Most first gen 4K displays are 2x 2k displays sharing an uncut panel requiring funky software and/or driver gymnastics to get it to work well. 2nd gen 4K displays generally have the two separate display drivers condensed down to one input, but third gen 4K displays where it's a true "plug and play" single display device through-and-through are still fairly rare. This is changing though.

If you can access the data with a PIN wirelessly, why does the "owner" of the license even need direct access to it? At that point it's the issuing authority's responsibility to be able to access it using the owner's given PIN.
 
To condense the argument down, "why do you even need a phone app? why can't you just give your last name and PIN to the officer?" All the phone app is doing here is validating that you know the PIN.

As they're finding out, the military drones are actually better at landing themselves, instead of letting the pilots land them remotely. Under ideal conditions it's very likely that a computer will be better than humans when taking off and landing. Computers can read and process sensor data a lot more efficiently than a human's eyes and ears. We're just made out of meat, after-all.

The onboard PWM for the arduino is fantastic, but there's not enough dedicated PWM for robotics unless you're just doing a 4DOF robot arm or something, which is why I mentioned the 16 channel PWM, which allows you do do 4DOF per limb. I have the PWM shield from adafruit, just picked up their non-denominational daughterboard (same chip, more generic mounting format) for the A+ this week.
 
And yeah those CH340G based Arduino Nano clones you can pick up off of ebay for $4 shipped are pretty amazing, they run for over a day off of an old nokia candybar cellphone battery, I have one running an SSD1306 OLED and temp sensor that stays charged off of a tiny solar panel.

Can you share your code on that project? That's actually a very useful tool.

The Raspberry Pi A+ is a good Arduino competitor; I2C, SPI, PWM, the PCB is actually smaller than the Arduino Uno R3 (standard Arduino footprint), and uses 100mA at idle (compare to 35mA at idle for the Arduino idling in non-sleep mode).
 
I haven't measured the A+ with the HDMI port turned off but at 100mA it's very competitive powerwise and runs a full linux stack, but has enough horsepower to do computing like OpenCV, encrypted wifi, and has full access to mathmatica and it's API now for highly optimized computing tasks, making it ideal for a robotics project. The Native PWM isn't so great but with I2C you can talk to a 16 channel PWM daughterboard for about $15 more.
 
Oh, and it's about half the weight of a BeagleBone Black, even if it's less powerful.

Ok I am bad at html apparently, good luck - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
 
  link attempt #2

Because most people's roommates don't speak mandarin,
 
link to explanation

Yeah 800w in that case is peak. If you're not home during the day and it's cloudy, that's still 200w going in to your batteries for use when you get home. If it's raining and you're home on a Saturday playing video games with the electric heater on at 9am, it's likely you're draining your batteries much faster than solar is feeding them. It really depends on your residential use scale. As a bachelor I don't have daytime power needs, but a stay at home mom or elderly retired may have a constraint drain.

Germany is cloudier than Seattle and yet they're the global leader in solar power. Go figure.
 
Have you looked at the price of Solar these days? In bulk it's down to less than $2/watt and that includes the inverter. You can install 800w of capacity for $1200 these days (plus batteries) so you're looking at $3000-4000 for 1KW professionally installed with lead acid battery backup. I pay about $1500-1800 a year for electricity in Texas and that would cover about 70% of my peak usage and would pay for itself after the third year. Solar is good for about 18-20 years and drops below 80% of it's nameplate rating after about 25 years. After year 5 you can just take your savings and roll it in to buying additional capacity/maintenance.

Anyone have a suggestion of a dropbox/owncloud replacement that is NOT written in PHP? PHP projects tend to be "babby's first project" and riddled with issues, security holes etc. Owncloud has been out for a few years but I'd like to avoid PHP if at all possible in the age of Ruby, Python, etc.

I think the market will end up bifurcated.

For my part, I try to avoid products that are priced free. I've looked at a lot of mobile software, and so much of it that's free is low quality or has a punitive pricing model. Free games with pay-to-play mechanics, for instance, tend to be designed so heavily around monetizing the fun parts of the game that the game isn't fun no matter what you do. These fundamental decisions corrupt the process. By trying to keep fun behind a wall, even the fun parts aren't as good anymore.

It's a bit better with productivity software and the like, but I prefer payment models that unlock all the features at once, rather than one feature at a time. One-at-a-time apps necessarily remove the interaction and synergy between features. Instead of making a set of features that seamlessly works together, you get a bunch of individual features that are less powerful split apart. Again, design decisions end up being made that undermine the making of a good product.

So I'll be paying for software. As a software developer (video games) myself, I feel that we deserve to be paid for our best work, and we can't do our best work while begging for scraps. You can't make the big, great games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age or Far Cry by monetising through small transactions. The $50-$70 you pay up front is for a whole piece of coherent work that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

The motherboard is a one piece unit with soldered on eMMC, RAM, CPU etc, battery is glued in, etc. Basically you have a plastic clamshell around the display, and a plastic clamshell around the keyboard/motherboard, and battery glued to the clamshell.

They're drop shipped directly from the manufacturer to the school district. Same as how enterprise computer sales work. There is no big box "chromebooks for schools!" retail outlet that superintendents and CIOs drive to once a year with their SUV to stock up on the latest school technology, and then drive home with it to wrap it up in christmas paper.

LOL +1 Funny. Unless you mean he lacks the kind of intelligence, i.e. Emotional Intelligence, required in management. Even that I would disagree with, there are many different strengths a manager can have and no one is strong in all areas. A high EI manager may be good at reading how their staff feels about what they're doing but shit at strategic planning.

I don't see anything wrong with remaining a mid-level programmer, better to serve as a good example through your code and behavior than to suffer from the Peter Principle and "rise to the level of their incompetence."