It's not even malware/scams - it's just "Person who wants a mortgage calculator" is "person who is interested in getting a mortgage", which is some seriously high-value data. There's a lot more profit in selling you on to mortgage lenders (with a lot of data, like your budget, pre-filled) than selling you to scammers.
Yep. And it's a hard, hard problem. Buying land or right-of-way in high-value, dense urban environments is considerably more expensive then buying it in unused wilderness. And dealing with each municipality's politics along the way is far more difficult and expensive than dealing with unincorporated, unpopulated land.
I live in Minneapolis, and remember when the 35W bridge fell. Republicans tried to prevent adding lanes for future light rail to the new bridge (particularly then-governor Coleman, who was eyeing a presidential run), and our mayor basically held the bridge hostage - he told the state and federal governments that if there weren't provisions for future light rail, that the city wouldn't be issuing the necessary construction permits for the new bridge. (A call I fully supported, btw.)
So then what is the cause of the ugliness? Is it inconsistent appearance between components? Or that it's too busy and cluttered, which would probably be true with a monolith as well?
Well, what's your success metric? I'd argue that neither of them would have been able to implement the rich features they have at the speed and scale they've achieved - features that have given them market domination.
If pure aesthetics is your metric, then yeah, they're ugly. So?
This is a brilliant idea whose time has come, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out.
I'm especially looking forward to seeing how it plays in the corporate arena; I'd love to see businesses that depend on open source every day (that is, all of them) throwing what is just pocket change to them at projects enabling their business. I hope you're planning on encouraging this behavior!
For guitar nerds, there's a whole online business by a guy named Troy Grady about fast picking techniques (he has a ton of extremely polished videos on YouTube - start with whatever "Cracking the Code" videos are up). He decoded the seemingly-magical techniques that allow players like Yngwie Malmsteen and Eric Johnson to play at what feel like impossible speeds, and illustrates them. (tl;dr the core trick is "pick slanting", striking the strings at an angle so the pick goes in and out of the plane of strings, rather than across it, and then switching strings only when the pick is "out". That, and "chunking", breaking into units of fixed length on a single string and using the fixed length to do a clock reset on the beats).
For a guitarist, it's almost impossible to explain the myriad tiny details that go into something as seemingly simple as picking a note. Troy's analysis of instructional videos by great players, where they obviously don't understand what they're doing, is kind of amazing. And a real eye-opener, for those of us who have played a long time.
I find the idea of power limits to be fascinating. As computing becomes more distributed, more detached, more mobile, then power, not computation, will be the boundary.
It's not just the cpu... it's the screen, and the antenna. A screen needs to produce a certain number of lumens of light to be readable. That provides a theoretical limit. An antenna needs to transmit clean signal over a certain range. That takes power, too. And the size of the device limits the size of the battery. How many joules of energy can we store in that physical space?
We may be coming up on limits for mobile devices much harder and faster than we think. Of course, IoT devices can be better off by not supporting a screen, but communication is still a problem.