it would cost something like $64,000 to load an iPod full
Perhaps so. Is this the 120GB model we're talking about?
I've so-far managed to fill 50GB of my player with music I actually own a license for, and that's in mp3 format. I don't think I'm that exceptional, and I have used fairly lo-def formats, but I have been collecting music for about 20 years now. So filling an iPod isn't that strange an idea to me.
You mentioned software projects targeted at devices which are tightly locked-down
No, I mentioned *some* projects that were locked down, your original examples of NAS and router devices were particularly wrong. The ways we put custom firmare on those is via the official method, with no circumvention required.
And what about your home router? It's also a general purpose computer, which has been locked down hard to force you to not fiddle with it. The same applies to NAS and even some external HDs.
Right, that's why projects like DD-WRT are stillborn and useless, and how I was totally unable to install a custom linux kernel and debian onto my NAS because Western Digital never released their kernel code under the GPL....
I'm referring to stuff such as MP3 players, media players, tablets, video game consoles and all of the sort.
Rockbox, XBMC for Apple TV, CyanogenMod, Kmeaw/Rebug custom PS3 firmware, PSP PRO firmware etc, none of these things exist in your world?
Admittedly, with the consumer electronics end of things, in many cases someone had to figure out how to root the device.
there's no general-purpose PCs made with ARM CPUs.
Wrong.
Did you even read the thread title? "Raspberry Pi" is a general purpose computer.
There are others, like the Trim Slice, and before that there were the plug computers, some of which (Guruplug Display, OpenRD) had built in display adaptors, while others could use USB video cards.
They currently have a miniscule market share, but they are out there.
"the mob mentality of the Internet is going to ruin him.. For nothing more than having a very bad day"
Several days really, if you see the email chain, and a repeating pattern shown on a few other sites.
this guy should be fired. On the other hand, the press this gets means this guys life is over. At least his online life... Has the Internet Mob Mentality become the modern day witch hunt?
He runs a one-man PR firm, and has shown himself utterly unsuited for such a task. I'm sure he's not the only one, but ruining that firm is really not a bad thing. He'll have to find something else to do.
And it's not a witch hunt because you have the evidence right in front of you. A witch hunt is where you don't have any and you look for scapegoats anyway, surely?
Also I get the feeling this would go away a lot faster if he had actually admitted he had been a jerk, instead of repeatedly blaming anyone and everyone around himself.
The Kakapo makes perfect sense in a place where there are no mammals, specifically rats and foxes. The Kiwi likewise.
It's one of the things that makes New Zealand bird life so crazy and cool. Damn shame those Maori wiped out the Moa, and introduced mammals look to be trying for the rest of the weird ground-birds.
In a sane world, perhaps. If your management are reasonable people and money isn't too tight right now.
I'm not sure about out here in the real world though. Mostly you are expected to use whatever skill you have in pursuit of your job. The idea of holding out because 'you hired me for monkey work' is a strange one to me. Not necessarily wrong, just a bit weird, but then I've always been employed to use my coding skills.
instead retreating to the fallacy of arguing from authority (well Dawkins is extremely smart, and he argues this, so...).
I have been watching and occasionally participating in religious flamewars since the mid 90s, from usenet to fark.com and a thousand other places.
I have *never* seen this bull-shit.
I have seen faulty logic, bad assumptions, stupid arguments and a lot of anger from all quarters.
And the main I have seen, over and over and over and over again is religious people and/or trolls playing semantic games to define 'atheism' as a religion, try to redefine their opponents views in the light of these games, then claim this strawman shows that all views are equal.
This goes round, and round, and round and round.
Nobody ever gets anywhere. Neither the atheists, the religious, those that define themselves as agnostic, those that try to appear to step back and weigh up both sides in an effort to make themselves feel superior to the others... nada, nothing ever changes.
Hell, I've seen atheists and theists (and AGW believers/deniers, pro/anti weed legalisation folk... anything really) have their arguments ripped to shreds, their whole premises exposed publicly as a sham. The very next week or even the very next day, there they are, the very same people making the very same arguments that they've already been shown are a total nonsense.
People don't come to the internet looking for a discussion (if they do anywhere else?), they come looking for a fight. They make emotional, rather than factual arguments to support the outcome they're already emotionally invested in, and they have no problem reciting already discredited arguments if they appear to support 'the cause'.
"I have this stuff I wrote in my spare time, it would make everyone's life easier, wanna buy it?"
Responses are probably going to be as varied as -
"Not interested"
"Sure, if the rate is reasonable and we get the code and copyrights"
"Wow, you know your stuff, there might be a promotion and more cash in it for you if you bring it in (might be)"
"That does sound useful, but now we're going to price out the commercial alternatives"
"Uh, you signed this piece of paper, we own your soul. Hand it over or get out"
"You used knowledge gained here, of our systems, to write this. Hand it over or get out"
"Huh, really, you did this in your spare time? So you can do this stuff? Well, how's about your task for the next month is to write an identical (but newer) version on our time and equipment so we own it?"
I have personally seen "Sure, if the rate is reasonable and we get the code and copyrights", but the guy that wrote it was senior staff and had been with the company at least a decade. I have no idea how often the others occur, likely they're not talked about so often.
Me, I like to keep any personal coding and company work in completely separate domains, so that there's no question of ownership. I also make sure that any contract I sign does not try to claim rights over stuff I do in my spare time. I'll sign limited non-competes (i.e. promise not to release competing products during the time I'm employed, this provision to end when employment ends), but not more than that.
Not that I'll be getting one any time soon, but ther seem OK. It's just a shame that (hardware-power-wise) they're a good year behind Samsung and Apple. Pretty though, and apparently a good user experience.
Lack of keyboard kills it for me though, they should have put the 950 on sale to the general public too.
"For crying out loud, Samsung outright stole Apple's icon artwork and used it in their stores."
Calling bullshit on that. It looks like the background decor, not the samsung stand, in a larger store. In one place, in sicily.
Apple's design work is not extraordinary enough that they should be able to get away with claiming rights over the 'rounded rectangle'.
This recent round of getting competitors products banned from sale in various countries is sickening. Call it a failure in the patent systems, the legal systems, whatever, but it's sickening. If you can't see that then you might want to take the apple stickers off your eyeballs. They are not the only company guilty of mass abuse of the legal system to avoid competition, but they have been behaving like total assholes.
And no, I don't own an android or iOS device, I'm not invested in either.
1. My large linux box can't be put into as many places as this, makes a lot more noises and consumes a hell of a lot more power.
2. You missed the part of the board that exposes all the other GPIO pins on the processor then?
3. Cheaper than 25 bucks? And I can program them using the languages and runtimes I'm used to? With all the operating system features I have come to know and love? With HDMI output? Sign me up...
4. And as full systems such as this become cheaper, who will need to bother doing that any more? The embedded space is becoming more and more dominated by systems running linux already, this will only accelerate.
This is a learning tool for computer science in general, not just embedded programming. You lack imagination.
The Raz' closest competitor are the plugs (Sheeva, Guru, Pogo-,...) and they are OK for ssh
The sheevaplug I have is powerful enough to run Gnome 2 in a vnc session. It also has built in storage and an SD reader.
"What is unique and very interesting about the Raz is HDMI output"
That's not unique, the Guruplug Display has HDMI also, though I have no idea if that ever really took off and I have a feeling debian had decided not to support it. It is more poweful than the Pi, and has twice the RAM.
The unique thing about Rasberry Pi is the proposed price though, with the Guruplug display at $200. Though that does come with a case and power lead, 4 USB slots and two micro-SD readers.
Most modern tvs probably have more power than this already.
My Samsung plasma (a couple of years old now) already has a UPNP/DLNA network media player, youtube interface, app-installer type thing and a variety of other stuff built in. Meaning it's already got a general purpose embedded computer in there, it's just feature limited at the moment.
"Having to maintain a seperate code tree for the nutjobs who doesn't like JS is simply too much of a hassle."
Heh, a lot of pages work just fine without the scripts. They may not look as pretty, but it seems that (just like a decade ago) javascript is mostly used to prettify things, to load ads and to track users. I can live without those things much of the time, and am rewarded with much faster page loads.
N900 - overclocking involves lowering the voltages and increasing the maximum burst speed, theory being that if you get the work done faster you can go to sleep sooner and save power.
I'm not sure it really works, but it does make the UI more responsive.
How someone who shies away from writing some simple javascript against well defined and well documented interfaces can call themselves a "power user" is beyond me.
How about someone who has some work to do?
there was little you could do to make some things happen in GNOME2 without hacking around in the C
Now you're just talking bullshit. There was a lot you could do in gnome (MOVE a panel, for instance, or add things to it) at the touch of a couple of buttons.
Or is a text editor instead of a pointy-clicky interface too daunting for a "power user" like yourself?
I use a text editor to write C. I click to customise my desktop GUI, like in every other OS.
Are you seriously, for even a second, suggesting that GNOME Shell was designed to allow "power users" more flexibility? You're more retarded than I thought.
To customise Gnome Shell you need to write javascript. I do not have the time or the inclination to write code to re-add functionality that was available with a right-click in the last release.
People who write custom FVWM2 configs in the way you talk about it were never power-users, they're obsessives.
You've made some assertions that might or might not hold true. Nothing has been proven conclusively.
Really not actually, they aren't assertions, they're holes punched in the logic of Pascal's trite little saying.
No problem, friend. Just friendly debate about an inconclusive topic.
Yeah... except it's not inconclusive, on this very narrow topic, you and Pascal are demonstrably wrong.
I'll be going to bed now, as this conversation is basically devolving into you saying "nuh-uh!" over and over again, but I'll repeat this one last time - I'm making no claim on the validity of religion, but that argument is nonsense. Persisting in claiming otherwise is just wilful stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps so. Is this the 120GB model we're talking about?
I've so-far managed to fill 50GB of my player with music I actually own a license for, and that's in mp3 format. I don't think I'm that exceptional, and I have used fairly lo-def formats, but I have been collecting music for about 20 years now. So filling an iPod isn't that strange an idea to me.
No, I mentioned *some* projects that were locked down, your original examples of NAS and router devices were particularly wrong. The ways we put custom firmare on those is via the official method, with no circumvention required.
Right, that's why projects like DD-WRT are stillborn and useless, and how I was totally unable to install a custom linux kernel and debian onto my NAS because Western Digital never released their kernel code under the GPL....
Rockbox, XBMC for Apple TV, CyanogenMod, Kmeaw/Rebug custom PS3 firmware, PSP PRO firmware etc, none of these things exist in your world?
Admittedly, with the consumer electronics end of things, in many cases someone had to figure out how to root the device.
Wrong.
Did you even read the thread title? "Raspberry Pi" is a general purpose computer.
There are others, like the Trim Slice, and before that there were the plug computers, some of which (Guruplug Display, OpenRD) had built in display adaptors, while others could use USB video cards.
They currently have a miniscule market share, but they are out there.
"the mob mentality of the Internet is going to ruin him.. For nothing more than having a very bad day"
Several days really, if you see the email chain, and a repeating pattern shown on a few other sites.
this guy should be fired. On the other hand, the press this gets means this guys life is over. At least his online life... Has the Internet Mob Mentality become the modern day witch hunt?
He runs a one-man PR firm, and has shown himself utterly unsuited for such a task. I'm sure he's not the only one, but ruining that firm is really not a bad thing. He'll have to find something else to do.
And it's not a witch hunt because you have the evidence right in front of you. A witch hunt is where you don't have any and you look for scapegoats anyway, surely?
Also I get the feeling this would go away a lot faster if he had actually admitted he had been a jerk, instead of repeatedly blaming anyone and everyone around himself.
Fair enough, should have read your signature!
Do we point and laugh at the panda also?
The Kakapo makes perfect sense in a place where there are no mammals, specifically rats and foxes. The Kiwi likewise.
It's one of the things that makes New Zealand bird life so crazy and cool. Damn shame those Maori wiped out the Moa, and introduced mammals look to be trying for the rest of the weird ground-birds.
I'm still annoyed I missed the fire sale on the 'full size' model.
In a sane world, perhaps. If your management are reasonable people and money isn't too tight right now.
I'm not sure about out here in the real world though. Mostly you are expected to use whatever skill you have in pursuit of your job. The idea of holding out because 'you hired me for monkey work' is a strange one to me. Not necessarily wrong, just a bit weird, but then I've always been employed to use my coding skills.
instead retreating to the fallacy of arguing from authority (well Dawkins is extremely smart, and he argues this, so...).
I have been watching and occasionally participating in religious flamewars since the mid 90s, from usenet to fark.com and a thousand other places.
I have *never* seen this bull-shit.
I have seen faulty logic, bad assumptions, stupid arguments and a lot of anger from all quarters.
And the main I have seen, over and over and over and over again is religious people and/or trolls playing semantic games to define 'atheism' as a religion, try to redefine their opponents views in the light of these games, then claim this strawman shows that all views are equal.
This goes round, and round, and round and round.
Nobody ever gets anywhere. Neither the atheists, the religious, those that define themselves as agnostic, those that try to appear to step back and weigh up both sides in an effort to make themselves feel superior to the others... nada, nothing ever changes.
Hell, I've seen atheists and theists (and AGW believers/deniers, pro/anti weed legalisation folk... anything really) have their arguments ripped to shreds, their whole premises exposed publicly as a sham. The very next week or even the very next day, there they are, the very same people making the very same arguments that they've already been shown are a total nonsense.
People don't come to the internet looking for a discussion (if they do anywhere else?), they come looking for a fight. They make emotional, rather than factual arguments to support the outcome they're already emotionally invested in, and they have no problem reciting already discredited arguments if they appear to support 'the cause'.
tl;dr - people are idiots.
My thoughts too, but it could go either way -
"I have this stuff I wrote in my spare time, it would make everyone's life easier, wanna buy it?"
Responses are probably going to be as varied as -
I have personally seen "Sure, if the rate is reasonable and we get the code and copyrights", but the guy that wrote it was senior staff and had been with the company at least a decade. I have no idea how often the others occur, likely they're not talked about so often.
Me, I like to keep any personal coding and company work in completely separate domains, so that there's no question of ownership. I also make sure that any contract I sign does not try to claim rights over stuff I do in my spare time. I'll sign limited non-competes (i.e. promise not to release competing products during the time I'm employed, this provision to end when employment ends), but not more than that.
N9?
Not that I'll be getting one any time soon, but ther seem OK. It's just a shame that (hardware-power-wise) they're a good year behind Samsung and Apple. Pretty though, and apparently a good user experience.
Lack of keyboard kills it for me though, they should have put the 950 on sale to the general public too.
"For crying out loud, Samsung outright stole Apple's icon artwork and used it in their stores."
Calling bullshit on that. It looks like the background decor, not the samsung stand, in a larger store. In one place, in sicily.
Apple's design work is not extraordinary enough that they should be able to get away with claiming rights over the 'rounded rectangle'.
This recent round of getting competitors products banned from sale in various countries is sickening. Call it a failure in the patent systems, the legal systems, whatever, but it's sickening. If you can't see that then you might want to take the apple stickers off your eyeballs. They are not the only company guilty of mass abuse of the legal system to avoid competition, but they have been behaving like total assholes.
And no, I don't own an android or iOS device, I'm not invested in either.
HDMI != HDCP
You can have HDMI without DRM, and HDCP also works over DVI connections.
HDMI is there because it's a good standard for a digital connection and has smallish connectors.
1. My large linux box can't be put into as many places as this, makes a lot more noises and consumes a hell of a lot more power.
2. You missed the part of the board that exposes all the other GPIO pins on the processor then?
3. Cheaper than 25 bucks? And I can program them using the languages and runtimes I'm used to? With all the operating system features I have come to know and love? With HDMI output? Sign me up...
4. And as full systems such as this become cheaper, who will need to bother doing that any more? The embedded space is becoming more and more dominated by systems running linux already, this will only accelerate.
This is a learning tool for computer science in general, not just embedded programming. You lack imagination.
The Raz' closest competitor are the plugs (Sheeva, Guru, Pogo-, ...) and they are OK for ssh
The sheevaplug I have is powerful enough to run Gnome 2 in a vnc session. It also has built in storage and an SD reader.
"What is unique and very interesting about the Raz is HDMI output"
That's not unique, the Guruplug Display has HDMI also, though I have no idea if that ever really took off and I have a feeling debian had decided not to support it. It is more poweful than the Pi, and has twice the RAM.
The unique thing about Rasberry Pi is the proposed price though, with the Guruplug display at $200. Though that does come with a case and power lead, 4 USB slots and two micro-SD readers.
Most modern tvs probably have more power than this already.
My Samsung plasma (a couple of years old now) already has a UPNP/DLNA network media player, youtube interface, app-installer type thing and a variety of other stuff built in. Meaning it's already got a general purpose embedded computer in there, it's just feature limited at the moment.
That spec is all but irrelevant these days, as many, many mini- and micro-USB chargers exist that give far more than this with no negotiation at all.
Perhaps the spec needs changing to reflect the real world usage?
"Having to maintain a seperate code tree for the nutjobs who doesn't like JS is simply too much of a hassle."
Heh, a lot of pages work just fine without the scripts. They may not look as pretty, but it seems that (just like a decade ago) javascript is mostly used to prettify things, to load ads and to track users. I can live without those things much of the time, and am rewarded with much faster page loads.
N900 - overclocking involves lowering the voltages and increasing the maximum burst speed, theory being that if you get the work done faster you can go to sleep sooner and save power.
I'm not sure it really works, but it does make the UI more responsive.
You really must have no real work to do...
How about someone who has some work to do?
Now you're just talking bullshit. There was a lot you could do in gnome (MOVE a panel, for instance, or add things to it) at the touch of a couple of buttons.
I use a text editor to write C. I click to customise my desktop GUI, like in every other OS.
Are you seriously, for even a second, suggesting that GNOME Shell was designed to allow "power users" more flexibility? You're more retarded than I thought.
No.
To customise Gnome Shell you need to write javascript. I do not have the time or the inclination to write code to re-add functionality that was available with a right-click in the last release.
People who write custom FVWM2 configs in the way you talk about it were never power-users, they're obsessives.
Why?
It could cost $5 and I wouldn't buy it because it comes stamped with 'Sony' on the front. Screw that and screw them.
On top of which there's a whole new proprietary memory card format! Hooray!
Really not actually, they aren't assertions, they're holes punched in the logic of Pascal's trite little saying.
Yeah... except it's not inconclusive, on this very narrow topic, you and Pascal are demonstrably wrong.
I'll be going to bed now, as this conversation is basically devolving into you saying "nuh-uh!" over and over again, but I'll repeat this one last time - I'm making no claim on the validity of religion, but that argument is nonsense. Persisting in claiming otherwise is just wilful stupidity.