yeah, i've been greatful for maplin getting me out of a bind several times, but the high prices and crap selection mean that the vast majority of my component purchasing (both personal and work) happens online.

but comparing it to those isn't really fair. Assuming it will be somewhere between $100-$200 that would put it in the same price bracket as the higher end options from the likes of wandboard, solidrun and odriod or even the atom based minnowboard.

And viewed in amongst that pack it doesn't seem especially exciting. I guess if you really must have both A15 cores (but only 2 of them) and native SATA then it may be a good option

The "videocore" is a bunch of modules including a processor (the "VPU"), a 3D core, various video related stuff etc. The SoC is booted by the VPU, the arm is inactive until the VPU starts it.

specs for the 3D core were released but specs for the rest of the videocore including the VPU remain closed :(. There have been some attempts at reverse engineering but with limited success.

I suspect "free for the maker community" translates as "free for personal use but if you use this in a product you are going to have to pay". How much you have to pay will probablly depend on the details of the product.

The core of phone networks has moved from physical circuit switching to virtual circuit switching to packet switching with priority but at least here in the UK normal phone lines are still delivered from the phone exchnage as analog pots over a pair of copper wires (which may or may not also carry DSL). I beleive the situation in the US is similar.

Were you thinking of some other place (and if so where) or were you using a pedantically narrow defintion of "dedicated pots line"?

Apparrently it's coming "in the medium term".

They started off copying BBC micro naming but they broke from it when they released the A+ and continued to break from it when they released the Pi 2 (the succsessor to the BBC B+ was the BBC master series)

The register broke a press embargo then put the misinformation about the core in a reply to a comment. Everyone who knew better was forbidden from commenting to correct them for another 7 hours or so.

Theres plenty of demand for mathematicians but most of it is going to be applying existing mathemical theorems/techiques or minor developments of existing theorems/techiques to someone's problem.

Top mathematicians don't want to be doing that. They want to be developing new theorems/techiques which may or may not turn out to have practical applications and that generally means working in a university under government grants.

However engine makers either can't or won't make engines big enough to make a plane the size of a 747 or A380 with only two engines. One large plane means one aircrew, one landing slot at the airport and generally larger planes have better fuel economy per passenger mile.

So if you can fill 747s or A380s then they may still make sense compared to a greater number of smaller 2-engined planes.

Not to diminish your point (you were probablly talking about legality rather than feasability) but I expect you probablly could get over 600 passengers on a 777 if you were prepared to throw the safety rules out the window. el-al once put over a thousand people on a 747 http://www.guinnessworldrecord... . If we assume a similar ration of "maximum legal passenger capacity" to "maximum possible passenger capacity" then you should be able to stuff about 742 passengers on a 777.

I disagree with your professor here, each tool you add to the toolbox carries a cost. Especially if you want to maintain the code on a long term basis or reuse code between projects. So you need to strike a balance between the number of tools in your toolbox and the appropriateness of the tool to the job.

It's pretty difficult to avoid C/C++, even if you don't actually code in it will find the interfaces to your operating system are defined in terms of C and possibly C++. If you are programming devices too small to run an OS you will often find a C (and maybe C++ if you are lucky) compiler is the only compiler available. So the question with a new language is not just "is this better for the application than C/C++" but "is this language sufficiently better than C/C++ to justify the costs of adding it to the toolbox and the cost of potential future problems if I want to port the application to a different target or reuse parts of it in an applicaiton for a different target".

And much as I like object pascal I have to say that I think the answer to that question is probablly no.

but in practice what you have in c is more likely

double a = b/c

is that doing floating point division or floored division? you can't tell without going and searching for the defintion of b and c and if you want floating point division of two integer arguments (a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do in many situations) you have to start putting in typecasts. It gets even worse in dynamically typed languages that use derivatives of C syntax.

Unfortunately it seems it's owner has gone to the "charge locked in customers a shitload of money" strategy. That may be profitable in the short term but it's not going to win you many new customers when the alternatives are free. Theres a starter edition whose price is a bit more paletable but whose license terms are most certainly not.

Theres lazarus of course, not sure how that compares nowadays.

And the lesson is if you care about privacy you should avoid storing your data with multinational companies because every nation in which the company operates is a nation that could potentially coerce the company into handing over your data..