Pebble was in debt, and Fitbit bought a lot of the IP and hired some of the Pebble staff. They specifically did not take the Pebble hardware. src

I'm not arguing that it sucked, but Fitbit's not a villain, here. A lot of people think that Fitbit "killed" Pebble, and that's not so. They aren't a white knight, either; they're keeping the Pebble servers still running for the their own reasons, but they shouldn't be blamed for what they didn't.

Fitbit didn't kill Pebble. One of the reasons that Pebble kept going back to Kickstarter was that their mass market sales through Best Buy did not meet their projections, and they were burning cash. Eight months before declaring insolvency and selling their assets to Fitbit (and others).

Pebble had to lay off 20% of its' staff in March src.

Unfortunately, they continued their downward slide, financially. The Pebble 2 was a hail Mary that didn't succeed.

The Time has a different type of screen and screen driver than the original Pebble, and isn't/wasn't susceptible to screen tearing.

My original Pebble started tearing about 16 months after I got it. Slowly, at first, and over the span of about 6 months it eventually was completely unusable. My Pebble Time is still going strong, with no issues.

I'm still running with my Pebble, and I agree.

The thing about the Pebble was that it wasn't really a "smartwatch", it was just a smarter watch. Sure, it had a built in pedometer, but for me, the killer app was the notifications.

I alternate between noisy and quiet environments. In the noisy one, I rarely heard my phone unless I had the ringer cranked up to 11, and often not even then. And then I'd be a in a quiet meeting room, get a call, and the ringer was deafening.

With the Pebble, I turn my ringer off, all the time. I get a vibration to let me know I have a call/text/appointment, and that's it.

That's really all the Pebble does (for me), and that's really all I need it to do. Sure, the Pebble Health stuff is icing on the cake, but that was it.

In contrast, all of the smartwatches I'm looking at now are trying to stuff everything under the sun into a watch - music, GPS, video player, etc., and in so doing, they end up with minicomputers on your wrist that need to be charged daily, barely last at day, and that's often with turning off the screen.

A lot of people would benefit from a lightweight, minimal function wearable. But the market is putting out gorilla-sized devices with hundreds of features.

Uh, what data, exactly? The phone numbers of people I call? The phone numbers of people who call me? The texts I receive or send?

Yes, those go through the phone company. Whether it be Bell, Rogers, Telus, AT&T, or someone else, the phone company will have a record of what your phone calls were, if for nothing else than bill purposes.

I'm not really sure where the call center is for Speakout. I think the last time I called them voice was in 2009. And at the time, they were actually pretty helpful (I was using a non-Speakout phone, and I had to configure a setting somewhere so it would restrict itself to the Speakout frequencies, and not use the other frequencies Rogers has).

I'm on Speakout, as well. If you're going through 7-11 rather than PetroCanada, you can buy minutes in blocks as low as $25 for the year.

I have co-workers who spend $350 a month for their family plans (two adults, two children). If they went with Speakout or similar, it would be closer to $7 a month. But then when you see two kids at the dinner table texting each other, or the adults making a 45 minute call on their cell phone when sitting right next to a landline, you see where why the telcos can charge what they charge.

People will pay it. They'll complain, but they'll pay it.

Elections are never a sure thing.

Absolutely true. But the NYT (and others) was not reporting the possibility of a Hillary win, they were debating the size of the landslide that she was going to win. That's why readers were so stunned. The NYT had not only not reported on the possibility of a Trump win, they had openly, and publicly, dismissed it.

This was a repeat of the infamous Pauline Kael line back in 1980, where Reagan's victory over Carter stunned the NYT, because "no one I know voted for Reagan". If a reporter cannot claim to have met a single person who voted for a president that wins in a landslide, they are living in a bubble and need to get out more. And that's the crux of their problem - they are living in an insular bubble, and they're only marginally aware of it. The lack of awareness alone damages their credibility.

For a news source that claims to be authoritative, not being aware of its' own shortcomings shows significant ignorance. And who's going to trust an ignorant news source?

The problem is that the NYT no longer meets their motto of "all the news that fits, we print" (apparently it's not "fit to print", but that's a quibble).

Rightly or wrongly (and I'd argue wrongly), they've embraced "advocacy journalism". Having a monoculture is never a good thing, because it renders the entire organization vulnerable to a common flaw. The NYT embraces diversity in every way, except in the most important one: thought. Politically, they are a monoculture, and that hurts them.

The problem isn't that lockstep ideology renders their editorial positions predictable; that's fine. It's the fact that it affects their news coverage, and it affects it negatively. When I'm reading a news story, I shouldn't be able to tell what the writer's opinions on the matter are, and yet in far too many cases, it's obvious. Worse, it's not only affected how stories are covered, but whether they get covered at all.

The most damning criticism of the NYT I've heard was a friend of mine who cancelled her subscription a few years ago. Her reason was that she was "tired of hearing people discussing controversies I'd never heard of". When newspapers decide not to report on a story because they feel it might empower their ideological opponents, they're not being reporters, they're being advocates. There's nothing wrong with advocacy, but you should at least be honest about it.

And, as the saying goes, "that's how you get Trump". How could an organization the size of NYT get the election so wrong? Because they were looking at it with blinders on. They may have put on the blinders intentionally, but their readers didn't. And yet their readers still suffered the effects of the blinders, too.

No, I spend $100 back in 1989 (when it was called 4DOS) because it allowed me to do a lot of things that the DOS command shell couldn't. And then 4OS/2 came out, and I could use the same scripts on my DOS and OS/2 boxes. And then 4NT came out (before it evolved into Take Command), and I got that.

I said I prefer it, because it allows me to use the strengths of the platform I'm on. Things like korn and bash are great on Solaris or Linux, but ports of them to Windows are dependent on the underlying tools that come with them, such as Cygwin. I can do more, faster, in TCC on Windows than I can in bash on Windows.

If your uncle Joe is using the command line and Windows 10, switching to PowerShell is probably a lot more painful than switching to TCC/LE. There is a free lite version. It's not as powerful as the commercial edition, of course, but it's still better than the default command shell, and, IMO, better than PowerShell.

But it you want to continue cursing the darkness, go ahead. It's your choice.

Yes.

Personally, I don't use either PowerShell or command shell, much preferring JPSoft's far superior Take Command to both of them. However, when I have had to use PowerShell, I've often used the "help" command, which is markedly different from the command shell's.

In PowerShell, type "help" and then type "cmd /c help" and see the difference. For those who rarely use the command shell, switching to PowerShell will not make life simpler.

You think Betty Sue is not capable of running anything more than one command-line tool and will be befuddled by this change, yet you think Linux is the alternative?

People who have trouble with "copy", "type", and "dir" rarely find "cp", "cat" and "ls" easier or more intuitive.

People salivating over this should remember that Nokia has already released an Android; the N1. That was two years ago. Was it a good tablet? By all accounts, it was excellent. Did it make a massive effect on the market? It barely made a ripple, and was quickly forgotten. And this is a spinoff of that Nokia.

People who are expecting Nokia to come roaring back are going to be disappointed. I'd love to see some new of the old Nokia magic myself, but like Ashton-Tate, Borland, Sun Microsystems, and the like, their time has sadly passed. Nokia was exceptional at making quality feature phones, and some really smart stuff went into their smartphones (I had a 5800 and loved it), but their skills didn't map to the mass market smartphone market. Like Blackberry, they were still selling phones with some computer features, while the rest of the market was selling hand-held computers that happened to make phone calls.

Fortunately, they appear to be making tentative steps. Maybe they'll come out with some cool features and give Samsung some competition. I hope so, but I'm certainly not expecting them to become one of the big three phone/tablet vendors any time soon.

When they were six, or when you were six?

If the latter, my sympathies.

If the former, there's a logical problem with people becoming parents at age six.

www.autohotkey.com

For those interested in making the shift key act like a typewriter, I use this snippet. Double tap (within 500ms) either shift key, and it enables shift lock; a single tap disables it:

Shift::
      if A_PriorHotkey = Shift
      {
            if A_TimeSincePriorHotkey 500
            {
                  SetCapsLockState, on
                  return
            }
      }

      SetCapsLockState, on
      keywait, CapsLock
      SetCapsLockState, off
return

It's not always necessary to wait that long.

"Advice is worth what you pay for it", appears to be the rule.

I worked at a Fortune 50 outfit, working on choosing a vendor for a major contract. Since the contract would eventually be worth at least seven figures, we spent about 18 months doing competitive analysis and proper due diligence. Ten vendors (A-J) were whittled down to five (A-E), and then finally to two vendors (A and B), who each ended up running their systems on site in the final execution round.

Vendor A wasn't popular politically, but won on technical merit. Vendor B was a serious player, and had previously held 80% of the market in that segment, but (a) had fallen behind technically, and (b) their presentation had truly been Keystone Kops level bad, unfortunately. They simply didn't take it seriously; they expected to win on name recognition, so they basically just phoned it in.

Ultimately, my customer selected Vendor A. I had to write a competitive analysis for my boss to justify my rankings, and I wrote about 20 pages, detailing the scoring criteria I used, my observations and analysis, etc. Some of the vendors were extremely interested in this (vendor C, in particular, since they just missed the final round by a whisker), and my customer approved my giving each vendor a subset of my report. They'd each get the criteria used and the evaluation of their bid, but not of the other vendors. I added a recommendation section to each, of the "this is what you'd have to do in order to win the bid" variety.

Vendor B basically told me/my customer what we could do with this analysis, since "they were the vendor of record for 80% of the industry", and we didn't know what we were talking about, etc. Vendor C, in contrast, flew up two guys (one business guy, one tech) to take me out to lunch/dinner and get a Vulcan Mind Meld with me; their approach was "we came in number three, what do we need to improve to be number one".

A year later, Vendor B was sitting at 20% of the market, and unlikely to hang on to that, as both Vendor A and Vendor C had passed them. And so, they brought in a consultancy firm to do a competitive analysis. Said competitive analysis cost low six figures to produce, took a team to generate, and the report was passed around at their board meeting, before being sent down from on high to the troops.

A friend of mine was at Vendor B at the time. He compared my (free) analysis with the multi hundred thousand dollar report. The difference? Mine lacked "a leather binder, buzzwords, and spelling mistakes". The most important section, the recommendations, were now commandments from on high.