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It's possible the Big 3 would actually prefer a Tesla-like direct-to-consumer model; for example, Chrysler tried opening a Chrysler-owned store in LA a few years ago, only to have it shot down by local law.

I'd imagine that if one of the Big 3 started doing direct sales, dealers would stop selling their cars en masse. There's no way for an established manufacturer to stop selling to dealers.

It's been a while, but I think Apotheker's plan was a two-parter:

* to kill off / sell off the consumer division

* to just turn HP into an IBM-type enterprise company.

The former isn't exactly true in this case; the latter is coming true.

The "A Fork!? You Should Improve Scalac!" section is delightful.

I don't think I've ever heard of a /hardware/ company pivoting like this. Pretty cool.

I can't speak to the British auto dealer experience, but in the US, salespeople are often undertrained and don't actually know enough about what they're selling.

Volkswagen can't really push its influence onto the salespeople directly, it would need to go through the dealer.

Are there any sites with runnable Servo binaries? Or is it seriously just the engine with absolutely zero browser chrome?

Let me answer.

"Chris Dixon, the project manager at Seattle Tunnel Partners [...] said he felt pretty confident that the blockage will turn out to be nothing more or less romantic than a giant boulder, perhaps left over from the Ice Age glaciers that scoured and crushed this corner of the continent 17,000 years ago. " ~ The article.

You would think they'd have learned after that 1984 fiasco a couple of years ago - taking content away does not a happy customer make.

This looks fantastic. I don't think I'll ever find a good use for it, but I may shoehorn it into something anyways. It's really pretty!

Showing people boilerplate instead of attr_accessor isn't really a way to convince people that Ruby's great.

I know HN's patron saint Jeremy Ashkenas does a lot of the interactive features for the Times. Any idea if he was involved?

Is this just GameSpy the gaming website (eugh) or GameSpy's server browser (also eugh, but it serves a purpose in life)? BF1942 and Quake and a couple other older games used it.

Interesting that one of the bugs was reported by a Ruby on Rails developer. Nice to see such cooperation between two similar open source products.

Companies investing in themselves? Disgusting behavior.

Oh god, I was worried for a moment this was about the car brand.

(Though they're probably on their way out too.)

I was very surprised to see that you weren't publishing on iBooks or Kindle, but truly self publishing through your websites. How the heck do you get yourself out there to the point that you're raking in 10k a month? (Besides HN.) And do you think that'll drop off once your main readership has bought the book?

Gearhead websites like Jalopnik and TTAC have taken Tesla to task for only providing extremely short press junkets to reviewers - assumably so nobody will ever get the thing down to empty and have something bad to say about it in their review. To me it shows a lack of confidence in their own product.

I personally hope the best for them, but to this day it remains to be seen if they can actually deliver the 50k Model S to a customer.

Ignoring the news for a second - am I the only one who thinks this dark grey on slightly lighter grey makes for a terrible color scheme for reading?

Dumb question: so is this just a lightweight X11 WM or is it a brand new windowing system? Or just some sort of directfb hack-job?