Don't buy the $50 microphone/remote and it can't spy on you.

Although I suppose your new internet-enabled refrigerator could have a microphone hidden inside it and you probably wouldn't every know.

My guess is that although the Tegra X1 has LPDDR4 it only had 3GB installed, an old PC typically has 4GB or more installed (and is upgradable). I just put 16GB DDR3 in this PC for $100. I don't know what I will do with all that RAM, but I'd rather have too much than too little.

I think the SHIELD Android TV would probably make an anemic desktop, maybe a good Chromebox. But it's no i7 or even i3, and comparing a 10W chip to a 55W chip is probably not going to lead you to any surprises. Intel has cutting edge fabs and design teams, they might pull a lot more watts than an ARM but they can do more computations.

I'm curious if the graphics performance of the Maxwell in Tegra X1 is comparable to the Intel Iris graphics. The full size maxwell-based GPUs for PC are of course way higher performance, but my interest is if Maxwell is more efficient to the point that their scaled down version in Tegra can be on par or better than Intel's integrated graphics. That's where using one of these as if it were a desktop becomes interesting, rather than compare the CPU.

Well Ouya is about 2 years old now. And used a processor that came out 3 years ago (Tegra 3). Tegra 3 is only a Cortex-A9 and a very old GPU architecture (related to the old nForce series, about 10 years old).

The Tegra X1 is 3 generations later (skipping over Tegra 4 and Tegra K1). And uses the Maxwell architecture copied from the desktop graphics, obviously scaled down to fit in the thermal limits and performance requirements of a mobile chip.

The performance difference between Tegra 3 and Tegra X1 is massive. Part of that is just having die shrinks and adding more transistors, and part of that is the improvements in architecture on the memory controller, internal buses and GPU.

Remember, Ouya is another company, not related to NVIDIA. And Ouya does not included TegraZone, which offers some games that hard-core gamers would appreciate more than the typical Android fair. And there is of course GRID streaming, which is popular among hard core gamers to be able to practice away from their desktop PC.

Depends on the part of CA, but yes. While most of the US would pay around $70k/yr for a SW engineer job (about equivalent to 4500 euros/month, if I did the exchange correctly), Silicon Valley would typically run around $100k/yr for essentially the same position. On the other hand, my company pays my colleagues in Finland more than they are paying in the Bay Area. (aside: I suspect Americans get to keep more of their paycheck, because the taxes are lower, but spend more of it because there are fewer services in their communities.)

So regional variations in salary are not surprising, but salary is not the only staffing cost for a business. There are the liabilities involved in jurisdictions with strong labor or litigation for discrimination. There are mandatory accounts (like PTO, unemployment insurance, etc) and costs for healthcare.

Indeed, one would know the laws in advance before going into business there. If you can't make it work there, then don't start a business in France, or at all really.

But that said, the psychological aspect of not worrying about your security doesn't really translate into workers who are more "focused". Here in silicon valley, I have many coworkers who obsess about their jobs, while at the same time they could be let go without notice and without further pay. Every year we get some token raise, roughly equal to inflation, while at the same time the company modifies our health care plan to make it cheaper for them, increases our premiums and reduces the stock grants. (There have been pretty significant cuts in stock grants this year across the tech industry, which translates to a pay cut for most of us)

It really does seem to be the CEO's fault for starting a business in France instead of California. I know from personal experience that layoffs in CA can occur without any severance. It's not nice, but if I were trying to run a business that basic fact would have to enter into the equation.

If development took only a few more years, we wouldn't have paper money to counterfeit.

No, kernel developer.

Like programming, I try to address on issue at a time instead of writing one giant spaghetti function that does it all.

We would have to legalize the blood sport known as the Autoduel.

But why not:
a hat off,
a twist off,
or another kind of off?

Because I don't pick fights that I can't win.

We should fence off the US and go to sleep for 50 years while China and India have a space race!

RoHS/Lead-free has already baked obsolescence into your consumer electronics. Tin-whiskers plus the difficulty in services devices with lead-free solder, not that VLSI really makes it practical to take your gizmos to the repair shop anymore.

but what if I want to put my smartphone in the paper-shredder when I'm done with it? [when Apple releases a new model]

I don't agree that you can build .ko's with g++

And yes, I'm a chip vendor. Anything I do is automatically blessed by myself.