bubuga

> Or you can just purchase an Ampy Move (www.getampy), an external battery pack powered by kinetic motion.

That gadget is way expensive for what it does (around $90) and the reviews are less than stellar. Furthermore, some reviews state that it takes around 60 hours of running to get the ampy move to store a measly 1800mAh.

For $1 you can purchase cell phone chargers that take standard AA batteries. For a bit more, but still a fraction of the cost of a Ampy move, you can purchase a rechargable cell phone charger.

I don't see a single category or use case that the ampy move works better than the alternatives, which cost a small fraction of its cost.

> I don't understand the real value in this. They take a bunch of BGA parts + passives and put the dies in a bigger BGA that approaches the same PCB area?

> (...)

> Only thing it seems to do is enable quicker prototyping by avoiding having to get things like the DDR memory traces correct. And a shorter BOM.

My guess is that this sort of bundling may help in terms of driver support, as it provides a very specific bundle of hardware components and features.

Perhaps someone knowledgeable on the subject can chime in on the subject.

> Or get a phone charger that runs on AA batteries

This.

There are cellphone chargers on ebay that cost $1 and take AA batteries, which are quite capable of charging any phone that supports the USB charging interface. I bought one to use when I travel abroad and it works very well.

From TFA:

> After evaluating the Eurofighter Typhoon, Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet and Lockheed Martin F-35 as Denmark’s next primary fighter jet, the country’s government is recommending the F-35 “unequivocally” as superior in “strategic, military, economic, and industrial aspects.”

So, the F-35 was compared with the Eurofigher Typhoon and the Super Hornet.

This means that the "every other fighter jet" refers only to the eurofigher and the super hornet.

Well, there are plenty more fighter jets out there.

> The problem to me seem to be that Git is too powerful. It has many features built in and my guess is that the average dev uses a tiny fraction of them.

I don't understand why that is supposed to be considered a problem.

Everyone has their personal itch, and scratching that itch is more than enough to actually do your work.

No one needs to memorize a whole dictionary before getting to speak with someone.

> The XKCD comic is true, because for most people downloading a fresh copy is far easier than working out how to use git properly.

If a local repository is broken, would it be better to:

a) spend hours trying to debug it, pinpoint the problem, come up with a solution, pray it doesn't affect remote repos

or

b) download another copy?

> What we need is a GUI app for controlling git.

Why?

I mean, I don't oppose anyone investing his own time developing yet another GUI interface for git.

But the thing is, a command line gives you much more control and is actually quicker to operate than any GUI app.

> Etc. Why did I have to Google around for it?

Googling for something is more convenient than going through the man pages, and Google is awesome at providing you with the best content associated with your query.

The highest voted question regarding git, «how do you undo the last commit», is the very first example listed in git's man page on git commit.

Convenience always trumps availability.

That blogger really hates subversion with a passion.

> Can someone please tell me why are they calling it a coup?

“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell”

They are calling it a coup because it's the only way they found to yell like hell, and in the process weave a story that helps them mobilize their base.

Calling Dilma Rousseff's impeachment a coup is more than enough to acknowledge that the analysis lacks any semblance accuracy and boils down to partisan rhetoric.

If both houses of the national congress of Brazil, whose members were democratically elected and represent the people of that nation, support and greenlight the impeachment process based on widely known corruption charges, and if Dilma Rousseff's government fails to secure minimal backing among all elected representatives to cancel the impeachment process (she only needed 1/3 of the votes), it is patently obvious that this is the democratic process working as expected, and as specified in Brazil's constitution.

> It's sad to see that AMD could compete in single core performance until Sandy Bridge (i7 3930) came along.

Well, an AMD FX 8320E sells for less than 110€, while the Intel Core i7 3930 sells for over 500€.

Sounds like AMD has a very competitive offering, both in terms of price and price/performance ratio.

> But on a decent quality XLR, you can re-solder 20 times, drive a truck over, yank on it until the cable snaps, ... and it will still work beautifully ;-).

Same for a humble headphone jack, if we're dealing with one which has been designed with that purpose in mind. Just unscrew the metallic cap, unsolder the cables, solder them again, you're good to go.

The XLR's robustness may actually be a problem. When an accident occurs, it's better to just break the 10€ cable than the 1k€ equipment it's connected to.

> These days it is all plastic, so he had to go out of his way to get tools and parts the last time they did anything to their home.

The main difference between plumbing and other de-facto standards like the mini jack is that plastic components offer some important advantages over the metallic ones, such as price.

It's only natural that obsolete standards are replaced by newer standards when the newer versions offer important improvements.

William Shakespear didn't saved as many lives as any physician of the time. Yet here we are, 400 years after his death, commemorating the man and his work.

Different people contribute differently to the betterment of mankind. That doesn't mean some contributors need to be censored away from popular culture just because you perceive their contributions to be not as important as others'.

> Is this not the thundering herd problem?

There's a wikipedia article on the thundering herd problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem

The article needs a little love, though.

You clearly have no clue about what you're talking about. You obviously don't understand what a model is, let alone how and why it's used, and you clearly don't understand the role models play in decision-making processes.

Furthermore, you are completely oblivious to the reality and application of models in general and economic models in particular.

If you are entirely oblivious to the issue you're trying to discuss, it's pointless to continue discussing it with you.

> I agree that everyone in power today is Keynesian. I also agree that "Keynesian" is not what Keynes wrote.

You hit the proverbial nail in the head.

Sometimes it appears that the people in power picked up Keynes' book and instead of reading "borrow and spend away in recessions, cut spending and pay the debt during economic expansion", they just read "borrow and spend away" and that was it.

> Only significant if you ignore 1933 to 1978.

You do know that between 1933 and 1978 there were a couple of incidents that ended up influencing the world's economy more than basic economic models, don't you?

I mean, I'm sure we can agree that an event like WW2 alone, with the shift from peace-time to war-time economy experienced by the leading economies of the world, does influence things a bit more than the theoretical effect of some economic systems.

> With big data you don't need models, you have actual real time information about the entire system.

Your comment makes absolutely no sense.

Models are just means to predict the future based on observations made in the present and/or in the past.

The available data, in this sense, serves only two purposes: serve as the starting conditions to analyze how scenarios may evolve within a given degree of accuracy, or to build correlation models to help analyze scenarios with a given degree of accuracy.

A model is a tool that tells you how systems evolve and lets you infer what you can expect out of them in order to make informed decisions.

> You also have means of using that data to make live predictions that can change all the time.

Again, this is absolute nonsense. Models are used to make decisions based on how things are expected to be years and decades into the future. It makes absolutely no sense to claim that you can tell how things will be in the immediate future if you're trying to make decisions based on what will happen over the following decades.

> Just because history says that "free markets" worked best, does not mean that this is true any more.

Holy non-sequitur, Batman. You sure wanted to shoe-horn that little gem in there.

Furthermore, free-market isn't or will not be any more or any less true than what is right now or was in the past. The free market is just a specific theoretical definition of an economic system. It establishes conditions, draws relationships between factors and their effects, and provides a tool to model the evolution of economies.

Some assumptions followed in the definition of a free market don't hold in some real-world economies, but it is already quite thoroughly established that the evolution of real world economies does agree quite well with the evolution of economic models based on free market principles if governments ensure that these economies follow basic free market principles.

> It was historically a fact because you did not have big data

This is absolute nonsense.

Making a presence does influence the tactical decisions made by the enemy.

Here's a simplistic example. If the enemy isn't aware that your side has CAS, he may believe that it's a good idea to attack your side in a certain way. He may get killed in the process, but that attack may result in some losses on your side.

If, on the other hand, the enemy is made aware of your CAS, he may opt to play it safe and not risk his assets by attacking you that way.

It's like when you play chess: some pieces control some areas of the board without doing anything. Just by being where they are, they restrict the opponent's actions.

>Actually, the A-10 is "broke" in the sense that it can no longer perform its mission in a modern air defense environment.

I'm sure that the A-10 can still perform its mission in a modern air defense environment, mainly due to the fact that the bulk of today's missions involve an enemy with limited resources, limited industrial capabilities, and limited technical skills.

> The current fleet is also old and wearing out.

I'm sure the US is quite capable of putting up a military aicraft program for a mark 2 version of the A10 thunderbolt, one which is focused on tackling the maintenance/cost issues of the current version and even increase the reliability of the whole airframe. The last four decades in the aviation field were very fertile with regards to technical progresses.

> On the opposite end of the spectrum you can get an AC-208 'combat caravan' for $150k in non-sequential bills and a late-model hyundai sonata (KBB value $15k).

Even considering that hypothetical scenario, there's also the cost of training everyone throughout the logistics chain and required to get the plane operational and in the air.

If you lose a peasant, you lose a peasant. If you lose a knight, you also lose the squire, the page, etc etc etc.

> losing 10 soldiers isn't cheap.

It's cheaper than losing the plane, the pilot, the resources spent in training, maintenance, and preparation of the whole logistic structure.

Not to mention the asset and its capabilities. After all, a grunt with a gun is less of a threat than a plane carrying an entire arsenal.

> Con: you'll have to use vendor chargers. > > Pro: you won't be able to use these:

The con (which is really a con) represents a restriction to your freedom of choice and, ultimately, the creation of a monopoly.

The pro, on the other hand, is irrelevant. If you wish to risk your gear connecting crap components to it, feel free to do so.

What I want is the ability to actually buy and use a component without being strong-armed by the manufacturer to comply with their price-gouging. If risking having to brick the product I bought with my own cash if I intentionally purchase crap chinese knock-offs then that is the price to pay, and a price that I'm willing to pay.

> In other news, the next firefox release is going to have W^X

That's nice and all, but if the people behind firefox keep on taking away the features that convince people to use it (Panorama, for starters) then these little accomplishments don't accomplish much.

> The article does not mention the cost of these houses which would seem to be the major point of information.

I don't know if it's possible to provide an accurate number. Although it's possible to specify material costs, the cost of construction work is mainly driven by labor cost and the organizational capabilities of each contractor. Mexico's government could provide the info on their own contracts, but that wouldn't be very representative of what they could cost in, say, the US, where wages are far higher.

> I think these developments can market themselves a lot better if they drop the terms "low income"/ "low cost"/"social housing" and adopted something like "young people homes" or "starter homes".

These projects are mainly driven by the need to cut costs right down to the bone, even if this means that the housing projects are, say, far from luxurious.

The main reason is that this sort of project is targeted at local and central governments who feel the need to spend a part of their budget in social housing projects, whose main goal is a mix of improving people's housing, eliminate shanty towns, serve as the first stage of an urban renewal project, and even plain old populist propaganda to get them reelected.

Therefore, the target market is a set of organizations with deep pockets whose decision is mainly political and is driven by cost-benefit analyses, but ultimately aren't the ones who will actually use the end-result.

Therefore, as cost is king, these social housing projects tend to be located in regions whose real estate value is very low, mainly due their sub-par location. As the people who will end up living in these housing projects, due to their low income, essentially don't have any better alternatives than living in a substandard house in a sub-par location (because, given an alternative, they would live elsewhere) then that's exactly the sort of people who will end up living in these homes.

> Still beats AMD's high-end FX-8350 processor in all cases, amusingly enough.

A brand-new AMD FX-8350 costs around $160, while a Intel Xeon e5 2670 is sold for $1560 (newegg prices)

The Xeon isn't 10x the processor that the AMD FX is. Not by a long shot.

I upvoted the submission, mainly because Debian doesn't get the publicity and the recognition it deserves. Debian deserves a little love once in a while.

I wouldn't read too much into the article. It's just a blog post of a dude reporting what he saw when he recompiled his code with a different compiler.

> The "really lazy desktop app" choice is Qt, not Visual Basic.

Qt has nothing to do with laziness. It's simply a well thought-out GUI toolkit which looks good and doesn't require tons of boilerplate code to get a hello world app to work.

Nowadays, if other GUI toolkits aren't as user-friendly as Qt, someone has dropped the ball.