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Comment Re:maybe theres no market to be had (Score 1) 213

I am going to write a app that integrates with our company's conference management system. We have an onsite system that allows us to push the start of sessions and talks and such. I think for these things it is actually useful to have this on your wrist, but it is not so important (or complicated) that I am going to spend a lot of time on the problem.

It is more of a piece of bling that makes our software look cool on paper. "Look! It also supports Apple Watch! All you hipster attendees will go through the roof with joy!".

And for about 2 days worth of work and a $500 investment in hardware (we already do iPhone apps) it is worth the marketing effort.

Comment Re:Chapel Hill/ Carrboro North Carolina (Score 2) 654

> Over time, people will make decisions about where to live based in part on the presence of public transit.

I live in Germany where transport (around here) is almost free ($70 per month flat fee). When we bought our house we did buy it in a town on the train track. This helps with public transport, but the property prices in our town is 30-40% higher than in off-the-track towns.

There are also other things. Our town has a much larger area of light industry than neighbouring towns, mostly because it is close to the tracks.
This means there are more jobs, which also send the property prices up. The towns away from the line do, in 2015, still not have broadband Internet. And I have known people who left there because of that.

So in short, people do select for public transport. They also select where they live because of the run-on effects of having transport connections in the frst place. But it also causes problems, especially if the public transport hub happens to be a major train line. The line here runs between Freiburg and Basel is the most frequented line in Southern Germany.

Comment Re:I would sell it (Score 1) 654

Transport is not free in Germany, but toral coverage in Freiburg over the entire countryside with all public transport costs 57 Euros per month, which is pretty much free for all practical reasons.

And I don't have a car because of that. It does help that
a) My job is right next to a small station
b) I live 500 m from one.

Very few of my colleagues come with a car, and mostly those that have to drive to our small workshop, which is a bit off the track.

Comment Re:For desktop OS, I'd tale BeOS' responsive handl (Score 1) 484

I still have an old ThinkPad with 256MB Ram that I have running on BeOS in a drawer.

BeOS is very responsive because EVERY thing ins threaded and they embraced multi-threading and SMP from day 1. Other OS/s use an event loop in the GUI apps while BeOS does it somewhat different. It encourages threading and not a single loop when you consume an event, process it and then go on to the next one. Events tend to spawn threads that then interact with each other. The single event consumer thing is a very old paradigm in UI design.

Another OS which is very very responsive for the same reason is Photon, the GUI running on QNX.

I miss BeOS, was really a great system.

Comment Same old answer... (Score 1) 688

Human industrialized society that has mature around the automobile has long had access to long range and near instantaneous restoring of full range capabilities.
To put that in more simple and concrete terms the average gasoline vehicle travels about 300-350 miles on a tank of fuel (about 5-7 hours) then can completely refuel from 0 range to 100% range in about 3 minutes at any commodity fuel station, or they can carry extra fuel in containers for very long or rural trips.

Until electric vehicles use batteries that are either: universal, interchangeable and can be swapped out in 5 minutes or they care capable of simply accepting a full charge in place in less than about 10 minutes then purely electric vehicles are doomed to be a niche market in modern society. At least until petrol fuel prices rise to make the hassles of recharging more tolerable.

We could also eliminate the charrging/range issue if people would give up the notion they need to own their own cars. IF there were simply a car club/service that you would use a car until the battery was close to depleted then drop it off at a charging center and step in to a new one, it would resolve the range issue as well. I don't see people, at least in the US, doing that any time soon.

So I'll end this the way I end all posts about electric and hybrid vehicles: switch to diesel electric instead of gasoline electric and you'll be on to something. Diesel-electric is the standard for every other transportation mode and use that isn't pure petrol or nuclear: ship, submarine, train, mining, etc. The efficiency if diesel engines is highly attuned to the constant-rate engine speed that diesel electric requires and wold probably increase hybrid vehicle range and efficiency by 2-3x.

Comment Re:Start a hot dog fire with booster cables (Score 1) 210

A friend of mine who studied chemistry used to light his BBQ fires with self-made napalm. He stopped doing that whan a) some right-wing terrorists inquired about building a bomb and b) He blew the roof off his lab-room and almost killed himself.

Then went into making drug, but that ended with an raid by the cops armed with heavy weapons who kicked down the door when his mom was there. They had bugged a kettle that she bought over the mail.

Comment Broken RAID Card (Score 1) 210

Once a RAID card on a machine with a critical database croaked. I EBayed for a replacement, did a buy now and phoned the seller and offered him 100$ Cash if he sent the damn card by courier RIGHT NOW at . Next morning it was waiting for me.

Problem was that the yokel who configured the card did not write down the config and I could not boot it. So I looked at the chip numbers and figure that one of them was a NVRAM chip. Took the NVRAM chip from the broken card with the hope that it had the config and plugged it into the new card. I was never in my life so happy to see Windows NT boot.

The data was rescuable, a few years later wrote a C program to reconstruct the RAID disks from image on that same damn machine, but that was critical and had to be done fast.

OF course my boss ran around and told the board that WE did some hardware engineering. He had nothing to do with it.

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