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Now your getting it. As a market matures, margins drop, and Apple moves towards obscurity.

Apple's had higher profit margins than its peers for over 15 years.....

As for asking PC companies Intel's average quarterly gross margin in the last five years is 59.97 per cent,

Try again, more like 24%
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AINTC&fstype=ii&ei=5KFsUdDoDIGylgPPDQ

Apple's profit margin is a little higher.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAAPL&fstype=ii&ei=QaJsUdCmIpqKlgOY_QE

and Microsoft's is even higher at 78.31 per cent

Try again.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AMSFT&fstype=ii&ei=nKJsUYjxEYiQlAPeswE

Perhaps you should look at Financial *performance* rather than the the top and bottom line

Silly me for actually thinking profit and loss is more important than some random numbers,

Google play https://play.google.com/store/apps/collection/topselling_paid_game?start=0&num=24 has a list of best selling games which is as good a place as any to start, and Android has great games. Ravensword: Shadowlands is a great place to get into Android Gaming.

Second Site seems to locale for this photo

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2013/04/Boston%20Photo.jpg

This Google Map location

Seems to match this photo

http://blacksportsonline.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/boston-marathon-explosion2.jpg

First of all, this article isn't a comparison or matchup - it's just a speculative post by someone who has done very little research and obviously lacks domain knowledge in the space. There is no mention of use cases, data sizes, performance, costs.

Hadoop is an open-source framework for distributed data processing, specifically an implementation of the MapReduce framework. BigQuery is a hosted service that allows you to run queries over massive datasets via an API. There are tools built on top of Hadoop that allow for fast querying over large datasets (Impala), and there are even tools that are not Hadoop based that provide this as well (Spark + Shark). However, actually using these tools is a whole different game - the author makes so mention of how many nodes/VM are required to compare the query performance of BigQuery.

Then there's data sizes. The author makes a strange claim that BigQuery "queries don’t run instantly; one of the samples took 3.3 seconds to grind through 3.49 Gigabytes of data. But that’s clearly fine for quick lookups." Huhn? What tool(s) are you comparing against? BigQuery allows users to run full table aggregate ad-hoc queries over really really big datasets (i.e. terabytes). In public talks, Google has demonstrated that it is possible to run regular expression match queries, with sums and aggregations, over several terabytes of data in under a minute. In order to do this with a MapReduce-based system, what needs to be done - perhaps use something like Hive, or write a custom MapReduce function - and what is the performance in this case? For the same use case, what is the cost of using some of the "OLAP" tools that the author describes? Would love to see some benchmarks.

Re: "In the end, BigQuery is just another database."

Huhn? BigQuery is not a database at all - it doesn't support CRUD operations on data - rather it is an append-only analytics tool. And conversely, databases, relational or not, aren't really the right tools for full table scan ad-hoc queries over many terabytes, which is what BigQuery is designed to do. BigQuery is a developer's product, and one that can be integrated with existing web apps via RESTful API. Hadoop has it's own development role and story (and tools like Cascading are really great) but it's not designed as the backend for interaction via a RESTful API out of the box - it takes a bit more work to provide Hadoop as a service for developers to integrate with an application.

Re: "The public version of BigQuery probably isn't even used by Google, which likely has something bigger and better that we'll see in five years or so."

BigQuery is based on Google's internal Dremel, which is used everyday by Google. There is a very public research paper describing Dremel (much the same as how Google described MapReduce years ago). Read about what is available in Dremel versus what is available in BigQuery: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html

https://www.google.com/#safe=off&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=animals%20flee%20before%20earthquake&oq=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.45175338,d.cGE&fp=144025172efe81&biw=1155&bih=844&pf=p&pdl=300

You will find some animals flee before earthquakes, some act peculiar, as in, will be afraid or seemingly barking for hours before they hit.

I'm sure you wanted a more scientific answer, but sorry, while the scientist do great stuff, predicting shit that happens isn't one of them.

Not that anyone on Slashdot would ever notice (I mean, who reads TFA anyway, much less TWO of them?) but the FoxNews article is almost word-for-word identical to the Reuters article. Yeah, no surprise there (mass media is amazingly lazy), but did we really have to have two links which said exactly the same thing? Well, at least the Wikipedia link had original content...

Although, for fun, try searching Google for "Snails South Florida" and try to find a news article that /isn't/ a rehash of the Reuter's article. It sure is a slick mess!

Watches are still useful. I wear a watch from time to time -- I own 4. A dive watch from St Moritz - a Momentum M50; a low-key dress watch from Skagen; a Breitling Old Navitimer; and my grandfather's Breitling Montbrilliant pocket watch. The latter two don't get out of the safe much any more.

The reason I state this, is because I've been building up a successful blacklist (albeit NOT vs. "spam" or phishers only, but more vs. online threats in maliciously scripted sites &/or servers known to serve up malware etc.):

Yes, thus - I'd have to say, based on 15++ yrs. of experience doing it (based on reputable & reliable sites listed below) that yes, MOST of it comes from those nations (& that's why I said "unfortunately" in my subject-line - since I know their people are NOT "all bad", just that they have a lot of what you state going on).

I base this not only on "opinion" but HARD DATA too!

From a list I apply in custom hosts files of over 1,967,147 such bogus sites/servers that grows by almost 200 - 2,000 such sites each day, approximately (that *might* strike some of you as "fantastic", but it's real)... I get my data from the following sites:

http://hosts-file.net/?s=Download
http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt
http://www.malware.com.br/cgi/submit?action=list_hosts_win_0000
http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
https://spyeyetracker.abuse.ch/monitor.php?filter=lastupdated
http://safeweb.norton.com/noscript/
http://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/
http://hostsfile.org/hosts.html
http://www.malwareurl.com/
http://sysctl.org/cameleon/hosts
http://pgl.yoyo.org/as/serverlist.php?hostformat=hosts&showintro=1&mimetype=plaintext
http://www.safer-networking.org/dl/
http://amada.abuse.ch/palevotracker.php

AND, then I import, consolidate, sort, & deduplicate that data using this application I wrote to do so:

---

APK Hosts File Engine 5.0++ 32/64-bit:

http://start64.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5851:apk-hosts-file-engine-64bit-version&catid=26:64bit-security-software&Itemid=74

---

Why? Simple - it works, & on the SIMPLEST PRINCIPLE OF ALL: What you can't touch, can't hurt you... & I never was the type of person to just "sit around & take it" - I do something about it, IF possible. The above IS my possible, and it is possible & works (in combination with all I put into this security guide I authored from 1997-2007, here -> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=%22How+to+SECURE+Windows+2000/XP%22&btnG=Submit&gbv=1&sei=PjNrUcDVGpSz4AOJuIHQDQ that works on the BEST THING WE HAVE GOING: "Layered-Security"/"Defense-in-Depth"... & yes, it works! )

APK

P.S.=> Any questions?

... apk

if you weren't such a dipshit you would have realized...google doesn't sell music or radio services (neither does samsung)

Samsung Music Hub
http://www.samsung.com/us/article/music-hub-all-the-music-you-want-all-in-one-place

Music on Google Play
https://play.google.com/store/music

Yes I'm afraid you have indeed made a factual error, don't feel too bad

"I'm a little surprised Android hasn't copied iOS's behavior, where it asks the user whether or not to grant permissions to a specific thing (e.g Contacts or Location) at the time the app tries to do so - it just makes sense, and it's not like both OSes haven't copied from each other before."

There are apps for that, eg:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lbe.security.lite
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1091065

But can you trust these kind of apps? So far I do, worst case scenario is there is now 1 more app that can access my data.

• dry area -- check
• surrounded by mountains -- check
• has inland sea -- check

• Mordor Utah

• populated by orcs -- ahem
• ruled by evil overlord -- OK, he's not that evil. And he has two eyes.

There are a couple of good "Arctic Death Spiral" plots out there, none of them look very encouraging.

There are a couple of good "Arctic Death Spiral" plots out there, none of them look very encouraging.

...the future is here:

http://www.google.com/patents/US20120040655

Here are more curves that were posted in the comments of the blog you're linking:

https://sites.google.com/site/arctischepinguin/home/piomas

Clearly, the exponential model has the best fit (which is not very surprising), and says 2015, take or give 1 year for 95% confidence. Of course, there is no theoretical model behind, but most of the time, the theoretical explanation comes after the empirical fit.

It's been eight goddamn years and Verizon has been dragging their asses the whole time. At this rate, Google Fiber will get to my parent's area before Verizon pulls collective their thumbs out of their asses.

I hope you're right. But https://fiber.google.com/cities/ shows nothing about Google Fiber actually coming to the Bay Area. Given that Google's HQ is there and a lot of their employees are there and everybody I know who lives there complains about the AT&T/Verizon duopoly, you have to wonder why Google isn't rolling out Fiber there. I'm afraid that "Verizon has been dragging their asses, Google will do better" isn't an accurate representation of reality.

My post was not a judgement between ISPs or Google. There is a trade-off with either.

It's your judgment that Google Fiber is different from other ISP's that people are questioning.

It was merely a clarification that there /is/ a difference between Google's methods and that of most ISPs.

You're wrong.

Here is full story with nice pictures (google translate from russian) http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=ru&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://habrahabr.ru/post/175827/

I don't doubt that well-educated Chinese individuals exist. I also don't doubt that high-work-ethic Chinese individuals exist. Those individuals are the ones who get to travel and whom people outside China tend to meet. But the vast, vast majority of the Chinese workforce are not at all well educated. That's why they're cheap. They work in sweatshops, making shiploads of cheap Chinese crap to sell both to China and to the rest of the world.

You compared China to Japan. The difference I see is that while Japan did benefit significantly from technology transfer during the time they were rebuilding from the devastation of WWII, they were already technologically advanced even before the war. By the 80s and during the 90s, Japan was where the future was being invented. China, on the other hand, is relying on espionage and outright theft to acquire technology. The draconian terms under which China allows factories to be built there basically guarantees that they will have access to all the technology, down to being able to make unauthorized, parts compatible clones.

I may have misunderstood what you initially meant by "work ethic". You're right about their attitude towards leisure and idleness. But they will take short-cuts, they will cut corners and they will cheat if they think they can get away with it, regardless of the danger to life or health. They'll use lead-based paint on children's toys, they've put toxic chemicals in infant formula (to hide the fact that the milk's been adulterated, they have fake eggs (!!!) which they'll try to pass off as food, they use waste cardboard as a food filler, they cut corners when building schools and housing, leaving students and residents vulnerable to earthquakes. This kind of corner-cutting is deeply ingrained in the Chinese culture. It happens not just in mainland China, but pretty much everywhere they are, from Vancouver to Manila. Compare that with the well-known Japanese obsession for perfectionism, for doing things right. I consider that attention to quality an important part, maybe the most important part, of one's work ethic. But you're right, the Chinese aren't an idle people.

Indeed, there's little reason for anyone to buy a new PC anymore. I'm typing this up on a Core Duo 1.8Ghz with 3GB RAM. It's maybe not as snappy as my primary machine with an i7 and 8GB and awesome switchable VGAs, but it's still sufficiently capable for web dev and graphic design and certainly any office tasks. But I have a hard time believing that Windows 8 as no role in this ... it's a massive dose of WTF is this shit?

Then enter the proliferation of tablets and smartphones, and suddenly a lot of people have no reason to own a fully-fledged computer. Why buy an over-featured device that will just add complication? If all you need is something for email and dicking around on FaceTwitstagramtrest, a tablet or smartphone is all you need. They are devices with interfaces designed for consumption with little interference of features. This is why mobile software mostly sucks and desktop software is so much more fully-featured. They are necessarily limited by their interfaces.

If PC makers expect to live through this transition, they need to refocus their efforts to users who actually use their computers as computers, not glorified TV sets. No more shiny-ass, overstyled, glitzy shit laptops would be a nice start, ie.: go back to making this tidy, understated and decidedly square, business-looking sort of thing, stop removing useful features, give us the form factor we actually want and stop making the godawful shiny, plasticky lumps of crippled shit that laptops are today.

Oh, and please, please, PLEASE give us our 7-row desktop-style keyboards back! How does anyone actually manage to get anything done on these bullshit 6-row monstrosities?

Indeed, there's little reason for anyone to buy a new PC anymore. I'm typing this up on a Core Duo 1.8Ghz with 3GB RAM. It's maybe not as snappy as my primary machine with an i7 and 8GB and awesome switchable VGAs, but it's still sufficiently capable for web dev and graphic design and certainly any office tasks. But I have a hard time believing that Windows 8 as no role in this ... it's a massive dose of WTF is this shit?

Then enter the proliferation of tablets and smartphones, and suddenly a lot of people have no reason to own a fully-fledged computer. Why buy an over-featured device that will just add complication? If all you need is something for email and dicking around on FaceTwitstagramtrest, a tablet or smartphone is all you need. They are devices with interfaces designed for consumption with little interference of features. This is why mobile software mostly sucks and desktop software is so much more fully-featured. They are necessarily limited by their interfaces.

If PC makers expect to live through this transition, they need to refocus their efforts to users who actually use their computers as computers, not glorified TV sets. No more shiny-ass, overstyled, glitzy shit laptops would be a nice start, ie.: go back to making this tidy, understated and decidedly square, business-looking sort of thing, stop removing useful features, give us the form factor we actually want and stop making the godawful shiny, plasticky lumps of crippled shit that laptops are today.

Oh, and please, please, PLEASE give us our 7-row desktop-style keyboards back! How does anyone actually manage to get anything done on these bullshit 6-row monstrosities?

Indeed, there's little reason for anyone to buy a new PC anymore. I'm typing this up on a Core Duo 1.8Ghz with 3GB RAM. It's maybe not as snappy as my primary machine with an i7 and 8GB and awesome switchable VGAs, but it's still sufficiently capable for web dev and graphic design and certainly any office tasks. But I have a hard time believing that Windows 8 as no role in this ... it's a massive dose of WTF is this shit?

Then enter the proliferation of tablets and smartphones, and suddenly a lot of people have no reason to own a fully-fledged computer. Why buy an over-featured device that will just add complication? If all you need is something for email and dicking around on FaceTwitstagramtrest, a tablet or smartphone is all you need. They are devices with interfaces designed for consumption with little interference of features. This is why mobile software mostly sucks and desktop software is so much more fully-featured. They are necessarily limited by their interfaces.

If PC makers expect to live through this transition, they need to refocus their efforts to users who actually use their computers as computers, not glorified TV sets. No more shiny-ass, overstyled, glitzy shit laptops would be a nice start, ie.: go back to making this tidy, understated and decidedly square, business-looking sort of thing, stop removing useful features, give us the form factor we actually want and stop making the godawful shiny, plasticky lumps of crippled shit that laptops are today.

Oh, and please, please, PLEASE give us our 7-row desktop-style keyboards back! How does anyone actually manage to get anything done on these bullshit 6-row monstrosities?

Indeed, there's little reason for anyone to buy a new PC anymore. I'm typing this up on a Core Duo 1.8Ghz with 3GB RAM. It's maybe not as snappy as my primary machine with an i7 and 8GB and awesome switchable VGAs, but it's still sufficiently capable for web dev and graphic design and certainly any office tasks. But I have a hard time believing that Windows 8 as no role in this ... it's a massive dose of WTF is this shit?

Then enter the proliferation of tablets and smartphones, and suddenly a lot of people have no reason to own a fully-fledged computer. Why buy an over-featured device that will just add complication? If all you need is something for email and dicking around on FaceTwitstagramtrest, a tablet or smartphone is all you need. They are devices with interfaces designed for consumption with little interference of features. This is why mobile software mostly sucks and desktop software is so much more fully-featured. They are necessarily limited by their interfaces.

If PC makers expect to live through this transition, they need to refocus their efforts to users who actually use their computers as computers, not glorified TV sets. No more shiny-ass, overstyled, glitzy shit laptops would be a nice start, ie.: go back to making this tidy, understated and decidedly square, business-looking sort of thing, stop removing useful features, give us the form factor we actually want and stop making the godawful shiny, plasticky lumps of crippled shit that laptops are today.

Oh, and please, please, PLEASE give us our 7-row desktop-style keyboards back! How does anyone actually manage to get anything done on these bullshit 6-row monstrosities?

All great points. You may also have distant relatives or old friends who may still be interested in your life either now or later. At the very least, historians may be interested in your life, including in your local historical society. See for example:
"Why do historians value letters and diaries"
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/letters/whydo.html
"Thus, the historical value of reading diaries and letters involves understanding the significance of how individual writers employed, experimented with, or altered the conventional forms alive in their time. Perhaps more than any other kind of historical text, the personal writing we are considering reveals how people both embraced and resisted the time and place in which they lived. Their personal motives for employing either form -- the emotional and intellectual energy infusing the form with life each time it is written with a new subjectivity -- suggest much about how people in the past made their cultures, but made them from the materials at hand."

In any case, whether pictures or writings remain, you've made ripples in the world in all the lives you've interacted with. What is the universe quantum physicists describe but the sum total of all those sorts of waves?

Probably too late, but might give you a bit more time to make a few more ripples:
http://sciencenordic.com/cancer-patients-high-vitamin-d-levels-live-longer
"For example lung cancer patients, the median survival rate after the cancer diagnosis was 5.3 months for patients with low vitamin D levels, whereas it was 22.6 months for patients with high levels."

More about other cancer options in this thread:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3610805&cid=43358733

You might find parts of this book by Thomas Moore "Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ideals" of interest, or at least, just the summary:
http://books.google.com/books?id=RKZreNYKNHQC
"Our lives are filled with emotional tunnels: the loss of a loved one or end of a relationship, aging and illness, career disappointments or just an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with life. Society tends to view these "dark nights" in clinical terms as obstacles to be overcome as quickly as possible. But Moore shows how honoring these periods of fragility as periods of incubation and positive opportunities to delve the soul's deepest needs can provide healing and a new understanding of life's meaning. Dark Nights of the Soul presents these metaphoric dark nights not as the enemy, but as times of transition, occasions to restore yourself, and transforming rites of passage, revealing an uplifting and inspiring new outlook on such topics as:
* The healing power of melancholy
* The sexual dark night and the mysteries of matrimony
* Finding solace during illness and in aging
* Anxiety, anger, and temporary Insanities
* Linking creativity, spirituality, and emotional struggles
* Finding meaning and beauty in the darkness"

Although it sounds like you have already found a way to honor and respect the dark night you are facing. So, I link to that more by way of honoring what you say.

A key point he makes is that in mainstream Western culture, we usually see "growth" as about like a caterpillar getting bigger, but ignore growth as "transformation", like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. "Groundhog Day" is a favorite funny movie that connects with that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film)

I wrote about my mother's last days here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
" I'm glad I had the "free" time

Google Docs, like LibreOffice, can insert equations written using LaTeX notation.
http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160749
I don't think you can write while never having your hands leave the keyboard (you must at least tap/click the "New Equation" button) but I don't know how easy it is to operate that way in any desktop program that renders input.

BTW, MS Word's Equation Editor lets you enter LaTeX also, it's not some superpower only open source software has.

I'm not promoting any one of these choices, just pointing that by writing math & notation as TeX is useful feature in a number of document creation programs, online and offline.

All the CFL's I've ever used performed an impromptu plasma jet flare-out and stopped functioning. Usually after about a year of operation. This is in the exact same fixtures that a decent 60W "infrared heating element" lasts a solid 3-5 years.

The best part is the smell of burnt mercury and plastic that lingers for hours afterward. I live 40 miles downwind of the worst-polluting coal-fired power plant in the continental US. And a CFL during flame-out makes me long for a gasp of clean outdoor air.

Fuck CFL's.

Just think if 10% of the population have electric vehicles, coming home at the end of a hot day in the middle of summer, and then all dutifully plugging in their cars to the grid at roughly the same time.

Believe it or not, the utility and automotive industries are well aware of these issues. A lot of work is being done to anticipate the possible rise of electrical vehicles, integrate them with the smart grid, etc. etc.

Incidentally, winter peaks are going to be more challenging than summer, because they happen later in the evening (compare slides 30 [summer] and 31 [winter], here).

Article from Engadget (Mentions Japan only): http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/12/nintendo-to-retire-some-wii-network-services-june-28/

Who referenced Nintendo's "Japan" website: http://www.nintendo.co.jp/support/information/2013/0412.html

And that website in English: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nintendo.co.jp%2Fsupport%2Finformation%2F2013%2F0412.html

I am sure this is a valuable piece of work, as it is claimed as the first of it's type and will be very useful as a benchmark. Analytic chemistry has progressed tremendously over the 40 years I was a practicing chemist, to the point where concentrations of particularly dangerous materials are possible to measure at femtograms per liter. At those concentrations you are detecting a very small number of molecules in a sample,

But since it's the first it really doesn't say much in terms of the progression of the state of affairs in these ecologies. It will be very interesting to see what the results are in a decade or two; whether the measures we are taking now to reduce the presence of these various very bad actors in the environment are being effected by environmental controls or not.

People greatly underestimate the versatility of Nature as a chemist. Some of the worst chemicals found in these studies are formed not only by man, but by Nature as well. For example DDT like chemicals have been found to exist in every evolutionary epoch.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Naturally_Occurring_Organohalogen_Compou.html?id=u45Z-kh61ngC

http://books.google.com/books?id=S2fvZsZwgQ4C&pg=PA185&dq=naturally+produced+ddt&hl=en&sa=X&ei=p0FoUe69C6nD4APzwoGYBA&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=naturally%20produced%20ddt&f=false

I am sure this is a valuable piece of work, as it is claimed as the first of it's type and will be very useful as a benchmark. Analytic chemistry has progressed tremendously over the 40 years I was a practicing chemist, to the point where concentrations of particularly dangerous materials are possible to measure at femtograms per liter. At those concentrations you are detecting a very small number of molecules in a sample,

But since it's the first it really doesn't say much in terms of the progression of the state of affairs in these ecologies. It will be very interesting to see what the results are in a decade or two; whether the measures we are taking now to reduce the presence of these various very bad actors in the environment are being effected by environmental controls or not.

People greatly underestimate the versatility of Nature as a chemist. Some of the worst chemicals found in these studies are formed not only by man, but by Nature as well. For example DDT like chemicals have been found to exist in every evolutionary epoch.

http://books.google.com/books/about/Naturally_Occurring_Organohalogen_Compou.html?id=u45Z-kh61ngC

http://books.google.com/books?id=S2fvZsZwgQ4C&pg=PA185&dq=naturally+produced+ddt&hl=en&sa=X&ei=p0FoUe69C6nD4APzwoGYBA&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=naturally%20produced%20ddt&f=false

The only 2 planks of the republican party I agree with are smaller government...

Since when do the republicans *actually* represent smaller government? Certainly, they do no better than democrats when it comes to total spending.

As far as I can tell, when they say "small government" all they really mean is "no regulations on business."

Some current CFL's do it just fine on the amateur radio bands. Admittedly it seems that it's gotten better lately, but I remember some early ones that were so noisy RF-wise I could just about hear them in my fillings.

If you are investing in a light source that will not need replacement for a decade then why, exactly, do you care so much about it being shaped like a light bulb?

LEDs don't like heat. Packing the equivalent of a 100W incandescent in a shape that pretty much minimized surface are to volume ratio is a very bad idea for heat dissipation.

LED light panels make much more sense.

Using Android's SurfaceFlinger API means your apps use Dalvik [...] X11 isn't getting ported

Unless your X11 server uses Dalvik. This exists.

Car mount for Android Phone, plus something like UlyssesSpeedometer with HUD mode enabled. Works like a charm, but is not really big enough using my GS3 IMHO.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.binarytoys.speedometer&hl=en

No disclaimers needed. I am not affiliated at all.

yes, I've heard of Hadoop - the framework that fixes java performance by splitting its execution up across a couple hundred machines. :-)

The framework language isn''t the performance part though - it just acts as a manager to send data to a group of workers and aggregate the results back, its the workers that are important. If they are slow, the whole thing is slow. So its best to write these in a native language. Its not anything special to Java either - Google's mapreduce implementation is written in python

If you want a good map/reduce language, forget Java and go with Erlang which is much more suited for this type of programming.

See link below.

http://books.google.com/books?id=qJZmsp3ZVG8C&pg=PA216&lpg=PA216&dq=being+literal+aspergers&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=being%20literal%20aspergers&f=false

This pretty much means you aren't in any industry that has government contracts

Not true. I work for a government research lab and we switched to GMail last year. Check it out: https://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/government/

Read this *before* you experiment the drivers. https://plus.google.com/u/0/102207276811032054708/posts/8bAKax1PJoi New nVidia beta drivers, 319.12, have been released yesterday. Unfortunately, several web sites have been quick to put articles with titles suggesting Optimus support finally coming to Linux, and I'm saying "unfortunately" because I believe this is a case where inaccurate reporting hurts everyone: to non-technical users, the articles may have an effect of giving a false impression that the wait is over and the complete and proper support in the official binary drivers has arrived. As far as I see, there is some confusion and misinformation in users' discussions, and that is not helping either. So, let's try to clarify things. In short, the new beta is but a first user-visible step towards complete Optimus support. Remarkably, it covers use cases that Bumblebee has never supported well: using external monitors attached to the nVidia GPU, and running all rendering on the nVidia GPU. On the other hand, Bumblebee provided power management and render offloading on the basis of individual applications, neither of which is offered by the new beta. In a typical muxless Optimus laptop (or a mux'ed laptop in "Optimus" configuration), you have the laptop LCD panel connected to Intel GPU only (so that nVidia card cannot display on it), and you may also have some external video port connected to nVidia GPU only (so that Intel card cannot display on it). Normally, you run the X server with the Intel driver, with the only output being the LCD panel, and all works well. Let's now consider more fancy scenarios. 1. You want to run a graphically intensive game, so you wish that heavy rendering is performed by the nVidia card, but it's only powered on for the duration of the game. You don't need to redirect rendering of any other applications to the nVidia card. This is called "render offloading". 2. You want to temporarily plug in an external monitor into the nVidia-driven output port without disrupting your existing X session already running on the X server with the Intel driver. Since the Intel chip cannot access that external port, it will need the nVidia card to perform display ("scanout") for it (this is assuming Intel does all rendering; alternatively, nVidia could be performing rendering for its portion of the desktop). 3. You want to use nVidia card for rendering the whole desktop, trading increased power consumption for improved acceleration of all graphical apps, including the compositor. Since the nVidia chip cannot access the laptop LCD panel, it will need the Intel card to perform scanout for it. 2 and 3 are called scanout offloading, and notice how it is needed in different directions for different use cases. The card performing the scanout is called the scanout sink, and the other is called the scanout source. With the new beta, nVidia supports scanout offloading, with the restriction that the nVidia chip can be the scanout source but not the sink. Thus, it supports use case 3. Use case 2 needs GPU hotplug in the X server, because you want to power up the discrete GPU only when the external monitor is plugged in, and on top of that use case 1 needs a mechanism to route rendering between different drivers. For now, it's possible to use a combination of virtual crtc patch and hybrid-screenclone to "solve" case 2 (yep, that's painful), and Bumblebee "solves" case 1. Proper support in the drivers/server stack will be more efficient, of course. Notably, it should be possible to use the new beta drivers to get better accelerated rendering for gaming sessions by starting the game on a separate X display with nVidia driver and scanout offloading. FSGamer should come in handy for that. Note that you want to be using xf86-video-intel driver for the offload sink in this case (not the modesetting driver as the readme currently suggests), which should work since version 2.21.5 and required, since Xorg does not support different drive

Slightly off topic, but I recommend the novelization of Fantastic Voyage. It is the one novelization I have read that was actually better than the movie from which it was taken. This is because it was written by Isaac Asimov in his prime.

There are all sorts of weird little things in the movie that are explained in the book. Like, why can the mission only take 60 minutes? And, at the end, whatever happened to the submarine?

(There was one scene from the movie that was just too stupid to explain, so Asimov simply left it out of the novelization. There's a scene where a box is brought on board, and someone asks what is in the box. "Oh, that's our atomic particle. We are going to be so small that we can run our nuclear reactor on one particle." Yeah, no.)

Years later, Asimov wrote a sequel. I tried reading it and couldn't get through it. His writing style had changed a lot, and I didn't care for it. So I only recommend the original book.

Google should setup a section to measure interest in other states / cities with information on how citizens can be Google Fiber "Ambassadors" for areas in which Google hasn't announced any plans to move into.. something like this page for those in the area, but for the rest of us would love to spread the word and garner support to lay the groundwork for Google to move in.

The 180-day limit is based on an antiquated legal standard, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was signed into law in 1986 - more than 25 years ago. At the time, email was still in its infancy, and "cloud"-based email providers like Yahoo, GMail, etc. simply didn't exist. Efforts are underway to update the act so that, among other things, law enforcement will need to obtain a warrant anytime they want to access email. But those updates aren't law yet, so the old statute still applies.

That old statute outweighs the Fourth Amendment? Interesting.

It still look a lot better then the iYacht.

Zombie steve's iYacht only makes it to number 5 on google's ugliest yacht list.

The 180-day limit is based on an antiquated legal standard, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was signed into law in 1986 - more than 25 years ago. At the time, email was still in its infancy, and "cloud"-based email providers like Yahoo, GMail, etc. simply didn't exist.

Efforts are underway to update the act so that, among other things, law enforcement will need to obtain a warrant anytime they want to access email. But those updates aren't law yet, so the old statute still applies.

So, are you critizising the existing, widely used recaptcha system? See the recaptcha description.

This might make sense for some Russian oil oligarch who has to visit oil platforms in the White Sea. For anybody else, it's kind of pointless.

At least it's more seaworthy than that boxy thing Steve Jobs had built.

Google used to be able to do exact string searches (case sensitive and everything) at the time they were competing against Alta Vista. I'm not sure when they lost the capability - sometime between 2000 and 2006 CE according to this thread.

But I remember when it used to work (and like you, I am annoyed that it no longer does!).

Tech will change along the way. First, St Louis has Variable-Speed-Limits. IMHO, VSL's should be everywhere. To entice truckers to drive at night, offer this: 8pm-8am 80mph. Second of course is that we will get cruise controls like this.. Eventually we will just use highways exclusively, turn on our google-cruise and sit back and surf. If you have something to do in a car, you don't mind getting somewhere 10 minutes later.
So the future will be full of drone-cars delivering pizzas, and drone-drivers surfing porn in private and no one speeding.

Here's a writeup in Techcrunch.

I don't know if it's going to get that big but I realized the other day that even in my non-criminal, law-abiding life there are still a lot of things that I send to people via SMS that I probably should not have. Lots. Of. Things.

They have a tech FAQ which goes into detail about encryption, privacy, etc.