> For some reason I get the feeling that adopting all of these "smart" devices actually makes me more vulnerable to risk and gives me less control over my life.
Oh, of course it does. Consider: when are you more in control, when you know the city you're in inside-out, or when you're depending on Google Maps?
It's a mix. If I need to get somewhere specific I'll follow directions, but if I'm browsing then I don't learn much by looking down at a screen the whole time.
Last time I was in DC for a conference in Foggy Bottom I got a recommendation for a pizza shop a few blocks from my hotel. &pizza, not bad.
Next day I went to that general area and browsed around looking for a bar. Because I didn't just look up bars on Yelp I was able to distinguish the character of the places I walked around, like the feel of a neighborhood that primarily houses GWU students, and another that is for unreasonably wealthy urban homeowners.
tl;dr I get what I want from a maps app when I know what I want. If I don't know what I want, I go out and learn by experience.
2012, October. I, an American from upstate NY, am traveling on the Queen Elizabeth Way to visit a friend in Toronto, a city I last saw at the age of 3. There are at least 6 lanes on the highway, packed with drivers so cantankerous and forceful that save for the autumn gray I could swear I was in LA.
I'm approaching the city and a display by the road says the route is closed for construction. My maps app redirects me to another highway, which is completely closed after 15 miles of driving. Another redirect, all while forcing my way through the automobile equivalent of a massive hockey team.
Suffice to say, I didn't know the city, and I didn't have the chance to unfold a map.
The only part that was out of my control was the $300 in roaming charges.
> It feels like my home is being sold out from underneath me to the Chinese. ... But it makes me very sad to feel like I don't belong in the place where I grew up.
Don't worry. If how the English treated First Nations is any guide, you'll get a reservation at the end of the day.
(Really brief history for those from outside the region: ethnic-Europeans have been ruling British Columbia for less than two hundred years.)
Although there could be a relevant point here, the combination of generic ideological tangent with snark is the worst way to make it. Please don't do that here.
capitalism sure does feel great when you're winning. but when someone shows up with more money, all of a sudden it starts feeling very unfair.
and nothing will be done about it because the powerful locals who make the laws are the ones getting rich (richer, really) selling all of the real estate to the foreigners.
and all of the anger will be misdirected at the chinese, allowing the process to continue indefinitely.
Pointing out how foreign nationals are buying up houses in the Greater Vancouver Area and feeding our local housing bubble is "slightly racist"?
Edit: Nevermind, your post seems to have completely changed. I suppose you're just afraid this will translate into Xenophobia against [presumably] people like you.
i was in the middle of editing my comment when you replied.
how is this any different than rich white dot com yuppies pushing lifelong latino or black residents out of San Francisco? am i supposed to feel sad for them, or sad for the white people getting pushed out of vancouver by rich asian people?
the answer is i don't really feel sad for either group. i'm sure it's sad if you're the one being pushed, but hey, apparently it happens to everyone.
I actually do feel sad for all groups being pushed out of their home, but as you rightly point out this is part of life. What is different about Vancouver is people are being pushed out of their homes and nobody is moving in. Seems a great waste of a beautiful location.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One might inquire what the First Nations think about white man's towers of glass and Vancouver Specials in what used to be beautiful temperate rainforest...
What about in London where the wealthy Chinese are also known to send their children, where complaints about their arrival can't be easily hand-waved away by saying that Europeans took the land from Native Americans or have only been there a short time themselves?
UK voted to sell itself out to rich people with mobile capital when they decided to stop being a manufacturing country and start being a finance country. That started in the 1980s and hasn't stopped since (witness Labour only ruling when they became "New Labour" stripping out all the too-Laboury bits). Plus it's hard to feel bad for people who reaped the benefits of colonizing half the world not too long ago.
Not to mention people in London usually complain about the wealthy Russians and Saudis these days
> If how the English treated First Nations is any guide, you'll get a reservation at the end of the day.
Only if your vast assumption about China is correct, which it isn't. Their economy is in free-fall.
China's imports just collapsed by 19% in January, exports collapsed by 11%. Trillions of dollars of capital is rapidly fleeing their economy. Their government is in the midst of an extraordinarily violent and widespread crackdown on individual liberty, murdering billionaires and disappearing high-level executives and journalists. And they're going to have to dramatically devalue their currency, which will have the effect in real terms of slicing their economy down to size, including their wealth.
Where can I read about this? Of course if it's true, I could find a zillion dumb stories about it from various locations, but maybe you know a good, insightful, deep writup somewhere?
I'd never heard of this, so I am really fascinated.
EDIT: From a co-worker, the chairman of China is an old-school traditionalist Maoist who thinks all this Capitalism and Democracy BS has gone too far, and it's time to purge it all and have another cultural revolution. Still no good hard evidence links.
But that could be detainment. And it doesn't go into executives.
Of course you are right, I was just being lazy, but I was trying to be smarter about it than typing an obvious search into Google and reading dozens of articles with the hope that I found one informing me about the claims made by someone I've in the past observed to be interested in the news.
I've been working as a programmer for a few years and I can't program very well. I can get things done but it takes longer as I'm constantly distracting myself. I want to contribute as well, particularly with compiling binaries and easier stuff but I don't know where to start.
I triage where possible in projects that are important to me, because when I have a problem, I expect my issue to be triaged in return. I'm not a student/newbie, but I'm not a coder and still desire to contribute where I can.
I never understood that kind of comment. It's not because someone is suggesting something that he must fill the position. Same thing about bug, it's not because something is wrong that it means that the one who report it must go in the source and fix it. Your comment doesn't provide values at all.
No, I'm not actually suggesting that he should volunteer.
But saying "surely someone can just volunteer" is pointless in the absence of evidence that someone actually wants to volunteer. If anything the evidence points to not enough volunteer triage PMs - the OSS world is not short on projects that could use a triager.
Oh, that's absolutely true. There are far too few people stepping forward to fill non-technical roles in OSS. And that's a shame, because I think it would really help get some projects off the group, and help others keep their communities together.
But I didn't say "surely someone can just volunteer". I said that they should "get someone to join". There are a lot of ways to do that, and many of them involve the current team members being proactive about going out and trying to recruit someone to fill that role. The OSS communities can't just rely on the "if you build it they will come" philosophy -- if you really want your project to grow, you have to be willing to put yourself forward and actively get people to help you.
> There are a lot of ways to do that, and many of them involve the current team members being proactive about going out and trying to recruit someone to fill that role.
Orrrr the current team members can be proactive and do something that will reduce the number of bad bug reports they get.
It's the old "OH you have a problem or a request with some open source project? Then how about YOU write the code/solve the problem! It's open source you know!"
It's a canned response that people roll out whenever anything is raised about an open source project.
Believe it or not, there are professional PMs who are just as interested in open source in their free time as some professional software engineers are. I'm not one of them -- I'm an engineer -- but I know some.
It would be a good opportunity for people who would like to contribute to an open source project who might have less technical experience or time. Mozilla has many indispensable volunteers who help triage and "groom" Firefox bugs in Bugzilla. They are a huge help. :)
This is completely untrue. You can't look for planning information the same way you look for code snippets. This is like looking for medical research on Youtube. StackOverflow? Try https://www.planning.org/ and the Journal of the American Planning Association.
As well, in any profession with large public impact, there is a gap between what the professionals know and what the public accepts. A planner can tell you how to solve traffic congestion in a city with a bridge, but it might not be so simple for a politician to convince people to pay millions, or worse, alter their lifestyle to make it happen.
To give an example: do you think economists and policy professionals don't have a lot of ideas to simplify and improve the tax code? Then why aren't they implemented? Because lobbying and special interests, because talk radio, because social equality, because families, because people think of themselves as impoverished millionaires, because messy real-life stuff.
Trying to access the documents ... they are not public domain, open licensed, nor indexed. And scientific papers should all be available to the public especially when funded with public money so should the data. Privatizing public funded work is theft of the people.
I do not trust any kind of expert or "wise people" that want me to trust them without having access to their so called wisdom.
I do not hear the "necessity is evil but we have to live with it". If people are not willing to prove their worth to the community and being scrutinized they should gracefully resign and admit they are not fit for the mission. This coward attitude is disgusting from people having a corporation that protect the security of their job based on ethic.
And last but not least, they should not spend money of others resulting in the slavery of public debts if they cannot give tokens that -at least- they did their bests in terms of means to achieve their goals.
People with powers should accept to be liable for their actions : it is called responsibility.
> I do not hear the "necessity is evil but we have to live with it". If people are not willing to prove their worth to the community and being scrutinized they should gracefully resign and admit they are not fit for the mission.
Great, so now they've all resigned and we're back to the start with no idea how to solve traffic congestion in a city with a bridge.
Best ask StackOverflow.
> Trying to access the documents ... they are not public domain, open licensed, nor indexed.
You have a long day ahead of you if you want to rant about non-open licensed academic papers
You can log into an @gmail.com Hangouts account through XMPP. The instructions on https://wiki.bitlbee.org/HowtoGtalk worked for my account which is also accessed by Hangouts on Android L.
(At least person-to-person messaging works well - I have not attempted group chats or video or stuff)
Indeed. Google voice texts, group chats, and video stuff do not work. I get incoming audio chat requests on pidgin for google voice calls, but they don't work.
Eh... there's some value, it's just really badly implemented currently.
A selling idea of the Nest is that it keeps your house warm when you're there, and not-frozen when you're not, and it will do so efficiently, so that the house is warm when you arrive home but not long before.
Now of course you can just turn up the heating as you walk in the door wait a few minutes to heat up, it won't hurt. But if technology can do it reliably, there's clearly some value. Compare, for instance, lighting a candle when you get home with just flicking the switch for those newfangled electric lights. The candle works but the technology is more convenient.
Of course, electricity doesn't give you failwhales these days, and there's a bit more engineering involved than "move fast and break things."
The problem isn't that "some value" can't be extracted. The problem is that the value that can be extracted is bounded by my actual problems. Nest can't fundamentally transform my house heating experience into some sort of delight; at the absolute limit, all it could possibly do is cut my heating bill down to $0. Which would be amazing, but it can't do that, of course.
Other IoT possibilities I see tossed about have even worse possibilities; Nest is probably already the biggest possible winner. If you eliminate 100% of the time I spend turning lights on and off, you've basically had no impact on my life. If you design a glorious IoT refrigerator that somehow requires 0 additional time out of my life to feed it data (which is a negative) it still has to face up to the fact that my "display" showing me what I have which I can get to by simply opening the door is superior to any practical front-mounted display. There's very little room for any sort of IoT water-use optimizer, certainly nothing a startup could wedge into and make money. What can the IoT do for my washer and dryer, play tunes off of Pandora while I'm loading them? My cell can already do that.
I don't need an Internet of Things. I need a Robot of doing Things, and if it's hooked up to the internet I rather expect we'll still see it as "a robot" rather than "an IoT device". (I don't think I want my robot live hooked up to the internet anyhow.)
And just to be clear, I'll say again I totally get it for commercial and civil use, so I'm not just down on IoT in general. (I'm down on IoT security in general, but that's a separate problem. Sort of. Close enough for now anyhow.) It just seems to me that the vast bulk of the IoT story involves being not physically proximal to the IoT device (and, indeed, note how the core Nest use case of "turning off the heat when you are not there" fits that to a T), and therefore, unless you live in a mansion, it's solving a problem a homeowner mostly doesn't have.
Honestly, I agree, and I love having my house low-tech and simple. The best solution is avoiding the problem altogether.
But your argument can be advanced against electric light. I could do just fine with candles in my house. But in 2016 I'm not going to go back to candles, even if electricity isn't really saving me that much time or money.
Imagine in 2050 never having to turn on the lights again because they will turn on automatically and that will work well. Never deal with carrying things and reaching over with your elbow. It won't add more than $200 of value to your life, but will you actively opt out of it?
It's not that "IoT" will make your life vastly more efficient and save you tons of money. It's that when it's easy enough and good enough, it will become the new normal as mains electricity is now. Currently it's a buggy gadget, but so was every technology once.
Another thing that you can do is tracking which products you have in your fridges, freezers and cupboards – and when you want to know where something is, you can just do "Jarvis, do we have another bottle of ketchup?" – "Yes, it’s in Kitchen Cupboard Number 2 Left"
In fact, I’ve actually designed something similar to that, but a lot simpler. A simple barcode scanner where you check in new products you buy, and check out products you throw away.
"A simple barcode scanner where you check in new products you buy, and check out products you throw away."
Your homework, before you start too far down this road, is to start doing that right now if you haven't already. You don't even need a real scanner; just pretend with a stapler or something vaguely the right shape and weight. You should also go through your cupboards and just scan everything once to simulate the initial load. Then, I don't know whether you mean to design this for yourself or for selling to others, but if it's the latter, consider whether your customers will actually do this for any period of time. I'd also recommend faceoffs between two people, one pretending realistically to ask your system where something is (either literally typing it in somewhere or doing real-enough voice recognition that you can see the correct query came out), and one just looking. Even if I don't know your kitchen, if it's at all sensibly laid out and you give me a quick look around first, decent odds I still beat your system finding something on average, even if it's not my kitchen.
If you completely eliminate 100% of the time in a year that I spend looking for kitchen goods that I don't know where they are, you've brought me maybe $20/year in value total; if you make me scan everything going in and out, I'd pay at least $200/year not to do that. (Probably more if I really faced that problem.)
(If this is just a personal project, go nuts. Very educational, lots of valuable skill building involved, and it's always good to scratch an itch with it. But if you have any ideas of making money with it, then I suggest taking it seriously and doing some heavy market research and proofing before the tech.)
I actually have built it in about an hour, weeks ago.
The situation was this: Was at home, had no idea what was in the cupboard. So I scanned everything with the app.
I stopped using it, mainly because scanning via phone is far slower than via a real scanner, and I don’t want to spend money. And because my parents always ignored it anyway.
> A simple barcode scanner where you check in new products you buy, and check out products you throw away.
I tinkered with something like this too in my app; but not for where things are, I already have pre-defined homes for things.
Instead I was more worried about food going bad before I ate it. but I backed away from it, mainly because barcodes don't carry expiration data. Instead, my app knows whats on my shopping list, and send me an email afterwards that lets me +1 my inventory of something, which ties into a general expiration for that product (like milk is ~week) and then sends me emails when something I bought is close to expiring. For milk it's not such a problem, but other things I buy and forget.
Fortunately, for most of the food one can buy, "expriation date" is just a manufacturer's suggestion, a date past which they "don't guarantee the intended taste and quality". Nothing to do with actual food safety - you can eat quite a lot of things safely months past their expiration date.
Arguably, many of the "slide" images aren't directly relevant to the content, they're just there because you're expected to have images in a tech conference talk.
Software is the perfect product - it doesn't wear out, it doesn't go bad, if you really need to you'll be able to use software you got in 1990 in 2090.
For the software creator, once you've sold someone your software, the only way to make more money is to sell it to someone else, or create and sell a new version. Eventually you run out of someone-elses to sell to and can make new versions or go out of business.
... or sell a support contract or a subscription model.
I don't like it from a user's point of view, but squaring my preferences as a user with preferences of business isn't easy.
It's not just software. Most of the things we buy and use are being purposefully broken because otherwise they wouldn't wear out fast enough. That's the sick side of capitalism.
Well sure, but there's an ultimately sustainable business model if your product needs replacing in 30 or 50 years. (Leaving aside the things like marketing claims of a "30 year" or "lifetime" warranties from a company with a 10-year lifespan.) Capital needed for initial production is then the only issue. But there isn't such a model if the product never needs replacing again.
30-50 years of replacement time is apparently not sustainable, since most of the things we buy have 3-5 years of expected lifetime tops. As for software, the entire tech industry, including its hardware areas, is nowhere near stabilizing yet. Most software has to be replaced after at most 10-15 years, either because of security issues or just because it's no longer supported by hardware. There are exceptions, yes - software written for Windows 95+ is still alive and kicking, but because most software has to interact with other software eventually (even if by exchanging files), it has to keep up. The rise of web and mobile applications has sadly only sped it up.
Maybe one day we'll reach the times when programming is done by "programmer-archaeologists", as described by Vernor Vinge in "A Fire Upon the Deep", whose job is to dig through centuries of legacy code covering just about any conceivable need, to find the snippets they need and glue them together. But right now, software gets obsolete just as fast as physical products.
> 30-50 years of replacement time is apparently not sustainable, since most of the things we buy have 3-5 years of expected lifetime tops.
In practice, yes, most things we buy are designed to fail. But in principle 30 years is possible, if anyone is willing to pay for it. Lots of people aren't, for many reasons including time cost of money, fashion, or just not caring.
> Most software has to be replaced after at most 10-15 years, either because of security issues or just because it's no longer supported by hardware.
Yes, so there's the answer for why the software upgrade treadmill exists: it's for software not important enough to run on dedicated separated hardware. Few people are upgrading CNC controllers or power plant controllers or aeroplane controllers because of security issues or because the hardware is no longer available.
Anyway, even on the consumer side the lifespans are rapidly lengthening. In the 1990s running current software on five-year-old computers or using a five-year-old OS would have been basically unheard of in the mainstream. Today a five-year-old computer is only a step behind current and Windows 7 has turned 6 years old and is still extremely widely used.
> n practice, yes, most things we buy are designed to fail. But in principle 30 years is possible, if anyone is willing to pay for it.
My mom is still using a cooking stove she bought in 1982, as a second hand purchase. Parts of it have been repaired/replaced, but I don't think they make em like they used to: I doubt a 2016 stove will make it to 2049.
It's not that creating more durable products is significantly more expensive (it could, and was done in the 80s), its that manufacturers cut costs of manufacturing and their B.o.M. in the interest of maximising profit.
The "rot" is because the environment is changing (the hardware you're running it on, other software you need to interact with) or the software is being carelessly updated.
If you need to, software rot can be eliminated. It takes effort but it can be done.
To give an example: you can run a space station with software installed in the 1980s, but you probably can't run a space station with seals or pumps installed in the 1980s.
> I think my biggest takeaway from Japan was that it's stuck between two worlds -- one 20 years ahead, and one 20 years behind.
Sure but you can give examples of that for just about every country. The Britons will laugh at U.S.'s card payment infrastructure. The Koreans will laugh at metropolitan U.S.'s mobile broadband infrastructure.
Oh, of course it does. Consider: when are you more in control, when you know the city you're in inside-out, or when you're depending on Google Maps?