farmerbuzz

The original author appears to be using an iPhone for prototyping, and clearly states that it is the "tablet form factor" that is making things so interesting. Even if they were using an iPhone there would be no point to putting the software on the app store as it would be useless without the appropriate hardware. (Edit: Just noticed author's latest post that yes they will distribute through the app store and sell an accessory. I stand corrected.)

In general, yes it is a bad idea to use consumer technology for devices with the sort of lifetime you find in the medical industry (often up to 10 years). Because of the high levels of regulation and testing, its not cheap to swap out a component for something equivalent when a manufacturer stops producing the one you originally designed and tested your system with.

There is a difference between competing in a business environment and limiting what your customers can do with your product. Although competition may indirectly determine what customers can do (by destroying businesses that may have created software they wanted) it is different from directly controlling what customers can do the way Apple does.

Another idea is to make things so confusing that the customer is no longer sure what they're getting. Just name a managed fund something confusing that makes it seem like an index fund (but still include all the fees like a managed fund).

The technology behind it seems to have made it into Google Docs (real time collaborative editing). There are plenty of people using Google Docs.

If its anything like the Archos 7 it will have a resistive touchscreen and a less powerful CPU, which probably explains the price difference. Android is painful to use with a resistive touchscreen because of all the swiping gestures and the pressure needed when using a resistive touchscreen.

Not to mention speech to text on Google Voice (usually laughable results) and translation (works a bit better, but breaks down hilariously e.g. http://groups.google.com/group/shibboleth-users/browse_threa... ).

In the US, medical devices are regulated by the FDA. When it comes to using 3rd party software, the company manufacturing the device has the responsibility to ensure any 3rd party components function correctly. Its unrealistic to impose regulations on every piece of software that is written "just in case". It is far more practical to put the responsibility on the company doing the integration and selling the device.

Here is the guidance from the FDA on off-the-shelf software: http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidanc...

Averages can be skewed by outliers. I imagine there are quite a few outliers in San Francisco using Mint.

Differential equations are great for modeling these sorts of problems. http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/education/calc-init/population/

Apple's "There's an App for that" marketing is certainly demonstrating the features and capability of the iPhone, but if you think back to the iPod it had far fewer features than a lot of other players (no fm radio, no recording, fewer buttons) and still tremendously outsold everything else on the market. The ads showed people dancing around listening to music, which could have just as easily been used as a product demo for any other music player.

I wonder if it was that they got the few features they chose to implement so right that all the other players seemed broken (most notably integrating with the biggest online music store on the planet). It could also have something to do with the feature of being stylish.

I would love to see a video demonstration of the answer (my intuition was apparently wrong which would make a video that much more entertaining).

Although it looks like that is a Google ad, so maybe they didn't intend to accept it?

Wow. Nevermind then!

Btw, this is awesome: http://ww.com/dilliecam

Perhaps its not that they're threatened by marijuana but disinclined to accept controversial and divisive advertising?

Do you have some evidence to support this?

Check out this other story about Jobs: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

I understand you probably did not have this story in mind when you made your comment, but he sounds like a jerk to me.

What software did you use for this? I have tried a few cookie blocking extensions for Firefox but haven't found a good one.

Also I notice you say "Back when I experimented.." -- was there a reason it didn't work out in the end?

Google Docs already has the most important feature from Google Wave (allow multiple people to edit the same document simultaneously). Wave's mission statement was a bit grandiose -- it should never have been about replacing email completely, the killer app is real time collaborative editing.

Herd effects, and company policies. Americans != programmers at startups.

I wonder if the outrage over this is part of the same trend described in the 20-somethings article ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614280 ). If kids are more sheltered, then it would make sense that it takes longer for them to "grow up" and start making decisions of their own. It could also explain why the partying and debauchery is so crazy at American colleges (the first real taste of independence), although I can't honestly say I know what its like anywhere else.

Why is this comment not welcome here? I would like not to repeat my mistake in the future but I'm not sure what I did wrong.

Anything that can be learned via talking to people can be learned via Stack Overflow assuming you can communicate well using text (although it may get tagged with the feared Subjective tag).

I haven't used paypal via phone, but paypay via the web is free for person-to-person transfers as long as you mark the transfer as such. There is only a charge when transferring to a merchant.

Flux didn't change the appearance enough for me -- what I really want is to have light text on a dark background at night. One ugly hack is to use the Windows 7 magnifier tool to invert video. The colors are atrocious but you can pretend they are neon lights for night mode ;)

Check out hacker news daily: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ (top 10 stories per day)

The end goal is probably to get into google results. There may be an advantage against something like Yahoo Answers by having a committed community for a particular topic and drawing experts to that community (haven't seen much expertise on Yahoo Answers beyond what you could find with basic google skills).

They're at least trying to address this issue by requiring substantial commitment up front before building out a site: http://area51.stackexchange.com/ . Whether the thresholds they've chosen will work remains to be seen but they at least know about the issue.

Are you using the site for reputation or to spread knowledge? If its the former then you're welcome to leave, if its the latter then why do you care about reputation?

Contrarian? Its humor, not philosophy. Lighten up.