Hasn't the future of 'open' android always looked bleak, more or less by design? At the bottom of the stack, we have SoC vendors who don't give a damn, handset OEMs who don't give a damn and/or actively prefer that older handsets remain as outdated as possible so you'll buy something new, and carriers who have largely the same incentives as handset vendors; but with their own crapware. This ensures that hardware support is spotty and typically weak for anything except whatever the device shipped with(and it's a moot point on the cryptographically locked devices). Markedly worse than the PC world in terms of vendor helpfullness or ability to do much of anything without a BSP or cobbling blobs together from vendors with slightly longer update support windows.

From the top of the stack, the 'free' parts of android are basically Google's hardware abstraction layer for google play services, and getting steadily more so.

I can't digg up the original contract to check; but some of the stories state that they are going to Apple because the deal was to purchase 'iPad+software', as a packaged product, from Apple. By all accounts Pearson was the significant weak link (not a shock, that's pretty typical for them), while Apple's stuff suffered only from the fairly pitiful state of iOS management; but the school district didn't structure the deal as 'Contract #1, buy ipads, Contract #2, buy textbook apps'; it was a package, and their claim is that half the package was rotten and the other half is of little use to them without the underdelivered component.

Given that Apple is reputed to be a brutal and efficient taskmaster of its suppliers, I'd imagine that either the school district will fail, or Apple will gouge it out of Pearson; but to the best of my understanding there is logic behind complaining to Apple, given the terms under which the devices were purchased.

If you are working on the (probably bullshit) theory that these devices improve educational outcomes, there is a civil rights interest in ensuring that students who made poor prenatal choices still have the opportunity to get a decent education.

However, that assumption is under-supported(even if they were free, it's not news that electronic gizmos are good for slacking off with, so they might have a negative effect unless the school actually has a good plan in mind; and since they aren't free, they are being chosen to the exclusion of other possible educational aids), and if it doesn't happen to be true; then there isn't much of a civil rights case for access to toys. If anything, devices for slacking off probably amplify the effects of differing qualities of home life, since parental attention will have a major effect on how much slacking you can get away with.

The superintendent at the time 'resigned' over the controversy; but depending on the outcome of the FBI's ongoing investigation into the circumstances of the bidding process, he may or may not be looking at further consequences.

Pearson is a company that brings a sort of defense contractor vibe to the educational sector. They are huge, superb at landing contracts, excellent at writing contracts that promise somewhat less than they appear to; but not so hot on delivering, much less on time or on budget.

Anyone buying a zillion ipads for school children without realizing that they'll be using them mostly to screw around on the internet within about five minutes is certainly an idiot; and Pearson certainly can't take the blame for that; but their failure to deliver some curriculum slurry and a terrible textbook app or two within the agreed upon time? That's the sort of thing they do.

It would not much fail to surprise me if it wasn't done this way; but something like those seatback location/direction displays require relatively little data transfer(you wouldn't need more than the 4800 baud NMEA spew you'd get from a standard GPS device, and you could likely get away with less) and no responses from the seatback unit; so you could do everything you'd need over an isolated, intrinsically unidirectional, link.

Put the avionics on the emitter side of an optoisolator, blindly blinking out location and heading data, the controller for the seatback entertainment system on the receiver side, listening, and you get an arrangement where there simply isn't anything to attack at the software level(you could probably hose in flight entertainment for the entire aircraft one way or another; but boredom isn't very lethal); and where physical attacks might be possible; but (by choosing an optoisolator and the location of the interface between the critical and noncritical side) can be made quite difficult.

That, plus iterative improvement by using the mk2 rock you produced by banging mk1 rocks together to shape a mk3 rock, and so on; is pretty much the truth.

Ants are awesome; but really a different flavor: they(along with termites) manage to get extremely impressive results from emergent behavior among swarms of really, really, dumb individuals. Very cool, particularly fascinating if you are trying to get good results from multiple agents without tacking on an unweildy command and control system.

The sort of tool use in TFA is interesting because it suggests fairly advanced cognition(and sometimes communication and transmission of learned techniques). Ants aren't so hot at that.

Oh no, his behavior was a flagrant violation of the rules; and they can selectively destroy his ability to interact with 8x8 black and white tiled surfaces using a cold war mycotoxin for all I care.

If anything, my intended thesis(that even a relatively weak or computationally limited computer could be a substantial aid to a reasonably skilled human) suggests that even modest machine assistance is quite dramatic cheating in terms of allowing you to beat people above your skill level. Being reasonably good just serves to make the computer's job markedly easier in this case, which then allows it to make your job markedly easier, which defeats the point of involving humans at all.

His Nexus 6 wrapped in toilet paper was hidden in the adjacent stall...

I don't know what the state of the art is(and it would presumably vary a bit depending on whether the phone was running the analysis or just acting as a nice UI for a remote server); but it's possible that he was using the computer to augment competent-or-better human play; but not replace it entirely.

Chess has a large enough search space that full scale brute force and ignorance is quite a challenge; but more constrained states(like the actual state of the board partway through a game, or after the use of one of the standard openings) have correspondingly smaller search spaces. A computer program could also assist in checking proposed moves for 'something dumb you would usually recognize; but sometimes miss under stress'. Again, by being one move 'in the future'(since you are just testing, without commitment) you reduce the difficulty of the analyzing the game; but get potentially useful error checking.

I don't know how thoroughly, in terms of human level of play, the game has been beaten with various amounts of hardware at your disposal; but it is definitely beaten enough that a good player with access to a machine is likely to play a better game, possibly a markedly better one.

Those won't really be 'advances' until we have micro-fusion cells and sintered unobtanium nanotube heatsinks.

Well, if you have a taste for brutal irony, newer revisions of the eDP spec include the option to use lossy compression(but it's, um, 'visually lossless', we swear!) to reduce the amount of data you need to send to the screen, and the power costs of the link... Where better than the suckers overpaying for resolution to introduce such a feature?

This is true; but if you've bothered to produce a small, very high resolution, display anyway; you'd have to really not care in order to be unwilling to sell some of the product you already make to somebody willing to buy it.

That likely excludes 'quantity: 1' orders from random hobbyists; but if you can hit the minimum order quantity, your money is a lot more important than your intended application.

The curious quirk, in this case, is that you probably won't even be able to get a 'theoretically better; but not perceptably so and definitely not worth the price' product; you'll almost inevitably get a worse one.

Any phone/tablet SoC with claims to being remotely high end is already some mixture of thermally constrained and deliberately crippled to save the device's battery life. If you demand their full performance, they'll throttle within minutes; and if they somehow had the thermal headroom to avoid that, they'd flatten the battery in a some egregiously short time.

Assuming reasonably equal tech(ie. not a 1920x1080 phone from two years ago against a phone from next year with this screen) the higher resolution device will have worse battery life(or a visibly larger battery) and be at a greater risk of annoying frame rate/responsiveness issues in any applications that try to do complex GPU work at native resolution. Some amount of this is accepted, since visible giant eyeball-slashing pixels suck; but the returns on graphical prettiness diminish, while the power and thermal costs just keep on scaling...

At least audiophile nonsense is generally good at what it does, if you ignore the price tag and the nonsense; this will be actively worse than a similar device based on a slightly less ambitious screen.

Speaking of updating outdated regulations... Is it time to give some thought to the amount of precious, precious, spectrum we dedicate to broadcasting low quality audio using extraordinarily archaic techniques? Sure, I appreciate being able to tune in to talk radio with nothing but a chunk of germanium and the patience to poke it until it agrees to start rectifying; but I need a better reason than that to operate a dinosaur preserve.