That'll never work.

I understand that, I order proto PCBs all the time and hand assemble. I speculate their fabricated product would require no components at all, or perhaps a few capacitors. The markup is high for small runs, but it's still cheap for a few units. I wouldn't bother making a kickstarter for that. Their entire design can be proofed out almost for free as the parent said. There is no excuse for them NOT to have done this before going on the web.

But from proto to product is a long road, and to create a viable business you can't sell 10s of units from your garage with no warranty, customer support, instruction manuals, enclosures (that do not degrade performance in the bands of interest, which I have learned is not a given even with plastic), etc. You also have to have a plan to volume manufacture. Even if it's to buy 100s of protos, sell at a loss and have the kid down the street package and ship. It costs money, it requires thought. Operating like that, if it's a good product you'll be demolished the second some cheap taiwanese crapshop sees your kickstarter and copies your design faster than you can scream "patent infringement". Even if they can't work around your patent, the damage will have been done.

So given that a proto is so cheap as to require giving up a few nights out on the town, and the next step is to develop a product and spend money, what exactly is kickstarter funding? If it's the latter I still say $500k is too cheap, or their business strategy too naive. I suppose with kickstarter I don't have to care about that, but it also suggests bullshit.

You don't buy hardware from a factory a la carte. You commit to a production run, maybe 100k units, whatever entices the factory to give you time and absorb the headache of setting up the line. You make that money back as you sell, of course, but you have to make it.

And getting a factory set up to run 100k units is itself an issue, you normally have to do a low volume run to shake out the problems, maybe 1k units (usually on prototypes). That takes money, lots of airline trips, and you pay a premium on components (in their case, maybe some plastic and cheap pcb) for low volumes.

Hardware is expensive. Yes I know what you can do in your garage, I do that myself on far, far less. But when you start talking about mass producing goods you are also talking about hiring employees who don't work for free. 10 years ago we might assume a loaded headcount cost of $200k/engineer/year. It won't be easy to attract talent with imaginary stock options and promise of riches at this instant.

It's not any one thing, it's the culimination of nonsense.

They are going to market in 3 months, but there's not even a prototype to show, that's crazy if you've ever done hardware design work. They just need $500K, that's outrageously low for hardware, I know software startups which eat 10x that. Hardware eats a lot of money in test alone. Their claims are outside the range and specs for the technologies they work with. Not outrageously so, but ... enough that eyebrows have to be raised. Their "technical details" carefully avoid explaining why any of it is possible, and instead give intellectual symbolic links to why it might work and secret sauce.

The things that are really dubious are the "shake to find" feature, which seems to be magical at best given how bluetooth works and what their claims are.

Then people are background checking the CEO and while this may or may not be trustworthy, his alleged linked in pages does not give him the credentials he claims. He's allegedly got patents on cold fusion... Add it all up, and you have to lean on the side of scam. Maybe he's a misunderstood genius, but he's going to have to prove it.

Microsoft's social rating is somewhere between "Nuke From Orbit" and "Kill With Fire", at this point any upgrades are really just choosing how far away from the building you are when you rid the world of a virulent plague. Personally I would just as soon remain far away. Even Amazon can release an android phone... and at least they're somewhat honest about why they're doing it.

find me a language that makes it impossible to write bad, unreadable, unmaintainable code and I will show you an AI capable of doing your job for you.

It doesn't strike you that engineering your environment around a particularly unnecessary aspect of a programming language is a sign of a problem with the language? The whitespace thing is really annoying to a lot of people. I'm a fan of whitespace, really, but I prefer to do it my way, or when being paid, the way my team wants it done.

I use python on a regular basis, it definitely has some advantages to perl in terms of datastructures, but it also has some bugshit crazy aspects too and an idiomatic style that really doesn't make a lot of sense and the control portion of the language has gone so far in to OOP excess that I find myself having to code around it.

So the magic mouse swipe gestures aren't obvious to people used to regular mice, I was very resistant, but I now love and miss them.

But I otherwise agree, I don't find anything about OSX to be "intuitive" to people used to using windows or linux. OSX is a fine windowing system, but it's a little rough around the hedges when it comes to usability for the portion of the world that simply cannot become Apple converts.

Hardware wise though, I have not found anything that comes close to an MBP. Windows or OSX, it beats the unholy snot out of its competition.

Last time I was in their neighborhood, MS employees were hauling MBPs around as their primary laptops. I never understood how they could get away with that, but "research" was in their job title...

That's great, so they're going to port their code to Open CL, then run it on your FPGA? Why not just buy a GPU and plug it in?

If they're really set on your FPGA, why not buy a PCIe attached version of your FPGA? Xilinx has them and they go up to pcie v3 x8? What about power? Datacenters care, FPGAs are going to use more power. Why is this a good idea?

s/datastructure/datacenter/

caffeine, it's what should have been for breakfast.

No ignore that entire last sentence, it's dumb. FPGAs don't do floating point very well for one and even their integer performance will never rival a GPGU either in performance, or power. For another, I can and do, use both FPGAs and OpenCL/GLSL in my daily life and would infinitely prefer to port my functions to OpenCL over an FPGA. It's quite a bit more work to synthesize and validate an FPGA design than it is to write OpenCL code and debug the usual way.

I think it's far more likely customers are implementing custom hardware solutions using the FPGA related to power management, server management and datastructure infrastructure that can only be done with an FPGA in certain power domains. I say this having designed servers and dealt with the feature requests.

What a joke. Check out my local dealership here in Texas: http://www.penskeautomotive.co...

Bet they're local to quite a few people in the US. And Germany. And Italy. And the UK. And Puerto Rico.

China is communist exactly the way in which the US is capitalist.

I've never worked in a place that did not have a competitive analysis lab and that did not have a tear-down process where everyone's products were looked at top to bottom, literally dissected, x-rayed, etc. It's used by everyone from design engineers on future products, to supply chain analysts to lawyers looking for patent infringements.

It's a good practice, too often companies get dominated by a few senior people with strong personalities who refuse to change. Show them a landscape of products were things are done differently, and with evidence that those things are working BETTER, and you can sometimes unclog some old-fartism. It's rare to see products with idea that hadn't been thought of before, but frequently you see implemented ideas that were shot down in your own org by someone.

I don't care how prerelease something is, if you put it out there expect that your competitors will see it.