minthd

There's a big difference in competition levels between the wifi(i.e. anybody is able to offer a free or commercial service), and between LTE-U assisted , which depends on access to the carrier network which is far from being competitive.

And that's the reason why carriers added the assisted part to the standard,according to internal documents:

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326570

Usually workplace and cafe wifi are offered for free.

That's some sneaky wording. the way wifi is viewed in society today - as a free resource - what matters is the total free capacity for everybody.

And in their example, most definitely , by taking 1 user and converting it to a non-free method, free capacity decreases.

Actually when we talk about serendipity with regards to books online, it's pretty silly to disconnect that from serendipity on the internet itself - because if you're a book lover ,ideas from the internet will guide you towards books.

And while there's a debate whether internet increases serendipity or just puts us in a filter bubble(personally i think that if you want more seredipity , you'll get it), there's some research that supports "more serendity" claims:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pandre/pubs/note0669-andre.pdf

No. The article was written ~3.5 years ago, and it's predictions doesn't seem to hold true. Ebook readers still use the same formats, the same distribution, etc.

What's the difference between this and using a parcel locker ?

This comment[1] , by bfritz , has another, reasonable view.

[1]http://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/ubeam-ultrasonic-wirel...

Don't the cyanogenmod installer supposed to offer an easy install experience ?

Fictional myth building around Elon Musk is a recurring activity.For example, the hyperloop:

"Two weeks before his Hyperloop announcement, Musk quietly met with the founder of ET3, an even-faster, already patented[since 1999] tube transport system."[1].

That's not to say Elon didn't help the hyperloop - he helped greatly by exciting the public's and investors imagination. But he didn't invent the thing.

[1]http://www.fastcoexist.com/3015704/futurist-forum/how-much-d...

The thing is - once you get to a decent curation level(and all the big boys will get there - not that hard) , curation level becomes subjective - and than you can convince people that your curation is better, by having better marketing. And who had the best marketing ? Well Apple.

I've seen some estimates of costs per package shipment via drone at less than $1, while currently amazon might pay $6 per package.

A guess: this uses memristors(i.e. rram).

crossbar is a startup in the field, their site gives plenty of details about the tech.

http://www.crossbar-inc.com/

Maybe intel mostly licenses the tech from crossbar, and just scales the production ?

Maybe there's no difference ? maybe they want to play the stock market, because for memristors, they might have competition, for example from crossbar inc ?

Ada is a good language for many things, but isn't very easy to use. It failed that test versus C.

Lua on the other hand, won that test plenty of times.

The safety-critical software industry is very different from your example, and in general, the results are very good.

>> Jobs where interacting with a human is the whole point.

There's a computer game that teaches people cognitive behavioral therapy , a job a psychotherapist used to do.Some prefer tablets instead of waiters.Teachers might be replaced with machines. It's really hard to tell whether interacting with a person is the whole point for a given job, especially for jobs that machines do things humans cannot.

And another category of job killers people forget about is things that do the job in a totally different way, not just automate. For example a dental vaccine might make dentists unnecessary , and remove any questions of responsibility and humanness.

And with regards to emotion - it's hard to tell, but a weird data point is Hatsune Miku, the animated japanese popstar/phenomena.

Still , Cx - lang is having a real hard time to find customers. So what's missing ?

They claim this language is highly parameterized. I wonder how much.

For example can you design a generic processor in such a way that everything will be parameterized?

It's hard to judge stuff from today's world, where all the system is geared towards growth and consumption. But it wasn't always like this. there we're periods in history or different cultures when people desired different things, so there's no reason for it not to happen again.

As for real human needs , like healthcare - it seems to be that with technology ,at some point in time, they will be fully solved, so no need for further growth.

Moore's law is also about cost per transistor.It has risen, so expect to see a very expensive card. Most of the cost/benefit ratio of this card would be probably due to the huge fast memeory, and not the 17 billion transistors.

>> But just like the other devices, the watch will start small and expand from here.

If you asked futurists how the iphone will 10 years on - they would have predicted a lot of what we have today - because it's based on clear technological trends - moore's law, cheaper/smaller sensors, etc and reasonable use cases - i.e. mobile gaming, mobile info.

But when reading about the potential of the watch, either you hear not so exciting uses(like a remote control for all your smart home devices, instead of a phone), or crazy predictions that's hard to see how get to technologically(the watch will have a small projector, the watch will detect an incoming heart attack).

And even with those crazy projections - it's not clear at all whether those technologies, if they work, would be preferably implemented in a watch.

On the other hand, Apple is great at marketing, so who knows ?

Apple had a very unique position at that time: the had legions of iPod fans, who are relatively wealthy, locked on to the Apple platform(due to music they bought).

Than they used that leverage on at&t , which was the weaker carrier in that time - in return only distributing via at&t - at&t agreed to give Apple full control - a thing unheard of in the industry. They repeated similar tactic in every geography.

That full control was the thing that enabled them to offer the best user/developer experience like matwood says and ride moore's law curve much better than the rest .

They bundled their machine with their own OS. Vector didn't.

What they forgot - jet.com is (secretly) backed by Amazon's biggest competitor(the chinese alibaba)[1]. Since AliBaba's revenue is probably larger than Amazon, since Alibaba is definetly bigger in cross-border retail - and it's investing huge sums into creating a global logistics network that could ship things from china to any customer in the world in 4-7 days(and also ship things from local warehouses for less time) , and it's model is less expensive than Amazon for manufacturers who want to sell direct-to-consumer(with great savings) ,and since there's decent likelihood of chinese government support behind the scenes, There's a good chance AliBaba will win the heart of the low-price seeking consumer.

Anyway, it's gonna be an interesting battle. I'm bringing the popcorn.

[1]http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/04/alibaba-backing-amazon-riva...

This is a good idea. I wonder if deep-learning will be useful to strongly test it this way:

1. divide a set of documents from the same person , apply stenography to half. represent each word by a number.

2. take half of this data and use it to train your deep-learning algorithm to categorize documents as clear/stegoe'd. Than test how well it can detect stego in the other half.

The inputs to those deep-learning should be as followed: num_of_word_0, synonym_number(num_of_word_0), .., num_of_word_n, synonym_number(num_of_word_n)

Where synonym_number(word) is: if we start with home-house-abode from wordnet as synonyms, home=1, abode=3.

This way we give the deep-learner info about your synonym use stats.

3. run algorithm.

Not too complex, and there's a decent likelihood that if there are statistical patterns, the deep-learner will find them.

Apple surely did know that apps would be a hit.That's why they gave monopoly on the iPhone to at&t - the weaker carrier at the time, in exchange for(among others) full control over the app store.

And i'm sure if you've asked in a place like HN at the time - they would have talked about some killer app ideas and a marketplace.

And let's not forget - we've already had android wear for some time(and the pebble before) ,and yet no great ideas, even just as prototypes or discussions.

Even with that, Android itself is well designed.

Currently it seems that apple is taking the battle to curation. I'm not sure it has the advantage there - but than again, content quality is very subjective and hard to compare,and than it becomes a marketing game - and Apple is much stronger in marketing.

>> that's when being the highly differentiated product will help the most

But the iPhone does seem to lose differentiation. Android apps have recently become well designed using material design, there's an app saturation, and 90% of the time people spend in phones is inside apps anyway,so it's harder to differentiate on the OS.

There are plenty of businesses with goal of making money that work well. And since we know that differentiation leads to profits and innovation leads to differentiation , innovation is actually a decent guidance.