Excellent points. If the government can define "hate speech" or "terrorism" to suite themselves, then there can never be any challenge to tyranny. The definitions will be changed to defend those in power at the time.
And seriously, how many US soldiers would actually kill their own country-men? Turning the US military on its own people would be a very difficult, if not impossible, thing to pull off.
These are people who go off to war believing they are fighting expressly for Freedom. And often their fathers and grandfathers before them, with the reason they are fighting part of their DNA.
Getting them to fight to _destroy_ freedom in their own country? Maybe a few mercenaries, but not the rank and file...
Maybe in some cultures and countries, but I don't think the brain-washing has gotten nearly that bad here yet.
There might even be a spontaneous re-growing of balls again, across the country... We might be numbed a bit from too much TV and 64oz sodas, but the spirit of revolutionaries is still in there somewhere... We're all descended from those who were willing to leave our original countries and make the effort to create a new life.
Things have been sliding due to some people letting themselves be manipulated by fear mongering, but the pendulum is swinging back the other way. Sometimes it takes a situation being taken to the extreme to wake people up, but we're waking up now...
For a geek hangout, most/.ers posting here are surprising ignorant about the absence of effects that non-ionizing radiation has.
Actually, most of the geeks are surprisingly unaware of their own body, given they are stuffing it with synthetic "food" and sugar and caffeine loaded drinks... Those are known to cause health problems, and yet they don't even notice it and make fun of people who might notice the effect of some things on their body.
Some of us DO feel the effects of this supposed safe radiation at levels the government has said is safe. Heating is NOT the only effect on biological systems, but that has been the only standard applied.
And no, I'm not a hypochondriac, and I started my engineering career in electronics. I understand the technology very well thank you. And most of it doesn't bother me. But cell phones next to my head, or being close to microwave oven or wi-fi is definitely something I can feel; and it makes me nauseous.
I'm not claiming something specific, or full of sweeping generalizations. What I am saying that I am completely certain of what I am experiencing, and have experimented with the effects many times in the last 10+ years. Most other people I talk to either don't notice it, or to a lesser level. (Or they just aren't very aware of what is going on in their own body until they pass out.)
Maybe I'm in the 99th percentile in this sensitivity, I don't know. But I see it as the "canary in the coal mine" effect. If it affects some people to this degree, then it is almost certainly affecting everyone, but just takes longer and thus it can seem safe to go into the mine. The reason canaries were used is that men didn't notice the effect until they passed out, and then it was too late.
In fact, the Wikidpedia article on "animal sentinels" is quite interesting and extremely relevant to this discussion. (not necessarily the power transmission discussion itself, but the effect of non-ionizing radiation on biological life) Animal_sentinels
There are two major issues here:
1) Not nearly as much is understood as pretended, but humans often like to look smarter than they really are. Or rather, cling to the illusion of certainty in life, which does not exist. (true science is about curiosity, and exploring new frontiers, not defending the status quo)
2) In the U.S. at least, large corporate interests influence everything, not the least of which is the government. (and yes, the regulatory agencies are full of politicians of one sort of another too) Since they fund most research, and/or control those who do the reviewing in those "peer-reviewed journals" you can bet that you are not being told the whole truth when there are billions of dollars at stake. To believe otherwise is simply naive... (sadly..)
Maybe if you don't understand the biology you should STFU.
Wouldn't it be great if you were running the FDA? No need for any of those controlled studies to see if a drug is safe for humans before selling it. Nope, just give it to few million people and see how many die. Good plan...
You talk like you know something, but if you were a real engineer, you'd know that determining what can go wrong is a big part of what we do. Don't try building a bridge without it...
There is a BIG gap between wringing one's hands and never doing anything the least bit risky, and ignoring all possible failure modes. In an earlier time, that latter would get you killed very quickly, and we wouldn't be here listening to you abuse people who are simply asking good questions _before_ investing millions of dollars.
Seriously, I know a very good man who almost went to jail for a little smack on the back of the head of his 16 year old son whom he had to retrieve after the kid got suspended from school.
And when the kid was a different time brought home by police for possession of alcohol, the police were sure to tell him -in front of the kid- that it was illegal to touch him.
But it is now perfectly okay for kids to verbally abuse adults. Watch carefully in public and it's not hard to find examples...
Why not see who registers the domains _and_ supplies downloads to existing bots?
Obviously the people who created this worm won't be stupid about it, but perhaps some clues could be gathered.
And if it gets really hard, maybe the guys from 24 or CSI can put one of their top people on it. They seem to do amazing things in figuring out multiple levels of hiding...
You calculate the value of a PC by how long it lasts (time and usefulness) compared to the price you paid. I still have a useful 2001 G3. After eight years it comes out cheaper than any PC.
And I still have a very useful and reliable 2001 Sony laptop running Windows 2000.
I agree about buying quality, but Apple doesn't have that market quite cornered....
RTFGP. I was responding to a post about GNU and the FSF, whose audience should be the general public; but very often miss the mark in their communications.
For a foundation that might ever want to reach the general (computer using) public, taking feedback about their image losing anyone but a certified geek might be valuable...
What is a nonconsole text editor, and what makes it so?
Not a terminal window. vim is a console editor. Gvim is not, as it won't run in a telnet session. (never mind that virtually no one uses straight telnet anymore... but saying ssh opens too many possibilities...)
They don't want Hulu to be competing directly with themselves on a TV, because the ad revenue they can get from getting your ass in a couch and watching TV vs. you watching it via Hulu is orders of magnitude greater. And unfortunately, that's not a tech thing, that's a "sponsers aren't willing to pay" thing.
Obviously you have never watched shows on Hulu, which often have even more commercials than on TV!
Yes, there are a few sponsored movies or shows with only one commercial at the start, but many have numerous commercials, which seem to get more and more frequent as the show gets closer to the end. I guess they figure they have you captive wanting to see how it ends, so they turn the screws. It's so bad it actually drives me _away_ from Hulu!
My own experience with a pair of Intel X25-M SLC 32GB drives: after less than a month of moderate use one began reporting unrecoverable read errors at an increasing rate.
Finally, some real world usage data, which is what the person asking the quetsion actually asked for -- not to be abused for not doing more calculations.
Do the manufacturers claims and the calculations actually hold up? It appears at least in one case, the answer is NO.
Ever since switching to an SSD on my dev machine I no longer have to suffer through things like a:wq in vim taking 5-10 seconds, or loading a file taking several seconds, etc.
5-10 seconds to write out a source file? Is this a million line source file, or were you using a floppy disk before?
We don't have to imagine. Thanks to the diversity of FOSS and the strength of the ability to bundle and innovate at will, there is Gentoo Linux and Open Embedded (which is based on Gentoo's Portage software installation and management tool.)
Ummm... No. OpenEmbedded is debian-based, and has what is essentially a shrunk down version of apt, called ipk.
Just wanted to get the facts straight. But your comments on the diversity of FOSS and all that stand of course.
Obviously, you've never actually tried to use Outlook with IMAP. It's on the marketing check list, and it "works" but not very well.
For instance, when you delete messages, they just get crossed out. You have to run a separate command to actually delete them all afterwards. And the sent folder is local. It doesn't use the sent folder on the IMAP server, so it's not backed up and you don't have access to it when away from the PC the message was sent from.
This is Outlook 2003, but I've heard 2007 is no different.
Is it the shared calendar/resource booking thing? In which case why do they elect to spend serious money (probably close to the annual wage of one of their junior employees) when a web-based shared calendar would be free?
Integration. Sending meeting invites via email, and having people be able to respond with a single click to accept/deny. Integrated ability to schedule meetings, see when others are busy, from within Outlook.
If you've actually used an integrated Outlook/Exchange solution you'd understand. And keep in mind the daily time you're saving includes every single person in the company, including highly paid executives. So the license cost is minimal in the big picture.
I'd still rather use an OSS solution than Exchange. The server fees are nuts; and the biggest hassle is needing to track all the licenses at all! Not to mention just wanting to support alternatives, and have plain text configuration, etc.
But the features of the Exchange/Outlook scenario are incredibly useful. Happily there are alternatives coming. (though why it is so f'ing hard for the OSS community to duplicate the most useful parts of Outlook mystifies me...)
Linux is a kernel. Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, and so on are distributions based around that kernel. Just because that concept doesn't seem to make sense to the average user (or you, from what I can tell) doesn't mean it's wrong or needs to be changed. It means somebody did a horrible job of explaining to them what "Linux" means or the user was lazy and filled in the gaps of their knowledge with incorrect assumptions.
Yeah, try explaining to your grandmother (or your PTB) what a "kernel" is. The concept of a file or directory is often hard enough.
It's not that "somebody did a horrible job of explaining to them what 'Linux' means." They don't care and they are not listening. Just like you don't want to hear the details of someone's colonoscopy.
The distinction between a kernel and distribution requires a level of detail they simply don't want to learn. You can say "but they should, or they have no business using our golden kernel." Exactly what they think too...
You think Mac users know what kernel it uses? Hardly.
It's why Windows has most of the market share for the desktop. The conceptual model is simple enough for most users to grasp. Windows is Windows is Windows. Though the kernel is completely different between Win98 and Win2K/XP, etc., they don't know that. They just know it works better, and their DOS programs still work in XP.
Ubuntu is moving in the right direction in user hand-holding, as well as a brand people can recognize, so they will start saying "I'm running Ubuntu." And they still won't want to try to understand what a "kernel" is...
Honestly though, it sounds to me like CPLD's or FPGAs may be the proper solution...... My question is why is this approach so rare? It seems like far fewer people use this approach than its benefits seem to imply. Am I missing some drawback?
Depends on the application, the system functions needed, the volume it will be produced in, the time to market required, etc. FPGAs and CPLDS are certainly used a lot. It's definitely a multi-billion dollar business. But these days mostly where performance is critical, and is worth the extra cost. FPGAs are not that cheap. The main ones we use cost us $100-200 each in small volumes. For one project, we're using a high end version that costs $2500.
Think of coding for CPLDs or FPGAs as a level _below_ assembly. Why isn't more software written in assembly code these days? It takes too much time. Even more so for good FPGA code. It is only worthwhile for certain applications which really need the performance per watt. And for high volume applications, the FPGA design is just a prototype stage, and then the design is moved into an ASIC.
Also, when you do build a system with an FPGA and either an embedded CPU or your own board design, you are no longer leveraging off of the work of many others. You are starting over from the bare metal, defining your own hardware interface, timing, APIs, drivers, and everything above that. Being able to leverage off of the hundreds of man-years of programmer time in Linux is a huge benefit, if you can do it.
Also, setting up a build environment, debugging interface, and other necessary tools eats up time. Some things you can find, but it's a lot harder than buying something like a Gumstix board with Linux loaded, and a set of cross-compiling tools on a CD. But you can't always use Linux for hard real-time hardware control.
In some cases, a FPGA or CPLD is the right answer, though as I said, now you have to develop everything yourself from scratch. It can be interesting and fun, if you don't have your company's ability to pay your salary (and everyone else's) dependent on you getting it done in 2 weeks....
The system I'm working on now uses a 400 MHz XScale based board we buy off the shelf, running Linux. Then we have a couple of simple drivers to interface to an FPGA which does the low-level hardware interface. But that FPGA code took many many months, and new features take many weeks to add and get right. (if you want it to run fast that is)
For a lot of low-level hardware control, the easiest thing is to just grab an off the shelf 8-bit or 16-bit processor and write mostly C code. Add a tiny bit of assembler, if you need it, and you can get the job done much easier and faster. Often you don't really need an RTOS, or can use a very very simple one. Since you can get 8-bit processors that run at 50MHz or more, and C code is so much faster to write than FPGA code. I've done many of those designs with serial port control in the past, and these days even the small processors can handle a simple TCP/IP stack.
Obviously an idea from a company who wants to sell more expensive chips.
What do we really want from our mobile devices? I want "infinite battery life" and no recharging.
Moore's Law (which is really an increase in the number of transistors per given area) could give us much much better battery life for the same performance, IF we don't go the way of the desktop and squander it on bloated software and eye-candy.
There are already displays which take almost no power (less than 1mW): http://www.qualcomm.com/technology/imod// Add in ultra-wideband, which today can already transmit enough data for HDTV while generating barely more power than background noise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-WideBand/), and you have seriously useful devices which take almost no power.
As the same number of transistors take up less space, less power, and run faster, we could eventually get to reasonably powerful devices which recharge like solar powered calculators, or from movement, like a self-winding watch. Now THAT would be news!
... voltage capacity of Tungsten T and T2 models is not high enough to support a wifi card
In which case Palm is either incompetent or deliberately crippled the hardware.
After all, the Pocket PC devices released at the same time had the necessary voltage to run an SDIO card.
Not necessarily true. Voltage is nothing without current. The issue is how much current can the device's power supply drive and still maintain the proper voltage to drive the accessory. Especially in high volume consumer devices there is a trade-off in every engineering decision between cost and requirements. They may not have made the power system strong enough to support these cards, and to use them might risk damaging the card and/or the PDA itself. Why add extra cost to a commodity device that people replace frequently? (in some companies and in some times past in this country, over-engineering is/was seen as common sense, but these days a company would probably be seen as a terrorist organization for "threatening the US economy.")
I don't know if this is true in this particular case, but it easily could be, so the conclusions being jumped to might be a little shakey...
Do a search at www.mercola.com. A ton of references there, plus commentary from a very knowledgeable doctor with a large practice (including other doctors).
There are two factors. While it is simple logic that the pancreas can "burn out" just like anything that is continuously stressed, the reality is that diabetes (type two at least; and perhaps type one to some degree) is actually a body-wide cellular problem of insulin resistance. The cells get so mucn of it that it takes more and more to get the nutrients into the cell. The problem is that insulin has many other effects on the body and the excess requirement both loads the pancreas and leads to high blood sugar and excess insulin in the system. And those two things lead to all the problems that are well documented as high risk factors for diabetics, such as eye diseases, heart disease, cancer, and serious circulation problems in the extremeties (often leading to amputation).
I'll pass on all that and just skip the new candy diet, thanks all the same...
Err, that's a bug in your code ($a is not an object, -> is an object reference), if you write buggy code then don't expect PHP to give you anything close to expected results, let alone consistent ones.
So would an error be too much to expect? I expect the language to help me out a little, and not just blindly run nonsense.
What was that? Someone agreed with me about food? Thanks for listening. Really. Quite a lot I get the same response as trying to warn those who bought Amazon stock at 200+ and were sure it was going up forever.
BTW, grass-fed beef, if you can find it, has an excellent omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, just like wild game. But if they are fed grain before butchering they very rapidly lose their omega-3 content ratio. The trick then is to find a rancher who skips the "fattening up" step. I'm lucky to live where I can get such beef year-around. But you can find sources here: http://www.eatwild.com Lamb is also a good choice if you like it, as it is almost always raised on pasture.
I agree that just eating meat, especially the rather poor quality hamburger of the fast food world, is not a good diet. The excessive carbs are so unhealthy for many people though, it still might be better. Also, when I switched I found I loved fatty meat for a few weeks until my body stabilized. Now I find my biggest challenge is getting enough vegetables to balance out my diet properly or I tend to let the starches creep back up, and neither too much starch or too much meat is not good. We have some balance point it's best to keep each meal.
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Excellent points. If the government can define "hate speech" or "terrorism" to suite themselves, then there can never be any challenge to tyranny. The definitions will be changed to defend those in power at the time.
Free speech is fundamental to freedom.
See the ACLU web site for a primer...
And seriously, how many US soldiers would actually kill their own country-men? Turning the US military on its own people would be a very difficult, if not impossible, thing to pull off.
These are people who go off to war believing they are fighting expressly for Freedom. And often their fathers and grandfathers before them, with the reason they are fighting part of their DNA.
Getting them to fight to _destroy_ freedom in their own country? Maybe a few mercenaries, but not the rank and file...
Maybe in some cultures and countries, but I don't think the brain-washing has gotten nearly that bad here yet.
There might even be a spontaneous re-growing of balls again, across the country... We might be numbed a bit from too much TV and 64oz sodas, but the spirit of revolutionaries is still in there somewhere... We're all descended from those who were willing to leave our original countries and make the effort to create a new life.
Things have been sliding due to some people letting themselves be manipulated by fear mongering, but the pendulum is swinging back the other way. Sometimes it takes a situation being taken to the extreme to wake people up, but we're waking up now...
For a geek hangout, most /.ers posting here are surprising ignorant about the absence of effects that non-ionizing radiation has.
Actually, most of the geeks are surprisingly unaware of their own body, given they are stuffing it with synthetic "food" and sugar and caffeine loaded drinks... Those are known to cause health problems, and yet they don't even notice it and make fun of people who might notice the effect of some things on their body.
Some of us DO feel the effects of this supposed safe radiation at levels the government has said is safe. Heating is NOT the only effect on biological systems, but that has been the only standard applied.
And no, I'm not a hypochondriac, and I started my engineering career in electronics. I understand the technology very well thank you. And most of it doesn't bother me. But cell phones next to my head, or being close to microwave oven or wi-fi is definitely something I can feel; and it makes me nauseous.
I'm not claiming something specific, or full of sweeping generalizations. What I am saying that I am completely certain of what I am experiencing, and have experimented with the effects many times in the last 10+ years. Most other people I talk to either don't notice it, or to a lesser level. (Or they just aren't very aware of what is going on in their own body until they pass out.)
Maybe I'm in the 99th percentile in this sensitivity, I don't know. But I see it as the "canary in the coal mine" effect. If it affects some people to this degree, then it is almost certainly affecting everyone, but just takes longer and thus it can seem safe to go into the mine. The reason canaries were used is that men didn't notice the effect until they passed out, and then it was too late.
In fact, the Wikidpedia article on "animal sentinels" is quite interesting and extremely relevant to this discussion. (not necessarily the power transmission discussion itself, but the effect of non-ionizing radiation on biological life)
Animal_sentinels
There are two major issues here:
1) Not nearly as much is understood as pretended, but humans often like to look smarter than they really are. Or rather, cling to the illusion of certainty in life, which does not exist. (true science is about curiosity, and exploring new frontiers, not defending the status quo)
2) In the U.S. at least, large corporate interests influence everything, not the least of which is the government. (and yes, the regulatory agencies are full of politicians of one sort of another too) Since they fund most research, and/or control those who do the reviewing in those "peer-reviewed journals" you can bet that you are not being told the whole truth when there are billions of dollars at stake. To believe otherwise is simply naive... (sadly..)
Maybe if you don't understand the biology you should STFU.
Wouldn't it be great if you were running the FDA? No need for any of those controlled studies to see if a drug is safe for humans before selling it. Nope, just give it to few million people and see how many die. Good plan...
You talk like you know something, but if you were a real engineer, you'd know that determining what can go wrong is a big part of what we do. Don't try building a bridge without it...
There is a BIG gap between wringing one's hands and never doing anything the least bit risky, and ignoring all possible failure modes. In an earlier time, that latter would get you killed very quickly, and we wouldn't be here listening to you abuse people who are simply asking good questions _before_ investing millions of dollars.
If something is found, I beat my kid's ass...
And then _you_ go to jail for child abuse...
Seriously, I know a very good man who almost went to jail for a little smack on the back of the head of his 16 year old son whom he had to retrieve after the kid got suspended from school.
And when the kid was a different time brought home by police for possession of alcohol, the police were sure to tell him -in front of the kid- that it was illegal to touch him.
But it is now perfectly okay for kids to verbally abuse adults. Watch carefully in public and it's not hard to find examples...
Why not see who registers the domains _and_ supplies downloads to existing bots?
Obviously the people who created this worm won't be stupid about it, but perhaps some clues could be gathered.
And if it gets really hard, maybe the guys from 24 or CSI can put one of their top people on it. They seem to do amazing things in figuring out multiple levels of hiding...
You calculate the value of a PC by how long it lasts (time and usefulness) compared to the price you paid. I still have a useful 2001 G3. After eight years it comes out cheaper than any PC.
And I still have a very useful and reliable 2001 Sony laptop running Windows 2000.
I agree about buying quality, but Apple doesn't have that market quite cornered....
I'm not entirely sure it's pointless given that debt is the fundamental basis of our modern economy.
WAS the fundamental basis. That pyramid scheme collapsed, and the economy went with it. That's something people tend to remember for a while.
RTFGP. I was responding to a post about GNU and the FSF, whose audience should be the general public; but very often miss the mark in their communications.
For a foundation that might ever want to reach the general (computer using) public, taking feedback about their image losing anyone but a certified geek might be valuable...
What is a nonconsole text editor, and what makes it so?
Not a terminal window. vim is a console editor. Gvim is not, as it won't run in a telnet session. (never mind that virtually no one uses straight telnet anymore... but saying ssh opens too many possibilities...)
They don't want Hulu to be competing directly with themselves on a TV, because the ad revenue they can get from getting your ass in a couch and watching TV vs. you watching it via Hulu is orders of magnitude greater. And unfortunately, that's not a tech thing, that's a "sponsers aren't willing to pay" thing.
Obviously you have never watched shows on Hulu, which often have even more commercials than on TV!
Yes, there are a few sponsored movies or shows with only one commercial at the start, but many have numerous commercials, which seem to get more and more frequent as the show gets closer to the end. I guess they figure they have you captive wanting to see how it ends, so they turn the screws. It's so bad it actually drives me _away_ from Hulu!
My own experience with a pair of Intel X25-M SLC 32GB drives: after less than a month of moderate use one began reporting unrecoverable read errors at an increasing rate.
Finally, some real world usage data, which is what the person asking the quetsion actually asked for -- not to be abused for not doing more calculations.
Do the manufacturers claims and the calculations actually hold up? It appears at least in one case, the answer is NO.
calculated_reality != real_world_experience
Ever since switching to an SSD on my dev machine I no longer have to suffer through things like a :wq in vim taking 5-10 seconds, or loading a file taking several seconds, etc.
5-10 seconds to write out a source file? Is this a million line source file, or were you using a floppy disk before?
We don't have to imagine. Thanks to the diversity of FOSS and the strength of the ability to bundle and innovate at will, there is Gentoo Linux and Open Embedded (which is based on Gentoo's Portage software installation and management tool.)
Ummm... No. OpenEmbedded is debian-based, and has what is essentially a shrunk down version of apt, called ipk.
Just wanted to get the facts straight. But your comments on the diversity of FOSS and all that stand of course.
Seriously, just go buy a Zimbra license.
Until Microsoft buys Yahoo and kills Zimbra....
...they could just use IMAP with Outlook.
Obviously, you've never actually tried to use Outlook with IMAP. It's on the marketing check list, and it "works" but not very well.
For instance, when you delete messages, they just get crossed out. You have to run a separate command to actually delete them all afterwards. And the sent folder is local. It doesn't use the sent folder on the IMAP server, so it's not backed up and you don't have access to it when away from the PC the message was sent from.
This is Outlook 2003, but I've heard 2007 is no different.
Is it the shared calendar/resource booking thing? In which case why do they elect to spend serious money (probably close to the annual wage of one of their junior employees) when a web-based shared calendar would be free?
Integration. Sending meeting invites via email, and having people be able to respond with a single click to accept/deny. Integrated ability to schedule meetings, see when others are busy, from within Outlook.
If you've actually used an integrated Outlook/Exchange solution you'd understand. And keep in mind the daily time you're saving includes every single person in the company, including highly paid executives. So the license cost is minimal in the big picture.
I'd still rather use an OSS solution than Exchange. The server fees are nuts; and the biggest hassle is needing to track all the licenses at all! Not to mention just wanting to support alternatives, and have plain text configuration, etc.
But the features of the Exchange/Outlook scenario are incredibly useful. Happily there are alternatives coming. (though why it is so f'ing hard for the OSS community to duplicate the most useful parts of Outlook mystifies me...)
Linux is a kernel. Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, and so on are distributions based around that kernel. Just because that concept doesn't seem to make sense to the average user (or you, from what I can tell) doesn't mean it's wrong or needs to be changed. It means somebody did a horrible job of explaining to them what "Linux" means or the user was lazy and filled in the gaps of their knowledge with incorrect assumptions.
Yeah, try explaining to your grandmother (or your PTB) what a "kernel" is. The concept of a file or directory is often hard enough.
It's not that "somebody did a horrible job of explaining to them what 'Linux' means." They don't care and they are not listening. Just like you don't want to hear the details of someone's colonoscopy.
The distinction between a kernel and distribution requires a level of detail they simply don't want to learn. You can say "but they should, or they have no business using our golden kernel." Exactly what they think too...
You think Mac users know what kernel it uses? Hardly.
It's why Windows has most of the market share for the desktop. The conceptual model is simple enough for most users to grasp. Windows is Windows is Windows. Though the kernel is completely different between Win98 and Win2K/XP, etc., they don't know that. They just know it works better, and their DOS programs still work in XP.
Ubuntu is moving in the right direction in user hand-holding, as well as a brand people can recognize, so they will start saying "I'm running Ubuntu." And they still won't want to try to understand what a "kernel" is...
Depends on the application, the system functions needed, the volume it will be produced in, the time to market required, etc. FPGAs and CPLDS are certainly used a lot. It's definitely a multi-billion dollar business. But these days mostly where performance is critical, and is worth the extra cost. FPGAs are not that cheap. The main ones we use cost us $100-200 each in small volumes. For one project, we're using a high end version that costs $2500.
Think of coding for CPLDs or FPGAs as a level _below_ assembly. Why isn't more software written in assembly code these days? It takes too much time. Even more so for good FPGA code. It is only worthwhile for certain applications which really need the performance per watt. And for high volume applications, the FPGA design is just a prototype stage, and then the design is moved into an ASIC.
Also, when you do build a system with an FPGA and either an embedded CPU or your own board design, you are no longer leveraging off of the work of many others. You are starting over from the bare metal, defining your own hardware interface, timing, APIs, drivers, and everything above that. Being able to leverage off of the hundreds of man-years of programmer time in Linux is a huge benefit, if you can do it.
Also, setting up a build environment, debugging interface, and other necessary tools eats up time. Some things you can find, but it's a lot harder than buying something like a Gumstix board with Linux loaded, and a set of cross-compiling tools on a CD. But you can't always use Linux for hard real-time hardware control.
In some cases, a FPGA or CPLD is the right answer, though as I said, now you have to develop everything yourself from scratch. It can be interesting and fun, if you don't have your company's ability to pay your salary (and everyone else's) dependent on you getting it done in 2 weeks....
The system I'm working on now uses a 400 MHz XScale based board we buy off the shelf, running Linux. Then we have a couple of simple drivers to interface to an FPGA which does the low-level hardware interface. But that FPGA code took many many months, and new features take many weeks to add and get right. (if you want it to run fast that is)
For a lot of low-level hardware control, the easiest thing is to just grab an off the shelf 8-bit or 16-bit processor and write mostly C code. Add a tiny bit of assembler, if you need it, and you can get the job done much easier and faster. Often you don't really need an RTOS, or can use a very very simple one. Since you can get 8-bit processors that run at 50MHz or more, and C code is so much faster to write than FPGA code. I've done many of those designs with serial port control in the past, and these days even the small processors can handle a simple TCP/IP stack.
Obviously an idea from a company who wants to sell more expensive chips.
What do we really want from our mobile devices? I want "infinite battery life" and no recharging.
Moore's Law (which is really an increase in the number of transistors per given area) could give us much much better battery life for the same performance, IF we don't go the way of the desktop and squander it on bloated software and eye-candy.
There are already displays which take almost no power (less than 1mW): http://www.qualcomm.com/technology/imod// Add in ultra-wideband, which today can already transmit enough data for HDTV while generating barely more power than background noise (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-WideBand/), and you have seriously useful devices which take almost no power.
As the same number of transistors take up less space, less power, and run faster, we could eventually get to reasonably powerful devices which recharge like solar powered calculators, or from movement, like a self-winding watch. Now THAT would be news!
When I'm logged into Gmail the logo still has the "beta" on it...
I haven't signed up for the full suite of apps, but it would be pretty strange if that made a difference...
Not necessarily true. Voltage is nothing without current. The issue is how much current can the device's power supply drive and still maintain the proper voltage to drive the accessory. Especially in high volume consumer devices there is a trade-off in every engineering decision between cost and requirements. They may not have made the power system strong enough to support these cards, and to use them might risk damaging the card and/or the PDA itself. Why add extra cost to a commodity device that people replace frequently? (in some companies and in some times past in this country, over-engineering is/was seen as common sense, but these days a company would probably be seen as a terrorist organization for "threatening the US economy.")
I don't know if this is true in this particular case, but it easily could be, so the conclusions being jumped to might be a little shakey...
Do a search at www.mercola.com. A ton of references there, plus commentary from a very knowledgeable doctor with a large practice (including other doctors).
There are two factors. While it is simple logic that the pancreas can "burn out" just like anything that is continuously stressed, the reality is that diabetes (type two at least; and perhaps type one to some degree) is actually a body-wide cellular problem of insulin resistance. The cells get so mucn of it that it takes more and more to get the nutrients into the cell. The problem is that insulin has many other effects on the body and the excess requirement both loads the pancreas and leads to high blood sugar and excess insulin in the system. And those two things lead to all the problems that are well documented as high risk factors for diabetics, such as eye diseases, heart disease, cancer, and serious circulation problems in the extremeties (often leading to amputation).
I'll pass on all that and just skip the new candy diet, thanks all the same...
So would an error be too much to expect? I expect the language to help me out a little, and not just blindly run nonsense.
What was that? Someone agreed with me about food? Thanks for listening. Really. Quite a lot I get the same response as trying to warn those who bought Amazon stock at 200+ and were sure it was going up forever.
BTW, grass-fed beef, if you can find it, has an excellent omega-3 to omega-6 ratio, just like wild game. But if they are fed grain before butchering they very rapidly lose their omega-3 content ratio. The trick then is to find a rancher who skips the "fattening up" step. I'm lucky to live where I can get such beef year-around. But you can find sources here: http://www.eatwild.com Lamb is also a good choice if you like it, as it is almost always raised on pasture.
I agree that just eating meat, especially the rather poor quality hamburger of the fast food world, is not a good diet. The excessive carbs are so unhealthy for many people though, it still might be better. Also, when I switched I found I loved fatty meat for a few weeks until my body stabilized. Now I find my biggest challenge is getting enough vegetables to balance out my diet properly or I tend to let the starches creep back up, and neither too much starch or too much meat is not good. We have some balance point it's best to keep each meal.