dnewcome

The shadow imaging hack to avoid lenses reminds me of the single-pixel camera that produces the image via random sampling http://www.ece.rice.edu/~duarte/images/csCamera-SPMag-web.pd... I love this kind of hack for some reason.

I was kind of disappointed that it wasn't an active voltage-sensing solution. If it works well with all batteries (even cheap ones) then I guess it's a good hack though.

I was thinking that an ASCII output option would be appropriate, given the TAB file tradition.

Good for them. I thought that DabbleDB was really cool. Some of the things that they were doing with Seaside/Smalltalk were pretty out there. Eg, doing persistence by just persisting the entire Smalltalk VM image. Each customer got their own VM, which seems incredibly wasteful, but must have had tons of other benefits.

SQL Server licenses will get you there pretty quickly.

Thanks for the comments. It looks like Node.net should port to any of those Javascript implementations. The basic requirements are the ability to use functions as delegates for callbacks from the host platform and thread sync primitives to serialize access to the event dispatch queue.

I added RDF/XML and RDF JSON equivalent representations of the most complex example given in the readme. I'll hopefully add some more examples soon.

I tried this for a while. No matter how soft whatever you are kneeling on is the pressure is only bearable for 30 minute periods. It would work as part of a system in combination with standing and sitting though. Another thing that might work would be a kneeling chair that lets you support part of your bodyweight somewhere besides your knees.

Thanks for taking a look. Working with XML isn't that hard, true, but even just using jQuery to replace my normal XPath looping-and-plucking was really nice. This just takes things one step further by letting you express collections and recursive structures directly in JSON. Instead of writing a function per XML structure you'd like to parse, you can write a single JSON expression. This project is barely 50 lines of code I think, so it isn't really too much of an abomination yet.

The flip side of this is that a problem can haunt you such that you aren't willing to let it go. This is great when the problem aligns with your goals, but can be destructive in other cases.

Once I got to the part in the article where they started combining the terms like `Independently innovative' I thought that this is ripe for a `personal leadership brand generator' site.

Is there a reference implementation of this?

Interesting. I have only tried Rainbow, which is another Arc implementation for the JVM http://github.com/conanite/rainbow/blob/master/README

Good point. I just disabled snap previews.

Did you contract out the voice acting? The wizard performance during the player setup screens is pretty good.

"you can do it too" should be rephrased as "you can do it too if you have my kind of connections". Good advice for hustling things along, but only if you are already solidly "in the game".

I have an x200 which I recommend highly. It was quite a bit less expensive than the x300 when I bought it and more powerful. You don't get an optical drive or a trackpad, but that suits me perfectly. It's a full powered laptop with a great keyboard but is only 12.1" and 3lb.

Yeah, I touched on RDF in my post. I have some experience with it, but it is pretty complex for just data. I think it is powerful, but the thing that makes the web work is simplicity.

Nice description, but this is unfortunately a very simple case. Sometimes the firmware may be a 2-stage affair, with a bootloader that has a decryption key for the main firmware, which is encrypted. Something like that might take a logic analyzer connected to the data pins of the CPU to crack. If the CPU is a MCU that has embedded flash, then there may not be an easy way to snoop on the data bus. Also, while serial ports are common, it may be necessary to use JTAG, I2C, 1-wire, etc.

One other thing that struck me though, was that companies would be using consultants to reverse a competitor's product. I thought that was a landmine. Isn't it better to be able to claim `clean room' engineering to avoid lawsuits?

I think that Bill can do a world of good by sharing his thoughts via a blog like this. Assuming he is candid and fosters real communication, that is. Sections like 'What I'm thinking about/what I'm learning' is exactly the right attitude.

A lot of what makes comedy work in the first place is cultural capital. Shows like The Simpsons et al. make use of shared cultural experiences to be funny. I'd expect that I would miss most jokes for a long while if I went to another country, even if I spoke the language. I don't think that using cultural references diminishes Conan's humor at all.

However, if making a big transition in writing is necessary to make things work on the web, I can't imagine anyone being better suited than Conan and his team.

There should be a startup `oblique strategies' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies) app somewhere to give you a little something to reflect on when you are stuck. Brian Eno's original ones would probably work, but maybe there are better ones for startups?

Assuming he is being honest with the numbers, this is quite a disclosure in my opinion. It is certainly self-serving (as a company/product blog tends to be), but if you look beyond the back-patting there is some market insight here if you are following this space. (BTW I didn't downvote your post, you're entitled to feeling like there is nothing here, but I'm glad that I saw this article).

This idea seems analogous to the fallacy of web 'hits' in the 90s.

Conceptually I think that this is right on. I realized that what I want most is an adjunct to my normal computing environment such as an LCD graphics tablet for scribbling on. These tablets (say, by Wacom) are north of 1000USD, and they aren't even computers, just graphics tablets with an LCD screen. Maybe Apple will blow the status quo completely apart with their tablet, but it will have to be just mind-blowing in order to justify the Apple price. It's going to have to be more than a way to browse the net on the couch. I can do that well enough with my phone. It's going to have to change the way I think about tablet computing and maybe even touch computing altogether. In the 200USD price bracket though, all bets are off. A `good enough' way for me to hack little diagrams together makes it money well spent.

Hardware tends toward being general-purpose over time. It only makes sense to do dedicated hardware for things that aren't feasible to do using general-purpose silicon at the time (notable exceptions are for simpler things like ethernet controller chips, although if a general-purpose CPU is cheap enough to replace the chip, maybe that will change). As you pointed out, hardware speeds do get exponentially faster over time, which makes it less desirable to go to the effort of designing purpose-specific hardware.

The problem with current FPGA and CPLD solutions where you would be able to upload your own algorithms is that currently they operate much more slowly than mask manufactured ASICs. Not to say that couldn't change at some point, but even then the line between software and hardware is pretty blurry. Tools for designing correct implementations of an algorithm in hardware that take full advantage of being in hardware (very fine-grained concurrency, etc) are difficult to master.

Sorry, it is hard to hit these points in depth in a short post, but hardware has a set of concerns that are separate from software, and treating them as exactly equivalent is not really accurate, even if functionally and algorithmically they are the same.

It may be true that programmers don't strictly require the power, but interesting things become possible when you can afford to waste a lot of power. This should be evident by looking at Rails etc. In another 10 years who knows what will be possible by wasting another 100x processing power?

Thanks for the reply. I never would have posted it unbidden, but here is a link to my resume: http://newcome.wordpress.com/resume/

I don't think that your parable of the gun is quite analogous to sharing knowledge. Most knowledge is not zero-sum, and sharing the `background' thinking helps the sharer and the sharee both. At best, your analogy would have to be modified such that the gun was somehow replicated, giving them the ability to have a duel at least.

I got some beer brewing equipment. Now I won't have to use old water jugs and spill stuff all over the kitchen. Come to think of it, this may have been just as much a gift to my girlfriend as to me... (she got me the stuff)