Same here ... Macbook Air desperately needs a better screen. I reluctantly bought one recently just for the quality and reliability. Perhaps Apple is concerned that it would cut into their MacBook Pro sales too much.
Wow, all this talk about VR in 1993 ... it would be interesting to read the history on that. Either the world wasn't ready for it or the implementation was very lame (something like Nintendo StarFox or worse yet ... BattleZone)
There was a lot of excitement about VR in the early 90's, but it was not driven by the game industry. I had the rare experience of using a VR hang glider simulator that was exhibited at SIGGRAPH in 1993. I was just a kid then, but it was far more impressive than any gaming system.
Looks like the hang glider simulator is mentioned in this book, "Sex, Drugs and Tessellation: The Truth About Virtual Reality, as Revealed in the Pages of CyberEdge Journal" [1]
SIGGRAPH has been called "the original VR meetup." [2] Much of the VR technology back then was used for military training/simulation and wasn't shown to the world [3].
Having tried both the "VR" of 1993 and the VR of today, I would argue it's nearly incorrect for them to have the same name. The goal was the same, but the technology to do decent VR didn't exist back then. There's a certain amount of responsiveness and optical clarity required for a decent VR experience.
Sega VR was never released due to many of the same issues that made Nintendo's Virtual Boy a failure. Among these were how expensive the unit was, its poor graphical capabilities and most notably its eyestrain / headache inducing effects after a short period of play time [1]. However, as with all things SEGA at least we got a cheesy keynote presentation out of it [2].
To be blunt, it made people sick. I was there, I saw the queazy faces at the end of the demo. I was "hardware boy" in the producer ranks and when that came up, I passed. I'm not sure they would have given it to me, but I made it clear I would not want to work on it.
It wasn't quite that bad. But it wasn't all that good, either. Still astonishing, especially for its time, and worth experiencing back then for the sake of having done so - but not really something you'd seek out on its own merit, even when it was new.
What if they have a 90% administration fee... all that matching could go right back into the charity. This would effectively make it 0% matching.
Also, the matching could be prorated over the next 100 years. This company has only been around for 3 years and doesn't have a profile on Charity Navigator yet. I will give it some more time.
100% of donations directly fund patient care. We even pay the credit card processing fees out of our own pocket in order to keep the administrative costs at 0% for donors. If you donate $10, it'll be matched to $100, and every cent will go to the healthcare provider to cover the cost of the patient's care.
We can afford to do this by 1) raising money separately from a group of donors to cover our administrative costs and 2) enabling people who donate to patients to add a tip to help cover administrative costs (despite it being optional, ~2/3 of donors tip).
We're too new to have been rated by Charity Navigator. Regardless, even when we are rated I won't point donors there. I think Charity Navigator is a valuable tool (more transparency around nonprofits is a good thing imo) but I don't think it's an effective way of evaluating an organization's impact. It's focused on what % of donations nonprofits spend on programs (vs administration) but not on whether the programs work.
You're right to be cautious and with any charity it's reasonable to expect transparency. I've donated to Watsi for a while, they send a lot of updates and freely share what procedures cost, the steps they are on and when they were performed. It's my understanding, they cover their operational costs from other sources (and asking you when making a donation). It's never free to run a charity and I can respect some higher expense ratios having worked for one. Assuming what Watsi is putting out isn't flat out lies, they seem competent and trustworthy.
I believe all of these are good points. The keywords are simple and concise and I believe the language constructs such as interface{} and sub-typing were designed to ensure compilation and running are insanely fast. Google is famous for optimizing their server applications and Go appears to be their "go-to" language of choice for all future web application development.
Interface{} (not interfaces as a whole) and subtyping would make compiling slower. I think sum types and pattern matching would compile faster and be more sensible.
Does anyone understand what the author meant by the following statement:
${lang} is the language of the future
This looks like a macro for substitution, but maybe its some hip new term I've never encountered. An actual language or just a placeholder for a language that hasn't been chosen yet?
For younger developers, you might try out the Intel XDK - it has a really simple interface and emulator for Android, iOS and web browsers (for building HTML5 apps). It includes publishing features and its totally free.
This is not really a startling revelation, businesses need revenue to succeed but where does revenue come from? Customers .. duh! They also need to attract customers to gain angel inventors, funding, and partnership deals.
I'm not sure that I agree with the author's opinion that time would be better spent innovating on User Interface / usability. Having run a business since 2000, I would say that delivering an innovative service to a very specific marketplace and at the same time developing a rapport with that segment should be the ultimate goal of any startup.
I noticed a nifty site that converts words into a phone number and vice versa. Just get your hands on a dictionary file and look at a phone keypad - shouldn't be too hard after that!
