Of all the things we do at Raspberry Pi, driving down the cost of computer hardware remains one of the most important. Even in the developed world, a programmable computer is a luxury item for a lot of people, and every extra dollar that we ask someone to spend decreases the chance that they’ll choose to get involved.
Instead, malfunctions lasted for hours. Cars were smashed, and faulty machinery fell several stories to the ground. Sometimes vehicles were stuck for so long that garage operators had to pay for customers’ taxis.
“It was clear that the garage was not ready to be open to the public,” said Russell Galbut, the managing principal at Crescent Heights, the property developer, which has sued two manufacturers over the botched garage.
It’s perhaps even more impressive when you consider that its modest specs—a 3.8-inch display, 3G and Wi-Fi networking, and a 3-megapixel camera—surpass those of the original iPhone, which was referred to in the tech press at the time as the “Jesus phone.”
By exploiting the graphics-rendering software that powers sports video games, researchers at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have developed a system that automatically converts 2-D video of soccer games into 3-D.
As for Krieger, he still remembers Bieber’s digital ID in the database that underpinned Instagram—6860189—because Bieber’s account was so often the source the latest problem. “I still know it by heart” Krieger says. “So many of the early scaling issues had to do with him hitting things we’d never hit before, so I got good at knowing it was him just by sighting his ID.”
Kaomoji are, of course, Japanese-style emoticons, first imported to U.S. internet shores by anime forum posters. Why use kaomoji? They’re more elaborate and more expressive — and also more practical: You don’t need to tilt your head to the side to read them.
The Jeep was made for war. In 1940, the impending U.S. involvement in World War II pushed the army to call for a new vehicle suited for battle. And so the Jeep, a works-in-progress vehicle, constantly evolving on its open patent, tailoring to changing demands of conflict, was born—and then shipped off to war.
More blurry is its etymology. Jeep legend is seeped in heavily contested mythologies, but one roots the name in a slurring of GP, or General Purpose, which may have been the original name of the military-design vehicle.
What stands out for Catmull is that nearly all of the critics devoted only a sentence or two to its breakthrough computer animation. “The rest of the review was about the movie itself,” Catmull recalls. “I took immense pride in that.”
In the capital, young people are turning to informal learning spaces such as Dev F, with its philosophy of “rather than develop technology, we develop people”, to join hackathons, meetups and code-clubs as part of their social infrastructure. Here, coding is a way to meet people – and code is their social media.