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Snowdax

VR. Next two years are going to be pretty stagnant. The resolutions, etc. just are still enthusiast tier.

But 10 years time? We could be seeing the beginning of the end of TVs, smartphones, cinema, social media, etc. as we know it today. VR arcade warehouses popping up in many places. Perhaps even starting to impact the layouts of newly architected houses to have less walls, focus more on wide one-story dwellings (but stacked on top of each other) and more open space to roam wide in virtual reality.

Re:SoundCloud is here to stay on Friday August 11, 2017 @01:10PM (#14992042)
Oh man, I hadn't thought of this before but yeah I'd funnel a few quid to the right guys.

Like Koan Sound are late on releasing their first full album, I'd pay to even just get an inside sample of the unfinished product right now.

Yeah they introduced ads in the past few months. Already looking for alternatives that have some resemblance of my existing SC library because of it.

I will mourn the loss of SC as it has been a superior product to Spotify, but it's all about two things:

1. Does it have the music I listen to? 2. Is it obnoxiously in my face trying to make money while I'm trying to concentrate with background music?

Right now, they're starting to ruin criteria 2 and there isn't much reason to be loyal to the brand. The only problem for me now is, that whatever alternative I find is. Inevitably it will befall the same fate.

Re:Tiny satellites ushering in a new space revolution on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @12:14PM (#14805385)
It can me infinite collisions. It does not matter. Conservation of momentum still applies. The system of collisions only have a finite amount of energy. And it's chaotic rather than engineered. So it's not cumulative, much more likely to happen at numerous different angles cancelling previous collision trajectories out.
Re:Tiny satellites ushering in a new space revolution on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @12:09PM (#14805348)
Between 6 months and 4 years ideally. 25 years max. If you can't prove reentry within 25 years in simulations you do not fly on the rocket at all in the first place.
You're right. It's not. At least there if I post something a conversation usually happens. Here, I post something and, at best, I get one reply total. While Reddit indeed has a load of crap at least some percentage of it is valuable engagement once you stay of the default and political subreddits.

Here I get they same amount of value of posting when I have something to say as putting it into a local text file.

Re:Scotland to seek second independence referendum on Monday March 13, 2017 @11:10AM (#13858421)
Spain has just come out last week and said that they are OK with Scotland joining the EU as long as England has signed of on Scotland leaving the UK first and the independence process being completed. The implication being that it would not set a Catalonian precedent as Spain would be inclined to never sign off on Catalonia leaving in the first place.
I've not been paying attention to 3D printing for quite a while now. Which companies are ruling the roost of desktop 3D printing these days?
Here in Ireland anyway for a university to be accredited at all ethics has to be part of the engineering curriculum.

First Semester of our first year we got a dedicated ethics class.

Re:Twitter Could Have Become a Protocol on Monday November 07, 2016 @07:13AM (#12890461)
Regulation. Having a full record of important conversations to fall back to for legal reasons is a big part of both corporate and governmental policies. Clinton's emails being deleted being an example of why ethereal messages are not taken lightly
Re:The Median Level of Founder Ownership at Exit on Friday November 04, 2016 @12:21PM (#12873727)
The best businesses need to raise less money because they can fund themselves via profit or manage burn rate to a high degree via cost cutting. If you don't do one of those, you will need to raise more outside capital. Thus sell more of your company. Notice how the most successful companies have leaders who sold the least of their ownership? There's a reason it correlates.

Revenue is not profit. Only reason Amazon had so many losses over quarters during the years because it was a managed tax avoidance measure, not because they had unfixable costs.

Re:Daydream – Google VR on Tuesday October 04, 2016 @04:27PM (#12639174)
A vast swathe of "the gamer audience" is on mobile though. The bulk of the numbers are people playing the likes of Candy Crush and Temple run, not COD or Halo. Just the ones who flesh out the most money for gaming.
Re:iPhone 7 on Wednesday September 07, 2016 @05:49PM (#12448118)
I don't want a Jaybird so that's not a winning argument for why I would want these.

I'm comparing them to my $90 noise cancelling over ear headphones that, while yes no exactly top tier, don't require their own charging infrastructure and have much better audio quality than stock apple.

I may as well have an entirely separate MP3 player that costs me a good bit less than $160 than deal with this BS.

It's not just you. That's why there have been so much M&A.

Interests rates are low so getting loans to buy out your competition. In a time when VC money has (relatively) dried up and growth in many industries has slowed your competition are increasingly desperate to keep the lights on. A good few companies are pretty primed to sell right now.

Re:Master Plan, Part Deux on Thursday July 21, 2016 @11:22AM (#12137442)
Photovoltaics. AKA Solar panels
Re:The syndrome impairing astronauts’ eyesight on Sunday July 10, 2016 @10:16AM (#12065640)
Until relativity and the standard model can be merged and we can figure out a cause and effect between gravity and other fundamental forces and figure out who to trigger gravity with an electrical switch for example gravity manipulation is not going to happen for quite some time. We'll probably just take the risk and go to Mars and suffer the health consequences.
Re:Will humans keep getting taller? on Tuesday June 21, 2016 @10:33PM (#11951180)
I would imagine as the average height increases, from a product design point of view, cars, planes, etc. will become more accommodating for people who would be considered very tall today's standards
Re:Another successful DAO attack recursive split on Sunday June 19, 2016 @01:55PM (#11933835)
I dunno, the trade part of Eve is fairly numbers and text heavy
I believe the term is vampires. That concept has been around for quite a long long time...
The three usual metrics that are used are "Team", "Market" and "Product" with investors focusing more on one or the other.

I'm fairly certain that investors who focus on team and market over the product metric are the ones who will continue to get burned by this sort of scenario. This isn't the last company that will try to peddle vaporware and get away with it for an extended period of time.

Re:Moving Forward on Basic Income on Saturday June 04, 2016 @03:19PM (#11837577)
I would argue that the idea is not quite mainstream yet outside the tech community. The tech community though is very concerned about UBI as we see automation barrelling down the line and making a large percentage of the population unemployable. When that happens many a programmer would like to not be lynched in the streets by Luddite mobs for doing their job.
4 and 5 are clearly not aligned. If they were, there wouldn't be the support that there currently is in volume for anti immigration rhetoric and policy.
Re:Growing Rift Between Valve and Oculus on Friday May 27, 2016 @11:59PM (#11790521)
Carmack tends to not particularly care what the business side are up to. He wants to focus on pushing the tech forward and not get bogged down with the office politics or PR spinning beyond what he's forced to do.

Hence John Romero...

Carmack is more of a Woz type character, hence why there is great respect for him in the industry. Many a developer merely dreams of being let loose on the tech and not have to deal with any of the "bullshit".

Well I can't speak for many countries but Irish police figures are slightly more flattering with 8 people shot by police in total over 15 years. http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/eight-fatally-shot-by-g...

This is mostly down to how your standard police don't have any firearms at all. So you could say things are at least a few places elsewhere a little different.

Re:Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft (2014) on Monday April 25, 2016 @10:42AM (#11564466)
Dublin sure, but lot less decent down the country. Not nearly enough available rides, if any at times.
Hook me up yo! If this thing works out it will change so much about the logistics of space.

Key word: if

1. The power requirements to run one of these would be larger than what would fit in a basic Cubesat form factor. It's not going to be a 1U, perhaps something like a 3U or 6U at best. Then there is the thermal management of the large power supply (getting rid of heat in a vacuum is not simple) which is even more equipment and mass. Those larger satellites are a bit more expensive.

2. A lot of the "Launch a 1U Cubesat for $100k" figures are for the launch itself. That ignores other stuff like engineer wages, legal, etc. and is mostly hyperbole. Launching two for $200k is much more common as the second one take a lot less time to put together once the initial R&D is done. Then these "$100k" Cubesats, capability wise, are fairly useless. Think Sputnik type satellites. Want a working payload? Prepare to do more R&D. Oh and Cubesats have about a 50% rate of actually operating in orbit. First one doesn't work? Now you need to find more money to launch another if you weren't lucky.

3. The number of people who are willing to throw millions after something that currently isn't explained by science and is a lot harder to debug when you don't have someone sitting next to it in orbit, when it can done on the ground for an order of magnitude cheaper, is very small. Most people interested in using this are waiting for someone to pay for the testing first. Hell most satellite engineers I know for now still believe it to either be a hoax or will end up being just a measurement error. So people are riding this out until there is more hard evidence.

Disclaimer: I'm a Cubesat engineer

Re:Facebook Messenger Platform on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @04:43PM (#11483410)
"Now that we've almost finished migrating our app away from Parse lets start integrating this new Facebook thing!"

Yeah, how about no.

Re:MIT Turns Wi-Fi into Indoor GPS on Monday April 04, 2016 @01:29AM (#11419614)
Any chance of getting it to work natively on android as a standalone library without cordova? Being able to integrate a library over Gradle into an existing app would be really really nice.
I wouldn't quite be going "Thank God!" if I was you on this news. It could end up that now when people go "Oh it's just like Lumosity" it could potentially be with the added tinge now of "Are you trying to mislead me too?"

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