How transcendentally awful. Adding lines to a sonnet and not respecting the structure. Was it too much effort to do it in iambic pentameter?

The Beaglebone has (had) this weird procedure where you plug it into USB, then "eject" it to activate a different mode. The first time I installed Beaglebone drivers is the only time it went smoothly. Later on different machines, all sorts of odd devices came up. In the end it was just easier to interact with it over SSH, so I can understand the decision to remove the USB-serial interface.

Having lived most of my life in the Bay Area, including six years in Berkeley, I would agree with your assessment. The City Council attracts some strange characters, and there is a slew of "committees" on topics that range from bleeding heart liberal issues to just plain weirdness. I consider myself fairly left/liberal but sometimes the Berkeley/SF councils seem like they're in a contest for craziness.

You don't want to pick up new interests unless they directly support your life/sanity as a PhD student. Things like learning to cook or getting into fitness, yes. Things like learning Haskell for a great good, picking up Arduino, not so much. Learning R, okay maybe that'll save you time down the road. You only have so many spare cycles for technical stuff, I've found, and any half-started projects will only linger around frustratingly.

If you have a qualifying exam in your program, find out what's on it and get an idea of how difficult it will be. Start studying; it doesn't have to be every day, but it'll do wonders to go into it with confidence.

Ouch. Yeah, wishful thinking doesn't make for a viable product.

As long as we're comparing mysterious numbers*, let's take a closer look.
Future Chip:
38 GFLOPS / 2.7W = ~14 GFLOPS/W
Tesla K20x:
3950 GFLOPS / 235W = ~16.8 GFLOPS/W
Radeon 7970:
3790 GFLOPS / 280W = ~13.5 GFLOPS/W

So I'm not seeing a power advantage here. More questions: does the chip do double precision, and what's the rate? What's the memory bandwidth? Is there support for ECC/scrubbing, which is essential for Big Deal calculations? (The 7970 doesn't support ECC. The Tesla does, and it had better given the amount of money you pay for it.) I'd imagine the Future Chip would be a cheaper solution, but you're starting from scratch with the compilers when everyone else has a major head start.

So while I think a FSF Principles chip is a good idea, pitching it for scientific computing is a stretch.

*Future Chip numbers probably do not include memory power consumption, and are likely a optimistic extrapolation from the dual-core silicon. Radeon result is the unholy combination of AMD's published single-point FLOPS and the max power consumption from Anandtech's review. Tesla numbers are marketing numbers combined with TDP.

It's an OmniVision part, but yes, it seems to be all closed as usual. I've never understood why image sensor documentation is so locked down.

Thanks for the tip about Energia. My old robotics club bought a bunch of MSP430 Launchpads when they came out, but the software side of the equation was definitely lacking, especially for cross-platform development.

I'm also excited about the Stellaris Launchpad and hope that an open source command-line workflow will be developed. Should be fun.

Which is probably a capacitor problem, because both transformer-DC and switching wall warts rely on large filtering caps.

To be fair, the Stellaris Launchpad is obviously a loss leader. The earlier MSP430 Launchpad never really gained a foothold in the hobbyist community despite its low price, so it remains to be seen how TI will manage this time around. Perhaps they don't care.

I thought the bit about intersections was hilarious -- "someone's going to own the intersection, so we defer to property rights and all problems are solved!"

I doubt 60 GHz multipath is much different from 2.4GHz multipath conceptually. If they can build a 60 GHz front-end (and they can) they can build whatever processing they need.

Actually there is still neutrino production at Fermilab. The Tevatron main ring was shut down but the Main Injector is still operating for the NOvA project, a long-baseline neutrino experiment.

http://www-nova.fnal.gov/how-nova-works.html

Space-age materials are pretty amazing, but Fusion-age materials are at a whole different level. I think the community hasn't expressed to the public just how daunting the challenges are. Controlling the plasma is one thing, but engineering the plasma-facing components (PFCs) is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

The so-called "first wall" is the interior layer of the fusion reactor. It has to stand up to neutron bombardment, but it also has to avoid shedding particles into the plasma. For example high-Z materials such as tungsten, molybdenum, and vanadium are interesting for their neutron tolerance, but if atoms scrape off into the fusion plasma they will radiate like crazy (proportional to Z^2) and drain a lot of energy out of the plasma. That's why they are testing a Be coating (Z=4).

On the other hand, you have divertors, which sit in direct contact with the plasma and basically hold it in place so it doesn't randomly hit the wall. These have to withstand a high heat load. I admittedly don't know much about divertors so I will stop there.

There's also the superconducting material in the coils of the tokamak to consider. Of course there's a whole bunch of neutrons flying around. But also but it turns out that a lot of the issues with superconducting magnets are mechanical in nature. The HEP community has figured out how to build SC magnets consistently, but I think the magnets needed for a tokamak are quite different.

There is supposed to be a International Fusion Material Irradiation Facility, part of the ITER project (and basically a consolation prize to Japan), that will provide intense neutron beams for materials studies. But I am not really sure what the situation/timeline is for that given the funding problems ITER has faced.

Mod parent up, op-amp hype is rife in the audiophile community.