First of all, I would like to interface with hardware I already have. Particularly, video, input, and Ethernet. So it would be really great if I could get a board with VGA out, USB host or on-the-go, and Ethernet, although other combinations are possible (e.g. Ethernet not on the board, but via a USB device).
Bear in mind that the core of Arduino is a microcontroller. It's meant for small to mid-size projects. Although it has a lot in common with what we think of as a "computer" today, you won't be turning it into a proper computer without a lot of hacking and peripherals. In many ways, it's better than a computer because a computer is extreme overkill for so many things where you want your project to be programmable but don't need the sheer amount of raw horsepower that a microprocessor offers.
There are tutorials on using Arduino to control LEDs, relays, servos, motors, LCD displays, and so on. You can connect virtually any kind of sensor to it thanks to its analog inputs. And there are "shields" that plug right into the board so that you can get started with them right away without soldering or breadboarding. The new Uno board comes with a second, smaller microcontroller on-board which (as I understand it) can be programmed to be any USB device. Various hackers have even programmed Arduino to do VGA output with a minimum of additional supporting circuitry, although I imagine that it doesn't have many clock cycles left to do anything fancy on top of that.
Secondly, I have virtually no experience with electronics, so I need something that is really easy to get started with. Of course, I am doing this in part because I want to learn, so if it's better to do a few simpler projects first to get the needed skills, I am open to that, too.
You're in luck, because there are a lot of Arduino tutorials that assume little in the way of previous electronics experience. (I highly recommend ladyada's Arduino tutorials.) You can do quite a lot just by internalizing a few basic rules (like, always put a resistor in series with an LED and its power source), but eventually you'll hit a point where you need to understand voltage, current, resistance, and the various laws that dictate how electronic circuits operate. The good news is, the Internet is bursting with information and tutorials thanks to the ever-growing maker/hacker movement.
Thirdly, I want the device that will be running things to be _cheap_. I am thinking max 20 USD. That's for being able to run some simple software (doesn't need a lot of RAM or ROM, as long as more storage can be added) with video output, keyboard input, and network access. If I need some extra expenses to bootstrap things (e.g. some extra hardware to write the ROM), that's ok, but I want to basically be able to tell my friends "for under 20 dollars, you can get one of these computers and run all this great software, too".
Arduino pretty much set the bar for cheap electronic tinkering and prototyping. A few years back, development kits for microcontrollers started in the $100 range. Arduino offers 95% of what they did for less than half the price. A basic Arduino kit will run between $30-$35. (There are Arduino boards that cost less, but they might have a few less features or aren't physically compatible with Arduino add-on shields.) If you want a hackable under-$20 computer with a large software library, I'd suggest buying a Gameboy Advance off of eBay.
Within these constraints, I would like to get the most bang for the buck that I can get. It doesn't have to be an 6502. If I can get an 68k or an ARM or an FPGA (given enough gates, of course), that would be grand.
Adafruit sells an Arduino-like ARM Cortex M3 board for $40. I don't know of any e
RIM, as you probably know, has the market on enterprise communication devices with the Blackberry. Since the iPad came out, almost every enterprise has started trial programs for the iPad in their organization. (Although in my company, this trial program is limited to all of the executives and managers. I posit that it's just a thinly veiled excuse to use company funds to pay for them to play around with an obviously consumer-level gadget. But I digress...)
This PlayBook is simply RIM's response to this. It's purely so that RIM can tell their shareholders that they at least tried to introduce a tablet to combat Apple's perceived inroads into enterprise tablet devices.
I hate these sorts of claims because they are absolute nonsense. How can you know if my university degree was a waste of money for me?
Just to point out the obvious: he said most people, not you specifically.
Some people go to college/university to better their understanding of the world or learn and contribute to their chosen field of study. And that's great, we need more people like that. But most people go to college/university because that's just what western culture says you're supposed to do if want to be successful and can afford it. Most people treat formal education like an extension of high school, only with less supervision and a lot more beer. And once they get out into the working world, they are shocked and surprised that nobody is handing them free money. Instead, they're all competing for the same low-wage entry-level jobs while staring down an education debt that will take them a large chunk of their productive years to fully pay off.
On the other hand, you can buy all the schooling you want and still be a arrogant prick. Did you stop to think that maybe English was his second language?
If it's like most government contracted aerospace vehicle development projects, it will cost 10 time as much, will arrive 10 years late, and will deliver 1/10th of what was promised.
Ubuntu may be getting better. But it still looks amateurish in comparison to Windows or OSX. It just doesn't feature the polish of those other OSs. Windows has a lot of clutter, but it is still a cohesive and fairly consistent experience.
The only way Windows could possibly be considered "cohesive" is when it's the only OS you know. In Ubuntu, you have one menu for your desktop preferences and one menu for system settings. In Windows, these things are scattered around the OS. Sure, the Control Panel groups a lot of things together but finding the exact setting you want is always a challenge when you don't already know where to look.
It doesn't seem like they gave enough thought to usability in Ubuntu
If you've been following Ubuntu at all, you'd know that pretty much the only thing they strive for is usability. Some ideas have been hit and miss (notifications behavior, window decorations, the hideous default orange-and-brown color schemes) but you have to give them credit for trying new ideas once in awhile. The basic Windows UI hasn't changed substantially (other than the window decorations) in 15 years and OS X hasn't really changed in around 10.
they simply copied bits of and pieces of what Microsoft and Apple have already done.
No, they took the parts that they liked best. And there's nothing at all wrong with that nor is it anything new. Microsoft copied many MacOS features and MacOS copied many Xerox-developed features.
One great usability feature that all Linux distributions have that neither Windows or OS X never will is decent package management. If you need some software, all you have to do is open up the package manager, search for what you want, and install it right then and there. No licenses, no DRM, no downloading, no CDs.
Synthesizers are never as good as the real thing, they don't have the ability to add certain qualities to the music like emotion.
"Emotion" is simply making minor adjustments to the playing of the instrument in certain ways at certain points. If it's possible to create an advanced acoustical model of a piano which is indistinguishable from a physical piano (and it is), then it is wholly possible to "program" emotion into a synthesized rendition of a piece.
Granted, the programming has to done by a human. And you could argue that by the time you've reached that point, it's a whole lot simpler to just record someone playing the instrument. But it's still adding human emotion into a synthesized piece.
They don't have the level of human error and randomness built in.
Many sequencers (the things that trigger notes which are sent to the synthesizer) have settings for randomness and other forms of human error. The accuracy can be set from "spot-on" to "oh my word, who let a white boy in here?"
If this actually happens and India really does subsidize and sell these Android tablets for $35 a pop to Indian citizens, I predict a lot of U.S. and western geeks will be purchasing them for $100 each on eBay.
Well, it's a little different. When you're not at work, you have a legal right to not expect your employer to trail you around town. I'm pretty sure you could press harassment or stalking charges pretty easily.
But this Chatter thing is being billed as "Facebook for business," which implies to me that if you're using this service in an official business capacity, you have no expectation of personal privacy. (And really, the same is true for Facebook itself, but for different reasons.)
Since they don't have to follow, well, any rules at all, it seems entirely likely that they can indeed simply keep all the money. Unless the game dev decides to sue.
Now, one interesting thing about PayPal is that it seems like when they pull these shenanigans, it's usually against people who would never be able to afford to successfully sue them. It costs thousands of dollars just to get decent legal advice, let alone go to court. I know a few people who have been bilked out of money from PayPal, so if this kind of thing is as common as blogs and first-person accounts suggest, PayPal must rake in millions annually from these little "misunderstandings." And I wouldn't doubt for a second that they consider this a major revenue source.
Rather like how the cell phone companies put the "access the web" buttons on their phones right next to other common buttons. Every major carrier admits they make serious cash from the accidental data charges, but only a percentage of customers actually call in to have the charges reversed.
This is why you choose a reliable OpenID provider for your account. A reliable provider should have a good security record and (ideally) explain the details of their authentication system including how the passwords are stored.
Since OpenID is open, you can also be your own provider.
Recently, I decided I wanted to ditch my iPod Touch. I'd really like a good quality Android device to replace it. So far the only decent Android devices that I know of are phones. (Yes, there are non-phone Android devices, but they often lack critical pieces, like the App Market.)
If I were to buy an Android phone (say, a Nexus One), and have no intention of using it as a phone (no phone calls, no text messages), can I use use all the other Android functionality without a carrier, just wifi? I've done a lot of Googling but haven't yet come across a definitive yes or no. I'd preferably like to hear someone who is already doing this.
(And yes, I already know I will pay a lot more than I did for the iPod Touch.)
After this twenty minutes of googling, I was plagued by LG Neon ads for weeks. Every third or fourth website I visited had an ad trying to sell me the very phone that broke on me. It made me more and more angry every time I saw it.
Government regulation is necessary in some cases but should always, always be a last resort. In this case, there's a perfectly good solution that involves no regulation or government interference of any kind: If the ads you see online disturb you, don't visit those sites. A more tech-savvy solution would be to install an ad blocker, which is child's play these days thanks to the wonderful world of browser extensions.
I'm all for strong privacy laws, but this is getting out of hand.
In the beginning, Yahoo had human editors scouring what little there was of the web and placing links to interesting sites in their heirarchy. This worked when the web was very small. (Yahoo's predecessors were those big thick Internet Yellowpages books.) When this failed to scale, they tried making their own web crawler and search engine. That didn't work out either, so they outsourced their web search to Alta Vista.
The only thing that Yahoo has done well since its beginning is convince people to use them for their web browser's home page.
That is what really drives Apple business, and is why their profits are so high. Their margins are extremely high. In the tech industry, this is not tolerated. You find consumers are extremely price sensitive. However in the fashion industry it is, and to Apple's good fortune they've figured out how to sell tech as fashion.
There's another ingredient too. With the exception of their computers, they deliberately limit the scope of their products to include only the top few functions that Steve wants and expressly block everything else. It turns out that when it comes to technology, what Steve wants is what almost everybody else wants too. The iPad is the best example of this. Like the iPod, it's a great content consumption device. You can read books, browse the web, watch movies, maybe do a bit of twittering. But isn't much good for anything else, even though the hardware capability is there. To get it to do something it wasn't designed for, you have to go out of your way to jailbreak it.
The key here is that Apple engineers are able to focus their energies on refining the set of pre-ordained features instead of spending all day worrying about how to make it a one-size-fits-all device that anyone can do anything with. They're also, as you point out, obsessed with aesthetics and the "cool factor" while all other competitors (and I do mean all, so far) are lucky to get a functioning device out the door.
How about measuring that in actual computer usage? X MHz on Y cores per Z nodes over A hours? Or at least say it would have taken one X MHz processor 35 years to compute it.
I really hate how the hardware world has gone into faster, faster, more, more when it should be working on cheaper and more energy-efficient. I'd rather that Moore's law went into making chips at current speeds cheaper than constantly expensive chips at faster speeds. Instead, what they do is phase out slow-cpu tech and keep selling power-hungry speed demons
You haven't heard of the netbook, smart phone, and tablet crazes of late? There are thousands of companies around the world trying gain the upper hand on small, energy-efficient, fast computers and I have to say some of them are doing a bang-up job. The iPod Touch that I carry around in my pocket all day has enough oomph to do about 70% of what my desktop computer used to.
I have a jailbroken iPod Touch and haven't found Cydia to be all that great. First, it's ungodly slow not only to load and start up the program, but also just to browse the various applications. The Cydia application itself almost contains more advertising than actual function. And it has a much higher ratio of shovelware (themes, wallpapers, etc) to useful applications than even the Apple App Store.
So far the only must-have app that I've found in Cydia has been the Backgrounder app which enables multitasking.
Slashdot Mirror
Bear in mind that the core of Arduino is a microcontroller. It's meant for small to mid-size projects. Although it has a lot in common with what we think of as a "computer" today, you won't be turning it into a proper computer without a lot of hacking and peripherals. In many ways, it's better than a computer because a computer is extreme overkill for so many things where you want your project to be programmable but don't need the sheer amount of raw horsepower that a microprocessor offers.
There are tutorials on using Arduino to control LEDs, relays, servos, motors, LCD displays, and so on. You can connect virtually any kind of sensor to it thanks to its analog inputs. And there are "shields" that plug right into the board so that you can get started with them right away without soldering or breadboarding. The new Uno board comes with a second, smaller microcontroller on-board which (as I understand it) can be programmed to be any USB device. Various hackers have even programmed Arduino to do VGA output with a minimum of additional supporting circuitry, although I imagine that it doesn't have many clock cycles left to do anything fancy on top of that.
You're in luck, because there are a lot of Arduino tutorials that assume little in the way of previous electronics experience. (I highly recommend ladyada's Arduino tutorials.) You can do quite a lot just by internalizing a few basic rules (like, always put a resistor in series with an LED and its power source), but eventually you'll hit a point where you need to understand voltage, current, resistance, and the various laws that dictate how electronic circuits operate. The good news is, the Internet is bursting with information and tutorials thanks to the ever-growing maker/hacker movement.
Arduino pretty much set the bar for cheap electronic tinkering and prototyping. A few years back, development kits for microcontrollers started in the $100 range. Arduino offers 95% of what they did for less than half the price. A basic Arduino kit will run between $30-$35. (There are Arduino boards that cost less, but they might have a few less features or aren't physically compatible with Arduino add-on shields.) If you want a hackable under-$20 computer with a large software library, I'd suggest buying a Gameboy Advance off of eBay.
Adafruit sells an Arduino-like ARM Cortex M3 board for $40. I don't know of any e
RIM, as you probably know, has the market on enterprise communication devices with the Blackberry. Since the iPad came out, almost every enterprise has started trial programs for the iPad in their organization. (Although in my company, this trial program is limited to all of the executives and managers. I posit that it's just a thinly veiled excuse to use company funds to pay for them to play around with an obviously consumer-level gadget. But I digress...)
This PlayBook is simply RIM's response to this. It's purely so that RIM can tell their shareholders that they at least tried to introduce a tablet to combat Apple's perceived inroads into enterprise tablet devices.
Just to point out the obvious: he said most people, not you specifically.
Some people go to college/university to better their understanding of the world or learn and contribute to their chosen field of study. And that's great, we need more people like that. But most people go to college/university because that's just what western culture says you're supposed to do if want to be successful and can afford it. Most people treat formal education like an extension of high school, only with less supervision and a lot more beer. And once they get out into the working world, they are shocked and surprised that nobody is handing them free money. Instead, they're all competing for the same low-wage entry-level jobs while staring down an education debt that will take them a large chunk of their productive years to fully pay off.
On the other hand, you can buy all the schooling you want and still be a arrogant prick. Did you stop to think that maybe English was his second language?
If they've been doing it this long, I wonder if they're getting inside help. Monoprix doesn't seem very determined to stop them.
If it's like most government contracted aerospace vehicle development projects, it will cost 10 time as much, will arrive 10 years late, and will deliver 1/10th of what was promised.
The name "Diaspora" is pretty awkward. Personally, I think they would do better to rename it "The World's Largest Virtual Linux User Group".
The only way Windows could possibly be considered "cohesive" is when it's the only OS you know. In Ubuntu, you have one menu for your desktop preferences and one menu for system settings. In Windows, these things are scattered around the OS. Sure, the Control Panel groups a lot of things together but finding the exact setting you want is always a challenge when you don't already know where to look.
If you've been following Ubuntu at all, you'd know that pretty much the only thing they strive for is usability. Some ideas have been hit and miss (notifications behavior, window decorations, the hideous default orange-and-brown color schemes) but you have to give them credit for trying new ideas once in awhile. The basic Windows UI hasn't changed substantially (other than the window decorations) in 15 years and OS X hasn't really changed in around 10.
No, they took the parts that they liked best. And there's nothing at all wrong with that nor is it anything new. Microsoft copied many MacOS features and MacOS copied many Xerox-developed features.
One great usability feature that all Linux distributions have that neither Windows or OS X never will is decent package management. If you need some software, all you have to do is open up the package manager, search for what you want, and install it right then and there. No licenses, no DRM, no downloading, no CDs.
Fixed that for you. I know quite a few "typical home users" who like Ubuntu just fine.
"Emotion" is simply making minor adjustments to the playing of the instrument in certain ways at certain points. If it's possible to create an advanced acoustical model of a piano which is indistinguishable from a physical piano (and it is), then it is wholly possible to "program" emotion into a synthesized rendition of a piece.
Granted, the programming has to done by a human. And you could argue that by the time you've reached that point, it's a whole lot simpler to just record someone playing the instrument. But it's still adding human emotion into a synthesized piece.
Many sequencers (the things that trigger notes which are sent to the synthesizer) have settings for randomness and other forms of human error. The accuracy can be set from "spot-on" to "oh my word, who let a white boy in here?"
If this actually happens and India really does subsidize and sell these Android tablets for $35 a pop to Indian citizens, I predict a lot of U.S. and western geeks will be purchasing them for $100 each on eBay.
Well, it's a little different. When you're not at work, you have a legal right to not expect your employer to trail you around town. I'm pretty sure you could press harassment or stalking charges pretty easily.
But this Chatter thing is being billed as "Facebook for business," which implies to me that if you're using this service in an official business capacity, you have no expectation of personal privacy. (And really, the same is true for Facebook itself, but for different reasons.)
Since they don't have to follow, well, any rules at all, it seems entirely likely that they can indeed simply keep all the money. Unless the game dev decides to sue.
Now, one interesting thing about PayPal is that it seems like when they pull these shenanigans, it's usually against people who would never be able to afford to successfully sue them. It costs thousands of dollars just to get decent legal advice, let alone go to court. I know a few people who have been bilked out of money from PayPal, so if this kind of thing is as common as blogs and first-person accounts suggest, PayPal must rake in millions annually from these little "misunderstandings." And I wouldn't doubt for a second that they consider this a major revenue source.
Rather like how the cell phone companies put the "access the web" buttons on their phones right next to other common buttons. Every major carrier admits they make serious cash from the accidental data charges, but only a percentage of customers actually call in to have the charges reversed.
This is why you choose a reliable OpenID provider for your account. A reliable provider should have a good security record and (ideally) explain the details of their authentication system including how the passwords are stored.
Since OpenID is open, you can also be your own provider.
I would say the picture in that photo says very emphatically, "leave me the hell alone, especially on my birthday."
Mystery solved.
Recently, I decided I wanted to ditch my iPod Touch. I'd really like a good quality Android device to replace it. So far the only decent Android devices that I know of are phones. (Yes, there are non-phone Android devices, but they often lack critical pieces, like the App Market.)
If I were to buy an Android phone (say, a Nexus One), and have no intention of using it as a phone (no phone calls, no text messages), can I use use all the other Android functionality without a carrier, just wifi? I've done a lot of Googling but haven't yet come across a definitive yes or no. I'd preferably like to hear someone who is already doing this.
(And yes, I already know I will pay a lot more than I did for the iPod Touch.)
But not quite angry enough to block the ad?
Government regulation is necessary in some cases but should always, always be a last resort. In this case, there's a perfectly good solution that involves no regulation or government interference of any kind: If the ads you see online disturb you, don't visit those sites. A more tech-savvy solution would be to install an ad blocker, which is child's play these days thanks to the wonderful world of browser extensions.
I'm all for strong privacy laws, but this is getting out of hand.
Read Slashdot instead.
In the beginning, Yahoo had human editors scouring what little there was of the web and placing links to interesting sites in their heirarchy. This worked when the web was very small. (Yahoo's predecessors were those big thick Internet Yellowpages books.) When this failed to scale, they tried making their own web crawler and search engine. That didn't work out either, so they outsourced their web search to Alta Vista.
The only thing that Yahoo has done well since its beginning is convince people to use them for their web browser's home page.
There's another ingredient too. With the exception of their computers, they deliberately limit the scope of their products to include only the top few functions that Steve wants and expressly block everything else. It turns out that when it comes to technology, what Steve wants is what almost everybody else wants too. The iPad is the best example of this. Like the iPod, it's a great content consumption device. You can read books, browse the web, watch movies, maybe do a bit of twittering. But isn't much good for anything else, even though the hardware capability is there. To get it to do something it wasn't designed for, you have to go out of your way to jailbreak it.
The key here is that Apple engineers are able to focus their energies on refining the set of pre-ordained features instead of spending all day worrying about how to make it a one-size-fits-all device that anyone can do anything with. They're also, as you point out, obsessed with aesthetics and the "cool factor" while all other competitors (and I do mean all, so far) are lucky to get a functioning device out the door.
They did in TFA.
You haven't heard of the netbook, smart phone, and tablet crazes of late? There are thousands of companies around the world trying gain the upper hand on small, energy-efficient, fast computers and I have to say some of them are doing a bang-up job. The iPod Touch that I carry around in my pocket all day has enough oomph to do about 70% of what my desktop computer used to.
Er, same way everyone else does... Take a class or better yet, start Googling.
I have a jailbroken iPod Touch and haven't found Cydia to be all that great. First, it's ungodly slow not only to load and start up the program, but also just to browse the various applications. The Cydia application itself almost contains more advertising than actual function. And it has a much higher ratio of shovelware (themes, wallpapers, etc) to useful applications than even the Apple App Store.
So far the only must-have app that I've found in Cydia has been the Backgrounder app which enables multitasking.