> (BTW, manufacturers, if you want to use touch sensors and you don’t want to lose the massive midwit market, make things that automatically turn on when first connected to power, without waiting for a touch.)
...and if you ever lose power to the house, suddenly all devices turn on.
What a great way to be sure the power has been restored. I suppose the power being restored at 3am would suck but in most cases I would want the lights to all come back on after an outage.
It reminds me of the glass vs plastic phone backside arguments. Glass is more fragile than plastic and will not absorb shocks. It is also heavier and harder to replace (most plastic backsides can be removed with a guitar pick).
I was astonished at the amount of ink, or pixels wasted by this ridiculous and completely manufactured distinction on the part of inept tech "journalists" and bloggers who had to find something non-technical to identify a pecking order among phones in order to attract readership who didn't understand the more subtle distinctions between features that affect actual usage of the phone.
The only other ridiculous argument that had an even worse effect on the net usability of phones, as well as the indistinguishable limited variety that we have today, is the ridiculous obsession with thinness. And then everyone puts a case on it anyway.
Thin, thin, thin, and a glass back on top of that. I'm not usually sympathetic to conspiracies but it sure seems like the interests of phone manufacturers ( especially one in particular) who want to sell a new throaway device every year were suspiciously well served by both of these absurd abitrary obsessions of the tech press.
People say "vote with your feet" and "just don't buy the stuff you don't like", but you can't exactly buy nothing when there are no options you like, because what if you need a laptop anyway? So you end up having to buy something "thin and light" which is a signal to the OEM that people want more thin and light even if all they wanted was a laptop.
Unfortunately the phrase vote with your feet is too often misapplied either by the hopelessly idealistic at one end, or by the toxically cynical at the other.
particularly those who are well aware that you have two feet to work with while their side has paid influence wrangling a stampede of cattle in the other directiin.
I personally like light phones and thin or small are two ways to make them light. I prefer small to thin if I have a choice, but the sub 6" Android phones can be counted on the fingers of a hand nowadays (with fingers to spare) so I can't be too picky. 200 g seems to be the new normal. Ugh!
Piggybacking on to this... I've currently split my home network into multiple VLAN, so that the IOT stuff can't access the "trusted" devices (or internet, depending on device).
However I realized it would be interesting to MITM the traffic and emulate the services these devices try to connect to, to see what data they are leaking. Does anyone know if there are any readymade software packages, or even tutorials, for this?
I like the novelty of it. I have a copy of The Manga Guide to Databases at my desk that I occasionally 'lend out' to people that mess up my databases. It won't turn anyone into a db hero but it's a decent primer at least.
Different strokes, I guess; I can't count the number of people that openly gush about _why's Ruby book with the cats or whatever, but to me it just read like the ravings of a highly functional something-opath. But reasonable people can disagree, and I'm sure I'll get downvoted for disagreeing with the hivemind.
I don't really get these weird ways of explaining different technologies, just give me a straightforward text description. But straightforward text isn't going anywhere and it doesn't hurt me if people want to read mangas about foxes or whatever.
To me, the attraction is less about the specific art used to communicate the concept, and more about the careful attention to a fully-formed analogy that explains the tech in completely different terms.
These kinds of explanations tend to focus on the most critical/important concepts, and help validate (or dispel) assumptions I've made about the tech.
This focus on analogy also lets the author tell the story faster, because I already understand:
- What an otter is
- That rivers flow
- The water flowing down a river that forks will be spread across those forks
- etc...
Depending on the strength of the analogy, it's possible to get the reader on the same page much faster than an intro/tutorial that must first explain foundational concepts just to get to the basics of the technology itself.
I've never really been a fan of analogies, because I feel like in the end I just need to first understand what the thing is underneath, so I can understand how the author has built their analogy... so the task of understanding why they used this analogy is equivalent to understanding the thing itself.
Do people find these analogies helpful? The concepts aren't that difficult, the audience for them is already technical, and adding a cutesy abstraction about it makes it harder to understand.
The art and animation in this is great, but I feel like the author's talents are wasted on a document with no audience. Make a kids' book instead!
Yea that's where I was going with asking why. It feels like it's a trendy thing is to convert a technical thing into a children's book. (Which is odd.. children don't need that book.. so it's for an adult that wants to consume children's literature)
Note: I'm not against creative attempts to explain technical concepts. But the form to me seems odd, and that it feels like we're producing very short tutorials in a childrens format. That's even weirder.
My initial impression was "more of this garbage" - but it was really well done in the sense that it distilled the core functionality of the system in an easy-to-understand form.
The guy above you mentioned manga-guides to stuff, which utterly fail at their job, which again, is to distill key-information in an entertaining, easy-to-read, general (but fully accurate) manner.
I never found it helpful from a purely technical perspective, but I found it extremely eye-opening as an unorthodox approach to programming that really captured my imagination. It was definitely something that encouraged me to dig deeper into Ruby and do more explorative "creative" coding.
There's no shortage of dry technical documentation, so seeing something akin to outsider art in that space was really refreshing.
Personally I would love to see more technical books come with a soundtrack!
Because to me it seems like a very pure way of separating a concept from implementation. In language and metaphors that are easy to understand and fun to read. I really like it. Now, in a very short time I can decide if Kafka can solve my problem or whether I should move on. I for one store information presented in this way much better, it's feasible that in 5 years I'm presented with a problem and the Otters pop into my mind.
Most Fennoswedic families moved ~400 years ago from Sweden to Finland. According to that logic, Americans would actually be native Britons? Sounds wrong to me.
The Finnish context and the American one aren’t really comparable. The USA is an 18th-century project where there was little emphasis on ethnicity. Modern Finland, on the other hand, is the project of 19th- and early 20th-century nationalism where the independent nation would be a home for specifically the ethnic Finnish people, while still providing rights and recognition for the ethnic Swedes (and, by the late 20th century, for the Saami). Complicating matters still further, some of the ideologues of an independent Finland for Finns, were ethnic Swedes who "switched sides", as it were.
wassenaar10’s two posts above are quite reasonable and on-topic, though I can understand how they might sound odd or offensive to people unfamiliar with Finland.
Culturally Swedish speaking Finns are much closer to Finns than to Swedes, 90% of the time. Add to the fact that a majority of them are fluently bilingual, and I'd call it somewhat of a stretch to characterize them as "ethnic Swedes". Source: live in Finland, speak both languages.
There’s a big difference, though, between Finland Swedes from Uusimaa who are well on the way to total assimilation, and e.g. those from Nykarleby whose contact with the Finnish language is limited and who still look to Stockholm in certain ways.
I am pretty sure that "Linus is an ethnic Swede, can't have that" was destined to sound offensive also to a fair number of people familiar with Finland, and that this was a predictable result. You also in passing manage to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of Finland as a nation-state while revealing a comprehensive lack of familiarity with American history. Please join wassenaar10 in resisting the impulse to visit your parochial resentments upon us and most certainly do not do so while appealing for tolerance under the banner of our 'unfamiliarity' with Finland. We are familiar enough with trolls and do not need to know any more than that.
> cast aspersions on the legitimacy of Finland as a nation-state
I don't know where you got that from. Finland is no less legitimate than all the other European countries whose independence movements arose in the 19th century, like Poland or those which emerged from Austro-Hungary. Finland is a fairly typical European nation-state.
> a comprehensive lack of familiarity with American history.
Ethnicity did not play the same role in the American War of Independence as it did in the 19th-century European independence movements, for the simple reason that that new notion of ethnicity did not arise until the age of Romanticism and the years immediately preceding 1848.
> your parochial resentments
I don’t share the resentments to which wassenaar10 may allude. I am not saying that he is correct, only that his view is one that exists in the Finnish context.
> We are familiar enough with trolls
"Troll" has a very specific meaning in internet parlance and is not merely anyone that you think is wrong.
