kux

Am I the only one that prefers Holo to KitKat/Kennedy?

Kennedy seems a closer to iOS than Holo was, so I expect this to make cross-platform themeing easier for app makers, but I'm sad to see Matias Duarte's work diluted

I just tried out the f.lux for Philips Hue feature and it is highly impractical because it arbitrarily adjusts the brightness of all Hue lights in your house...

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of LampShade.io, an Android app for the Hue that has a similar feature (and many others too)

Shameless self promotion: I'm the creator of an Android app for the Hue called LampShade.io that also supports this (and a ton of other features!)

Why not assign something like http://try.github.io/levels/1/challenges/1 as homework instead?

Battery replacements are around 10k/decade[1]. Quite a bit less than the 30k/decade estimated petrol specific costs provided by the author.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S#Battery

Is this just about being able to reuse components beyond the original use case, or also being able to split the product and let hackers drop in existing Arduinos we have laying around?

Unfortunate side effect of decreasing the barriers to (e)book publishing?

Despite the problems Google had initially shipping physical products over Play/Wallet, I suspect this will be more polished. The showroom they have for the Google Fiberhood appeared well run when I encountered it.

I grew up around the energy industry and spent my childhood focused on engineering and history. I was converted through my high-school's strong computer science program. Next I picked up Android development. Now I'm a CS & EE undergrad. In my internships so far I've done HCI R&D for the Oil Industry. Not sure if I'll become a full blooded "valley-type techie" or a software/engineer for some other industry.

I just got a 16GB model after hitting refresh on and off for the past hour

why aren't they taking pre-orders and/or back-orders?

engineers solve problems too

Yes. Google 'Mud Pulse Telemetry'

Low bit rate as in < 30 bits per second (As of when I interned for a major oil services company this past summer)

the Nback Progress page doesn't appear to be working

was App Inventor ahead of it's time?

In my experiences using App Inventor I found it, like Scratch, useful for rapid prototyping of simple apps and games. The problem was that it doesn't produce efficient enough apps for complex games than run well on today's phones.

one of the biggest reasons Apple would switch to ARM for laptop-like products is to reduce their dependence on Intel's effective monopoly!

Intel has an effective monopoly on x86 high end mobile chips, and those chips are now provided graphics and require Intel motherboard(southbridge) chips as well. Intel is also in the SSD and wireless chip market. In short, Intel parts are an increasingly large percent of the cost of a laptop.

Apple's profits dependent on Apple's control over component costs, but their dependence on Intel threatens this. It is hard to negotiate prices down when there is no viable alternative supplier.

If Apple can control developers enough to switch to ARM and write efficient code for 'just good enough' ARM-based laptops, then Apple should switch as soon as possible.

This rumor was first addressed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2519858

The transition would occur in 2014 or later. By that point in time we will have quad core 64-bit ARM A15's or better.

x86 will have have lasted 8+ years at Apple, which I think is reasonable when you consider how much Apple products have changed since x86 was adopted.

Apple has significant motivation to ditch x86 now that Intel has an effective monopoly in high end x86 chips. Intel's fab process is 2+ years ahead of the fabs used AMD and ARM competitors though, so Apple switching architectures will only make sense in the long run.

ARM competes because of a more power efficient architecture; however, this difference is less of an issue if Intel's fab process can get farther ahead of the competition.

In short term(next 4 years) Intel's lead fab lead will likely continue to grow, because Intel switched to Tri-Gate(FinFET) at the 22nm node while TSMC and others will not adopt similar technologies until 16nm node(2014 or later).

Keep in mind Microsoft is also working on porting Windows to ARM. Ideally there would be some form of Windows 8 able to run on the new Mac's by the time the architecture transition occurs.