There is quite literally no excuse for this. A car battery is on the order of 40-50 amp-hours. To discharge even a half-dead car battery in 2 weeks means drawing a constant 60mA.
Apple's selling point isn't that their phone is impossible to crack into - it's that they are not working with the US government to give secret back doors. It should surprise no one that technically sophisticated people can retrieve the information from a phone that they have physical possession of. If anything, it's kind of a feather in Apple's cap that it took so much work.
The BBC microbit should be fun to play with once it is more generally available. The pins are not very convenient, but there are plenty of them and there are already edge connectors to take care of that. The built-in accelerometer/compass and bluetooth along with the crude display give it some unique features.
Some of them, sure, but the "Arduino" moniker is no longer limited to the original 8-bit Atmel-based board. I think there is even an Arduino with the M0 chip found in this BBC thing.
I have a Roku and it has an app for the phone. Despite my entire family having phones and tablets, we almost always use the remote instead of the app. If we were forced to use the app we probably would, but there's no preference for it as far as I can tell.
Don't worry - the new Vizio fills the room with a soothing radiation which wirelessly charges the remote and anything else with a round conductive shape. It's kind of fun to watch my coffee cup with the metallic ring arc playfully as I browse YouTube with my giant remote. Just make sure you remove your wedding ring.
I suggested getting Pis for the class rather than the individual. Collect them up at the end of the lesson. To program the Microbit they will need PCs for every child anyway, which will belong to class.
That solves the "selling it on eBay" problem, but then they can't take it home to diddle with it. It's a tradeoff.
Not at all. With the Pi you can throw in an SD card that boots into BASIC and then immediately start toggling LEDs connected to GPIOs. There is no reason why they couldn't provide a standard LED shield and the Javascript library code they created for the Micro:bit to run on the Pi as well.
That injects an unnecessary step and abstracts you from what the hardware is doing. If the goal is to teach a little bit of programming, then just open a web browser and forget the hardware altogether. If your goal is to teach basic electronics, then playing with more primitive hardware is beneficial. Flip this bit and the light goes on, flip it again and it goes off. Sure, you can make a Pi pretend to do this - but you can make a web browser pretend to do this as well.
The Pi is actually easier and more immediate as you can run individual BASIC commands from the command line. With the Micro:bit you have to compile, download over wireless and then execute with minimal debug capability. I expect the kids will end up spending a lot of time in the simulator for that reason.
I expect that they'll have chromebooks or tablets pre-configured with a simple programming environment. The kids will likely type a line of c code or similar and hit the "play" button. No diddling with SD cards, no waiting for it to boot, no complications at all. Unplug the microcontroller and the blinking stops. Plug it in and it starts right back up. It draws a few mA, so the kid can put a few button cells on it and wear it around.
A Pi is a cool little computer. But for blinking lights it is more complicated than it needs to be. I think giving a Pi out to kids is also a great idea - these two projects can be complimentary. Microcontrollers and full-fledged computers are both very useful and are complementary. I don't see the conflict at all.
To a Yank, the Queen is part of the government. Just pretend kav2k said "Establishment". The BBC and it's "fee" is imposed on the people of Britain from above, call it what you will.
I'm not sure why this is a problem. They all come out-of-the-box with internet connectivity and an app store/repository, which is better than a ROM-encoded interpreter. If you can get a WiFi signal, you have access to many free interpreters and compilers, no matter what platform you have. Even if you are restricted to web sites only, there are plenty of sites to compile and run programs in-browser. Options are far better today than they were in the 80s, computers far cheaper, and, well, Google.
Does it matter from any point except semantics? It's money that you have to pay because the government forces you to. Where the check goes is secondary. If you have a TV in Britain, you have to pay money by force of law - do you really care if you make the check out to the BBC or "Her Royal Highness"?
PBS doesn't do itself any favors by consistently targeting viewership from one side of the aisle. While that strategy does give them fervent supporters, it also gives them fervent detractors. Like it or not, those detractors do pop into political power now and again.
FYI, when talking to Brits it can get confusing when you refer to the "government". To them the Queen is not part of the government. Since the BBC is not authorized by Parliament directly, but by Royal Charter, it would be more proper to say that the TV license is an "Establishment-backed tax".
Hopefully I got that right - you can go in circles with this obscure terminology when talking across the Atlantic.
They guy you are replying to is not denying that a Pi is "better", in terms of capability. But this has some qualities that make it "better" for the task at hand: 1. It's fairly worthless outside of it's intended environment, which means it won't be a temptation to "lose" it on eBay. 2. It's simpler. Setting up a Pi is not exactly hard, but it teaches you about setting up a computer, not electronics. You can get right to blinking lights. 3. It's cheap enough to give to the kids. Most kids will put it to the side and never play with it again. A few will dick around with it and graduate to an Arduino or Pi. Those are your target.
You want to introduce kids to stuff and see what floats their boat. Some will get the musical bug, others the art bug, and some will get the electronics bug. Sometimes they get this exposure at home, sometimes at school. If society values technical people, then technical education needs to be part of public education.
IMHO, the main value of Codeweavers is when you have a legacy program that is holding you back from updating your systems. Expecting it to work on a 15-year-old Windows program is not unrealistic. Expecting it to work with constantly-upgraded programs like AutoCAD is going to lead to disappointment. If AutoCAD is your bread and butter, than Windows is your companion - that's just the way it is. If you just need to run your ancient XP-era security keycard programmer, give Wine a whirl. If all of your pre-1997 documents are in an ancient version of WordPerfect, give it a try - it certainly beats paying an intern to convert them all, and the intern won't have to kill himself.
It's gotta be at least close... the Cray Y-MP could do 333 megaflops per processor, and it had 8 processors. Are there really $100 phones doing 2.6 gigaflops? Graphics is cheating!:)
Anyway, wrist-slap taken. Next time I'll do a little due diligence...
If cost is no object, then your comment has merit. But cost matters, which is why a $100 Android phone is impressive even if it doesn't quite have the horsepower of a 1980s Cray supercomputer. That's an extreme example, but certainly you would value a 3 hour ride across the Atlantic, even if you could have paid double to shave off another 10 or 20 minutes.
You forget that Bitcoin transactions / wallets can be unmasked to reveal IP addresses
While I'm not all that intimate with Bitcoin, I did actually remember that, which is why I mentioned laundering - you need to launder the bitcoin to stay anonymous. It is probably a little easier to launder Bitcoin than cash, but I could very well be wrong as I have never had the need to launder either:)
With cash, you can trace it with the serial number and with bitcoin you need the chain - both are trivial to work around, though laundering physical money is harder.
With cash you cannot tell who gave you the cash- this is also the case with a "laundered" bitcoin. Here cash has the edge since you don't need to take any action.
With cash, you can hide it anywhere - just like your bitcoin wallet. Bitcoin has an edge here because the wallet is ultimately just a number. It is easier to hide a slice of information than a physical pile of cash.
Both seem to scare the hell out of authorities. That's perhaps the best "feature".
Slashdot Mirror
Nice. Maybe the people with these 2-weeks-until-dead cars have done something naughty :)
There is quite literally no excuse for this. A car battery is on the order of 40-50 amp-hours. To discharge even a half-dead car battery in 2 weeks means drawing a constant 60mA.
Apple's selling point isn't that their phone is impossible to crack into - it's that they are not working with the US government to give secret back doors. It should surprise no one that technically sophisticated people can retrieve the information from a phone that they have physical possession of. If anything, it's kind of a feather in Apple's cap that it took so much work.
ULA apparently spends all of their marketing money on shills.
The BBC microbit should be fun to play with once it is more generally available. The pins are not very convenient, but there are plenty of them and there are already edge connectors to take care of that. The built-in accelerometer/compass and bluetooth along with the crude display give it some unique features.
Some of them, sure, but the "Arduino" moniker is no longer limited to the original 8-bit Atmel-based board. I think there is even an Arduino with the M0 chip found in this BBC thing.
I have a Roku and it has an app for the phone. Despite my entire family having phones and tablets, we almost always use the remote instead of the app. If we were forced to use the app we probably would, but there's no preference for it as far as I can tell.
Don't worry - the new Vizio fills the room with a soothing radiation which wirelessly charges the remote and anything else with a round conductive shape. It's kind of fun to watch my coffee cup with the metallic ring arc playfully as I browse YouTube with my giant remote. Just make sure you remove your wedding ring.
I suggested getting Pis for the class rather than the individual. Collect them up at the end of the lesson. To program the Microbit they will need PCs for every child anyway, which will belong to class.
That solves the "selling it on eBay" problem, but then they can't take it home to diddle with it. It's a tradeoff.
Not at all. With the Pi you can throw in an SD card that boots into BASIC and then immediately start toggling LEDs connected to GPIOs. There is no reason why they couldn't provide a standard LED shield and the Javascript library code they created for the Micro:bit to run on the Pi as well.
That injects an unnecessary step and abstracts you from what the hardware is doing. If the goal is to teach a little bit of programming, then just open a web browser and forget the hardware altogether. If your goal is to teach basic electronics, then playing with more primitive hardware is beneficial. Flip this bit and the light goes on, flip it again and it goes off. Sure, you can make a Pi pretend to do this - but you can make a web browser pretend to do this as well.
The Pi is actually easier and more immediate as you can run individual BASIC commands from the command line. With the Micro:bit you have to compile, download over wireless and then execute with minimal debug capability. I expect the kids will end up spending a lot of time in the simulator for that reason.
I expect that they'll have chromebooks or tablets pre-configured with a simple programming environment. The kids will likely type a line of c code or similar and hit the "play" button. No diddling with SD cards, no waiting for it to boot, no complications at all. Unplug the microcontroller and the blinking stops. Plug it in and it starts right back up. It draws a few mA, so the kid can put a few button cells on it and wear it around.
A Pi is a cool little computer. But for blinking lights it is more complicated than it needs to be. I think giving a Pi out to kids is also a great idea - these two projects can be complimentary. Microcontrollers and full-fledged computers are both very useful and are complementary. I don't see the conflict at all.
To a Yank, the Queen is part of the government. Just pretend kav2k said "Establishment". The BBC and it's "fee" is imposed on the people of Britain from above, call it what you will.
I'm not sure why this is a problem. They all come out-of-the-box with internet connectivity and an app store/repository, which is better than a ROM-encoded interpreter. If you can get a WiFi signal, you have access to many free interpreters and compilers, no matter what platform you have. Even if you are restricted to web sites only, there are plenty of sites to compile and run programs in-browser. Options are far better today than they were in the 80s, computers far cheaper, and, well, Google.
Does it matter from any point except semantics? It's money that you have to pay because the government forces you to. Where the check goes is secondary. If you have a TV in Britain, you have to pay money by force of law - do you really care if you make the check out to the BBC or "Her Royal Highness"?
PBS doesn't do itself any favors by consistently targeting viewership from one side of the aisle. While that strategy does give them fervent supporters, it also gives them fervent detractors. Like it or not, those detractors do pop into political power now and again.
FYI, when talking to Brits it can get confusing when you refer to the "government". To them the Queen is not part of the government. Since the BBC is not authorized by Parliament directly, but by Royal Charter, it would be more proper to say that the TV license is an "Establishment-backed tax".
Hopefully I got that right - you can go in circles with this obscure terminology when talking across the Atlantic.
They guy you are replying to is not denying that a Pi is "better", in terms of capability. But this has some qualities that make it "better" for the task at hand:
1. It's fairly worthless outside of it's intended environment, which means it won't be a temptation to "lose" it on eBay.
2. It's simpler. Setting up a Pi is not exactly hard, but it teaches you about setting up a computer, not electronics. You can get right to blinking lights.
3. It's cheap enough to give to the kids. Most kids will put it to the side and never play with it again. A few will dick around with it and graduate to an Arduino or Pi. Those are your target.
You want to introduce kids to stuff and see what floats their boat. Some will get the musical bug, others the art bug, and some will get the electronics bug. Sometimes they get this exposure at home, sometimes at school. If society values technical people, then technical education needs to be part of public education.
IMHO, the main value of Codeweavers is when you have a legacy program that is holding you back from updating your systems. Expecting it to work on a 15-year-old Windows program is not unrealistic. Expecting it to work with constantly-upgraded programs like AutoCAD is going to lead to disappointment. If AutoCAD is your bread and butter, than Windows is your companion - that's just the way it is. If you just need to run your ancient XP-era security keycard programmer, give Wine a whirl. If all of your pre-1997 documents are in an ancient version of WordPerfect, give it a try - it certainly beats paying an intern to convert them all, and the intern won't have to kill himself.
It's gotta be at least close... the Cray Y-MP could do 333 megaflops per processor, and it had 8 processors. Are there really $100 phones doing 2.6 gigaflops? Graphics is cheating! :)
Anyway, wrist-slap taken. Next time I'll do a little due diligence...
Ha! I should have known someone would run the numbers...
If cost is no object, then your comment has merit. But cost matters, which is why a $100 Android phone is impressive even if it doesn't quite have the horsepower of a 1980s Cray supercomputer. That's an extreme example, but certainly you would value a 3 hour ride across the Atlantic, even if you could have paid double to shave off another 10 or 20 minutes.
They probably seem more comfortable when drunk. I'll have to try drinking while working. For science.
In my case it was zero dollars because I already had a counter and barstools. It was just a matter of setting the computer down. :)
Now where's the fun in that?
I have this setup at home and do not find it comfortable. It seemed like a good idea.
You forget that Bitcoin transactions / wallets can be unmasked to reveal IP addresses
While I'm not all that intimate with Bitcoin, I did actually remember that, which is why I mentioned laundering - you need to launder the bitcoin to stay anonymous. It is probably a little easier to launder Bitcoin than cash, but I could very well be wrong as I have never had the need to launder either :)
It's basically exactly analogous to cash.
With cash, you can trace it with the serial number and with bitcoin you need the chain - both are trivial to work around, though laundering physical money is harder.
With cash you cannot tell who gave you the cash- this is also the case with a "laundered" bitcoin. Here cash has the edge since you don't need to take any action.
With cash, you can hide it anywhere - just like your bitcoin wallet. Bitcoin has an edge here because the wallet is ultimately just a number. It is easier to hide a slice of information than a physical pile of cash.
Both seem to scare the hell out of authorities. That's perhaps the best "feature".