Posted on 12/21/2023 9:54:02 AM PST by ShadowAce
The Toaster
Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. “What do you think this is?”
One advisor, an engineer, answered first. “It is a toaster,” he said. The king asked, “How would you design an embedded computer for it?” The engineer replied, “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I’ll show you a working prototype.”
The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, “Toasters don’t just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don’t look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.”
“With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.”
“...The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, ‘Cook yourself.’ The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.”
“Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don’t want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.”
“We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won’t buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. Users will want to pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.”
“Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller!).”
The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.
I have two toasters. One is a four slot unit. One side is set for toast and the other side is set for waffles. My second toaster is a two slot unit with elongated slots for toasting really wide bread. Or it can toast four pieces of normal sized bread. It even has a count down timer so I can see how many seconds until my toast is done. I have plenty of counter space and outlets, so both are always out and plugged in.
A watched toaster timer never pops up
“Yes, and there must be an app on your Smartphone so you can start your toast before you get home, and a camera so you can view it.”
You’re practically still living in the late 1900s.
Today it requires an API that interfaces with generative AI to automate the creation of the requisite “selfie” of the celebrity-esque activity of eating a meal, and auto-magically push it to multiple social media feeds.
Not bad, but he missed dependency injection.
—”A cheap toaster never makes sense; if anyone needs one, buy a more expensive one.”
We were gifted a new two-slice Cuisinart that cost over ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS, as our ancient one was going dark and slow.
The new one is nice and even but takes about four minutes on plain white bread; slow junk!
Our old neighbors used an ancient gizmo that toasted one side of one slice at a time. A fork was used to activate a flipping mechanism.
Mr A would be reading the paper, having a cigarette, coffee, breakfast, and having a conversation; with a deft move of his fork flips the toast to perfection!!!
And fast too.
That old king was great and wise!
Pre electricity days the skillet was the toaster still works better than a toaster.
My Granny always made toast in the gas oven, slathered with butter. (I’ve tried many times to make that toast in an electric oven, and it just never works.)
When it snowed and we were off school, she topped it with brown sugar and cinnamon, and we had tea. Lots of carbs for playing all day in the snow!
(When I was much older, we got an electric toaster. Things were just not the same...)
Try pop tarts with butter on them
I bought two toasters at a thrift shop.
The toaster one has 4 wide bays with 2 separate sets of controls for toasting level and defrosting before toasting.
The second toaster was made in West Germany and handles the oversized slices of bread such as the 8-inch wide Artisan bread slices.
Lol... I am tired of tinkerers who just have to tinker even if there is no reason to tinker. They are like tweakers.
Like those those in congress. I would be happy to pay them to DO NOTHING. This lawmaking for no reason is a bad thing.
They just had to try and fix something that wasn’t broken.
I wish I had the kind of toaster we had when I was a kid. Nothing ever popped up anywhere. It had two doors, with little handles, that opened down and you could see if the toast was done. If it wasn’t dark enough for you, you just . . . closed the door again.
Like the one shown in post 35.
The pop-up ones are dangerous. I’ve seen people go after a too-fat piece of toast without unplugging the toaster first.
I was thinking that a build-your-own would be good, esp. if it could be like building a PC via https://pcpartpicker.com. Today I saw Toyota IMV 0 Concept Is a Build-Your-Own Electric Pickup Truck not-quite-full-size truck starting price of just $10,00 - https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a45599623/toyota-imv-0-concept-details/ But in US? Not likely.
HAHAHAHA!
I saw a really old one once. You set it by the fire in your fireplace and spin it to the other side with your foot. The colonial toe stir!
Progressives gain power from wrecking things that are working perfectly well.
Then they gain even more power by creating “fixes” for things they wrecked.
Also, they have a long history of destroying things and then bringing back what they previously destroyed as a great progressive “innovation”, e.g.:
-streetcars / urban transit
-precinct stations / community policing
and on and on..
“Progressives gain power from wrecking things that are working perfectly well.
Then they gain even more power by creating “fixes” for things they wrecked.
Also, they have a long history of destroying things and then bringing back what they previously destroyed as a great progressive “innovation”, e.g.:”
I agree. And mostly through government involvement and regulation.
From what I read here on FR that's exactly what the world's self-appointed elite want for us, too. The few of us left after mass die-offs from some reason or another.
Oops, gotta go - late for my latest COVID booster.
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