See also the San Francisco Chronicle's movie review "little man". Not a star or a thumb, but a very clear indication of what the reviewer thought. Is the little man applauding or asleep. Or is his little movie theater seat empty?
Stars are awful and should never be used. There's a reason YouTube dropped stars in favor of thumbs up/down. There was a serious bathtub curve on the stars, putting a huge percentage at 1 or 5 stars, and only a few 2,3 or 4 stars.
That's vastly different than how I use stars. But when I look at a star rating all I know is what my star rating means. Is 1 star a zero? Is one star an "F" (50%)? Is 5 stars the pinnacle of mankind's achievement or does it mean you saw a boob. You could get those answers with statistical analysis, but they wouldn't do to anything as well as defining your terms up front.
(Facebook "Likes" are equally meaningless. People will "Like" posts with bad news because they want to support the person. And some actually like the bad news.)
Older than that. Well before USB thumb drives I was contracting at [Large Government Contractor You've Heard Of]. One day someone was outside on the street giving away CDs with free software on them. They were nice and pro, color cardboard sleeves shrink-wrapped. On the CDs were a bunch of shareware and just as many viruses.
I didn't really mind. for three full days I got paid to sit around and wait for the admins to fumigate the network.
The exact same thing happened less than a year later.
Thunderbird isn't a commercial product. It doesn't have to add arbitrary bullet points every 18 months so they can sell an upgrade. There is eventually a point where it's good enough and adding anything to it would detract. If only more software would do this.
Yeah, I used to run my own email server. And I would spend hours a week dealing with spam. And I made it a rule to spend an equal amount of time trying to prevent future spam, tweaking rule sets, blacklists, whitelists, filters... After having the same email address for nearly 20 years the amount of spam was truly astounding.
Now I just pipe it through Google Apps For Your Domain. Weekly time spent dealing with spam: 5 seconds. Sure, it doesn't have all the advantages of running your own, but I get hours back in my week, which is priceless.
Oh, I think I've heard of this. It's like YouTube if you could only choose one of 6 videos to watch, someone else decided when to hit "play" and they made you watch 3 minutes of ads for every 7 minutes of video.
"However, as an engineer, I feel obliged to point out that this exercise, while interesting, has absolutely zero practicality or usefulness. "
Yeah, that's why Sikorsky has put up a $250,000 prize for anyone who can fly a human powered 'copter for a minute to an altitude of 3m. Because there is certainly no point in this exercise.
What a crap engineer you must be to have built a wall so close to your face.
Here's another protip: No software will ever me as ingenious as a motivated kid. And nothing motivates a kit like a stupid obstacle. Like one that tells the they can't visit [some web site that sounds like a lot of fun] Why can't I go? What am I missing? Why are web pages that mention chicken breasts and breast cancer and Dick Clark, pussy willows, and photos of ancient Greek statues blocked?
Kids don't do what their parents say largely because they don't respect the parents. Putting up an arbitrary filter isn't going to increase respect.
What about power? I have spent the last 15 years traveling with my work, working out of cafes, coffee shops, bars, planes, trains, and automobiles, beaches, and basements. I am incredibly conscious of size and weight because I cary my laptop everywhere, every day. If I'm outside my laptop is on my shoulder or back. 3 punds is the breakpoint. Less than 3 pounds and you can carry it everywhere all day and not notice you've got it. Above that it becomes a problem.
But really, by far the most valuable thing to have in a portable computer is a long-lasting built-in power supply.
There will never be an outlet when you need one. I guarantee it. And with a portable computer you must have an outlet to do anything at all. Even if you did cobble together a battery for a portable computer it wouldn't be nearly as efficient as a laptop because laptops are made to run efficiently. And you'll need to carry the cord. More mass. Before "ultraportables" and the Air I would carry Sony X-series and spring for the extra-life battery. It increased the weight 50% and volume by 25%, but gave me 8-9 hours of tether-free power (vs 2) which saved my job on more than one occasion. I don't get quite that with the Air at this point, but 5+ hours is easy. I usually leave the charger at home/office/hotel room, which saves more space in my bag.
Projectors also require a flat, light colored, vertical surface to project on. This is much less available than you might think.
Reading Gladwell always gave me that itchy feeling that you get when you know you're around a douchebag but he hasn't done anything exactly douchey yet.
But happily judging the judgement of history well before history even gets to the party is a super douchey thing to do, so now I can label him a definitive douche and get on with my life.
Neither of the most popular desktop operating systems (Windows, OS X) work very well at arbitrary DPI. Windows is surprisingly ahead of OS X at the OS level, but lots of windows applications misbehave if you change the DPI settings. For example hard-coded interface layouts can mean that controls will be displayed outside the window area and are therefore inaccessible.
Of course it has. This is just a company going for a cash grab. I'm surprised they aren't using a proprietary 2D barcode format, but that would mean hiring 3x as many developers.
This thing is such a bad idea it shouldn't even have to be enumerated. 1) EMT doesn't have the app. 2) Person is in a reception dead zone. (Soon to literally be a dead zone.) 3) Disaster scenario: What happens to mobile phone reception? 4) Paramedics have time to surfe the web while trying to save lives? 5) LifeSquare's web site is down. Whoops, guess I'll die of a reaction to penicillin then.
Sure, there are privacy issues, but that seems to be the least of the faults with the system. Just write the dam thing in English on the bracelet and all you need to do is be able to read English. Low-tech solution is the right one.
Even if you chain it to your wrist, other things can happen beyond theft, such as damage from carelessness or accident. And tech can just fail.
Keep $4K in a bank account at all times so you can immediately replace it. When I was living out of a case this saved my bacon more than once. Keep remote backups (encrypted, naturally) so you can get back your data.
Get insurance as well, but don't expect it to pay out in every situation or in a timely manner.
I hire people and I work with and know a lot of people at big and small companies who hire people, so I'll say this:
Qualifications for most jobs and the amount we pay for them is almost completely unrelated to type or number of degrees. Create a portfolio and be able to answer questions about it. Period.
(There are a few very very large employers who look for specific degrees, but they are shrinking as they can no longer afford to spend a year training a potential candidate if they want to stay competitive.)
The best enegery saving, battery-life extneing thing I've done is to use FlashBlock. (Or in Chrome set it up to not load any extension without a click.) This has been the difference between getting 8 hours out of my laptop and getting 2 1/2.
Now if only web pages would be smarter about using setTimeout.
You can go on more than faith. If you have access to Kickstarter.com you have access to a stalker's paradise of tools to find out how legit a project is.
Do your research:
1) Does the process pass the sniff test. Is it too good to be true? Does the money-side seem legit? Does it violate any physical laws, or laws of common sense? A surprising number will fail here.
2) Look at the project docs. Do they have a real thing to produce? If it's for an object do they have an actual working one or do they have just sketches and a nice rendering. Do they know how to mass-produce something? Do they know how to deliver all of their rewards?
A project can't over-communicate. Do they update and answer questions with good answers? Or are they evasive?
3) Google the crap out of the project team. What have they done. Have they done something like this? Have they done anything at all besides come up with a couple hundred words and a video? If they're scam artists it will show. If they're simply in over their head it'll show too.
4) Beware of the ones who are in over their head. There are a lot of them. Tons. Looking at the rewards vs the reward prices is a good place to start. Is there enough left after producing the physical reward to produce the project? People show up with a good idea and think "how hard can it be?" and then they drop a decimal when pricing rewards and end up in the hole $3 for each T-shirt they have to get out, and didn't include shipping, so could you add another $12 to your pledge, oh, and I had no idea that it cost that much to duplicate a DVD/tool a factory/rent a sound studio... and the whole project collapses.
One of my biggest gripes about Kickstarter's setup is that you can't ask question on the project page unless you've ponied up the dough. That leads to a number of projects that are snake-oil getting funded.
I've back 2 and evaded many more. The two I backed delivered. One took 2x as long as anticipated, but they were in new territory, but they had a working model and I had personally talked to the team and they knew what they were doing. The second knew exactly every step to execute on it. And did.
The fallacy there is assuming that Facebook is a universal constant. If there's anything that anyone who knows about the "old school" net is that you're never too big to fail and fail quickly. Facebook's IPO won't be good for it's users. When Facebook fails people will have the choice of jumping to another abusive service or using the next generation of tools to take personal ownership of their content. How many do the latter will depend on in what matter Facebook fails.
This guy is the inventor of the TV-B-Gone, which is a surprisingly Fascist device for turning off TVs in public space. Were you watching that? Oh, sorry, I won't let you. Even though it's not my TV.
Jeez, what an asshole. It's a hissy-fit turned into technology.
(I don't own a TV, and hate TVs in public spaces, but forcing other people in public to abide by my arbitrary opinions is a dick move.)
I thought it was ironic that he used the Internet to announce it. And even cited the Internet as one of the things that (D)ARPA perpetrated for its evil goals.
Taking a look at the project that raised his hackles it looks like it's diverting funding from the military to education. Not sure I can find too much fault with that.
What a way to prepare them for the real world where there are no dinosaurs or birthdays.
Last week I overheard a conversation in a cafe. A woman was telling a friend how her family was having a hard time because she had decided to no celebrate Easter or Christmas with her family. I thought "Good for her, not thoughtlessly letting religion set her celebrations."
Then I heard the reason she wasn't going to celebrate them was because they were based on Pagan rites and no proper Christian should celebrate such wickedness.
No, not rocket science, but it increases the complexity (and therefore the price and maintenance cost) of something that already costs more than the market is willing to pay.
I'm old enough to remember when they tried making cars that could be regular cars during the week and change into a pickup when the owner needed to haul stuff. That's a much simpler transition, and I'm sure it met someone's needs. But, man, they didn't sell at all.
What magnetic storage media are you talking about? The strongest magnets in your house are inside of your hard drives.
Are you talking about floppies, Zip disks, audio tape, or VHS? Because if you haven't noticed those things don't really exist any more.
The only magnetic storage that is still in use that is vulnerable to magnetic fields is your credit card stripe, and even those are obsolete in most of the world.
But then again virtually nothing made in a factory is made under "Worker friendly conditions."
Very few things at all in fact. Your food, for example. Explore where that all comes from. Anything sold at a Big Box store. Video Games for large companies. Movies.
There are few Worker Friendly products out there because the point isn't to be nice to the workers, it's to make money.
If you want things produced with respect for the workers, buy things produced locally by small businesses or individuals. However you won't be able to find a phone made that way. You have to make your choice: How much is your convenience compared to a few minutes of factory worker's time in another country? A country you probably know nothing about, economically or culturally?
Slashdot Mirror
See also the San Francisco Chronicle's movie review "little man". Not a star or a thumb, but a very clear indication of what the reviewer thought. Is the little man applauding or asleep. Or is his little movie theater seat empty?
Stars are awful and should never be used. There's a reason YouTube dropped stars in favor of thumbs up/down. There was a serious bathtub curve on the stars, putting a huge percentage at 1 or 5 stars, and only a few 2,3 or 4 stars.
That's vastly different than how I use stars. But when I look at a star rating all I know is what my star rating means. Is 1 star a zero? Is one star an "F" (50%)? Is 5 stars the pinnacle of mankind's achievement or does it mean you saw a boob. You could get those answers with statistical analysis, but they wouldn't do to anything as well as defining your terms up front.
(Facebook "Likes" are equally meaningless. People will "Like" posts with bad news because they want to support the person. And some actually like the bad news.)
Are we assuming that diggers in the future won't have a Gieger counter?
And if we're assuming that they won't then we can't make any assumptions about communicating with them in any way.
Just put a skull and crossbones on it and call it a day. If the digging civilization doesn't have skulls or bones, then that's their own problem.
Older than that. Well before USB thumb drives I was contracting at [Large Government Contractor You've Heard Of]. One day someone was outside on the street giving away CDs with free software on them. They were nice and pro, color cardboard sleeves shrink-wrapped. On the CDs were a bunch of shareware and just as many viruses.
I didn't really mind. for three full days I got paid to sit around and wait for the admins to fumigate the network.
The exact same thing happened less than a year later.
Thunderbird isn't a commercial product. It doesn't have to add arbitrary bullet points every 18 months so they can sell an upgrade. There is eventually a point where it's good enough and adding anything to it would detract. If only more software would do this.
Yeah, I used to run my own email server. And I would spend hours a week dealing with spam. And I made it a rule to spend an equal amount of time trying to prevent future spam, tweaking rule sets, blacklists, whitelists, filters... After having the same email address for nearly 20 years the amount of spam was truly astounding.
Now I just pipe it through Google Apps For Your Domain. Weekly time spent dealing with spam: 5 seconds. Sure, it doesn't have all the advantages of running your own, but I get hours back in my week, which is priceless.
"By the end of 2012, broadcast televisionâ¦"
Broadcast what?
Oh, I think I've heard of this. It's like YouTube if you could only choose one of 6 videos to watch, someone else decided when to hit "play" and they made you watch 3 minutes of ads for every 7 minutes of video.
Yeah, that's why Sikorsky has put up a $250,000 prize for anyone who can fly a human powered 'copter for a minute to an altitude of 3m. Because there is certainly no point in this exercise.
What a crap engineer you must be to have built a wall so close to your face.
Here's another protip:
No software will ever me as ingenious as a motivated kid. And nothing motivates a kit like a stupid obstacle. Like one that tells the they can't visit [some web site that sounds like a lot of fun] Why can't I go? What am I missing? Why are web pages that mention chicken breasts and breast cancer and Dick Clark, pussy willows, and photos of ancient Greek statues blocked?
Kids don't do what their parents say largely because they don't respect the parents. Putting up an arbitrary filter isn't going to increase respect.
What about power? I have spent the last 15 years traveling with my work, working out of cafes, coffee shops, bars, planes, trains, and automobiles, beaches, and basements. I am incredibly conscious of size and weight because I cary my laptop everywhere, every day. If I'm outside my laptop is on my shoulder or back. 3 punds is the breakpoint. Less than 3 pounds and you can carry it everywhere all day and not notice you've got it. Above that it becomes a problem.
But really, by far the most valuable thing to have in a portable computer is a long-lasting built-in power supply.
There will never be an outlet when you need one. I guarantee it. And with a portable computer you must have an outlet to do anything at all. Even if you did cobble together a battery for a portable computer it wouldn't be nearly as efficient as a laptop because laptops are made to run efficiently. And you'll need to carry the cord. More mass. Before "ultraportables" and the Air I would carry Sony X-series and spring for the extra-life battery. It increased the weight 50% and volume by 25%, but gave me 8-9 hours of tether-free power (vs 2) which saved my job on more than one occasion. I don't get quite that with the Air at this point, but 5+ hours is easy. I usually leave the charger at home/office/hotel room, which saves more space in my bag.
Projectors also require a flat, light colored, vertical surface to project on. This is much less available than you might think.
Reading Gladwell always gave me that itchy feeling that you get when you know you're around a douchebag but he hasn't done anything exactly douchey yet.
But happily judging the judgement of history well before history even gets to the party is a super douchey thing to do, so now I can label him a definitive douche and get on with my life.
Also: Don't feed the trolls.
Neither of the most popular desktop operating systems (Windows, OS X) work very well at arbitrary DPI. Windows is surprisingly ahead of OS X at the OS level, but lots of windows applications misbehave if you change the DPI settings. For example hard-coded interface layouts can mean that controls will be displayed outside the window area and are therefore inaccessible.
Of course it has. This is just a company going for a cash grab. I'm surprised they aren't using a proprietary 2D barcode format, but that would mean hiring 3x as many developers.
This thing is such a bad idea it shouldn't even have to be enumerated.
1) EMT doesn't have the app.
2) Person is in a reception dead zone. (Soon to literally be a dead zone.)
3) Disaster scenario: What happens to mobile phone reception?
4) Paramedics have time to surfe the web while trying to save lives?
5) LifeSquare's web site is down. Whoops, guess I'll die of a reaction to penicillin then.
Sure, there are privacy issues, but that seems to be the least of the faults with the system. Just write the dam thing in English on the bracelet and all you need to do is be able to read English. Low-tech solution is the right one.
Even if you chain it to your wrist, other things can happen beyond theft, such as damage from carelessness or accident. And tech can just fail.
Keep $4K in a bank account at all times so you can immediately replace it. When I was living out of a case this saved my bacon more than once. Keep remote backups (encrypted, naturally) so you can get back your data.
Get insurance as well, but don't expect it to pay out in every situation or in a timely manner.
I hire people and I work with and know a lot of people at big and small companies who hire people, so I'll say this:
Qualifications for most jobs and the amount we pay for them is almost completely unrelated to type or number of degrees. Create a portfolio and be able to answer questions about it. Period.
(There are a few very very large employers who look for specific degrees, but they are shrinking as they can no longer afford to spend a year training a potential candidate if they want to stay competitive.)
The best enegery saving, battery-life extneing thing I've done is to use FlashBlock. (Or in Chrome set it up to not load any extension without a click.) This has been the difference between getting 8 hours out of my laptop and getting 2 1/2.
Now if only web pages would be smarter about using setTimeout.
You can go on more than faith. If you have access to Kickstarter.com you have access to a stalker's paradise of tools to find out how legit a project is.
Do your research:
1) Does the process pass the sniff test. Is it too good to be true? Does the money-side seem legit? Does it violate any physical laws, or laws of common sense? A surprising number will fail here.
2) Look at the project docs. Do they have a real thing to produce? If it's for an object do they have an actual working one or do they have just sketches and a nice rendering. Do they know how to mass-produce something? Do they know how to deliver all of their rewards?
A project can't over-communicate. Do they update and answer questions with good answers? Or are they evasive?
3) Google the crap out of the project team. What have they done. Have they done something like this? Have they done anything at all besides come up with a couple hundred words and a video? If they're scam artists it will show. If they're simply in over their head it'll show too.
4) Beware of the ones who are in over their head. There are a lot of them. Tons. Looking at the rewards vs the reward prices is a good place to start. Is there enough left after producing the physical reward to produce the project? People show up with a good idea and think "how hard can it be?" and then they drop a decimal when pricing rewards and end up in the hole $3 for each T-shirt they have to get out, and didn't include shipping, so could you add another $12 to your pledge, oh, and I had no idea that it cost that much to duplicate a DVD/tool a factory/rent a sound studio ... and the whole project collapses.
One of my biggest gripes about Kickstarter's setup is that you can't ask question on the project page unless you've ponied up the dough. That leads to a number of projects that are snake-oil getting funded.
I've back 2 and evaded many more. The two I backed delivered. One took 2x as long as anticipated, but they were in new territory, but they had a working model and I had personally talked to the team and they knew what they were doing. The second knew exactly every step to execute on it. And did.
The fallacy there is assuming that Facebook is a universal constant. If there's anything that anyone who knows about the "old school" net is that you're never too big to fail and fail quickly. Facebook's IPO won't be good for it's users. When Facebook fails people will have the choice of jumping to another abusive service or using the next generation of tools to take personal ownership of their content. How many do the latter will depend on in what matter Facebook fails.
This guy is the inventor of the TV-B-Gone, which is a surprisingly Fascist device for turning off TVs in public space. Were you watching that? Oh, sorry, I won't let you. Even though it's not my TV.
Jeez, what an asshole. It's a hissy-fit turned into technology.
(I don't own a TV, and hate TVs in public spaces, but forcing other people in public to abide by my arbitrary opinions is a dick move.)
I thought it was ironic that he used the Internet to announce it. And even cited the Internet as one of the things that (D)ARPA perpetrated for its evil goals.
Taking a look at the project that raised his hackles it looks like it's diverting funding from the military to education. Not sure I can find too much fault with that.
Good luck getting the visitors to your site to use the browser/version you want them to.
This comment looks best in IE6.
What a way to prepare them for the real world where there are no dinosaurs or birthdays.
Last week I overheard a conversation in a cafe. A woman was telling a friend how her family was having a hard time because she had decided to no celebrate Easter or Christmas with her family. I thought "Good for her, not thoughtlessly letting religion set her celebrations."
Then I heard the reason she wasn't going to celebrate them was because they were based on Pagan rites and no proper Christian should celebrate such wickedness.
You can't win for losing.
No, not rocket science, but it increases the complexity (and therefore the price and maintenance cost) of something that already costs more than the market is willing to pay.
I'm old enough to remember when they tried making cars that could be regular cars during the week and change into a pickup when the owner needed to haul stuff. That's a much simpler transition, and I'm sure it met someone's needs. But, man, they didn't sell at all.
What magnetic storage media are you talking about? The strongest magnets in your house are inside of your hard drives.
Are you talking about floppies, Zip disks, audio tape, or VHS? Because if you haven't noticed those things don't really exist any more.
The only magnetic storage that is still in use that is vulnerable to magnetic fields is your credit card stripe, and even those are obsolete in most of the world.
But then again virtually nothing made in a factory is made under "Worker friendly conditions."
Very few things at all in fact. Your food, for example. Explore where that all comes from. Anything sold at a Big Box store. Video Games for large companies. Movies.
There are few Worker Friendly products out there because the point isn't to be nice to the workers, it's to make money.
If you want things produced with respect for the workers, buy things produced locally by small businesses or individuals. However you won't be able to find a phone made that way. You have to make your choice: How much is your convenience compared to a few minutes of factory worker's time in another country? A country you probably know nothing about, economically or culturally?
If there was any doubt that The Hunger Games are young adult novels, just read through the list.
I'd weep for the youth of today but I was a youth of yesterday and I was a giant idiot too. I mostly grew out of it. They will too. It's how it works.