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Comment Re:Era of absurdly overpriced ARM boards is ending (Score 1) 77

by Roman Mamedov (#38517440) Attached to: PandaBoard ES Benchmarked

Economies of scale. The price is relatively high due to the low volume of production. These are hobby boards. The only reason you can build a $200 PC right now is because the hardware gets production runs in the millions or more.

Sure, and also maybe the chicken-and-egg problem?
There won't be any scale until there's significant demand, and there won't be any demand while those boards cost so much, that even most ARM enthusiasts would find it difficult to justify the purchase.
It's okay that the performance of those boards would not be stellar, but with them being so overpriced, the result is that the price/performance absolutely BLOWS -- and that's a big problem.

Comment Re:Era of absurdly overpriced ARM boards is ending (Score 2) 77

by Roman Mamedov (#38516590) Attached to: PandaBoard ES Benchmarked

This has 4 times the memory, twice the clock speed and twice the cores of the Pi, of course it isn't going to be less then twice the price. Everything else being equal you might expect nearly 4 times the price (i.e. ~$130)

So, $130 for a bare board with CPU and RAM?
Yeah that would sound great, except when anyone can build a whole PC for $191, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392163,00.asp
With 2x the RAM and a CPU that rips the ARM on PandaBoard into a thousand of tiny teddy bears in terms of performance.
And a frigging 500 GB HDD (ok, pre-HDD-crisis).

You could say, "yeah but it's not ARM and low-power etc". Okay. There are now Chinese tablets with comparable specs, http://www.aliexpress.com/product-gs/509457480-CPAM-Free-shipping-10-1-superpad-3-android-2-3-tablet-pc-flytouch-3-GPS-512MB-wholesalers.html
that cost $125 shipped. Including stuff like 10" touch screen, camera, internal flash, battery, casing, etc, etc. There's no way a bare board should cost $130. It's just vendors up until now felt just fine with hiking up the price as much as they desire, because those who need it (for development etc) would buy it anyway, or even buy on their company's funds. But hopefully the Raspberry Pi will beat some sense into competitors in this area, and this will move an ARM PC from the ranks of a too-expensive-to-be-practical dream, to reality.
Earth

Earthscraper Takes Sustainable Design Underground 269

Posted by samzenpus from the moving-on-down dept.
Hugh Pickens writes"The 'Earthscraper,' a 65-story, 82,000-square-foot inverted pyramid beneath Mexico City takes a new approach to escalating megacity problems like population growth, urban sprawl, preserving open space, and conserving energy and water, promising to turn the modern high-rise, quite literally, on its head. The proposed building will be located at the Zocalo, Mexico City's major public plaza one of the few sizable open spaces left in the city of 9 million. 'It's a massive empty plot, which makes it the ideal site for our program,' says architect Esteban Suarez. The Earthscraper concept begins with a glass roof replacing the opaque stone surface of the Zocalo preserving the open space and civic uses of the Zocalo, while allowing natural lighting to flow downward into all floors of the tapering structure through clear or translucent core walls. The first 10 stories would hold a museum dedicated to the city's history and its artifacts. 'We'd almost certainly find plenty of interesting relics during the dig — dating right back to the Aztecs who built their own pyramids here,' says Suarez adding that the design incorporates a system of gardens occurring roughly every 10 stories, to help generate fresh air. One thing working in Earthscraper's favor is there are strict laws that prevent building upwards in this part of Mexico City, but no laws for building down. 'They will have to develop new laws to stop this from happening,' says Chief Design Officer Emilio Barja. 'I hope they don't [find the] time to do that.'"
Science

EU Scientists Working On Laser To Rip a Hole In Spacetime 575

Posted by samzenpus from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong? dept.
astroengine writes "Those pesky physicists are at it again; they want to build a laser so powerful that it will literally rip spacetime apart. Why? To prove the existence of virtual particles in the quantum vacuum, potentially unravel extra dimensions and possibly find the root of dark matter. The $1.6 billion Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility (known as ELI) will be built somewhere in Europe by the end of the decade and physicists are hoping the ten high-powered lasers — delivering 200 petawatts of power at a target for less than a trillionth of a second — will turn up some surprises about the very fabric of the Universe."

Submission + - Russian Telco MTS bans Skype, other VoIP

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: MTS, one of the three largest mobile carriers in Russia, have been buying up smaller cable TV and Internet providers across the country, and besides the GSM/3G cellphone service they now also offer cable TV and home broadband Internet access. And their unified TOS (Russian; mirror) for home broadband now says: "3.4.4. The customer may not use the Services for the purpose of transferring voice over the Internet; Skype and other similar software is forbidden." (screenshot). Really, why would you need to phone over the Internet, comrade, when you have a perfectly good cellphone [from MTS, assumingly]?

Comment Re:Scale (Score 1) 83

by Roman Mamedov (#36486476) Attached to: NanoNote Goes Wireless

> Do they have them for $100?

Sure, why not?

Checked eBay lately, you can get yourself a 7" Android tablet for like $65.

NanoNote has many virtues, but being cheap and "accessible" (third world, blah blah blah), is NOT one of them. On the contrary, it is WAY overpriced for what it is. And likewise so, this new wireless addon - 41 Euro, for god's sake, and you were saying something about students and poor children?

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