Kinda off topic, but I'm starting to see this kind of website design more frequently these days, just a big "Join" button (or something) without any information whatsoever about what is it I'm joining up for. I hate it and I don't know why anyone thinks it's a good idea.
The problem isn't so much signing up, the problem is that from their website, without signing up, I have no idea what their service does and what are it's features.
A small paragraph and maybe a screenshot would do wonders for my willingness to try their service. But I'm basically complaining for the sake of complaining because I dislike this trend.
They could, but since so much of healthcare sits inside Citrix these days, it's unlikely that in OP's scenario it would've mattered. It's pretty easy to find out if you are running in a VM on Windows though, so I bet they do.
I agree with this. I have though about it extensively, as an introvert who hates large cities, and I think (at least for me) a city between 500k and 1 million inhabitants spread out over a sizeable area is ideal. It has some of the benefits of a large city and some of the benefits of a small town, and I think it strikes a good balance between being anonymous in a crowd while having enough space for myself to live comfortably. Such a city would also have the population to find enough people with similar interests/hobbies to have clubs and meetups.
I'm overall surprised at how unpopular/unknown wxWidgets is when the discussion turns to cross platform UI toolkits.
I've used it a lot, as well as other popular toolkits (Qt, GTK, etc.) and I find that wx is, at the very least, the least bad option and overall programming in it hasn't been a pain, regardless of which binding I used.
I guess my only complaint would be that it's a bit harder to do something way outside the norm when compared to Qt, but at that point it might be better to use native SDKs or straight up OpenGL or something for your GUI.
The wxPython demo (which spawns many apps that show use of many widgets, including complex ones), is very good too. And is a non-trivial wxPython app itself. Separately downloadable from wxPython itself, last I used it. All apps come with source (of course), good for learning from and adapting to your own app needs.
> The Honda e made its debut in Europe this week, but this scrappy little city car is not destined to come to the United States.
Typical. :| Why can't we have nice things here in the US? We're supposed to be the greatest country in the world, but we make it extremely impractical to import rad things like this.
The thing worth mentioning is that becoming a famous author and writing quality books are different goals, achieved through different means. Cynically, I would say that they're unrelated, but in reality I'd say writing quality books is one avenue towards becoming a famous author but likely the least reliable one. Similarly, getting rich writing books is also another separate goal, which can also be achieved without the other two.
Thus, I disagree that goals like "becoming a famous author" entirely out of your control. There are definite steps one could take towards such a goal, but as with anything in life there's never a guarantee. Granted, you do have less control over the outcome if your goal depends on other people, like becoming famous, but those steps still exist and could include things like networking extensively, spending a lot of time self-promoting, polishing your image, hanging out with the rich and famous, etc.
The problem, I think, is that a lot of people tend to think that goals like "becoming a famous author" and "writing good books" are the same, or that the latter will automatically lead to the former, and when they figure out that the strategies for getting there are different they become disillusioned.
I pretty much agree with everything you are saying and I do think a lot of confusion comes from conflating the two goals together. I think I was speaking more from personal experience that taking on goals that are more in my own control leaves me feeling more fulfilled. I also tend to get better results that way because I focus on the process.
The complaint isn't about the capability for mass surveillance, but the normalization of it, in the public mind.
The capability has existed for a pretty long time, mostly out of the public eye, with occasional bursts of outrage when something caused it to become public, quickly forgotten afterwards.
The capability is there, that genie is out of the bottle and nobody is going to put it back in. This isn't really about the technology, it's about the legal frameworks and social attitudes surrounding this capability that are worth talking about. Putting your hands up in defeat is not useful, and at this point probably neither is trying to prevent the technology from spreading. I am unsure what the solution is but the conversation needs to happen, and in all likelihood the end result of that conversation will be that corporations can't be trusted, just like they couldn't be trusted with food safety, for example, thus the FDA was created. What actions will be taken after that, I cannot predict.
Sorry, I can see where you're coming from, I just think you're seeing a difference that isn't there.
Specifically, these programs are totally normalised. We've had them for decades. They're supported by both parties in the the whole English speaking world. They've grown and expanded since they were revealed. At this point, total surveillance is normal.
If anything, making an app for coronavirus is a good thing. It's easier to ignore this if it's done server side than if your carrier suddenly compels you to install some shitty slow battery draining app. I don't know if that qualifies as normalising it, but if it does and get people up in arms (or encourages even 1% of them to move to tor or signal or something) it's a good thing...
This is likely to be untrue in the immediate future. This is probably already true in places like China, where mobile payments are the norm.
As a personal example, and I know this does not yet apply to the US, but where I live it is impossible (or so inconvenient that it might as well be not possible) to do some banking operations without an Android or iOS device, as even accessing my bank's website requires me to have the app installed for token generation. I'm sure if I shopped around I could still find a smaller bank without such a requirement or live with the limitations, maybe finagle a way to use an emulator or something equally inconvenient, but I'm quite certain that this will not last and a smartphone will become essential. A lot of other things are also quite inconvenient without a smartphone around here.
I know the US and Europe have a distinct resistance to the smartphone (or even the computer) becoming required to live as anything but a homeless vagrant because their economies and infrastructure developed before smartphones were even an idea, which gives them the luxury to resist these technologies on moral grounds, or even on the grounds of not wanting to learn the new thing. On the other hand, countries whose economies developed in lockstep with cellular technologies and smartphones (China, India, much of Africa, South-East Asia, much of Latin America, etc.) don't have that particular luxury or simply take a much more pragmatic approach to the whole thing. In these places it is already incredibly inconvenient to get by without a smartphone and will likely become impossible in the near future, if it isn't already.
When smartphones and the internet do become essential to life, I can only hope that the laws of the land have managed to catch up by then. I am not particularly optimistic on this aspect, though, and I suspect it will take some kind of major disaster and/or abuse of human rights (or more likely, a series of them) to happen for another "age of enlightenment"-like period to happen, focused on information technology this time.
Do you know the size of fraud departments at banks and payment providers, and the budgets going into fraud prevention every year? A bank card is as easily destructible as a smartphone is, but is far less secure, as we're sacrificing security for usability.
If we're comparing smartphone vs bank cards, it's only fair to presume that the bank cards are equipped with EMV, because magstripe terminals won't be able to accept smartphone either. In that case, I fail to see any security advantage over smartphones.
> which gives them the luxury to resist these technologies on moral grounds, or even on the grounds of not wanting to learn the new thing.
I do think making a smartphone a requirement for living is a genuinely catastrophic idea, not simply an ivory tower exercise nor conservativism. Requiring people to possess and carry with them at all times a computer with a myriad of sensors and an ever-broadcasting beacon not under their control seems terribly fragile, unnatural, caste-creating and cruel. It is worthwhile to fight this, despite it being undeniably convenient for some things.
Hm, the site seemed a little slow at times, but i wasn't sure if it was my old laptop. The UI was a little bit unusal at times, especially that << backarrow-thing, which looked like it would be for going back, instead of moving on along some path. But it was obvious from context for me. I really enjoyed
the 3D-inserts where you could zoom, pan, rotate, and the changes, rising and disappearing buildings across the timeline. Though i had to click on reload sometimes to have them appear at all.
Besides that you could always click on the drop down menu in the upper left and use the TOC to jump around, or skip something.
>Besides that you could always click on the drop down menu in the upper left and use the TOC to jump around, or skip something.
I think that was kinda the main problem for me, actually. When you have a PDF article or book or a plain webpage, you can jump around without much penalty, and you can skip ahead then go back and so on, you can skim parts and can check if something relevant appears ahead. At least, that's how I read scientific articles: read the introduction, skim through the text, go back to read the more interesting parts and jump around until you grasp it and so on. Any supplementary data or figures provided I usually have open in another window for quick reference as I'm reading the text.
The best UX for scientific articles for how I read them is still paper for the text and a computer for anything else. Second best would be a good PDF reader.
Thus, for this kind of interactive visualization, I would have preferred it if they had made a good visualizer and an accompanying article, instead of mixing the two into a single thing. Feels like they added unnecessary friction to both sides of the presentation and overall the effect would be better if split. For example, an apparent problem is if I want to jump back to a piece of text I read before I have to remember where in the TOC it was (can't just scroll back up) and then wait for all the 3D inserts to load when what I want is just the text.
A project that I think did this mostly right is GeaCron (geacron.com), at least the visualization part. It's not really comparable since GeaCron is a world map, but with it I can visualize a particular point of interest and then read up the information at my own leisure. I've wasted hours with that map this way.
I don't want to diminish the effort of these authors, for it is impressive and the 3D-inserts are great and I still enjoyed it despite the UX problems, but as someone who is a bit passionate about visualization in academic environments, I often see projects like this that I feel could be so much better if they didn't try to reinvent certain wheels.
>A lot of car guys just aren't going to rip apart their wiring harnesses and do testing to make sure it'll work with their onboard sensors.
I'm not so sure about that.
My go-to mechanic is an older gentleman, late 60s, and oftentimes I'm surprised how quickly he updated his workshop to include electronics. He went from barely having a multimeter and not knowing how to use a computer in the early 2000s to having a well equipped electronics bench with oscilloscopes, scan tools, soldering equipment, etc. He told me he went to a bunch of courses to get updated on modern car technology because his clients started bringing newer cars. Keep in mind this is in a developing country (Mexico) so he has to keep repair costs down to keep clients, because the more affluent people will go to dealerships to get a proper fix. A lot of his repairs that I've seen involve what I'd charitably call "bodging" using parts that aren't original or intended, but they get the job done on a budget.
Similarly with car guys I hang around here, there has been a noticeable uptick in electronic knowledge, maybe not to the level of custom ECUs yet, but stuff like making an arduino controlled radiator fan or making a custom box to read the CAN-bus to get the steering wheel controls do stuff they weren't intended to do is pretty commonplace.
People working with cars are already used to complexity and learning new things, after all, so I don't think electronics will scare them off. We don't see as much of it yet because of all the lockdown and manufacturer's insistence at straight up replacing parts, but now that modern-style fully electronic cars (2010 or so) are becoming affordable enough to be "project cars" for average car guys, we'll see more and more stuff like this. A car guy might not want to rip into the wiring harness on his daily driver that he paid 15k for, but a 3k shitbox he bought as a second car for fun? Well, people are already doing that.
Kinda off topic, but I'm starting to see this kind of website design more frequently these days, just a big "Join" button (or something) without any information whatsoever about what is it I'm joining up for. I hate it and I don't know why anyone thinks it's a good idea.