I'm sorry, you lack cynicism: what this submission IS is a troll for ad revenue. It's almost a troll... kind of like every John Dvorak article since 1990 (but without the legitimacy he had built up prior to that time).

I thought I had it good when we ditched our "desktop" computers 6 years ago and went with just laptops in the home. Now it's an iPad 1 and 2. When I am developing for Drupal, I use my iPad and laptop (Ubuntu, with Komodo IDE). When I take notes or read OReilly/Safari Books, it's the iPad. When I take notes or set appointments, it's the iPad and Google apps. When I play games, I use either the iPad or the PS3. When I watch movies, it's NetFlix on the iPad or PS3. I suppose for some the droid tablets are the same (although they all seem rather sluggish to me, and have inconsistent UIs.. but maybe I'm just jealous).

I was going to post the same exact thing. It's not a syntax error, but the mistake still flew over everyone else's head.

Pretty sure the land WAS occupied. The railbuilders had bounties on both natives and buffalo.

There's that, and the fact that the Walmart cupcakes were made using Chinese flour, in a Mexican bakery, and then shipped 2000 miles by a non-union trucker who was only permitted 6 hours rest before resuming his driving shift.

PS - the meat you get at a local butchery is also way better quality than Wal-mart's.

Most companies will pay tens or hundreds of thousands to license a patent, over the howls of their engineers if need be. A lawyer fight will easily cost more.

Companies stand up to patent bullying when it is life or death for their products.. getting someone's phone "banned" from the EU or the US tends to increase the stakes. Even then, they don't care about the patent's validity, just getting the patent holder to back down. Seeking to overturn the patent is merely a threat... offer a better price on the patent and no corporation will refuse it and keep fighting to overturn the patent. So, you're completely wrong.

Yes and no. Patents are a problem -- you can NOT launch a small technology firm and make anything useful without violating patents. This is a barrier to US businesses and Europe, but not China as they will simply ignore patents (for their domestic market).

I'd say America lost because Wall Street *wanted* America to lose. Maybe not explicitly, but as a result of all those outsourcing tax credits Wall Street wanted.
Talk to a US based electronics manufacturer... all of them had NO CHOICE but to move their R&D to China, because that's where all the manufacturing is.
Often times, the latest and greatest micro chip thingy will be documented by a Data Sheet which is written in Chinese. Eventually it will be translated to English, but the part might be depricated by then if it is a short lived market item.

Linksys, D-Link, Buffalo etc. all of these router manufacturers have almost NO knowledge what is in "their" products. They simply say "I'll take one of those" from the ODM and slap their web GUI on the firmware.

Apple is the last remaining US manufacturer who -designs- in the US. They pay a high price in terms of cost of operating. And even then, all their manufacturing is outsourced, and they don't really R&D any of the low level stuff.

Back to my original point... even if you reformed patents, and even un-did the Bush era outsourcing credit, NONE of those R&D jobs would come back. You'd have to convince China and Japan to subsidize their businesses to move operations back to the USA. No other country is dumb enough to kill their manufacturing, deliberately.

  But hey, Wall Street knows what it's doing... killing US manufacturing kills unions, and higher unemployment means workers will accept forced overtime and less safe working conditions. It's all pretty basic stuff, really.

Actually, yes, Zynga has "alleged" connections to Russian organized crime (who, to their credit, recognize that corporate games are more profitable than street ones, and less likely to result in actual jail time).

This is known, but I just had to point it out as so many replies didn't get your jest.

>How did that turn out?

Maybe ABI they make their money not off accurate predictions, but page hits from controversial predictions. Or maybe zacharye makes the referral cash (90 published submissions? I remember back when this site was a blog, and quality posts came from interesting folks who weren't SEO peddlers.

Straw argument you made there.

If the government DENIES big companies the ability to abuse taxpayer funded courts, that is NOT raining big government on the companies. Quite the opposite.

Because dd-wrt wanted to take the project closed. Not necessarily closed source, but effectively so with some deliberate barriers to discourage folks getting into the code and making their own customizations. This drove away both users and potential contributers. Big surprise, that.

Everyone has gone over to open-wrt because it is... well, open.

Plus dd-wrt is a bit "closed". They seem to deliberately go out of their way to make it difficult even for experienced developers to package up their own custom firmware. (If I don't qualify that, someone will reply with a red herring case why newbies shouldn't hack router firmware... and in such an extreme example, I agree).

Supposedly open source projects shouldn't go out of their way to keep people from modifying the source. This hurts not just the users, but it drives away potential new contributers. Which is why of course we have open-wrt. You'd have to pay me to use dd-wrt.

>I'd rather it have 2 network ports.

You can add USB hubs and switches if need be, OR you can choose an already available low-end single-board system which has multiple ports onboard.

This is -supposed- to be minimalist, low-energy tiny-footprint platform. And adding more hardware changes what it is. I like the fact that it's basically the cost of an Arduino, but can do so much more.

So pretty much you're saying you aren't very productive with a computer, and also: it's the user's fault if the OS is exploited. Gotcha. ... and I laugh at any Windows user who calls any other OS a "walled garden". Sour grapes from someone stuck inside a prison, I think.

As perpenso said, these things don't use RAM for data.

These Atmel processors come with (besides the "CPU") RAM, flash RAM, and EPROM storage. External SD storage and more RAM, Flash etc are available if you add it yourself to the board.

So anyways, your script/sketch is saved to flash, which loads up in RAM (just like a regular script or program).
If you code things correctly, your bitmaps, your font definitions, are all in flash memory and so almost no RAM is used by that resource.

Some folks don't care, and the resource is embedded into the script (which means the resource lives in RAM). This is fine as long as you have enough memory and you weren't expecting other folks to run your sketch on smaller processors.

For end user data like an ebook on SD card, that gets loaded straight from the SD card and tossed onto the screen. The system is not trying to load the whole thing before display (which would blow out memory). Instead you scan and display things line by line... like you would do in an old-school shell script when your shell/console had very little memory (even on a server).