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Comment Re:Obligatory (Score 0) 46

Sorry, guess I should have read you submission more thoroughly. Even if you find a museum to take the old paraphernalia, it likely won't make it to their limited display space. Your best bet may be to contact those who were involved, their companies, their schools, and see if someone with a personal interest may want to display it.

On the other hand, they're knickknacks as you said, and while they may have substantial meaning to you, their power lies mostly in evoking memories in those who lived through certain events. They don't really speak for themselves as a record of the past, nor will they say much to those outside the free software movement or to future generations. The best you can probably do is make an electronic record which can be tagged, indexed, and archived, so that future scholars might expand (ever so slightly) their knowledge of these events.

Or just let them go. I'm reminded of a Star Trek quote: "...Humans have a compulsion to keep records and lists and files. So many in fact, that they have to invent new ways to store them microscopically—otherwise their records would overrun all known civilization."

Comment Re:only for nerds (Score 1) 66

I hate to break it to you, but even if it had a working power plug a Galaxy S would be crippled to the point of useless today. Smartphones have been improving fast...really fast. That phone is somewhere less than 5% as fast as today's models, equivalent to a very early P4 in PC terms. I'd be very surprised if many modern apps and web sites worked acceptably on it. And if you don't care about those, get a dirt cheap dumb phone with better battery life.

PCs have been 'fast enough' for a while, at least when coupled with solid state storage. Phones are catching up, though they've got a few generations to go before they reach desktop-level performance (never imagined I'd say that). By 2020 a phone could be a long-term purchase (and we'll have moved on to the next hot gadget), but not yet.

Comment Re:only for nerds (Score 1) 66

I can't imagine this will see serious adoption in its current form.

  On the other hand, I can see this leading to phone designs with one, two, or a strip of small replaceable I/O modules along an edge, for people who want custom addons or this year's new $feature without carrying around adapters or replacing their phone.

People might want a camera with a bit of optical zoom, or a MicroSD card reader, or a bigger speaker, or for this crowd even an XJACK-type pop-out ethernet jack.

By constraining expansions to simple peripherals, modules could use a more foolproof bus like USB and give people ninety percent of the benefits of Ara with ten percent of the penalty.

Comment I disagree (Score 1) 631

CurrentC will win? Seriously?

It's a pain to set up and they require a ridiculous amount of information, including your bank account, driver's license, and SSN.

It's a pain to use: Unlock phone, find app, launch app, read store's QR code, approve transaction, let store read your QR code. Cash would be faster.

It's a security nightmare: In addition to the information above, they track your purchases and share all your personal info—even what medical info they can glean—with their merchants, any of which could be breached. On top of that, you lose the fraud protection your old credit card company gave you.

So... what's in it for the customer? Why would anyone use CurrentC? Merchants are asking their customers to give up privacy, protection and convenience just so the merchants can save money. It's not going to happen.

On the other hand, Apple Pay and Google Wallet are simple, easy and secure (particularly Apple's solution) and there's no special setup or fees required to accept them, so why would they die out? It won't be some massive nationwide rollout like CurrentC, but shoppers will use them where they can, and stores that don't handle NFC now will slowly adopt it to match their competitors.

Comment 'Mobile' no more. (Score 4, Informative) 130

Per the Geekbench 3 CPU benchmark suite, the A8X scores ~4500.
The Surface Pro hybrid laptop's i3 scores 4750.
Apple's base model MacBook Air's i7 scores 5300.
(and for reference, the old Core 2 Quad Q6600 scores 4250.)

Meanwhile, the Intel chips in the Surface Pro and MacBook Air have a 15W TDP, while the A8X should be well south of 5W. Granted, a lot of that goes to the integrated GPUs, but the A8X is no slouch in graphics either. The iPad runs at a higher resolution than 90-plus-percent of PCs today and runs plenty of good-looking 3D games. It's good enough for consumer use, definitely.

Finally, Intel's 'recommended customer price' for their ULV chips is ~$300. Major purchasers like Apple and Microsoft no doubt negotiate a substantial discount, but I doubt it comes close to the ~$20 (plus in-house design costs) Apple pays for the A-series chips.

This may sound like an Apple fanboy post, but it isn't. It's a 'Intel needs to get their shit together' post. A decade ago Intel lost their way with the Pentium 4 and AMD took the lead for a few years. In the end that gave us the vastly improved Core architecture. If Broadwell and Skylake don't put Intel out ahead of ARM designs in a hurry, the next few years could be very interesting.

Comment Could be worse (Score 1, Interesting) 206

My router injects a unique identifier into every packet it sends. The manufacturer claims they can't turn it off. Yeah, probably under pressure from the government. But I'm building my own open source router that blanks out everything—MAC, IP, you name it. I'll be invisible to everyone. Take that, Orwellian bastards!

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