ippisl

have a look at codemontage.com or openhatch.org.

It depends i think. Let's say you develop mobile games for a living and then the unemployment rate rises to 20-30%. The economy collapses, and nobody buys games. Not the best place to be while paying the mortgage.

Ironically , if you're a programer who increases productivity, i.e. causes unemployment, you save money. In sour economy the need to save money is the greatest.

Sorry for my bad recommendation: just now my opera mobile updated itself to 14.0 . 14.0 sucks.

the problem is that social solutions are much harder to implement than technological ones , and rarely do succeed.

But i've seen better solutions to this problem .one example is letting bacteria grow basic food elements at 10x less cost, like pronutria claims.another example is making high quality chicken substitute from soybean,which,depending on proces could be much cheaper than chicken.

this way they get more revenues. see, just the customer service in us is $150 billion market .what about global customer service?what about doctors,lawyers ,or every other type of knowledge worker ? if Watson is as good as ibm claims, all those people would pay alot of money to use it.

on the other hand ,all of the search engine market is less than $150 billion per yer,probably much less.

and not fighting with Google is also a great bonus.

I use opera mobile, downloaded a day ago. The address bar is hidden when you use scroll down, and i don't see any big text on page load.

And regarding readability:i think opera is the best by far - because it has great reflow on zoom.

I think the real challenge for a kickstarter would be to offer attractive fpga development route. Currently xilinx prices their fpga-c dev tool at around $5K. My guess is that's the real limit , not the price of the zedboard.

Chuck, have you verified that the price is $15? because i heard it's mostly marketing and the real price is much higher.

Technology can be a huge help in solving social problems. For example , the pill has caused the biggest impact on the goal for woman equality, by far.

Even with those use cases, there should be some technologies and controls who help keep privacy who help filter, encrypt , store locally, anonymize and transform all kinds of types of information about a person's searches and surfing.

A simple example would be: give me an easy option to disable recording only my health related searches.

And those are relatively simple technologies to implement.

I think IBM watson is showing us that it's possible to build a great search engine with no privacy issues.

One thing that can really improve hangouts is eye contact.This is probably the main difference between video conferecing and the more expensive telepresence , which is replacing flights for business meetings.

While the eye-contact effect is harder to achieve on a pc[2], you can easily achieve similar effect by using a TV , putting the camera on top of the TV, and sitting in the right distance:

from "More than face-to-face: empathy effects of video framing"[1]":

""" TV Set-top design Viewing distances for large screen TVs make it easier to design effective interactions. At an 8’-12’ viewing distance, the recommended eye-camera distance is 8”-12”. An off-the-shelf camera placed flush on top of the TV will still leave several inches of screen space to accommodate the eye-head distance. A full screen upper-body image should give close to the recommended eye-camera distance for 5◦ error, and certainly within the 90% allowable angle error of 8◦. The camera lens can easily be chosen to frame the correspondent’s upper body (or the whole body which may be more appropriate) at 8’-12’ viewing distance. """

[1]http://gsct3237.kaist.ac.kr/e-lib/Conferences/CHI/2009/docs/... [2]https://plus.google.com/+GuyKawasaki/posts/KYADNHRgazS

What programmers can do about homelessness(and poverty):

Simple. Work for places(or build startups) that:

1. Help develop better and cheaper healthcare systems, products and processes. 2. Help develop technology that reduces the price of construction and in general the cost of living. 3. Help non profits and social entrepreneurs. 4. Help political change through technology.

And yes, doing some of this things might mean less wages , and not living in San Francisco.

But long term , those kids, who will face the huge struggle ,will be those who'll change the system and make history.

So let them be.

I'm talking about integrating two pieces of silicon inside a single package.

Of course you can package silicon in different packages, and package them, and assemble them on a pcb.

The big thing is not this phone, it's the chip.

The chip(MT6250) is a processor for feature phones which includes 260 mhz arm7 cpu,8Mbyte of ram , dsp,bluetooth,2.5G and All kinds of IO. It can run games on a touchscreen phone.

And it costs $2 in large volumes. This is much less than many microcontrollers who offer much less capability. And with such performance and memory , it can support much better languages and tools, faster time to market, and more complex systems, for cheap.

Also , this chip uses 2 different silicon pieces(one for processor and one for ram), for very low cost, instead of what we do today: build different stuff on the same silicon piece and compromise performance and cost and development time along the way. This could open the way to a lot of innovation.

But most of the profit in smartphones is made on the higher end. And those users do use apps, i think.

I'm dunno. My brother has a single core android, and it works fine.

RyanZAG also mentions an archos phone. Archos is definetly no a "a chinese no name android phone".

I don't know, but i don't think that really matters. google mostly deals the "cheap" stuff, while watson deals with really valuable stuff , so compute cost is is not so important.

I think there was a query on quora about this.

They say now it's "a pizza-box-sized server".

One application of watson is in medical diagnostics. They are working on other applications in finance, helping to develop drugs, predicting when industrial machines need maintenance and even coming up with novel recipes for tasty foods.

Basically, by reading and understanding large amounts of text, it can help you validate an hypothesis or even lead you to new hypothesis.

I wonder what would be the best strategy for google to monetize such an asset as ibm watson? Surely ads based model is not the best way(since they've already got a large part of the internet ad market and given that only google, ibm and maybe microsoft could build something similar.

If it's a truly competitive advantage, wouldn't offering it for startups/other-businesses in return for equity would offer bigger profits?

In addition to what's the article tells, you can get in china components you just can't get in the u.s.

For example , the mt6250 which is 260mhz arm7 microprocessor, with 8MByte ram , with dsp, with cellular modem, with bluetooth and with all kins of IO.it can run a feature phone with touchscreen and run games. Or be a cool internet of things micro controller. Or.

How much does it cost ? $2 in volume , in low volume you can maybe get it in $3 in china. But no way to get it in the u.s. .

And i bet there are plenty of other gems available.

First even Thiel agrees there isn't lack of innovation in computing.

Alan Kay asks about big ideas, not about innovation. I'm pretty sure that if you look at research papers you'll find amazing ideas that within a 5/10/30 years time will be important(but we can't tell, not until we worked hard to make them work).

Just of the top of my head, there are many potential amazing ideas: look at literature based discovery, alan kay's project that tries to build full os + apps in less than 20KLOC, "naked objects" and meredith patterson's work on parsing and security[1].

[1]http://www.securitytube.net/video/7251

I bet that if you looked at household income and working hours and worker conditions at the beginning of the industrial revolution you wouldn't see great improvement. You've seen that only after the workers movement gotten worker rights.

That's to say that those metrics are wrong to measure technological advancement per se. But of course what's important is standards of living.

While i don't generally buy into Thiel's arguments, There are many big barriers between great scientific discovery and massively deployed product:

1. Unneeded regulation.

2. Power structures in industry.

3. Complex and expensive commercialization processes.

4. Lack of funding, lack of long term funding.

5. Market acceptance.

6. Lack of entrepreneurial talent and general talent in the relevant field.

In this context, small sustaining innovations tend to produced more than radical innovations.

I wonder , when building a HW product what embedded platform people here use for manufacturing ? Arduino/Mbed/plain microcontroller?

And if you use arduino , how do you manage the need to release object files (according to the arduino license) ?

Thanks. Really interesting work.

Are you allowed to share some of the data ? If so:

Does the time includes time to walk to bus station or an estimate?

Is there some histogram of time saved per passenger ? or even something like X% of passengers save a big amount of time ?

Do you have a way to estimate time save by adding routes or alternative transport(like jitneys) before making the change?

Those are interesting, but i also think if some of this data was available(like for example big time saving for some part of the population), this would have better media coverage.

They talk about 10% time reduction(probably average). Does anybody know more fine grained statistics ?