The Orange Pi PC isn't a bad board if one doesn't need video-encoding, -decoding or accelerated X. The CPU is speedy enough, there's a GPIO-header for connecting stuff, the 3 USB-ports it has are actually connected to the SoC instead of going through an internal hub (the other Orange Pi - models use a hub, the OPi PC doesn't) and the ethernet-port is also connected to the SoC instead of being a USB-device -- considering the device's price those specs might be good enough for a lot of things. I haven't tried mainline-kernel on my OPi PC yet, but I am under the impression that everything else works now except for ethernet and GPU, and the ethernet is under work. The SoC has mainline u-boot support now, though, so it has an advantage over RPis in the sense that you do not need a single binary blob to boot and use the device.
The downsides include the usual stuff: it uses a Mali GPU, so accelerated X is outta the window and it looks like there never will be an open-source Mali-driver, video-encoding is more-or-less missing entirely and video-decoding is work-in-progress via a VDPAU-implementation, but due to unaccelerated X it's not speedy and suffers from timing-issues.
The Odroid uses that god-awful Mali GPU for 3D, which means there isn't and will never be an open-source display-driver, you'll just be stuck with an unaccelerated framebuffer for X. The RPi is at least doing some progress in that area, including being able to run actual OpenGL with the open-source driver instead of only GLES. Basically, the Odroid is great if you only want to do headless stuff with it, but the RPi has a brighter future if your needs include graphics.
No, where did you read that the ESP8266 only has 1 GPIO? That's totally incorrect, it has 11 GPIO and you can have 2 more if you get one of the modules where two of the pins going to the flash - chip are cut or you cut them yourself for a total of 13 GPIO - pins. There is also one analog input pin. Also, you can run a web-interface on them, if you want to.
I have several ESP8266's myself and they are fabulous little devices and perfect for uses like this because they are so small, they use very little power and the built-in WiFi means you don't need any dongles or anything like that to make network-connected sensors and controllers. I have a small 2.8" colour LCD with touchscreen connected to an ESP with temperature/humidity - sensor, a PIR motion - sensor and a few more sensors in my use, and it works great.
I was just thinking of the use of the word "illegal" there and then I happened to read your comment; which country's laws are the ones that are being talked about here and is this actually illegal in China or not? Did those Israeli researchers report this practice to any authorities or are they just fishing for attention, but not actually doing anything about this otherwise? Also, if they did report this stuff to authorities and if it was illegal in China how likely is it that anything will be done and what sorts of consequences could one expect?
Well, true, I certainly don't disagree with you there! The comparison is rather silly, but maybe Timothy was hoping to look smart by name-dropping "nerdy" things?
You can actually run the ESP8266 at 160MHz too just fine, no stability-issues whatsoever, and that gives it a whole lot more grunt. The lack of ADCs and I/O-pins and such are a bit of a downside depending on what one is planning to do with it, but then again, one could just use I2C - based extenders for those if one needs them. I have a PCF8574 8 - pin I/O - expander, for example -- if I don't need interrupts on those pins all it takes is the two pins for I2C on the ESP8266, if I need interrupts it's one more pin used. Also, the beauty of I2C is that one can chain multiple I2C - devices on the same bus, like e.g. with the PCF8574 I mentioned one could extend the amount of I/O - pins available by up to 128 pins, all just by using two pins on the ESP8266's side!
It's the much larger amount of RAM and built-in WiFi that makes the ESP8266 so great for so many things, they are fabulous little devices for low-power, WiFi-connected needs!
I think everyone who's even remotely into hobby electronics knows what the ESP8266 is. They would also know that it has a tiny TINY microcontroller which can only run rudimentary code on it and puts it more in line with a WiFi dongle than anything else on your list.
It is capable of a whole lot more than what you give it credit for, see e.g. https://youtu.be/SSiRkpgwVKY?t... for a very neat example.
What do you mean? There's nothing stopping you from using all four cores. Stability is also fine if you use e.g. Armbian where the voltages and clocks have been brought back into Allwinner's reference - range, or you modify the fex - files yourself to do that. As I said in the other comment, Steven et. al. are selling and advertising OPis based on heavily-overclocked and -overvolted specs and that's where the stability-issues stem from.
Actually, Orange Pis were heavily overclocked and overvolted by Steven and whoever are behind the designs, bringing the clocks and volts down to within the range designed by Allwinner fixes stability - issues and thermals -- no need to underclock or undervolt. That said, they are selling Orange Pis and advertising with the heavily - overclocked and overvolted specs, which is kind of dishonest.
Can they instead get direct communication to the ethernet port, not that shitty solution over USB?
It's not just the ethernet-port that is over USB, but it and all four of the USB-ports are all connected to a single, internal hub, meaning they all share the 480Mbps bandwidth. That's kind of crappy, would be nice to have it more like e.g. my Orange Pi PC is, ie. it has 3 USB-ports that are all fully capable of the 480Mbps -- no internal hub, whatsoever, and no sharing of bandwidth -- and the ethernet-interface is actually connected directly to the SoC, too. Though, unlike you, I would definitely want built-in WiFi and I heartily welcome that in RPi3.
As an aside, I wonder if RPi3 will finally bring HEVC-support with it. It's one of those things I care a lot about.
They have just recently tried removing cancer via modified cells, forcing the immune-system to remove the cancer-cells: http://arstechnica.com/science...
There are some downsides to this at the moment, but they are trying to perfect the technique. The takeout that someone should take from this, however, is that the researchers have shown it's possible to create a "vaccine" against certain kinds of cancers -- that is a MAJOR fucking step forward.
Even CPU bound, ffmpeg does several hundred frames per second when encoding, as do all the front-ends that use it.
Bullshit. Depends totally on the codec and settings. Just try encoding, say, 1080p H.265 with veryslow - preset and tell me about all those hundreds of FPS you're getting.
The instructions for using NVENC are wrong, though. NVENC does not support specifying constant rate-factor with -crf, it only does CBR or VBR, and VBR can be done either by specifying bitrates or quantizers. NVENC does work fine, they just need to fix that information to actually show how to use it correctly.
Who are you to say keyboard doesn't have to move? I move my keyboard all the time, even though I use it on the desk. Wireless devices are much more convenient since there is no need to fiddle with cables when you have to temporarily move something around.
I've seen a mere couple of desktop-mobos with BT in them, and those only in advertisements. None of the desktop-mobos I've actually gotten my hands on have had BT integrated. Then again, I don't live in fantasy-land.
OpenWRT's hardline attitude towards binary blob drivers has left it without official support of modern wifi on any router.
Oh, really? How come e.g. my 802.11AC NBG6716 is working fine? Oh, right, because there are actually quite a few modern WiFi-routers out there that don't need binary blob drivers to work!
As far as I know, DD-WRT is run by some small, slow company called NewMedia-NET GmbH -- it's not really a community-project like e.g. OpenWRT is, and they don't really have much of an incentive to keep things properly updated. A vendor here and a vendor there pays them a few bucks to get DD-WRT running on their hardware, but after that it's mostly just abandoned. OpenWRT is already in the progress of moving to 4.x - series kernels, but I don't know how far away the next release is, and those guys seemingly try their best to keep all supported hardware up-to-date.
I'm still running 3.4! Though, that's only because the drivers for the device aren't available on a newer kernel, not because I want to be running such an old kernel:/
I don't even get the point of bots for something like Hearthstone. I can at least understand WoW or Diablo which have a lot of grinding built in to the game play, but what the hell does a bot even get you in a game like this? The only thing you can do (that I'm aware of as I don't play either) is play the card game.
As far as I know, it's mostly just ego-boosting and stems from immaturity -- they get to feel superior to the other players by beating them and they sometimes record clips or take screenshots of their "accomplishments" to brag with to their friends. It's easy to dismiss the fact that they are using cheats, I've met many a cheater online over the years who keep deluding themselves with claims like "I only cheat because it's possible, I don't even need cheats and I would do just as well without because I am just so skilled!" There's not much you can say when a person 100% believes their own lies.
Personally I don't think they should ban the people who use the cheats though. Instead, just put them in a special area where they only get to play other cheaters or they programmatically lose 90% of their games and just end up raging harder.
Yeah, I actually find it surprising that Blizzard hasn't done this already. Just lock all cheaters on cheaters-only servers without telling them and depending on the person and the circumstances it may even take them a while to notice what happened.
I was surprised to see the claim that Hearthbuddy also belongs in this list. Nowhere, _nowhere_ else can I find anything to back up that claim and neither does the "article" provide any details. I do not play Hearthstone, I do not use bots (I actually totally despise cheaters and that's 90% of the reason why I never play multiplayer-games in the first place), but I am aware of quite a bunch of people who use the various bots by the company that is behind Hearthbuddy (they have bots for WoW, Diablo, Hearthstone etc. etc.) and these bots are popular because they're actually pretty functional when compared to the competitors. The company would be shooting themselves in the foot if they were spreading malware with these as the bots are not free, you have to pay for them, and if they did include malware people would rather quickly stop buying.
My point here is that I can't help but wonder if Hearthbuddy is mentioned because of pressure from Blizzard as a way of trying to scare people away from it, not because it actually harms you, your wallet or your PC.
This is why Android isn't really Open Source in spirit. It is as closed as Apple is.
Hardly. Even on a non-rooted device all you have to do is tick "Allow untrusted sources" in the settings and then you can install stuff outside of Play Market as much as you like. Play Market is closed, yes, but it's also a separate thing and not required for using an Android-device. iPhones and iPads and the likes, as far as I know, require doing a lot more than just ticking a single box to allow installation of things from outside of Apple's AppStore.
Oh, I'm sure all the people that know me would be absolutely terrified when they saw that.....I've spent most of my day surfing Hackaday, esp8266.com, Github, Orange Pi - forums and loading all sorts of specsheets. At least when they saw that I've been browsing Slashdot several times a day they'd permanently block me!
Depends on the content you'd use it to serve. If you were thinking of serving dynamic webpages, like e.g. PHP-generated content, it would barely be useable by one client at a time, but for mostly-static content it'd work just peachy. The AR9331 is a single-core SoC and 64MB RAM doesn't allow for much caching to be done, so it would be a lot more limited than your smartphone.
Slashdot Mirror
you can have broads from 12 euros (orange PI H3)
The Orange Pi PC isn't a bad board if one doesn't need video-encoding, -decoding or accelerated X. The CPU is speedy enough, there's a GPIO-header for connecting stuff, the 3 USB-ports it has are actually connected to the SoC instead of going through an internal hub (the other Orange Pi - models use a hub, the OPi PC doesn't) and the ethernet-port is also connected to the SoC instead of being a USB-device -- considering the device's price those specs might be good enough for a lot of things. I haven't tried mainline-kernel on my OPi PC yet, but I am under the impression that everything else works now except for ethernet and GPU, and the ethernet is under work. The SoC has mainline u-boot support now, though, so it has an advantage over RPis in the sense that you do not need a single binary blob to boot and use the device.
The downsides include the usual stuff: it uses a Mali GPU, so accelerated X is outta the window and it looks like there never will be an open-source Mali-driver, video-encoding is more-or-less missing entirely and video-decoding is work-in-progress via a VDPAU-implementation, but due to unaccelerated X it's not speedy and suffers from timing-issues.
The Odroid uses that god-awful Mali GPU for 3D, which means there isn't and will never be an open-source display-driver, you'll just be stuck with an unaccelerated framebuffer for X. The RPi is at least doing some progress in that area, including being able to run actual OpenGL with the open-source driver instead of only GLES. Basically, the Odroid is great if you only want to do headless stuff with it, but the RPi has a brighter future if your needs include graphics.
No, where did you read that the ESP8266 only has 1 GPIO? That's totally incorrect, it has 11 GPIO and you can have 2 more if you get one of the modules where two of the pins going to the flash - chip are cut or you cut them yourself for a total of 13 GPIO - pins. There is also one analog input pin. Also, you can run a web-interface on them, if you want to.
I have several ESP8266's myself and they are fabulous little devices and perfect for uses like this because they are so small, they use very little power and the built-in WiFi means you don't need any dongles or anything like that to make network-connected sensors and controllers. I have a small 2.8" colour LCD with touchscreen connected to an ESP with temperature/humidity - sensor, a PIR motion - sensor and a few more sensors in my use, and it works great.
I was just thinking of the use of the word "illegal" there and then I happened to read your comment; which country's laws are the ones that are being talked about here and is this actually illegal in China or not? Did those Israeli researchers report this practice to any authorities or are they just fishing for attention, but not actually doing anything about this otherwise? Also, if they did report this stuff to authorities and if it was illegal in China how likely is it that anything will be done and what sorts of consequences could one expect?
Well, true, I certainly don't disagree with you there! The comparison is rather silly, but maybe Timothy was hoping to look smart by name-dropping "nerdy" things?
You can actually run the ESP8266 at 160MHz too just fine, no stability-issues whatsoever, and that gives it a whole lot more grunt. The lack of ADCs and I/O-pins and such are a bit of a downside depending on what one is planning to do with it, but then again, one could just use I2C - based extenders for those if one needs them. I have a PCF8574 8 - pin I/O - expander, for example -- if I don't need interrupts on those pins all it takes is the two pins for I2C on the ESP8266, if I need interrupts it's one more pin used. Also, the beauty of I2C is that one can chain multiple I2C - devices on the same bus, like e.g. with the PCF8574 I mentioned one could extend the amount of I/O - pins available by up to 128 pins, all just by using two pins on the ESP8266's side!
It's the much larger amount of RAM and built-in WiFi that makes the ESP8266 so great for so many things, they are fabulous little devices for low-power, WiFi-connected needs!
I think everyone who's even remotely into hobby electronics knows what the ESP8266 is. They would also know that it has a tiny TINY microcontroller which can only run rudimentary code on it and puts it more in line with a WiFi dongle than anything else on your list.
It is capable of a whole lot more than what you give it credit for, see e.g. https://youtu.be/SSiRkpgwVKY?t... for a very neat example.
What do you mean? There's nothing stopping you from using all four cores. Stability is also fine if you use e.g. Armbian where the voltages and clocks have been brought back into Allwinner's reference - range, or you modify the fex - files yourself to do that. As I said in the other comment, Steven et. al. are selling and advertising OPis based on heavily-overclocked and -overvolted specs and that's where the stability-issues stem from.
Actually, Orange Pis were heavily overclocked and overvolted by Steven and whoever are behind the designs, bringing the clocks and volts down to within the range designed by Allwinner fixes stability - issues and thermals -- no need to underclock or undervolt. That said, they are selling Orange Pis and advertising with the heavily - overclocked and overvolted specs, which is kind of dishonest.
Can they instead get direct communication to the ethernet port, not that shitty solution over USB?
It's not just the ethernet-port that is over USB, but it and all four of the USB-ports are all connected to a single, internal hub, meaning they all share the 480Mbps bandwidth. That's kind of crappy, would be nice to have it more like e.g. my Orange Pi PC is, ie. it has 3 USB-ports that are all fully capable of the 480Mbps -- no internal hub, whatsoever, and no sharing of bandwidth -- and the ethernet-interface is actually connected directly to the SoC, too. Though, unlike you, I would definitely want built-in WiFi and I heartily welcome that in RPi3.
As an aside, I wonder if RPi3 will finally bring HEVC-support with it. It's one of those things I care a lot about.
They have just recently tried removing cancer via modified cells, forcing the immune-system to remove the cancer-cells: http://arstechnica.com/science...
There are some downsides to this at the moment, but they are trying to perfect the technique. The takeout that someone should take from this, however, is that the researchers have shown it's possible to create a "vaccine" against certain kinds of cancers -- that is a MAJOR fucking step forward.
Your reaction to them implementing a feature that people had asked for is to...suggest moving to something else?
I am getting about ~180 FPS when using NVENC to encode 1080p H.265 on a Geforce GTX 970. YMMV.
Even CPU bound, ffmpeg does several hundred frames per second when encoding, as do all the front-ends that use it.
Bullshit. Depends totally on the codec and settings. Just try encoding, say, 1080p H.265 with veryslow - preset and tell me about all those hundreds of FPS you're getting.
The instructions for using NVENC are wrong, though. NVENC does not support specifying constant rate-factor with -crf, it only does CBR or VBR, and VBR can be done either by specifying bitrates or quantizers. NVENC does work fine, they just need to fix that information to actually show how to use it correctly.
Who are you to say keyboard doesn't have to move? I move my keyboard all the time, even though I use it on the desk. Wireless devices are much more convenient since there is no need to fiddle with cables when you have to temporarily move something around.
I've seen a mere couple of desktop-mobos with BT in them, and those only in advertisements. None of the desktop-mobos I've actually gotten my hands on have had BT integrated. Then again, I don't live in fantasy-land.
OpenWRT's hardline attitude towards binary blob drivers has left it without official support of modern wifi on any router.
Oh, really? How come e.g. my 802.11AC NBG6716 is working fine? Oh, right, because there are actually quite a few modern WiFi-routers out there that don't need binary blob drivers to work!
As far as I know, DD-WRT is run by some small, slow company called NewMedia-NET GmbH -- it's not really a community-project like e.g. OpenWRT is, and they don't really have much of an incentive to keep things properly updated. A vendor here and a vendor there pays them a few bucks to get DD-WRT running on their hardware, but after that it's mostly just abandoned. OpenWRT is already in the progress of moving to 4.x - series kernels, but I don't know how far away the next release is, and those guys seemingly try their best to keep all supported hardware up-to-date.
I'm still running 3.4! Though, that's only because the drivers for the device aren't available on a newer kernel, not because I want to be running such an old kernel :/
I don't even get the point of bots for something like Hearthstone. I can at least understand WoW or Diablo which have a lot of grinding built in to the game play, but what the hell does a bot even get you in a game like this? The only thing you can do (that I'm aware of as I don't play either) is play the card game.
As far as I know, it's mostly just ego-boosting and stems from immaturity -- they get to feel superior to the other players by beating them and they sometimes record clips or take screenshots of their "accomplishments" to brag with to their friends. It's easy to dismiss the fact that they are using cheats, I've met many a cheater online over the years who keep deluding themselves with claims like "I only cheat because it's possible, I don't even need cheats and I would do just as well without because I am just so skilled!" There's not much you can say when a person 100% believes their own lies.
Personally I don't think they should ban the people who use the cheats though. Instead, just put them in a special area where they only get to play other cheaters or they programmatically lose 90% of their games and just end up raging harder.
Yeah, I actually find it surprising that Blizzard hasn't done this already. Just lock all cheaters on cheaters-only servers without telling them and depending on the person and the circumstances it may even take them a while to notice what happened.
I was surprised to see the claim that Hearthbuddy also belongs in this list. Nowhere, _nowhere_ else can I find anything to back up that claim and neither does the "article" provide any details. I do not play Hearthstone, I do not use bots (I actually totally despise cheaters and that's 90% of the reason why I never play multiplayer-games in the first place), but I am aware of quite a bunch of people who use the various bots by the company that is behind Hearthbuddy (they have bots for WoW, Diablo, Hearthstone etc. etc.) and these bots are popular because they're actually pretty functional when compared to the competitors. The company would be shooting themselves in the foot if they were spreading malware with these as the bots are not free, you have to pay for them, and if they did include malware people would rather quickly stop buying.
My point here is that I can't help but wonder if Hearthbuddy is mentioned because of pressure from Blizzard as a way of trying to scare people away from it, not because it actually harms you, your wallet or your PC.
This is why Android isn't really Open Source in spirit. It is as closed as Apple is.
Hardly. Even on a non-rooted device all you have to do is tick "Allow untrusted sources" in the settings and then you can install stuff outside of Play Market as much as you like. Play Market is closed, yes, but it's also a separate thing and not required for using an Android-device. iPhones and iPads and the likes, as far as I know, require doing a lot more than just ticking a single box to allow installation of things from outside of Apple's AppStore.
Oh, I'm sure all the people that know me would be absolutely terrified when they saw that.....I've spent most of my day surfing Hackaday, esp8266.com, Github, Orange Pi - forums and loading all sorts of specsheets. At least when they saw that I've been browsing Slashdot several times a day they'd permanently block me!
Depends on the content you'd use it to serve. If you were thinking of serving dynamic webpages, like e.g. PHP-generated content, it would barely be useable by one client at a time, but for mostly-static content it'd work just peachy. The AR9331 is a single-core SoC and 64MB RAM doesn't allow for much caching to be done, so it would be a lot more limited than your smartphone.