Yeah, it's actually three, though only from a branding perspective. They did rebrand Lync/Office Communicator as "Skype for Business" for a bit, though I don't think there was ever any code shared and it was just a branding thing.
Honestly I think they simply don't care, and from their perspective they finally have gotten it right with Teams.
FWIW, you're thinking about the DoD/the Pentagon, not the federal government as whole - and yeah, the Pentagon hasn't been able to pass an audit in ~6 years.
The defense budget is somewhat more opaque, though, for national security reasons. I don't know if they are good reasons or not, but that's the story at least.
As someone that an Android user, and has been a user (and formerly, major fan) of Sonos for about ten years now, it honestly seems worse than that. For a while, Sonos speakers appeared as Google Cast targets, which was a phenomenal (if slightly overcomplicated) way to use them without opening up the Sonos app. Then, the cast functionality became really unreliable. Then, it just went away one day. Then, the Sonos app itself became basically unusable.
So, a decade or so ago, I spent $1k+ on speakers. Over time, due to software changes, they've become more or less unusable for me. My recourse on this is.. pretty much nothing.
Is there a good technical article for why casting has become unreliable over time? Is there like an issue with standardization across Manufacturer's APIs or is it more of an issue with Client SDKs being spotty in implementation?
The former. AirPlay and Google Cast (and Spotify Connect for that matter) are not actually standards at all. They're proprietary protocols subject to change in ways and for reasons not publicly known nor disclosed. But it can typically be safely assumed that any/all changes are made in order to maximize profits.
I'm not saying what they did was ok, but would it be possible to solder on a raspberry pi or something? Compared to other types of board rework, audio connections and DC power is relatively easy.
I'd suspect that there is. That kind of ruins the point of Sonos, though - their appeal was their ability to do a lot of different things, automatically, with just a wifi connection. Having to set up some sort of alternate source of audio means that I really should have just bought a cheaper speaker back when I bought my Sonos products.
Since we're talking about books, this statement reminds me of one that OP might want to look at: Super Founders.
It's been a while since I've read it, but off the top of my head: most successful founders are older than you probably think, have less industry experience than you probably think, start (like nVidia) with more competitors than you think, but (to your other point) are more likely to have more entrepreneurial experience than you think (even very young famous founders like Zuckerberg or the Collisons had another venture before the one that made them very well known).
Honestly I found Super Founders kind of dry, but it's one of the only data-driven books about what differences exist between founders of businesses with exception outcomes vs founders with less successful outcomes that I've read.
To be fair, the automatic belt "fad" was more interesting than that. For a brief time in the 80s (and into the early 90s), cars were required to have either automatic seat belts or airbags. Generally speaking, air bags were more expensive during that time period, so automatic seat belts were more popular.
I don't really know for sure, 2007 was a weird time. The iPhone launched that year with obvious deficiencies (no apps, no 3G) but managed to evolve into something much better quickly enough that it didn't really matter. The Foleo was really limited, but I'm not sure that would have killed it if they would have gotten subsequent versions right.
I don’t think we can even reasonably talk about Palm circa 2007 and iPhone 2007 in the same sentence.
PalmOS was an aging clusterfuck that was a PDA with cellular glommed onto it (and the good Treo’s of the era ran Windows Mobile, which was better in some ways but a ridiculous mess for its own reasons) and the iPhone, even without apps or 3G was such a revelation and improvement that it single-handedly reshaped not just mobile, but personal computing, nearly overnight.
The software the iPhone did have was truly impressive — at least for the core feature that really set it apart: the web browser.
The capacitive touch screen and the on-screen keyboard made mince meat out of every other mobile operating system in existence or even in development; Google completely changed Android from being a Palm/BlackBerry clone to being an iPhone clone as soon as they saw it. People were willing to jailbreak and reverse engineer their iPhones to run apps on it.
Palm, like most everyone else, was caught completely flat-footed. They weren’t working on webOS in 2007; their next-gen version of Palm OS (the name escapes me) was not going to set the world on fire and Windows Mobile (who they increasingly had offloaded software duties to) was also not doing super well. It took new investors (and management changes that included ousting Colligan, who by all accounts is a pretty great guy and who did lead Palm and Handspring well in different environments) and a brand new engineering team for Palm to create webOS, an OS that had a lot of promise but was still largely better as a tech demo than a finished product, and even with insane work, webOS launched 2 years after iPhone and couldn’t compete on hardware or software.
Foleo, which was from the older era of Palm, never could have worked. Ever. Even in a world without iPhone, it’s a dud. But with iPhone, it’s DOA before it even gets to production.
.. and as soon as you stop just uploading files (which, as you say, nobody does), a lot of the other advantages go away also. Laravel and Symphony both make PHP much slower. If you are going to have sane routing, you're probably going to need to tweak your websever to behave, well, less like a web server. There's a decent chance you'll need to clear a cache after you upload your changed files if you want to actually see those changes.
I actually like PHP a lot, and it's amazing how far it has come in the past 10 or so years, I just think way too many people assume you get the 2004-era PHP simplicity with all of the 2024-era PHP refinements, and you really don't. There's tradeoffs.
Wireless inductive charging also allows for a (more) sealed case design, which is helpful for a device that will almost certainly encounter moisture in normal use cases.
I can keep my phone somewhere dry when it's raining, I've never thought to take off my watch when it rains.
Their launch license requires them to initially aim at the water, and only shift to aiming at their tower if both the booster internally judges it's in perfect health, and they send the signal from their control system.
I think there is a reasonable possibility that something goes wrong enough at some point for the booster to go in the drink. But if that happens, maybe it'll be close enough to the shore that we'll get some nice video of it?
This is also standard procedure for Falcon 9 landings. They would do it this way even if the launch license didn't require it, because they know the probability of some sort of failure of the booster is high, and they don't want to destroy the launch tower if they can help it.
