I upgraded to the Nexus 4 after owning a Galaxy Nexus and I have to say I feel mixed about the changes. As an Android device, the N4 is definitely faster and nicer to use. But as a phone, I found two important issues were a step back - the max volume of the earpiece and the strength of the vibration. The latter, in particular, is so weak on the N4 that I usually miss texts and other notifications. Instead I get to be yet another obnoxious person with a loud ringtone to avoid missing calls and texts. :(
For the problem with missing SMS notifications, there's software in the play store that'll periodically trigger an alarm if there are unread texts / unanswered phone calls. You can usually also use a different alarm sound than the default for these, so you can use something discreet for the original text arrival message, and then something more obnoxious for the repeated alarms. The best thing ever.
The one I use is "Missed Call Reminder", but there are plenty of others.
The strength of the vibration is ridiculously low, I've never felt it vibrate when in my pocket, and even when the phone is out on a surface the vibration is easy to miss.
Project member here. I was disappointed with the way the PCWorld article described it as an "open source PC". MinnowBoard is really an open hardware embedded platform. If you're looking for a small form factor PC, the NUC is definitely the way to go. MinnowBoard is for embedded applications or product development where interfacing with custom hardware (whether I2C sensors, or custom FPGAs through PCIe, etc) is needed.
I can't believe you guys price it at 199$, totally unacceptable as embedded platform. at 1/4 of the price, there are plenty of ARM solutions. Why even bother?
If the board doesn't meet your requirements, then don't use it. The MinnowBoard is part of an ecosystem of boards that offer different feature sets at different prices. One differentiator the MinnowBoard has is that its SATA and Gigabit ethernet are powered by PCIexpress, so you're definitely going to see performance reflect that. Likewise, we offer PCIe lanes through our expansion connector, so the MinnowBoard could be interfaced with high-speed hardware (think FPGAs) for all sorts of interesting applications.
I find the comparisons of MinnowBoard with ultra low-cost embedded boards like RasberryPi to be pretty silly. The MinnowBoard is not Intel's version of a RasberyPi. The media may play this up just to generate conflict and to set up a straw man comparison, but I hope people are capable of seeing through that.
> but I hope people are capable of seeing through that
You and me both, but sadly I don't think it's going to go that way in the general tech-enthusiast media without a pretty significant "nudge" from you folks and maybe a few others. Unless you've got some experience with performance-demanding applications in embedded systems, you have no idea why RPi/Minnow is an Apples/Oranges comparison.
But everyone understands price! All they're seeing is two tiny boards, one produced by David that sells like hotcakes, the other produced by Goliath. Goliath's is late enough to be called a reaction to David's move, and it's nearly six times the price...
It depends on what you're doing. If you're making an internet toaster, go buy an arduino. If you're doing anything CPU intensive, or if you're not familiar with embedded systems tooling, cross-compilation, Yocto or similar build systems, Atom >> ARM.
Honest question, no snark - Why not gut out an elcheapo laptop's mainboard (Atom or AMD Brazos) and dedicate a usb port to an Arduino or something. You get the power of x86 along with the expandability (i.e. GPIO, SPI, I2C, etc) of a microcontroller chip.
I've done sort of what you suggest professionally on projects where design decisions are driven largely by per-unit cost. If the SoCs that do everything you need aren't cheap/available, go with the best-fit main microprocessor to handle the heavy lifting, and one or two cheap micros to fill in the missing pieces. It's also a good approach for when a part of your solution needs good strict real-time software.
However for low-volume and/or personal projects, dev cost/time often trumps hardware cost and heterogeneous systems have a whole host of secondary challenges. Specific to your recommendation, it's a more complicated power architecture, more components to enclose, more tooling to worry about (software and hardware), and I have to worry about how to synchronize and communicate between the SBC and the micro/arduino.
It's worth an extra $100+ to be able to focus my limited free time on solving the problem I want to solve rather than on "shaving yaks."
It all depends. Are you running off batteries, or wall power? Does your system have idle time that it can take advantage of for power savings? Were the boards in question designed with features to allow for low-power sleep, etc? Are you working with analog? Do your boards have low noise supplies, or do they expect a low noise input source? Are you doing any high current or high voltage switching? Is power-coupled noise an issue? Are we doing any switching of mains power? Is safety an issue? Should we use isolated supplies? If so, how much isolation do we need?
Software folks, myself included, tend to drastically underestimate the complexity of power design...
it's a 1GHz single core CPU from 2010. While Atom might have some IPC advantage over ARM, I doubt that as a whole it would be competitive against high-perf ARM boards, like the ODROIDs (up to 1.7GHz quad-core, beginning at 89 dollars).
[Edit: In the embedded world "as a whole" rarely makes sense. Design takes a very top-down approach where only specific features of a hardware platform (those necessary for the OEM product/solution) are considered for value comparison. This is why most SoC vendors have so damn many chips in each of their SoC product families.]
It depends on the problem you're solving, how much time/effort you're willing to dedicate to your solution, and what type of solution you choose.
If you have an embarrassingly parallel problem that optimizes well for ARMv7, you're 100% correct. If you're working on a more serial solution utilizing libraries optimized for SSE, Intel cache heuristics, Intel pipelining techniques, or similar (many of which don't exist or have equivalent siblings on ARM), I'm betting on the single-core 1GHz Atom pony.
While I have great respect for Arduino, if you are looking to do something with networking, go buy a BeagleBone Black (or other cheap ARM linux board).
I was using a bit of hyperbole to illustrate the spectrum of choices. I think if you're building an internet toaster, you might want to reevaluate your priorities.
My only disappointment is that there's no option for a 64-bit Atom. Yes I know that would mean a 2GB option instead of 1GB would likely be required, but doing OS development is way easier on a 64-bit system.
EPIC is a reputable organization, and have filed a federal lawsuit to help stop this practice. I just sent them a donation, and encourage others to do the same.
When I moved to Portland, OR I was amazed with how social the tech community is here. Informal coding gatherings spring up regularly throughout the city, and there are two reliable "pdx hackathon" nights you can show up and hack on interesting projects with interesting people.
Drat. If the earlier rumors I had heard were true (unlocked phone for $199), I was thinking they were committing to a smart strategy to decimate Nokia and their N900 phone. Guess that's not the case.
It would be nice if you spent some time explaining why you believe selling at $199 would be "smart". Google already gives too many things away for free. Selling a phone that might be able to compete with the iPhone at $199 almost certainly means selling at a loss. To what end? I can't imagine that search queries can make up for the remaining $100 or $200 that it costs to manufacture the phone. Unless you believe "decimating Nokia" is an end itself, I'm curious why you think it would be a smart move.
The $199 was never the attraction for me, and seemed unlikely. $300? Ehh... Maybe. I always figured it'd land in the $500 range, and this isn't too far off.
The real carrot for me was the idea of a prepaid $29/mo data only plan, which I actually thought was believable. T-Mobile already offers pretty much the exact same plan ($1/day) for prepaid Sidekick users (voice is 0.15/min.) I barely use voice (~100 minutes/mo), and if I could drop my unlimited text/internet/450 voice plan for something that was only $29, I could definitely learn to live with the quirks of VOIP on a mobile handset and the loss of MMS.
Honestly, even if you threw me in a contract to get the phone at $199, as long as data was that cheap I'd gladly sign up for two years the same minute I was sending Verizon their $350 good-bye letter.
I don't use my phone as a phone and am sick of having to pay so much for minutes I just don't use. The cost of my voice plan before data and text is around $40/mo, which works out to me paying .40/minute for what I use. Even if I used real voice instead of Google Voice I'd be saving money.
Google has a lot more at stake than just profits from this particular phone. They are interested in establishing the Android platform as a major player on smart phone devices, and are coming into the game with a pretty weak position given Apple's current dominance. To be able to make headway into the market they need every advantage they can get, and neutralizing Nokia's N900 offering would help prevent another player from complicating the market for them.
Not to mention at that price they'd be dealing Apple a major blow. I figure they have the cash, why not use it for something like this. I admit this is all idle speculation on my part, and that Google may or may not have a lot at stake in the success of Andriod.
Technically impressive as it is, the N900 is only being sold to early adopters and thus its market share is a rounding error. Competing against that is a pretty low bar.
I know for this particular example the problem is tightly related to California's state budget problems, but the astronomical increase in the cost of a college education over the past generation drives me nuts.
It seems like this is one area where market forces can't do their job, because almost no one seems willing to forgo paying the exorbitant price of a college education, so there seem to be no pressures for prices to decline or remain stable. Instead we've changed the culture so most of this generation starts their working lives with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. If you're not willing to put up with this, you could very well be shutting yourself out of the middle class. It's not right.
I'm not exactly Mr. Free Market, but as far as I can tell the market appears to be functioning as intended.
People place a very high value on what they perceive to be a good college education, and this value is typically how much student debt they can acquire. There are well-known ways to significantly cut the cost of your college education: going to in-state schools, and conducting the first two years of your education at a community college. Despite this many people shun in-state institutions (unless they're in a state like California which has numerous highly regarded public universities, but then again they're all hard to get into), and even more laugh the the notion of Jr. College, determining it only fit for misfits teens and continuing adult education Note: I don't agree with that assessment, but it serves to illustrate the fact that college has become so closely tied to social status, making pricey schools all the more desirable.
As for what's driving tuition upwards, it's probably the fact that the modern University has become a luxury resort. They've got an array of clinics, career councilors, psychologists, paid tutors, entire buildings designated for non-athletic student recreation, bike and jogging paths, numerous social groups, reasonably well-maintained facilities and immaculately manicured campuses.
Further driving costs upward, besides state budget shortfalls for public universities, is the fact that they are very aggressive at handing out scholarships to attract top-notch students, along with the significant amount of marketing that is conducted to get everyone else to shell out big-bucks for their undergraduate programs.
And when you look at study after study that shows you're going to earn significantly more over your lifetime if you get a college education, is it any surprise people are willing to eat the high upfront costs? Paying $50,000 to a student loan for an additional $10K+/year in earnings potential seems like a bargain to me. Granted, it's not always going to work out for the best, but hey you gotta take risks to get ahead.
Another possible reason for tuition increases is Baumol's Cost Disease ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumols_cost_disease ), in which the relative cost of providing a service grows rapidly because it hasn't had productivity improvements. When the amount of time needed to teach someone how to compose an essay hasn't changed since before 1960, it's not surprising that it's gotten more expensive compared to the price of microwave ovens.
Since most of our economic activities experience greater productivity growth than we've seen in education, it's not surprising that educational expenditures are growing faster than inflation. I'm hopeful that this will change as web-based education goes mainstream.
the cost of college is also highly subsidized. That's not exactly a functioning market, although the market part of the system is responding to those non-market incentives. That's probably why college has turned into a luxury resort. If you aren't paying the full price, why not go to the school with free rock concerts and a yoga room?
I think a possible solution might be to require that if a college gets government subsidies, it must make it's services separable. That means students get the option to not pay for (and not participate in) student activities. Of course, there should be no government subsidies for non-essential services.
Once again, this is where government intervention into the market is causing adverse side effects. If there wasn't a student loan system, their would be no way for students to finance their education and thus colleges would have to cut costs to become affordable. When students can borrow and pay whatever exorbitant prices prices will continue to inflate as everyone bids up the price.
Additionally, we are seeing the costs of goods that are produced in America increase (education, healthcare, housing) because they do not have the returns to scale as other industries.
And on the flip side, having a college degree isn't any kind of guarantee of good pay or job stability, so college students are getting screwed on both sides. In another 10-15 years people are going to start seeing just how bad a bargain this has been for their overall prosperity and the education bubble is going to burst painfully.
The price of college will keep "correcting" itself upward as people continue to see it as necessary for non-labor employment. College isn't a prerequisite for competence. Once people come to their senses about this, it will drop back down. Until then, the price will continue to go up -- people see a decade of debt as being worth the price of perceived employment opportunities.
In a sense, you're not buying an education so much as the prestige of the institution that grants your degree, so it makes perfect sense that higher-priced universities are perceived as a superior 'product'. I'm sure most university presidents see it that way - hence the emphasis on research, rather than instruction.
I live in Portland, and bikes are huge here. The most common complaint I've heard about electric bicycles is that they enable new, relatively unskilled riders to wreak havoc in heavy bike-traffic situations. This mostly involves complaints of passing too close to other riders.
This really isn't a problem with electric bicycles themselves, but with rider education.
I will also say there is definitely a sense of smugness from some riders against electric bicycles, but I'd say there are at least as many people who support the concept and want to see more people out on bikes.
Regular bikers tend to be somewhat snobby both towards other bikers, and any other types of traffic they may encounter (walkers, rollerbladers, cars etc.) So the fact that some Portlander-bikers are being annoyed isn't saying much, and I doubt there's enough of them to be a problem.
This article raises the question of how to balance one's life as a technologist or someone immersed in technology. I thought I'd share one tip of something I do. I only own a prepaid cell phone, and I keep it off most of the time unless I'm expecting a phone call. This allows me to have it for emergencies and to sync up when meeting people at bars and whatnot on weekends. But I can avoid the downsides of being constantly interrupted or getting involved in the obsessive culture many people seem to have with their cell phones (constantly texting or talking when they're on the bus or in lines).
I use computers and the internet most hours of most days, and I have plenty of offline activities and social groups I am involved in. If taking a weekend day off away from your email to go hiking is something you know you'll be "punished" for when you return (in terms of email load or friends'/employers' expectations), then it may be time to work out a plan to reduce your online commitments.
Same here - I waste a lot of time with the internet, including watching some TV online.
It's said that alcoholics and drug addicts have a clear path to getting clean - completely cut out the addiction from your life. But people who have problems over-eating can't make as simple a change to solve their problem. After all, you need to eat to live.
The internet is kind of like that for me - it's something I need to do work on and learn from, but is something I frequently over-use.
