This phone strongly reminds me of the Motorola ROKR, a pre-iPhone device whose sole redeeming quality, vs. any other dumbphone of the time, was that it could play tracks you downloaded from iTunes and manually transferred to the phone over USB 1.0. It would only accept 100 songs and/or 1GB of files, whichever limit you hit first. It wouldn't play MP3's.

Amazon has released a phone that has nothing to distinguish itself from the competition other than the fact it is hog-tied to the Amazon ecosystem. It's does not have any particularly interesting features that could not be implemented in pure software, and the price is nothing to write home about either.

I don't see any reason why anybody would purchase this over the Moto G LTE, or any number of other smartphones that are available for a heckava lot less money. If you really don't mind being tied to a contract, there are better phones for less than the $200 they want.

IBM Z-series mainframes still use a customized CPU, although the i-Series did indeed move to POWER some time ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

The subject of the previous post should have been "Energy >= Electricity"

The policy still doesn't make clear if an employee of a company always counts as a "paid contributor" if their job duties do not involve Wikipedia and they can expect no payment, recognition, etc. from their employer for their activities. Is that considered a "volunteer edit" or would my mere paycheck make me a "paid contributor"?

Just because the article is sloppy and thinks gas doesn't count as energy doesn't mean I'm going to make the same mistake. Drying laundry takes a lot of energy, as does heating the water if you wash with warm or hot. (I don't care that gas is cheaper; energy is energy.)

Do you really game so much that your gaming computers take up more juice than the water heater? If they were running full-tilt 24x7 I could certainly conceive of this, but they don't. And when a water heater is cycling on, that sucker is drawing multiple kW. (And when I was referring to food, I was mostly thinking of the fridge; unless you cook a LOT, cooking doesn't use up that much energy.)

In any case, all that is going to dwarf a dinky little cable box, no matter how badly designed.

I'm not buying this for one second... The only way that the cable box could possibly be the 2nd-largest consumer of energy would be if nobody in that house took showers, did laundry, or washed dishes, as a water heater uses an insane amount of electricity. And I'm pretty sure a fridge is going to be up there in energy-usage also.

In all fairness, the article and headline did say "many homes", but what use is a statistic if it only applies to slovenly basement-dwelling otaku?

As others have pointed out, it's also written most sloppily. The max rating of a box (500 watts) has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with average power consumption. We certainly don't decide that a house uses an average of ~30kw simply because it's equipped with a pair of 150A main breakers.

That said, yes, there's no excuse for how much juice these things use in standby mode.

I agree that the test itself was largely language-independent. But the two years of CS I took to get to that point certainly were not. Nor were the some of the follow-on cources in college-level CS.

I wasn't complaining that after two years of language instruction, I was not fluent in a language. I was stating that even compared the low bar set by the standards of the class, I was horrible, even in relation to my peers, who were being taught in the same way and came from the same background.

You'll get no argument from me that waiting until high-school to teach foreign language, and then doing so in typical lecture classes, isn't very effective. But that's not what my post was addressing.

Throughout my entire educational career, I was a slacker. I got decent grades (if not straight A's) without studying, paying much attention in class, or doing homework. I have a natural aptitude for the humanities and the sciences, and am adequate in math. (Better with applied vs. theoretical math.)

My one exception was foreign languages; I have absolutely no ability whatsoever in foreign languages. In American, I can speed-read, and have reasonable facility with writing. In any other language, it mattered not at all how much I studied, practiced, or did my homework, I was horrible, even by the low standards of an American high-school foreign language class. French, Latin, even American Sign Language as an adult, and I was hopeless. I got barely passing grades in French and Latin out of pity more than anything else.

Some difficult things are simply difficult for some people, and no amount of hard work is going to fix that. Throwing students against subjects they are unable to master is a waste of resource and is discouraging for both the student and teacher. I'm not saying students shouldn't be challenged; just that the idea that "hard work" will magically enable a student to master any subject is toxic.

Waaaayyy back in the mid-90's, I took the AP CS test my junior year of HS. The test was scheduled right after I took the AP US History test in the AM (I rocked that test with a 5 and passed out of 2 semesters of history for it) and as my brain was fried, I staggered into the principal's conference room to take the AP CS test with another dozen or so kids from my class.

I completely bombed the test (a 2)... my brain was so scorched from the history exam that morning I couldn't make heads or proverbial tails of the essay questions. I got a 2, and I'm glad I did. Why? Because that was when the test was still being administered in Pascal, and by the time I got to college, my school had shifted over to C++ as their main "teaching language". It's no fun taking an advanced CS class when all your assignments take extra time while you give yourself a crash course in C-style syntax everybody else is taking for granted.

That said, despite the fact I flunked the test, my actual high school CS class was excellent. It meant that when I had to re-take intro-to-CS in college all I had to do was learn new syntax for the concepts I already knew; the overlap of the theory was pretty complete.

On another note, why would we expect the average high-schooler to pass a college-level CS exam? It's a hard test, just like it's supposed to be. And it's a subject that many students, no matter their other virtues, don't have much aptitude in. (I'd be interested to know what this one year in "Computer Science" that all Chinese kids are given actually consists of...)

All that said... yes, waaayyyy more than 10% of our high schools need to be offering the class. Every high school surely contains some students with both the aptitude and desire to take such a class.

GNU stands for GNU's Not UNIX.

Linux is just "Linus with an 'x' at the end to make the name look UNIX-y"

Due to their commanding smartphone marketshare, along with millions of devices with embedded Linux shipped every year, wouldn't Samsung be the largest UNIX vendor?

Oh? What's that? You weren't counting embedded Linux and I'm a pedantic #$(*#$&@!!!. Can't argue with that!

News Flash! Company legally buys competitor's gear on the open market!

What, precisely, is the story here?

I think the idea is more about user data (rather than applications themselves) not being shuffled in and out on File I/O, the SCSI stack, LBA's, etc.

Along with the new O/S, they are also working on getting both Linux, and (oddly) Android running on it.

If you RTFA, you'd see that they'd like to re-structure the O/S to take full advantage of the systems planned giganto memory capacity, instead of being built around shuffling data on and off disk.