. I built robots. I don't remember having to have a hypothesis, basically just a goal: I was trying to build something with certain capabilities.
Ironically, the title in the url (study-higher-minimum-wages-hasten-automation-job-losses) is more accurate than the actual title on the page (Study: Higher minimum wages bring automation and job losses). It seems reasonable to conclude that increasing the minimum wage will hasten job loses due to automation, but that's going to happen anyway.
How do they know a purchase is response to an ad?
They don't necessarily, but in most cases it probably is in response to the ad, and even if it's not they can attribute it to the ad for lack of any other data. After all, if they can show that a purchase was made in response to an ad that was purchased through Google, that will mean the company is more likely to advertise through Google in the future.
No, the west does not execute spies.
That's not true; it just hasn't happened in a long time.
So it looks like this is supposed to solve the same "problem" that web components was created to solve, but without all of the interesting parts like CSS, Javascript, Shadow DOM, and (run-time) HTML imports...
That was over 5 years ago, and thankfully, I didn't work for this person for very long.
I once had the CEO of the company I was working for at the time change the name of a field in my database table because he didn't like the name I had given it, and didn't tell me or anyone else about the change. I came into work the next day to find that the previously working code was no longer functioning.
Digging tunnels to help alleviate traffic congestion seems pretty unrealistic; the logistics of getting permission and avoiding any existing underground infrastructure seems like it would be a nightmare.
On the other hand, being able to efficiently dig tunnels seems like something that would be vital to building a colony on Mars...
I live in the Boston area, and I had a vehicle with a similar radar system for emergency braking for about 6 months. It beeped at and/or braked for me maybe half a dozen times during that period (so about once a month), and about half of those were actually instances where I might have actually gotten into an accident without it (one would have certainly been an accident, or very close to it). So, it did a pretty good job, and wasn't providing false positives at a rate that would even approach annoying.
There are actually some "smartwatches" out there that are in fact standalone phones, which makes much more sense to me than something that has to be paired to your existing phone, though they all appear to be of dubious quality. Here is one example: https://www.amazon.com/Eversho...
You forgot one other main reason people run Windows: games. Steam has done a lot and there is an increasing number of games that'll run naively in Linux, but there are still a great many games (including most of the AAA titles) that only run in Windows.
I had a windows 10 update completely hose my system. It got stuck in a loop when booting up trying "auto fix" the problem, and absolutely none of the options in the recovery program helped. My wife's computer did the same thing several weeks before. My only option was to put my Windows 7 disk in it and reinstall from scratch. I haven't upgraded to windows 10 again (even though it keeps bugging me to do so several times a day).
And honestly, I don't really mind the ads on my Fire tablet. They're attractive ads (i.e. not ugly or overly obtrusive), and some times they're rather interesting, even though I've never actually purchased anything that was advertised that way.
If you're talking about "mobile websites" in the context of a separate page/site that mobile devices get redirected to, I'm completely in agreement. Those are garbage.
But what I think they are talking about here (since I skimmed the article and it mentioned web standards), is what is commonly referred to as "responsive design" (https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ui/responsive/fundamentals/?hl=en). It's the exact same website / webpage as the desktop "version", but some additional things are added to make it display / function properly on a mobile device. One such example is scaling things on smaller screens that have high resolutions to make them readable (so you don't have to constantly be zooming in and out to use the app.
And CSS does some really wonderful things now where you can display things differently depending on the size of the screen (i.e. on a desktop you might have several items laid out horizontally in columns, but on a mobile device they become stacked vertically instead)