But it is "Open the doors and cool the servers" cold in winter at least, so savings from cooling are sure to be substantial. Coupled with the cheap electricity in summer, and well developed infrastructure, and you can see why it was chosen.
Also, isn't It's a covert penetration testing device (bot) designed for covert use during physical penetration tests. a little redundant? That's the second sentence of the copy, and it doesn't set up a good first impression.
They are in Argentina. If you are lucky enough that they will actually allow you to receive the package at all. Just try to buy a Kindle, once it reaches customs they keep it there and there is basically nothing you can do about it.
To learn how FPGAs work, I'd recommend starting with a cheap Digilent board; see http://www.digilentinc.com/choosing.cfm - You can get a simple BASYS 2 board for under $100, possibly under $50. This board is the Arduino of the FPGA world. There are tutorials from many schools, lots of good documentation, it's a proven design...you can't go wrong with the Basys board. It does sacrifice performance for simplicity, though - Notably, there's no RAM except for what's on the FPGA. Go up to the Nexys for that, but if you're just interested in learning Verilog/VHDL, the Basys is a fine place to start.
To learn how these things work, get a job at a company which uses FPGAs. You'll probably never see one of these parts as a hobbyist.
If you're interested in stuff that's actually like this, and want to start right away, then look for a board packaged as a PCIe card. This will be significantly more expensive; think $500 on the extreme low end. NetFPGA is (http://netfpga.org/) is a good starting point if you're trying to start at a higher level. (Note that the old board is 33MHz PCI and the processor is obsolete; you want the 4x10GBE Virtex 5 part if you're looking for modern tools)
Been there a couple times. Emulating a real Lisp Machine would be a little more complicated than just a Lisp-running processor - you have miscellaneous hardware around it. I was imagining something software-compatible with a Symbolics or LMI with a USB port for keyboad/mouse, an SD card slot and an HDMI output.
I totally agree that developers should not assume that per-pixel content is visible at these pixel pitches.
However, I strongly disagree that the target market should be these individuals, even if they are the typical/average consumer. Sure, there's some cost involved in making the screen this size, but that's no reason to make these people look at pixelated screens.
At this resolution, a tiny, tiny fraction of the population (if that) will feel that the resolution is too low. Don't aim for 50% of the market to feel that the pixel pitch is clearer than they can see and the rest accept it as typical, aim to have 99% of your market rave about the beautiful graphics.
There are a lot more places than just the US that use "at" to refer to a location. Why not just release to anyone who wants to use the English-only app?
We did release it in all of the english speaking countries that we could pick out of the list. The app actually has canned messages as part of the functionality, so I think it'd be pretty rough to use in any country where you'd likely meet with non-english-speaking folks. So question 1) Is there an english speaking country we missed? 2) Are there enough ex-pats-who-meet-with-mostly-english-speakers that you think it'd make sense to launch without native language support?
On the other hand when you are filming something do you really have a scene in a film that is longer than 30 minutes? Realistically your scenes are much shorter so the utility of having a camera that could shoot longer is probably low.
Say a concert? (I don't know anything about cameras, I was just thinking about that same thing and realised there are probably some uses for scenes longer than 30 minutes.)
The vertical control of Apple (most notably) as well as Amazon and Google is almost complete. The author noted that they don't have:
1. Billing/banking control - Purchases on all three go through credit cards, where a portion gets siphoned off.
2. Internet access control - Apple has a lot of clout, and can do basically whatever they want, but they're still limited by the ISPs and telecos.
I really hope to see these companies compete in these industries. However, he left off one more space where they don't compete: at the bottom of the stack, selling silicon. Companies like Samsung and Toshiba can build their own SoCs for the devices they manufacture. If those manufacturers start doing more internally, we might see some impressive and competitive new devices.
I don't think that any of the three are willing to try to integrate billing directly instead of relying on Paypal, Visa, etc. It's a regulatory minefield between all the world governments, and the % that the payment processors take is probably very much worth the costs that would otherwise be taken from keeping such a system working.
I'm sure Apple and Google have explored it, but in the end, found that the current payment processors provide both a level of service(Visa's payment backend, as far as I can tell, has never suffered non-scheduled downtime) and help avoid all the regulatory pitfalls that it's worth the price.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lule%C3%A5#Climate
Looks a little cooler than most of the northern US. "Artic Circle" or not, you're right, this isn't "Open the doors and cool the servers" cold.