David Acevedo's Blog

About a year ago Microsoft came out with a highly publicized phone called the Kin. You might remember the commercials about a girl wanting to do a trip to meet her friends face to face. Well, a few weeks after the phone was out in the market Microsoft killed it. Why they went ahead with producing it only to kill it? Hmmm. Now Hewlett Packard (HP) has pulled the exact same maneuver. A few days ago I saw a commercial with of all people Many Paquiao for the HP TouchPad that uses the WebOS. Yesterday I read how Best-buy is returning its huge order of HP TouchPads. And today HP pulled a M$ dropping the tablet and the modestly successful Pre phone that works on WebOS. Dumb asses. Really. Dumb asses. They killed the platform by starving it. It's like being disappointed in Einstein because he was bad at math as a kid, saying this kid will never do any good in school. He's not a prodigy let's pull him out of school. What were they expecting? With Apple dominating the...

Like programming books that don't teach programming but the programming language instead, I don't much like Dance teachers that teach a dance sequence instead of actually teaching dancing. They show you combination of moves rather than showing you how to do the actual move and think that speed is somehow equated with advance. The only problem with this is that there is only one type of person who can follow a class like that and derive benefit: a dancer.  So like the programming books with a target audience of programmers this dance teachers assume you have a basic understanding and all you need is to learn this particular dance flavor or language of programming. This is a very inefficient way of learning and teaching. Some people of course get programming immediately, they don't need to be taught it; same way some people get dancing immediately and need no actual teaching. But targeting that way of learning is inefficient; most people aren't born programmers or bor...