mellis

So very sad. Ben Fry is one of my heroes. He's done an amazing job with Processing, over a very long time. I can't think of any other open-source project with the same consistency of vision and quality of execution, plus the level of design and usability.

I read a lot of Ben's code while I was working on the IDE for Arduino. It was always extremely clear, robust, and well-commented. And occasionally hilarious. My favorite part was the prompt to take a walk that showed up when you had created a new sketch for each letter of the alphabet on a particular day (sketch names defaulted to something like 20231003a, 20231003b, etc). But there were also some good digs at the failings of Processing's various dependencies, like Java and Mac OS.

The world of computational design and open-source software is much better for having Ben Fry and Processing in it.

There's a great discussion of state in one of the original lambda papers: "The Art of the Interpreter or, the Modularity Complex" by Gerald Sussman and Guy Steele from 1978: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6094/AIM-453.... (Part 2).

One thing that I think is lost in a lot of the comments here is that, to a large extent, privacy is experienced, not factual. That is, in many cases, the breach of privacy is the act of mentioning something that should be private, not whether or not the system (or the person) knows that thing. This is something we tend to intuitively understand in our human relationships, but one that somehow seems to be forgotten in the design of these systems (or, at least, the conversations about them). We need good ways to tell the Google Assistant that something is private (or for it to figure it out for itself) -- even if it still possesses the underlying data.

(There are, of course, situations in which the actual existence or not of specific data is what matters, but I think those are less relevant to the success of something like Google Assistant than the perception of privacy -- and that perception is important, regardless of the underlying data.)

There are use cases for things like Arduino (a microcontroller development board). We'd like to allow uploading to Arduino boards from an online IDE. We'd also like to allow for interaction between sensors and actuators on an Arduino board and websites (e.g. programs written in the Scratch visual programming language). Yes, we can do much of this by having the user install a local application that communicates via web sockets, but that has its own security implications and adds an additional step for the user.

This is great! A few things that might be nice to add are the ATmega32U4 (on the Arduino Leonardo and Micro, among other things), the ATtiny85, the ATtiny84, and these resonators: http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/AWSCR-8.00CV-T/535-...

For hand-soldering, it might be nice to include 1206 packages in addition to 0603 ones, although I realize that would make the list much longer.

Another good reference for this kind of thing is the Fab Lab inventory: http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/fab/inv.html and it might be worth looking that over to see if there's anything that seems worth adding.

My former advisor, Leah Buechley, and other friends created this introduction to programming and electronics via e-textiles and the LilyPad Arduino: http://sewelectric.org/

More here: http://highlowtech.org

As someone who's tried to get from San Francisco to Silicon Valley without a car, I'd love to see companies like Google advocating and supporting better public transportation as well as just providing a private solution.

I've tried to source the components using as few vendors as possible (currently DigiKey, SparkFun, and Arduino, plus ordering the PCB) but it's definitely more work than just buying a kit. I'm working on a better solution but it's probably a ways off.

I haven't had any problems. Only one TSA security person noticed it, and they didn't give me any trouble.

The key point here is the difference between copyright and patents. If someone has a copyright on something, you can create an alternative (free) implementation of it. If they have a patent, you can't.

I've heard good things about the Lasersaur, a DIY laser cutter: http://labs.nortd.com/lasersaur/

Also, Ponoko is a decent option for a laser-cutting service: https://www.ponoko.com

It apparently sounds pretty good, according to the people I've called. The reception seems pretty standard, although I don't actually display signal strength in the interface yet so I'm not totally sure.

As the person who made the phone, I think this is an interesting question.

Do we say that Apple doesn't build computers themselves because they buy the CPU from Intel? Or because they use Qualcomm transceivers (and lots of other off-the-shelf components) in their phones? On the other hand, we probably wouldn't say someone made a phone if they just put it into a different enclosure.

I can say that I spent a lot of time selecting all the components, putting together the schematic, routing the board, and writing the UI software. (All of that took a lot longer than laser-cutting the case.) Of course, it probably took a lot more work than that to create the GSM module. But that's also true of the microcontroller I'm using, the LCD, even the battery. Just about everything is built on top of the work of others (see the Toaster Project for an example of how hard it is to do otherwise).

Interestingly, this critique hasn't really come up from the people I've worked with to build the phone. I explain the function of the GSM module (and the rest of the components) but after putting it all together, people don't seem to think of the phone as just a box for the module -- in part, I'd argue, because they realize how many other things are in there too.

Again, though, there's a fundamental question here that I'm trying to explore with my research: what does it mean to do it for yourself?

BTW, the latest files are here:

Hardware: https://github.com/damellis/cellphone2hw Software: https://github.com/damellis/cellphone2

Anyone heard anything about whether the new hardware and software will be open-source? It would be a shame if MakerBot's continued success and growth come at the expense of openness.

For more details, see "It Will Be Awesome if They Don't Screw it Up: 3D Printing" by Michael Weinberg: http://www.publicknowledge.org/it-will-be-awesome-if-they-do...

Doesn't Gatekeeper allow you to sign apps that aren't distributed through the Mac app store and avoid the warning mentioned in the article? That makes it a feature that's explicitly intended to improve the security of the Mac _without_ requiring that all apps be bought through the Mac app store (i.e. the opposite of the EFF's argument).

Also, there's more to the iOS story than the small amount of money that Apple makes from the app store. Apple has over $20 _billion_ in revenue per quarter from the iPhone [1], making Cydia's $10 million / year about a hundredth of a percent of Apple's revenue. Tim Bray has an interesting estimate [2] of how a small a fraction of iPhone revenue goes to software developers - $12 vs. $350 for the hardware - making Apple's cut an even smaller ~$5. I would argue that user experience and control are a much larger part of the motivation for locking down iOS than the additional revenue.

There's a good argument to made about the problems with closed platforms but, by being misleading about Apple's technology and motivation, the EFF does a poor job of making it here.

[1] http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q2fy12datasum.pdf [2] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/03/04/Mobile-Mon...

Designers designed the old look; designers designed the new look. What makes them arrogant now?

I'm happy to see a big player in the open-source world take a design-focused approach to software development. The author may not like Apple's design, but their top-down approach has led to products that are loved by many. It would be great to see this approach succeed in open-source, so that we end up with well-designed products that preserve the freedoms of open-source.

Does anyone else find the strictness of these policies disturbing? It sounds like they found one post that violated their policy and as a result you can't find Chrome on Google for the next two months. While I appreciate the evenhandedness in applying the rules to their own company, should these things allow for a bit more leniency and discretion in enforcement?

The problem (or one of them) is that if the euro splits up into many separate currencies, the values (exchange rates) of those currencies are probably going to fluctuate greatly. This causes all kinds of problems for governments, banks, companies, and even individuals as the value of your debt, the cost of supplies, the price of your exports, etc. all change dramatically.

It looks like they got rid of the white plastic MacBook, too. Now the product line is even more focused.

But there is a reason: to provide a free / open-source version of a useful and successful product. This software commons may lower the value of competing commercial products but it provides value to everyone else (who can use and build on it without cost or permission).

Currencies (and other assets) benefit from liquidity: someone willing to buy it when you want to sell and to sell when you want to buy. It can be difficult to distinguish beneficial market-making activity (which still involves turning a profit) from harmful speculation, regardless of the way it's described by the person doing it.

As Sam says, one of the best parts of Octopart is that it has so many distributors, especially the ones you've never heard of. So when Digikey and Mouser are sold out of what you need, you can find it somewhere else.

For an in-depth treatment of modularity, state, and side-effects, see "The Art of the Interpreter" by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman: http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-... (and the rest of the original Lambda papers: http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html).

Openness is indeed a continuum and different degrees of it make sense for different people and different situations. The problems arise when you claim to be more open than you are or become less open than you were. Apple is clear that it offers proprietary platforms; Google claims Android is open but isn't acting accordingly.