I suspect that was just a crapilly written article, the specs in the review on mini-itx.com ( http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/pico-itx/ ) certainly don't say or imply that it is only for flash.
That said, why is everyone evaluating an embedded system using criteria usually applied to laptops and/or desktops. Does no one here ever do (or even know about) embedded work anymore? The epia boards sit on the boundry between PCs and embedded computing. They are just about powerfull enough to run desktop software which means no specialist development tools and easy testing. They are also just about small and low power enough for embedded use. Finally they have one off prices that make them accessible to hobbyists.
When I have looked at PC-104 boards the cost to get ones with enough performance to run modern windows has been rather high.
they are cheap! the bottom end epia board is about £60. If you plan to net boot then the only thing you need to add is ram to get a functional device. even with a compactflash card and adaptor for booting (needed to easilly run windows) and a copy of whitebox OEM windows XP home i'd imagine you are looking less than £200 all in.
if you don't want a heatsink to come off there is always arctic silver epoxy (http://www.heatsinkfactory.com/shop/product.php?p roductid=16157) , it is a little permanent though.
I have also heared you can mix ordinary heatsink compound and araldite rapid but i'm not sure i'd want to risk that.
we do not want a 'full range' of connectors. I bet many boards that don't have the ports still have the features on the chips. Bringing them out to a few pins doesn't really cost much size wise and makes life much easier for those projects that need custom stuff interfaced as a keyboard or mouse. Likewise for serial ports for more general purpose interfacing (yes you can get PICs with USB support but the software needed to run the USB dominates the structure of your code and many projects end up dedicating a chip (either a USB pic or a dedicated USB-serial chip) just to managing the USB.
IDE costs a lot of pins but it makes it very easy to do a fully solid state setup that can boot windows (CF card in a CF-IDE adaptor). I do not know of any other way to easilly set up windows without using a rotating drive. Also the range of laptop hard drives still seems wider in IDE than in SATA.
DVI-I is really a loss over seperate VGA and DVI-D, it is the same number of wires and lines from the chip yet you can only use one of the two interfaces at a time.
I do wonder why the full sized VGA connector was put onboard rather than on a cable, maybe it was signal integrtity issues with the fast analog signals or something.
What vias epia series provide is enough power to run modern windows (at least XP which is modern enough for most purposes) or linux at acceptable speeds while also being relatively small and cheaper than most embedded PC kit (the PC104 kit you link to doesn't show a price which i tend to intepret as meaning if you have to ask you can't afford it).
Say you want to build a system of information screens. You can easilly build an epia into the back of your screen enclosure, add some ram and then run a network cable too it. Far easier and probablly cheaper than trying to run VGA cable all over the place (VGA cable of the quality needed for long runs is not cheap and there is a limit to the number of VGA ports you can put into one PC).
2K is similar to XP but it is less bloated (apparently XP can be trimmed down to be less bloated than 2K but it certainly is more bloated when comparing default configurations) and doesn't have product activation. It was also apparently much more stable than early versions of XP (though nowadays they are pretty comparable. IMO it is one of the best windows releases ever.
OTOH the improvements to network secuity in XP and particularlly XP SP2 were valuable. Running 2K or earlier on the open internet nowadays makes a third party firewall pretty much mandatory.
vista brings more bloat and more drm. The value of it's security improvements are somewhat debatable, given that i have heared of viruses spreading using encrypted zipfiles, I believe that newbies are quite capable of following long but detailed instructions to get at stuff they think is important.
Yep, sign up for Charter FREE UNLIMITED LONG DISTANCE and get an itemized bill of all your long distance and zone calls. nice, that sounds far preferable to the way it is in the UK where unless you do your own metering of phone usage you have no way to tell if you are getting good value from your unlimited plan or not.
FUD? Nope. YOu can spread FUD only on uninformed people, people that learn about a given issue can't be FUDed so to speak. The hard fact is that most people do not have time to do in depth research on every issue that marginally affects them.
Also sure IBM and Novell won this case but could you win if a similar troll went after your linux deployments or linux based products? I don't know exactly how much IBM and Novell spent on this but I bet they each spent more than the average western worker earns in a lifetime.
When will it be technically over, and when will there be no more to slog through? My understanding is that sco will eventually be declared bankrupt and given that they don't actually have much in the way of other debt compared to what they will owe on theese lawsuits thier carcass will probablly end up owned by one or more of the companies that have filed countersuits against them.
Other GNU Classpath developers working for Red Hat were very quick to produce a version of OpenJDK using pieces of Classpath to fill the wholes of "encumbered" components that havent been open sourced (like the font, graphics and sound engines that were licensed by Sun by 3rd parties). This is called IceTea. since it took me a while to find this (it didn't help that you got the name wrong) i'll post a link here, hopefully the site can handle/.
What is happening to the FSF's java project now? My suspicion is the java clones will slowly die off as linux distros, even the license paranoid ones start shipping sun based java
but that cannot happen until sun java is completely free which it isn't yet (though someone mentioned a project to hack up a working java based on the free stuff sun has released in another reply to you).
not really surprising given how most OEMs are practically forcing it on home users (yes I know a few still offer XP on selected systems and that you can buy a buisness version and downgrade if you have appropriate media but most home users would never think of that and probablly don't have the approrpriate media for a downgrade either).
What are Microsoft going to do now? Revoke the key they used to sign drivers with? They could just blacklist the ati driver in question. Of course that alone would probablly cause a LOT of customer upset.
the class of a laser product is not the same thing as the class of the laser inside. Afaict if the laser is completely enclosed then the product is class 1 regardless of the class of the laser inside.
from the power of this laser it sounds like the laser itself is well into the class III range even though the product is class I (the product in question being a DVD burner).
Actually, if the little turds use one of these modified pointers, you can easily find and pound their asses. not if they point it in your eyes first.
I would say that if you see troublemakers with something like this your best bet would be to turn your back and run like hell. Permanent blindness is going to hurt you far more than missing out on revenge on lowlife scum.
it's only that belief that makes the dollar worth anything. if you want to operate in the US without the government trying to shut you down you have to pay taxes to the government. Those taxes must be paid in US dollars.
at least in the uk paper money started as something that was gauranteed by the issuer to be exchangable for a fixed ammount of something else (generally precious metals). Then because of problems with currupt issuers the government took over and then from there the exchangability to gold was phased out.
it could just be that the emulator writer got A and B the opposite way arround from on the real controller by mistake. Button labels aren't clear enough for me to make out which is A and which is B in the youtube video.
the imacs look lovely for those who only have one machine on thier desk but for those that have more than one machine and dont have space for a monitor per machine they are totally unsuitable. All of apples midrange machines have built in monitors:(.
last I checked the ugly set of gstreamer plugins which includedes a mp3 decoder was in the main section of both debian and ubuntu. IIRC it is redhat that is really paranoid about mp3 (I understand the patent claims against mp3 decoders are much weaker than those against encoders).
But is the Windows tax actually positive or negative? Some people have asserted that PC vendors actually get paid to put Windows+crapware on their systems. maybe the big vendors do for home systems which are often shipped loaded up with huge ammounts of crapware that most home users will have trouble getting rid of though I don't belive it is possible to get exact figures on either what dell pays for a windows license or what they get paid for thier crapware load. I can't imagine any crapware vendors wanting to pay to put thier crapware on corporate targetted systems that they know will get reimaged immediately anyway. I also can't imagine many whitebox vendors being able to secure enough from crapware vendors to pay for whitebox OEM windows (about £60 here in the uk for home and £100 for pro iirc).
Dell's computers are apparently cheaper with Windows than without. Food for thought... IIRC some hardware combinations are significantly cheaper with linux and some are significantly cheaper with windows. I suspect it just comes down to the linux boxes being a more unusual product and therefore not getting many special offers.
You can say that again. The pseudo-XML in httpd.conf makes me long for something nice and simple like sendmail.mc... personally I have to say I quite like apaches configuration file format. It has an easy to follow struture that will be easy for anyone who is familiar with html to follow without the over-verboseness of xml.
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I suspect that was just a crapilly written article, the specs in the review on mini-itx.com ( http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/pico-itx/ ) certainly don't say or imply that it is only for flash.
That said, why is everyone evaluating an embedded system using criteria usually applied to laptops and/or desktops. Does no one here ever do (or even know about) embedded work anymore?
The epia boards sit on the boundry between PCs and embedded computing. They are just about powerfull enough to run desktop software which means no specialist development tools and easy testing. They are also just about small and low power enough for embedded use. Finally they have one off prices that make them accessible to hobbyists.
When I have looked at PC-104 boards the cost to get ones with enough performance to run modern windows has been rather high.
they are cheap! the bottom end epia board is about £60. If you plan to net boot then the only thing you need to add is ram to get a functional device. even with a compactflash card and adaptor for booting (needed to easilly run windows) and a copy of whitebox OEM windows XP home i'd imagine you are looking less than £200 all in.
if you don't want a heatsink to come off there is always arctic silver epoxy (http://www.heatsinkfactory.com/shop/product.php?p roductid=16157) , it is a little permanent though.
I have also heared you can mix ordinary heatsink compound and araldite rapid but i'm not sure i'd want to risk that.
we do not want a 'full range' of connectors.
I bet many boards that don't have the ports still have the features on the chips. Bringing them out to a few pins doesn't really cost much size wise and makes life much easier for those projects that need custom stuff interfaced as a keyboard or mouse. Likewise for serial ports for more general purpose interfacing (yes you can get PICs with USB support but the software needed to run the USB dominates the structure of your code and many projects end up dedicating a chip (either a USB pic or a dedicated USB-serial chip) just to managing the USB.
IDE costs a lot of pins but it makes it very easy to do a fully solid state setup that can boot windows (CF card in a CF-IDE adaptor). I do not know of any other way to easilly set up windows without using a rotating drive. Also the range of laptop hard drives still seems wider in IDE than in SATA.
DVI-I is really a loss over seperate VGA and DVI-D, it is the same number of wires and lines from the chip yet you can only use one of the two interfaces at a time.
I do wonder why the full sized VGA connector was put onboard rather than on a cable, maybe it was signal integrtity issues with the fast analog signals or something.
What vias epia series provide is enough power to run modern windows (at least XP which is modern enough for most purposes) or linux at acceptable speeds while also being relatively small and cheaper than most embedded PC kit (the PC104 kit you link to doesn't show a price which i tend to intepret as meaning if you have to ask you can't afford it).
Say you want to build a system of information screens. You can easilly build an epia into the back of your screen enclosure, add some ram and then run a network cable too it. Far easier and probablly cheaper than trying to run VGA cable all over the place (VGA cable of the quality needed for long runs is not cheap and there is a limit to the number of VGA ports you can put into one PC).
2K is similar to XP but it is less bloated (apparently XP can be trimmed down to be less bloated than 2K but it certainly is more bloated when comparing default configurations) and doesn't have product activation. It was also apparently much more stable than early versions of XP (though nowadays they are pretty comparable. IMO it is one of the best windows releases ever.
OTOH the improvements to network secuity in XP and particularlly XP SP2 were valuable. Running 2K or earlier on the open internet nowadays makes a third party firewall pretty much mandatory.
vista brings more bloat and more drm. The value of it's security improvements are somewhat debatable, given that i have heared of viruses spreading using encrypted zipfiles, I believe that newbies are quite capable of following long but detailed instructions to get at stuff they think is important.
ok I guess technically it is hydrodynamics rather than aerodynamics but i'm pretty damn sure the same basic principles hold.
Yep, sign up for Charter FREE UNLIMITED LONG DISTANCE and get an itemized bill of all your long distance and zone calls.
nice, that sounds far preferable to the way it is in the UK where unless you do your own metering of phone usage you have no way to tell if you are getting good value from your unlimited plan or not.
FUD? Nope. YOu can spread FUD only on uninformed people, people that learn about a given issue can't be FUDed so to speak.
The hard fact is that most people do not have time to do in depth research on every issue that marginally affects them.
Also sure IBM and Novell won this case but could you win if a similar troll went after your linux deployments or linux based products? I don't know exactly how much IBM and Novell spent on this but I bet they each spent more than the average western worker earns in a lifetime.
When will it be technically over, and when will there be no more to slog through?
My understanding is that sco will eventually be declared bankrupt and given that they don't actually have much in the way of other debt compared to what they will owe on theese lawsuits thier carcass will probablly end up owned by one or more of the companies that have filed countersuits against them.
Other GNU Classpath developers working for Red Hat were very quick to produce a version of OpenJDK using pieces of Classpath to fill the wholes of "encumbered" components that havent been open sourced (like the font, graphics and sound engines that were licensed by Sun by 3rd parties). This is called IceTea. /.
d istro-packaging.devel/5
since it took me a while to find this (it didn't help that you got the name wrong) i'll post a link here, hopefully the site can handle
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.openjdk.
What is happening to the FSF's java project now?
My suspicion is the java clones will slowly die off as linux distros, even the license paranoid ones start shipping sun based java
but that cannot happen until sun java is completely free which it isn't yet (though someone mentioned a project to hack up a working java based on the free stuff sun has released in another reply to you).
not really surprising given how most OEMs are practically forcing it on home users (yes I know a few still offer XP on selected systems and that you can buy a buisness version and downgrade if you have appropriate media but most home users would never think of that and probablly don't have the approrpriate media for a downgrade either).
btw is there an official "test" version of vista 64 bit intended for driver developers to use that doesn't have the protections?
What are Microsoft going to do now? Revoke the key they used to sign drivers with?
They could just blacklist the ati driver in question. Of course that alone would probablly cause a LOT of customer upset.
and to make life even more confusing firefox used to be called firebird and both projects have previously been called phoenix
the class of a laser product is not the same thing as the class of the laser inside. Afaict if the laser is completely enclosed then the product is class 1 regardless of the class of the laser inside.
from the power of this laser it sounds like the laser itself is well into the class III range even though the product is class I (the product in question being a DVD burner).
Actually, if the little turds use one of these modified pointers, you can easily find and pound their asses.
not if they point it in your eyes first.
I would say that if you see troublemakers with something like this your best bet would be to turn your back and run like hell. Permanent blindness is going to hurt you far more than missing out on revenge on lowlife scum.
it's only that belief that makes the dollar worth anything.
if you want to operate in the US without the government trying to shut you down you have to pay taxes to the government. Those taxes must be paid in US dollars.
at least in the uk paper money started as something that was gauranteed by the issuer to be exchangable for a fixed ammount of something else (generally precious metals). Then because of problems with currupt issuers the government took over and then from there the exchangability to gold was phased out.
it could just be that the emulator writer got A and B the opposite way arround from on the real controller by mistake. Button labels aren't clear enough for me to make out which is A and which is B in the youtube video.
the imacs look lovely for those who only have one machine on thier desk but for those that have more than one machine and dont have space for a monitor per machine they are totally unsuitable. All of apples midrange machines have built in monitors :(.
last I checked the ugly set of gstreamer plugins which includedes a mp3 decoder was in the main section of both debian and ubuntu. IIRC it is redhat that is really paranoid about mp3 (I understand the patent claims against mp3 decoders are much weaker than those against encoders).
But is the Windows tax actually positive or negative? Some people have asserted that PC vendors actually get paid to put Windows+crapware on their systems.
maybe the big vendors do for home systems which are often shipped loaded up with huge ammounts of crapware that most home users will have trouble getting rid of though I don't belive it is possible to get exact figures on either what dell pays for a windows license or what they get paid for thier crapware load. I can't imagine any crapware vendors wanting to pay to put thier crapware on corporate targetted systems that they know will get reimaged immediately anyway. I also can't imagine many whitebox vendors being able to secure enough from crapware vendors to pay for whitebox OEM windows (about £60 here in the uk for home and £100 for pro iirc).
Dell's computers are apparently cheaper with Windows than without. Food for thought...
IIRC some hardware combinations are significantly cheaper with linux and some are significantly cheaper with windows. I suspect it just comes down to the linux boxes being a more unusual product and therefore not getting many special offers.
You can say that again. The pseudo-XML in httpd.conf makes me long for something nice and simple like sendmail.mc...
personally I have to say I quite like apaches configuration file format. It has an easy to follow struture that will be easy for anyone who is familiar with html to follow without the over-verboseness of xml.