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Justin and Jason discuss The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, How in-flight entertainment systems are architected, Irish ATM’s weird defaults, How Moore’s Law may work for years to come due to quantum anomaly, Justin’s idea of flipping a house, and much more.
Executive Producer #1: Dave Marshall
Executive Producer #2: Alex Gemmell
Thanks for the donations!
Yep, I felt I had to pay my dues for berating Jason on Google+ or you wouldn’t invite me back
Nah, I just thought I’ve been enjoying listening to your shows for SO LONG that I really should contribute to making them happen seeing as you let us all listen to your mighty industry insights for free. It was like buying you guys a Christmas present
Now now Justin. Jason does the Techzing Healthwatch segment because he cares…
Besides, I find it motivational as well. Consider yourself a proxy for all listeners that need to work on their health a little more!
Hey guys, the way in-flight entertainment systems work is that there is a local server in each plane that controls all of the screens. There are a few large companies that supply this technology and service. The reason movies are usually out of date relates to the challenges of updating those boxes (movies get loaded locally on the servers and provisioned out to each screen as requested)….as you can imagine, scheduling the upgrades and swap outs for a whole fleet gets tricky logistically…..not to mention the kind of security clearance needed for onboard access, etc. I once found myself in a conversation with a guy at CES who managed the inflight system for Air Force One – let’s just say, kickass.
@Jordy, I’m not sure I approve of Air Force One having an inflight entertainment system. They should be working!
@Alex Gemmell – Wait a minute. You’re not even American! What do you care?!
The Central Bank of Ireland forbids all ATM usage fees so the most likely reason for the odd default amounts is probably driven by customer demand.
I know when I get cash from an ATM I choose amounts that will force the machine to deliver as many small notes as possible to avoid the problem of using say €50 to buy a pack of chewing gum. Amounts of 40, 90, 120 will optimise for this strategy.
Very informative episode. I like it that you talk about other stuff and not only tech.
I’m not sure if I should talk about Iran, I don’t want to cause a political storm here
but I’m always happy to hear what people outside Israel thinks about the subject.
Might I suggest Microsoft OneNote? It’s got an awesome screen capture utility that cuts and pastes screen shots and allows you to annotates everything as well.
And the better word would be “hegemon” and not empire.
What I found most interesting in this one is how Justin identifies himself. I have to ask Justin, do you see yourself as American now? All of your comments in the first half (decline of the USA) you said “Our problem” “Our debt” identifying yourself that way. Just curious about it really.
@Ben – You know how when you’re at a party playing a game. You pick a team, and as soon as you start talking to the team you say things like “we should do this” or “we should do that”. It only takes a few moments for you to feel part of the team. It’s a bit like that.
@Justin, so you’re on Team America? Fuck yeah!
@Jason, similar to what you said in the podcast, I’ve been paying close attention to American politics since 9/11 and the whole Iraq war debacle. Fascinated how our “mighty leaders” can be such murdering douchebags. So yes, I do care! But I guess like you discuss, America’s power will wane further and I will have to switch my attention to the Chinese leaders!
@Ben, Alex and Justin – I think how much you take on the identity of the group your with is very much dependent on the person. I consider myself to be on the opposite end of the spectrum to Justin as I’ve always had a strong aversion to joining anything unless I created it myself or co-founded it – the podcast, AnyFu, my soccer team, etc. If you recall back to a much earlier episode, Justin actually talks about how he developed a chameleon-like social behavior as a defense mechanism to being bullied as a kid. I think that might be why he’s so quick on the draw to adopting the “we” as opposed to the “you”. But, I could be wrong.
@Jason sounds like a reasonable theory.
@Justin was just curious. Your answer sounds totally likely too. On that, if you were still in Ireland when this was discussed would you have said “Their” and “Your”?
I guess I am more like Jason in that I try not to identify with groups if at all possible. So much so I even refer to my work place desktop as “The computer I am assigned” rather then most peoples “My computer”.
I found the contrast really sticking out in my mind and that’s what prompted the question. Idle curiosity while scrubbing the floor
Good show guys.
I have just listened to the Sitepoint podcast http://www.sitepoint.com/podcast-144-freemium-schmeemium/ and it seems Tyler’s blog post has even more life left in it with a long discussion between the hosts and even naming the podcast after the news item.
I’ve seen in-flight entertainment systems reboot several times. The individual screens seem run an embedded OS. On some flights I’ve seen Windows CE. On others an embedded version of Linux like BusyBox. The games are simple enough that they’d easily run locally on the embedded OS. But I’m sure that the movies, audio, and probably the games software as well are all streamed from a central server.
On a separate note. As much as I enjoy the discussion shows, don’t forget to do the occasional interview show too. They add some variety to the podcast.
@Jason, regarding note taking, I always carry around a little notepad and pen. Still the hands-down best way to jot ideas down. I WISH there was a good way I could do this on my smart phone but, like you, I find the tiny little keyboards slow and painful to scribe my stream of consciousness!
Ideally there’d be a notepad app that required some kind of pen that worked with a touchscreen. Like the old-school Pocket PCs (remember them?). Hmmm, I wonder if there’s an app for that…?
Also, may I HIGHLY recommend you look at Notational Velocity for making simple text file notes. I use nvAlt (http://brettterpstra.com/project/nvalt/). I make loads of notes in there and the search/filter functionality is lightening fast for me to find stuff again. Also, it allows you to store the data file in your Dropbox folder allowing me to auto-sync my notes across any machine I am using! Sweet!
Jason – I’m surprised you don’t use the Instapaper iOS app more often – you could catch up on your reading when you have a few spare minutes. Think of all the trees you’ll save
On the topic of auto-summarizing articles, I’ve run across two sites in the past that do it, but I haven’t actually given it a try: http://www.feedstomper.com/ http://tldr.it/
What I’d really like is a way to input a bunch of feeds, have them summarized and then run them through a high quality text-to-speech and make my own personalized “podcast”!
@Jason, oh and I remmeber you saying you printed out articles (how quaint!) to read before going to sleep. I got a Kindle for Christmas and there’s a great browser plugin called Kindle It that will turn a webpage in to a kindle article and email it to the device (all for free). As long as your Kindle has wifi (or 3G) turned on then the article magically appears on it! Perfect for quickly adding to your reading list and wastes no paper
I was wondering if anyone could help me out. In this episode about 1 Hour 46 Minutes 14 Seconds in Jason mentions a startup that does a text summary of new articles and websites.
There is one similar startup that I’ve heard of which is: http://www.summly.com but I was wondering what was the one Jason mentioned and if there are any others out there.
Was just interested in using their API if they have one for a project.
@alex Yeah I love sending articles to my Kindle Fire too!
Is It Better to Buy or Rent? – Interactive Graphic (Flash) – NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calculator.html
Happy new year guys… from Switzerland!