I don't see this as a problem at all. This is the type of thing that screams for a dedicated processor, not a GP chip, and it's typical to see a 99% reduction in power consumption when you go this route.

If you are going to cut cost, Bluetooth isn't a terrible place to start. Especially if you have 1 or 2 USB ports. (I didn't see that in the article)

GPS is also not so meaningful in a tablet; in a car you'll more likely use your phone.

I remember well when Honda was the butt of similar jokes in the Late 70's and/or early 80s. Nobody makes these jokes anymore.

Most times, market disruptions occur when previously expensive or inaccessible technology is provided at low cost. Sometimes, this happens when a high-end provider streamlines their processes and deliver their wares at new, lower cost. Far more often, however, it happens when a profitable, low-end provider moves upscale and discovers that they can deliver higher end wares at lower cost.

There are significant odds that your kids will drive Tata cars and love 'em, if they are, in fact, still driving them.

Stale thread is stale. But I bought a bluetooth keyboard for my phone and love it!

If I want to type srs bsns then I unfold the keyboard, which casually fits in my shirt pocket. Unfortunately, this model of keyboard is no longer manufactured and the price appears to have ballooned as a result. (When I bought mine a year or two ago, it was $40)

Even if they could review the source, there's no assurance that the binaries provided actually come from said sources. Further, there's no assurance that the "NSA bullshit" is in any way obvious. It could be as simple as an exploitable memory leak which can be tripped in certain, very rare conditions that would have no indication at all of being exploitable or "NSA bullshit".

My guess is that China wants to start pushing their "Red Flag Linux so that they can at least have a chance at knowing when their security is compromised.

I'm sitting in front of my $2500 laptop while a $50 TV stick smoothly plays Netflix on my bedroom TV. This "TV stick" is a fully functioning Android computer with all that implies. This is the "desktop equivalent" to the laptop, which in this case is a mobile phone device.

My point is that what "is a computer" is so cheap that the market is about to be tripped, completely. My phone now represents the majority of my interaction with the Internet in a personal context, and I do Internet development professionally.

That there are as many active mobile devices as there are people doesn't mean that everybody has a mobile device. And the reality is that mobile devices actually are ubiquitous, and the 7.1 billion number understates their ubiquity, since many devices are wifi only.

I type this on my Linux laptop that I use for work, but outside of some gaming, mobile devices have taken the crown for personal use. Mostly, I browse on my smart phone. I schedule on my smart phone. I email on my smart phone. My "TV" is actually a Google TV Stick running android. I frequently take a tablet with me when I travel, just so I can plug the hotel room HDMI into it and watch what I want, rather than "what's on".

Mobile devices are everywhere, and still growing fast, and have completely up-ended the computer marketplace. This trend will continue and even if you knock the number in half, it still stomps the every loving *!@#$* out of the classical desktop "computer".

Which is pretty much bollocks. Debt is one of the most powerful economic tools ever invented, rivaling money itself. Like any tool, it can be used well, or poorly. It's basically never a zero sum game.

Sorta, but not really. Debt is a type of mutual bet made by the investor/banker and the beneficiary that the value of the assets purchased by the debt will exceed the value of the money the debt reflects. And most of the time, it works out, and everybody wins!

Let's say I need $100,000 to buy new injection molds for my business in order to build a product. Without the $100k loan, the injection molds never get built, and at the end of a year, you have $100k in cash still sitting in the investor's hand.

But if the injection molds get built, and the product sells, you have:

A) The investor no longer has $100k in his/her hand, but they have the debt, now somewhat greater than $100k. (interest)

B) The borrower has $100k in debt, offset by the value of the new injection molds, AND the profits made from the product created with the injection molds.

This scenario is a positive sum game. Personal debt is an entirely different matter.

Like before, you are making a bet with an investor, and it does sometimes work out for the positive, but consumer debts are typically used for things to consume. If you spend it on a house, a house can be built that wouldn't exist otherwise, so it's probably a good deal. If you spend the money on hookers and blow, you truly consume the money and have no assets to "win" on. Now you have interest due on the money, which is economic activity that won't happen. Money spent on interest is then NOT spent on "real" goods, and everybody loses. Even the lender loses some, as the overall economy is damaged, even if this loss much less than they gain in personal interest money.

I have 8 GB of RAM. I would never notice 67 MB of RAM.

PS: BitTorrent already supports video streaming by pushing to have earlier packets downloaded before ones later in the movie. Netflix has the option to do something very similar. (I personally hope they do)

So, what makes BitTorrent traffic "lower" priority than other streaming protocols?

But in practice, there is no meaningful difference between "QoS" and "Net Neutrality" as there is no meaningful definition of what constitutes a "type" of traffic.

For example, NetFlix uses a traffic based on SilverLight's streaming video capability. Comcast only has to change this ever so slightly so it's a different "type" and then they can claim QoS. There is no meaningful limit to the rules that can be used to determine QoS, thus there is no meaningful distinction between QoS and "Net Neutrality".

I wonder how many of those jobs for "big data" involve data sets that will sit on a USB drive?

PHB: "But it's a TERABYTE, at least!"

I just remember how critical everybody here on /. was about the iPod. How many years ago was that?

In case you hadn't noticed, Credit Card companies secure your credit card using techniques very similar to A/V vendors' products. They do heuristic scanning of transactions, looking for consumer spending patterns and throwing red flags when they change significantly. You can wax poetic all you want about "smart cards" but the system is big enough that we'll probably *never* be without similar methods for protecting your bank account

In my laptop, I have an SSD. Upgrading the HDD cost about as much as a new laptop and cost significantly less. I've been able to buy 2+ years of time on my old laptop with an upgrade at significantly less cost.

So the numbers make sense, here!

We host a heavily database-driven app. Use of an SSD reduces latency by at *least* 95% in our testing. It's a no-brainer. Even if we replaced the SSDs every single year, we'd still come out way ahead. SSDs are where it's at for perfromance!