2x03: And Those Who Dig

First? Years ago when I was a kid. Mid to late 80s, perhaps?

Fair enough! I think there’s a big difference seeing a film when it’s new versus when it’s already got cult status, wondered if that might’ve applied.

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I think the guest presenter worked brilliantly (just like on HIGNFY and NMTBC). @christina did a great job!

I vote try and get Brian Blessed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yif3FM6PQtw; think of the anarchy.

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UPDATE: After recording the show I contacted PicoBrew with the following question: “If PicoBrew were to fail as a company, would the device be rendered useless? The fact that you cannot add your own ingredients to a pak would seem to indicate this is the case. Am I missing something? Thanks.”

They once again responded extremely quickly (under thirty minutes) with the following: "You are not missing anything and that is a quite valid concern. To alleviate this concern, we can promise two things:

  1. We’re not going anywhere. We have a quite solid business plan and a quite large purse to keep us going for many years to come.
  2. If we were to go out of business, we would make sure our customers, those who trust and support us, are not screwed in our passing. We would release all software surrounding our products and let the community build themselves a working server to support their appliances as well as release how to build your own Pak."

–jeremy

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Commendable promise of openness! History will doubtless relate whether it’s true or not, although hopefully you won’t have to find out :slight_smile:

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Here’s a new data point on mobile OS sales for Q4 2016, from The Verge:

The latest smartphone figures from Gartner are out, and they paint an extremely familiar picture. Between them, Android and iOS accounted for 99.6 percent of all smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2016. This duopoly has been the norm for a while now (in the second quarter of 2015 this figure was 96.8 percent), but it’s always impressive — and slightly terrifying — to see how Google and Apple continue to wring the last decimal point drops of market share from global smartphone users.

Of the 432 million smartphones sold in the last quarter, 352 million ran Android (81.7 percent) and 77 million ran iOS (17.9 percent), but what happened to the other players? Well, in the same quarter, Windows Phone managed to round up 0.3 percent of the market, while BlackBerry was reduced to a rounding error. The once-great firm sold just over 200,000 units, amounting to 0.0 percent market share.

–jeremy

I find it interesting that Windows having 0.3% of 432 million units comes to 129.6 million compared to 200 million of Blackberry being only 0.0%. Must be this new math they use these days! :smile:

Wow, these are some horrifying numbers :worried:

I think you may have misread slightly :slight_smile:

431,539,300 (432M) units total
1,092,200 (1.1M) units for Windows = 0.253%, rounded to 0.3%
207,900 (208k) units for Blackberry = 0.048%, rounded to 0.0%

So if Blackberry had hit 216k users they would have been at 0.05% and been rounded to 0.1%.

Gotta love that rounding.

Nope. I just don’t know how to place decimals. HA!!! Sorry.

I agree with the comments during the show that Windows Phone failed in part because it’s a legacy product.

I think the potential for a serious competitor to Android and iOS is actually three or more years out. At some point in the 2020s, a $50 smart phone will have 2GB of RAM and a quad core ARM processor and at the same time WebAssembly will be mature. Then I think there will be a general shift towards writing mobile applications as WebAssembly/HTML5 with a thin native wrapper. That lowers the barrier to switching mobile ecosystems.

(Edit: I realize this is more wishful thinking than anything. But I sincerely think that if anything like Firefox OS was ever going to succeed, these would be the preconditions.)

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If Swift tells us anything, I think that it’s “no, that’s not going to happen”.

The flipside of that is React Native, though…

It’s too early to judge whether WebAssembly will get any traction. I’m not asserting that it will, just that it could.

Number of consumer devices available with WebAssembly preinstalled, ever: zero
Number of consumer devices that are iPhones sold in Q4 2016 alone: 78 million

That’s a daft comparison. There weren’t any devices that Swift apps could run on before it was released either.

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Swift announced at WWDC 2014, 2nd June 2014. Swift apps able to be deployed to the App Store, 9th September 2014.

And this might be a bit of a crap metric, but Swift is the most starred language on GitHub.

I’m not saying WebAssembly is rubbish, and I know Apple are part of the consortium working on it, and it may provide a useful niche platform for app development and deployment, but …

Oh, sure thing. But that’s the difference between doing development cooperatively in the open and doing it in secret behind closed doors and only announcing when you’ve got all the dominoes lined up. Once WebAssembly’s released, it’ll be in Chrome and then basically every modern Android device will have it for a start. I imagine after that it’ll show up in Safari at some point too and then basically every phone will have it.

I’m not saying that WebAssembly’s great, but there are better reasons to dismiss it than “nobody’s using it yet”; it ain’t out yet :slight_smile:

Have you seen this @jeremy ? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1708005089/pico-c-craft-brewing-for-all

Hit’s your price point!!!

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…and it it’s much smaller than how I imagine the one that jeremy tested.
I think this one could fit right next to our espresso machine at home.

For me it would be great if you would evaluate it too.