fotbr

Having (very briefly) owned a fitbit flex (I think -- it's the one that got recalled for giving people a rash), does anyone know of a similar device with fairly high time resolution, that does NOT require an account, subscription, or connection to a website/service to work? Specifically, something you can pull the data directly off the device in some usable form? OS requirement for the device connection is irrelevant, I've got the common ones (ios, osx, android, windows, linux) covered.

What's wrong with a web browser being just a web browser?

It would seem they're neglecting the elephant in the room:

The average millennial doesn't have much disposable income.

Sure, it's not all of them. But many of them are struggling financially, and a new car, no matter how "cool", "hip", or whatever the current terms is, just isn't something they can afford. So they drive old cars, and drive them less. Or they live places they don't need cars.

You can stick $10k worth of the latest and greatest gadgets into the new car, and all it will do, at best, is end up as their phone background (the equivalent of my generation's poster on the wall), and move that car $10k+ farther away from what they can afford.

Sounds like a promising start for them, and I hope it goes well -- especially now that they're taking steps to partner with the actual music providers.

However, like anything associated with the music industry, I'll take a wait and see approach to using it. I see no point in jumping on the latest thing if it's going to a) be sued out of existence, or b) sell out and get rolled into a company I don't like. Partnering with the other services seems like a good step towards avoiding bad-result a, so that's a promising sign.

The question left then is whether these folks are in it for the long haul, or if they're just in it for an "exit".

It does happen. I refer you to the Therac-25.

http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf

http://courses.cs.vt.edu/professionalism/Therac_25/Therac_1....

plenty of other reading: https://www.google.com/#q=therac-25

It's what the cool kids at google were doing, so mozilla had to copy them, as usual, without any real thought as to whether it made sense.

It still doesn't change the fact that it's owned by a company that many despise and want nothing to do with, no matter how shiny their product may be.

I don't think anyone said FB was going to buy it and kill it. The fear, which is still valid, is that FB will turn it into a data grabbing, ad-deliverance product that's useless unless you're online and logged into your FB account.

I believe it. I'm there with him. I swore off everything sony after the cd rootkit episode. How long has that been, 12, 13 years now? I still don't even consider sony for electronics, even if they offer the best -insert device here-. I don't buy music offered on a sony label. I don't buy or go see movies produced at, or by a sony studio. I would, and do, simply do without their offerings and listen/watch/spend money on offerings from other companies instead.

Facebook is another company I will refuse to do business with, even if that means I do without something I would otherwise want.

Add another person that was formerly excited about Oculus and is now walking away from it. Yes, I dislike facebook and their business practices enough that I'll turn my back on a very promising bit of technology I was looking forward to. I'm also looking into canceling my devkit2 pre-order.

I don't comment often. I came here following the dice purchase of slashdot, and found a quality tech oriented site without too much crap.

At the rate I (slowly) accumulate the imaginary internet points here, it will be the better part of a decade before I end up with the ability to "endorse" any other comments. I don't really care about that, except you're locking out those of us that don't have a following here, or name recognition. We, collectively, have seen how "voting" works -- here and elsewhere -- after a very short time, people just upvote based on who the person is, not the comment. Endorsements will work the same way.

Being limited to only one "pending" comment at a time, and the very high probability that I'll see significant delays between being able to comment, pretty much guarantees that I'll leave and find my tech news elsewhere.

Perhaps that's fine with you. But it's a shame to ruin a community to solve a problem that, quite frankly, doesn't exist.

That's one of many such companies.

It's simpler than that, though. On a local level, away from the large cities, it's not uncommon for the guy or gal that owns (not necessarily the same as the name is on the sign though) the local dealership to be the area's state senator or state representative. No amount of lobbying or money from tesla, etc, are going to convince him to vote against his/her own business.

But in wiki-land, that won't be acceptable, because it wasn't published anywhere else first.

Here's why I won't use it if I have any other option: As an example to see if it's still an issue -- I tried clicking your islington.cc "sign-in or register" button. I'm greeted with a popup saying "We are sorry, but currently your browser is not supported. <firefox logo> Persona works with Firefox and other modern browsers". The browser I'm using? Firefox (ESR 24.whatever is current). Closing the pop-up and trying again worked, eventually. This happens about a third of the time I try to use a persona-based sign-in.

Hopefully iceweasel will not be so stupid as to follow this decision in the first place.

With the way Google has been acting over the last, oh, 5 years or so? Yeah, I try to avoid google for the most part.

I'm firmly in the camp of "You (the server) provide the content. I (my computer) decide which pieces of that content to display. You get no say in what my computer does or does not do." So yes, I block ads. I block javascript. I block flash. I override your CSS. I pick and choose which elements to display. I'm perfectly fine with doing without your content if you make it too inconvenient, because 99% of the time, I don't really need that content anyway, and the other 1%, well, the same content can be found elsewhere.

The the thing that younger people do not understand: I've lived in a pre-internet, pre-cellphone, and for the most part, a pre-personal-computer, world. I know what it's like. I know it's not the end of the world to go back to that. As a result, there's a lot of stuff I'm not willing to put up with.

Biggest rewards available in SV? Hah. Maybe if you want to do fluff "social" and web work, or if you count money as the only reward available.

I'll take the average programmer from the middle of bumfutz nowhere over someone so self centered that they think anyone that doesn't buy into "SV is the best place in the world" is crap, even if that person is a "rockstar" programmer.

Want to know why? I can work with average, be quite successful, and enjoy my work.

Stuff for work? No. I develop, other people use. I have no need to do the things I write software for - nor do I want to.

My personal code projects? They're not products, they're tools: they get written to solve specific problems or to do specific tasks. Sometimes only once, usually a few times, then they are never touched again.

It depends. I go through phases. Some weeks, I want nothing to do with a computer when I'm not at work - I read, I work in the yard, I mess around in the shop with whatever idea has popped into my head. Other weeks, you can't pry me away from it - RPGs (of the non-mmo variety) are a big reason, but it can also be something as simple as learning about [insert subject here].

What I won't do, is work. Bringing work home is something I avoid whenever I can. I learned that lesson a while ago - burnout is a bitch. Let your brain do other things. Write code if you want, but don't code on anything work related.

Exactly my thoughts as well. Since I've never been keen on Google's ambitions to rival the various alphabet-soup agencies on what they know about everyone, I guess I can cross that off the list of upgrades I'll be doing when I replace the heater this spring.

That's not accurate, since making a proprietary fork of, say, a BSD project, does not deprive anyone of the original project.

Except you don't "turn it into" anything else ... the original is still out there, and still available to be used as anyone else wishes.

Not necessarily. I've worked on projects where a high six figure yearly price tag was "trivial money". It still took approvals from several steps up the line, but they were the rubber-stamp variety once something was seen as necessary for the project. Many of those decisions were based on "here's a handful of options, there's others we can follow up on if none of these are satisfactory" conversations. Anyone that required contacting them for a ballpark estimate ended up in the second group, and as often as not were not even considered.

At least they HAVE pricing pages. Quickest way to lose a potential sale (and all future potential sales and references) is to not provide pricing information because you're stuck in the sales-rep model where I have to call/email/otherwise contact you when all I want is an estimate so I know if I'm looking at a trivial-dollars-a-year or a reorganize-the-entire-budget-to-pay-for-this product/service.

You're not the first. There have been several women in indy before you, and there is at least one, Simona Di-something-or-other, who is already in the series. Coming on a tech website with your blatantly false spam isn't the way to make fans.

So they'll be a mid-pack team with an owner that goes whining to the officials anytime something doesn't work to his benefit?

Not exactly the "reppin'" I'd like to see for the USA in world motorsport.

Actually, the engines (and gearboxes, for that matter) don't get rebuilt. Breaking the FIA seal means they might as well replace the engine with a fresh one, since the same penalties apply.

To be completely honest, it was a bit of getting lucky, and a lot of realizing that if I needed to modify one object in that particular library to satisfy a legal requirement, it was only a matter of time before a decree would come down that the rest need to be changed as well.

Another point of anecdata:

Once upon a time, early in my career, I spent half a day automating and error-proofing a 15 minute task. My boss, at the time, was slightly annoyed, and slightly amused. Fast forward two months from that point, and that same task needs to be done not once, but several thousand times. My boss wanted to go get coffee before we got started, so while he was grabbing his wallet, I fired up my automated process. By the time we got back, the task was done, and the boss was annoyed at himself for being annoyed earlier, and never again questioned why I built the systems I did. I, unfortunately, was too young and too inexperienced to realize that he was an excellent boss, and left a couple years later for "greener pastures", where I encountered many "productivity is measured entirely by the time you sit at your desk" bosses.

TL;DR: I work hard to look this lazy, had a boss that recognized it, and was too dumb to realize how good I had it.

If your attorney isn't in the room, there's no such thing as a "Good Cop". If your attorney is in the room, there's still no such thing as a "Good Cop", so listen to your attorney.