The heat wave is over, except here in the Scottosphere.
Tektronix once frequently embedded small cartoons in their schematics. They must have had a fun engineering culture in their day. If you’ve ever seen what passes for an official Apple schematic these days, you’d appreciate how much has been lost. | |
The US Navy will replace some touchscreen controls with mechanical ones. This is not a simple Luddite victory story. It’s a study in human factors design and the misapplication of technology. And more proof that “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Also, look at that interface. It’s absolutely stupid. | |
According to The Verge, June smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 degrees. “It’s a really wonderful feature to be able to remotely preheat your oven, and it’s a completely new world that’s very exciting, and there’s things that happen,” their CEO said. A completely new world! Full of $700 toaster ovens controlled by pop-up phone notifications! Very exciting indeed. | |
The next version of Android will be called Android 10. Finally, one of Silicon Valley’s most subborn holdouts drops silly names in favor of numbers. Software versioning systems that don’t have an obvious sequence are incredibly stupid. You’re next, macOS. | |
Microsoft: today’s datacenter locations are a product of 19th-century politics. Because the easiest place to run east-west fiber optic cables in the United States is still directly alongside Union Pacific’s transcontinental railroad (completed in 1869). Imagine if the project’s original investors could see into the future! | |
Boston ranks fairly low on this comparison of CCTV cameras per capita. The methodology is not super rigorous, but they do cite all their data sources. And it’s nice to see us far behind San Francisco and Toronto. | |
I saw an evening concert at Boston’s Hatch Shell the other day happening without any kind of security cordon. Anyone who’s been to the Esplanade since the 2013 marathon bombing will appreciate how desperate we all are for the long period of overreaction to be finished. For a while, you would need to submit to a bag search and pass through two air-gapped layers of steel fencing to see a community orchestra playing to a crowd of old ladies–a truly embarassing and avoidable situation. |