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Comment Hell No (Score 2) 332

Seriously, try using a touchscreen for more than a text message. Use a bunch of on screen keyboard variants. Swype, android, apple, and any other one you care to try.

You'll be happy when you are back to a machine that has a real keyboard. Even a mobile with a real keyboard.

Comment Re:The usual $50.00 question... (Score 1) 221

At least based upon the Galaxy S/Vibrant, which I'm starting to regret (see below), Samsungs have been very easy to root, and flash custom hardware. (I haven't yet rooted it, because I haven't had time to play with that.)

No physical keyboard. The more I deal with touchscreen only, the more I hate the lack of it.
Samsung's delayed 2.2 release. Seriously, the offical release had been promised, then pushed back to November, then before End of the Year, now...

So basically, for Samsung, I'd bet on not much official support.

Comment Re:something missing (Score 1) 399

Actually, this wouldn't work on most modern processors.

Due to interaction with peripherals, there is a minimum, to have your bios able to work and talk to them, depending on the interface, for example, Hypertransport on early AMDs didn't allow a CPU less than 800MHz, or wacky stuff started to happen. Intel would have the same sorts of problems.

Comment Re:But... Ummm... (Score 1) 60

Speaking as a long time ago calculator hacker. If you can't do the math itself, you frankly, aren't doing yourself any favors by using a calculator. A calculator is a useful shortcut, if you know what you are doing. Also, for undergrad work, quite often calculators are flat not allowed on mathematics tests. If you want people to learn, you don't use a calculator to teach them, and you don't let them use a calculator to 'learn' it.

Imagine this situation: AP calc test, and your calculator breaks, and doesn't seem to want to work, after a little bit of messing. My solution to that exact situation was to put the calculator on the desk, and get the highest score possible (which was a 5, so I probably could afford to miss a few problems), though it took me a bit longer. After messing with it for a while after the exam, it finally reset. (Still no idea what happened, I actually didn't have any programs on it at that time.)

Comment Re:Does it leverage other open hardware? (Score 3, Informative) 105

Having made a mostly arduino controlled mill that works, but needs work to correct some wobble (structure problem). I can tell you that even with the current set of shields, there isn't one that works out of the box. I had to modify the bipolar stepper on this page: http://www.tigoe.net/pcomp/code/circuits/motors/stepper-motors, to also accept an enable/disable. That's in addition to an Adafruit motor shield (which was when I was doing research on them, far and away the best). Both of which used two stacked chips in place of one.

So not *completely* custom, but it does need at least a modified circuit. Take another 5 people with slightly different knowledge and such, and you'd likely get different solutions, simply because there isn't one I've found which would work without modification. Even using a stock Adafruit motor shield, where you could power 4 DC motors, adding encoders to those would require custom work.

Multiple Arduinos wouldn't work well, as the inter-microcontroller communications are slow. I2C is limited to 400kbps, Serial was eliminated in my case (required to talk to the computer), and SPI might be fast enough, but at the time, there were only software implementations, which were slow. Arduino 0019 introduced a hardware library, so it may work now. (However, it wouldn't work with the shield noted above, as it uses pins 11 and 12)

Anything even mildly complicated probably requires it's own setup.

Comment Re:Windows-only game? (Score 2) 231

Actually, no Wine unfortunately does *NOT* register as Other, at least on the several systems I've used. I recently had to (prior to the latest steam survey) change the ID in Wine due to it bitching about w2k support ending. Other is likely mostly whatever people have hacked win2k to work(possibly some people with wine), and win2k8.

Comment Re:Desktop CNC (Score 1) 258

I've designed and built my own, and I must say that the rigidity part is very true. (Also, I now know why the particular design is favored, as it's more rigid) I must say that having not worked with wood for nearly 15 years, the quality of wood is crap. I did look it up and find out why. There was a change in the building standards (at least in the US), where instead of wood having to have 15% moisture content max when they left the mill, they now have to have 19% at the time of installation (meaning it likely leaves the mill at even higher than that.) This explains why the lumber seems a lot more warped now days.

If you can, spend the money for proper linear rails, I think they would be worth the investment. Using Steppers out of old Epson printers, I've got a theoretical (if it were rigid) level of ~8 micrometers/step. (Relatively small amounts of torque though)

Comment Re:blindly pushing marketable limits... (Score 2) 200

Speaking as someone with an Alpha Station conveniently as a footrest...

I'm calling a double bullshit.
First of all the parent: 1.2GHz for 800 when Pentiums were 433MHz?
21164 Alphas, topped out at mostly 600MHz, and were faster than x86 clock for clock. They were also pushing the MHz limit at the time, being the first to 500MHz, and using a slightly later 533MHz (21164PC) they were damned fast compared to any x86 chip. As far as speed, at the time, they were overall the undisputed fastest processors. (DEC only made up to 8 processor machines as I recall. At least I think that's the limit for the 8400, a quick googling shows a reference to 12 processors, so it's likely higher)

21264 Alphas, were mostly released at under 800MHz, while air-cooled chips were demonstrated up to 1GHz, they weren't available. They were a lot faster per clock. (Of note, the Athlon used the EV6 (21264) bus which was one of the big reasons it did well. Plus a lot of DEC engineers going to AMD following the DEC/Compaq merger, which was if I recall correctly just before the 21264 was released, I don't recall any actual DEC hardware) Near the end P4s were released so you may be thinking 466MHz Alphas vs 1.2GHz P4s. (Where the Alphas would lose on integer, they would beat the P4s on floating point instructions) Benchmarking them, they were about 1.5x as fast clock for clock as at the time the fastest x86 processor (The original Athlon, mind you this is comparing optimized builds and the alpha didn't have SIMD instructions) If you were thinking of the API builds, you might be right, if you switch the MHz numbers around.

21364 Alphas were released following the HP merger and were the only ones which were over 1GHz. At this time, it was way late. The FPU was still respectable, but overall it was a case of too little too late. The 364 was not even a new core, it was a 264 wrapped in a much better communication to the outside world, on-board memory controller, and a very hypertransport like connection. (Which predated Hypertransport, at least in the beginning of the design, but was delayed so much, that as I recall Hammer wasn't that far off)

21464 was canceled, though it had a number of things, including the first Alpha SIMD instructions.

The alpha, even the 21064s, which were petering out in favor of 21164s when I got introduced to Alpha, were not cheap. However, they (21164PCs anyway) were priced comparably to a high end x86 system. When x86 got better and cheaper, they simply didn't keep up. Part of that was due to a DEC-Intel suit/resolution, which as far as I'm aware Intel didn't hold up. Which eventually got DEC merged with Compaq. Then it was all the 'Itanium is the future', where Compaq ended up basically killing Alpha for. When HP got it, they were also heavily in the Itanium camp. HP also had their own prior processor (PARISC) which was being killed off for Itanium. Which as I'm sure you are aware the Itanic future didn't turn out the be the case.

Second:
Slow, was the one thing the Alpha was not. Expensive, rare, hot and some other things, but slow it was not. Considering that an Alpha led the SPEC cpu benchmarks for over 9 *continuous* years, being broken of the integer by P4 on release, and fpu by a much later P4 (See above for how the Alpha's frequency wasn't keeping up on the 264s)

At no time, when alpha was being sold by DEC or Compaq, would SGI (MIPS) and Sun (SPARC) hardware have been faster per processor than Alpha. Look on the SpecCPU pages, or if you can find them (I can't) the old Seti@home statistics. Hell, look at just about *any* benchmark from around that time.

Comment Re:Human Translated Links and More POVs (Score 2, Insightful) 214

To be fair usually it's "software patents are evil"

As far as patents being evil. They aren't inherently evil. Just that what is allowed to be patentable, is way more than the set of useful inventions. It may be to the point where the only way to make them actually promote ideas is, where we throw them all out because of abuses, and start with a much stricter set of rules. (Yes, that sucks for some people/companies)

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