Old hardware is your best bet. Anything new would be unsupported by the older 2.2/2.4 kernels, PCIe, SATA, chipsets etc.
*Slot 2 Pentium II or III CPU's and Socket 370 CPU's are perfect. If you want multiprocessor, a Tyan or Supermicro dual slot/board is a good bet but stay away from any board with RDRAM using the i820 or i840 chipsets. They did however realize how big a mistake RDRAM was and Intel made SDRAM->RDRAM bridge chips so those chipsets could use PC-100/133 SDRAM. Tyan made a dual processor i840 board with dual slot 1 and SDRAM using the bridge chips.
*At least 256 meg of ram, 512MB - 1GB is ideal. Make sure your board supports the RAM you have.
*An AGP Riva TNT card or better yet, a Geforce 1, 2 or 3 graphics card. 3D support may not be available*
*Sound Blaster Live!, Ensoniq, Turtle Beach or Aureal sound cards should all work. Though the Sound Blaster Live! is probably your best bet.
*You are also going to need an ATA hard disk (2+GB) and CD/DVD rom drive, I am unaware of any P2/3 board that supported USB booting so you need the optical drive.
*If no onboard LAN card is present (most common scenario) you want a PCI 3Com 3c905B/C, or any PCI card based on the DEC Tulip chipset (21040/21041/21140/21142/21143). Many older Netgear FA311 cards also worked flawlessly, based on a well supported National semi chip that I think was a tulip clone)
*Bonus: decent 19"+ Trinitron CRT monitor. I still have a 21" Sun Trinitron.

Stay away from ISA cards as much as you can. I had a hell of a time getting my old ISA Sound Blaster AWE 64 Gold sound card running under Mandrake back in the day. And that was a "plug and play" card without jumpers. As for why to use Pentium 2/3 boards and not a pentium 4, the p4's after socket 432 willamette generation might not run a 2.2 or early 2.4 kernel. Socket 478 gained things like SATA and PCIe so its a crap shoot. Pentium 2/3 is a guarantee.

*Nvidia hardware 3D support does not appear to be supported on 2.2 kernels. I checked the README for the oldest Linux Driver and 2.4 and 2.6 kernels were mentioned. Have a look here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-ia32-71.86.15-driver.html and check the hardware issues section in the README!

Have fun kickin it old school.

Thank you for that medically astute observation Dr sribe.

I thought the same thing, it should be its own phone. But then it isn't an accessory but a standalone smart phone that you wear on your wrist. But in addition to calls and time, navigation and sports apps would be a great addition. GPS readouts, music player interface, etc.

Taking my phone with me on a bike ride is annoying as I want to travel as light as possible. I only take a bit of cash, drivers license (for id) and phone. It would be nice If I can glance at my watch and see that I have ridden for x miles, current speed, weather and trip time. I don't need maps or graphics. Same would go for distance sports/activities in addition to a pedometer (accelerometers). I can leave my phone in the little pouch on my bike frame and keep it off the handlebars or pocket. It should also be waterproof so I don't care if I get caught in a downpour.

The problem is a cop does not consider him/herself to be a citizen. They are cops, we are citizens. It's an "us vs them" mentality in which the cops are a privileged class of people who think they are the law and sometimes pretend they are above it. That mentality also leads them to form tight bonds in which they will cover for each other and outright lie about anything to keep their jobs and freedoms. And internal panels for review are just as bad often letting cops off the hook for perjury, assault and outright murder with little more than a slap on the wrist.

If you ask me law enforcement should retrain itself (pipe dream, I know but hopefully not) to see itself as citizens who are tasked with enforcing the law. They are not the law, they are not above it and they are subject to the very law they help enforce as everyone else is. They simply have a job to do though it is a very important one.

I prefer idfa as getting the keys with the ammo/weapons made the game pointless.

Have a 250GB Samsung 840 which so far has been reliable. Then again it has only been a year since installing it.

Have a look at this article: https://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte

The Samsung did die an early death but the sample size is too low to be conclusive. Though, this does not worry me at all since my SSD is only for games. Plus I make backups :-)

There are five lights. How many do you see now? - ZZZZAP!

200 rpm is in the slow speed category (300RPM). Those speeds are typically reserved for very large ship diesel engines (search for Wartsila). Even medium speed diesels are not very fast, in the 300-1000 RPM range. Most Diesel gensets for backup, or portable power tend to be high speed units running at 1500 RPM for 50 Hz and 1800 RPM for 60 Hz. I doubt there are any 200 RPM generators unless they are one of those old Listeroid type engines. And those are belt driven to increase the speed to 1500 or 1800 RPM at the generator shaft.

The frequency of a generator is determined by the speed of the shaft and the number of poles in the alternator. The formula is f = (p*RPM)/120, f is the frequency, p is the number of poles, and RPM is the shaft speed of the armature. Also, the number of poles is always even. So a 4 pole alternator spinning at 1800 RPM will yield 60Hz. The same 4 pole spinning at 1500 RPM will yield 50Hz.

At 200 rpm, the alternator would need 36 poles to produce 60Hz or 30 poles for 50Hz. That is a lot of poles and makes construction a bit more complex.

Do you plan to use an x86 CPU in a future design?

I love the idea of a laptop that is a portable hardware hacking platform. Its a trifecta of PC + FPGA dev board + open source design in one portable box. I can carry one system and it has everything I need. But the limitation that seems to hamstring it is the ARM CPU which is unable to run the Xilinx tools. This means we have to lug an x86 laptop to run the Xilinx tools if we want to make changes to the HDL code. That or use a remote server/workstation to build and download the bit files which might not be practical if there is no net connection available. If the Novena had an x86 CPU, we could do all of the development on it.

I would love to see a Novena with a 2GHz quad-core AMD G series SoC. We could then run the Xilinx tools and be able to do all of the development work on the same machine. It has a load of I/O, GPU, supports more RAM (up to 16GB) and features virtualization so we could run Windows in a VM if need be. Power consumption would be higher but no higher than most laptops. The only issue would be connecting an FPGA as I don't believe the G SoC sports a local bus like the i.MX 6. So a more costly Spartan 6 LXT FPGA with gigabit transceivers and PCIe would be needed, not that its a bad thing ;-). If a board like this were available my response would be "Shut up and take my money!"

What's in a name?

Seriously, why would the name turn you off to his work? I know bunnie is a cutesy-wootsy name but it has no bearing on who he is or what he does. Maybe he likes rabbits. Maybe its what his mother calls him. Maybe it was a nickname he earned on the mean streets of Boston during his time at MIT. Either way, who really cares?

Eh, a single piston at 200 RPM would be a bit shaky unless perfectly balanced. Most high speed diesel engines (every road going diesel) typically idle at around 600 RPM. Perhaps a small flat or boxer type 2-4 cylinder with an alternator bolted right to the flywheel.

A better idea would be to have a variable speed engine paired with a DC generator that has a wide operating range. So as you put your foot on the accelerator, the engines speed regulator would increase the RPM's to match the needed current output. As you get up to speed, the computer can slow the engine down to the minimum needed to sustain the vehicle's speed. The benefit would be that the engine only has to work as hard as it needs to and does not need to run at a constant speed.

The only reason generators (we are talking alternators producing mains power) are constant speed is because the frequency is directly proportional to the shaft speed. A 4 pole 60Hz alternator needs to spin at a constant 1800RPM. To avoid this newer small portable generators use inverters connected to an alternator. As the current demand increases, the voltage sags and the computer speeds the engine up. It works great for really small generators (4kW) but becomes more costly after that as you need more/bigger MOSFETS/IGBT's in the inverter. BUT if your target output is DC like an electric car would need, then you don't need the inverter, just the speed regulator.

I am not at all shocked that the Kinect eats GPU power. Machine vision isn't exactly computationally light, there is a lot of math to run on each frame plus the I/O overhead. They have to run those algorithms on something and my guess is they used DirectCompute to utilize the GPU to save money on hardware.

They could use a dedicated DSP in the Kinect but that would drive up the cost of the Kinect making it an overpriced and unappealing accessory. A quick check on Digikey for the Analog Devices Sharc DSP reveals that even a 450MHz chip costs about $32 in quantity. Perhaps there is a higher performance DSP that is cheaper but you also have to factor in the cost of memory for it and other ancillary components. It can easily add $50+ to the hardware cost. I know its a VERY rough guesstimate but it illustrates why dedicated processing in the Kinect is not utilized. Another thing to consider is using the GPU gives more flexibility in designing newer and better algorithms which might be constrained by a DSP with limited performance.

I have always said that if everyone who gets a ticket pled not guilty, the system would collapse under the weight in a matter of days.

I fight every ticket I get because its not only within my right, its also within my best interest. I have fought a number of tickets and beat getting points or having fines reduced. I just recently beat a speeding ticket, I plead to a lesser offence, illegal parking. It only cost me $200 and no points. At an old job a co worker was busted driving a van with improper registration. It was a checkpoint and they were targeting vans. They gave him 7 tickets totaling $1500. He took it to court and got every single ticket thrown out.

Sitting in court you will hear one moving violation after another being pled down to a lesser offenses. Things like no seatbelt and parking violations. They keep the price tag of the moving violation but let you avoid getting points which jack up your insurance rate. They just want your money.

Most of the Apple fanboys out there now are such because, when they were in highschool, apple was the only computer in the school... and therefor the only computer they had access to.

I kind of doubt that. When I was in grade school the standard was the Apple IIx. In high school we had PC's running Windows 3.x or 95. At home we first had a Franklyn Ace 1200 and later various PC's. Yea this isn't the 80's/90's anymore but there is a bit more to this than Macs at schools.

Apple only rose to its current height after the assault of trendy advertisement and product placements of the early-mid 2000's. The iPod was the first piece of hardware that really brought them attention and it was everywhere including being worn by prominent musicians in music videos of the day. Everyone had to have an iPod. It was not only a piece of technology but a fashion statement and a status symbol. Oh you still listen to burned CD's, that like so 90's! The iPod's success along with OSX and sleek product design began the Apple ecosystem of iPod+Mac. The iPhone further cemented that and people to this day prefer to buy iPhones because its about status, not technology. Its only natural for them to buy a Mac instead of a PC.

I will also say that their saving grace was OSX which finally got them out of the OS dark ages and gave people a real alternative to Windows. They marketed it to geeks as a Unix OS (which it really isn't) and even managed to lure in a significant portion of developers. Hell at my brothers place of work everyone has a Mac mini or Macbook Pro for web development. They are embedded in a multi million dollar marketing firm which is all Mac. If they need to test on Windows they fire up VMware. A friend who works for Disney mobile switched to a Macbook years ago. Another friend also does all his game coding in C/C++ on a Mac. Go to any Maker fair and look at how many people are sporting Macbooks. And yes, going back to your original statement, Macs are in a lot of schools but many have Windows servers on the backend running Active Directory and everything else. I bought my old Lenovo Thinkpad running Debian to my brothers work place of work and was laughed at for having a PC until they saw Xmonad on the fucking screen. Then they were like "oh shit you're hardcore", which I really am not but its easy to impress half assed geeks I suppose.

I have been doing some contract work for my brothers place of work. I asked to use of of the Mac books so I don't have to lug my "ugly" thinkpad in. I will say this, OSX is a pretty neat OS. Xcode is free and lets you write just about anything you want compared to Microsoft's Visual Studio which requires a costly license to do any real work (to be fair Apple charges 99/yr for app store publishing but otherwise its free). I can open terminals and do all the unixy stuff I need (scp, rsync, ssh, git, etc) while having a shiny GUI on top that runs most of the software I already use. And the best part is the sane method for software installation. A DMG image containing a single file you drag into the programs directory. Done. At first I thought I was doing it wrong but no it was the way it worked. No files thrown all over creation (Linux) and no stupid idiotic registry (Windows). At one point I almost considered buying a Macbook myself. Apple really did their homework and made a nice, simple OS.

Because it doesn't have the wow-wee factor compared to raw clock speed numbers.