I have the same gut instinct as you do, but a huge proportion of English* verbs come into being this way, taking over nouns as a shorthand way of expressing the idea.
* I restricted my assertion to English because I don't know one way or the other if other languages tend to this sort of evolution. My impression is that particular languages tend to be open to some types of changes and less open to others, but that which changes varies from language to language.
That's kind of an amazing aspect of English as a language; you can misuse words entirely, yet still convey a message. I wonder if this linguistic flexibility is due to the fact that our language is a mixture of so many other languages with disparate grammatical rules.
I think the evolution of English through new word use is generally an excellent and exciting thing. It can just be a little disconcerting adjusting to new usage (at least new for me personally, in this case).
Anyone else notice that in the Tyco contactor picture it's labelled "Coil 3.14 Ohms"? It makes me think they only needed it to be 3 Ohms, but an engineer somewhere couldn't resist making it πΩ
I wondered when this might happen. You can't really rely on any of these devices with a 'cloud' based backend to work a couple of years after you've bought them (As anyone with a Nabaztag gathering dust in a corner will tell you).
It's really easy to get up and running and interfacing with it is simple. I have mine print out reminders for when to plant seeds for the garden and it also notifies me when automated downloads via FlexGet have finished.
Beyond the issues of relinquishing control over a service to a third party, I think another disturbing aspect is all the waste this causes: perfectly good electronics get thrown out just because some company goes out of business. The fact that these "cloud connected" devices are often proprietary and locked-down (for "security reasons") makes it worse.
Except the email I just got says if they can't find a way to keep the service running, they will open source it and open source the firmware on the cloud device.
This is possible, but rare. If your GPS navigator requires "cloud maps", it will be useless the moment its provider goes out of business or turns off the v1 servers in favour of v2 servers. This as already been discussed in the Ars Technica's article about Android and the problem of old phones with "broken" apps.
(Well, the reality is that it will be useless for 3 years, after which somebody will finally crack the DRM and put a OSM-based replacement on it that has 90% of the features of the previous software, but it nowhere as polished as it.)
> This is possible, but rare. If your GPS navigator requires "cloud maps", it will be useless the moment its provider goes out of business or turns off the v1 servers in favour of v2 servers.
I have a 10 year old GPS receiver in a box, with no way to update with maps from Garmin, not because Garmin went out of business but because they just choose not to support the device anymore.
Do I want to spend hours trying to figure out how to update a 10 year old device? Or would I rather spend $100-$200 on a brand new one with the latest maps?
Obsolescence isn't a bad thing, its how we move forward. We just need a clean process to recycle the waste that process generates.
The issue is that a GPS navigator is basically a solved problem, and the only part that requires updating are the maps.
Do I want to spend hours trying to figure out how to update a 10 year old device? Or would I rather spend $100-$200 on a brand new one with the latest maps?
The ideal situation would be a device that you buy once, but it's also one you could use with whatever map data sources you want (OSM, commercial, etc.) - based on an open format.
(I know GPS is also dependent on the satellites being available, but since it's government-owned and critical to many parts of the infrastructure, it's likely to stay around for the forseeable future.)
> The ideal situation would be a device that you buy once, but it's also one you could use with whatever map data sources you want (OSM, commercial, etc.) - based on an open format.
Like an iPhone/iPad/Android phone/Android tablet? Tomorrow's tech will be available to me soon, and much cheaper than today's tech. Support = people's time = expensive.
Genuinely curious, but why print reminders like that when you can use a calendar? Or using something like Pushover for notifications when a download has finished.
The reminders are only printed once a week on Saturday mornings and use maybe 5-10cm of paper. It's just nice to have a physical reminder to do things sometimes, something you can't ignore. Plus I get enough alerts on my phone already.
Like people have said about the Berg printer, it's really a solution looking for a problem. I just wanted to make a little networked printer and build a nice case for it (I'm doing it in the style of a piece of equipment from one of the Alien films). There's no real reason to have it, but I do, so I'm making use of it.
Great point. I think if you're launching a product like this you need to have a fallback strategy established from the beginning, or maybe just go open fromt he start so that the ecosystem isn't dependent on a single piece of locked-down infrastructure.
Chumbys still work (probably because bunnie seems benevolent). Even when its servers were turned off for a while, they still worked; you just couldn't choose a different clock face.
The thing I find most surprising is that she went from being a protesting vegan hippy-type, to a Daily Mail reader who says "I don’t read the Guardian—nobody I know reads the Guardian". That's some shift to the right.
Most people's political preferences are a more direct product of their desires (fears, etc.). The less educated a person the less "reflective stability" established between psychological tos-and-fros and their politics.
The idea that people go around with a stable set of political (, intellectual, moral, etc.) preferences is a very modern one (c. 1950s) and we'd all be better off to get rid of it.
If one is interested in unbiased reporting then it's probably a good idea to steer well clear of both the Daily Mail and The Guardian. They're both pretty rotten.
Who does provide unbiased reporting? In the UK? I have yet to see a newspaper that is unbiased. In Germany, I am quite sure, we do not have that. But saying the Guardian is as rotten as the Daily Mail seems far fetched to me.
I've no idea. I'm also not sure any news outlet is unbiased. The Guardian relentlessly spins its news in order to be palatable to its rich, middle class and liberal audience. If you're interested in rational, objective reporting then the Guardian is definitely not that ... especially in its cultural/society related opinion pieces. The Guardian is as much skewed to the left as the The Daily Mail is to the right, and once you realise this The Guardian's output can start to look at once absurd and genuinely terrifying. I don't know what the answer is, although I personally try and gather my news from a large range of sources from across the political spectrum in an attempt to gain a heuristic understanding of what might really be going on.
From the few details [1] I've been able to find it seems like it's unusable in the UK anyway as it uses 151-154 MHz, which is a licensed band. If they moved it up into the 433ishMHz unlicensed band their range claims would all have to be revised.
To me it seemed like part of your sales pitch was infering that you could use it internationally where you don't have service or don't want to pay the high overages ;)
On my Moto G (which is listed as being 'Partially compatible'), it's nearly impossible to get any of the demos in the app version to respond to the phone's movement. I'm assuming that's down to the lack of gyroscope, which is a bit disappointing.
There's a strange sense of morality in being able to execute someone but not show their full last words due to swearing. The US media seems to view the world in a similar way.
Hm, for some people they are martirs and for people denying the right of the State to the death penalty, they are martirs because they bear witness to the futility of the act.
