October 20,

The XFL Is Remembering Guys At An Alarming Rate (Deadspin)

The XFL Draft starts today at 10 a.m. Eastern, and it might actually be worth checking in on, because it sounds bananas. There are going to be 71 rounds! Teams get only 90 seconds between picks! It’ll be done via conference call, and if you work in an office you know those never work. This font’s italics don’t slant far enough to the right to emphasize what pure chaos this might be!

Rebble with a Cause: How Pebble Watches Were Granted an Amazing Afterlife by an author (ifixit.com)

In the early summer of 2018, you could buy an Apple Watch with built-in GPS, wireless payments, and speakers that buzz water out after a swim. Meanwhile, Katharine Berry was hustling to keep five-year-old watches with black and white screens alive.
Berry had worked for Pebble, maker of the first not…

(This was meant to be a brief reply to this post, but it ballooned into a post all its own.)

Open source automotive software makes sense on paper. I am all for it, even though it would obviate my employment as a test engineer for an automotive supplier. So let me tell you why it won’t happen.

  1. Automotive manufacturers do not understand open source. They only see the liability, not the potential. If anything happens in the field requiring a recall, they are on the hook anyway. So they assume they should control the whole process and develop everything themselves from scratch. I’m not entirely sure some of them understand software itself, as evidenced by John Deere presuming ownership over the software in their tractors.
  2. Who would test this open source software (besides the manufacturer)? With web software, you can spin up a remote server on a cheap laptop and you are off and running, in relatively little time, at low cost. With automotive software, the platform costs are at least 5 figures, not to mention the specialized tools to upgrade the software of the various components. It is a much larger barrier to entry for third-party testing.

Again, I agree in principle that it would be a good idea. But it will never happen unless lawmakers force it to, and they do not have a great sense of open source software either. Of course, it will be interesting to see if traditional software companies (Google and Apple) will bring this mentality whey they enter the space in a few years time.

Possibly the most awesome, completely unrelated pieces of mail ever to come at the same time
filght of the conchords album and transformers 2… oh my