This feels very disingenuous - seems reasonably clear that the activity apple is concerned about is encouraging people to agree to meet strangers while committing in advance to bringing large amounts of cash.
Went out for a meal with my 77-year old father last week and as always he brings a magnifying glass and flashlight as the restaurant lighting is too dim and menus too small almost universally for people with poor eyesight. He’s pretty tech capable and has a big bright phone with large text though so seems to me there’s a potentially huge accessibility opportunity here if they were done well.
(Sounds like they’re not well done in practice although don’t have much personal experience- maybe haven’t hit the UK as much yet)
I’ve experienced it once in the UK and either the phone network reception was really bad or the restaurant’s website was ultra slow so it didn’t work.
While we are on the subject… The worst app crime is the effing calmac ferry app. All the timetables would amount to about 100kb of data which is updated usually once a year months in advance. Phone reception is non existent or spotty in a lot of the Highlands and Islands, but when you go to the app to check a timetable it tries to download a PDF file! every time you open a timetable page!! It’s a reasonably rare situation where it makes sense to have an app not a website.
You are not the only one to have this thought. The problem is - who comes and fixes the mess when the inevitable customizations needed have been done by a contractor who is now long gone? It seems like a great idea at the beginning, but at some point someone ends up responsible for a fleet of AWS accounts that have diverged in different odd ways. Who is that someone? Individual departments? A centralized department?
The latter sounds nice except for the lack of appetite (on both sides of the atlantic) for doing what's necessary to recruit and keep SREs as actual government employees rather than just contracting everything out...
I don't think it ever quite works in practice. Letting teams come pick up the config module off the shelf in January is all well and good, but when the maintainers of the module issue a security fix in October how can you ensure the consumers apply it?
On top of that, how can the maintainers know if a change they make will be safe in the environments of the consumers?
IMO you either offer the whole service (i.e. a PaaS), or you form technical groups within the organisation which regularly share their learnings and experiences. Sharing code (aside from the smallest modules) when you don't have control or influence over the consuming team just doesn't work in the long run.
Are they being humiliated though? Feels like they get lots of press when announcing this kind of stuff which sits well with some target part of the electorate, then when the whole thing gets abandoned it happens with almost no attention. The current government seems to be well aware that most of the time announcing a policy has a much higher ROI than actually implementing one (cf all the times pre-existing spending commitments get recycled in new announcements)
But you can only perform this act so much before it wears out and backfires. See for example the recent defections of "red wall" Tory MPs after the announcements you mention - they know the situation is becoming indefensible in the eyes of their electorate, since they keep promising money which then fails to materialize.
Have they reached this point with the "online moral-indignation brigade" yet? Maybe not, but it's been 5 years since the Snoopers' Charter, I don't know how many since the porn-blocking promises and about 13 since the first pledges in this area by a Conservative party, with no significant progress to show for it. That's a lot of time even in political terms.
> announcing this kind of stuff which sits well with some target part of the electorate
I really dont see anyone in the electorate clamouring for any of this stuff. Announcing the same policy being told it is a shit idea and announcing it again 6 months later is much harder to sell than the recycled spending (which they tend to just lie and say it is in addition to the last lot they announced anyway). That said, the electorate dont actually care much (unless it is a penny off the price of a pint or something) so it is hardly a humiliation when these ideas go nowhere and it makes the government look busy.
I can only assume that the driver is the security services, or just recycling past homework to look busy. As noted in many other comments they try all sorts of seemingly stupid ideas in this space - banning all encryption has failed countless times, adult verification is already a thing on mobile networks, and logging every online activity has slipped through and passed.
If you say you're going to do this often enough, and keep getting thwarted for whatever reason, eventually you won't have much credibility with anyone.
The Uk is making decent progress on this already. I live in a London suburb and there’s been a huge rollout of charging points already - within a few hundred meters of my flat there are at least 6 high voltage charging points. There’s also a big rollout of charging points built into existing lampposts - by tapping existing power lines these are very cheap to install. The chargers are run by a few different networks but you pay for usage so it’s quite possible to just sign up to them all and carry 2 or 3 cables.
The Uk is making decent progress on this already. I live in a London suburb and there’s been a huge rollout of charging points already - within a few hundred meters of my flat there are at least 6 high voltage charging points.
How many people live within a circle of "a few hundred metres" in London? It averages 4700/km^2 across all of Greater London according to Wikipedia, it will be denser in the middle. How many cars is that? TFL says average of 0.3 cars/person. So that would be 1410 cars or 235 per charging point.
> I'm somewhat indifferent on the issue; I reckon leaving will send a signal about reforming the EU ... Do I think that's worth the hassle of actually leaving? Pretty marginal.
It's this which upsets me as someone in favour of remaining. I know a large number of people who are personally concerned for the immediate safety of their jobs following an exit vote (working in the finance sector in London, working for research institutions currently funded by the EU, or Brits working outside the UK) and also have friends (and a sister-in-law) who have come to the UK thanks to the freedoms afforded by the EU, and who are worried about their futures now.
I have great sympathy with the desire to send politicians a message, and with a desire to make the EU a more transparent, more efficient organisation, but you can surely understand the frustration of people who are facing very real fears for their own livelihoods, when someone in favour of exiting tells us they are doing so not because they believe that leaving is the best thing for the UK, but rather because they want to "send a message". This message comes at a great potential cost, and the people sending the message are in many cases not the ones paying the price
I've found the authors proposed approach at the end of the article to be a very useful one, even if you're not using TDD. A very regular piece of advice I give to new developers is "breadth-first not depth-first" - i.e. write a whole function at a consistent level of abstraction before you dive into writing the other classes etc. you need to support those few lines of high level code.
I find that most new developers instinct is to do exactly the opposite - i.e. write the first line of their main function, then realise it needs, say, an argument-parsing class, so start writing that, then realise that needs a logging class, so start writing that, etc. which means you have to keep much more stuff in your head at once, you end up writing much more code in each commit than you should, and the distinction between bits of code at different levels of abstraction often ends up much blurrier which leads to messier design.
This seems to be quite easily countered though - just pointing out to people the difference between breadth-first and depth-first styles can have quite an immediate effect
Is "top down" vs. "bottom up" programming/design really not a set of terms and concepts that is still taught in nearly every introductory programming course such that people mentoring "new developers" need to introduce the concepts and invent new terminology for them?
It definitely is. The problem, I think, is that people forget these fundamental concepts when they're shoved into a giant legacy code base that clearly didn't follow that process. They seem to get overwhelmed by the spaghetti and forget their entire undergrad curriculum.
As a side note, I find it helpful to think of what the high level business objects will be at the beginning, but build a bunch of utility functions from the bottom up, working towards a DSL of sorts at the various abstraction levels. As you explore the solution, the end location of those functions usually becomes abundantly clear.
> As a side note, I find it helpful to think of what the high level business objects will be at the beginning, but build a bunch of utility functions from the bottom up
Yeah I think this is a reasonable approach, especially as if you do end up completing this, and get to a design you are happy with, it will probably be very different (and hopefully infinitely superior) to your original high level design.
You've probably already heard of it but the mikado method can also be useful in some of these situations.
The "depth-first" approach (I've seen it as well) is a mistake that is largely orthogonal to a top-down/bottom-up style. It looks top-down, but immediately goes off into the weeds and can easily be recognized by statements of the form, "I need an X, so I'm building a Y." As in, "I need a reporting application, so I'm building a logging module", or the '90s Japanese 5th generation computing project, "We need intelligent, communicating systems, so we'll build a Prolog machine."
The problem is students don't listen. The majority of people see course work as a necessary evil, to be gotten through, and forgotten after passing the final exam.
No, students not listening can often be the problem. You can be the greatest teacher in the world, and still there will be a few students who don't want to listen.
Speaking personally, I voted lib dem in 2010 on the basis that they were a party broadly of the left, but distinct from the Labour party of the time in a number of positive ways. To then form a coalition with the party of the right and support a number of measures that I think were quite regressive did not match with the party I thought I voted for.
Of course after seeing 10 days of government without the lib dems to moderate I'm starting to re-evaluate how positive an influence they likely were...
When my grandparents died and we sold their house (in the uk) we had some builders in to tidy up some stuff and they discovered that in a big part of the house the earth was actually wired to live in the sockets. They'd lived with it for 40 years or something. Guess not many devices actually use the earth.
(The wiring was originally done by my grandad'a brother - use a professional people...)
This tester can simulate a 10A or 15A load and measure voltage drop, which should remain within 5% of its unloaded value (this is the recommendation in U.S. code). This can identify situations where connections are weak, or wires are too long or too thin.
It has also helped me to improve my wiring practices. It turns out that keeping voltage within 5%, under a 15A load on a 20A circuit, is pretty demanding, and a series of (say) 8 or 10 twisted connections may not meet it, if you are not careful with your technique.
The device can also test GFCI outlets by allowing some current to leak to ground. This provides an end-to-end test in situations where the GFCI is not present at the outlet.
I love Manufactoria, precisely because it's a game about programming but manages to avoid the Lightbot style where you just put commands in a fixed sequence. Lightbot abstracts procedural programming into a game, but so did graph3.tpu back in the day for me. Manufactoria makes a game about programming by forcing even programmers to think different.
