To be fair, my first cell phone only displayed one line of text which was only numbers, didn't have a phone book, had terrible call quality, in addition to all the listed missing features. So the Kin is actually a great phone. Should have sold millions.
I'm not sure why people are so offended by what Facebook has done. They've just made the information people made publicly available already easy to parse for computers. Full disclosure: I had no way to prepare for Facebook's new features and I haven't change a single privacy settings since it launched. I just used this site to check what was publicly available for the first time and none of it was a surprise except my events and I don't feel invaded in any way. Feel free to browse around my profile.
what bothers me is not that people can see what I've rsvp'd to, but that they can see what I've been invited to, but ignored (unless i remove that event, which must be done manually for each event).
My friends invite me to a lot of events that I _never_ want to publicly be associated with, but unless I specifically remove this event, the whole world can see it.
Because Giles is a cult of personality. He's the Matt Lesko (http://bit.ly/cEUsK5) of Hacker News. You know every fiber of his being is lousy and watching him makes you a worse person, but his outrageous suits keep your eyes glued.
You're going to make a lot of stuff. Some you will give away, some you will charge for.
You pretty much HAVE to give _some_ stuff away not because we live in a post-Napster, open source apocalypse where everybody expects things to be free, but just because you need something to get people to give your idea/song/software a chance.
As I have a lot of friends in bands, I often come back to music: "You will make a lot of music. You will probably give most of your recordings away, with the exception of special packages now and then. You will probably almost always charge for your live performances, with the exception of a few special occasions. You will regularly make some thing related to your art and charge for it (screen-printed posters, sweathshirts, etc.)"
People who make any kind of intellectual property can basically put it in one of two buckets:
* stuff i will charge for
* stuff i won't charge for, but is used to attract attention/keep people feeling involved
The difference between the two isn't arbitrary, but it isn't exactly based on qualitative difference. It's mostly based on distribution, limitations of medium, and a stuff like that. You'll probably tend to give away stuff that's easy to pass around, and charge for stuff that's not. Not in a piracy-centric mindset, just thinking mostly of friction, etc. It's entirely possible the thing you charge for doesn't take more work to do than the things you don't charge for.
It's true that video files aren't so hard to pass around. But it's way harder to pass videos around than a blog post links.
My main point is was related to your interesting "ads that look like content" observation:
That there can be little difference between the things that many people give away (ads), versus the things they sell, especially in terms of labor by the creator.
I think this would be so much better and useful if it was a solar powered shower that sat in your garden. It could catch rain water when available and use tap water (from the hose) otherwise. It's pretty simple to stick a water tank in a solar oven to heat the water too. And you don't need a water pump if the water tank is on the roof, you get plenty of water pressure from gravity.
The water could also then drain into the garden if you used the right soaps in the shower.
A nice design like this could really bring grey water to people who don't want to build their own outdoor showers.
BTW, I know this idea is kind of out of left field but its the first thing I thought when I saw the box. It really looks like it would be a pleasure to take a shower in it while being in the garden.
I tried a low res and high res picture of some Gill Sans here and it failed too. And they have Gill Sans in their db. The results list had fonts that were kind of close but different in some significant ways.
I ran through it providing answers for Gill Sans and I got back 30 possible fonts. Gil Sans was near the bottom. I guess this is pretty useful if you're working from a picture of something.
That's PRI not NPR, which is relevant because NPR famously rejected the show (then had to license it from PRI because it's so good).
I once heard Ira Glass talking about why he didn't make it on NPR... he was hosting the national phone-in show for a few months, and they would have expert panels discussing things like the Cold War. One day, some national security expert -- evidently trying to play the folksy card -- responded to a question by saying, "Well, it's like my grandmother says, blah blah blah". Glass' immediate instinct was to say, "Oh really? Tell me more about your grandmother!" He always wanted to go for the marginal, overlooked thing. I love that story.
One other point before I get off this NPR binge: has anyone else noticed that Ira Glass' vocal mannerisms have been picked up by the new generation of NPR journalists? This is really annoying. It's like a whole generation of singers imitating Bob Dylan. Listen, people: it was cool when he did it; you are making asses of yourselves. The worst offenders are the people on that "Planet Money" team; I can hardly listen to them. Ok, rant over.
Which is funny because Ira Glass specifically warns against that. Talk like yourself. But then again, maybe we imitate masters to learn before we figure out which ones of the things we're imitating are right, and which are just effects we're cargo culting.
Though he's certainly the most oft-imitated, it's not just Ira Glass who's mannerisms have been copied. The folks on Marketplace all sound alike - even the women sound like Kai Ryssdal. Additionally, the very odd cadences of Robin Bloom on WHYY have caught on to some degree amongst other voices on NPR.
Now you're touching a nerve. I'm a big NPR fan, have listened to Wait Wait since they started, and it pains me to say: that show has deteriorated. Most of their panelists suck, especially the ones who seem to appear most often. I find myself cringing at how lame they are... not a good sign for a comedy show.
There are only 10 questions, you can't review your questions before final submission of the test, some of the questions are pretty silly, and some of the terminology is questionable.
I think these kinds of "standardized" tests only make sense when the results are normalized against the population of test takers. That most embedded software developers received a D- only tells us that a combination of the performance of the test and the performance of the test taker was poor.
The contact sync feature has an option to replace your existing photos in your contacts and is disabled by default.
Unfortunately, it seems to have gone ahead and replaced many of the photos I have set for contacts. It hasn't done it for all of them but it has for many of them. I'm not sure about all the details of the bug but be aware that it's likely your pictures will be replaced whether you want them to or not.
You also may have to sync a couple times before photos are synced to all the relevant contacts. Their photo download protocol looks pretty chatty and I guess some of the requests fail and they aren't re-trying until the next sync session.
"if you can’t get fired for missing a deadline then you aren’t a real programmer working in the real world"
I thought the essay was pretty good until I hit that line. I feel like mastering something kind of requires rising above the daily grind. In order to master programming wouldn't one have to be a programmer simply by existence? I, for one, don't consider myself a programmer because I write code for Apple or because I have a degree that says I'm a certified computer scientist. I'm a programmer because I write programs.
If you can get fired for missing a deadline in non-egregious situations, you're working in the real world alright, but as a replaceable cog -- you're a typist, not a programmer.
Firing you means that they're declaring their investment in your thoughts a total loss, implying that they weren't paying you to think (or that you didn't do any of the thinking you were paid for!).
I interpreted that sentence to mean "If you don't have real-world constraints on your system, you aren't a real programmer." Which I think is true. It's easy to build the "perfect" academic system, exploring every detail until you've got things just right. Problem is, reality tends to bite you in areas that you don't expect (as in, real programmers have real performance/deadline/usability constraints), and those often aren't exposed in an academic paper.
I suspect most of that relates to incompetence. I rarely see unexpected performance issues bite me in the ass. Premature optimization may be the root of all evil, but having a long conversation with the back end database is FAIL.
Most Entrepreneurs are way to young to have the depth of experience to really understand what they are doing. But, they are judged on a separate scale. Twitter design is probably evolving to a reasonable design, and Facebook might be fairly elegant at this point, yet they both started as crap. These entrepreneurs had deadlines but they where not trying to send someone to the moon with the computing power of a watch. Business is about the last hack standing and not creating art, but evolution also works.
I don't think it's incompetence, at least not at the academic/professor level we're talking about. Most people who get to be professors at research universities understand the low-level details of performance quite well.
Rather, I think it's often because the details about how a system will be used aren't clear until the system is built and people actually use it. As you know, engineering involves tradeoffs. It's possible to make one operation run faster by making another slower, or it's possible to make the system easier to use by making them both slower. Academics - and startups - aren't in a position to make those tradeoffs, because they don't know how the system will be used. So they'll micro-optimize along one dimension, but it turns out that people really use the software in a completely different dimension.
Performance under extreme pressure is by definition what sorts out he great from the average in other disciplines: sports, music, performing etc.
If you haven't experienced sport (or similar) at the highest levels you probably won't get how much a few insane minutes can enhance your mastery. It really is a whole new level, where everyone is competing at their peak and you have to greatly improve your level or fail miserably.
This type of pressure & competitiveness just doesn't happen in most business environments, so the degree of pressure to lift your game isn't there.
