jjindev

Convergence devices have a long history. I read in Steward Brand's 1988 book, The Media Lab, about devices that would converge, collect the functions of our small electronics. Xerox PARC was starting on ubiquitous computing and "pads, tablets, and slates" in the timeframe.

A 30 year progression has brought that old dream to hundreds of millions, who just call it a "phone."

I have a hard time seeing the long history in terms of just one brand, or even a few. The trend is much bigger.

I actually like the confusion of the Android market, but I chose a purely conforming Nexus for myself.

Still I like an ecosystem that is really that, and Xiaomi contributes to diversity, even if I don't buy one.

I was one of those boys who bought a TRS-80. The thing is, I don't remember it as a peer accepted pursuit for me either. This was before anyone noticed, let alone Hollywood recast it as their version of Revenge of the Nerds. This was when being a nerd was not nice.

While I did get some quasi support from people who thought it might help in a career someday, the much more common response in those days was "who needs a home computer?"

Update: I agree that we should encourage everyone with an aptitude now to go into higher ROI fields (of which CS is one), I do think it is a bit reconstructed history to make TRS-80s actually "cool" and "non-cool kids excluded."

Indeed, the TRS-80 was not even a game machine. PCs as game machines came a bit later, and as price effective ones, much later.

I think this is a "stages of moral development(1)" thing. In post-conventional levels of development, all tools would be valued for their strengths. We wouldn't denigrate a tool for belonging to a class of tools.

1 - with apologies to Kohlberg

Yeah, I had a Cherokee and knew that the road out from my house flooded every 3 or 4 years. When if finally did ... the police got there first and blockaded it. I had to drive around anyway.

That was funny, I cussed for the next few miles.

As a guy with a chem degree, I prefer Metric in the lab, and Imperial (US) in the kitchen or workshop. It isn't really that hard to shift gears/units for your task.

Even better is when you learn to cook or build without measurement, just transferring sizes directly. See James Krenov on building a cabinet.

Went camping this week. Left my Prius behind, took my girlfriend's 4x4 up the forest service road to the campground ... found 3 Prius there ahead of me.

We need less car than we think we do.

I enjoyed this review from 2012, but in 2014 we are past a 2013 "MOOC backlash" and live in an era where lines are well drawn. There are still some educators committed to true distance learning, but some also who have circled the wagons and who decry such "solutionist" thinking.

The really sad thing is that the current battle isn't just about this or that "poor" offering in the present, it is against the whole effort. Do you have an idea for a better way to run distance learning? You too are a "solutionist" and have enemies in place.

I always considered it a mild anti-theft measure. "Hey, that's my ..."

[meaning sticker combos should be pseudo unique]

I personally (redundantly) am an android/linux user, but I perceive that iPhone and iPad are accepted in rich and powerful circles, and are precisely the market for an IBM effort.

I don't think IBM wants to sell _both_ a corporate data initiative and a new phone at the same time.

thank you, noted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJUhlRoBL8M

You know, companies with the size and wealth of MS sometimes employ people just to have them NOT innovating elsewhere. Consider 18K smart people freed of that as the bright side.

While I defend "disruption" as a thing, that happens sometimes, I don't think this is it.

What Apple and IBM have really done is join an ongoing movement, something that has been going on for years. People already have these iPhones in their pockets, these iPads on their desks, and they very naturally have been integrating them with their life-and-business processes.

Sure, Google would love to have the IOS cache, but this deal more reinforces IOS market dominance than "disrupts" it, the leader.

Should karma be an ephemeral thing? Should it age off in a week or so?

There could be a downside to the early entrants benefit. Sure, you can explore new territory and carve out a huge position, but you become a "Land Barron" in a sense, and no friend of later "squatters." (Relatedly, Bitcoin)

("sure I've got 20000 points, but they guy just climbing from 100 to 200 is a repwhore")

Are there too many bad questions?

Why not the Google answer, which is that search brings you "good" no matter how much "bad" there is?

The striking thing for me was to Google a few questions in a row, to find good answers on SO, and then to see that each one was also closed/rejected for some reason. It was strange to see that the answers to these questions all had high ratings, but the question was closed anyway.

I guess it's a vision opposite of the internet itself. Rather than "find one of a million pages that work for me" it is "there should only be one."

(In the spirit of the internet, perhaps if a question cannot be found by a simple search on SO, that IS a reason to ask again, and to fill the search slot.)

Curious on the "hybrid progeny have wildly different/non-uniform offspring." I bought some "Big Thai Hybrid" chilies because that's what the store had (rather than just regular Thai chilies). Any idea how far offspring will diverge? I'd imagine that if I saved seed I'd get something much like a Thai chili ...

Update: Go ahead, save seeds from your hybrid tomatoes!

http://blog.arrowheadalpines.com/2011/08/go-ahead-save-seeds...

As logfromblammo notes, this is a very old thing. Perhaps as old as agriculture itself.

That said, I see nothing wrong with the branding, as an education and promotion drive. If it gets more gardens in, all the better.

(I try to beat the "input costs" with my home container drip system, and not abuse the planet by growing $400 vanity tomatoes. Recycle, reuse, buy on closeout.)

In many older parts of California you can rent an apartment over a garage. Great system. Revenue for the home owner, good environment for the renter, distributed rentals. Of course that was then, right? When people talk about rentals versus homes now they have a mental image shaped by very strong zoning. That is the apartment strip, this is the single home suburb.

Compare to Japan, Tokyo in particular, with tiny homes and tiny apartments pushed into every nook and cranny.

Why do our costs keep rising? Because we have structured it that way, for the apartment owner and for uniform suburban living.

1. We have a currency without government! 2. We were robbed, and will now contact the government.

I am not a nutritionist or a biochemist, but as a guy with an old BS Chem and a general knowledge, it does not surprise me to hear (again) that we are not all bomb calorimeters. We have long known that our metabolic pathways are neither uniform nor universal. There is no surprise there. When you eat fat, carbohydrate, or cellulose, different things happen.

Thus, I think the extreme "calories is calories" argument is anti-scientific.

Given the real complexity, I personally favor a varied and omnivorous diet, avoiding things both unnatural in their manufacture but also unnatural in their availability. A diet high in sugar is not natural. It would be very surprising if evolution and the evolution of our accompanying microbiome prepared us for it.

If you believe in technological plateaus ... it's possible that ReactOS has all the time in the world.

I have a related suspicion ... that Google made the deal in part because they believe Lenovo will run Motorola well, with goals compatible to Google and Android.

I don't think Google was ever into Motorola to make it pay. They were there for strategy, and Lenovo can do that too.

(Don't forget that Lenovo just bought IBM's x86 server business, and so is "going big.")

Update, sorry for the bad link http://www.pcworld.com/article/2090680/lenovo-agrees-to-buy-...

Once, as a relative UNIX newbie, I "cleaned up" a Sun box, until I had moved things I needed for boot off the boot partition. I got it all back, manually mounting partitions, and etc. but I was certainly in a cold sweat for about 15 minutes.

Perhaps the only lesson is "slow down."

But don't most people here, at HN, want that right to decide their own openness? I mean, does everyone here plan to do a web startup and then produce a tarball of [their] full work? A full DB API?

I understand that we all, or most of us, have contributed to free or open projects, but I thought the pure-souls, without a little "IP" one way or another, were very rare.

This is a digression, but it is slightly more complicated. The top US software companies, by market cap, all use FSF tools, but then in turn decide their own separate levels of openness. Entrepreneurs here will use FSF tools, and then decide how far to open their own kimonos. The original FSF intent, that copyleft would provide contagion to a truly open world seems actually stalled. Apologies for the digression.

So, I was at the park watching soccer. My friend introduces me to a "world famous neurosurgeon." We all talk and he says that he'd interested in giving her son (now in CS) an internship, and then something about not trusting a programmer over 40.

Now, the kicker is that the neurosurgeon is in his 60s.

I think he missed the implication that if programmers must stop by 40, but neurosurgeons can keep going and keep up into their 60s ... neurosurgery is easier than programming?

(I don't doubt that in all fields there are people who slack off, but also in all fields there are smart people who keep on learning. It is very sad that 50's engineers are exculded on the assumption that they are slackers.)

"AMD says Kaveri has 2.4 billion transistors, or basic building blocks of electronics, and 47 percent of them are aimed at better, high-end graphics."

This sentence would have been so much better off if they'd just punted on the weak explanation of "transistor" and left it to anyone unsure to look it up.

"that more money makes you happier does not mean that any amount of money can make you as happy as you want"

And "more money" is not always the easiest or most available "life hack."

In a literal sense we have gold coins. I guess it's interesting that governments mint and sell them for a thin premium on bullion prices. And then, yeah, I'm sure there are things you could buy with a pocket full of Krugerrands. Really though, governments are giving you this opportunity to go off their currency standard. If you want to keep part of your wealth, near-cash, in gold coins, you don't have to use American Eagles to do it.