I purchase a lot of the same materials to incorporate into my products. So I just find parts I like, then just buy direct from suppliers. Cheaper, direct relationship. Way to go for a small business like mine.

Iâ(TM)ve thought about selling through Amazon but seems like they just keep finding new ways to screw over sellers.

I have environmental sensors based on arduino pro mini and XBee radios (802.15). These radios connect with the Pi, which acts as a gateway to the Internet. Using this system, I monitor daily tree growth.

Am I the only one, only programmer, who thinks, jeez, just you know, "update hits set hits = hits * 1.0012;"?

How do we know those numbers are legit? Certainly, assessing facebook traffic numbers/members is as difficult to do as determining unemployment numbers. Is it so hard to believe that facebook would over-inflate it's numbers to compensate for the bad press and leaving members? As far as I know, there is no mechanism to verify the numbers they put out. And there seems to be a TON of money to be made based on these numbers.

Am I wrong?

It's the same old story as MS right? I mean, you feel like you dominate a market so you start throwing your weight around. You want programmers to be MS programmers. That was their strategies, go after the coders as they are the ones who make the decisions. For every big software shop that dictates the technology, there are a hundred one man shows where the coder is selecting his own stack. Whether its putting out and steering people to your own language or own browser or whatever, its a move that betrays your sense of dominance and power. What's nutty is that it just doesn't work. Google is not evil until they are in the driver seat and screw everybody.

It also works the other way. kids are less likely to argue with stupid ideas coming down from the top. Older developers know where shifty decisions end up to the annoyance of the boss.

I second this. Sometimes when I fire up paperboy or zelda, I find it hard to believe it still works.

My school has very small desktops and I needed a laptop that I could balance on a small surface. I finally ended up with the small macbook air as the surface's keyboard does not support the computer. If I always had access to a big flat surface that would be one thing but you can't use that on your knee!

I've recently started school and shopped around for a small device that would allow me to take notes in class. It came down to the Mac Book Air and the Surface Pro 2. Ultimately, I realized that there was no way the Surface would balance on those half desks in the lecture halls of my school. I decided I needed a keyboard that would support the screen. The Surface just can't do that. The designers assume you will be sitting a full desk.

If the builder didn't use mortar to hold the bricks together, he's going to be done faster, spending less time, than had he used it. So imagine if the wall was built correctly. We'll say that this represents 100% of the needed programming time. If I throw some crappy wall together quickly, most likely because my boss is saying, "Don't worry, you can come back and put the mortar in later once we are keeping the bears out", I've saved myself, say, 30% of those coding hours. Now the wall is falling apart, bears are all over the place, and someone is saying it was a poorly built wall with bugs. In reality, it was a poorly built wall on the cheap.
Of course now you have the job of sticking mortar into a built wall which sucks and is gonna cost you a lot more.
Best solution, fire that guy, hire someone else who is going to come in, tell you the last guy sucked and he's going to do it right and will just build another wall around the existing wall.

I've used Linux for a very very long time. I've suffered through hardware compatibility issues, sudden changes in software stacks, everything we've all gone through. Then Ubuntu came out and things seemed to stabilize. I was a happy camper. Then they decided to replace the gui with something I didn't like and all. KDE is really ugly and I don't like it either. I hate that stupid wallet. Well, I got a new laptop and of course, step number 1 was to wipe the drive and put on some distro. But I didn't burn it yet and put it off. It's been a year now and I have to say, evilness aside, Windows 8.1 is fine. I just work. Netbeans, mysql workbench, putty they work fine, no problems. (I'm a LAMP developer).
I get the whole Windows sucks thing, I just think that if the Linux world is going back to the days of big uncertainty, I'll take a little stability.

Sit them in front of a nice clean virtual machine and tell them to get a basic PHP page up and running. They have to install apache/php/mysql. If you want to cut down on the time, download the stuff first. Should take about 20 minutes.

This trend of supplying every person with a programmable device packed full of sensors could very well be the beginnings of mainstream robotics. I mean sure, an iphone or samsung that sports bada may not look like Asimo, but it's certainly gaining the environmental sensing capabilities. Imagine one day driving up to a restaurant, docking your phone, and having it valet your car. Dock into your lawn mower and have it cut your grass... Plug it into a multi-purpose robotic platform and have it make you tea. With the sensing and computational power that's increasing in sophistication, we are watching robot brains grow in our pants pockets.

the sell-out?

They've been watching our tv and listening to our news for a while now...how about we greet them with, "Let me explain..."

Thanks for writing this.