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Comment Pebble or TomTom Runner (Score 1) 169

Excellent question. While I'm not a marathoner I am a half-marathon runner and have some experience with this.

The Pebble/Pebble Time supports showing running stats on the watch when synced up with RunKeeper or Endomondo. There might be other apps available but those are the two I've used.

They require that you have a smartphone drive them, and you'd have to have enough smartphone battery to not have the phone die while using GPS for your run.

Both apps let you start/pause/stop your run from the watch. I used to use this for biking (and a bit running) and it worked out really well.

Note neither currently has a built in HRM, an so you'd need to wear Bluetooth HRM to sync with your phone if you care about that stat, but they CAN show you your heart rate on the watch.

I've since transitioned to just using a TomTom GPS Runner or Multi-sport with the built in HRM as that works well for me while running. It also removes some of the battery anxiety I used to get when using my phone for GPS.

Comment Re:What about OpenCL 1.2 support? (Score 3, Interesting) 59

Mantle is less an open specification than CUDA is, CUDA does have a full x86 implementation available which is mostly slower due the CPU not taking too much advantage of the massive parallelism of the GPU (not sure about how this play out with Xeon Phi).

Mantle on the other hand is a very low level Graphics API that basically exposes SW to some low level interactions with AMD's GPU. It's more like GLIDE than OpenCL. From what I've seen so far it's not clear to me Mantle will be very portable across several AMD generations. It works for GCN based cards out now but who knows if it will be fast for GCN++ without a major rewrite of the application. NVIDIA could implement Mantle but would probably have to translate so much stuff in SW to make it work you'd lose the low SW overhead.

From the one or two talks I listened to Mantle seems to basically expose the same interface the driver developers have access to and lets you go to town. This is great for the latest architecture but now it's up to your application to evolve as the HW does. There's a whole lot of work being done to optimize for each architecture release in the driver which allow older games that the publisher doesn't really want to support anymore to work and see performance boosts.

Comment Nothing easy but Udacity can help (Score 5, Informative) 198

So there's nothing really easy about GPU programming. You can look at C++ AMP from Microsoft, OpenMP or one of the other abstractions but you really need to understand how these massively parallel machines work. It's possible to write some perfectly valid code in any of these environments which will run SLOWER than on the CPU because you didn't understand fundamentally how GPUs excel at processing.

Udacity currently has a fairly decent intro course on GPU programming at: https://www.udacity.com/course/cs344

It's based around NVIDIA and CUDA but most of the concepts in the course can be applied to OpenCL or another GPU programming API with a little syntax translation. Also you can do everything for the course in your web-browser and you don't need an NVIDIA GPU to finish the course exercises.

I'd suggest running through that and then deciding on what API you want to end up using.

Comment Re:Change the DPI setting (Score 3, Insightful) 234

Your comment shows a lack of understanding as to what DPI is supposed to be used for since DPI shouldn't control scaling.

DPI stands for dots per inch, and you should configure that setting to match the actual number of dots per inch of your display. Then the SW environment should support some sort of sliding scale to let you change the size of any UI elements.

Sadly most desktop platforms don't do this correctly and bind the DPI to the size of UI elements. I will admit that resolution independence isn't easy, Microsoft didn't really start down that path until Windows 7, and Apple didn't start to get close until Mountain Lion.

Having used a retina display Mac it irritates me that they don't just have a slider to set UI scale, but instead you can select from several pre-set resolutions. I suspect this is because many applications still try to plot stuff pixel by pixel and so can't scale arbitrarily. It's not easy for most SW to be truly resolution independent and it seems most developers seem to skip handling that sanely on all platforms.

Comment Not entirely a FB bug, phone software is the prob (Score 2) 178

The Facebook bug here is that if you ask Facebook for someone's email, it was returning the last one added which was that stupid @facebook.com email. But why was the phone deleting contact info and replacing it? If your only source of contact data for a person was their Facebook email then yeah I can see that swapping, but why isn't the phone keeping Facebook, and other contact info separate?

My phone shouldn't see Facebook info change, then go and delete the work email from my Google contacts, or phone contact. If these phones are doing that I'd argue you have a phone SW bug. I wouldn't want any random sync service to suddenly override my manually entered contact data.

As for people complaining about work emails being swapped, why do you sync work emails via facebook? You should have that entered into a separate place. My Android phone is smart enough to keep google contacts and facebook contacts separate, and merge the accounts for display purposes. (And my old Palm Pre back in the day did an even better job of this.)

Comment Re:From Wikipedia... (Score 4, Informative) 627

That's not radiation, that's because cheap CRTs tubes oscillate at 60 hertz and if you're not deaf in the upper frequencies you can hear them whine. Basically it's noise from the flyback transformer in the CRT. Many children can hear them but people often lose those frequencies as they get older.

I can still hear when a cheap CRT is on but I don't claim to be allergic to wifi.

See http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/comp/crt/failWhine-c.html for some more info.

Comment Re:Carmack (Score 4, Insightful) 616

I think there was a hope that computing power would catch up and make VMs a competitive alternative to native code.

While you're right there's a computing power issue here, the issue is battery life not lack of CPU cycles. VMs add overhead, as you add overhead you'll run longer and burn more power on the CPU. If you want to squeeze all you can out of a limited battery you need to optimize your code and in the end that's going to mean native code with very explicit memory management. VMs just don't play well in embedded environments.

Comment Re:Just Bizarre (Score 1) 722

I'm pretty sure the real goal is to force you to choose one or the other. In the long term I think they plan to drop or spin off the DVD business and become a 100% streaming company. I think they're hoping that everyone just decides that having both is too much money and choose to just stream. If everyone would just switch to the DVD only plan they'd probably rethink this strategy.

What annoys me is that they don't have a 3 DVD out at a time plan without streaming. My ages old plan is getting a massive rate hike come Sept. They still have too much DVD only content for me to really think that their rate hike is justified.

Comment Re:Interesting Highlights (Score 1) 279

Apple's already across the street, I doubt traffic would get too much worse since this place is right next to the freeway. Though at the moment Apple is spread out all over that area and now they'd be concentrating all those people into a couple blocks. Luckily I don't need to drive past Homestead and Wolfe all that often :D.

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