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Comment That's open source (Score 5, Insightful) 165

Here's what one person said about it:
 

What I don't like about this project is that they simply use all the work (software development) of the foundation and the RPi community to sell their product. They call it "compatibility" but in fact it means: let other people do all the work and we make money from it.

Someone is new to open source/designs I see. Arduino has a bazillion knockoffs that are compatible yet they still seem to be doing okay. Unless RPi isn't an open architecture - in which case, why do we advocate its use?

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 67

I don't know about rural Japan, but I found the OSM data far better when I visited Tokyo a few months ago. Google didn't know building names and placed a load of things that we were trying to visit a few blocks away from where they actually were. This was very frustrating as the web site that we were using to find vegetarian restaurants used Google maps - we spent half an hour one lunchtime walking in the wrong direction, because we'd come to a junction and, according to the Google map needed to turn left and would then see our destination on the right. It turned out, when we eventually found it, that we should have turned right.

Comment Good (Score 4, Interesting) 67

I use OSMAnd on my phone[1], but my girlfriend recently bought a Windows Phone and I've been very impressed with Nokia's mapping app (I actually like a lot of what Microsoft's done with Windows Phone 8, but it's a strange mix of very polished and well-designed UI parts and completely unfinished parts with missing features). It's good to see more competition with Google maps, which is becoming increasingly entrenched in spite of the fact that the UI is pretty poor in many regards and the mapping data is terrible. For example, here they're missing (or have in the wrong places) most of the cycle paths, which ends up with people regularly getting lost if they rely on Google, in spite of the fact that all of this data is in OpenStreetMap.

[1] For me, it's the killer app for Android. Offline maps, offline routing, and open source backed by high-quality mapping data from OpenStreetMap. I use the version from the F-Droid store, which doesn't have the limitations of the free version from Google Play and it's one of the few open source apps that I've donated money to.

Comment Re:About time (Score 1) 89

Remember when the SoundBlaster Live! came out and Creative Labs were telling you that it had as much processing power as a Pentium 166MHz MMX, dedicated entirely to sound processing? Well, it turns out that now you can have far more CPU power than that dedicated entirely to sound processing without custom hardware...

Comment Re:no price? (Score 2) 88

Just curious, what's so wrong with branch with delay slot and isn't that more native way to look at branch ?

They're a pain for people on both sides of the ISA.

The compiler has to find an instruction that can run after the branch. This is normally trivial for calls, but for conditional branches within a function it's often difficult to find an instruction that you can put there. It has to be one that is either from before the jump (or in both basic blocks after the jump), but that the branch doesn't depend on (because it's executed after the branch instruction). This means that you quite often end up padding the delay slots with nops, which bloats your instruction cache usage. On a superscalar implementation this is the only cost, but on a simple in-order pipeline it's also a completely wasted cycle.

On the other side, it's a pain to implement. It made sense for a three-stage pipeline in the original MIPS, because you always knew the next instruction to fetch. A modern simple pipeline is 5-7 stages though, so your branch is still in register fetch (if there) by the time the delay slot is needed. It doesn't buy anything and it means that, if you're doing any kind of speculative execution (even simple branch prediction, which you really need to do to get moderately good performance) then you have an extra dependency to track - you can't just use the branch as the marker and flush everything after it, you need to do some reordering. In a superscalar implementation, you need to do even more complex things in register renaming to make it work.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 108

based on the SC and the EFF, it seems as if i would be well within my rights to set up some cameras to OCR plates myself than correct? I could even crowd source it, and post little trackers on particular cars when they pass the citizen cameras showing the routes and routines of anyone I want as well? Cops, federal employees, if i got down to chappaqua and set some up i could even monitor the clintons, all legally correct?? Hey if thats how they want it than i got to start writing a new android/iphone app

You can likely do some of that, though some of what you describe (following specific people) would fall under anti-stalking laws. As noted elsewhere in this thread, repo companies are already doing this and businesses have cameras set up on their property and within the store recording your every move. Get writing! You only need a bunch of people willing to do this and a lot of license plate reading equipment.

Im not against reasonable retention laws, 30-60 days is well within reason for the numbers not being watched on some list, any longer is too much (I feel the same way about internet logs and phone records, 30-60 days without a court order and it should be purged)

Seems reasonable to me.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 108

The supreme court and EFF disagree with you. While you have the right to travel freely, you have no right of privacy when in public and collecting information about you and your travels does not impede you traveling. You also have the option of not traveling by your own car - you can rent a car, borrow one from a friend, walk, bike, or take public transit.

As for your last statement I completely agree that collected data should be deleted after some period of time - enough time that if it's needed as evidence it can be used, but not so long that your entire travel history is available for perusal at any time by any person.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 108

What constitutional right? Privacy? Let's see what the EFF says about that:

https://ssd.eff.org/your-compu...

That means the police can follow you around in public and observe your activities, see what you are carrying or to whom you are talking, sit next to you or behind you and listen to your conversations — all without a warrant.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 108

Why?

I mean, from a privacy sense, you're in a public place and therefore have no reasonable sense of privacy. Do you chase down people that are taking photographs where you or your car are in the background?

If you want to talk about what's done with that data after it's been collected that's a different story and not what is being asked for in this case. But you're just as entitled to set up your own license plate tracking system just like the police are.

Also think of this as a lead in to having police carry cameras and record every interaction with the public. Should that data get dumped immediately if the person is not accused of a crime? Michael Brown was accused of a crime, but there wasn't time for Wilson to know that, so under your rules, the events leading up to his shooting would be expunged.

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