Most ARM SoCs advertising high clock speeds are actually advertising max turbo speeds - just because that TV stick is saying it's running at 2GHz doesn't mean it gets there often.
Turbo is a great thing, but it's not for long workloads, it's for "race to sleep" workloads.
This is a $5 SoC, so you've got to expect some reduction in specifications given the rest of the board, and the large amount of support for the ecosystem.
People have said this new Pi is overclockable to 1100MHz too, more seems likely (very early days).
The A20 has half the A7 cores that this new Pi has.
The good thing is that this new Pi will force all the competitors to bump their specs a little where they are weaker. Maybe the next Cubieboard will use an A80.
But having a board where everything just works and is well supported is well worth it when your free time is valuable.
Broadcom have released the register level specs of the VideoCore IV, and an open (ARM space) driver is being worked on.
But tbh the VideoCore IV was designed from the ground up for embedded firmware use like this, it's a full CPU as well as a GPU, and it takes load off of the CPU. However now there are four cores it's less of an issue, and of course it makes the GPU very upgradeable.
Quad-A7 isn't too bad for $35 in my opinion. But the 12 GFLOPS GPU isn't very exciting (I was hoping that the RPi upgrade would also upgrade this aspect).
I suspect that Broadcom have given up on VideoCore development in the face of the competition, and will be licensing GPUs in the future from ARM/Img, etcc.
If you read the article's comments, The Register broke the NDA by releasing the article before the announcement.
As a result they got all the facts wrong, and made you look bad.
Btw, the Neon support in this chip makes it 20x faster at code that makes use of it (multithreaded video processing, for example), which is a nice boost.
I was hoping for native SATA or USB3 or a faster GPU, but it's $35 and the most supported ARM board on the planet...
It's the same in the UK, except chip and pin is the default and has been for around eight? ten? years already. I don't know if the magstripe is really used anymore either.
It's quaint seeing a foreigner (American) try to pay for goods with a card, and have to go through special procedures for the signature style payment.
Yeah, but the process of reducing "body frequency" is rather terminal - however ghosts can indeed walk through walls. Interacting with physical matter is a problem though - poltergeists must be able to change their frequency on demand.
Indeed it is quite a shame that they didn't take the opportunity to show off these capabilities with these very boxy buildings!
However ultimately buildings are going to have straight edges and not many curves, so a capability for curved structures may not be as useful as it first sounds. On the other hand I'm not an architect full of curved wall ideas thwarted by straight wall building practices...
But half the cost and half the time (and not using loads of wood) is certainly useful.
Using a machine which measures a staggering 20 feet tall, 33 feet wide and 132 feet long, the team at WinSun started with a basic CAD drawing which they fed to the massive 3D printer that was able to fabricate the structure piece-by-piece using a specially formulated and patented ‘ink’. The ink, which includes construction waste such as concrete, fiberglass, sand, and a special hardening agent, is an incredible way to recycle general construction materials — not to mention it is flexible, self-insulating, and resistant to strong earthquakes
Of course, this is recycled PR that might not be entirely truthful. The recycling of construction waste is a nice sounding feature. So it isn't the same printing material as the US based housing prints.
The company then placed beam columns and steel rebar within the walls, along with insulation, reserving space for pipe lines, windows and doors.
Well, it is "3D printing", albeit fairly coarse printing of large scale components. It's still a lot faster and cheaper (lower manpower requirements) than the alternative.
Also the "printer" can do the work on-site (eventually), so there's no need for the factory aspect. It can print the components for an entire house within a day. Assembly is cheaper than construction. It might not be printing a finished house, but to expect that would be silly right now.
As for finishing the walls, most houses require a plastering step anyway, even over drywall. The rough finish is actually better for that.
I hope the 3D printed structural components include ducting for water, electricity, etc.
Apart from not suggesting IntelliJ, this comment is pretty much spot on.
However typically he'll be integrating with his client's database, so he doesn't get to pick that - however Java has leading support for different databases and a decent ORM in Hibernate for abstracting away the database specifics.
In addition if you want to go funkier, but remain compatible with the JVM, you've got Clojure, Scala, Jython and more.
If the clients don't want Java on their systems, they will still be okay with it on their servers. Nothing simpler and more standard that a Java webapp in a Tomcat, and a Javascript front end to present the data dynamically to the users.
You aren't describing a web app there, you're describing a web page with a search form.
There is nothing stopping dynamic, fast, real-time updates of data within a web-app. A web app will have the front end UI and a (typically json) api to the backend (ajax or websocket) which is doing the hard work of running the searches, filtering, connectivity, authentication, etc.
IntelliJ is a whole level above Eclipse, in my experience. I used to use Eclipse only, for many many years, but since using IntelliJ I can see that the difference is night and day.
In my opinion, the person asking this ask slashdot should learn Java backend/middleware and Javascript Front End programming, because I've talked to a lot of businesses in the past year, and that's the model they are moving to, from Windows Forms front-ends for simple data presentation. Maybe his clients aren't right now, but one day they might, and his market is going to shrink.
If the users just want interactive reports, then it may be that using report generation software (Splunk, Birt, etc) is the sane way forward, rather than writing custom platform-specific tools.
Well, it launched in 2004... and space tech is usually about a decade behind again...
Luckily it is only one bank of flash that's bad, so they're going to work around it by disabling that one - probably means a reduction in overall capacity, but maybe it's enough to solve this issue (and/or it was overprovisioned in the first place).
We're probably talking about kilobytes of flash here, rather than megabytes.
Meh, BlackBerries lack of support for the Playbook after promising BBOS10 for it and not delivering it says a lot. Additionally the fact that they got the security right means there are no Android hacks for it, so you're stuck with what it has.
I want to like this device for being different, but it's still a BB.
Luckily it can run Android apps, and includes the Amazon App Store for Android Apps on board.
But I don't know how it runs Android games that use the NDK, not the Android runtime...
It's an odd shape, but I've read a couple of things about it that are positive - non-obscured display because the keyboard is also a trackpad for example, natural left/right handed use, solid software...
You are lucky to be able to cope with 5 hours sleep a night. Or you lose a significant amount of the weekend to catching up on sleep.
IMO work should stay in the office (maybe checking emails on the train to/from work) unless there's an outage that needs dealing with. Maybe once or twice a month it's okay if needs require it.
Doing 55 hours a week regularly is nothing to be proud of - unless maybe you have significant shares in your employer (as a founder, for example). Where do you get the time in all that to do your own hobbies (for a decent amount of time)?
Actually according to some studies I read about intellectual jobs (programming being one of them) you can get around 6 hours useful work out of someone each day, and certainly after 8 you are working so ineffectively that you are just creating more work in the future.
If your employer considers 10 hours a day as standard, then they are not an employer that you want to work for. 9 is stretching it (i.e., 9-6 - seems very common these days).
Consider also the commute to and from work - an hour each way? Out of the house for over 12 hours all the time? What's the point of that, where's the time for yourself (after sleep, showers, housework, etc, you might be lucky to get thirty minutes to watch TV). Of course a commute is good for listening to music/news/etc (if you drive) or catching up with Twitter/Facebook/Email/books/etc if you catch a train.
When going for job interviews, make sure you try to do one after hours - see how full the office is at six and seven, for example. That will tell you more about the company than anything the interviewer will tell you.
Also, always do your number twos during work hours. Or wear a nappy during your commute!
Which is why Solar is working so well in Germany. It doesn't need to be sunny for solar panels to operate well.
The problem is that the grid gets loads of solar power during the day, but peak usage hours are later. There are only so many reservoirs they can pump up mountains with the spare power during the day, and offices that need A/C. Of course hopefully everyone will be charging their electric cars during the day so maybe in the long run it will even out.
The article even makes the clear. How the submitter misread that is beyond me.
The advantages of this board: Smaller. eMMC connector. ADC. RTC. Better power management. Small LCD module option ($30 incl. usb hub and ethernet). Disadvantages: USB/Ethernet on a different board ($20), connectors sold separately ($4).
The RPi B+ resolves the power management issue.
The advantage of being compatible is that the software support for the RPi is actually very good, and there is a massive community.
It does seem that they nearly have all the ingredients to make a viable 8-bit computer on a (small) sheet of paper now. I guess an Atari 2600 could fit in a fairly small area with it's 128 bytes of RAM (1 cm^2) and other simple logic. This printed RAM access speed isn't great though - 200us is three orders of magnitude too slow compared to even the memory in those old computers. Hopefully shrinking these RAM dots will also improve speed.
In addition Inmarsat can surely just also correlate pings from other aircraft with their actual known position to verify their algorithms they have come up with are valid for the MH370 situation where they only have the pings.
I mean, they did do some basic validation like that, right?
In addition I strongly doubt this is the only person to have double checked on the mathematics used, but he's the only one saying its wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Most ARM SoCs advertising high clock speeds are actually advertising max turbo speeds - just because that TV stick is saying it's running at 2GHz doesn't mean it gets there often.
Turbo is a great thing, but it's not for long workloads, it's for "race to sleep" workloads.
This is a $5 SoC, so you've got to expect some reduction in specifications given the rest of the board, and the large amount of support for the ecosystem.
People have said this new Pi is overclockable to 1100MHz too, more seems likely (very early days).
The A20 has half the A7 cores that this new Pi has.
The good thing is that this new Pi will force all the competitors to bump their specs a little where they are weaker. Maybe the next Cubieboard will use an A80.
But having a board where everything just works and is well supported is well worth it when your free time is valuable.
Broadcom have released the register level specs of the VideoCore IV, and an open (ARM space) driver is being worked on.
But tbh the VideoCore IV was designed from the ground up for embedded firmware use like this, it's a full CPU as well as a GPU, and it takes load off of the CPU. However now there are four cores it's less of an issue, and of course it makes the GPU very upgradeable.
Quad-A7 isn't too bad for $35 in my opinion. But the 12 GFLOPS GPU isn't very exciting (I was hoping that the RPi upgrade would also upgrade this aspect).
I suspect that Broadcom have given up on VideoCore development in the face of the competition, and will be licensing GPUs in the future from ARM/Img, etcc.
If you read the article's comments, The Register broke the NDA by releasing the article before the announcement.
As a result they got all the facts wrong, and made you look bad.
Btw, the Neon support in this chip makes it 20x faster at code that makes use of it (multithreaded video processing, for example), which is a nice boost.
I was hoping for native SATA or USB3 or a faster GPU, but it's $35 and the most supported ARM board on the planet...
It's the same in the UK, except chip and pin is the default and has been for around eight? ten? years already. I don't know if the magstripe is really used anymore either.
It's quaint seeing a foreigner (American) try to pay for goods with a card, and have to go through special procedures for the signature style payment.
Yeah, but the process of reducing "body frequency" is rather terminal - however ghosts can indeed walk through walls. Interacting with physical matter is a problem though - poltergeists must be able to change their frequency on demand.
Indeed it is quite a shame that they didn't take the opportunity to show off these capabilities with these very boxy buildings!
However ultimately buildings are going to have straight edges and not many curves, so a capability for curved structures may not be as useful as it first sounds. On the other hand I'm not an architect full of curved wall ideas thwarted by straight wall building practices...
But half the cost and half the time (and not using loads of wood) is certainly useful.
The article shows an internal picture of the post-install inserted rebar and concrete pour into the wall.
Also the plan would be for a printer to be installed on-site to do the printing of the components.
I think the buildings should be subjected to strength tests of course, before taking their word for it.
It's still a potential step forward in one aspect of house building.
Using a machine which measures a staggering 20 feet tall, 33 feet wide and 132 feet long, the team at WinSun started with a basic CAD drawing which they fed to the massive 3D printer that was able to fabricate the structure piece-by-piece using a specially formulated and patented ‘ink’. The ink, which includes construction waste such as concrete, fiberglass, sand, and a special hardening agent, is an incredible way to recycle general construction materials — not to mention it is flexible, self-insulating, and resistant to strong earthquakes
Of course, this is recycled PR that might not be entirely truthful. The recycling of construction waste is a nice sounding feature. So it isn't the same printing material as the US based housing prints.
The company then placed beam columns and steel rebar within the walls, along with insulation, reserving space for pipe lines, windows and doors.
So there is still some manual work involved.
Indeed, in the UK the first floor is on the floor above the ground floor, whilst in the US it is the ground floor.
However the ground floor is still counted towards the total number of storeys in the building in both places.
The picture is of a five storey building, unless there is a smaller construction on the top (lift shaft housing does not count).
Well, it is "3D printing", albeit fairly coarse printing of large scale components. It's still a lot faster and cheaper (lower manpower requirements) than the alternative.
Also the "printer" can do the work on-site (eventually), so there's no need for the factory aspect. It can print the components for an entire house within a day. Assembly is cheaper than construction. It might not be printing a finished house, but to expect that would be silly right now.
As for finishing the walls, most houses require a plastering step anyway, even over drywall. The rough finish is actually better for that.
I hope the 3D printed structural components include ducting for water, electricity, etc.
Apart from not suggesting IntelliJ, this comment is pretty much spot on.
However typically he'll be integrating with his client's database, so he doesn't get to pick that - however Java has leading support for different databases and a decent ORM in Hibernate for abstracting away the database specifics.
In addition if you want to go funkier, but remain compatible with the JVM, you've got Clojure, Scala, Jython and more.
If the clients don't want Java on their systems, they will still be okay with it on their servers. Nothing simpler and more standard that a Java webapp in a Tomcat, and a Javascript front end to present the data dynamically to the users.
You aren't describing a web app there, you're describing a web page with a search form.
There is nothing stopping dynamic, fast, real-time updates of data within a web-app. A web app will have the front end UI and a (typically json) api to the backend (ajax or websocket) which is doing the hard work of running the searches, filtering, connectivity, authentication, etc.
IntelliJ is a whole level above Eclipse, in my experience. I used to use Eclipse only, for many many years, but since using IntelliJ I can see that the difference is night and day.
In my opinion, the person asking this ask slashdot should learn Java backend/middleware and Javascript Front End programming, because I've talked to a lot of businesses in the past year, and that's the model they are moving to, from Windows Forms front-ends for simple data presentation. Maybe his clients aren't right now, but one day they might, and his market is going to shrink.
If the users just want interactive reports, then it may be that using report generation software (Splunk, Birt, etc) is the sane way forward, rather than writing custom platform-specific tools.
Well, it launched in 2004 ... and space tech is usually about a decade behind again...
Luckily it is only one bank of flash that's bad, so they're going to work around it by disabling that one - probably means a reduction in overall capacity, but maybe it's enough to solve this issue (and/or it was overprovisioned in the first place).
We're probably talking about kilobytes of flash here, rather than megabytes.
At least they have identified a fix. But it surely won't be too long before more of the flash memory banks start exhibiting similar behaviour.
Still, 44x longer lifespan than originally planned == win in anyone's books.
Weird, my (otherwise useless) playbook charges from any micro-usb charger.
Meh, BlackBerries lack of support for the Playbook after promising BBOS10 for it and not delivering it says a lot. Additionally the fact that they got the security right means there are no Android hacks for it, so you're stuck with what it has.
I want to like this device for being different, but it's still a BB.
Luckily it can run Android apps, and includes the Amazon App Store for Android Apps on board.
But I don't know how it runs Android games that use the NDK, not the Android runtime...
It's an odd shape, but I've read a couple of things about it that are positive - non-obscured display because the keyboard is also a trackpad for example, natural left/right handed use, solid software...
You are lucky to be able to cope with 5 hours sleep a night. Or you lose a significant amount of the weekend to catching up on sleep.
IMO work should stay in the office (maybe checking emails on the train to/from work) unless there's an outage that needs dealing with. Maybe once or twice a month it's okay if needs require it.
Doing 55 hours a week regularly is nothing to be proud of - unless maybe you have significant shares in your employer (as a founder, for example). Where do you get the time in all that to do your own hobbies (for a decent amount of time)?
Actually according to some studies I read about intellectual jobs (programming being one of them) you can get around 6 hours useful work out of someone each day, and certainly after 8 you are working so ineffectively that you are just creating more work in the future.
If your employer considers 10 hours a day as standard, then they are not an employer that you want to work for. 9 is stretching it (i.e., 9-6 - seems very common these days).
Consider also the commute to and from work - an hour each way? Out of the house for over 12 hours all the time? What's the point of that, where's the time for yourself (after sleep, showers, housework, etc, you might be lucky to get thirty minutes to watch TV). Of course a commute is good for listening to music/news/etc (if you drive) or catching up with Twitter/Facebook/Email/books/etc if you catch a train.
When going for job interviews, make sure you try to do one after hours - see how full the office is at six and seven, for example. That will tell you more about the company than anything the interviewer will tell you.
Also, always do your number twos during work hours. Or wear a nappy during your commute!
Which is why Solar is working so well in Germany. It doesn't need to be sunny for solar panels to operate well.
The problem is that the grid gets loads of solar power during the day, but peak usage hours are later. There are only so many reservoirs they can pump up mountains with the spare power during the day, and offices that need A/C. Of course hopefully everyone will be charging their electric cars during the day so maybe in the long run it will even out.
The article even makes the clear. How the submitter misread that is beyond me.
The advantages of this board: Smaller. eMMC connector. ADC. RTC. Better power management. Small LCD module option ($30 incl. usb hub and ethernet).
Disadvantages: USB/Ethernet on a different board ($20), connectors sold separately ($4).
The RPi B+ resolves the power management issue.
The advantage of being compatible is that the software support for the RPi is actually very good, and there is a massive community.
It does seem that they nearly have all the ingredients to make a viable 8-bit computer on a (small) sheet of paper now. I guess an Atari 2600 could fit in a fairly small area with it's 128 bytes of RAM (1 cm^2) and other simple logic. This printed RAM access speed isn't great though - 200us is three orders of magnitude too slow compared to even the memory in those old computers. Hopefully shrinking these RAM dots will also improve speed.
In addition Inmarsat can surely just also correlate pings from other aircraft with their actual known position to verify their algorithms they have come up with are valid for the MH370 situation where they only have the pings.
I mean, they did do some basic validation like that, right?
In addition I strongly doubt this is the only person to have double checked on the mathematics used, but he's the only one saying its wrong.