zenlinux

I upgraded to the Nexus 4 after owning a Galaxy Nexus and I have to say I feel mixed about the changes. As an Android device, the N4 is definitely faster and nicer to use. But as a phone, I found two important issues were a step back - the max volume of the earpiece and the strength of the vibration. The latter, in particular, is so weak on the N4 that I usually miss texts and other notifications. Instead I get to be yet another obnoxious person with a loud ringtone to avoid missing calls and texts. :(

If the board doesn't meet your requirements, then don't use it. The MinnowBoard is part of an ecosystem of boards that offer different feature sets at different prices. One differentiator the MinnowBoard has is that its SATA and Gigabit ethernet are powered by PCIexpress, so you're definitely going to see performance reflect that. Likewise, we offer PCIe lanes through our expansion connector, so the MinnowBoard could be interfaced with high-speed hardware (think FPGAs) for all sorts of interesting applications.

I find the comparisons of MinnowBoard with ultra low-cost embedded boards like RasberryPi to be pretty silly. The MinnowBoard is not Intel's version of a RasberyPi. The media may play this up just to generate conflict and to set up a straw man comparison, but I hope people are capable of seeing through that.

Project member here. I was disappointed with the way the PCWorld article described it as an "open source PC". MinnowBoard is really an open hardware embedded platform. If you're looking for a small form factor PC, the NUC is definitely the way to go. MinnowBoard is for embedded applications or product development where interfacing with custom hardware (whether I2C sensors, or custom FPGAs through PCIe, etc) is needed.

Project member here. The hardware design files will be released in about a week.

EPIC is a reputable organization, and have filed a federal lawsuit to help stop this practice. I just sent them a donation, and encourage others to do the same.

When I moved to Portland, OR I was amazed with how social the tech community is here. Informal coding gatherings spring up regularly throughout the city, and there are two reliable "pdx hackathon" nights you can show up and hack on interesting projects with interesting people.

http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-weekly-hackathon

Google has a lot more at stake than just profits from this particular phone. They are interested in establishing the Android platform as a major player on smart phone devices, and are coming into the game with a pretty weak position given Apple's current dominance. To be able to make headway into the market they need every advantage they can get, and neutralizing Nokia's N900 offering would help prevent another player from complicating the market for them.

Not to mention at that price they'd be dealing Apple a major blow. I figure they have the cash, why not use it for something like this. I admit this is all idle speculation on my part, and that Google may or may not have a lot at stake in the success of Andriod.

Drat. If the earlier rumors I had heard were true (unlocked phone for $199), I was thinking they were committing to a smart strategy to decimate Nokia and their N900 phone. Guess that's not the case.

I know for this particular example the problem is tightly related to California's state budget problems, but the astronomical increase in the cost of a college education over the past generation drives me nuts.

It seems like this is one area where market forces can't do their job, because almost no one seems willing to forgo paying the exorbitant price of a college education, so there seem to be no pressures for prices to decline or remain stable. Instead we've changed the culture so most of this generation starts their working lives with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. If you're not willing to put up with this, you could very well be shutting yourself out of the middle class. It's not right.

I live in Portland, and bikes are huge here. The most common complaint I've heard about electric bicycles is that they enable new, relatively unskilled riders to wreak havoc in heavy bike-traffic situations. This mostly involves complaints of passing too close to other riders.

http://bikeportland.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2995

This really isn't a problem with electric bicycles themselves, but with rider education.

I will also say there is definitely a sense of smugness from some riders against electric bicycles, but I'd say there are at least as many people who support the concept and want to see more people out on bikes.

This article raises the question of how to balance one's life as a technologist or someone immersed in technology. I thought I'd share one tip of something I do. I only own a prepaid cell phone, and I keep it off most of the time unless I'm expecting a phone call. This allows me to have it for emergencies and to sync up when meeting people at bars and whatnot on weekends. But I can avoid the downsides of being constantly interrupted or getting involved in the obsessive culture many people seem to have with their cell phones (constantly texting or talking when they're on the bus or in lines).

I use computers and the internet most hours of most days, and I have plenty of offline activities and social groups I am involved in. If taking a weekend day off away from your email to go hiking is something you know you'll be "punished" for when you return (in terms of email load or friends'/employers' expectations), then it may be time to work out a plan to reduce your online commitments.

Same here - I waste a lot of time with the internet, including watching some TV online.

It's said that alcoholics and drug addicts have a clear path to getting clean - completely cut out the addiction from your life. But people who have problems over-eating can't make as simple a change to solve their problem. After all, you need to eat to live.

The internet is kind of like that for me - it's something I need to do work on and learn from, but is something I frequently over-use.

I was surprised by the difference in obesity rates between the US and Canada. Both have similar eating time values, and I generally consider them culturally and economically pretty similar. But still Canada's obesity rates are much lower than in the US.

I'm a big fan of the podcasts at zencast.org. Particularly those by Gil Fronsdal. He is a Vipassana teacher and gives talks in a very humble, down to earth manner.

As a somewhat heavy guy (230 lbs), I've found that some of the knockoff office chairs you can get cheaply ($100 or less) from Staples/Office Max/etc can fail in the pneumatic lift system. In fact many chairs at the above retailers have a tag suggesting a maximum weight limit of 200 lbs.

I bought this one a few years ago and it's still holding up perfectly. It has plenty of adjustments to it:

http://www.ergonomichome.com/zmeofch.html

If you liked this article you'll probably also enjoy this interview with Reid on the VentureVoice podcast: http://www.venturevoice.com/2006/11/vv_show_40_reid_hoffman_...

Man I miss the times when VV had new interviews coming out every couple of weeks. They were consistently very high quality and insightful.

Working for justice can also involve accepting compromises along the way to one's goal.

This still seems pretty counter-intuitive to me. I would think that large businesses would be preferred over smaller ones in a down economy, because clients/customers would be worried that small shops could go under. Likewise, larger businesses would feel a greater urgency to spend more personal time with clients/customers to avoid losing them.

Thanks for sharing and being open about all the problems you encountered. Launching an application is definitely not easy, nothing takes as long as you hope it will (even if you pad for unexpected problems) and it's really hard to declare something "done." Congrats on your launch.

You'd think after seeing this thing day after day the video taper would want to pick up a tripod?

I'm an avid cyclist and I can sunburn easily if I don't use sunblock. I would say that surfers are more likely to burn (and do so more quickly) simply because beaches don't have much shade. While riding a bicycle you can often duck into tree shadows during a ride.

Some cyclists do use long-sleeve summer jerseys, but they're in the minority. Short sleeve and sleeveless jerseys are more popular because they are cooler.

You need to have something really compelling - a product that really excites people and/or a high liklihood of success in the near future.

I know someone who is about to start some sw development work for a local startup for equity. The company is getting ready to sell their first product, and he told me that his plan is to try working for them for eight weeks and see if they can actually sell their product. If not, he's planning to quit. He's been totally up-front about this with the founders and they're ok with that. So a creative strategy like that might work.

I haven't noticed too much slowness lately...but I am guessing the web application's user sessions have been reset a few times over the past two days, as I keep having to log in even though my browser cookies are enabled correctly.

I don't know about you, but I'm counting the hours until April 9.

Thus speaketh the kernel source:

The "anticipatory" I/O scheduler is the default disk scheduler. It is generally a good choice for most environments, but is quite large and complex when compared to the deadline I/O scheduler, it can also be slower in some cases especially some database loads.

The deadline I/O scheduler is simple and compact, and is often as good as the anticipatory I/O scheduler, and in some database workloads, better. ...

The CFQ I/O scheduler tries to distribute bandwidth equally among all processes in the system. It should provide a fair working environment, suitable for desktop systems.

Yikes. I just signed up for an Advanta business credit card last week, and received my notice that I was approved. I'm not planning to take out any cash advances using the card. Has anyone else had good/bad experience with this company?

Geoffrey Grosenbach of the Ruby on Rails podcast interviewed this author, John Medina, in the following two podcasts:

http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/john-medi...

http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/john-medi...

Get some exercise and take care of yourself (probably in ways you neglected while doing the startup). When you can internalize the fact that failure is not a bad thing (as long as you learn from it), it will become easier to deal with.

Finally, be proud of the fact that you ventured out and took some risks. Life isn't meant to be spent hiding from potential failures.

I love Designing the Obvious - it's a great book on interface design and usability, and focuses on web applications. Very relevant to this community.

I discovered VirtualBox a few months ago and am now migrating to it away from VMWare Workstation. It's stable and performs well.

It also offers the Parallels-like feature which allows you to run application windows from your VM in your host desktop environment. This is very handy for doing cross-browser web app testing, where you can (for example) put a Win IE7 browser window right next to your Linux Firefox one to compare things side by side.