The Raspberry Pi is kind of in a weird situation, and I can't understand why it really caught on. On one hand, it's overkill for little electronics projects where something like an Arduino would be much better suited. On the other hand, it's not quite powerful enough to act as a respectable desktop or media center. The disk I/O is very lacking because it doesn't support an interace with DMA. Various disk intensive applications like torrents will bring the thing to its knees. If the video doesn't happen to be in a codec that is supported in hardware, then there's no chance of it having the horsepower to decode it.

As far as media centers go, It makes way more sense to get a low power Intel board that you know will have enough power to do everything, and will be able to run just about any application and run Windows or Linux as you prefer.

Might be cheaper in the short run, but in the long run, you have to keep on replacing them. Get a decent monitor, keyboard and mouse, and they will last for many years. Then you can replace the computer as it stops working, or as newer computers come along at really low prices.

Can this device run Flash in the browser? If it can, I'd be very likely to get one for each of my kids for doing their homework and general computing on. I'm not a big fan of flash, but it's necessary for some of the homework/game sites the school uses. Combine it with a monitor, keyboard and mouse, and something like this seems to be good enough to be a fully functional computer.

I think the problem is with how much they charge for the upgrades. I'm not going to pay $100 for an OS upgrade on a computer that's only worth $200. I might as well just wait until I buy a new computer where the license comes with the computer and I only actually end up paying $30 for the license. The reason that you still see people running XP, is because people are still running computers they bought with XP, and people don't want to spend $100 to upgrade the OS. If it was only $30, you'd probably see a lot more people upgrade. I know I updated a couple computers to Windows 8 when they had their introductory offer of $39 for the upgrade.

I can buy a gallon of milk (4L actually, but I'm Americanizing it) for $4.00. There's no reason that a coffee drink with a little bit of extra milk should cost $2.00 extra over the regular coffee. You can actually dump half the coffee out if you want, and fill up half the cup from the self serve cream/milk if you want. The real reason that it's $4.00 for the fancy coffee is that people are willing to pay it. If nobody bought coffee and milk at that price, they wouldn't sell the product, or they would have to sell it at a price people were willing to pay.

Yeah, which is why I don't think the correct solution is to mount a lawsuit against people making a product that blocks ads, nor is it the right solution to mount a lawsuit against your own customers. I think it's kind of a bad situation that sites are in. Even if they only have good ads that don't take up a bunch of resources and screen real estate and aren't really that obtrusive, they still risk getting blocked because there are a lot of other advertisers that do have intrusive ads that most people don't want to see.

The problem is that using ad block can kind of be compared against messing with your electricity or water meter so you aren't billed for as much. I understand that it's inherently different, because there is no agreement/requirement set up to view the ads in exchange for browsing the website they are on, but that's basically how things are set up. There's only a few ways things could work.

First option. Web site is free to use and there are no ads. Person visiting the site is happy, but the person hosting the site has no way to generate money, other than asking for donations, but that could be considered an ad for the site itself.

Second Option. Only people who pay see the site. This works for the website owner, because they are ensured that everyone pays, but breaks the general way in which most of the internet is used, because you can't send a link to a friend and have them view the content if they haven't paid. Works for sites like Netflix but wouldn't work for something like a blog.There would still be problems with not everybody paying because people would share accounts.

Third Option. Website maker puts up ads on their site to make money for operating the site. If the user blocks the ads then the person operating the site cannot generate any money

Fourth option. The website owner sells actual products at their website and makes money that way. This works if the website is an actual store, as that's what the user came there to do, but very few users, if any, are going to buy something from a website that isn't actually a store. Also, the person operating the website also has to operate a store, which they may have no expertise or interest in doing.

Feel free to come up with some other ways of generating income from a website to recoup the costs of running one. There aren't a lot of good options. I realize that some ads can be over the top and extremely annoying. In that case I just usually leave the site and try not to go there in the future. I don't like blocking ads that are not intrusive, as that undermines the website's ability to make money, and if it's a good website, I want it to remain in operation.

more data than will fit in the device's memory

. I record my bike rides with my GPS. Not once in the last 2 years have I had to remove data off the device because it ran out of space. I think in total there might be a few megabytes worth of data, and it's only that big because they use XML to store the data, which is inherently verbose. There is less data than actual XML. I'm sure that a simple fitness bracelet could store a lifetime's worth of data in under 1 GB.

If home owners could take advantage of using batteries to balance out the peaks in electricity usage, the electricity companies would probably be doing it already. Maybe not in the US, but some power company in some country would be doing it if it was economical. The reason it's not being done is because it's not economical yet. Perhaps someday it would be, and I hope it is soon. As soon as we get battery technology that makes it economical to do so to offset the peak usage rates, renewable forms of electricity and other generation methods like nuclear are a lot more convenient because you don't have to worry so much about variability when the power is generated or (in the case of nuclear) how fast you can ramp them up when more power is needed immediately.

I write web applications in .Net, and as far as I'm concerned, nothing else I've see comes close for large projects. There was a bunch of hype about Ruby, so I tried that. For anything beyond basic CRUD applications, it was quite painful to use. The .Net API has amazing amounts of built in functionality. I can't think of any language that comes close. It amazes me how people write stuff in Java without having a decent "Date" data type. Why should I have to use a third party library to get decent date support?

That's kind of the big legal question. I remember that Nintendo went after a bunch of "watch me play" people on YouTube. The music in the background is often owned by a third party and licensed for use in the game. And I know that Youtube often takes down videos (video games and others) based on copyrighted songs being in the background.

Exactly. The only situation where the homeowner would want to optimize for the highest use time of day is if the power company was paying them an increased rate for power fed into the grid during that time period. and at that point, it might make more sense for the home owner to store all the power generated in batteries and only send power back to the grid when they are getting the best price.

Where I live there's a 5 cent difference between the cheapest and most expensive parts of the day. I wonder how cheap/efficient batteries would have to get before it would make sense to just charge the batteries at night, and use them during the day so I never have to pay the higher rate.

Obviously the panels should be motorized so that they are always facing the most optimal direction. A system that moves the panels shouldn't add that much to the cost and will probably pay for itself very quickly with the extra energy collected.

I have a Surface 2 (not Pro), and even I like that better than the iPad in just about every respect, save for the number of apps available. The entire device is done very well. I think if on the next iteration they could get a more affordable x86 tablet then they could really start to take some business away from Apple and the other tablet manufacturers. Get rid of the digitizer and go with a plain old touch screen, use a low power Atom processor, and include the keyboard in the box, and I'm sure that most people who really stopped to think about it would easily choose a Surface over an iPad or Android tablet, which is extremely limited, and would be just as expensive.

Why not just have a mechanical trigger? squeeze the grip at the end you're holding it on, and a mechanical finger is moved to press the camera button on the screen. Should be pretty easy to build different ones that automatically line up for popular phone types, or make an adjustable one that can handle a variety of phones.