Ok let's assume that both watches have zero features. Because they do. I can ask anyone what the time is, and if I'm in range of my phone from my watch I could pick up the phone.

Now the argument is:

Would you spend $800 on something that last 13+ years with no maintenance. Or would you spend $500 on something that last 3 years and then needs to be replaced?

Now the argument would be if you follow this train of thought then the smartwatch with a flat battery which is unable to sync to the phone is still the same fashion accessory, except then you have the broken watch problem. If you don't have a watch and you ask someone the time everything is okay. If your watch breaks and you ask someone the time you get strange looks. If people know you run around wearing a broken watch they just think you're an absolute twat. Mind you that could be a fashion statement all in itself.

Point is the value proposition for things we put on our arms are nothing to do with features but they are to do with design, manufacture quality, and longevity, and the smartwatches in general really fail on that last part.

Oh I agree. They should die in a fire, but my point is that the ecosystem is out of their control. If they disappeared tomorrow it wouldn't change that Arduino is used and works on thousands of clones, copies, and even in some legit products which have been loaded with their bootloader.

I'm speaking back against the assertion that Arduino SRL's actions in some way make the Arduino ecosystem not worth the trouble. They could run around tomorrow and start killing babies, but the system itself will still work the same way it did yesterday.

Exactly. My $800 watch has lasted for about 13 years. It's on it's 3rd battery. My dad's Rolex is about 35 years old now, it doesn't even have a battery.

I may be able to justify a nice looking smart watch if and only if it had some way of extending it's life as a fashion accessory, otherwise it is just a dumb device that duplicates all functionality I already have in my pocket except on my hand.

Fashion accessories should not wear out, suffer from EOL problems due to irreplaceable batteries, or not work with future devices, especially if they are expensive fashion accessories.

This! For the Australian launch of the iPad 3 there were people queued for the entire day at the Apple store. My friend ducked out of work at lunch time went down to JB HiFi picked up his iToy, grabbed lunch and was back at his desk before anyone noticed.

It's like people think the Apple store is the only place to actually buy Apple stuff.

I have an Ubuntu phone you insensitive clod.

The root cause here is that a person was mentally unstable and murdered everyone.

The root cause was NOT that the pilot may have done it while imitating the co-pilot.

Remember we're talking about airline safety, not about person blame. A root cause must always identify the underlying process cause of the incident, and is not designed to lay blame on a specific person since person and human behaviors are transient.

So would the 150+ people be any less dead if it was the primary pilot who did it? Or the stewardess?

The website bit, and more importantly the second part involving active forum members willing to help.

All platforms have their social issues, but from what I've seen the mbed platform does not rank highly in my humble opinion on community support. Certainly not as highly as Arduino or to a lesser extent the AVR community who can also be a right royal bunch of twats to newcommers at times.

Oh I agree, the problem is the upgrade part. You can add seatbelts to a car (better shutdown system to your reactor), but you can't add crumple zones (inherently safer design). There's only so much sugar coating you can put on an old dried turd before you realise that underneath it all there is still something leaving a foul taste in your mouth.

The modern world is about inherently safer design. Not just nuclear, but chemical and industrial too. We rely less on safety systems instead opting to run at lower pressures, lower temperatures, with less dangerous materials, just like modern nuclear reactors do with different void co-efficients, passive cooling systems, etc.

You can't upgrade to that. You can just shut down and rebuilt, and fundamentally the problem has been a lack of new plants means the old ones which do have approval get bandaid after bandaid applied rather than the sensible thing of shutting it down and building a new reactor along side, or better still further away from populations.

That's your sphere of comprehension. Chemical plants like refineries are every bit as scary when you know how they operate. Imagine a container with 80t of hydroflouric acid, which instantly evaporates to vapour on loss of containment and can quite easily kill people with low concentrations. Sounds scary but I just described many SMALL refineries often within only a couple of km of major population centres, closer than any reasonable person would every build a nuclear power plant. I also suggest looking up Bhopal disaster. It won't make you any less scared of nuclear, but it may just make you give up and go live in the forest somewhere.

I won't say nuclear is unfairly vilified, but rather we unfairly give everything else a free pass when the reality is really REALLY bloody scary.

Not blocking the link, but blocking the initial distribution. Yes it would be far harder but it's no more difficult than the current state of blocking where you can go onto Google, type in (insert fav torrent site here) and get a list of which domain it happens to be running on today. The only difference is you're looking for the magnet link which will bounce around as the power that be continue their futile attempts to block content one web address at a time.

One of the biggest problems with these systems is the trace resistance. Silver ink has in every case so far been orders of magnitude higher in resistance than a small copper trace effectively making these systems useless for anything that carries power. I'm not talking about big power either, simply powering several micros, a few logic chips and a couple of relays on a circuit is enough to bring the current up that you can't just run everything in the same trace.

I predict lots of people will set fire to their projects.

No, it's the entire environment that does that. The point of the Arduino is that any idiot can grab %insert Arduino model here% and attach %insert shield here%, go and download %insert library here% and then plug it all in and turn it on.

I have friends who have never programmed before using Arduinos for all sorts of neat things, controlling lights via PWM, monitoring environments etc. None of them would have achieved what they have if they had to dig through datasheets, understand the differences between voltages, signals, figure out how to communicate via I2S, or god forbid solder something (I'm sure most of them would have grabbed the iron like a pencil).

Arduino exists as it does because of all the little conveniences it provides.

I've just found a bit of the quote there that gives it all context. So you've used development environments before then? Probably fully featured ones too. Yes in that context Arduino is the worst.

However it is by far the best development environment ever for someone who has never programmed before. A 14 year old could literally pick it up and have code running in minutes without needing to check for help or figure out how to configure project environments, or attach debuggers, or find out how to download code, or %insert feature of proper IDEs here%.

For the record I agree with you, but I also come from a background of a proper IDE and I'm under no delusion that someone who has little to no background in programming could pickup the likes of AVR studio, and have code up and running in 5 minutes.

This should be modded +5 funny in context of this discussion.

Of course they are a very real risk. We have built up an industry now which has abandoned all investment for the past 40 years. You can never eliminate all risk but risk itself is a combination of hazard and consequence, and the hazard takes into account likelihood. The consequence has remained the same, the hazard is greatly reduced, and if you want to talk about worst case you must live in a very special city if there isn't something in the area which could kill you right now.

For instance I live in a city which is completely set in its NIMBY ways, but is perfectly happy to entertain the existence of refineries and chemical plants processing large amounts of ammonia and hydroelectric acid where the "worst case" modelling could kill 50000 people, and that from an industry that most cities have within their border in reasonably close proximity to either their business centre or their trade centres.

But by effectively scaring ourselves away from investment in nuclear we have an entire industry that is the equivalent of a 1960s Impala driving down the highway at 70mph with no seatbelts, airbags, or crumple zones, just waiting to brutally kill all occupants whenever something goes slightly wrong.