foxylad

22 ms·

211.
by foxylad 9y ago
OK, it is in this this guy's interests to "sell" Appengine, but he's absolutely right. And I have no skin in the game except as a very satisfied user. Our startup happened to get in on Appengine early on, and we went wit
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by foxylad 9y ago
And when that bug is fixed, assuming modern update practices, it is fixed for everyone. In effect, human drivers can only learn from their own mistakes whereas autonomous systems learn from every mistake made by their system's drivers.
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by foxylad 9y ago
I agree - it's boring to see "but they close projects so you can't trust them" comments every time Google does anything constructive. Maybe the bot could also post an "If you provide a free service, how are you obli
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by foxylad 9y ago
And Google Appengine is stuck on Python 2.
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by foxylad 9y ago
Easy - anything boring. "Boring" usually means repetitive and not mentally challenging, which to my mind is exactly what computers are for. Even if the task happens infrequently and the script takes longer than the task, automatin
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by foxylad 9y ago
Add extraneous code?
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by foxylad 9y ago
Does anyone know how the electrical connection works? It seems to me that this is critical. If connections fail in a really hostile environment (high thermal range and moisture levels) then maintenance will kill any savings. But if they&#x2
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by foxylad 9y ago
So "you people" who drove the Obama birth certificate narrative for ten years (not only with no evidence for, but concrete evidence against) are criticising a different set of "you people" for driving a narrative? And a
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by foxylad 9y ago
Methinks someone wants Tesla stock cheaper. Absolutely no mention of the considerable IP capital Tesla is building, or what that might be worth to a company with smart car ambitions and 250B in the bank.
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by foxylad 9y ago
Checks?! We do business in several countries, and the US is the most backward - by far - for banking services. It's laughable that using a bit of posted paper (even if conveniently generated and sent by your bank) is even an option, le
221.
by foxylad 9y ago
New Zealand and Australia here - ditto.
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by foxylad 9y ago
Thanks for explaining the point, and I note that you are not necessarily supporting what you are explaining. To be honest, I'm unsure about the whole "make it worth more and they'll invest more in it" argument, but I do
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by foxylad 9y ago
> ...one just cuts the cables Isn't this a problem with any centralised electrical power source? In fact I've always thought that terrorists could cause far more disruption by taking out a couple of transmission line towers tha
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by foxylad 9y ago
I do have a fair bit of business experience, including seeing how destructive anti-competitive behaviour (both others and my own) can be. Successful businesses have lots of customers, and customers like the businesses they patronise to be
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by foxylad 9y ago
Laws are just our social norms ("how we do things around here") codified into actionable rules. Social norms develop and act much faster than laws, and I would suggest they are more powerful. In Uber's case, publicity about t
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by foxylad 10y ago
Would renting a private jet have been a viable solution for United to get their four employees where they needed to go? I have no idea what it costs, but given they were in the hole for several thousand dollars in refunds, it might have sav
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by foxylad 10y ago
I agree. I've always been non-plussed at Twitter's valuation, given the lack of a clear monetization scheme, but then so many early unicorns were the same - eyeballs were the primary goal, with vague assumptions that revenue will
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by foxylad 10y ago
More money - and mindshare (=future money). Chromebooks run linux, and if this issue affects those, then O365 is looking terrible against Gsuite for huge numbers of school students. In five years, those students will be starting their worki
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by foxylad 10y ago
You can buy ESP8266 boards with wifi built in for less than $3, so wifi doesn't justify the price tag. The Edison is certainly a lot more more powerful, but most IOT applications simply don't need that power. And if you do, Raspbe
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by foxylad 10y ago
Not in my experience. We have three payment providers at the moment, including one that only handles a few transactions a month. We've never been hassled over minimal volume. I can't explain our difference experiences - maybe it&#
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by foxylad 10y ago
Microwave ovens are another classic. We got ours 25 years ago, and it's still going strong. In fact several people who know about appliances have warned us never to ditch it - apparently the magnetron tubes for all modern microwave ove
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by foxylad 10y ago
Depends on the device. Both our fridge and washing machine are 20 years old, and still going strong. New models offer nothing that we value - I don't want to attach either of them to the internet.
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by foxylad 10y ago
I think developers come at payment services with a mindset that it's such a simple thing (it's really just decrementing a number in one account and incrementing a number in another account) that they leave it to last to implement.
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by foxylad 10y ago
Ah, GROKLAW. I used to camp on that website, waiting for IBM's white knights to slay the evil Darl McBride, and PJ to put on her red dress. PJ was Pamela Jones the blogger, who gave an incredibly informed commentary of the cases. I won
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by foxylad 10y ago
> People actually _are_ sued on a regular basis Are they? I'm quite happy to be enlightened, but I've never heard of a patent-based attack against users of widely used open-source tools (the example here is Hadoop). Except for
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by foxylad 10y ago
One Dunedin Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunedin_Multidisciplinary_Heal... result shows that a "disadvantaged" childhood combined with a certain set of genes leads strongly to anti-social adults (well,
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by foxylad 10y ago
Subscriptions. My company only provides services via subscription, which means we can provide great support, continuous development, and no ads. Our customers love this. You could argue that this doesn't solve your problem, because we
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by foxylad 10y ago
What are you, communist or something?! I read a poignant comment on Twitter the other day, about how nowadays public libraries and fire services would never be funded - perhaps we'd give illiterate people tax credits for buying books,
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by foxylad 10y ago
True, it costs $5 a month - nearly free. It comes down to the eternal truth that there is no such thing as a free lunch, and expecting a $100/hour support person to be at your beck and call for $5 a month isn't realistic.
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by foxylad 10y ago
Exactly. Because they've usually only experienced support for Google's free services, people assume all Google support is minimal - but it isn't. We pay $150 a month for silver support, and in the extremely rare (several year

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