i've been studying this for 25 years (as a reverse-engineer from a software background). i've started to have to go to the field of optics to fully understand why it is that this "extra force or maybe a particle" has not been discovered. look up the work by "Ido Kaminer" and his team and you find that (for the purposes of creating "optical tweezers" - google it) it's possible to create phase-coherent X-Ray beams that *LITERALLY* bend in parabolic arcs or even semi-circles, and as they do so the phase rotates by 1/2 the angle of the amount of curvature.
how the hell could that even happen, ehn?
ok, so it goes like this: the phase-coherent beam does "cancellation" such that it curves a tiny but, but this is the crucial bit - as it moves forward the phases REMAIN COHERENT which is pretty frickin awesome.
now, it's not so hard to imagine that photons (x-rays) could conceivably be created which are so totally phase-coherent that they *LITERALLY* come back to their starting point, and thus (because light has no friction) continue circulating forever. what would we call this? well.... i'd call it... a particle!
what types of particles would you call it? well, we know from radio that you have something called I / Q (which is to do with phase), and i *believe* that if the majority of the photon's phase is in the "real" numberspace you'd end up with an electron, but if it's imaginary it would be a NEUTRINO. utterly hard to detect.
the implications of this quite rational and logical progression are enormous - because it's not the only particles that could have such "imaginary" or complex-number properties, totally invisible to us because they *DON'T* interact in the normal E/M field but they'd only really start to interact at the atomic particle distances.
my feeling is that neutrons are *NOT* a "neutron" but may in fact be a "neutron-atom-with-an-orbiting-neutrino". further, that just like with Hydrogen (H2) there's no reason why two neutrons would not bond together in a Neutron-2 "atom"... utterly impossible to detect, being both chemically stable as well as electrically and magnetically invisible... *this* i believe is our missing "dark matter".
it's a huge logical chain of progression but i haven't seen any evidence which contradicts anything in the chain. the only problem is that there are too many scientists worshipping the "Church Of The Standard Model" or should i say, "stuck for funding if they stray outside of the Standard Model Holy Grail". it thus becomes extremely hard to interact with them (i've tried) as they have literally zero common ground for discussion (not enough experience with the field of Optics), the people in the field of Optics don't have enough interest in particle physics... gahh:)
the consequences that we've seen from google's failure to use a self-protecting license includes:
* companies incorporating GPL'd code into Android (particularly video players) and not releasing the source * performing DRM or other lock-downs ("Tivoisation") and in the case of qualcomm ending up with 900 million devices that are basically landfill * causing confusion in the minds of corporations over the fact that the linux KERNEL (and u-boot) is still GPL'd
google seems unable to comprehend the severe detrimental consequences of its actions, and the effects that their decisions have on the rest of the software libre community. i appreciate that they're an advertising company so are required to maximise the effective distribution of devices so that they can thus maximise the number of devices through which they can advertise, but pissing all over the free software community that MADE IT POSSIBLE FOR THEM TO HAVE A BUSINESS AT ALL is completely unethical, not to mention the detrimental consequences and money that users have to throw away when devices turn out to have major security flaws that the designers CAN'T FIX IN THE FIELD. http://arstechnica.com/securit...
y'know... it occurs to me that seeing CENTRALISED trust mechanisms break down really is no surpise, at all. it's a simple mathematical equation which can be explored by doing e^(1/N) * N where you increase N, then make a tiny *tiny* change in the 1/N value. so E^(1/100,010) * 100,000 for example is drastically divergent from E^(1/100,000) / 100,000. point being: the more you CENTRALISE trust, the greater the chance of it being violated (exponentialy greater)
solving this will take moving away from CENTRALISED trust to DECENTRALISED trust. does anyone remember keynote (an IETF RFC), or advogato, or even the moderation system behind slashdot, and how effective those are? we really really need to start moving to things like blockchain. as in, don't arse about expecting the incumbents to move to blockchain (because they have financial incentives not to do so) - just move to blockchain-based SSL Certificates.
Perhaps you aren't aware how low the low end of the Intel processor linecard goes? In particular, see the X3-C3230 and X5-Z8300.
i wasn't! oh _good_ - the collaboration between rockchip and intel actually produced results. why the hell didn't my contact at intel get in touch?? ok *sigh* i'll speak to him and find out if they have a reference design.... that *doesn't* have the backdoor co-processor in it....
right. interesting. the "brief" - and by brief i mean "so sparse and devoid of information it's pretty useless" - says that it was released Q1 2015. i believe it wasn't long after this that intel announced the COMPLETE TERMINATION of their involvement in the smartphone and tablet industry.
now, whether that applies to the rockchip collaboration remains to be seen. anyway, thank you for making me aware of this one, i'll keep an eye on it.
Funny, I can buy an entire tablet (it has "memory, storage, processor, hdmi output, usb output *and* casework" and also screen, battery, cameras) with a latest-generation quadcore Intel processor and more storage for the proposed price for the SBC alone (no case).
i trust you understand that that was vs a desktop PC intel processor. i've seen this next type of comparison before as well (a lot) - another mass-produced mass-volume well-established manufacturer product vs an early concept libre and privacy respecting crowd-funded one.... doesn't really mesh, does it?:)
Perhaps you aren't aware how low the low end of the Intel processor linecard goes? In particular, see the X3-C3230 and X5-Z8300.
i wasn't! oh _good_ - the collaboration between rockchip and intel actually produced results. why the hell didn't my contact at intel get in touch?? ok *sigh* i'll speak to him and find out if they have a reference design.... that *doesn't* have the backdoor co-processor in it....
by total contrast we're creating the beginning of a comprehensive eco-system of hardware re-use which *happens* (through direct correlation) to both save money for end-users and also reduce e-waste.
In defence of the Raspberry Pi foundation's work, the ecosystem (peripherals, software, community) is what sets it apart from the sea of samey Allwinner-based SBCs. I really hope that the ecosystem you're building is as successful!
yeah it was the price-point for the feature-set at the right time that really got people's attention, in the same way that the $9 CHIP has grabbed people's attention now... but less so *because* the pi already exists.
so that area is "sewn up" and over-saturated. that's not *the* reason why i have taken the approach that i've taken - it's a different story, tackling a much larger set of systemic and underlying problems in the way that we (world-wide) think of and "consume" our computing appliances. never liked that word "consume". like, "how's that PCB tasting, sir? need some ketchup? how about some steel-reinforced dentures?"...:)
the sunxi community then helped take that initiative over, they've been working non-stop now for years to pressurise allwinner
I hope they have more luck with that than with their software. With all due respect, the linux-sunxi tools are poo, and are (in my experience) a big part of the reason most Allwinner SBCs are found running Android.
yeah if you don't receive any funding and have to do stuff part-time... nobody's very happy with allwinner, but the price-point on their SoCs and the overwhelming marketing success in China is extremely compelling - GPL-violating or not. but, y'know what? they're getting there. oliver and the team have managed to get most of CEDARX reverse-engineered, which is deeply impressive. http://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus must add that to the TODO list...
As a consumer, yeah! I am not a bank. And seeing your prices. pfff...
Thus basically you're asking people to fund with a zero interest loan, not only your pet project but also your eduction.
absolutely correct on both counts (despite the clear hatred, jealousy and patronising in your voice which can be detected from the use of the word "pet"). that's exactly how ethical crowd funding projects work. the unethical ones such as the pi-top and many of the china-based 3d printers that steal marlin GPL'd firmware, they teach people a hard lesson... but it's still education. as a software libre developer i will be documenting everything so that other people can learn, just as i learned from the openmoko, openpandora, ben nanonote, neo900, and many many more.
And you use words like "project that's entirely transparent", but the majority of the funds goes towards NRE (which could be anything)
What critical phase? You telling me that only 250 units will maybe be produced as prototype and then there is this magical critical phase? How transparent are you...
Really...
Really?
i don't understand your point, i'm having difficulty interpreting the meaning, it's obscured by sarcasm. could you please clarify, perhaps by dropping the sarcasm, it's getting in the way of what you want to say.
Excellent and substantive response, though you ["ikcl", but not sure of your relationship to the project] sound a bit defensive about it. Considering the mixed success history of such projects (which both of us referenced), I certainly understand why.
yeah no i get it. here's the thing: i am happy to admit that i don't know what i'm doing: that's why i'm inviting people to participate and point things out. if it succeeds, it succeeds as a *group* project, and that's really valuable. the approach that i'm taking seems to be working: we got this far, y'know?
I followed http://rhombus-tech.net/crowds... and read some more, but it seems to me that your approach is too orthogonal to what I'm trying to describe. You have lots of detail about how you think you can deliver a certain product with certain capabilities within a certain budget. Those numbers seem too fuzzy for me to trust the totals, and I couldn't find the schedule. Other places it felt like you were diverted by details that should not be relevant at this relatively early stage.
i'm talking to the factory owner online, and planning to go to taiwan (and then to HK and Shenzen) in september. leading up to christmas the factories are *stupidly* busy, which is why i will go and collect components personally. the critical window of opportunity is between the two new years: that's when i'd like to get the majority of PCB manufacturing done.
but, part of the issue is: if we go beyond the capacity of the current factory, we'll actually have to find another one, and thus redo the entire schedule. i'll also be able to do injection-molding instead of 3d-printing the casework.... so i put down a best-estimate (it's on the crowd supply page at the end) and we see how it goes. i figured that people would be happy to be kept informed of what's going on.
The high end Intel/AMD system is already sufficiently modular and far more open than SoC and other embedded hardware.
... except that for the cost of the lowest-end intel/amd *processors* we can do an entire computer - memory, storage, processor, hdmi output, usb output *and* casework.
and exclude the only two good things it has going for it, GbE and SATA?"
answered in depth on the FAQ section - look for "SATA and GbE" and a more in-depth answer on http://rhombus-tech.net/crowds... again search for the keyword "SATA".
Even the old Raspberry Pi 2 is much faster than the A20, being a quad core A7.
only available from broadcom - a hypocritical company that operates on unethical grounds and maintains cartelling business practices, ships proprietary arbitrary untrusted executables that boot the CPU *from* the GPU, and forces children to purchase licenses to watch films, for $2.50. what kind of hypocritical lesson is that, that kids may only educate themselves "so far", but beyond a certain point they can FUCK OFF. great. i think that's a great education. we should all teach kids that they are only allowed to learn up to a certain point and beynd that they're expected to be treated like cattle.
If they wanted to go cheap and Allwinner,
EOMA68 is a hardware standard. read the "processor selection" update as well as the "passthrough card" update.
there's the A80,
uses PowerVR which is known to cause enormous instability problems ever since it came out, on *every* architecture that ever uses it. why would i want to bring out something that i know for a fact would be severely problematic?
H3
not designed for low-power.
or A64.
GPL-violating SDK with a proprietary untrusted bootloader.
sorry dude - don't try to be too clever and sarcastic, and you'll get a much less curt answer. i got too much ground to cover - over 25 forums and increasing.
what it's doing is demonstrating to both you and to other readers that... (if i may be completely honest with you here)...
LOL ok Mr Universe, tell us what other people can comprehend.
that's enough. sorry, but when you start laughing at other people's expense to make yourself look better than them, that's when i know not to take you seriously, and everyone else reading this will know that too. sorry, but you've had three chances to not display yourself as a "troll", and failed each time. apologies but i can't spend any more time replying to you until you change the way that you approach other people.
sorry, i don't understand. could you possibly expand on this, perhaps help review the logic analysis behind the modular standards that i've reviewed over the past five years
No. And I just wanted to say, that is a really, really weird thing to request.
it's not weird at all. what it's doing is demonstrating to both you and to other readers that... (if i may be completely honest with you here)... you haven't thought through what you're saying. or, more to the point, we can't *check* your conclusion, because you're not prepared to provide us with the facts or any of the logical reasoning *behind* your conclusion. thus, if you're not prepared to stand up and do the work to justify your perspective, then your points may be safely ignored. the question i asked, which is a known technique that i was advised to use throughout this campaign, is therefore a simple "double-check" of your true intent.
if however you were prepared to answer the question and engage, both of us might learn something. you might actually have a legitimate and logical point of view that is grounded in rational and reasonable evidence. but if you *can't do that*, then people will *see* that you can't do that, and will be able to safely discard what you've written.
i'd *prefer* that you answered the question, because i actually *genuinely* need people to independently verify what i'm doing, even though i've been working on it full-time for five years: i'd like to know that i've not missed something important.
no offense taken: this is the internet... it's slashdot.... what you wrote is actually really helpful as a counterpoint: chris answered i think really well https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
, bill yourself as a fully open and environmentally friendly alt to the raspberry pi and similar.
*deep, deep breath*..... AAAAAAAAAAAgh no:) *shudder* no, no, nOooo, and no.
ok to explain my reaction, there: those are all SBCs (single-board computers). after six months of supernova-style popularity, they're dead. each manufacturer of each SBC has to scramble like mad to bring out *the next* SBC using whatever processor they can get their hands on, and the next, and the next, in a desperate cat-and-dog bitch-fight of popularity and unethical abuse of the word "open".... am i painting a broad picture here of the *really* stark contrast between the approach taken by the embedded "educational" SBC clone market and what we're doing with EOMA68?
by total contrast we're creating the beginning of a comprehensive eco-system of hardware re-use which *happens* (through direct correlation) to both save money for end-users and also reduce e-waste.
but more than that: if we took the EOMA68-A20 board and turned it into an SBC, it would *INSTANTLY* be perceived as being a tired total waste-of-time banana pi or cubieboard clone... when in fact the irony is that those products exist *because* of the reverse-engineering and persistence that i applied to Allwinner to obtain GPL compliance. the sunxi community then helped take that initiative over, they've been working non-stop now for years to pressurise allwinner, and i've been helping quietly in the background ever since.
this project has a completely different focus in other words, where it succeeds if there is a *huge* compatible eco-system (tablet, laptop, router, camera, gps, media centre, lcd tv, games console - everything you can see on here http://rhombus-tech.net/commun... and many more) and a huge compatible range of EOMA68 Computer Cards (and an FPGA card and a Pass-through Card and a DisplayLink Card) with a wide price-range and crucially a decades-long-term "just plug it in, it will work" *stable* standard.... massive, massive difference.
The problem is that (by modern standards) it's physically huge
Any smaller and it would not hold a DVD drive, an LTO drive and a DAT drive, and still have somewhere to put USB sticks and SD cards, not to mention the place required for SCSI cards.
yeahhh i had to make a decision whether to make the first EOMA standard for mass-volume clients or for mass-volume servers. i figured that with facebook, google and hp and others having the data centre market pretty much sewn up, and them trying to convince everyone that "cloud is good", and having poisoned the word "open" in that area with their "open compute" standard, the chances would be much better if i focussed on "the little guy"...... that meant using hardware that was simple enough for someone like me to learn, and with a persistent and bloody-minded attitude actually gain access to Reference Designs and so on, and that in turn meant SoCs around the $2 to $8 mark that are designed for "tablets" and "smartphones", not "intel-style PCs", and _that_ in turn meant "SATA and GbE and PCIe are off the interface set". you can't get a QFP-176 SoC at $2.50 that has PCIe or SATA, basically, but you *can* get one that has HDMI, 3x SD/MMCs, 2x USB2 and several other really good interfaces that you can make a fully-functioning low-cost computer from (look up the Allwinner R8 - it's QFP176 and $2.50. absolutely amazing).
As someone who actually saw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v4Juzn10gM EDSAC working, I think the standard tower PC case is about right, and I KNOW that tape will keep my data for 30 years (I have read my own backups 30 years later),
toootally cooool! ahh... don't read them too often, the heads are abrasively-worn by the read/write cycle...
and I know DVDs won't keep my data for even six years.
*sigh* that oxygenation of the metallic compound through the edges of the disc when they thinned down the amount of varnish to save money, it's a bitch, huh? did you happen to mark the DVD with a permanent marker then close it up inside a plastic case? i know of someone who learned the hard way that the fumes from those pens migrate *into* the discs and oxidise the metal.... whoops...... you can't use HDDs because after 5 years there's a 25% chance that just *powering them up* will cause a head-crash: thermal warping (cool-down) of the HDD when it was last shut down, combined with the bearings seizing as the oil/grease isn't being cycled round during storage.... yyyeah.
you can't use SSDs because the geometries are too small now, you get data loss over time due to quantum effects and radiation... what are we down to now... 20 atoms to store one bit of data??
we're screwed basically:)
I certainly don't want MY data in the cloud.
cloud... that's where you store your data on other people's computers, right?:)
A very tiny and again short lived market for you then.
This product has one selling point, modular. Which has absolutely no value. Nobody cares if their pc is modular or not, it just have to work. It could work if like the case is 100 bucks or something in that range and looks designed, but to ask 500$ for an unassembled... and 1200$ for... I mean, i can buy a macbook for that.
ok, so you're comparing a mass-produced product that's been refined by a billion-dollar company that has a track record of taking software libre source code and using it without actually funding or compensating the people whom their profits are critically dependent on... against a crowd-funded *prototype* project that's entirely transparent, is deliberately limiting the first prototype production run to around 250 units, where the majority of the funds goes towards NREs and to ensuring that the project can reach the next critical phase so that it can get *to* that next larger volume production run... and many many other aspects that make it a totally different proposition...... i therefore don't really understand what you're trying to say.
I have an ANCIENT (>10 years old) Dell XPS desktop machine - and last week, the motherboard failed. Went to Fry's paid $65 for a new motherboard and $120 for a new CPU (which included a new cooling fan). My RAM modules were too ancient to run in the new motherboard - so I spent another $60 for a couple of RAM modules. To my surprise, the original power supply, graphics card, hard drive, DVD drive and case all fitted perfectly - and a simple reboot got me back into Ubuntu as if nothing had happened - I was back up and running in an hour.
Sure, the CPU socket had changed - and my decade-old DDR-2 memory wouldn't work in the DDR-3/4 motherboard - but aside from that, modularity worked 100% perfectly. I could have chosen from a dozen different CPU's and a similar number of RAM suppliers and any one of a dozen motherboards - and the outcome would have been the same.
... you're aware that intel has moved *away* from socketed CPUs and is forcing BGA onto manufacturers, now? you're really lucky to have been able to find a motherboard that suited you which didn't have the BGA-soldered processor on it.
So the desktop PC "standard" is already an incredibly modular system. The problem is that (by modern standards) it's physically huge.
For small systems like IOT devices, the cost of "the computer" including graphics, networking, RAM, long-term-storage is down to $10 or less...so modularity at that scale is just pointless - increasing the cost by adding connectors between the parts is just silly.
... and actually causes huge reliability and manufacturing issues. yeah. you get it. which is great to see.
For systems at the scale of a cellphone, modularity is a tough sell because the physical form-factor has to fit perfectly with the shape of the battery and screen and heat management is a big issue - so making a *usefully* modular phone is challenging.
dave hakkens is *PISSED*, man. like, really *really* disappointed and betrayed by google. all that money and they *claim* open-ness but actually instead they're just strengthening the positions of the existing cartels. what a fucking waste. the sad thing is, i spotted all this years ago, but it's taken everyone else (and dave) quite a while to catch up, because most people are non-technical and do not have a reverse-engineering background https://davehakkens.nl/news/re...
The real issue is modular laptops.
that's why i'm tackling it: to make sure it's done right, and in a transparent way, with a standard that's *genuinely* open.
It's a real pain if you screen gets cracked or your motherboard or power supply fails. But you don't need modularity at the electronics level - it's all about modular cases and connectors.
and having the right *to* repair or 3d-print those modular case parts.
You can buy software, download free software or write your own - and it's pretty simple to make it work on the trifecta of OSX, Windows and Linux - and trivially easy if you can make it web-based. But it's very evident that the business model of most companies these days is to lock you in to buying music/video/apps from their "app store"...that's where the $$$'s are...so expect to see more moves like MS's efforts to lock down Win-10 so you have to buy apps through their store.
one thing that hadn't occurred to me (but i must add to the standard, to protect against), is that DRM is going to be totally ineffective in modular computing. you can't *possibly* agree a DRM standard across a truly open architecture: it just doesn't work when access to all the hardware relies critically on drivers that are released under GPLv2+ licenses.
i mean... they can _try_... but it will be a hell of a job to maintain.
so i think i'm safe in adding "hardware-level DRM simply not
I should have worded my post differently and qualified my statements.
nono, no need - it was actually really helpful that you pointed those things out
My best guess from the sidelines is that you're approaching this from a well-informed, well-planned angle and everything I've read and watched built my trust.
thanks!
I pledged to support the project.
that's really kind of you - thank you.
But I still think that those angles are the most likely cause of trouble. Hopefully nothing comes up or you're able to adjust for everything that does come up.
this is why i'm going to go over to taiwan, and from there to HK and to Shenzen. got bunnie's book already. my partner marie speaks mandarin. planning to go meet allwinner. and go *personally* to all the component suppliers to pick things up and pay by cash (which is totally normal, there). will be accompanying the finished units down to the docks and making sure they get sealed and loaded so that we don't end up receiving a container with boxes packaged nicely with 1.1kg worth of bricks... yes this really does happen, and when you complain, the customs officials go, "you no china citizen! sorry no can help!" then they go down to the docks and go "well done ripping off gwailo stupid foreigner! next time you give me cut off of what you sold their stolen goods for, okaaay?"
if you want a laugh (kinda...) read keyboard.io blog.. http://blog.keyboard.io/ - i've dealt with most of these things before and found people that i trust... took five years to find them, but i found them.
I appreciate all of your free software work, by the way - I've used Samba before myself.
:) the highlight of that work was, over a decade later, porting samba-tng to w32 and cross-compiling it using mingw32 to run... *under wine*. i still have difficulty comprehending why i even tried doing that, but it was, ultimately, in the hope that the ReactOS team gave serious consideration to doing a proper implementation of the various MSRPC services that are needed to be fully interoperable with NT, and to drop Samba TNG into place as the SMB server....
VERY EXPENSIVE machine tools
HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of HOURS of VERY EXPENSIVE engineering time
MASSIVE AMOUNTS of special purpose tooling
The last three items are one-off costs, spread over the entire production volume. If your volume is high, they are negligible, if your volume is low, you are stuffed.
sorry, forgot to say:
VERY EXPENSIVE machine tools which is why i went with re-using of legacy PCMCIA casework. why pay $250k to get tooling made up and end up having to order 1 million units when you can re-use what already exists? tools costs wiped out....
HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of HOURS of VERY EXPENSIVE engineering time - or just one person over a looong time, doing things from home, backed by small sponsors, or by working part-time, but also doing things as a modular approach so that the main bulk of the designs (the "Housings") can be EASILY UPGRADED with a MINIMUM of work instead of requiring TOTAL REDESIGNs. cool, huh?
MASSIVE AMOUNTS of special purpose tooling - that's why i'm going with laser-cut maple plywood for the desktop casework, and with 3D-printed casework and bamboo plywood panels for the laptop. no special purpose tooling required... those costs are eliminated as well. in china, mohou.cn has network-3d-printed factories where because they get PLA in such bulk quantities they can do the casework for $35 instead of $70 which everyone else charges. $35 is actually affordable and is not that far off what it would cost in injection-molding. i think i'll stick with the bamboo panels and the multi-part (repairable) design, even for mass-production, i think it's cool:)
hoooraaay, congratulations on being the first person in this thread to notice:) profit-maximisation is achieved through *deliberate* obsolescence, and cooperation through standards compliance is viewed as "an opportunity for competitors to step in and take over the market that you created".
You do not want to sell individual components.
You want consumers to buy a whole new thing, paying for everything new, even if the old trackpad or display of the old one is still working. More money there.
in theory... yes. but the profit margins on laptops are becoming so much tighter it's becoming ridiculous. it's around 10% for the *ENTIRE CHAIN*. not 10% for the factory, 10% for the middle-man, 10% for the salesman... it's 10% *TOTAL*. no wonder they're pushing extended warranties so hard: that's the only place to actually make money.
Plus you can not push new technologies. People will stay with their old trackpad, display, cpu/mem and update only what they want. Bad for business, it slows adaptation....
There is absolute no market for it.
hooray. so the entire market for a modular ecocomputing approach is open to meeee, yippeee!:)
The FSF-approved Linux distribution (or GNU/Linux, whatever) "Parabola" that they offer won't include the firmware for the GPU, and does all graphics processing and calculations on the CPU. So the GPU is included on the chip but it's not used.
... not quite: again, the phoronix thread had people explain this in some detail, it's 200 comments so i won't go looking for it, i have too much ground to cover, but the key discrepancy in what you said is that the 2D GPU is up and running: we're *not* doing "pure framebuffer". so there's far less load on the CPU than would otherwise be expected. see the very first update, in which i got xf86-video-fbturbo up and running on the Parabola-ARM Gnu/Linux-Libre card: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...
Slashdot Mirror
i've been studying this for 25 years (as a reverse-engineer from a software background). i've started to have to go to the field of optics to fully understand why it is that this "extra force or maybe a particle" has not been discovered. look up the work by "Ido Kaminer" and his team and you find that (for the purposes of creating "optical tweezers" - google it) it's possible to create phase-coherent X-Ray beams that *LITERALLY* bend in parabolic arcs or even semi-circles, and as they do so the phase rotates by 1/2 the angle of the amount of curvature.
how the hell could that even happen, ehn?
ok, so it goes like this: the phase-coherent beam does "cancellation" such that it curves a tiny but, but this is the crucial bit - as it moves forward the phases REMAIN COHERENT which is pretty frickin awesome.
now, it's not so hard to imagine that photons (x-rays) could conceivably be created which are so totally phase-coherent that they *LITERALLY* come back to their starting point, and thus (because light has no friction) continue circulating forever. what would we call this? well.... i'd call it... a particle!
what types of particles would you call it? well, we know from radio that you have something called I / Q (which is to do with phase), and i *believe* that if the majority of the photon's phase is in the "real" numberspace you'd end up with an electron, but if it's imaginary it would be a NEUTRINO. utterly hard to detect.
the implications of this quite rational and logical progression are enormous - because it's not the only particles that could have such "imaginary" or complex-number properties, totally invisible to us because they *DON'T* interact in the normal E/M field but they'd only really start to interact at the atomic particle distances.
my feeling is that neutrons are *NOT* a "neutron" but may in fact be a "neutron-atom-with-an-orbiting-neutrino". further, that just like with Hydrogen (H2) there's no reason why two neutrons would not bond together in a Neutron-2 "atom"... utterly impossible to detect, being both chemically stable as well as electrically and magnetically invisible... *this* i believe is our missing "dark matter".
it's a huge logical chain of progression but i haven't seen any evidence which contradicts anything in the chain. the only problem is that there are too many scientists worshipping the "Church Of The Standard Model" or should i say, "stuck for funding if they stray outside of the Standard Model Holy Grail". it thus becomes extremely hard to interact with them (i've tried) as they have literally zero common ground for discussion (not enough experience with the field of Optics), the people in the field of Optics don't have enough interest in particle physics... gahh :)
https://fuchsia.googlesource.c...
the consequences that we've seen from google's failure to use a self-protecting license includes:
* companies incorporating GPL'd code into Android (particularly video players) and not releasing the source
* performing DRM or other lock-downs ("Tivoisation") and in the case of qualcomm ending up with 900 million devices that are basically landfill
* causing confusion in the minds of corporations over the fact that the linux KERNEL (and u-boot) is still GPL'd
do i need to continue the list? i don't but i believe a reference to mjg59's list is appropriate:
http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59...
google seems unable to comprehend the severe detrimental consequences of its actions, and the effects that their decisions have on the rest of the software libre community. i appreciate that they're an advertising company so are required to maximise the effective distribution of devices so that they can thus maximise the number of devices through which they can advertise, but pissing all over the free software community that MADE IT POSSIBLE FOR THEM TO HAVE A BUSINESS AT ALL is completely unethical, not to mention the detrimental consequences and money that users have to throw away when devices turn out to have major security flaws that the designers CAN'T FIX IN THE FIELD. http://arstechnica.com/securit...
huh. like this. how about that - someone's already done it. https://github.com/okTurtles/d...
y'know... it occurs to me that seeing CENTRALISED trust mechanisms break down really is no surpise, at all. it's a simple mathematical equation which can be explored by doing e^(1/N) * N where you increase N, then make a tiny *tiny* change in the 1/N value. so E^(1/100,010) * 100,000 for example is drastically divergent from E^(1/100,000) / 100,000. point being: the more you CENTRALISE trust, the greater the chance of it being violated (exponentialy greater)
solving this will take moving away from CENTRALISED trust to DECENTRALISED trust. does anyone remember keynote (an IETF RFC), or advogato, or even the moderation system behind slashdot, and how effective those are? we really really need to start moving to things like blockchain. as in, don't arse about expecting the incumbents to move to blockchain (because they have financial incentives not to do so) - just move to blockchain-based SSL Certificates.
sooo.... are they going to replace all apple employees with dummies, next? oh wait....
Perhaps you aren't aware how low the low end of the Intel processor linecard goes? In particular, see the X3-C3230 and X5-Z8300.
i wasn't! oh _good_ - the collaboration between rockchip and intel actually produced results. why the hell didn't my contact at intel get in touch?? ok *sigh* i'll speak to him and find out if they have a reference design.... that *doesn't* have the backdoor co-processor in it....
right. interesting. the "brief" - and by brief i mean "so sparse and devoid of information it's pretty useless" - says that it was released Q1 2015. i believe it wasn't long after this that intel announced the COMPLETE TERMINATION of their involvement in the smartphone and tablet industry.
now, whether that applies to the rockchip collaboration remains to be seen. anyway, thank you for making me aware of this one, i'll keep an eye on it.
l.
Funny, I can buy an entire tablet (it has "memory, storage, processor, hdmi output, usb output *and* casework" and also screen, battery, cameras) with a latest-generation quadcore Intel processor and more storage for the proposed price for the SBC alone (no case).
i trust you understand that that was vs a desktop PC intel processor. i've seen this next type of comparison before as well (a lot) - another mass-produced mass-volume well-established manufacturer product vs an early concept libre and privacy respecting crowd-funded one. ... doesn't really mesh, does it? :)
Perhaps you aren't aware how low the low end of the Intel processor linecard goes? In particular, see the X3-C3230 and X5-Z8300.
i wasn't! oh _good_ - the collaboration between rockchip and intel actually produced results. why the hell didn't my contact at intel get in touch?? ok *sigh* i'll speak to him and find out if they have a reference design.... that *doesn't* have the backdoor co-processor in it....
there's always AMD
.... whose processors have been backdoored in exactly the same way as Intel's since 2009, except all AMD's processors are backdoored since 2013.
by total contrast we're creating the beginning of a comprehensive eco-system of hardware re-use which *happens* (through direct correlation) to both save money for end-users and also reduce e-waste.
In defence of the Raspberry Pi foundation's work, the ecosystem (peripherals, software, community) is what sets it apart from the sea of samey Allwinner-based SBCs. I really hope that the ecosystem you're building is as successful!
yeah it was the price-point for the feature-set at the right time that really got people's attention, in the same way that the $9 CHIP has grabbed people's attention now... but less so *because* the pi already exists.
so that area is "sewn up" and over-saturated. that's not *the* reason why i have taken the approach that i've taken - it's a different story, tackling a much larger set of systemic and underlying problems in the way that we (world-wide) think of and "consume" our computing appliances. never liked that word "consume". like, "how's that PCB tasting, sir? need some ketchup? how about some steel-reinforced dentures?"... :)
the sunxi community then helped take that initiative over, they've been working non-stop now for years to pressurise allwinner
I hope they have more luck with that than with their software. With all due respect, the linux-sunxi tools are poo, and are (in my experience) a big part of the reason most Allwinner SBCs are found running Android.
yeah if you don't receive any funding and have to do stuff part-time... nobody's very happy with allwinner, but the price-point on their SoCs and the overwhelming marketing success in China is extremely compelling - GPL-violating or not. but, y'know what? they're getting there. oliver and the team have managed to get most of CEDARX reverse-engineered, which is deeply impressive. http://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus must add that to the TODO list...
As a consumer, yeah! I am not a bank. And seeing your prices. pfff...
Thus basically you're asking people to fund with a zero interest loan, not only your pet project but also your eduction.
absolutely correct on both counts (despite the clear hatred, jealousy and patronising in your voice which can be detected from the use of the word "pet"). that's exactly how ethical crowd funding projects work. the unethical ones such as the pi-top and many of the china-based 3d printers that steal marlin GPL'd firmware, they teach people a hard lesson... but it's still education. as a software libre developer i will be documenting everything so that other people can learn, just as i learned from the openmoko, openpandora, ben nanonote, neo900, and many many more.
And you use words like "project that's entirely transparent", but the majority of the funds goes towards NRE (which could be anything)
What critical phase? You telling me that only 250 units will maybe be produced as prototype and then there is this magical critical phase?
How transparent are you...
Really...
Really?
i don't understand your point, i'm having difficulty interpreting the meaning, it's obscured by sarcasm. could you please clarify, perhaps by dropping the sarcasm, it's getting in the way of what you want to say.
Excellent and substantive response, though you ["ikcl", but not sure of your relationship to the project] sound a bit defensive about it. Considering the mixed success history of such projects (which both of us referenced), I certainly understand why.
yeah no i get it. here's the thing: i am happy to admit that i don't know what i'm doing: that's why i'm inviting people to participate and point things out. if it succeeds, it succeeds as a *group* project, and that's really valuable. the approach that i'm taking seems to be working: we got this far, y'know?
I followed http://rhombus-tech.net/crowds... and read some more, but it seems to me that your approach is too orthogonal to what I'm trying to describe. You have lots of detail about how you think you can deliver a certain product with certain capabilities within a certain budget. Those numbers seem too fuzzy for me to trust the totals, and I couldn't find the schedule. Other places it felt like you were diverted by details that should not be relevant at this relatively early stage.
i'm talking to the factory owner online, and planning to go to taiwan (and then to HK and Shenzen) in september. leading up to christmas the factories are *stupidly* busy, which is why i will go and collect components personally. the critical window of opportunity is between the two new years: that's when i'd like to get the majority of PCB manufacturing done.
but, part of the issue is: if we go beyond the capacity of the current factory, we'll actually have to find another one, and thus redo the entire schedule. i'll also be able to do injection-molding instead of 3d-printing the casework.... so i put down a best-estimate (it's on the crowd supply page at the end) and we see how it goes. i figured that people would be happy to be kept informed of what's going on.
The high end Intel/AMD system is already sufficiently modular and far more open than SoC and other embedded hardware.
... except that for the cost of the lowest-end intel/amd *processors* we can do an entire computer - memory, storage, processor, hdmi output, usb output *and* casework.
"Why are you using a shitty old processor like an A20
answered in the update regarding processor selection - https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...
and exclude the only two good things it has going for it, GbE and SATA?"
answered in depth on the FAQ section - look for "SATA and GbE" and a more in-depth answer on http://rhombus-tech.net/crowds... again search for the keyword "SATA".
Even the old Raspberry Pi 2 is much faster than the A20, being a quad core A7.
only available from broadcom - a hypocritical company that operates on unethical grounds and maintains cartelling business practices, ships proprietary arbitrary untrusted executables that boot the CPU *from* the GPU, and forces children to purchase licenses to watch films, for $2.50. what kind of hypocritical lesson is that, that kids may only educate themselves "so far", but beyond a certain point they can FUCK OFF. great. i think that's a great education. we should all teach kids that they are only allowed to learn up to a certain point and beynd that they're expected to be treated like cattle.
If they wanted to go cheap and Allwinner,
EOMA68 is a hardware standard. read the "processor selection" update as well as the "passthrough card" update.
there's the A80,
uses PowerVR which is known to cause enormous instability problems ever since it came out, on *every* architecture that ever uses it. why would i want to bring out something that i know for a fact would be severely problematic?
H3
not designed for low-power.
or A64.
GPL-violating SDK with a proprietary untrusted bootloader.
sorry dude - don't try to be too clever and sarcastic, and you'll get a much less curt answer. i got too much ground to cover - over 25 forums and increasing.
what it's doing is demonstrating to both you and to other readers that... (if i may be completely honest with you here)...
LOL ok Mr Universe, tell us what other people can comprehend.
that's enough. sorry, but when you start laughing at other people's expense to make yourself look better than them, that's when i know not to take you seriously, and everyone else reading this will know that too. sorry, but you've had three chances to not display yourself as a "troll", and failed each time. apologies but i can't spend any more time replying to you until you change the way that you approach other people.
And by "move to block them" what do you mean, they'll dress up in a chicken suit and dance in the street?
... cue the "why did the man in the chicken-suit dance in the street" jokes....
sorry, i don't understand. could you possibly expand on this, perhaps help review the logic analysis behind the modular standards that i've reviewed over the past five years
No. And I just wanted to say, that is a really, really weird thing to request.
it's not weird at all. what it's doing is demonstrating to both you and to other readers that... (if i may be completely honest with you here)... you haven't thought through what you're saying. or, more to the point, we can't *check* your conclusion, because you're not prepared to provide us with the facts or any of the logical reasoning *behind* your conclusion. thus, if you're not prepared to stand up and do the work to justify your perspective, then your points may be safely ignored. the question i asked, which is a known technique that i was advised to use throughout this campaign, is therefore a simple "double-check" of your true intent.
if however you were prepared to answer the question and engage, both of us might learn something. you might actually have a legitimate and logical point of view that is grounded in rational and reasonable evidence. but if you *can't do that*, then people will *see* that you can't do that, and will be able to safely discard what you've written.
i'd *prefer* that you answered the question, because i actually *genuinely* need people to independently verify what i'm doing, even though i've been working on it full-time for five years: i'd like to know that i've not missed something important.
Not trying to be rude.
no offense taken: this is the internet... it's slashdot.... what you wrote is actually really helpful as a counterpoint: chris answered i think really well https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
, bill yourself as a fully open and environmentally friendly alt to the raspberry pi and similar.
*deep, deep breath*..... AAAAAAAAAAAgh no :) *shudder* no, no, nOooo, and no.
ok to explain my reaction, there: those are all SBCs (single-board computers). after six months of supernova-style popularity, they're dead. each manufacturer of each SBC has to scramble like mad to bring out *the next* SBC using whatever processor they can get their hands on, and the next, and the next, in a desperate cat-and-dog bitch-fight of popularity and unethical abuse of the word "open". ... am i painting a broad picture here of the *really* stark contrast between the approach taken by the embedded "educational" SBC clone market and what we're doing with EOMA68?
by total contrast we're creating the beginning of a comprehensive eco-system of hardware re-use which *happens* (through direct correlation) to both save money for end-users and also reduce e-waste.
but more than that: if we took the EOMA68-A20 board and turned it into an SBC, it would *INSTANTLY* be perceived as being a tired total waste-of-time banana pi or cubieboard clone... when in fact the irony is that those products exist *because* of the reverse-engineering and persistence that i applied to Allwinner to obtain GPL compliance. the sunxi community then helped take that initiative over, they've been working non-stop now for years to pressurise allwinner, and i've been helping quietly in the background ever since.
this project has a completely different focus in other words, where it succeeds if there is a *huge* compatible eco-system (tablet, laptop, router, camera, gps, media centre, lcd tv, games console - everything you can see on here http://rhombus-tech.net/commun... and many more) and a huge compatible range of EOMA68 Computer Cards (and an FPGA card and a Pass-through Card and a DisplayLink Card) with a wide price-range and crucially a decades-long-term "just plug it in, it will work" *stable* standard. ... massive, massive difference.
The problem is that (by modern standards) it's physically huge
Any smaller and it would not hold a DVD drive, an LTO drive and a DAT drive, and still have somewhere to put USB sticks and SD cards, not to mention the place required for SCSI cards.
yeahhh i had to make a decision whether to make the first EOMA standard for mass-volume clients or for mass-volume servers. i figured that with facebook, google and hp and others having the data centre market pretty much sewn up, and them trying to convince everyone that "cloud is good", and having poisoned the word "open" in that area with their "open compute" standard, the chances would be much better if i focussed on "the little guy"... ... that meant using hardware that was simple enough for someone like me to learn, and with a persistent and bloody-minded attitude actually gain access to Reference Designs and so on, and that in turn meant SoCs around the $2 to $8 mark that are designed for "tablets" and "smartphones", not "intel-style PCs", and _that_ in turn meant "SATA and GbE and PCIe are off the interface set". you can't get a QFP-176 SoC at $2.50 that has PCIe or SATA, basically, but you *can* get one that has HDMI, 3x SD/MMCs, 2x USB2 and several other really good interfaces that you can make a fully-functioning low-cost computer from (look up the Allwinner R8 - it's QFP176 and $2.50. absolutely amazing).
As someone who actually saw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v4Juzn10gM EDSAC working, I think the standard tower PC case is about right, and I KNOW that tape will keep my data for 30 years (I have read my own backups 30 years later),
toootally cooool! ahh... don't read them too often, the heads are abrasively-worn by the read/write cycle...
and I know DVDs won't keep my data for even six years.
*sigh* that oxygenation of the metallic compound through the edges of the disc when they thinned down the amount of varnish to save money, it's a bitch, huh? did you happen to mark the DVD with a permanent marker then close it up inside a plastic case? i know of someone who learned the hard way that the fumes from those pens migrate *into* the discs and oxidise the metal.... whoops... ... you can't use HDDs because after 5 years there's a 25% chance that just *powering them up* will cause a head-crash: thermal warping (cool-down) of the HDD when it was last shut down, combined with the bearings seizing as the oil/grease isn't being cycled round during storage.... yyyeah.
you can't use SSDs because the geometries are too small now, you get data loss over time due to quantum effects and radiation... what are we down to now... 20 atoms to store one bit of data??
we're screwed basically :)
I certainly don't want MY data in the cloud.
cloud... that's where you store your data on other people's computers, right? :)
no problem d - we learn by making comparisons...
A very tiny and again short lived market for you then.
This product has one selling point, modular. Which has absolutely no value. Nobody cares if their pc is modular or not, it just have to work.
It could work if like the case is 100 bucks or something in that range and looks designed, but to ask 500$ for an unassembled...
and 1200$ for... I mean, i can buy a macbook for that.
ok, so you're comparing a mass-produced product that's been refined by a billion-dollar company that has a track record of taking software libre source code and using it without actually funding or compensating the people whom their profits are critically dependent on... against a crowd-funded *prototype* project that's entirely transparent, is deliberately limiting the first prototype production run to around 250 units, where the majority of the funds goes towards NREs and to ensuring that the project can reach the next critical phase so that it can get *to* that next larger volume production run... and many many other aspects that make it a totally different proposition... ... i therefore don't really understand what you're trying to say.
I have an ANCIENT (>10 years old) Dell XPS desktop machine - and last week, the motherboard failed. Went to Fry's paid $65 for a new motherboard and $120 for a new CPU (which included a new cooling fan). My RAM modules were too ancient to run in the new motherboard - so I spent another $60 for a couple of RAM modules. To my surprise, the original power supply, graphics card, hard drive, DVD drive and case all fitted perfectly - and a simple reboot got me back into Ubuntu as if nothing had happened - I was back up and running in an hour.
Sure, the CPU socket had changed - and my decade-old DDR-2 memory wouldn't work in the DDR-3/4 motherboard - but aside from that, modularity worked 100% perfectly. I could have chosen from a dozen different CPU's and a similar number of RAM suppliers and any one of a dozen motherboards - and the outcome would have been the same.
... you're aware that intel has moved *away* from socketed CPUs and is forcing BGA onto manufacturers, now? you're really lucky to have been able to find a motherboard that suited you which didn't have the BGA-soldered processor on it.
So the desktop PC "standard" is already an incredibly modular system. The problem is that (by modern standards) it's physically huge.
For small systems like IOT devices, the cost of "the computer" including graphics, networking, RAM, long-term-storage is down to $10 or less...so modularity at that scale is just pointless - increasing the cost by adding connectors between the parts is just silly.
... and actually causes huge reliability and manufacturing issues. yeah. you get it. which is great to see.
For systems at the scale of a cellphone, modularity is a tough sell because the physical form-factor has to fit perfectly with the shape of the battery and screen and heat management is a big issue - so making a *usefully* modular phone is challenging.
dave hakkens is *PISSED*, man. like, really *really* disappointed and betrayed by google. all that money and they *claim* open-ness but actually instead they're just strengthening the positions of the existing cartels. what a fucking waste. the sad thing is, i spotted all this years ago, but it's taken everyone else (and dave) quite a while to catch up, because most people are non-technical and do not have a reverse-engineering background https://davehakkens.nl/news/re...
The real issue is modular laptops.
that's why i'm tackling it: to make sure it's done right, and in a transparent way, with a standard that's *genuinely* open.
It's a real pain if you screen gets cracked or your motherboard or power supply fails. But you don't need modularity at the electronics level - it's all about modular cases and connectors.
and having the right *to* repair or 3d-print those modular case parts.
You can buy software, download free software or write your own - and it's pretty simple to make it work on the trifecta of OSX, Windows and Linux - and trivially easy if you can make it web-based. But it's very evident that the business model of most companies these days is to lock you in to buying music/video/apps from their "app store"...that's where the $$$'s are...so expect to see more moves like MS's efforts to lock down Win-10 so you have to buy apps through their store.
one thing that hadn't occurred to me (but i must add to the standard, to protect against), is that DRM is going to be totally ineffective in modular computing. you can't *possibly* agree a DRM standard across a truly open architecture: it just doesn't work when access to all the hardware relies critically on drivers that are released under GPLv2+ licenses.
i mean... they can _try_... but it will be a hell of a job to maintain.
so i think i'm safe in adding "hardware-level DRM simply not
I should have worded my post differently and qualified my statements.
nono, no need - it was actually really helpful that you pointed those things out
My best guess from the sidelines is that you're approaching this from a well-informed, well-planned angle and everything I've read and watched built my trust.
thanks!
I pledged to support the project.
that's really kind of you - thank you.
But I still think that those angles are the most likely cause of trouble. Hopefully nothing comes up or you're able to adjust for everything that does come up.
this is why i'm going to go over to taiwan, and from there to HK and to Shenzen. got bunnie's book already. my partner marie speaks mandarin. planning to go meet allwinner. and go *personally* to all the component suppliers to pick things up and pay by cash (which is totally normal, there). will be accompanying the finished units down to the docks and making sure they get sealed and loaded so that we don't end up receiving a container with boxes packaged nicely with 1.1kg worth of bricks... yes this really does happen, and when you complain, the customs officials go, "you no china citizen! sorry no can help!" then they go down to the docks and go "well done ripping off gwailo stupid foreigner! next time you give me cut off of what you sold their stolen goods for, okaaay?"
if you want a laugh (kinda...) read keyboard.io blog.. http://blog.keyboard.io/ - i've dealt with most of these things before and found people that i trust... took five years to find them, but i found them.
I appreciate all of your free software work, by the way - I've used Samba before myself.
:) the highlight of that work was, over a decade later, porting samba-tng to w32 and cross-compiling it using mingw32 to run... *under wine*. i still have difficulty comprehending why i even tried doing that, but it was, ultimately, in the hope that the ReactOS team gave serious consideration to doing a proper implementation of the various MSRPC services that are needed to be fully interoperable with NT, and to drop Samba TNG into place as the SMB server....
VERY EXPENSIVE machine tools
HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of HOURS of VERY EXPENSIVE engineering time
MASSIVE AMOUNTS of special purpose tooling
The last three items are one-off costs, spread over the entire production volume. If your volume is high, they are negligible, if your volume is low, you are stuffed.
sorry, forgot to say:
VERY EXPENSIVE machine tools which is why i went with re-using of legacy PCMCIA casework. why pay $250k to get tooling made up and end up having to order 1 million units when you can re-use what already exists? tools costs wiped out....
HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of HOURS of VERY EXPENSIVE engineering time - or just one person over a looong time, doing things from home, backed by small sponsors, or by working part-time, but also doing things as a modular approach so that the main bulk of the designs (the "Housings") can be EASILY UPGRADED with a MINIMUM of work instead of requiring TOTAL REDESIGNs. cool, huh?
MASSIVE AMOUNTS of special purpose tooling - that's why i'm going with laser-cut maple plywood for the desktop casework, and with 3D-printed casework and bamboo plywood panels for the laptop. no special purpose tooling required... those costs are eliminated as well. in china, mohou.cn has network-3d-printed factories where because they get PLA in such bulk quantities they can do the casework for $35 instead of $70 which everyone else charges. $35 is actually affordable and is not that far off what it would cost in injection-molding. i think i'll stick with the bamboo panels and the multi-part (repairable) design, even for mass-production, i think it's cool :)
There is no money in it for the big players.
hoooraaay, congratulations on being the first person in this thread to notice :) profit-maximisation is achieved through *deliberate* obsolescence, and cooperation through standards compliance is viewed as "an opportunity for competitors to step in and take over the market that you created".
You do not want to sell individual components.
You want consumers to buy a whole new thing, paying for everything new, even if the old trackpad or display of the old one is still working. More money there.
in theory... yes. but the profit margins on laptops are becoming so much tighter it's becoming ridiculous. it's around 10% for the *ENTIRE CHAIN*. not 10% for the factory, 10% for the middle-man, 10% for the salesman... it's 10% *TOTAL*. no wonder they're pushing extended warranties so hard: that's the only place to actually make money.
Plus you can not push new technologies. People will stay with their old trackpad, display, cpu/mem and update only what they want. Bad for business, it slows adaptation. ...
There is absolute no market for it.
hooray. so the entire market for a modular ecocomputing approach is open to meeee, yippeee! :)
The FSF-approved Linux distribution (or GNU/Linux, whatever) "Parabola" that they offer won't include the firmware for the GPU, and does all graphics processing and calculations on the CPU. So the GPU is included on the chip but it's not used.
... not quite: again, the phoronix thread had people explain this in some detail, it's 200 comments so i won't go looking for it, i have too much ground to cover, but the key discrepancy in what you said is that the 2D GPU is up and running: we're *not* doing "pure framebuffer". so there's far less load on the CPU than would otherwise be expected. see the very first update, in which i got xf86-video-fbturbo up and running on the Parabola-ARM Gnu/Linux-Libre card: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...