That hasn't been true for a while now. Floating point support (in various versions of "VFP") have been standard since ARMv6 (e.g ARM11) and were optional in ARMv5 (e.g ARM9, ARM10, XScale). ARMv7 (e.g Cortex-A8/A9/A15...) has NEON ("advanced SIMD") as an option that most licensees also include. So ARM cores now have pretty good floating point performance too.

Oh, that's right. Hasn't Broadcom licensed any of the Cortex cores yet? No wonder they're able to make them so cheap; they're several generations behind and ARM Holdings mustn't be charging much in royalties.

How far behind? Well each of the Cortex-A9 cores in this OMAP 4-based SoC perform about 2.5 times better than ARM11 at the same clock speed. So each one could get about the same amount of work done as the 700 MHz ARM11 while puttering along at only 280 MHz. The dual-core OMAP 4460 running at 1.2 GHz has about 1200 * 2 * 2.5 / 700 = 8.57 times the processing power of the Raspberry Pi. Hmm... $25 * 8.57 = $214.29. So the $187 price of the PandaBoard ES (subsidised by TI) may be worth it!

You really think these compact machines use sets of chips? Quite the opposite. They're systems on a chip (SoC), often even a package on a package (PoP) i.e multiple chips layered into one package. Now, don't get smart and point out that technically a PoP is a chipset - they're used for packing an SoC with DRAM and flash memory. The multiple functions of a chipset (e.g peripheral interfaces) are all on the one chip of the SoC.

The anonymous poster gave a good answer, so sorry for repeating some of what he/she said: I mean "fake" as in they did everything necessary to get the degree (exams, assignments, lab work, etc) but then publicly denounced the subject and made statements that flat out contradicts everything that they studied/said/wrote in getting the degree. An example is someone getting a degree in geology and then supporting the idea of the biblical flood as a factual event. They'll say that radiometric dating is wrong and that rocks, fossils, and geologic formations were all laid down in the flood about 6000 years ago. They'll use the authority of their degree (often from a prestigious university e.g Harvard) to give credence to all the crackpot "alternative" explanations that are necessary to support their dogmatic beliefs.

The problem is not that they don't "believe" the subject of their degree. One normally gets a degree with the intention of applying the knowledge and/or skills you've supposedly attained. Using it merely as a prop and misinforming the public is bad faith (somewhat ironically). And for the institution there is the problem of reputation - it could easily raise questions about the institution's selection and grading criteria.

Sadly, there are now a few creationists with degrees in things like biology or geology. They manage to fake their way through uni/college and then go on the creationist lecture tour circuit touting their degrees. It's the classic argument from authority fallacy: "I have a degree, so everything I say is factual. God did it. Really. I have a degree."

Studying religion(s) doesn't necessarily mean you have to practise or believe it. In fact, studying religion is quite likely to result in you seeing religion as just mythology and not believing it.

Gee, what about AMD and the AMD64 architecture that they developed? You know, the one that Intel eventually had to adopt (license?) when their 64-bit Itanium didn't quite live up to their expectations of being the next architecture that everyone moved to?

Oh, and ARM Holdings don't make chips. They design architectures and implementations that others license and put into actual chips. The summary wasn't so clear on that, and it's a point that lots of people often overlook.

Your economy is in the crapper, Australia's isn't. We're doing pretty well, partly thanks to our mining sector selling raw materials to China. We also had a recession back in 1987 due (from what I'm hearing now) to bad assets. It had the result of (eventually) clearing out all of those bad assets and leaving our banks stronger than before. So when the GFC hit everyone, we were able to weather it rather well. You guys haven't, and you haven't gotten rid of the toxic assets that caused it in the first place! We're all in for more pain...

Maybe. But the nice thing about lossless encoding is that there's no generational loss. So just transcode your FLAC rips to ALAC to send to your Airport thingies. Still equivalent to the original CD!

It's a pay-off. Yes, it does cost you RAM. But compressed RAM is still much faster than rotating disk, and probably SSD too (for now). So sacrifice some RAM (and CPU) and save swapping quite as much.

The Firewire plug/socket design is very close to that of the Game Link Cable. See this photo on Wikipedia. As for USB - not as much.

Check the forums - people still haven't received this hardware and are cancelling their orders. The main website hasn't been updated in a year. AI showed some neat ideas but have utterly failed to deliver them. In the mean time the big manufacturers have picked up those ideas and are selling slick consumer devices you can actually buy. Sorry AI, you're dead.

Another neat idea they had was having the main system (SoC + Wifi + BT) in a phone-sized module with its own screen that can be removed from the tablet part and used as a (VOIP-only) smartphone. But that's also been tried by one or two big manufacturers since they showed this idea.

As opposed to, you know, figuratively playing the clip of the bus jump in Speed.

My Grandpa got duped by this group a little while ago. He was never very tech savvy and is now going senile. And his vision is going too. The description in the summary is just about spot-on. He found some local PC tech to check out his machine and found it clean. Amazingly it looked like the scammers were simply after the money. He managed to cancel the payment and eventually got new credit cards. IIRC, it took Mum and her siblings a while to convince him to do that though. He thought he was safe because the local tech hadn't found anything on his PC, but they could have taken any of his banking and other details.

If you don't mind going a little DIY, there is the Ubiquiti RouterStation Pro. It's a board with four GigE ports and three mini-PCI slots for wireless cards, and comes loaded with Open WRT. Look around online and you should be able to find a few places selling it with a simple case, power pack, and a wireless card for ~$150 or less. Note, I haven't used it, so I can't speak from experience. It's on my wishlist though :)