"Retina" is a claim for 20/20 at "standard" viewing distance - I'd call that barely acceptable from a specs standpoint.

My vision (used to be) 20/15 in one eye and 20/10 in the other. I'd say the pixel cramming contest can slow down when we've hit about 4x what Apple called "Retina" resolution.

Are you satisfied with audio equipment that can only reproduce 20Hz to 16kHz? That's about all the "average" person can hear.

I don't agree that all startups that need big $$$ are bad ideas - there are lots of very good startup ideas that take 10s of millions to get rolling.

On the other hand, startups principaled by a 19yo sleeping on AOL's couch, yeah, show me where the first 20K went, and a detailed plan of how the $500K is going to be spent. Don't like counting paperclips? Get a real job.

10 minutes of transactions at a grocery store... not a big deal, at a chain of 1000 grocery stores.... possible, but 10 minutes of transactions through a company like Amex, Visa, MasterCard, etc. would be a scary large chunk of data, especially if you're talking about worldwide.

Favorite quote of the President of the first company I worked for:

"Perception is all there is."

Truth, proof, reality? yeah whatever - what matters is what people think, feel in their gut, trust with their instincts, believe other people want them to do - that's what drives their decisions. It's a rare homo sapiens that actually makes their choices based on ground truth proven verifiable facts.

I used to not understand how double spending was prevented in Bitcoin, but I finally got it - there's a cloud of P2P servers that keep a signature trail of every transaction everywhere... o.k., so, now I believe that double spending is prevented, but I'm having a very hard time wrapping my head around the idea that this could scale to handle any kind of transaction volume.

Isn't that the ultimate goal of the incubators: to get young kids to spend their whole life working on their startup...

I have recently migrated off of Visual Studio, onto Qt Creator because Creator has matured to be clearly better than Studio.

Everyone has their own needs and preferences, I have copies of Studio, Eclipse and Creator on all of my machines at work and home - Eclipse is a necessary evil for some targets, but for the desktop, I was using Studio because it was the better environment - until the last six months or so.

And, I had an engineer - used computers all his life - ask me about "this Linux thing, how different is it?" I explained that it was all just the same, but most of the names have changed. "So, if I want to edit a document, like Word, what do I use?", "That's called Open Office Writer", "Oh, hmmm... and I'll want to edit some pictures, I usually use Photoshop", "there's something called Gimp that's very similar", etc. by the time we got to the fourth thing that had a different name, he was very discouraged - you see, it sounded like an awful lot of effort to him to learn new names for everything.

You know that, I know that, anyone competent in the field knows that, but above a certain level in a large company, people tend to be less than competent in the IT field - but that doesn't stop a most of them from pushing their philosophy down the organization.

The higher levels also tend to listen to ALL of their advisors: legal, financial, sales, marketing, human resources, and even the ones who know nothing about computers still have opinions.

Linux has convinced a good portion of the IT and engineering world, but incase you haven't noticed, we're not exactly in control.

If I were a too busy to be bothered executive, my high level opinion of the hobbyist operating system would be that it's bound to be full of backdoors put in by the coders. What's worse, is when those backdoors cause my golden parachute producing institution serious financial harm, there's nobody to sue. At least if Microsoft were to do something dastardly, there's a few billion in assets to get the lawyers worked up over.