Actually, I think it is YOU who are missing the point. Because if an Arduino will satisfy your needs, then by god, use the Arduino! If your project's small enough that a $30 Arduino UNO will be ample for what you want it to do, you'd be downright silly to build your project around one of these, instead.
But you're falling into the same trap that a lot of other people are -- thinking that all embedded systems have the same needs. Not all embedded systems need to be low-power, battery operated, or have no need for a display or a disk controller. Some robots need a lot more processing power than you can cram in an 8-bit micro, especially if you're dabbling in machine vision and autonomous systems. A document scanner (not to be confused with a document camera), laser printer, blu-ray player, and an XBOX 360 are all examples of "embedded systems", too.
The above list showcases another misconception about embedded systems: Not all embedded systems can stand alone. Sure, you could probably build a scanner around an Arduino -- I've certainly had scanners in the last 30 years that were built around much less capable microcontrollers -- but you'd need an external computer to drive the thing and to stitch the images coming off the sensor together into one single page and save that as whatever document format you want. If you just want to connect it to your desktop computer or you've already got a spare PC that you want to dedicate to controlling your project, that's fine. But you can save a lot of space and power if everything were able to be integrated into a single system.
I'm not trying to say that you should go out and buy a stack of these and use 'em everywhere you'd use an Arduino. That wouldn't make any sense. It's entirely possible that you, personally, are never going to contemplate a project that would ever need more than an Arduino UNO, or maybe you'll eventually upgrade to a DUE. And that's okay. Really, it is. But just because YOU don't have a need for something like this, doesn't change the fact that some of the rest of us might.
The $110 UDOO Dual core is most comparable to : RPi x 2 + Arduino DUE = $130 (using your numbers)
The $130 UDOO Quad core is most comparable to : RPi x 4 + Arduino DUE = $210
So yes, if you're just going to compare one embedded board to another, without taking into account their relative capabilities, the UDOO is more expensive. If instead, you compared the boards based on BOTH cost AND capabilities, things look very different.
Sure, for some things an Arduino mini is going to be plenty. But some projects make more sense with a multicore system processor and an I/O subprocessor.
The UDOO has HDMI output and some other features, but it's not so clear to me what the advantage of UDOO is over just plugging a regular Arduino into a Raspberry Pi via USB (and the resulting combo is cheaper to boot).
Actually, the RPi is single-core, and thus you would have to bolt FOUR of them (at $35/ea) together with an Arduino DUE (at $50) to have something comparable to the $130 UDOO Quad, (board-only -- the board packaged with power supply, 2 preloaded SDCards, and HDMI cable is $160) and that mess wouldn't get you the SATA port that's on the UDOO Quad. -- The dual-core UDOO doesn't have SATA.
Except that when you're trying to emulate processors and hardware, trying to spread that across multiple threads makes trying to get clock-cycle-perfect synchronization between the different parts of the emulated hardware gets really freaking hard. And since MAME is all about emulating the hardware as perfectly as possible, that's not gonna happen.It's been discussed at length in the various MAME mailing lists and FAQs.
MAME does use multithreading for graphics rendering, but all of the hardware emulation is single-threaded.
Now, if you were to build an arcade cabinet around this thing, connect the arcade controls to the board's Arduino, and load a sketch that emulates either a keyboard or multiple gamepads.
Oh, and the pcDuino is "close to" this in so far as a board with only a single-core ARM Cortex-A8 can be considered "close to" a board with a dual (or quad) ARM Cortex-A9 *AND* the same Cortex-M3 that's on the Arduino DUE.
I wonder how good their Arduino work-a-like API library will be...
It won't be.... "a work-a-like", that is. The UDOO board is, quite literally, what you get if you take an Arduino DUE and bolt it onto the same PCB as a quad-core ARM system with a SATA port(*), instead of using a USB cable to connect the two. The Arduino code runs directly on the ATSAM3U, just as it would on a "real" Arduino DUE.
(*) The dual-core board will *NOT* have a SATA port.
Netflix wants to switch not because they're looking for DRM. They want to switch because they're looking for a better platform that also supports adequate DRM. Sure, no matter what they come up with, somebody's going to find a way to circumvent it. But the majority of people aren't going to put that amount of effort into it.
Switching to HTML5 will allow them to build a user interface that will work on any system that'll run a modern web browser and stream video content as long as a supported DRM module is available.THAT is the reason that, as of now, the only way to stream content from Netflix on linux involves using WINE. They climbed into bed with Microsoft and moved their platform to be 100% Silverlight, and Microsoft absolutely refuses to allow their DRM interface to be ported to Mono, which means that any system that isn't Windows or MacOS is SOL.
DRM support in HTML5 allows Netflix to be in control of which platforms are going to be able to play their content.
Screwing around with the UI and diving the code to figure out where the assumptions are, whether or not they're valid, how the assumptions can be invalidated, and what unexpected things happen when the unexpected occurs -- For some people, that's the very definition of "a good time."
I'm kinda okay with that. Normally, when I go to bed is when I plug my phone in.... If I remember to plug my phone in. I've got an extended battery installed so I don't absolutely HAVE to charge my phone every night. If they get things set so every device uses the same charging standard and you can have one mat charge all your devices simultaneously, that would be killer for convenience. Get the XXL-sized charging mat and put it on the floor next to the bed. Get undressed, drop your pants on the mat, and when you wake up the next day, your phone (and any other digital device in your pants) is fully charged.
Doh. Forgot to add the note that the Prius was used as the reference vehicle since that's the platform Google's self-driving cars were built on top of.
Buying a $40,000 vehicle to save on $50 taxi rides doesn't seem to offer a good ROI.
Say you're right, that the self-driving car was $40k. According to Toyota's website, **BASE** price for a Prius is $24k. So, if you were even contemplating a new car purchase, you'd only really have to justify the extra $16k for the self-driving option.
$16k at $50/taxi ride is 320 rides that you'd have to eliminate for the feature to pay for itself. If you only use the self-drive feature when you're going out drinking, and go drinking one night per week, the feature pays for itself in 320 weeks. That's 6.15 years. (6 years, 8 weeks) -- Certainly not an unreasonable expectation of the car's useful lifetime. Last several cars I've had lasted > 10 years before they either died or were replaced for other reasons.
Wouldn't it just point to their mobile phone instead, which is contracted to a real name and credit card / money?
Not directly. And in many cases, not at all.
A smartphone that has been connected to a WiFi network will default to sending ALL internet traffic over WiFi instead of the cellular network. So, it'll be just like your netbook.
So, if the RIAA/MPAA wanted to file a "John Doe" lawsuit based on torrent tracker records, they'd see that the public IP used on the connection was on the network owned by, say, AT&T. They serve AT&T with a subpoena, and find out that, at the time in question, that IP was assigned to "Mom & Pop Coffee Shop".
At this point, they either name the owner of "Mom & Pop Coffee Shop" directy in their lawsuit and call it good, or they contact them and demand records on who that IP was assigned to.... Records which probably don't exist. In which case, they'll probably say "fuck it" and name the coffee shop in the suit anyway.
The larger chains that contract to third-parties to manage their customer-pointing WiFi (like Starbucks) may actually retain those MAC address records (and email addresses, if their capture page collects them)
US law requires that cellphone network carriers accept emergency calls, even from non-active cellphones. So if you turn the thing on and it can see a tower, you can use it to make a 911 call. No account, no contract, no cost.
Some charity organizations, like domestic abuse shelters, are giving out donated inactivated cellphones to people who don't have one of their own so that no matter where they are, if they get into trouble, they can at least dial 911.
A little quality time with your search engine of choice should turn up any number of places that you can take your old phones (preferably WITH chargers) to be donated. Hell, you carrier's local storefront probably has a dropbox. -- Just make sure you ask first whether they donate the working phones or just send the whole shebang out to the scrappers.
Having a built-in recovery routine in the bootloader can at least avoid a nasty trip for repair
The recovery environment doesn't have to be built into the bootloader. You just have to be able to bootstrap it via the bootloader. This is, after all, how Android phones work. (At least, on my HTC EVO)
If you go to the company's website and actually look at the board and the better photos on the starter kit entry, you'll note that the cables are all standard 10-pin ribbons. In other words, the same kind of cables that are used for connecting serial ports to motherboards, but without removing one of the wires from the ribbon.
If something more Arduino-like is what you want, look at their Fez Panda-II. It's $39.95 and has Arduino-compatible headers.
Both boards are built around a 72 MHz ARM7 that just happens to have Microsoft's.Net runtime preinstalled. Don't want to use.Net? Rather develop for the bare metal? That's what the JTAG port is for.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I think it is YOU who are missing the point. Because if an Arduino will satisfy your needs, then by god, use the Arduino! If your project's small enough that a $30 Arduino UNO will be ample for what you want it to do, you'd be downright silly to build your project around one of these, instead.
But you're falling into the same trap that a lot of other people are -- thinking that all embedded systems have the same needs. Not all embedded systems need to be low-power, battery operated, or have no need for a display or a disk controller. Some robots need a lot more processing power than you can cram in an 8-bit micro, especially if you're dabbling in machine vision and autonomous systems. A document scanner (not to be confused with a document camera), laser printer, blu-ray player, and an XBOX 360 are all examples of "embedded systems", too.
The above list showcases another misconception about embedded systems: Not all embedded systems can stand alone. Sure, you could probably build a scanner around an Arduino -- I've certainly had scanners in the last 30 years that were built around much less capable microcontrollers -- but you'd need an external computer to drive the thing and to stitch the images coming off the sensor together into one single page and save that as whatever document format you want. If you just want to connect it to your desktop computer or you've already got a spare PC that you want to dedicate to controlling your project, that's fine. But you can save a lot of space and power if everything were able to be integrated into a single system.
I'm not trying to say that you should go out and buy a stack of these and use 'em everywhere you'd use an Arduino. That wouldn't make any sense. It's entirely possible that you, personally, are never going to contemplate a project that would ever need more than an Arduino UNO, or maybe you'll eventually upgrade to a DUE. And that's okay. Really, it is. But just because YOU don't have a need for something like this, doesn't change the fact that some of the rest of us might.
While I will grant that you're right, "doesn't usually" is not the same as "never".
The $110 UDOO Dual core is most comparable to : RPi x 2 + Arduino DUE = $130 (using your numbers)
The $130 UDOO Quad core is most comparable to : RPi x 4 + Arduino DUE = $210
So yes, if you're just going to compare one embedded board to another, without taking into account their relative capabilities, the UDOO is more expensive. If instead, you compared the boards based on BOTH cost AND capabilities, things look very different.
Sure, for some things an Arduino mini is going to be plenty. But some projects make more sense with a multicore system processor and an I/O subprocessor.
The UDOO has HDMI output and some other features, but it's not so clear to me what the advantage of UDOO is over just plugging a regular Arduino into a Raspberry Pi via USB (and the resulting combo is cheaper to boot).
Actually, the RPi is single-core, and thus you would have to bolt FOUR of them (at $35/ea) together with an Arduino DUE (at $50) to have something comparable to the $130 UDOO Quad, (board-only -- the board packaged with power supply, 2 preloaded SDCards, and HDMI cable is $160) and that mess wouldn't get you the SATA port that's on the UDOO Quad. -- The dual-core UDOO doesn't have SATA.
It's also only a single-core A9. Not dual or quad. And it lacks a SATA port.
Except that when you're trying to emulate processors and hardware, trying to spread that across multiple threads makes trying to get clock-cycle-perfect synchronization between the different parts of the emulated hardware gets really freaking hard. And since MAME is all about emulating the hardware as perfectly as possible, that's not gonna happen.It's been discussed at length in the various MAME mailing lists and FAQs.
MAME does use multithreading for graphics rendering, but all of the hardware emulation is single-threaded.
Now, if you were to build an arcade cabinet around this thing, connect the arcade controls to the board's Arduino, and load a sketch that emulates either a keyboard or multiple gamepads.
Take the ODroid and bolt an Arduino DUE onto the same PCB. That's pretty much exactly what this is.
Oh, and the pcDuino is "close to" this in so far as a board with only a single-core ARM Cortex-A8 can be considered "close to" a board with a dual (or quad) ARM Cortex-A9 *AND* the same Cortex-M3 that's on the Arduino DUE.
Which is to say, not very.
I wonder how good their Arduino work-a-like API library will be...
It won't be.... "a work-a-like", that is. The UDOO board is, quite literally, what you get if you take an Arduino DUE and bolt it onto the same PCB as a quad-core ARM system with a SATA port(*), instead of using a USB cable to connect the two. The Arduino code runs directly on the ATSAM3U, just as it would on a "real" Arduino DUE.
(*) The dual-core board will *NOT* have a SATA port.
I think you missed the point. He wants other people to do the work of porting the games. He just wants to be able to play them on an FPGA.
Netflix wants to switch not because they're looking for DRM. They want to switch because they're looking for a better platform that also supports adequate DRM. Sure, no matter what they come up with, somebody's going to find a way to circumvent it. But the majority of people aren't going to put that amount of effort into it.
Besides, from all signs, not even Microsoft takes Silverlight seriously anymore. ( http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/microsoft-shuns-its-own-silverlight-while-embracing-flash-214335 )
Switching to HTML5 will allow them to build a user interface that will work on any system that'll run a modern web browser and stream video content as long as a supported DRM module is available.THAT is the reason that, as of now, the only way to stream content from Netflix on linux involves using WINE. They climbed into bed with Microsoft and moved their platform to be 100% Silverlight, and Microsoft absolutely refuses to allow their DRM interface to be ported to Mono, which means that any system that isn't Windows or MacOS is SOL.
DRM support in HTML5 allows Netflix to be in control of which platforms are going to be able to play their content.
It's not all sadism, although a little of that certainly helps.
As is pointed out in some books, part of the "Hacker Mindset" involves identifying and questioning assumptions. ( eg: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/networking/security/9781593273422 )
Screwing around with the UI and diving the code to figure out where the assumptions are, whether or not they're valid, how the assumptions can be invalidated, and what unexpected things happen when the unexpected occurs -- For some people, that's the very definition of "a good time."
Paste buffer fail.
THIS is the link I thought I was posting -- https://play.google.com/store/search?q=repligo+reader&c=apps
Sorry, all.
I see that several people have suggested the iPad, but I'm astonished that I'm the first to suggest RepliGo Reader. It's pretty damn awesome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guF533z4bdM
I highly recommend watching the demo video
I'm kinda okay with that. Normally, when I go to bed is when I plug my phone in.... If I remember to plug my phone in. I've got an extended battery installed so I don't absolutely HAVE to charge my phone every night. If they get things set so every device uses the same charging standard and you can have one mat charge all your devices simultaneously, that would be killer for convenience. Get the XXL-sized charging mat and put it on the floor next to the bed. Get undressed, drop your pants on the mat, and when you wake up the next day, your phone (and any other digital device in your pants) is fully charged.
It is a patentable subject, but overcoming prior art is usually quite difficult.
Maybe in a country with a sane patent system, but in the US, an estimated 30% of granted patents are duplicates.
Source: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack
While I thought the program was extremely interesting and a good listen, if that sort of thing isn't for you, you can read the transcript. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/default/files/TAL441_transcript.pdf -- the statistic is near the top of page 10.
You're right that patents and copyrights are completely different.
That said, tell me, honestly, that you don't think patents are a way to make an idea "less than free"
Recipes aren't copyrightable. Any recipe you can find is "free as in freedom".
Not quite. Recipes are sets of instructions on how to combine and process ingredients into a finished product.
That makes a recipe a description of a description of a METHOD, which is patentable in the United States.
Doh. Forgot to add the note that the Prius was used as the reference vehicle since that's the platform Google's self-driving cars were built on top of.
Buying a $40,000 vehicle to save on $50 taxi rides doesn't seem to offer a good ROI.
Say you're right, that the self-driving car was $40k. According to Toyota's website, **BASE** price for a Prius is $24k. So, if you were even contemplating a new car purchase, you'd only really have to justify the extra $16k for the self-driving option.
$16k at $50/taxi ride is 320 rides that you'd have to eliminate for the feature to pay for itself. If you only use the self-drive feature when you're going out drinking, and go drinking one night per week, the feature pays for itself in 320 weeks. That's 6.15 years. (6 years, 8 weeks) -- Certainly not an unreasonable expectation of the car's useful lifetime. Last several cars I've had lasted > 10 years before they either died or were replaced for other reasons.
Not directly. And in many cases, not at all.
A smartphone that has been connected to a WiFi network will default to sending ALL internet traffic over WiFi instead of the cellular network. So, it'll be just like your netbook.
So, if the RIAA/MPAA wanted to file a "John Doe" lawsuit based on torrent tracker records, they'd see that the public IP used on the connection was on the network owned by, say, AT&T. They serve AT&T with a subpoena, and find out that, at the time in question, that IP was assigned to "Mom & Pop Coffee Shop".
At this point, they either name the owner of "Mom & Pop Coffee Shop" directy in their lawsuit and call it good, or they contact them and demand records on who that IP was assigned to.... Records which probably don't exist. In which case, they'll probably say "fuck it" and name the coffee shop in the suit anyway.
The larger chains that contract to third-parties to manage their customer-pointing WiFi (like Starbucks) may actually retain those MAC address records (and email addresses, if their capture page collects them)
US law requires that cellphone network carriers accept emergency calls, even from non-active cellphones. So if you turn the thing on and it can see a tower, you can use it to make a 911 call. No account, no contract, no cost.
Some charity organizations, like domestic abuse shelters, are giving out donated inactivated cellphones to people who don't have one of their own so that no matter where they are, if they get into trouble, they can at least dial 911.
A little quality time with your search engine of choice should turn up any number of places that you can take your old phones (preferably WITH chargers) to be donated. Hell, you carrier's local storefront probably has a dropbox. -- Just make sure you ask first whether they donate the working phones or just send the whole shebang out to the scrappers.
The recovery environment doesn't have to be built into the bootloader. You just have to be able to bootstrap it via the bootloader. This is, after all, how Android phones work. (At least, on my HTC EVO)
If you go to the company's website and actually look at the board and the better photos on the starter kit entry, you'll note that the cables are all standard 10-pin ribbons. In other words, the same kind of cables that are used for connecting serial ports to motherboards, but without removing one of the wires from the ribbon.
If something more Arduino-like is what you want, look at their Fez Panda-II. It's $39.95 and has Arduino-compatible headers.
Both boards are built around a 72 MHz ARM7 that just happens to have Microsoft's .Net runtime preinstalled. Don't want to use .Net? Rather develop for the bare metal? That's what the JTAG port is for.
It was the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, previously known as S.E.A.L. Team 6. That said, even if they had been Marines, you could still call them Navy and be (technically) correct. The Marines are under the Department of the Navy.