Believe it or not, my Nissan Leaf has smooth, instant acceleration, at any speed under about 65 mph.
The acceleration was a pleasant surprise. When you tromp on the accelerator (not the "gas pedal") the Leaf jumps. It's pretty awesome, even though the car doesn't look nearly as nice as a Tesla. But it is in the 30s, and leases are crazy cheap.
The point is also almost completely mythical: Of the people who are thoroughly devoted employees, only a tiny fraction of them will ever come remotely close to being the president of a major corporation.
Wow, that's completely missing the point. It's not that "John" made it to president, it's that the railroad job was just a job for Dave, but for John it was more.
There are clearly people with drive and ambition, and put together with actual ability, they tend to get ahead.
If you don't like it, don't buy one. It's that simple.
For actual reasons why Apple didn't go with a micro-USB connector, check out Boom.
People keep asking why Apple didn’t opt for the micro-USB connector. The answer is simple: that connector isn’t smart enough. It has only 5 pins: +5V, Ground, 2 digital data pins, and a sense pin, so most of the dock connector functions wouldn’t work – only charging and syncing would. Also, the pins are so small that no current plug/connector manufacturer allows the 2A needed for iPad charging.
I'm not emptying my pool, but it's chlorinated, so that should be OK, shouldn't it?
Unfortunately, a lot of the wetlands in Massachusetts are protected areas, so they're huge mosquito breeding grounds. It'd be nice to drain them all, but that has side effects.
Please explain more. Why did you go for the Ph.D. at 52? How long ago was that? Were you doing CS work before that? What differences did you see after the Ph.D.?
the fact that Apple is releasing a "me too" smaller tablet
So, your theory is that Apple saw the Nexus 7, and told their engineering team to start working on a "smaller tablet" to go out the door in 3 months?
Yeah, that makes sense.
Assuming the DF is correct in its release-time guesses, it's (barely) possible that Apple has had a mini-iPad in the works for a year or two, but is pushing it out earlier than planned, or even that the good reception for the the Nexus 7 made Apple give the project the "go" for commercial sale, but I'm pretty sure that you can't ship any size tablet without a significant run-up in production across many parts providers, not to mention the R&D that is required before that.
Palm pilots with phone functionality is basically exactly what newer model iPaqs were.
That's what the Palm Treos were too, and Apple ran them down as well.
It's the same reason that the likes of Netbooks sold hundreds of millions of units
Citation, please?
It's not that previous devices, whether smartphones or tablets, were business-oriented, it's that they sucked compared to what Apple came out with.
I worked for Palm in the early 2000s, and yeah, the Treo 650 (and later models, although the 650 was the most rock-solid IMO) was a very nicely integrated PDA and phone. But the iPhone left everything that came before it in the dust, especially when it came to browsing the web. I agree with the previous poster(s) who said that the web was the killer app for phones.
As for tablets, the pre-iPad Windows tablets were a joke. Very few apps were written for the tablet OS and UI, and overall the interface sucked ass. Try right-clicking with a stylus. You could do it, but it was like your fingers were playing Twister.
Saying that the iPad was nothing new is asinine. The iPhone and iPad clearly redefined their categories, and the proof is in the products that their competitors are making, all of which are very evidently modeled on the iOS devices.
I've no connection with buzzfeed. I am a backer of the Pebble Watch on Kickstarter.
There are some Kickstarter horror stories, like the Hanfree iPad stand. The project raised $35K, and never delivered. My uninformed guess is that they spent too much money on research, material selection, etc. and realized they didn't have enough left to actually fill the orders they had taken. The comments on the project page are brutal.
When I worked for Palm, a certain app that shipped on every Treo was written with a default schedule to hit the network every hour, starting at 8:00 am.
It wasn't a question of bandwidth, it was that some tens of thousands of devices, all synced to the same network time, opened data connections at the same time, overloading the server that was responsible for initiating data connections.
Should they have been using more than one server for that? Sure. Is it a valid reason for preventing certain apps from running on their net? Probably not.
Of course developers should have some level of access to the production environment. No matter how good your test environment is, it's not going to match the live server in load, or what's in cache, or the concurrent access to some resource, etc.
Our process was to have one person with access, investigating whatever problem via the SQL command line, or the Rails console (let the RoR jokes commence), with another person watching, to make sure they were doing select * and not update or delete. Even then we'd execute stuff in a transaction or sandbox so that we weren't making any permanent changes, although changes to memcache generally can't be rolled back so easily.
I've seen admins, who are adamant that dev not be allowed to change anything, change psql configurations at a whim, crippling DB performance. And then blame dev for poor response times. That's so not cool.
How do you think big authors got to be big authors? How are we (as readers) going to find the next Stephen King or Heinlein or Grisham? It's not going to be because somebody read something on someone's blog and told their friends about it.
Name me an author, or a band, that has made it big without involvement of a publisher or label. All these authors (and the bands releasing their stuff on the net to great acclaim and profits) are Big Names already, because of the marketing and push from the publishers and labels.
Yes, there are a couple of people who started off on the net (Scalzi, for one) and then went through a big publisher, but the big publisher is still a requirement for authors to make a good living, as opposed to just writing for a hobby, or for pizza money.
Don't get me wrong, the publishers and labels have been major a-holes to their authors and customers, but I for one don't want the publishers to go out of business. I want them to continue being a filter so I don't have to read crap that wouldn't even make it to the slush pile.
I'm not saying this is the case, but any decent software developer can write a web browser that's really fast. Getting it to actually render the right stuff all the time takes a lot more work, error checking, and additional code. That's going to slow things down.
Yeah, other than the fact that they're both winter-time leisure activities involving strapping one or more long pieces of fiberglass to your feet, in order to make your way down a snowy slope, they're nothing alike!
Even with narrow-spectrum LEDs, you can mix a set of them to obtain the color you'd like. Pick a red LED, a green, and a blue, and mix them with the appropriate currents to get the warm light you'd like.
As pointed out, though, Cree (and others, I'm sure) have been working towards warm single-LED lighting.
Check out the candlepowerforums.com site for exhaustive discussions on LED lighting and related topics.
Those are my two favorite types of toys.
For magnets, I like K&J Magnetics.
For flashlights, I've ordered but not yet received some seriously bright small flashlights from Fenix.
Lasers are a subclass of flashlights to me, and you already have that covered.
Slashdot Mirror
The previous article you refer to concerns Google owing $1B, not Amazon. I don't disagree with the rest of your screed.
Believe it or not, my Nissan Leaf has smooth, instant acceleration, at any speed under about 65 mph. The acceleration was a pleasant surprise. When you tromp on the accelerator (not the "gas pedal") the Leaf jumps. It's pretty awesome, even though the car doesn't look nearly as nice as a Tesla. But it is in the 30s, and leases are crazy cheap.
Wow, that's completely missing the point. It's not that "John" made it to president, it's that the railroad job was just a job for Dave, but for John it was more.
There are clearly people with drive and ambition, and put together with actual ability, they tend to get ahead.
Get out of the house once in a while, and make a friend in your own timezone.
All they wanted was indicates a little bias towards Google's position.
It takes two to make a deal. Google and Apple couldn't agree on terms, so there was no deal. It's that simple.
If you don't like it, don't buy one. It's that simple.
For actual reasons why Apple didn't go with a micro-USB connector, check out Boom.
I'm not emptying my pool, but it's chlorinated, so that should be OK, shouldn't it?
Unfortunately, a lot of the wetlands in Massachusetts are protected areas, so they're huge mosquito breeding grounds. It'd be nice to drain them all, but that has side effects.
Please explain more. Why did you go for the Ph.D. at 52? How long ago was that? Were you doing CS work before that? What differences did you see after the Ph.D.?
the fact that Apple is releasing a "me too" smaller tablet
So, your theory is that Apple saw the Nexus 7, and told their engineering team to start working on a "smaller tablet" to go out the door in 3 months?
Yeah, that makes sense.
Assuming the DF is correct in its release-time guesses, it's (barely) possible that Apple has had a mini-iPad in the works for a year or two, but is pushing it out earlier than planned, or even that the good reception for the the Nexus 7 made Apple give the project the "go" for commercial sale, but I'm pretty sure that you can't ship any size tablet without a significant run-up in production across many parts providers, not to mention the R&D that is required before that.
Recommended to me by Vernor Vinge. Great "classic" SF, but not dated.
Also, Keith Laumer, and Mack Reynolds.
Palm pilots with phone functionality is basically exactly what newer model iPaqs were.
That's what the Palm Treos were too, and Apple ran them down as well.
It's the same reason that the likes of Netbooks sold hundreds of millions of units
Citation, please?
It's not that previous devices, whether smartphones or tablets, were business-oriented, it's that they sucked compared to what Apple came out with.
I worked for Palm in the early 2000s, and yeah, the Treo 650 (and later models, although the 650 was the most rock-solid IMO) was a very nicely integrated PDA and phone. But the iPhone left everything that came before it in the dust, especially when it came to browsing the web. I agree with the previous poster(s) who said that the web was the killer app for phones.
As for tablets, the pre-iPad Windows tablets were a joke. Very few apps were written for the tablet OS and UI, and overall the interface sucked ass. Try right-clicking with a stylus. You could do it, but it was like your fingers were playing Twister.
Saying that the iPad was nothing new is asinine. The iPhone and iPad clearly redefined their categories, and the proof is in the products that their competitors are making, all of which are very evidently modeled on the iOS devices.
37 Saddest Failed Kickstarters
I've no connection with buzzfeed. I am a backer of the Pebble Watch on Kickstarter.
There are some Kickstarter horror stories, like the Hanfree iPad stand. The project raised $35K, and never delivered. My uninformed guess is that they spent too much money on research, material selection, etc. and realized they didn't have enough left to actually fill the orders they had taken. The comments on the project page are brutal.
Wow, this got +5 "insightful".
I don't think people read enough to realize that the change in weather described here is because the author moved from San Diego to the northeast.
Didn't she die along with him, in the plane crash? The wiki says so.
Jeepers, what did /. do to this text field to make it so hard to paste a link?
When I worked for Palm, a certain app that shipped on every Treo was written with a default schedule to hit the network every hour, starting at 8:00 am.
It wasn't a question of bandwidth, it was that some tens of thousands of devices, all synced to the same network time, opened data connections at the same time, overloading the server that was responsible for initiating data connections.
Should they have been using more than one server for that? Sure. Is it a valid reason for preventing certain apps from running on their net? Probably not.
Can apps take down the cell network? Yes.
Of course developers should have some level of access to the production environment. No matter how good your test environment is, it's not going to match the live server in load, or what's in cache, or the concurrent access to some resource, etc.
Our process was to have one person with access, investigating whatever problem via the SQL command line, or the Rails console (let the RoR jokes commence), with another person watching, to make sure they were doing select * and not update or delete. Even then we'd execute stuff in a transaction or sandbox so that we weren't making any permanent changes, although changes to memcache generally can't be rolled back so easily.
I've seen admins, who are adamant that dev not be allowed to change anything, change psql configurations at a whim, crippling DB performance. And then blame dev for poor response times. That's so not cool.
"Insightful"? Who was drinking Kool-Aid when they...
This is the only failblog post I've every bookmarked: Graffiti Win I'm compelled to visit it every few months, and it never fails to make me chuckle.
How do you think big authors got to be big authors? How are we (as readers) going to find the next Stephen King or Heinlein or Grisham? It's not going to be because somebody read something on someone's blog and told their friends about it.
Name me an author, or a band, that has made it big without involvement of a publisher or label. All these authors (and the bands releasing their stuff on the net to great acclaim and profits) are Big Names already, because of the marketing and push from the publishers and labels.
Yes, there are a couple of people who started off on the net (Scalzi, for one) and then went through a big publisher, but the big publisher is still a requirement for authors to make a good living, as opposed to just writing for a hobby, or for pizza money.
Don't get me wrong, the publishers and labels have been major a-holes to their authors and customers, but I for one don't want the publishers to go out of business. I want them to continue being a filter so I don't have to read crap that wouldn't even make it to the slush pile.
When the government starts dictating requirements and the price, we're all screwed.
Check here.
Am I missing something? That says that it's version 1.2, updated 28 May 2010.
Is this just a developer raising a ruckus as advertising?
How about this possibility?
"Sucky non-standards-compliant browsers aren't popular"
I'm not saying this is the case, but any decent software developer can write a web browser that's really fast. Getting it to actually render the right stuff all the time takes a lot more work, error checking, and additional code. That's going to slow things down.
This is a tech that seems like it should be cool, but from the demos it's incredibly boring.
Yeah, other than the fact that they're both winter-time leisure activities involving strapping one or more long pieces of fiberglass to your feet, in order to make your way down a snowy slope, they're nothing alike!
And the parent got modded "insightful"? Sheesh.
Even with narrow-spectrum LEDs, you can mix a set of them to obtain the color you'd like. Pick a red LED, a green, and a blue, and mix them with the appropriate currents to get the warm light you'd like.
As pointed out, though, Cree (and others, I'm sure) have been working towards warm single-LED lighting.
Check out the candlepowerforums.com site for exhaustive discussions on LED lighting and related topics.
Those are my two favorite types of toys.
For magnets, I like K&J Magnetics.
For flashlights, I've ordered but not yet received some seriously bright small flashlights from Fenix.
Lasers are a subclass of flashlights to me, and you already have that covered.