If you are interested in no fuss, get your elderly parent an iPad. They will love it with Netflix streaming because they can make it as close to their eyes as necessary for them, and they -- and they can get a good quality pair of headphones (with inductive coupling to the hearing aid, possibly) to make it eaisier for them to hear. And yes, the ipad app has captioning.
When they are more comfortable, they will download books and recipies, and love it because the paper won't take up much space in their home and they can enlarge the text to exactly what they want. They will be delighted when they figure out how best to do video chat with you (whether that might be Facetime or otherwise) for "free."
And for you, once her internet connection is up and running, the purchase will be a "painless" one for support... no need to configure the device for her, no need to "set the clock on the DVD player" or what have you... You will be free to have conversations about more important things for your life.
This is from a long time Linux geek whose 70+ year old mom is pleased as punch with her iPad. Even though I am a die-hard Linux guy & would rather have myself on the latest and greatest Linux-ish device -- her happiness & piece of mind is worth a lot to me. This makes her happy.
Big/little is a lazy way out of the power problem... Because instead of investing in design and development and in fine grained power control in your processor, you make the design decision of, "Heck with this -- silicon is cheap!" and throw away a good chunk of silicon when the processor goes into a different power mode... You have no graceful scaling -- just a brute force throttle and a clunky interface for the Kernel.
So, not all ARM licensees have been convinced or seen the need to go to a big/little architecture because big/little has that big disadvantages of added complexity and wasted realestate (and cost) on the die. Unlike nVidea (Tegra) and Samsung (Exynos), Qualcomm has been able to thus far keep power under control in their Snapdragon designs without having to resort to a big/little and has thus been able to excel on the phone. So far, the Qualcomm strategy seems to be a winning one for phones in terms of both overall power savings and performance per miliwatt -- where on phones every extra hour of battery life is a cherished commodity. Such may not be true for tablets that can stand to have larger batteries and where performance at "some reasonable expectation" of battery life may be the more important.
Doing what you prescribe will do the very thing that you are trying to avoid - get you on the NSA's list of people who are probably not American and must be up to something really interesting. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/06/21/1443204/use-tor-get-targeted-by-the-nsa
I actually had a thought about this... What if several thousand of us started sending "strongly encrypted noise" to places known to be "snooped" by the NSA -- say, just 1TB per person _daily_? At the very least, it should use up wherehouse-loads loads of disk space very quickly with "garbage," and with this, the NSA's current tactic would be rendered inneffective...
1) Need Siri to respond intelligently to time-based queries - "Show me nearby currently open hair salons"
2) Voice Translation in Siri - "English and Korean translation mode. You are so beautiful!"
3) Ability to replace default utilities - i.e. replace safari with Crome.
Huh??? The idea of grants being served by the "inteligencia in government" -- honestly, it sickens me. What is the inteligence level of a typical person in civil service relative to the typical startup employee or entrepreneur? Oh help me please... I've worked for civil service in the past, and I know the real story.
Honestly, we all know that the "Inteligencia" in government cannot fight out their way out of a paper bag. So, how does it serve the public good for these designers of waste, these perfect jewels of the moric, and even criminaly graphic behaviour, to decide that even one charity deserves funding in the interest of society?
If a tech non-profit cannot sustain itself by garnering public support through donations for it's work in the public interest... dude... it doesn't deserve to survive.
Perl is only as (un)readable as you make it; if you write readable Perl code, you won't have any problems reading and understanding it 6 months later.
But yeah, you can write unreadable Perl code - but then again, is there any language in which you can't?
I for one am certain I can write unreadable code in Perl better than any other language I know... I am "fully enabled" -- encouragingly so -- in the language for the illegible to the limit that such is inevitable.
This is is the message of what I am trying to get across, with -- granted -- much less eloquence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbqLO1TBnGo
That even "the goal" of a moral society is superior to the decadent bent and inevitable behaviour of socialism.
I have to add to this... I work on productizing cell phone chips. No government agency would work as hard as my org in producing a product (LTE) that is turning out to be so beneficial to so many people's lives. Nobody in government could have predicted the utility of being able to map where they needed to be interactively, or the tremendous utility of being able to query how to defibrilate their friend at the mall in the middle of a heart attack... let alone answer the question of the next evolution of Pikachu to their son.. from their phone, or from a "Siri" equivalent... Such "frivilous" innovation is actually discouraged by active government.
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
