Wouldn’t the better solution just be to have an app, or web app, that users pull up on their phone? That is: why should a restaurant pay to provide the hardware that most are already carrying with them?
No.
A geek would happily install an app on their phone. To us, it would seem nifty, fun, and easy.
A regular person would walk in, find out they have to install an app on their personal phone to order lunch, then walk out and find a restaurant whose head was not up its own ass.
Every day I read a new article about some company whining about how hard it is to hire technical staff. Invariably it turns out that they’re only looking for people within a commuters distance of their office. I refuse to feel sorry for such companies.
As a system administrator, op is one of my favorite tools. I have explained why already, so I won’t go into it here.
If you clicked the op link above, you may have noticed that it goes to a 404 page. (If you’re in the future maybe it works again; congratulations!) At least, as of December 2011, it is a 404 page and it’s been that way for at least a year now. The maintainer of the site (Alec Thomas) tells me that his server crashed some time back, and he hasn’t had the time to get all of the old content back online. His site mentions an upcoming daughter, and those of you with kids are already nodding your heads, because you know exactly how this story goes.
In any case, since there is currently no other place online to download this code so far as I know, I dug up a tarball and mirrored it on GitHub. You can get the latest code for op at tangledhelix/op.
My C skills are not up to par, so I am not currently planning to do anything with the code except host a copy of it. If Alec never gets back to it, and I decide to brush up on C in the future… well, we’ll see.
A bit of history to give some perspective on our modern issue of piracy (music and movies):
A few centuries ago, the penalty for unauthorized copying was breaking on the wheel. It is a term we’re not very familiar with these days, but it was a form of prolonged torturous death penalty where the convict first had every bone in his body broken, and then was weaved into the spokes of a wagon wheel and set up on public display. The cause of death was usually thirst, a couple of days later.
Back then the issue was duplicating popular fabric patterns. Yes, that was really a thing. And note that this didn’t happen to only a handful of offenders. Sixteen thousand people suffered this fate. Over fabric patterns.
The brutality of our forebears never fails to amaze me.
But it’s the end result of this practice that I find the most fascinating:
Capital punishment didn’t even make a dent in the pirating of the fabrics. Despite the fact that some villages had been so ravaged that everybody knew somebody personally who had been executed by public torture, the copying continued unabated at the same level.
I guess some things never change.
And When Even The Death Penalty Doesn’t Deter Copying — What Then? | TorrentFreak
Ryan Cash complains about online newspaper sites:
Another HUGE complaint I’d like to add to Brad’s list is when these websites draw a story out over 10 pages.
Welcome to the Internet — a place where physical pages don’t exist, and there’s no such thing as “no space left”. There is absolutely NO REASON for any story to span over more than one single page.
I wholeheartedly agree.
But the problem here isn’t cluelessness on the part of the editors. The problem is that newspapers aren’t in the business of providing news, and they never have been. They are in the business of gathering page views. They used to call it circulation, and they used to sell half-page ads, classifieds, and coupon inserts, but it’s the same game as it ever was (except less profitable).
Back in the 90s, I toured a local NBC affiliate’s offices with a friend who was in the news business. Two things I heard that day have informed my opinion of commercial news ever since.
My friend, a local news producer for many years:
How we decide what’s on tonight’s news: News is whatever I say it is.
Down in the bowels of the building was a room where two men watched a wall of monitors. A videotape robot busily swapped tapes behind them. This room aired the commercials.
This is the only room in the whole building that matters. What you think of as TV is just the stuff we cram in between commercials to keep you from changing channels.
Some excerpts from a speech by Philip K. Dick in 1978. I can’t decide if he’s extremely insightful or completely crazy.
It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question “What is reality?”, to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.
It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life.
I watch the children watching TV and at first I am afraid of what they are being taught, and then I realize, They can’t be corrupted or destroyed. They watch, they listen, they understand, and, then, where and when it is necessary, they reject. There is something enormously powerful in a child’s ability to withstand the fraudulent. A child has the clearest eye, the steadiest hand. The hucksters, the promoters, are appealing for the allegiance of these small people in vain. True, the cereal companies may be able to market huge quantities of junk breakfasts; the hamburger and hot dog chains may sell endless numbers of unreal fast-food items to the children, but the deep heart beats firmly, unreached and unreasoned with. A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children. They do not ask me; I turn to them.
How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later
On artificially inflating a child’s sense of self-worth:
Meanwhile, rates of anxiety and depression have also risen in tandem with self-esteem. Why is this? “Narcissists are happy when they’re younger, because they’re the center of the universe,” Twenge explains. “Their parents act like their servants, shuttling them to any activity they choose and catering to their every desire. Parents are constantly telling their children how special and talented they are. This gives them an inflated view of their specialness compared to other human beings. Instead of feeling good about themselves, they feel better than everyone else.”
In early adulthood, this becomes a big problem. “People who feel like they’re unusually special end up alienating those around them,” Twenge says. “They don’t know how to work on teams as well or deal with limits. They get into the workplace and expect to be stimulated all the time, because their worlds were so structured with activities. They don’t like being told by a boss that their work might need improvement, and they feel insecure if they don’t get a constant stream of praise. They grew up in a culture where everyone gets a trophy just for participating, which is ludicrous and makes no sense when you apply it to actual sports games or work performance. Who would watch an NBA game with no winners or losers? Should everyone get paid the same amount, or get promoted, when some people have superior performance? They grew up in a bubble, so they get out into the real world and they start to feel lost and helpless. Kids who always have problems solved for them believe that they don’t know how to solve problems. And they’re right—they don’t.”
On not acknowledging that your children have flaws:
“A principal at an elementary school told me that a parent asked a teacher not to use red pens for corrections,” she said, “because the parent felt it was upsetting to kids when they see so much red on the page. This is the kind of self-absorption we’re seeing, in the name of our children’s self-esteem.”
Paradoxically, all of this worry about creating low self-esteem might actually perpetuate it. No wonder my patient Lizzie told me she felt “less amazing” than her parents had always said she was. Given how “amazing” her parents made her out to be, how could she possibly live up to that? Instead of acknowledging their daughter’s flaws, her parents, hoping to make her feel secure, denied them. “I’m bad at math,” Lizzie said she once told them, when she noticed that the math homework was consistently more challenging for her than for many of her classmates. “You’re not bad at math,” her parents responded. “You just have a different learning style. We’ll get you a tutor to help translate the information into a format you naturally understand.”
With much struggle, the tutor helped Lizzie get her grade up, but she still knew that other classmates were good at math and she wasn’t. “I didn’t have a different learning style,” she told me. “I just suck at math! But in my family, you’re never bad at anything. You’re just better at some things than at others. If I ever say I’m bad at something, my parents say, ‘Oh, honey, no you’re not!’”
On over-indulging your children:
This same teacher—who asked not to be identified, for fear of losing her job—says she sees many parents who think they’re setting limits, when actually, they’re just being wishy-washy. “A kid will say, ‘Can we get ice cream on the way home?’ And the parent will say, ‘No, it’s not our day. Ice-cream day is Friday.’ Then the child will push and negotiate, and the parent, who probably thinks negotiating is ‘honoring her child’s opinion,’ will say, ‘Fine, we’ll get ice cream today, but don’t ask me tomorrow, because the answer is no!’” The teacher laughed. “Every year, parents come to me and say, ‘Why won’t my child listen to me? Why won’t she take no for an answer?’ And I say, ‘Your child won’t take no for an answer, because the answer is never no!’”
After the conference, though, Hare seemed introspective. He said, almost to himself, “I shouldn’t have done my research just in prisons. I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well.” “But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,” I said. “Serial killers ruin families,” shrugged Hare. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”
How to spot a psychopath | Jon Ronson | Books | The Guardian
This is exactly right, and it’s the same reason I’ve been using YAML a lot lately.
There is a reason why JSON is becoming very popular as a data exchange format (more important than it being less verbose than XML): programmers are sick of writing parsers! But “wait”, you say — “surely there are XML parsers available for you to use so that you don’t have to roll your own…”. Yes, there are. But while XML parsers handle the low-level syntactic parsing of XML tags, attributes, etc…, you still need to walk the DOM tree or, worse, build one yourself with nothing but a SAX parser (Objective-C iPhone SDK I’m looking at you!).
Why is JSON so popular? Developers want out of the syntax business. | MongoLab