reemrevnivek

Are import taxes of 100% ((1200 - 600) / 600) realistic?

Yes. A $10 Spartan 3 could run a simple core and interpret LISP code. It's been done before, check Open Cores.

I totally agree that developers should not assume that per-pixel content is visible at these pixel pitches.

However, I strongly disagree that the target market should be these individuals, even if they are the typical/average consumer. Sure, there's some cost involved in making the screen this size, but that's no reason to make these people look at pixelated screens.

At this resolution, a tiny, tiny fraction of the population (if that) will feel that the resolution is too low. Don't aim for 50% of the market to feel that the pixel pitch is clearer than they can see and the rest accept it as typical, aim to have 99% of your market rave about the beautiful graphics.

There are a lot more places than just the US that use "at" to refer to a location. Why not just release to anyone who wants to use the English-only app?

Or why not ask their EU customers to pay the extra 4.9% it would cost to sell it as a camcorder?

That would not only get them off the hook but also encourage their customers to abolish this ridiculous law.

The vertical control of Apple (most notably) as well as Amazon and Google is almost complete. The author noted that they don't have:

1. Billing/banking control - Purchases on all three go through credit cards, where a portion gets siphoned off.

2. Internet access control - Apple has a lot of clout, and can do basically whatever they want, but they're still limited by the ISPs and telecos.

I really hope to see these companies compete in these industries. However, he left off one more space where they don't compete: at the bottom of the stack, selling silicon. Companies like Samsung and Toshiba can build their own SoCs for the devices they manufacture. If those manufacturers start doing more internally, we might see some impressive and competitive new devices.

It's read on login and on every app startup. That, IMO, makes it not meaningless.

Thank you for doing this. I, for one, am willing to use dconf-editor or gsettings during the once-in-a-blue-moon occasions where I need to modify the binary blob if it results in faster startup times for login and apps.

I assume (based on your extensive explanation involving cache hits and disk seeks) that you have benchmarked this. How much time is actually saved by this change?

Is your car body magnetic? If you had aluminum body panels, it probably could, though the panel is probably a good deal stiffer than this tuba. If you had steel body panels (which is very likely), it wouldn't.

This is wrong. Raspberry Pi is a completely different domain than Arduino. There isn't a great price difference between the cheapest (<$1) microcontrollers and powerful SoCs like the Raspberry Pi's Broadcom part, which only cost $20 or so (either when buying in huge quantities or by pulling strings as Broadcom employees). In small quantities, that doesn't leave a lot of room to make a profit. However, the Arduino (and other products based on 8-bit micros) are and will always be lower power, lower cost, and lower complexity than the Raspberry Pi parts.

They're lower power because you can only flip so many bits with your battery, and running Linux at 800 MHz instead of an RTOS at 8 MHz is going to drain your little watch battery fast.

They're lower cost because each square millimeter of silicon costs money. Economies of scale can only take you so far.

They're lower complexity because you can write an assembly program in a few dozen bytes for the Arduino. On the Raspberry Pi, you'll need lots of libraries and there will be layers upon layers upon layers of abstraction. With increased power comes increased complexity.

Hacking on a phone has a huge barrier to entry and huge complexity levels. No one at Apple, Nokia, Samsung, or any other phone manufacturer can hold the whole code base in their mind at one time. Most Arduino sketches are two functions with just a couple hundred lines of code leveraging one layer of simple and understandable libraries. Furthermore, if you want to mass-produce your Arduino design, you can do it with home-printed PCBs and a Digikey or Sparkfun order. The chips used in the Raspberry Pi aren't available anywhere at any price in small quantities, and using them requires X-ray inspection equipment and professional 4+ layer boards.

Raspberry Pi aims to be the cheapest PC available. Arduino aims to be the easiest hardware platform to start on. Raspberry Pi is not a competitor to Arduino.

There are over 300 different models of the MSP430, ranging from the G2 or Value Line parts having 1k of Flash, a couple hundred bytes of RAM and usually one timer to the F5 series with 100-pin parts having 256kB of Flash and 16k of RAM, and 4 timers. Limiting yourself to stuff that's compatible with the $4.30 starter kit is not an accurate representation of the MSP430 lineup.