cweiss

"it's clearly none of Dropbox's business"

Actually, it's a core piece of Dropbox's business. One of the ways they save on storage is by comparing hashes of files (or even parts of files - how many bits of any two JPG or DOC files are identical?) being stored and, if identical, only store one copy of the file. That and they explain in plain english that they're allowed to do that. That they explicitly say they do as much in their TOS puts the onus on the user to not store anything they're concerned about the privacy of on Dropbox's servers.

Here's the thing, if FB really wanted to do the 'courtside seats' thing, they should have licensed being able to stream the feeds through the FB web site - In terms of revenue stream, they'd make a boatload more $$ off of charging for that than they will by attaching it to a $1500 piece of headgear that you're not going get away with slipping on in your office to sneak a quick game.

What's Viaweb?

This speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of the two products. Oculus Rift is about bringing hyper-immersive 3D to the wearer, Google Glass is about moving the Google interface to the eyeball. It's like comparing a 4k TV to a Chromebook. Both are outstanding products, but there's little actual value-proposition overlap. I would hate to think that the Facebook board was equally ignorant of the differences and didn't just buy into "Google has a thing for the face, we need a thing for the face! We're Facebook after all!"

I'm less worried about folks being turned off of VR - That Oculus has such great traction means that other big tech manufacturers won't be too far behind emulating their display technology and coming out with competing products at lower pricing than the VR. At least one of them will actually be decent enough to sell well.

Also, WhatsApp replaced something that many people hated on several levels - Ridiculously overpriced, phone company sponsored text messaging. Rift combats no such villain.

I noticed that as well - One wonders what % of that expenditure is on improving R&D processes to lower costs, assuming that most of that cost is on non-renewable hardware modeling (hurling one-off test cars at brick walls and such). Also, is racing considered part of the R&D budget?

Now that it's been a week, would you be willing to post a followup? What did you learn? How's the ROI? Any surprises?

"No one cares that you turn off your lights at 9:43, or that you are at slightly more risk for diabetes. At least not advertisers..."

Seriously? Lifestyle information is a gold mine for advertisers. If someone is diabetic, they need drugs, so I'm sure going to serve up more pharmaceutical ads (and those pay very well). If they're running the heater, they're almost certainly in the market for a jacket, blanket, or similar. Suddenly using "auto away" for stretches at a time? I bet they're traveling for work, and could use some luggage or a vacation to throw mileage points at.

Waay more profitable than just throwing random crap out there and seeing what sticks.

+1 on this. Beyond Compare is one of the few reasons I keep a Windows VM around these days, it's just that damn good.

Wouldn't the better analogy be "pervasive in the way MySpace was X years ago and America Online was, X years before that"? The question is, what's going to replace it? The "instant messaging" market is too fragmented right now (though one could argue the social network space was just as fragmented before FB exploded). SMS has no fundamental single 'owner' to drive change/feature improvements.

For VIM n00bs, care to explain what these do/why you use them?

Speaking from experience - This isn't nearly as foolproof as one would hope. I used that process to back up my music collection in the early days and have discovered that optical media/drives aren't nearly as durable or compatible as one would hope. Years later, I'd found a large portion of my collection was unreadable by all but the original drive that wrote them. And several of the disks have suffered aging failures.

See also tinyduino: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kenburns/tinyduino-the-t... smaller, but less accessible hardware interface.

I map it to both - quick tap for ESC and hold for Ctrl. http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/#cont...

Is there a workflow that would allow you to import the images via "Camera Upload" functionality to allow for additional free space?

Don't let that stop you - This book is far more about thinking about how to hack than it is about actually hacking the XBox. The lessons learned here apply far wider than Microsoft's game machine and console hacking in general. I bought this in dead-tree form many years ago and it's one of the few tech books that's managed to survive the several "great purges" since then.

The idea behind NextDoor is that you are invited via snail-mail so you have verified neighbors. You need a "seed" person in a neighborhood to sign up and then sign up some neighbors. It's real power is in community neighborhoods (gated communities, condo/townhome complexes). I found it to be a great tool to find out what's going on with the neighbors and a far more trustable marketplace than Craigslist for buying/selling items. However, if your living area isn't as "community-oriented", getting any sort of traction can be difficult. As it's entirely crowdsourced, if it's not in an area, it's because nobody's signed up to be a "seed" and invited neighbors, as opposed to NextDoor themselves not providing infrastructure/data.

Are you sure? That seems counter-intuitive. If I were a pro gamer (and were allowed), I'd sure bring the mouse I was most comfortable with.

> Power is not free. An electric vehicle still needs to get power from somewhere and that power requires all the normal transmission infrastructure.

My understanding is that Tesla's new SuperCharger stations are solar based, charging a a local battery that's used to supply customer Teslas, then feeding any excess back into the grid, making it a "negative carbon footprint" source.

My understanding is that the big issue is that e-Ink displays have a miserably slow pixel update time. The new Kindle Paperwhite is on the order of 450ms whereas the average LCD display is in the single digit ms range. Great for static text, but horrid for anything real-time.

For what it's worth, most generic budget cube work surfaces are essentially adjustable shelves. With a little effort, you can unscrew the surface, move the shelf brackets up a few notches, and screw the desk surface back on. I've done that at my work place. We're a little 'loose' on that sort of thing, so permission wasn't required. I just went and did it one evening. It was more about social acceptance than actual policy.