Don't buy anything today. Wait until there are media boxes with quad Cortex A15/A17 chips and buy one of them. They'll be out any week now. Rockchip RK3288 is coming, should be affordable, and the company is spending a lot of effort making sure it's well supported in mainline.

Cortex A9 hails from 2007. It's ancient. The GPUs are at best old Mali-400's. The compute/watt is not-great.

If you want to go really low power- if battery life is your concern and you don't actually have serious CPU use (you mention MSP430, so it sounds like you don't have real CPU use needs) get a Cortex A7 or Cortex A5. There are dozens of dual core Allwinner A7 boards out there. A5 has slimmer pickings, but will get you pleasantly below the one watt range, and the boards come with more embedded targeted peripherals that might not be included on media devices.

Yes, well, the terminal was a much more sensible sane client that could take care of itself. We should _definitely_ go back to that on-the-line paradigm.

These are such tiny little warts. A) don't use global variables, perhaps 'use strict' if you want to be good. B) most languages have arbitrary bit limits. Holding up the floating point limit of 52 bits and making mock of that, but not holding up the 64-bit limit of integers? That's weak sauce accusations from sore fucking whiney babies. Oh you want to insist on arbitrarily deep numerical precision? Have fun crossing off a huge section of people that need moderately performant math.

Languages are all basically the same shit, with slight flourishes that everyone gets zealous and overblown about. Get serious. Go find something real to fight about, like how vim is so much better than emacs.

Yes, but the proliferation of tools makes it harder to make sensible decisions about which one's are directly applicable. Copy pasting random stack overflow answers in and hoping they work is a regular practice, and it's the very embodiment of what's happened in the technical realms: information glut.

Worse: a lot of information, very little sense. Very few projects out there bother spending the time to trace their genetic roots, to find historical context where sense-making of information can even begin.

I don't want to agree or disagree about web or web apps being kludgetastic or not, but I do want to point out- there were a lot less people doing programming and they'd built themselves a lot less tooling. What had to be understood was far less, and what it could be done was yet far less still.

A diverse technical ecosystem springing up is, in my view, a healthy thing: a natural awakening and striving for new potentials. That the many technical societies and practices don't all form themselves towards the same careful deliberate ends, one free of subcultures and instead pushing towards one unified culture, is natural.

This claim of elegant understandable tools of old is more likely to be the unavailability of other signals out there cluttering up the programming spectrum. Thrown into the mess of programming, it's hard to discern relevance of the many things one is being exposed to.

-LM

Spotify's extensibility is really good! Their API is great, very flexible, and extends the common-est platform on the planet. Playing with Spotify made me a better programmer, for sure.

The ability to use language (the command line) to express complex tasks is indeed it's highlight, but there's absoluetly nothing magical about this task-constructing that makes it uniquely UNIX'y in nature IMHO. Noflo, Node-RED, jBPM, IFTTT &c demontsrate user-authored task composition at the GUI level. Android Activities are themselves a kind of pipe to "?", where the GUI asks the user to complete.

The difference with UNIX is that the shell is a language, one that has very wide expressibility, and one that has multiple levels of grammar: the shell itself has a grammar, and the programs each have their own argument grammar, and this multi-level flexibility has proven robust, durable, & capable for expressing a very wide range of things. Which I don't see as uniquely UNIX, as uniquely CLI, but as a characteristic & not necessarily a good one that explains it's survival & persistence as an expressive tool.

HTML presents a graphical first environment that humans can come in to an enrich with code: declare your content, then orchestrate and manipulate that media via an API for the media.

HTML+DOM is awesome in that it's media-first, API second. The DOM is verbose, certainly, but it gives a much richer, more tangible surface than a standard library that is strings, vectors, ints, floats: so, we can get good at this platform without programming (HTML) and the DOM standard library, for when we do want to start programming/manipulating things, is a rich-media standard library as opposed to a primitive one.

<quote>A wrong character at some position might cause a lot of unexpected behavior and leave a good mess to clean</quote>

Absolutely!

The user experience in the command line is very demanding: a user has to marshal up the strings that describe their action. They have to be able to form sentances that say what they want.

Having the leeway and room of a language, a syntax, is the point: as long as you have the grammar, it's expressive. And whether that expression does what you want is question #2. But this chain, being able to form sentances that mean what you intend: that mastery of language is very much something I do wish to see advanced as a worthy cause, as indeed more important an experience than whether or not you know X or Y menu option in Z application.

Computer literacy can begot in a meaningful way only by calling upon people to form their own thoughts, not tap thoughts made available to them.

How do we promote electrical engineering when we're surrounded by an increasingly software & solution based world? Microcontrollers and increasingly so, full-blown microprocessor system-on-chip designs integrate a bedazzling array of top-notch analog and digital peripherals. Watching electronics parts catalogs, there's an ever growing profusion of special-purpose ICs, a low cost on hand solution to every problem. And in this state of being well served, I'm curious how we maintain proficiency, expertise, and interest in hard electrical engineering when soft skill-sets can carry us so far, when so much is provided. It seems great to me that we have NodeBots and AVRs &c &c that get people excited and spooled-up so quickly doing hands on work in amateur and professional electronics projects, but at the same time it seems cause for worry.

Reflecting on myself: I've gone through a number of high speed signals and systems books but still cower in fear for that day when I'll have to wire up DRAM to a microcontroller: I keep fingers crossed that my vendor will include an application note specifically for wiring RAM, that I'll have reference designs I can crib from, and I look forward to the day when RAM comes package-on-package with my micro. I want to have a better mastery of electrical engineering, want to be better equipped to face these challenges, but education has only taken me so far. Or, another example, I can carefully step through design of a flyback converter to plan out the behavior of that analog based system, but these days I'd tend to rely on some microcontroller functionality: take advantage of some comparators and timers, and begin with a much less carefully planned out and much more stripped down set of hardware components that I can fudge into near working order with software.

I'm wondering what the response is, if any, to this shift in skill set, and how we ourselves in touch with and unafraid of first principles, hard as that hardware-oriented knowledge might comparatively be.

Get rid of power cables. We don't need them. We're reasonably close, at least.

USB Power Delivery (USB-PD) specification allows for either-directional power transfer (host->device or a new device->host mode, say, monitor->laptop) of 20V@5A: 100 watts. Two connectors would power any laptop out there just fine with room to spare.

GET RID OF POWER CABLES. Pfawh on your faster horses IEC, your seemingly noble intent masks the superior result. Strategically there's a lot to love about USB's move as well: most laptops use 19V for charging, and the 20V power delivery target allows for a fantastically small & efficient buck regulator to clean that power.

Resistance is a function of conductivity times length, and sure, USB connecfors's conductivity isn't all that high, but neither is the length it has to work across. With active cooling of the connector jacket and "no limit" cabling on either side, it'd be interesting to see what amperage could be shoved through various well made connectors.

Ethernet is of course way smarter and way happier to throw piles of money at the problem than USB is: PoE+ will negotiate up to 60V using two pairs, albiet at what is typically a very mild current rating. USB Powered Device spec tops out at 20V but pushes 5A, which is a fine balance given the very short run USB has to travel.

You've written hobbyist-targetting books with Radio Shack that work through hands on projects hobbyists can do themselves. My question is, for those seeking to carry your mission in writing those books over to computer-aided or simulation based learning, what things of value did you create that will be the hardest to carry forwards and what are the greatest things of value that computer-assistance will uniquely be able to take & make it's own & go furthest with?

Personally I would've gone for a mention of Mantle, the proprietary API they are introducing that sidesteps OpenGL and DirectX. I don't really know what it does yet, haven't found good coverage, but DICE's Battlefield 4 is mentioned as using it, and the description I've read said it enabled a faster rate of calling Draw calls.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/graphics/display/20130924210043_AMD_Unveils_Next_Generation_Radeon_R9_290X_Graphics_Card.html

And once one has started playing BF4 ($60 value), one can either pay for DLC individually or spend $40 more for Premium.

I'm pretty displeased BF4 is a $100 game.