tommusic

As far as I can tell, TextPlus is an app made by someone else that is distributed via Apple's iOS App Store.

Claiming it is an Apple product in such a case is probably a bad idea.

It's interesting: when I look back on my life so far, I don't feel like my path has been messed up significantly because of any particular piece of advice.

There were times in my life where acting on a particular bit of advice kept me from getting what I wanted. Those were frustrating times. But those times caused me to learn to deal with being frustrated; to stop and reflect on why I was reacting with such emotion.

There were times when the advice that I received was unclear, which made it easy for my motivation-to-follow to falter. I would waste time and not get homework done. Familiarity with a topic would grow more faint and my class performance would show it. And then I started to learn how to best use my time to learn the material. (In small groups, using multiple forms of engagement; reading/writing/speaking/listening)

The advice that, on-balance, seemed least helpful at the time:

* "such-and-such will happen when you least expect it"

* "don't ever give up"

* "don't run with scissors"

But in later reflection these lead me to different conclusions about these same items:

* The advisor understands that you're in pain, but really likes who you are when you're not moping. They're trying to help you get there, but they're not sure how.

* Admitting defeat is OK, and you can change focus (pivot) without stopping (giving up) entirely. This is a loophole. Use it.

* This has always been a good idea. Still is.

The advice I would offer would be to use advice wisely. Don't follow it blindly; reflect often, and be adaptable.

Great job learning a language (and an infrastructure) with such speed!

I've been building something with a similar aim on and off for a long time now, and it's neat to see in the comments that there are at least three others already out there.

I wonder if there is something that will lead to more widespread awareness/adoption of sites like these. Or are we better off trying to pick a target market smaller than [all book readers]?

Some good food for thought as I try and finally finish my own entrant into the space.

I wonder if this virus has been able to effectively spread to Madagascar.

To put it another way: I wonder if "Free Public Wifi" was the surviving ad-hoc phantom in countries where the primary language isn't English.

For what it's worth: Woot.com's deal for the day is a flip-around tablet-style netbook. http://woot.com/

Also worth pointing out: your site crashes iOS4 Safari while loading your index page. Running on the latest.

Your instructions say to select a topic and then hit "Start", but the topic list is inactive until the user clicks the Start button.

It took me a little while to decide to stop following the instructions. I don't know what that says about me as a person.

I'd expect they use the data in aggregate to figure out what sizes of clothing to stock where to keep latency and transportation lower.

It doesn't seem that much of their variable cost would get shaved off by already having one's measurements, which makes me think this wouldn't help them with a lowest-price strategy. Maybe a higher-end market focus.

But as other have already said: body size data can be expected to expire often. I'm an edge case, but my weight has oscillated between 195 and 165 a few times in the last year.

Most table cells don't have selectable/copyable text, as they're not able to get for-free the built-in text editing menu.

Clicking on a table cell could advance the user to a "detail" view that does allow cut/copy/paste, though.

One of the most difficult things to do is to create an effective mechanical way of measuring that student has learned the subject matter.

Naturally for some subjects it is more straightforward than others, but the problem is still challenging on balance.

Early childhood development requires a lot of psychological growth, in addition to knowledge growth. Abstract thought is not always acquired at different rates, and recognizing its emergence isn't very deterministic.

A solely software-based system also requires that the user provide honest input. It's hard to diagnose a lying patient.

Some parts intuition, some parts adaptability.

As the ability of software to handle these tasks improves, it will surely become a larger part of the equation. I don't think it will replace live humans in my lifetime though.

  come be a poet
  with people around the world
  one line at a time

http://haikoo.org

I enjoyed reading the article, and the resulting recognition that to "really disappear" is diametrically opposed to what we'd normally seek around here:

  - Brand Ownership vs Brand Abandonment
  - Search Optimization vs Search Pessimization
  - Collect User Metrics vs Stay Out of Site Logs
  - Networking/Meetups vs Self-Imposed Exile

It was intriguing to look down that alley, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Third shelf, all the way to the right, "The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide" -- which does not include Mostly Harmless, but IS leatherbound and DOES include slick gold-leafing.

According to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_Traveler the TSA allows these companies to collect and submit user information. The TSA then does the screening, and returns approval or condemnation.

It sounds like there were around 165,000 members. At $200 per person per year, that's $33M in revenue.

Apparently they raised somewhere near $100M in funding.

I wonder what their costs looked like.

As did my wife and I. Victory!

Nope. It was some slick illustration for the assertion discussed in the beginning of the book; that we are closer to being destroyed by Huxley's vision than Orwell's.

Do you feel that the advancement of technology (print > TV > online grassroots) is linked more than temporally to the reduction in social closed-mindedness (Kennedy as non-Protestant, Obama as non-white)?

I wonder how much of the change in the electorate can be attributed to the shifting forms of communication. There appear signs of a relationship, but I'm not persuaded yet.

If during Taft's time the electorate was entirely unconcerned by race or religion, I wonder how Kennedy and Obama would have fared.

This book is a lot of fun.

I'm reading this book at the moment, and liking it very much.

Postman goes deeper than this, though. He isn't saying that TV's weakening of the discourse is directly because of trash programming, but that the medium itself is modifying what messages people take in.

Taft was over 300 lbs when he was elected president. There is no way he would be elected in the age of television. He wouldn't have the look for TV.

Political speech in the time of Lincoln assumed of the audience a long attention span, ability to parse arguments and complex sentences, and up-to-date knowledge of current events.

I'm not halfway through, but I'm finding it compelling so far.

When I wanted to make sure that I knew a class subject area front and back, I'd get into a room with a whiteboard. Preferably with other students.

We'd make an agenda, or use a study guide, and take turns presenting the material at the white board.

You feel yourself writing it. You read it. You say it. You hear it.

It worked like gangbusters. A wild-draw-4 of learning styles.

Thanks for the tip! I'll spend some time reading on what those both provide; I think that once I'm writing code and watching it perform I'll have to motivation to pull myself over the other hurdles.

I just recognized that I missed this reply!

What I meant to call as inaccurate is that the article is dated 18 March and describes the two locations; post-announcement publication.

Your consideration of the word "schools" was not at all being indicted.

Your dating of the picture was some nice cross-referencing!

Thanks for clarifying some more!

I've been using PHP almost exclusively when doing stuff for the web, but frequently feel that I want to pick up both Ruby and Python. I still haven't actually done it yet.

It isn't a lack of community or the presence of jerks that keeps me from getting there. A big part of it is that it seems to take a bit of a different infrastructure to get started. This may be somewhat driven by misunderstandings.

If I want to incorporate a great library that someone wrote in PHP, I drop the source in and start linking to it. File system operations; I know those. For others, say Ruby, it seems like I'd need to run an installer that grabs files and places them somewhere. Then I type out a text file and run another script that builds my database. I don't know how that clock works, so I don't feel comfortable basing my schedule on it yet.

It seems like an awesome way to do things, and I'm excited about getting into it, but I'm making time tradeoffs between (learning another language and how to manage apps) and (day-job and building project ideas that I love).

The key is going to be to shift (learning another language ... etc) onto the project stack.

When you talk about PHP being too "web centric [... and] just not flexible enough", how do you mean?

Would less web-centric mean being useful in making desktop apps? What other dimensions of flexibility do you have in mind?

I really appreciate the time you took to reply, and feel like I have a much improved understanding of the landscape.

And now: a short thought on default passwords!

It feels like default passwords should not mean "operate normally". When you have the default password set on a router, it ought to keep bugging you to change it before it works as expected.

It'd need to be an industry standard to avoid companies touting theirs as "easier" because it doesn't require setting a password.

Though this would make it harder to steal a neighbor's wi-fi while one waits for one's own installation after moving into a new apartment.

Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.

Some Slashdot-spelunking resulted in a few comments that seemed reasonable:

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1191575&cid=27502... The poster makes some odd similes in advancing an argument that the biggest problem is not central computers, but the endpoint devices at substations and such.

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1191575&cid=27503... This poster asserts that a drive to create interconnectability has resulted in more open access.

I feel like I have more information, but not much more understanding of the answer to my original question. :-)

Can anyone explain (or at least speculate) a little bit more about what kind of vectors the "cyberspies" might have used?

The article didn't seem to imply physical presence, so my mind goes next to social engineering and e-mail trojans.

I'm assuming our power grid doesn't have externally-accessible web servers that are linked to the actual management functions...

  http://uspowergrid/admin/show_grid.php?plant_id=19';DROP TABLE powergrid;

That would be really frightening.

Though it is a little inaccurate; the article is dated too recently to miss that Boston is right out.

Perhaps it was built awhile back, and just recently published?

From the default index.html that is placed in a user's Sites folder on Leopard:

"Open System Preferences and click Sharing, then select Web Sharing.

Your done. Your site is now available on your private network at home or work."

What, what's that about my done?

For our great-grandmother we ended up getting one of HP's Presto printers. You pay a monthly fee (for the ISP) and the printer dials out on the phone line and downloads and prints any photos that have been e-mailed.

You set up a whitelist to avoid the spam issue, and then make sure you train people not to send all of those exciting forwards and 60-pic messages.

She loves it.

Wow. This would feel so out-of-place in the US that people would wonder about the mental health of the shouter.

I like the assertion of importance implied by the shouting; it seems that the US car corps have enough separation between the performance of a company and the impact on the exec that it doesn't carry the same weight.

The "down economy" or "lower consumer spending" are too well-established as escape-goats.