Their engineering/status update bogs were really interesting. Particularly injection mold issues and RFID/NFC standards.
And I agree, the build quality is really nice - just wish they sold the screen protector during the kickstarter - I have the silicon protector and wifi dev board but my LCD screen is scuffed from carrying it around in my pocket.
Nature is advanced technology. Look at the trillions of micro-machines that operate inside of us - we're full of nano-bots. Obviously I'm taking liberty with the terms machines and bots, but ever since I started thinking about nature as technology it's made me appreciate even the dullest looking moss, a tiny ant carrying a crumb or weeds sprouting between cracks in the pavement.
If anything, the smaller an organism, the more it can take advantage of Van der Waals force, static, bioelectromagnetics.
Slightly related to the article, I watched a jumping spider crawling on my bench jump off the edge and curve its trajectory to land on my stainless steel dishwasher which was to the right of its initial jumping arc - I wonder if it was able to use the hairs on its body to create a static response or even as control surfaces.
In fairness to Atlassian I work for a charity and we get to use their products for next to nothing and I've found Jira to be a valuable project management tool.
My experience is that dev's have...mixed feelings about it because it can get in the way of "actual work" but only a few of those dev's are as good and organised as they think they are. The rest it's like herding cats and without Jira or an equivalent they'd be churning out dogshit.
While others have said it's an Australian thing, to give an example a popular Sydney based pub-brewery down the street from me has the rule "No Dicks!" on their wall and it really works. Always a friendly place to be, the people genuine and a sense of community.
Swearing, when used properly, punctuates an otherwise boring corporate message.
Would be an interesting situation if someone bricked a large chunk of internet connected TV's. It would possibly drive the mainstream population towards greater internet security.
The federal opposition could one-up them and carry in a PV panel and battery cell claiming it and the light reflecting from Minister Dutton's head is the key to our future (the latter part only if they want to channel Paul Keating's spite).
> It encourages micro-management. It encourages more and more process.
I think it's a case of there being multiple truths, and depending where you sit on the food chain you'll sing one and not the others:
1. If you're a highly competent dev it gets in the way and wastes valuable time
2. If you're a project manager with thousands of moving parts and a diverse array of talent from almost useless to God-tier it can help keep things on track
3. If you're a rookie you can at least quantify and digest which tasks require your attention and not feel overwhelmed
4. By virtue of some common personality flaws you over-estimate how good you are, underestimate what you need to do, and work on the wrong task and still say it's a pile of shit despite it being exactly what you need
Who is and how do you define that? I'd say in some very important spaces they're leaders, such as performance per watt in the mobile CPU space.
> by 2040 will be viewed as Xerox came to be
If you mean PARC's transition from an innovator to the one trick pony Xerox of today I'd say the difference is Apple keeps delivering high quality products and services in an expansive set of markets - some in so much demand you can't even buy today if you have the money.
Those products are rarely if ever the first to market, but always highly competent and aspirational to own. Their consistency in achieving this approximately a decade after Job's death should be a good indicator that they have a robust research, design and marketing process that will keep them moving.
I'm sure detractors would put their money on marketing being the primary driver, while happily ignoring Apple's achievements in engineering market-leading SOC's.
You're joking but interestingly Tesla at the Battery Day presentation revealed a giant injection mould to make the aluminium chassis for one of their cars, which will simplify the manufacturing process.
So we're going into uni-body territory but with a faster, simpler process than milling/printing. If Apple is happy buying thousands of milling machines for laptops and phones, a chassis injection mould might be the process they'd need to break into the car space.
As an ethical vegan (reduce animal suffering but previously enjoyed eating meat) I don't care if it shares the same grill or goes into the same fryer. But I'm also unlikely to go somewhere where that'd happen - it's more likely if I'm pressed for options i.e. somewhere out of the city.
I'd give the McDonalds burger a go though - it's always interesting to see how far food tech can be pushed and how different it is from the real-deal. The key in my mind is synthetic collagen to give fake meat the bounce/snap/chew of real meat (FWIW I don't eat fake meat often, just interested in food tech in general).
Optus is terrible. It's worth paying a slight premium for Telstra 4G. I'm on a 45gb cell phone plan for AUD$60 and it works everywhere, even in tunnels or remote areas, with speeds that shame my Fibre To The Building connection (though not in latency). My work laptop uses Optus and regularly loses connection despite being in an inner city suburb and close to a cell tower.
Maybe, I'm guessing, when you're at such a niche area of science like topological edge states in honeycomb plasmonic lattices you've got to double back to calling things simple shit in name-pairs just to keep everyone onboard.
I considered that as well. I live in an area of town where a lot of 110+ year old town houses still stand proudly (European cities would laugh at that statement) but I know that only the stuff built well is standing today while whatever had been made to a lower quality crumbled and was built over. Just because old buildings survive to this day doesn't mean everything from that era was built to last.
With regards to the featured article, I'd say multiple factors are at play - Roman concrete has amazing properties and structures that used it combined with good quality-control (i.e. correct material ratios in the concrete) and good engineering survived.
The human elements, quality-control and design, are less interesting than a magical substance.
> user patience and goodwill, basically political capital with the user base.
Or they can go down the Trojan Horse route and bolt one of their A-series chips as a co-processor to a board with an x86 CPU, begin the process of rewriting the OS and other assets in their control to run on ARM and provide some encouragement for dev's to make the switch over the next 4-5 years.
By having an ARM co-processor lightening the load running system assets they could balance the parts cost by using a previous generation x86 CPU.
They've already offloaded the System Management Controller, image signal processor, audio controller, and SSD controller to the T2 chip (64-bit ARMv8 A10 derivative: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208862) - the next step would be integrating T2 into a full blown CPU/SOC. Maybe T2 was the beginning of the Trojan Horse?
And I agree, the build quality is really nice - just wish they sold the screen protector during the kickstarter - I have the silicon protector and wifi dev board but my LCD screen is scuffed from carrying it around in my pocket.