This sounds like a flawed development cycle. Where's the end-user testing?
In defence of the developers/programmers, many people are really bad at explaining what they want, not least because it's often not what they actually need.
If a designer is designing something that looks good but doesn't work well (i.e., solve the problem), they are bad at usability/UX. They should be getting user feedback on their design before it's implemented - that's what user-centred design is about.
There's often a gap when it comes to understanding requirements - between the end-user and the developer, between the designer and developer, etc. Requirements gathering is actually a specialised skill and one of the key duties of a business analyst.
Added to the problem is the general lack of funding around the world for infrastructure, owing to the fact that politicians control the purse strings and infrastructure isn't "sexy" [1][2]. Building something new that can be named after someone is no doubt easier to fund than the maintenance of something that already exists.
"we always forget that maintenance in perpetuity is much much harder"
I imagine that part of the problem is that the heavy maintenance for large engineering projects begins years or decades after completion. Upon completion, it's hard to imagine these huge creations falling apart; add to this an element of "this won't be my problem (I won't be here in 50 years)" and you've got a recipe for short-term thinking - especially by those who don't have the expertise (read: the politicians and bureaucrats).
Part of the issue with dams is that you don't have great safe-disconnect-and-fix options.
Nuclear, you can spin down a plant and balance generating capacity elsewhere.
Bridges, you can provide access via detours or ferries.
Almost every other mega-engineering project we have is network related: in that there exists alternate connectivity.
Dams are intrinsically linked to their topography and hydrology. Where can you source replacement water at that volume? Where can you put excess water? They essentially have to be hotfixed in-place, while in operation.
The same options that existed while they were under construction also exist...
Drain down, dig a bypass, temporary dams inside both sides of the bypass, do the offline / bypassed work, reverse the procedure. Maybe the second time we'll have the foresight to make the bypass more easily serviceable again.
Draining a huge lake is easier said than done though. Even if the bypasses are still up for it they almost certainly were not designed for that. In addition, every bridge and river bank downstream would need to be checked and possibly reinforced for a much higher flow rate.
Btw, the time scales are quite long even if it can be done. Filling Lake Mead took from late 1934 to may 1937 or about 2.5 years. Assuming the downstream infrastructure can take double the normal flows, you'd need 2.5 years to drain and another 2.5 years to refill after the maintenance is done. The opportunity costs are huge, it seems at least worthwhile to check if you can do the works underwater with robots or something like that.
The garbage journals are a plague. You publish one article in a legitimate journal and in next to no time these worthless journals (and conferences) start spamming you, even if what you wrote has nothing to do with what they're supposedly publishing.
I don't see how this is practical. You could spend a lifetime testing the work of others and still not get through it all, let alone get to working on anything original. Progress is made by building on the work of others.
The point is not to test everything ever published, its that when you want to do X, you look for papers on X understanding that they are likely flawed but better than starting from scratch.
This still don’t make sense. For example, I want to paint my house with a less toxic paint. I can’t trust any academic research. I have to now research what is toxic in paint? Then I have to find ways to measure various chemicals and gases? Etc...
This seems like a complete utter waste of time.
In real life most life impacting academic research is much more right than wrong. You are far better served assuming so. Unless you want to waste your time going back to basic science and rebuilding all the academic knowledge in most things you wish to do.
I think what you’re missing is that academic research focuses on novelty, not basic facts. Ultimately not trusting novelty can save time. Basic facts can be found in reference material.
So it’s more like suppose you want to paint your house green, and you read that somebody says you can mix red and blue paint to make a really cool green paint. Instead of immediately going out and buying enough red and blue paint to cover your whole house, first buy a small amount of red and blue paint, mix them together, and see if you get that neat green paint.
It’s common sense, but the window dressings of academia can lead you to burn time and money on things that are totally silly because somebody important-sounding said they did it once.
Where people get burned is that there’s an enormous power imbalance—-junior scientists can end up stuck trying and failing to make green paint out of red and blue paint because nobody senior is going to take them seriously if they can’t make green paint. This presents a serious ethical challenge if making green paint is impossible.
What are "basic facts"? Surely the point of most research is to uncover new facts? And what is "reference material" if not other research - research that you're using as a foundation for your own?
It's fair to question things, especially if they don't make sense to you and even if acknowledged authorities are behind them. However, (1) something that you may question is not necessarily something I may question, and (2) questioning may be a waste of time.
If a paper that says mixing red and blue paint makes green paint has a thousand citations, perhaps you don't need to question it because others already have. If you can't reproduce it, the simplest thing to do is ask an expert who says it is possible to do it.
It’s not as simple as buying paint. You’re not going to use any treatment where research came from a medical school or associated institute without personally proving it works first? Good luck!
If making green paint is impossible I think that it will eventually self correct, or is simply inconsequential. In some instances it may take a while, but if the alternative is to reprove a result before using it — that seems like something only a fool would do or someone with infinite time.
Haven't thought about Tucows in many years... I used to love exploring it to find new software to try out. There were so many interesting utilities and such to enhance Windows 95/98. Would love to give it one last browse. Ah well! Thanks for the good times, Tucows.
For me freshmeat.net was the source of new software around that kinda timeframe.
But I did help a few people download browsers, and better FTP clients from tucows.
There was a related site, an index of available software, but I can't remember the name. I remember it had an abbreviation, something like "chase" and hosted mostly shareware stuff. But the details elude me.
Depends on where you stand... If you're one of the people who comes to rely on the product, then your answer would probably be "yes".
The cost of the experimentation is people wondering what product they'll discontinue next and whether it'll be one that _they_ rely on. If you find yourself asking this often enough, you'll probably start moving out of the Google ecosystem. How is this good for Google?
Yes, I understand that products need to pay for themselves, but Google keeps drawing people into services that they then shut down. It's frustrating for users and damaging to Google. What's the cost of the damage to their reputation?
Yet another example of the customer coming last. Are TV's that force ads on customers heavily discounted? If not, the manufacturers are earning extra revenue while the customer loses their privacy and gets nothing in return other than annoyance.
It's a good illustration of why privacy is so complicated: most people wouldn't think that in buying a TV they're compromising their privacy because they don't know about ACR and such. The manufacturers, of course, know all about it, but it's not in their interest to share the information - specifically, to do so in a way that empowers the consumer to make an educated decision at purchase time. (Or am I wrong and they do in fact explain everything "on the box"? I haven't had to buy a TV in a long time.)
I do this and it's been somewhat useful - you need to disable blackhole rules periodically to get app updates though (and the TV will send a storm of DNS queries your way if you dare to block queries)
Frustratingly, recently the latest Plex app stopped working with the block rules I had in place, so I've had to allow through a lot more of the TV's traffic to samsung domains than I'd like.
My primary annoyance is Samsung's monitoring of what I do on my TV, and secondarily their IPTV service, which it seems to default to on startup (I only use apps and PC/game console sources, the TV isn't plugged into or tuned for any channels).
Realistically I need to switch to a Shield TV and hope that nVidia's privacy policies are better... and never buy a samsung tv ever again.
i tried blocking DNS or whitelisting and you probably see that large amount of blocked requests because it tries like every second if you refuse the response.
Unfortunately, it's worse than that. It's more like a case of the consumer coming first.
The vast majority of consumers don't care about this. They're trying to get the biggest screen for the least money. And TV manufacturers are giving it to them.
However, to remain price competitive with the other TVs on the shelf in WalMart, they need to rely on ad revenue. So, we get TVs with ads.
This isn't a dystopian thing forced upon us by evil TV manufacturers. This is a dystopian thing we've asked for.
> The vast majority of consumers don't care about this.
You may be right, but how exactly is someone meant to make an informed decision when they don't know what their TV is doing? It's unreasonable to expect the average person on the street to be an expert on the subject and to have fully researched everything before walking into a store, so if the TV's packaging doesn't say anything about the subject, how do they learn?
> However, to remain price competitive with the other TVs on the shelf in WalMart, they need to rely on ad revenue.
Which other TVs are you referring to? And is this really the case or are you speculating? Surely a company the size of Samsung can be competitive without having to resort to this sort of activity?
It's unreasonable to expect the average person
on the street to be an expert on the subject and
to have fully researched everything before walking
into a store, so if the TV's packaging doesn't say
anything about the subject, how do they learn?
I 100% agree with you that the current solution stinks and is unfair.
The solution depends on who you ask.
Some would say that it's up to the consumer to be educated. Like you, I don't think this is realistic. It's not realistic to expect every consumer to become an expert in the nuances of every single thing they might buy.
Others would say that if it's really important to customers, we'll vote with our dollars and demand alternatives to the current situation.
Some would say that the government should ban the practice or at least require some sort of very clear disclosure.
How do you know that? I am going to go out on a limb here and say you have not done background research on TV manufacturers who focus exclusively on inexpensive dumb TVs, so how can you know it's not worth it to them?
It is entirely possible there are other factors as to why we are not buying from them right now, such as supplier-related issues unbeknownst to us.
In short, the economy is more complex than claiming "demand" and saying we are done.
I have almost never heard anybody outside of the tech world express concern about this sort of data collection, and even most tech-savvy people I know explicitly reject the idea of caring about it.
Yes, admittedly this is anecdotal, but I am talking about an extended family/social circle of hundreds of people over the course of quite a few years. The odds of it being a massively unrepresentative sample are rather low.
Let's turn it around. How do you know that people are concerned about data collection?
All available evidence points to my assertion being correct. All sorts of "smart" devices, chock full of phone-home tracking, are flying off the shelves. There are alternatives, but they are quite niche.
I am not talking about the demand for privacy, I am talking about the demand for dumb, inexpensive TVs. You are saying it is impossible to find a market that needs dumb, inexpensive TVs. But suppose all of those people saw an option for a cheaper TV that happened to be dumb. This line could even be sold by a major brand. Call it something like a "SimplySmart" line.
The "smart" functionality is how they achieve low prices. They subsidize the cost of the TV by selling your usage data. They may have deals with app providers as well - similar to how the price of a consumer laptop is subsidized by preloaded crapware.
Given the privacy angle, I expect they won't do ACR in Europe. Because that would require asking permission and the courts have ruled that "free and explicit consent" means the user must be able to say no. Otherwise it doesn't count as consent and the massive GDPR fines come into play.
For all the bad press it got, I'm happy to have GDPR because it very firmly puts the consumers in control of their data.
Enforcement isn't fully there yet, but with Oracle getting sued and pulling the plug on the European side of their Blukai data sales business things are moving in the right direction.
My new LG CX tv has an option in the settings for this (in Norway) so I can just turn it of.
My old Sony Bravia with android tv didn't even honour my DHCP DNS settings so I made the firewall reroute all the requests to my internal dns for "pi-holeing".
GDPR is a massive win for consumers, enforcement will come it just takes time :)
Not the best of articles, IMHO. It has too many broad statements and seems to be trying to be a "one size fits all" bit of advice.
I like the metaphor and agree with this sentiment: "the problem of understanding what customer needs, as opposed to accepting what the customer is asking for".
A few points:
1. The customer has a say in the requirements. They are often the domain expert. Even if they have no expertise, they need to be regularly consulted otherwise you still run the risk of delivering software that no value to them.
2. Understanding the business and eliciting requirements is often beyond the ability and scope of the software developer. These are the skills of a business analyst. Of course, developers can and do have these skills, but it shouldn't be assumed that they do.
3. Proper business analysis may lead to a solution that doesn't involve custom software. The article doesn't seem to allow room for this.
4. Implementation is often important to the customer. Many won't be comfortable to leave everything "below the surface" to the software developer.
In defence of the developers/programmers, many people are really bad at explaining what they want, not least because it's often not what they actually need.
If a designer is designing something that looks good but doesn't work well (i.e., solve the problem), they are bad at usability/UX. They should be getting user feedback on their design before it's implemented - that's what user-centred design is about.
There's often a gap when it comes to understanding requirements - between the end-user and the developer, between the designer and developer, etc. Requirements gathering is actually a specialised skill and one of the key duties of a business analyst.