lesingerouge
It does feel like shoehorning people into fitting some particular "pattern" that the author believes to be the "secret" to obtain said goal.
I always find it surprising that such short (relatively) articles, choke full of relatively difficult to apply advice gain a mass following and plenty of readers.
It does remind me of the rather stupid advice that depressed people get every day: "pull yourself up!" Amazing how we do seem to forget the complexity that riddles our minds.
Great internet (like everywhere in Romania btw), nice town, cheap living, nice places to hike to in the surrounding countryside, university town (aka lots of girls).
MongoDB 3.2
Anti-Vaxxers Fund Study That Finds Zero Link Between Vaccinations and Autism
Why did Airbnb buy a russian design company?
I am guessing that any job that is not CPU or memory hungry would fit the bill. Like crawling, sending a massive amount of emails, simple text processing, maybe even as a RabbitMQ server.
Samsung Exynos-5422 Octa-Core Servers
Why would they want this and who would want to risk the fate of an entire country and their own reputation on a "gamble"?
Because they started the negotiation game with a huge disadvantage and there was no way that they could bring something new to the table. So Tsipras and Varoufakis chose to "play the dumb communist" scenario that everyone was painting, stretch the canvas a bit and get new offers on the table and start with a different negotiating position.
This hypothesis, which I will check the following days, proposes that the Tsipras government and Varoufakis knew and understood very well the nature of the political and economical forces that pushed on them from outside of Greece. Knowing those forces and playing on the predictions laid out by the other side (Germany was already unhappy after Syriza won, expecting to have a difficult time negotiating with them) they followed to the line the "predicted" course. Difficult negotiations, huge differences in views, big political declarations and discourse, etc. The goal in the end was simple enough: get a cleaner slate.
Both the turbulent negotiations, with Varoufakis playing the evil marxist scapegoat, and the referendum, after a week of bank closures, were used as a ruse to lead the European leaders through to a "clean slate" phase. It was a very risky move, but I believe that the various contradictory signals that Tsipras sent just before the referendum confirm that it was a game. Like poker player that accidentally reveals his weakness just before he pulls a full house. The resignation of Varoufakis today is the next piece in their scenario: just take out the nasty opinionated communist and all the european parties will clearly feel more relaxed. I believe that this move was planned from the beginning and Varoufakis was used to "stir up" the pot a bit, while apparently being discarded as "peace offering" after a while.
So what was gained by this daring gamble? First of all, the markets were calmed. The negotiations were so desperate from the start, given the position of the two parties that everybody was sure of the Greek default. Now, with the financial markets accepting the default event in itself, any new deals on the table will have to take this fact into consideration. It's not "looming" anymore, it is here and it is indisputable. Second, the situation now allows for a much needed debt haircut. Refinancing is all fine and dandy, but everybody agreed that the debt could not be sustainably repaid. So now everybody is suddenly ok with the debt reducing. Third, the Tsipras government kept its word with its electors. They "fought" valiantly for the good of the people. Actually with the cards they got dealt by the previous government, they played quite a good game until now. And their general appeal has definitely risen from 36.3% (plus affiliated parties) to a 61% (as shown by the referendum). Fourth, the european hard-liners were blind-sided and the rules for the negotiation were changed. The deal before this referendum was "behave or we will strangle you". Now, it's quite a useless threat given the actual default. So Tsipras most certainly will be able to have better terms.
Sorry for the long post, had a bit of thoughts to get out. :D
I might be biased towards Manning books, but I find their style and ELI5 wording to be very helpful as an introduction to a subject.
Fleye: personal flying camera
Basically the whole system should be a layer cake of smaller modules/systems, as "opaque" as needed to one another, but interacting with each other solely through a well defined "internal API".
I think the approach proposed in the article is good when starting or prototyping projects, but the object oriented and layering approach, even if it's a bit more challenging to visualize correctly at the start of the development of an app, is worth its weight in gold as features start piling up.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Application-Architecture-Ad...
later edit: for clarity.
And the base of that logic is in the premise, which in the author's case is that expressive design, using simulacra of real life, somehow gives a user a better understanding of the actual use of the digital object.
I believe that logic to be fundamentally flawed. As someone here already said, humans have been trained to look at symbols far less time than they were trained to look at real objects. As such, there exists a fundamental divide between perception of a symbol and the perception of an object (even if it's a simulacra, not a real one). Marshall McLuhan outlined it best in his Gutenberg Galaxy, by separating letters (cold medium) from drawings (hot medium). As he was saying, perception accuracy varies between this hot and cold mediums, with hot having the highest accuracy, and cold the lowest.
Now, given this perceptual situation, I contend that given the nature of the digital medium, any kind of symbol used within it will be perceived as intrinsically cold by a given generation/cohort of users. I willingly shift my attention from the symbols to the users because I believe that they should be the true focus of the discussion. And the reality is that the very nature of the digital world and the understanding of its functionality and laws is a very high barrier to consumption for a lot of users.
My argument is way longer, but for the sake of simplicity, let me say just this: I believe that design should focus on advancing the understanding of the object that one uses. As such, I do not believe that expressive interface design holds all the necessary keys to that advancement, being that, in its intrinsic nature what it does is to simplify matters by simulating objects that the user is already familiar with. There are only so many ways to use a hammer and the representation of a hammer is contextually limited.
Minimalism is a temporary finish line. As the author noted, painters and sculptors in modern art have trekked across a very large conceptual space before arriving at minimalistic design approaches. Did this temporary finish line stop development? No, it generated a diverse set of reactions, with some painters re-approaching realism from different directions and some others exploring the limits of minimalist symbols.
I believe that "flat" design is just a way-point, and that having reached this way-point, there are myriad avenues now open to explore more in depth the semantic interconnection between symbols and humans.
Granted, their product is not excellent and it has major flaws and lacks some common DB features, but they have the advantage of developer-ease-of-use and low barrier to use.
I think this product is simply not yet "DONE".
Framing this whole article as a hypothesis, the question is now whether this hypothesis can be proven (ie does it work in real life) and what are the limitations of this theoretical approach (ie maybe it will work only for software and IT opportunities).
Anyway it seems like an interesting avenue to explore (combining psychological and anthropological studies with investment research). Does anybody know of any VC/accelerators/incubators that apply this method?
Statistics tell us that there will always be a certain percentage that are on the train just for the hype.
My 2 cents: getting on the train just for the hype is a clear indicator that you do not have a very good knowledge of yourself. Internal, time-tested, hard-earned kind of knowledge.