I agree about the arduino and batteries, but this board is a bit different.
It uses external memory which takes more power. It uses javascript which could take much more power. And the wifi also might not be low power. So it's not clear yet how low power it is.
When you can buy something that looks like a decent(512MB, 4.5",dual core) android phone[1] at less than $100, and many similar models are coming from china , why bother with this phone ?
You've never used Android 4.3 on 512 MB of RAM, right? I have and it is unusable. The base OS and the base apps, like the stock Android browser do run, but nothing is left for other apps. A minimum of 1024MB is needed.
Also that phone is $100 in the US. To get the price in EU or most other markets multiply with an amount between 1.5 and 2
An android phone without 'Google Apps' does not offer much more than FxOS in my opinion. I test drove an AOSP build of android for some time, without Google Play and other 'non-free' Google apps, and there's not much you can do.
Very few application vendors provide .apk's to install outside of Google Play and they don't provide them from other markets available internationally. f-droid has some applications but not a huge amount.
Basic functionality like Facebook, Twitter, 'sharing' photo's to social media,etc don't work if you can't install those apps.
What I ended up doing was installing Firefox (Mozilla provides apk's and it's available from f-droid) and using web apps.
Firefox OS on the other hand provides all this functionality out of the box.
Because it's not the price that is at the heart of the debate. FxOS is an attempt at an alternative to the current mobile OS behemoths in iOS and Android and their anti-consumer features and policies.
Not in the current stage of FxOS, since Gaia (the UI) seems to fail to deliver anything 'new' to a plain consumer.
For FxOS to really stand out in developing countries it would require a lot more than what it is providing now. In my opinion, since we are partly already doing communications for free trough Facebook and Twitter, something like P2P connections between the FxOS devices does sound doable for me, both for text and voice. In addition, if you could implement something like Twilio for actual calls it would strip down costs both for mainland and international calls. For reference, where I live calls trough Twilio are six to sixteen times cheaper than what my carrier can provide. This way, you would also avoid the need to sign a contract with a carrier. I believe that this form of carrierless phone would appeal to the crowd the FxOS is trying to reach.
I'm not trying to be rude but do you know anything about FxOS and its goals and architecture?
1. Does the current admission by the US government of comprehensive NSA spying on the entire internet interest plain consumers? No, it doesn't. "Plain consumers" don't understand the implications nor the technology behind it. So to ask if a "plain consumer" would be interested in FxOS is to miss the point. The "plain consumer" does not have the knowledge to judge the issue and Mozilla is not trying to become a billion dollar corporation to rival Apple or Google.
2. The architecture of FxOS is completely different for a reason so IMO, no, it wouldn't make sense to fork Android.
I'm a huge fan of Tesla, but GM/Chrysler wasn't just about the vehicles. It was about the employees, the economies in that part of the country, and the ripple effect that killing off American auto-makers would have had to every industry they touched.
I truly hope what Tesla is doing becomes the future of the American auto-industry, but the nation was in no position, at that time, to facilitate that transformation in a way that was logistically, economically, or politically acceptable.
I've had my kit since March the novelty has yet to wear off.
Off the top of my head, I'd think that comes from two main things
1.) Developers are still exploring how to take advantage of the hardware - figuring out what works best or how things like binaural audio, a kinect sensor or a wiimote to add to the experience.
2.) It's a necessarily focused experience. The fact the people refer to being "in" a Rift demonstrates this. This is unlike other games or technologies that might be played alongside an IRC session or a with a movie on in the background.
Encryption is basically a tool against wiretappers and men in the middle. But what if you don't fully trust your users, and fear they'll try to add exploits to your software ?
Another high level effort in security is meredith paterson's "language theoretic security"[1] can help you code secure protocols, to fight against this problem.
There's also a tool to help implement it called hammer[2].Not sure if fully developed yet.
Amazon currently plays a dual role; both a traditional retailer and a 3rd party logistics business, and they'll probably be quite good at both of those, see the kiva purchase for example.
I think they could probably beat ebay in this kind of game if they'll be interested.
Political change on it's own won't work. They will still keep the infrastructure in case they need to spy on someone(with a court order). But if they have the infrastructure , conceptually it's just a press of button again to full blown illegal surveillance.
there has been infrastructure to read snail mail contents for 200 years. Doesn't matter, the US Gov isn't routinely reading snail mail because of politics. I think he's right, make it a political issues. Actually, more: make it political issue, encryption issue, hosting issue, social issue (denied nsa contracting recently based on Snowden), I mean total war - make their life as difficult as possible using all means possible. As long as it's legal of course.
Doesn't really matter. To read a regular mail you just need so much more in legal terms compared to reading somebody's email that it's just not worth contemplating no matter what. It's not like with emails where after 6 months they automatically are open to the Government sniffing. Because of the political reasons it's not even worth contemplating -- look -- you need regular court order, not some BS whatever rubber-stamp.
With laser enrichment, you can do enrichment in a typical house with typical power consumption, so it seems easy to hide.
But building the tech today is quite complicated, and hopefully that stays that way in the future.