dankoss

Matchbook = matching your physical book purchases with e-books.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." - FDR

Hmm. I would think there's a way of setting reasonable expectations for return calls. I would think a client that requires a same-day response ought to be paying a lot of money for that privilege.

Returning family calls, on the other hand...

Couldn't you solve this problem by simply turning off your cellphone? Or using Do Not Disturb or Airplane mode?

Upgrades are confusing for novice users. Version numbers aren't. While upgrade pricing has been nice in the past, I fully understand wanting to get more revenue from existing users, it just means that the price per version should drop. If customers are truly "loyal" they should have no problems paying full price for an app.

As tablet hardware and software becomes more capable, I would expect to see PC hardware sales drop. There may never be a perfect convergence where, for example, it's possible to develop tablet software on a tablet. But as the use cases increase particularly for content creation, less people need the capability of a full PC.

The thing is, portable computing is now cheaper and more ubiquitous than desktops. There was a time when laptops were more expensive than desktops, but now that they are similar in price or cheaper, consumers are picking portable devices.

Do you have a Mac or an iPad? If so I'd recommend Garageband as an easy place to start, and there are plenty of tutorials available for it.

Since they put it on the app store Logic has been $199, because there isn't an upgrade price from previous versions that used to cost $500-$1000. I think it's another halo effect -- Apple wants to sell hardware and is willing to use cheaper software like Logic and Final Cut to draw pros and prosumers to the platform. Most other DAW vendors don't have hardware sales to fall back on.

I really wish free trials were available for some of the more expensive iOS software. Even for things like Garageband or Pages, I'd like to be able to compare them to other music software on the app store. I don't even consider some task managers (omnifocus) because their price is prohibitive without a trial, even with glowing reviews.

The only major difference I see is the search and note sidebar. Which, IMO, is an iOSified improvement over iA's file picker.

In sales this is known as the anchoring effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

Having seen Dave 3-4 times now, I can say his fanbase seems similar.

I worked on a Hitachi based coal plant in college. The Japanese were the originators of high precision engineering, and it shows. TI's OMAP program is going the same route: pursuing long term, more stable business instead of consumer facing chips. I suspect that wages in Korea are much lower, allowing them to manufacture ripped off designs at a much lower price.

Sony's problem is that they're an engineering driven company in consumer markets. While they often win the spec game, they aren't vertically integrated enough to give the same consumer experience that Apple can. Ars has covered many of their missteps in depth.

In this example, yes. But floating point commutativity isn't guaranteed for multiple operations. a + b = b + a, but a * b * c is not guaranteed to equal b * a * c due to the rounding effects in the registers, which means commutativity fails for numbers that are at the rounding edges of floating point dynamic range.

Interesting personal take, but my impression is that JCP is in a slowly dying industry. Does anyone under 30 shop at department stores anymore?

I never really understood mind maps after trying them a couple times. Can anyone explain why they are better than an outline format, or plain text?

I get that some people think visually (I'm more of an auditory learner/thinker), but it seems like mind maps make organization and prioritization harder, rather than easier.

It's interesting that the DIY mentality doesn't extend to fixing or maintaining computers. I'm not sure if its a generational thing, or the fact that computers are becoming appliances, but it seems like less people are willing to try to fix computer problems on their own.

Exactly. Most of the blogs I read are updated once a week or even once a month, but they have great content I don't want to miss. RSS allows me to not have those sites in my bookmarks but always get their latest content.

I've also used it for Craigslist searches and store updates when items go on sale, which are infrequent enough that I would miss them unless I checked every day.

I would like to use RSS to grab frequently updated tech news, but in a separate bucket that doesn't count as "unread". I'd rather strip out the site design and just focus on the content. That's what news is, right?

Why is this is acceptable in your 20s? Why not sleep/drink/waste your way through your 30s or 40s?

"Know yourself" sounds too much like "Don't just do something, stand there!" I'd rather learn by doing than spend months in limbo figuring out who I truly am. Then you really have stories to tell that become part of who you are.

I'm surprised that it can't be self-hosted, since the product is explicitly directed at enterprise. Any company with a large or important codebase is likely to want completely secure control over their VCS. Anecdotally, at least, external hosting would never fly at my company.

This is a lot easier to do in high level languages. When working in C or assembly, I find that defining the problem in code takes so much work that it's too costly to delete and restart.

For some reason, I've always written documentation, emails and code in a single draft, only going back and tweaking if absolutely necessary. I've never understood those English professors who require 3-4 drafts before a final version.

Great suggestions, thanks.

Excellent suggestion, thanks! Trying it out right now.

Any ideas for file manipulation with the keyboard? With long Windows paths there's no way a CLI is going to be faster than moving files around with Explorer, which is not very keyboard friendly. I've looked at alternative file managers and haven't found anything that sticks.

I'm pretty sure it's a specific parody of Mailbox.