I often wonder if there would be a market for appliances designed to be easily repaired and upgraded. Obviously it would be a niche market, but based on the popularity of the "Maker" movement recently, I think it has some potential. The real problem is keeping up with the pace of innovation in the more custom consumer electronics.
I think you could get there with appliances that existed in the 60s or 70s, but in many cases you simply aren't going to duplicate functionality of a modern device any other way. An MP3 player needs an IC to decode the MP3, if nothing else.
Although this makes me wonder if an analog MP3 decoder made out of maintainable parts is possible. It would be awfully big, though.
Big, expensive, and unreliable. The most unreliable parts of most electronics I've owned are user-manipulated wires, connectors, and ports. Taking the whole unit back to the store for an exchange when there's a tiny defect (as I did with my iPad a couple months ago) is actually more valuable to me than the prospect of being able to do maintenance and component replacements on something the size of the box an iPad comes in and twice as expensive.
Looks like he's trying to remake Corda into something useful.
Of note, both Omniture and Corda are based in Utah. When he went shopping, he didn't look far.
It's interesting that he doesn't have any non-compete agreements in place stopping him from competing with the $1.8B analytics company he just sold and resigned from.
There have been a decent number of them recently. Facebook had also previously said that the talent acquisitions are working for them and they plan to keep doing them.
I don't think the bitcoin system is in any way designed to benefit the miners. Its intent is to create a digital currency that has a guarantee of retaining its rarity in the future. Making mining difficult and inefficient is kind of the point.
I concur, and I'm the author. It's a wonderful introduction to Big O for folks that struggle with it. My post is merely a tool to help refresh my knowledge of fundamental concepts. William Shields does an excellent job of making Big O approachable to non-CS majors.
The only passage I take issue with is his description of O(n) arithmetic examples. In my thinking addition/multiplication are O(1) but I blame that view on years of thinking about FLOPs and letting thoughts of # of operations conflate with big O notation. In practicethe example of adding two large integers is a single operation, or at least a fixed size handful operations for arbitrary precision.
