There are some rare use cases, but I think it would have a negative impact on my own life.
1. I'd question the security, is there going to be an exploit where someone can intercept signals to the door, and then use them to open or close it on their own when I'm away?
2. What happens if I arrive home, and my network is down? Or what if their cloud servers are not responding? What if I open the door for a delivery guy like the other poster mentioned, then the network fails, and I can't close it? I'm at work, and my package and home is now open.
3. In one of their use cases they mention setting up a schedule, so it opens when your kids get home. Same as the above, if the network isn't responding, your kids are locked outside. This means they need a key to open the door as backup, so what was the purpose of the automatic schedule in the first place? What happens if they're running late from school, my house is open when no one is home again?
4. What happens if I have something below the open door (although not in line with the sensor), and it decides to close itself because of a schedule, or someone else in my family triggering it online? For example, the trunk of my car goes up fairly high. If the door closes while the trunk is open, the braces hanging down could potentially hit it. So if I'm unloading my groceries, and my spouse is at work thinking the door shouldn't be open, we have one scratched car.
5. It's another piece of technology to micromanage. I don't want to start worrying about the schedule of my garage door. I enjoy the simple life.
Anyway, this is too much thought for what it is, but you get the idea.
My dog never saw a mirror in his life, he lived outdoors, and aside from a puddle, he would never have an opportunity to see his own reflection. One day I had a fullsize mirror outside. I walked my dog infront of it, pointed to it, tried to hold his head to look into the mirror, and there was absolutely no reaction. It's like my dog was looking into an empty wall. It wouldn't make eye contact with the reflection, it was simply like it didn't exist.
So, what's going on here? My dog would go crazy if another dog was anywhere within view, but nothing happened. Did my dog just understand without doubt that's a reflection, that dog is me, that human is you, there's no point in even looking at it for a second? Or did my dog just recognize it as a 2D surface, and think anything in the mirror doesn't exist, it's just a bunch of shapes moving around. Kind of like holding out a printed photo of a dog, where it would just see a blob of color on the paper, recognize there's no dog here, nothing physically present, no depth, no smell, no noise, etc.
I have this theory that some animals (e.g. cats and dogs) do in fact recognize that mirrors are reflections, but they just don't care about what's in the reflection. We are fascinated by the idea that we are watching ourselves, but that's a somewhat meta concept and animals just don't care. Just because an animal doesn't care about reflections doesn't mean it necessarily feels like it needs to rub red paint off its reflected self or even really make that connection.
This seems right. I work with monkeys, and some of our monkeys have mirrors attached to their cages. They don't use the mirrors to inspect themselves, but they do seem to use the mirrors to surreptitiously spy on other monkeys. It's likely that a monkey can quickly figure out that the thing in the mirror isn't another animal and when they move, the thing in the mirror moves, but drawing the connection that they are the thing in the mirror seems quite a bit harder.
Of course, no one here started off as an average or expert developer, we were all beginners writing awful code at one point in our lives.
I think you need to consider two main attributes when hiring...
1. Does this person have the right mindset and intelligence to excel as a programmer? Are they a good problem solver? If they run into an issue, do they get frustrated and toss their hands in the air asking for help, or do they start debugging their code, using logic to find their errors, search out answers online, etc. You can see this at any level of experience. If you're teaching someone to write their first few lines of code and they miss a semi-colon, or declare a variable wrong, how do they react, and how do they move forward? Anyone can learn the correct syntax, but can they grasp the concepts of programming?
2. How much passion do they have for programming? Do they work on projects of their own? Are they learning more than you ask of them, for their own enjoyment? Does their day end at 5pm, or do they show up the next morning with a plan to tackle challenges they faced the previous afternoon?
If you're hiring more experienced staff, you need to look at things a little differently. However, when it comes to new talent, I think those are the two most important factors - do they have the mind of a programmer, and a passion for programming.
I agree with you on points one and two but how do you figure that out in a interview over a couple of hours? I can figure out how skilled they are technically, I can figure out if they have decent communication skills which are also important and then I get to the points you mention and these are softer, harder to quantify skills. How do you go about finding answers to these questions and do you make it quantitative in some way?
I think of the radio similar to television. For example, I can have any tv show and movie at my finger tips, but sometimes it's nice just to turn on the tv. There's something enjoyable about letting someone else make the choice. It's the same reason you might have a DVD library collecting dust, but you get excited when one of your DVD's appears on television. You just push a button, no decision of which movie to watch, and no taking time to setup a DVD.
It's similar with the radio. Any song or album is available online, but sometimes I just want to listen to music, without finding a new playlist every hour, or switching songs constantly. Music streaming services online have this covered to some extent, but there's something comforting about a box that's sole purpose is to play music, and that's where the radio comes in.
Imagine if you had a box next to you, and all it had was a volume knob and 8 buttons, each for a different genre of music. You push classic rock, and it just starts playing a non-stop stream. Get bored with it? Switch to electronic. Your only choice is which genre, and how loud. No sign-up, no advertisements, no accounts to manage, no downtime, no social media, etc.
I've always thought it would be nice to write a program that auto-generates a TV programming schedule by time of day. The first problem that's prevented me from doing it is that my TV shows aren't divided up for commercial breaks, which is half of the appeal.
ToonamiAftermath is the prototype for exactly what I'd like to do. TV shows with commercial breaks and bumpers, streamed 24/7 constantly. I haven't been able to figure out how they (he?) was able to pull it off, other than cutting files and making each day's playlist by hand.
Mozilla doesn't have a choice. Let's say Firefox has 30% of users. The argument is that sites will not use DRM, because they'll be losing revenue from 30% of their users, and therefore Mozilla saves the day.
But, what happens if Google says they'll accept that challenge, and they're willing to lose 30% of revenue from something like YouTube in the short term. They implement DRM on YouTube, and Firefox users can no longer watch videos. What happens? Firefox users start converting over. Where to? Chrome, which falls into Google's best interest. Now, that 30% loss keeps getting smaller and smaller, and Chrome users start increasing. Fast forward a year, and Firefox only has 10% of the users. This continues to shrink until Firefox dies.
Sadly, this is what happens when we give Google and Facebook too much power, and the ability to run the internet. It's our fault for giving them that position, and not developing or supporting alternatives. If you want to fight back, you need to give Mozilla a better position to stand. Sites like Wikipedia, Imgur, etc, need to run banners for browsers that support DRM, and block users, or encourage them to switch to a DRM free browser, like Firefox. Take the wind out of their sails, before they try to do the same to us.
I like what you are saying and I too think this way.
My solution has always been that we need to teach people and make it easy for them to hop onto the darknets and any decentralized networks while also helping smaller companies and indie devs establish their business outside the boundaries of the commercial internet and onto the Deep Web.
This will allow us to reboot back to the early 90s and rip power away from all these present-day corporations who've turned the commercial internet into a money-grubbing mess.
Are there any good documentaries about Bill Gates, and his philanthropy work? I remember seeing TED talks, and a number of short videos and articles, but are there any more substantial videos covering this recent work and upcoming goals?
I gave up on BuySellAds, they turned me down three times without reason. My site gets more traffic then any other sites they have in that same niche, it follows all of their rules (nothing adult related or inappropriate), and it's better designed than the majority of their sites.
So, I sell my own ads directly now. I can get some of the biggest names in the tech industry excited about running ad campaigns on my site for $10k a week, but apparently that wasn't good enough for BuySellAds. Their loss, they're not going to get my business at this point.
Chrome doesn't render Google web fonts well, it's been that way for as long as I remember. It's a known issue, and it's been reported countless times.
You would expect this to be high priority, since reading text in the most important aspect of the internet. For whatever reason, Google doesn't seem to care, and they have no problem using these poorly rendered fonts all over the place.
This is slightly incorrect as the problem only affects Google Chrome on Windows. Also, the Chrome team is actively working on this problem as seen in in its issue report [1]. The progress can be seen by launching Chrome Canary with the --enable-direct-write flag. chromestatus.com indicates that its scheduled to be released in M36.
Chrome for Windows is one of the most common setups for browsing the internet, so this isn't an edge case situation. That post originated in 2009, over 4.5 years ago.
It's good to hear it might be finally addressed, but I wouldn't say they've been actively working on it, when all the other popular browsers had this sorted years ago.
If I had to give any advice, it would be to run through ideas quickly. If they're not gaining traction, or they're a struggle to grow, drop them and move on to the next idea.
This isn't going to be true for everyone, but each of my successful projects was a success from day one. I posted them online, pointed a few communities towards them like Reddit, and ended up with a few thousand registered users in the first day. That then dropped to a few hundred daily registrations and went up from there for the coming years. They've still been a lot of work, but I knew I had something the instant they went live.
Every project I launched that was difficult, never went anywhere. There were a handful of sites I started where I was working hard to build traffic and it was always the same, a spike, then nothing a week later. Some of these I worked on for months, one project I developed over the course of a year. My two or three successful projects were built within a week or two. They were rough, but provided something of value, and I could build them from there.
No one hits a homerun every time. Look at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft struggle. These are companies with unlimited budgets, and some of the best in the industry. They fail. Often. It doesn't matter if you fail 90% of the time though, you just need to burn through those ten ideas to find the one that works. If you get hung up on the first idea, and devote all your finances and time for years, you'll never get to the good one.
This is, I think, the best advice I've heard. I've been listening and reading WPCurve (Dan Norris) - http://wpcurve.com/blog/ and he gives the same advice.
1. I'd question the security, is there going to be an exploit where someone can intercept signals to the door, and then use them to open or close it on their own when I'm away?
2. What happens if I arrive home, and my network is down? Or what if their cloud servers are not responding? What if I open the door for a delivery guy like the other poster mentioned, then the network fails, and I can't close it? I'm at work, and my package and home is now open.
3. In one of their use cases they mention setting up a schedule, so it opens when your kids get home. Same as the above, if the network isn't responding, your kids are locked outside. This means they need a key to open the door as backup, so what was the purpose of the automatic schedule in the first place? What happens if they're running late from school, my house is open when no one is home again?
4. What happens if I have something below the open door (although not in line with the sensor), and it decides to close itself because of a schedule, or someone else in my family triggering it online? For example, the trunk of my car goes up fairly high. If the door closes while the trunk is open, the braces hanging down could potentially hit it. So if I'm unloading my groceries, and my spouse is at work thinking the door shouldn't be open, we have one scratched car.
5. It's another piece of technology to micromanage. I don't want to start worrying about the schedule of my garage door. I enjoy the simple life.
Anyway, this is too much thought for what it is, but you get the idea.