It looks like a poor man's version of a Nest except it costs $50 more and has to be purchased through a contractor. The distinguishing feature that they are touting (the geo-fencing capability) is not something I would even want. I don't want an app on my phone sending constant updates to Honeywell on exactly where I am located. This seems like an established company trying to play catch-up to an unanticipated change in their market and doing a poor job.
Interesting parallels between this story and the prologue of the excellent book Fortune's Formula. In the early 1900's a former Western Union employee became rich by setting up a wire service for bookies. He hired men to watch the horse races and flash the winner in code to a nearby building using a mirror . Someone in that building would wire the results to bookies who paid for the service. This prevented bookies from taking bets on completed races. Of course if someone tried to bet on a losing horse, the bookies would take that bet anyway.
When this first debuted, my grandfather (born in 1917) thought that they had a piece of nylon material that was connected between the first down markers on the sidelines. That's when you know a technology is good. It's so seamless that it never occurs to a layman that it might even be possible.
Yes, I distinctly remember trying to convince my Mom in 1992 that paying $75 for the SNES version of Street Fighter II was worth the money. That was more than 20 years ago and it's still expensive for a game by today's standards.
There are a wide range of modules in the Qt library including an OpenGL library if you want to do 3D games. I would say that Qt is strongest in doing basic apps with standard components like buttons, images, sliders, etc. since there is a large built-in library of Qt widgets to use. The down sides are that your apps may not look 100% native and the Qt libraries add a few MB of bloat to your app size.
I would recommend developing your code base using Qt, which will export to Android and iOS. I think Windows Phone will be supported in the future, but has not been fully released yet. Qt is open source and free to use under LGPL.
I can imagine a future where energy is priced in real time. The only reason it hasn't been done so far is that it wasn't technically practical until recently. Imagine if you could tell your Nest to optimize the comfort of your house and keep it below a projected budget. If battery technology progresses, the Nest could even one day store energy at low points and use the battery at more expensive times.
Interesting. I guess Google is pushing domain owners to buy a Google Apps account instead of just using mail forwarding. I've been forwarding my personal domain to my Gmail account for almost 10 years now and only pay for the cost of the domain renewal. I wonder if you will be able to bypass this by creating a filter to move all e-mails put in the "External" folder back into your inbox.
Speaking from experience, my advice is to use your job title to land a better paying job at a different company and don't look back. It sounds like your predecessor figured it out. Now it's time for you to do so too. Don't negotiate a new deal at your current company. Take the new offer and focus your efforts there. It can be scary to leave a role you are comfortable in, but it's the step you need to take to grow your career. A $50k/year salary increase is a lot of money. Even after taxes, that alone would cover the mortgage payments on a nice house in many parts of the country.
Saying the company is on the verge of growth is common tactic that people like your boss use. It plays into the same psychological effects that cause people to overvalue things that they own. The pain of missing out on something seems greater than the upside of selling, even if you logically know it's not true. The truth is that if your boss is cheap and entitled, he will be that way even more so when the company is more successful. Don't be surprised if he starts doing things like giving himself a generous salary increase or investing in capital equipment before profits are computed. Also 1% of profits is likely worthless if he cashes out and sells the company (notice he didn't offer you true equity). Don't let that mirage fool you into getting the paid what you are worth in the market.
I am interested in parallel computation and computer architectures and thought it would be fun to experiment with. I have worked on some projects developing signal processing algorithms for large GPU arrays and I want to see how the Parallela compares. I plan on implementing a real time audio watermarking algorithm and some image/video processing algorithms.
I'm looking forward to getting mine. I ordered it back in October and they recently said the Zynq-2010 based boards would be shipped in mid-May. I wish they would have been more up front about the delays. There were long periods where there was no communication from the company. I didn't order through Kickstarter but directly from Adapteva.
It will be interesting to see how Colbert structures his new show. Will he still play the sort of character he plays on the Colbert Report or will he be more like his normal self? I suspect it will be somewhere in between. He will have to tone down the political aspects of his satire, but he will still use a bombastic personality style as a source of humor.
If anyone can pull it off though, it's Stephen Colbert. When I first heard about the Colbert Report I thought "Oh that will be a fun little experiment after The Daily Show, but it will get tiresome after a few months". But he has managed to keep an audience for years. He's very smart and seems to nail the right tone in every circumstance. Listen to his talk at the recent RSA conference as an example. His jokes have some bite to them but he manages to find a good balance between being not being too mean and not being too conciliatory.
I thought that at first too, but it would actually be a funny plot development if someone later points out that information theory dictates that the claims are impossible. Then the main character would receive more VC funding to pivot into a completely different but even more ridiculous idea.
I would take the option to go to UF for free. Maybe it's more theoretical than you want but you might find you like it. Some of my favorite engineering classes were ones I knew nothing about before college. Also Florida is a pretty good school. I wouldn't sell it short.
For most employers, there is little difference between Florida and USC. All things being equal, I think just about every one of them would hire a UF grad with a few interesting open source projects over a USC grad without a Github account. Definitely not worth the extra tuition money in my opinion. Try Florida for a year and transfer if you don't like it.
I've fallen into this trap myself and understand where you are coming from. You get so burnt out on your current job that you start to treat every job interview as a potential relief from this burden in your life. What happens though is that you start to sound desperate when interviewing. No one wants to hire a desperate person. Even if you are the most qualified candidate, if you give off the wrong vibe it is difficult to get hired.
My advice is to stop focusing on the outcome of interviews and just focus on what you can control in the process. Try to do a few things each week that will make you seem like a better candidate than you were last week. Treat it like a game where you are leveling up during each round. Go back and review interview questions that you didn't answer well and rehearse what you would say the next time. Put together some material that you can show to someone interviewing you that helps guide the conversation towards your strong points. Keep an open mind and talk to people in your industry. Making it trough several rounds with Google means you are a strong candidate. If you keep up with the process, you'll start getting job offers.
I don't find the recommendations very useful either. Maybe the secret value of the recommendation engine for Netflix is evaluating movies outside of their catalog. When considering how much to pay for the streaming rights to a movie, they can use the recommendation engine to determine how well received it would be by their membership and bid accordingly.
If it's only 20 students, maybe just ask them to come by your office during office hours. Most of my professors would just post grades in the hallway using student IDs, but a few did it this way. It gives you a chance to connect with the students and give some personal feedback. At the graduate level this can be helpful not only for them, but also for you since these students are people you will likely work with later in industry and academia.
If you are not in your office much, then I would just offer the GPG option. Sending 20 e-mails will not take very long. Out of the 20 students, I bet only half of them get their act together and e-mail you a key, so it's really more like 10 emails that you would need to send.
I stopped following accounts like this because of their promotion tactics. They retweet stuff from other accounts and then delete it 15 minutes later. If you look at the feed before subscribing, it looks like it is a bunch of interesting photos. Once you start following them, you see these lower quality retweets at the top of your feed that are deleted as soon as they start to get pushed down on subscriber timelines.
I've experienced that too where a few recruiters bombard my inbox with low quality jobs ("Entry-level Java .NET developer needed immediately for six week contract in Frostbite Falls, MN! Up to $40/hr. DOE!"). I just use Gmail to filter those messages into the trash. Protip: Spammy recruiters hate it when you politely decline in response to a LinkedIn message because LinkedIn only charges them when someone replies.
I don't understand why it bothers people so much to be contacted by recruiters. I just send a quick reply that says "I appreciate the interest, but I'm not looking for new position right now.". It takes me about 10 seconds to type that sentence and hit send. It takes me such little time that I probably would not remember if they contacted me again a year later.
I'm always grateful to have skills that are in demand. I have friends in other fields that are not so lucky. No need to be the girl that tries to tell everyone how attractive she is by complaining about the attention she receives from guys.
Very nicely done. I've thought about doing something similar with college basketball players. My idea was to plot the locations of the players with a circle and make the radius of the circle tied to some sort of stat such as points scored or minutes played (or something more advanced like PER*minutes played). I think it would give some interesting insights into the recruiting footprint of each school. For football, there are enough players on each roster that highlighting the counties gives a similar view.
For anyone looking to an alternative method, there is a great open source Python script called Bagoma that incrementally backs up your Gmail account: http://bagoma.sourceforge.net/ . Each email is stored as an individual text file rather than the mbox format. I have backed up my account with it every few days for a couple of years and it works great. It will even restore your account to Gmail if you need to switch accounts or accidentally delete messages.
Does anyone know if this is actually the case? I have noticed something similar and I am curious about it. My new employer uses ADP for payroll, but does not use the online system. However I can still log in to the ADP online system using my account credentials from my old employer and get electronic copies of my new paystubs. I would like to know if my old employer has access to these paystubs.
I wish Google would open up an API for Google Now to developers. There are many custom notifications that I would love to add to my Now screen, but right now I am limited to the few that Google provides.
I'm still kicking myself because when I first heard about Bitcoin (in 2010) I was working on a research project that required three GPU clusters (each costing between $15k and $20k). The contract for the project was delayed and I seriously thought about "benchmarking" the hardware by Bitcoin mining until work on the project could continue. I never actually did any mining and the hardware sat idle in our lab for a couple of months. I don't have the stomach to calculate what the Bitcoins that hardware was capable of generating would be worth today.
Does this whole concept creep anyone else out? Forget downgrading to a three-star hotel, I would rather sleep in my car than share a private room with a stranger and I'm a younger guy who is generally not too concerned with my own safety. I would guess that only a very small percentage of women would be willing to do this.
Not only is safety a concern but also just personal habits as well. How do I know the person I'm sharing room with would not come back to the room drunk at 2:00 AM? Or spend over an hour occupying the bathroom in the morning? Would someone assigned to share a room with me mind if I stay up to watch the end of a basketball game on TV or that I snore?