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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Terrain mode is still there, you just have to type Terrain in the search bar, and it'll switch the view. Then X out of the search to return to the normal map view. Otherwise, if you click the input box, you should get a terrain button in one of the many expanding boxes.
I don't know who came up with the above concept for switching modes, but it's absolutely awful.
I don't think it's 'hipsters' or young designers in general. I think situations like this happen when a bunch of people sit down in a room, and draw something up on a whiteboard. They draw all kinds of flow charts, sales funnels, color emotions, menu mockups, how X study showed 3% more users preferred the search bar 10px from the top, instead of 7px from the top, and how renaming the button from Search, to Go with a silly icon makes the company more human and will improve their image.
They get caught up in all these little details and studies, and on paper they can rationalize everything as being perfect. Then, it's a turd in reality, and everyone is left wondering what went wrong, the studies showed B was greater than A, and C was even better than B, and D surpassed C. So, how in the world can the original A be better than D? I don't know, but anyone in the design or development world can verify that it happens.
The car is perfect, big windows and lots of sunlight, a giant cupholder, a horn that plays a catchy tune. Everything is great, until you look at things as a whole.
Now, my least favorite aspects of the new Google maps. I use it on almost a daily basis because I travel often, but I'll be trying to experiment with OpenStreetMaps, or Bing.
1. The search input box hides itself. Why in the world is the search hidden, forcing me to X out of directions to see it again?
2. The blue lines for directions make it nearly impossible to tell if the road offers street view. Mousing down on the little man produces blue availability lines, but you can't see them under the directions.
3. I don't believe it's possible to split directions and street view on the screen. This was the view I used most often. Splitting them side by side would make the most sense with widescreen monitors. Now, you just get a little map in the lower left, and it does a weird expanding animation when you hover over. Previously you could drag the little man to pan around the map, but now you have to keep clicking locations to move.
4. Images at the bottom. I'm here for maps, not images, so this makes absolutely no sense. The three little images at the bottom look like buttons for terrain, map, satellite view, bit instead they open these thumbnails. Now, you have to click the earth button to get satellite images, and the weird part, the image thumbnails at the bottom have separate visible/hidden settings depending on the view. If you close the thumbnail bar when viewing a map, then switch to satellite view, you would think it would stay closed. Nope, it'll open itself, because it's enabled on satellite view. You have to toggle it off on each view.
5. The top left dropdown. Way too many boxes expanding, collapsing, etc as I try to navigate.
My wishlist...
I'm just going to mention one thing, because this has bothered me for ages. Why the heck can't I customize the level of detail? There have been countless times where I just want to see countries and their names, or countries and capital cities. I'm looking at Europe right now, and it's not displaying half of the countries, but displaying city names all over the place. If I zoom in to see all the country names, the map is crowded with hundreds of cities and roads. I always end up doing an image search online for maps, because they achieve this most basic goal. Look at the below image. Google maps on the left. It still doesn't label the Czech Republic in that image. If I zoom out one level, it'll show the Czech Republic, but hide other country names, like Montenegro. Right is just a random map I pulled off an image search. The right map is 100x easier to see the borders and countries. Google maps is an absolute disaster in these situations. If I ask someone that isn't familiar with European geography to find the Czech Republic in the below images, they'll be scratching their heads with Google maps, unless they start zooming in and out hoping the name of the desired country pops into view.
You can show me street view from a coral reef, or roads in some obscure village on a small island, but you can't show me a simple world map with country names? Where are the priorities here?
Edit: Switched my homepage to DuckDuckGo instead of Google search, and updated by bookmarks to OpenStreetMap. I'm honestly getting tired of supporting Google, since the list of things they do right gets smaller on a weekly basis. It's time I give someone else a turn.
What type of advice? User submitted content and advice (http://www.reddit.com/r/relationships), or a site where you write articles about 'the top 10 secrets to dating every guy should know'?
It is a big niche, but it's also highly competitive, and you would be competing against people that are already well connected and established in the industry. I would say the chances of success are extremely slim.
It seems like it would be relatively easy to test out. People donate blood all the time. I'm sure the effects are known of how much blood you can replace at once without causing issues. Without a doubt some elderly people would volunteer. Why can't we start giving them new blood once a week from donors, and see the results on their health or illnesses? I'm all for testing, but this seems like one of those things you could quickly move to human trials.
How long would effects like this last? I mean, let's say a bunch of children donated blood for the cause, and we used it to replace the blood of a senior citizen.
I don't know how to phrase this properly, but how long does the blood maintain the youthful qualities? Do you constantly need new blood coming in from a young donor? Do you receive it once and you're good for a week? A year?
Then you're just applying random votes, instead of actual votes.
For example, something that should be 15-2 votes, ends up being 95-82. You'll be applying a large number of votes to both sides, and pushing everything towards a 50/50 rating. This doesn't help anyone, the goal is A/B testing, and you're making it more difficult to get accurate data. 15-2 shows a lot of promise for A, but then you add 80 random votes to both sides, and 95-82 seems like a tie.
You don't want to force people to do anything, otherwise it skews the results. Force someone to vote for 30 seconds, or to vote 10 times, and they'll just sit there tapping the first picture until they reach their target. You'll get lots of votes, they'll just be useless.
I think you'd get enough votes if the app was in the right format. It would have to be like hot or not, where you have 2 photos, pick one, and instantly get another 2 photos along with the results from the first set. This gets people trapped in the just one more click mindset.
Focus it on fashion and clothing, people will vote to see more photos, to judge the outfits of others (a lot of people enjoy doing this for fun), and to get inspiration for themselves.
Also, allow users to select what gender and age groups can vote on their photo.
One problem. People what spend $300 on a keyboard are quite familiar with computers. This is the same group of people that types and uses shortcuts without ever looking at their keyboard, so the benefit is highly reduced.
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.