> maximized our mobile synergy paradigm

Same here, sort of. But the upside is that I get to play with an Apple watch, so it ain't all bad...

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.

> I'm not sure what would count as the killer app for the PC.

Lotus 123 Spreadsheet.

Later it got nuked by Excel, but that thing made IBM rich.

No, rode straight through the entire city the other day with my bicycle. Took about 25 minutes.

Forgive me but I have to ask. WHAT exactly uses a table with a trillion rows in it??!!

> 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.

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.

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.

WTF do you have such a thing???

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.

Suhweet. Definitely. I one used a Nintendo Powerglove with wire cut to interface with a joystick port and used to to play a Tci Tac Toe game we wrote. Back in 92 or so. That impressed some chicks...

My sister is a veterinarian in nowhere, Africa and she has a PhD in Veterinary science. She does it because she likes it!

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.

Personally, I find jQuery great as the baseline to support bespoke programming solutions.

There is a LOT of love for framework over libraries like jQuery, but in my experience most hit up against Dietzler's Law* pretty hard. with frameworks one has to be rock solid in the real browsers stuff AND the framework one chose AND the hacks you had to set up to meet the gap between requirements and the framework sweetspot. (vs bespoke, where it's just the real browser stuff and then straight to the gap ;-)

*Dietzler's Law: "Every Access project will eventually fail because, while 80% of what the user wants is fast and easy to create, and the next 10% is possible with difficulty, ultimately the last 10% is impossible because you can’t get far enough underneath the built-in abstractions, and users always want 100% of what they want" - but it's generally applicable

To reply to myself: The commute is by train, not car. And I live 5 minutes walk from the station.