News from the meeting at GC


Now, I am scared ...
Well, anything can go wrong. Theoretically, there could be a catastrophic volcanic eruption, the sky would turn dark, and Pyra mass production would be doomed. Though, to be honest, as long as Ed doesn't prophesy doom and destruction in a spontaneous intuition again, we should be rather safe.
 
Well, anything can go wrong. Theoretically, there could be a catastrophic volcanic eruption, the sky would turn dark, and Pyra mass production would be doomed.
You don't even have to make up a doomsday scenario that causes the world to stop spinning. ED could just have a bad accident.
In my company we are encouraged to assume that anyone of us could be run over by a bus this evening. So we constantly have the question in mind, whether someone else can take over the work of that unlucky person, at least until a replacement is trained.
 
You don't even have to make up a doomsday scenario that causes the world to stop spinning. ED could just have a bad accident.
In my company we are encouraged to assume that anyone of us could be run over by a bus this evening. So we constantly have the question in mind, whether someone else can take over the work of that unlucky person, at least until a replacement is trained.

Funny how you start with you don't have to make up a doomsday scenario and then you make one up yourself :D
 
Quantum effects? ;)

Maybe software people have just forgotten (or are too young to know) how software development worked back in the days of punch cards.
I'm too young myself, but I always enjoyed the stories of older coworkers about driving boxes of punch cards to the compute center only to find out the next day, that one or two punches were in the wrong place or that someone dropped the box, and got all the cards mixed up.

Yes, punch cards definitely or at times when you had to program through rewiring (I have a computer from 1962 in my office which you program by rewiring; still works fine) but modern programming, while more efficient, has the same kind issues, but less disastrous (often anyway). People do have that same thought; you did this 'same thing' (that's where the rub is) many times before, how can it have bugs? And then you fix the bugs, rinse-repeat until people are happy / less (noticeable) bugs. With hardware, and with a lot of firmware, like the hardware/firmware for the products I make for a living, you cannot update in the field. The product shipped and that's it. Every bug or issue has to be tested and fixed before it leaves the factory. Not many years ago this was the same for game consoles, but now that's fixed, that's why you are downloading a giga or so everything you start a game on a ps4/xbox; 'a few bug fixes and some improvements' (we didn't get too efficient in software delivery either 'because internet speed is infinite anyway').

This computer; https://museum.syssrc.com/media/cache/0e/70/0e70cd87ae845e2fcfcd452db7356320.jpg
 
Unless that one person happens to be the one whose dream we are all a part of :p
That still isn't the end of the world, it just makes us unhappy. Actually, even the destruction of our planet is rather insignificant, it just seems like a big deal to those of us that live here.

Maybe ED should have someone ready to take over in case he gets hospitalized for exhaustion or if something else happens.

This thread started by everyone telling ED not to kill himself, now we're imagining it!?
Shit happens.
 
I wonder if some VC company could fund ED or some other startup that could market and mass-produce the Pyra. I suspect a number of IT professionals might appreciate one. Maybe some market research could be done - phone questionnaire to 1000 IT workers, describing the unit and and asking about their interest level?
 
Of course they can. But they'd only do it in exchange for part of ED's company. And they'd insist on changes to the design, so we'd lose at least one SD port, probably the cellular variants, maybe the nubs and d-pad. There's a reason ED does it this way.
 
You haven't completed Link's Awakening?

Sorry for spoiling the sad moment if you haven't...
Ah, I think I misread the other post the first time. :D

Yeah, I finished it a few times. We have special tags for spoilers, ya know. ;)
 
I wonder if some VC company could fund ED or some other startup that could market and mass-produce the Pyra. I suspect a number of IT professionals might appreciate one. Maybe some market research could be done - phone questionnaire to 1000 IT workers, describing the unit and and asking about their interest level?

I would highly doubt this kind of machine is interesting anywhere outside a niche of emulation gamers / devs. If it did then Sharp or Sony (who did umpcs in the past) would definitely jump in, but it never went anywhere for the simple reason that people want the thinnest, lightest phones in the world with the largest screens and the thinnest, lightest laptops in the world with the largest screens. Obviously all big brands do the research you suggest and come up with the basic common denominator; light, thin, cheap. Even big brands like Sharp or Sony have never been able to make a device like that; small nor cheap. The Zaurus family from Sharp was *perfect* at the time (and formfactor it is even now, just highly underpowered); so was the Psion series. But they all got beaten in the face by Palm and then feature phones and then smartphones. Some of them (Psion/Palm and to an extend Blackberry) never survived the ordeal.

And there is another issue; the OS. We (the Pyra community) wants freedom I believe. I am not sure about that, but reading these forums I choose to believe it. There are only a handful of vendors doing Linux machines; sure Linux runs on all chromebooks, core of Android, most higher spec embedded devices, but that is not exposed to the user. When exposed to the user, this Linux has to be polished more and it has to conform to updates from a specific distro. Even if using blobs for drivers, the specific parts for the device have to be maintained and kept up to date. In this case it would mean the investors have to see money in that, because that's an effort which they either have to trust the community doing (which investors won't be big fans of anyway) or someone has to pay for that because the hardware is one-off. If I would make this device (so if I would be ED and I am definitely not :), I would sell it at cost, but with an automatic subscription maintenance/support fee of like 75,-/year with 1 mandatory year at point of buying. Make a closed support forum (just one of the forums, the rest open) and distribute 50,-( times number of paying support users) out to valid answering members (with some threshold and some % per valuable answer), keep 25,- per user per year for making it happen (these are random numbers ofcourse; it would need having insight in a lot more to make these numbers fit, but many more would buy). Because now it has mobile access, do as mobile does; you can make deals with carriers or just use their affiliate deals. I would open a market where you can pay for requests, like E100 for someone who will give me a recipe I can run on my Pandora/Pyra to run i3wm on it as default WM (should be easy with the Pyra and Debian, but is pain under Pandora). Or Sponsor: E50 for a Video how to do x,y,z. Or Trying to raise E2000 for a really cool phone dialer app => pay online via this market and when reaches/goes over 2000, it is crowdsourced. ED keeps 10%, rest goes to the best answer. Many successful examples of this online even though the Pandora had some bad luck crowdfunding at first, well not the funding but... Keeping it in-house works. But I digress. Those would be things investors want to hear anyway and if ED + community would not agree with it, they would not be very interested. I would do this without investors, because I think with the right balance or pre-ordering, crowdfunding and affiliate sales, you can make a good living out of this for 2 people doing this fulltime.

If the world was a slightly better place, and this is even true in the case of Pandora or Pyra, hardware would be more open. Because if I buy a E100,- Android, take it apart and put a slim clamshell case around it, I have, in some ways, a cheap, more advanced device than the Pyra. However, it won't have the ports, but even if I don't care about that; it doesn't have the software. It'll run Android. And as much as I like and use Android; it's awful for productivity. There is no way (well there is, but that's serious uphill struggle as all these Chinese SoCs are closed and awful to hack on) to put linux (or anything else) on it.

Personally, I am a coder and I use Linux almost exclusively for everything, but I highly depend on the build-essentials and aptitude with the latest repositories for my work. I believe this community (Pyra) if investor backed, would have to jump to Windows 10 to get enough installs. And then already you are becoming a mainstream provider and you will notice that people will not want the keyboard on; only hackers do. People will say; why not just a little tablet with a stand and a BLE keyboard? Which immediately makes you compete with MS-Nokia... And where is the fun in that even if you had a chance?
 
That doesn't need to to collectively fill in for him!

I don't actually know what difficulties an eruption would cause, but I assume it would only really impact air transport. I can't actally remember what's being made in places that would transported due via aeroplane. LCDs and components probably mainly come from china/korea (with a few from the US), but there'll be thousands or millions of those bits in various warehouses around the world, fed by supertankers crossing the oceans, so I think that'll be okay with a small interruption to air transport. Boards are etched and populated just down the road from ED, so that can't be flown economically, and I imagine will go in a cute little van to the dragonbox shop. Cases are made in Greece which feels like a long way from here, but with German in the middle of the EU and the large volume of the case parts would probably make it cheaper to put them in a lorry than to put them in a plane.

I forget where the keymats are being made, so those might be at risk of a transport shutdown. And of course if you take planes out of the equation, road and rail and boat transport will probably take advantage of the situation and put up prices slightly, but they're generally so much cheaper than hiring a transport plane, that it shouldn't make all that much difference.
 
Question: would Drumpf's "policies" cause any issues for Pyras entering America this year, if they start shipping this year?
 
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