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What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

prog21.dadgum.com

31–40 of 87 posts

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#31

Reminds me of a question I have been wondering about: Can you formally specify what is the purpose of a suitcase? In principle, you could dump all your clothes, toiletries, etc. in a pile on the airport checkin counter, and if system were organized enough, it could deliver all your stuff to hawaii and lay it all out on the hotel bed for you. E.g., a robot would scan all your belongings at the airport, and dump them a…

I can invent on the spot 10 uses for a suitcase that have nothing to do with moving things belonging to a single person together. First of all, you may have a couple packing their items in one suitcase. The suitcase may be used as a chair, as a table, as a structural support, to protect from rain, sun, lasers, alpha and beta radiation, it can be used as a weapon or as a shield, as a makeshift hammer, etc.

The problem is in your questions. "Purpose" is not something that is a part of an item. It is a part of our mind.

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#32

Reminds me of a question I have been wondering about: Can you formally specify what is the purpose of a suitcase? In principle, you could dump all your clothes, toiletries, etc. in a pile on the airport checkin counter, and if system were organized enough, it could deliver all your stuff to hawaii and lay it all out on the hotel bed for you. E.g., a robot would scan all your belongings at the airport, and dump them a…

> kinda like how the internets work!

Using this analogy, isn't a suitcase roughly equivalent to a packet? It's tagged with source/destination, and basically standardised so the routing gear doesn't need to care about the specific items you are routing.

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#33
The more I have to deal with corporate project management patterns, the more I think the whole approach behind specifications is wrong. Trying to focus on what the "domain objects" are and what is their flow is pointless, especially if you're dealing with real-world objects (like the fridge from TFA). You can model something this way, but it will be usually the imaginary perfect path, a narrow vision of how things should be done, that will break on first contact with the real world - a world that is messy and requires humans to improvise on the spot.

I'm starting to believe that one should focus on the workflow instead. After all, the reason for writing software as a tool is to simplify or automate some existing process. So focus on what people are already doing and what they're trying to achieve and find a way to remove repetitions, unnecessary delays, etc. Just look on what people are doing and find a way to do some parts of the process faster and better.

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#34
post #10
post #5

The question is wrong, as it stands the answer is "any non-fluid or contained fluid that will fit". "What should one store in a refrigerator?" is a better question.

I would argue that pretty much anything you would put into your refrigerator is contained inside packaging. Sometimes that packaging is just a simple plate.

I put a cat in the refrigerator more than once - for some reason, my cats loved sitting there for few mintues long when there were young. There were definitely not packaged.

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#35

Reminds me of a question I have been wondering about: Can you formally specify what is the purpose of a suitcase? In principle, you could dump all your clothes, toiletries, etc. in a pile on the airport checkin counter, and if system were organized enough, it could deliver all your stuff to hawaii and lay it all out on the hotel bed for you. E.g., a robot would scan all your belongings at the airport, and dump them a…

> kinda like how the internets work! Using this analogy, isn't a suitcase roughly equivalent to a packet? It's tagged with source/destination, and basically standardised so the routing gear doesn't need to care about the specific items you are routing.

The analogy goes even further!

At certain points along a route, deep packet inspection is performed, and some packets will be modified to remove contents that the country in question does not want to route.

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#36

I say we make a refrigerator library; then anyone can define a refrigerator within the library; then we can call the function and apply it to out arbitrary needs. #include

Wrong. We need refrigeration factory that returns a class called RealRefrigerator that extends AbstractRefrigerator and implementing IRefrigerator, which then must be DI by configuring external XML (bonus points if the xml itself is stored in the database, so no way to reach the config with grep).

The outdated approach of if (food.canSpoil()) { refrigerator.put(food) } was too burdensome and did not conform to all of the best practices.

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#37

"Any contained item that can fit inside a refrigerator, whose quality would degrade significantly more when kept at room temperature rather than at 1-4°C, by the estimated time of use/consumption." The term "contained" above is restrictive, and probably needs further precision. Only things that thrive inside an opaque and sealed container would fit the definition above. Otherwise, things that can affect the quality o…

* Puff pastry that needs to be chilled for five minutes so that the butter doesn't melt into the flour before you do the next roll.

* Jello that needs to be set

* Sprouted beans / seeds for which you want to restrict the rate of growth

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#38
The original spec, "Anything that fits into a refrigerator," is a pretty darn good one. It conforms to Postel's law: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others".

We can develop a spec in a vacuum, but we can't be sure what users actually want from our refrigerator. Maybe a live penguin actually does belong in there, as in the famous children's novel.

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#39
post #38

The original spec, "Anything that fits into a refrigerator," is a pretty darn good one. It conforms to Postel's law: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". We can develop a spec in a vacuum, but we can't be sure what users actually want from our refrigerator. Maybe a live penguin actually does belong in there, as in the famous children's novel.

I disagree with Postel's law, as it results in broken standards in practice.

Re: What Can You Put in a Refrigerator?

#40
post #38

The original spec, "Anything that fits into a refrigerator," is a pretty darn good one. It conforms to Postel's law: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". We can develop a spec in a vacuum, but we can't be sure what users actually want from our refrigerator. Maybe a live penguin actually does belong in there, as in the famous children's novel.

> "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others"

Wikipedia has an example of a tag soup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_soup which is probably poster child example of this law:

This is a malformed fragment of HTML.

What do we do here? Do we do what browsers have historically done? Or do we throw our hands up in the air when we see malformed tags?

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