I grew up loving my visits to Radio Shack for hobby electronics when I was a kid. It seemed like a place that would be a straight up dream job. Eventually, I worked at a Radio Shack up in Canada to pay for University and I felt the pain of this stupid competition with your coworkers to make $1 more in pay day to day only to have someone return some high commission item days later and put you on the shit list again. If the commission went into negative territory where I live, they still had to pay minimum wage. Commissions were just a bonus and usually only available during Christmas when the malls are busy. I usually went for the "spiffs," which were some kind of payout based on selling special/discontinued goods and often paid better than having to stretch to a 2000-3000 revenue day. Ahh retail. Don't miss it.
This might be something to build an awesome community around. Giving users way to add more than just comments: stuff like a way for the public to do more than suggest products - add them to a pool of incumbents that others can talk about immediately, a way to discuss personal experiences, ratings, photographic examples of products after x years of use - examples of failures after x time stuff like that.
I'd love to see a 100 year old Lodge pan or a pair of those keen sandals after 3 years :) Obviously clothes and cast iron posts have significantly different lives.
Out of curiosity, how did you handle the mobile web with this project? With my pet project, Streeme, I had non-stop issues with the music streaming stopping on lock screens. The root cause was javascript not triggering the next track unless you unlock the device. I also found that formats/codecs could be problematic between mobile devices and different software stacks (mobile firefox, chrome, safari). Is there some alternative interface for this nowadays that doesn't need javascript? Have they settled on a common codec yet? I got pretty fed up with iOS fundamentally changing Safari's HTML5 Audio behaviors with every OS overhaul as it was my main listening device on the bus and at work. Even though it still works on the desktop, mobile clients really killed my passion for trying to make a web based media player.
I really like that my phone has replaced my watch.
No disgusting strap, no having to take it off to code, no watch tan, no stupid thing on my arm to fiddle with and besides, the really important thing is I really don't need to know the time most of the day (the same applies for tweets, sms messages, missed/incoming calls, the latest in game ads I forgot to disable and google chat pings) Smart or dumb, a wrist mounted realtime information monitoring device is kind of the last thing I want from technology.
Sad thing is.. they're going to be mandatory to own in order to live in cultured programmer society in 3 years. So, I hope they at least make them as nice as my old Nixons that are now sitting at the farthest back corner of my dresser.
On a 40+ year time scale for clean up, there's only so much that can be planned and executed - I'm impressed that they have produced some kind of public update like this. Japan itself may undergo political, technological and ecological/geological changes in the timeframe that will impact this work. The fact that the technology they propose to use needs to be invented, researched, built and tested in the first place gives me enormous concern that this situation is still very much out of control and responses will be largely reactive to changes in the situation of the current site.
The timeline also can't foresee issues of mistakes in the remediation process, which seem to be likely given that no country has fixed a problem like this and the material inside a melted core is a big unknown and probably can't be worked on directly by human beings. Step 5 in that illustration on how to take apart a melted reactor states "drill down to break the melted fuel into chunks, pack it into casks, cart it away and you're done!" I mean that almost feels tongue in cheek. The chances for serious casualties and tremendous radiation releases exist in each attempt to drill into a reactor containment and there's 4 damaged reactors at this time. The project risk, unknown variables and the scope of proposed solutions leaves me wondering can they truly put a price tag on the work at such an early stage. It's absurd to think that I may not see Chernobyl or Fukushima's remediation happen in my lifetime.
I remember a tenor sax hanging off my neck was enough work let alone having its entire hard case attached :) It seems, to me, the best solution for all of these issues is just to rent a practice space and go play until your cheeks and lips fall off. I am pretty amazed with how the trumpet output sounds through that Yamaha mute, though - it looks like you could even circuit bend that gadget to do some nasty things to a trumpet's tone.
Yeah, it really is remarkable! Synthesized brass/winds are generally quite bad. I was very skeptical, but watching the video changed my mind. I do have an old trumpet lying around...
I did see a video for the sax case where a person had it mounted on some kind of stand, so that's probably a lot more feasible!
I don't think they're actually synthesizing anything in the traditional sense...just essentially using a DSP to convert sound in the bell to natural room sound.
I have an 11" Macbook Air from 2011 and it's been great. Went from snow leopard all the way to mavericks without a hitch. Use it mostly for web coding stacks have been Java, Python, Scala, PHP and the occasional Photoshop/Xcode. The only environment I have a hard time with was Scala just because the compiler is a bit of a beast, especially when getting a project up and running with SBT where a new artifact could be added every day or two. I ended up offloading Scala compiles to my home PC, but you could probably get a cheap VPS for the same effect. Great little machine, make sure to only use homebrew or your own source compiles and never trust the Apple shipped packages. Also go with the most storage you can afford - it's annoying to run out.
And it's not even good or recommended as a cache at any kind of profile. So I guess their most valuable niche is low traffic/prototype sites with poor architecture discipline or genuinely unrelated data sets. There are so much better tools for caching (memcached/redis), durable persistent storage (postgres), session storage (memcached/redis/browser hybrids) and document storage (postgres). Mongo is just one of those brands that quickly solved a problem that most of the better technologies missed - the user interface.
I think being able to have flexible data storage with indexing is where they are better than most other options. There's something to be said for some of what they do offer. I was able to replace the search system for a site that used SQL to MongoDB, which often includes geolocation, it works fairly well, I had considered using a ElasticSearch, or something similar, Mongo was a better fit.
Today, I would be inclined to use PostgreSQL with JSON support, and some triggers to update an aggregate search table, or look more seriously towards RethinkDB.
With any NoSQL system you give up something.. you just need to be aware of what you are giving up, why and for what gains.
