I bought the autonomous desk from kickstarter for $500 (basic model): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/403524037/autonomous-de..., so far quite happy with it. Really stable, and the table top is of good quality. I can see the author's point where the motor is not necessary but when it's cheap enough (at the low end of the $500-$3000 price range), it's certainly a nice to have feature.
Wobbly desk really bugs me and I would rather have a fixed height desk rather than a wobbly one. Testing the stability (or confirm from other's review) before you buy.
The whole article is based on the assumption that people make donation to universities as charitable donations. I find that a bit unrealistic. Give money to universities are gesture of appreciation from alumni, gain more opportunities of networking/recognition from the university for the donor and his/her family, etc. For donations with the pure purpose of helping the poor, there are other institutions for that.
3D TV is no longer a gadget that can be easily purchased on a whim and throw away in the closet later. Check the 3D TV sale in China, I bet you will find it's not more than the US.
For now I can only provide an anecdotal evident that most of the Chinese I know (including me) don't like 3D (TV or Movie). 3D movies are very tiring and draining to watch, and afterwards I don't remember the scenes as vividly as I would from a 2D screen.
I'd say this is just a sign for Xiaomi to show interest of entering the "home TV, phone, tablet as unified" system market. There are much to be desired there.
IMHO after working in mobile for 2 years (we were bought by HTC but worked for most (all?) major global mobile device manufactuers except Apple) and then going through the process of interviews - in English then Mandarin.. and I'm anglo - to manage the Smart TV products for the world's largest TV producer (hint: they're Chinese) ... this whole industry is out on a limb and the myth of user experience that seemlessly moves between 'the three screens' is not only a falsity but not something consumers actually want. Primarily, vendors want it to lock you in. Appstore-style.
FWIW, Geography major student do have access to professional traffic simulation software (e.g., TrafficSim, SUMO, .etc) if they are interested in research topics related to traffic. I am not sure what algorithm Sim City uses, but I am assuming they are not as complicated as these professional software.
Perhaps that's the point of your suggestion, to lower the entry level to these field, or for a broader audience.
Well he specifically said he was particularly referring to High School students, not college undergraduates majoring in Geography with access to sophisticated, professional traffic simulation software.
The map failure is just another example of where apple's design principle cannot be blindly applied to every product. Apple's top-down approach on software design is expected to fail on Maps. Maps put hard requirement on data, bottom data, nothing to do with your leader's vision. Apple's way out of this is not to engage user input to add missing data or correct data errors --OSM tried that for years, the most accurate data still comes from semi-professional survey-er.
Look at other companies that does map, google map started out using Tele Atlas, NavTeq serves yahoo, bing and mapquest. Let's face it, spatial data cost money to collect and even more costly to update/maintain. Nevteq and Tele Atlas are gigantic companies for serving basic spatial data for a reason.
I guess apple didn't do sufficient data QA before saying, "hell yeah we are going with OSM where every big player is going with commercial data."
Without a solid baseline data, any fancy pants software development would just evaporate in air.
I have to say though, the GUI for apple map and functionality has very high usability. Apple just need to adapt a different mindset when dealing with data-dependent applications.
(disclaimer: I am a PhD student in Geography with CS background, did my share of processing spatial data for the last 8 years)
sorry, just saying that I actually work in the field, not just a bystander saying apple is evil. I would be very happy if OSM in the end works(which I believe it will, just need at least a couple of more years); I would also be happy if apple map were able to fix the problem--which, as I pointed out, is the under-emphasized data issue.
> I guess apple didn't do sufficient data QA before saying
Do you have this on good authority? (seeing your disclaimer and all) Because the way I understood it, they have all the data from TomTom and that seems to work fine - so it seems the problem is definitely not the data but what they are doing with it...? In this case some people in here stated it is an issue with search priorities, the phone suggests a different destination with a very similar name.
I am somewhat doubtful about gyroscope replacing GPS. If it can actually happen, it will require, as noted by others, re-tuned/tweaked/calibrated/adjusted every day/week to void accumulated error/noise.
Keep in mind that as precise as gyroscope can get, they could be susceptible to shock (if you drop it on the ground).
But I am interested in seeing how it could develop into
