Radio Shack has tried to serve makers. It turns out, makers are among the people most comfortable shopping online.

I was in a RS recently and they had a 3D printer display, had a rack of Arduino kits, robotics stuff, and lots of little circuit toys for kids on display.

http://www.radioshack.com/diy-...

I have a tablet and use it all the time, but have no plans to buy a new one. I suppose if there are enough people like me, the tablet market is doomed.

Lesson learned: don't build a good product that is going to work well for a long time.

The person who called me didn't get far because I told him right away that I know it's a scam.

Then he threatened to kill me and my family. That was a little unsettling.

I'm thinking Stephenson was second choice because Lenovo already hired Ashton Kutcher to be a product engineer.

I put it on 2 computers, so does that make it $5/month?

I realize that in the long run, purchasing may save more money, but for such a small amount, it's an easy buy for me. Despite the hate here, Office 2013 is pretty good software and I don't mind spending a reasonable amount of money to support it. The $10 / month for 5 computers plan seems fair to me.

I actually defected the other way.

When Office was $250 per license, I used OpenOffice and then Google Docs because I didn't want to spend that much money. But now that it's only $10 / month and I can (legally) install it on my desktop and laptop, it's an easy buy. I'm going to be using it quite a bit until late spring, and then I can suspend my subscription if I'm not going to need it for a while.

his ability to sell a handful of vehicles to a small number of rich people

There are a lot of rich people in Texas. California is a bigger market for Tesla and New York may be as well. But Texas isn't far behind.

Proxying and caching was a huge win back in the analog modem days. These days it is still a win, but not as big. Looking forward, the costs associated with having a secure connection are only going down while the value of the secure connection is holding steady or maybe increasing.

Schools use Google Apps for Education. It's designed for use by school aged kids.

Google makes all of their money selling ads, Microsoft makes their money selling software and services (mostly to businesses), and Apple makes their money selling a hardware/software ecosystem. Apple's cut on software sold in their app store is a multi-billion dollar business all by itself. That's what I was talking about when I said there's room for more than one business model.

Hardware is not what distinguishes a high-margin iPhone from a low-margin but high end Android or Windows Phone. It's the software.

Do you have any recommendations for C++ tools?

I've used PVS-Studio and was pretty happy with it.

That's not Apple's model and Apple is making lots of money too. There's room for more than one model I think.

They do for sure. My point though, was that Comcast wasn't throttling Netflix traffic, they were throttling Cogent traffic because Cogent was operating well outside of the peering agreement. If they had been throttling Netflix, then Apple TV (via Level 3) users would have also had problems.

Rather than buy bandwidth from Cogent, Netflix is now buying it directly from Comcast. It's cheaper for Netflix, it makes Comcast more money, and it gives better service to Netflix's customers. Everybody wins, except Cogent.

People forget that when all of the Netflix congestion was happening, customers watching via Apple TV didn't experience any of the drop outs or pauses. That's because for some reason, Netflix streams to Apple TV via Level 3, not Cogent. Other companies that bought transit from Cogent had the same problem with the congested interconnect. If Comcast was targeting Netflix, the Apple TV customers would have experienced the same problem. In reality the problem was a between Cogent and Comcast.

Linux has finally become the dominant operating system and nobody knows it.