A computer though, I have no idea how most people could last 5 years.

I'm typing this on a work issued 4.5 year old HP Probook 6455b. I've got an AMD Turion mobile processor and it wasn't fast when I got it. Two years ago, I tried to trade it in for a faster model. IT slapped some piece of crap slow SSD in it and refused me a new machine.

It's not fast. I can do some engineering work on it (CAD, statistics), but most of the time it runs Firefox and Chrome to get to Google Apps where the corporate IT infrastructure runs. For what modern work often is, 5 year old hardware is sufficient and I've decided the SSD is "fast enough" and it's not work arguing with IT.

Another angle: even if you don't need money, there are plenty of engineers who do - google can afford paying for these things full sticker.

Google is not avoiding paying one team, but several. Not only are they avoiding dealing with exclusively a firm at random, who, lacking financial competition, is likely to build in a decent profit margin, but they're soliciting from several teams who understand the nature of the competition. Regardless, they're catching a price break. Successful companies often get that way by avoiding paying money they don't have to. In this way, they're not ending up with an "average" design, and not only are they getting the "best" design, but they're getting a whole pile of designs. Any chance they see to pick design elements from a few of the "almost best" ones to make the "best" even better, that's something they can leverage.

I'm still puzzled by the economics of these prize driven challenges. Look at the winning design: (pdf) [littleboxchallenge.com]. R&D costs of it (including expertise, etc) well exceed $1mil. And having a lot of teams working on their designs... Assuming that there are at least 3 other good teams means then expected payout is laughable $250k...

The $250k is only a small part of the payment. Look at the biographies at the back of that PDF. This team isn't doing it for the cash, they're doing it for the publicity. They might want to get Google to conduct business with them more regularly, perhaps even manufacturing these boxes for them, but they really want the wider engineering market to see what they're doing as innovative. This isn't some cheapskate bully firm screwing an individual graphic artist by offering only publicity for their hard earned work (and nobody cares about it), this is GOOGLE. This publicity is worth something. In their portfolio, they can now put "Winner of the Google Little Box Challenge" and they'll shove that in any prospective client's faces. I don't know if this is going to help them seal any deals or get higher profit margins, but I'd expect it's one of those two.

Wasn't this a feature in the 60 minute Viper commercials in 1994? I seem to remember that among the absurdities it had the ability to launch a flying drone type thing from the trunk.

A friend of mine had a similar problem, and found he couldn't get a computer monitor big enough. He ended up getting a 40" LCD TV with a HDMI input. It's on his desk at what I'd consider an uncomfortably close distance, but he swears by it.

I have a stupid question... If the fat mass fell by a mean of 0.3 kg, and the fat free mass fell by a mean of 0.6 kg, what's making up that fat free mass? Water would be an easy culprit, but does that indicate that less sugar resulted in less water retention, or that the subjects also decreased their sodium intake concurrently? I think it's easy to blame sugar for some of the effects, but I'm not convinced it's the only variable that was changed.

Like everyone else, I think the in-car navigation is done better by anyone else. Tom-toms, Garmins, or in my case, Waze on my phone.

What if the in-car entertainment system had a set of APIs that could be controlled by an external device like a phone? That external device could then have a variety of different apps that could use the APIs, even set up several competing apps to take advantage of them. If car companies write off the tiny incremental income from the people who use the services, or even offset it by having their own branded apps cost money, perhaps they could concentrate on making those APIs secure and decrease the impact of successful hacks?

A car company that was able to do that successfully would have quite a selling point to people who were in BYOD and security.

In windows multiple desktops was always a nuisance

If you're referring to what I think you are, have you checked out VirtuaWin? It's not perfect (specifically with PowerPoint -- don't leave it open in one desktop and open an existing document in another -- all other apps I've used have worked well), but it's a fine product with excellent utility.

Every now and again, we read about some average Joe who discovers a new object. If I could cough up $300 and have my computer watch my telescope every night, all night, and compare objects to known objects, I'd do it. If there were 1,000 systems throughout the US, 10,000 throughout the world with cheap $300 telescopes, I would think there would be some progress toward making sure big objects were seen.

I understand that big, fancy telescopes with top of the line imaging is where all the deep space science is done, and I know that cheap $300 telescopes won't see any new planets, stars or exoplanets. I'm just thinking that a distributed network wouldn't have cloudy nights and could classify the night sky in near real time.

Those of us behind corporate firewalls thank you.

Has slashdot really become a means for tech companies to inject free advertisement by a simple blog post made to look like real journalism?

Why, did you not get enough :CueCats and i-Openers? This is hardly the first Slashvertisement, and it's the only one from this company that I've seen.

That core was basically the Intel Atom of PowerPC architectures.

I agree with all of your sentiment, and most of your statements, but this one I have trouble with. Atom is basically an original Pentium, slightly modernized. To get that out of PowerPC, you'd need to start with a 603 or so, and bring it into a 2005 age. 603 migrated to 750 and 7400. But since the 7400 was essentially a 750 with a vector unit taped to the side, the 750 would suffice as an Atom-esque core. The die size of the 750 class machines in 90nm supports this.

The PowerPC core in the PS3 and 360 was derived from Power4, a server class processor, with bunches of stuff taken out and re-pipelined. The core was made in-order, the pipeline was brought down to allow the frequency to be amped up. The area of the PowerPC core in the Cell is about the same as the entire die (core and cache) of a 750 in the same 90nm technology.

Pistols are also the best self-defence weapon

Dogs are the best self-defence weapon. Their barking scares away countless intruders. They're armed even when you're not home. THEY GO AROUND CORNERS. They can be recalled, do not kill instantly, and can quickly recognize friends by smell.

20 years ago, my dad and I came home from a camping trip a day early, but late at night. If my mom had been armed, she would have shot at both of us. Instead, the dog woofed to wake her up and then went to go greet us.

4.0 - great
2k - great

I could argue on both sides about 3.5 and 3.51

First OEM cars DONT BLIND PEOPLE. It's the dipshits that own hondas and pickup trucks that do aftermarket HID retrofits from ebay that blind people. REal stuff doesnt do that.

Consider for a moment a road that's not perfectly straight and flat. Those OEM HID lights that are so bright and so focused on the road ahead of the car as if it were on a freeway with no slope or turn are now going to be pointing in other places. I regularly drive on back roads of New York to and from work, and there's a few places where I can tell the fancy cars because of the lights that are way too bright until I get on the same level or a straight section.

Yes, after market HID installs are a problem, but they're easy to pick out. OEM HID have different problems, and denying it underscores your tight focus on a limited terrain.