It's a full-featured, power-efficient desktop computer
No more so than many other arm linux boards are, yes you can run it as a desktop but you can do that with other arm linux boards as well provided they have video output. Heck they don't even include the SD card that is required to boot the thing. Also would you really want a desktop with only 224 megabytes of usable ram?
Also note that the Pi only comes with the board iself, PSU and storage are both extras (on most arm linux boxes i've dealt with at least storage is included and sometimes PSU too).
this in a world where any equivalent product tends to be sold for around 10 times that amount.
It's not as much as 10x unless you are comparing products that are far from comparable.
When I looked at farnell earlier today IIRC they were listing the pi at arround £26, other arm boards i've looked at are nowhere near 10 times that. They range from just over twice the price of a Pi for a board that is better than the Pi in some ways and worse in others (beaglebone which afaict has a better processor, the same memory, more GPIO but no HDMI port) to arround 5x the price of a pi for a board that is far better than the Pi (panda or imx.53 quickstart).
The hardware is actually based on a mobile phone SOC, not a router SOC. That means more memory and a GPU but it also means the ethernet is stuck behind USB.
I agree though that even given the fact it's less than half the price of the cheapest comparable linux board i've previously seen (the beaglebone) the buzz round the thing is still insane.
Inherently FLACs dont have to be CD quality* but in most cases they probbablly are.
Music is usually realeased by artists in CD quality. The MP3 and AAC files sold on digital distirbution services and distributed on pirate networks are a result of applying lossy compression to the "CD quality" files the artists release..
I would expect the FLAC files released by any self respecting release group (whether legit or pirate) to be a lossless encoding of what the artist released.
Of course it is possible to produce a flac file from a downsampled version of the original audio and it is also possible to produce a FLAC from a file that has already been through lossy compression and then decoded but frankly i'd expect such files to be pretty rare even on open sharing services. Those who know about and use FLAC are mostly those who care about audio quality AFAOCT.
You can also have FLAC files in better than CD quality but only if the artist has released the music in such a form which afaict most don't.
though long-term preservation of data is also surprisingly expensive if you're actually serious
Afaict jounal papers are usually well under 10 megabyte each. That means you can fit over three hundred thousand of them on a modern hard drive.
Lets say you can put four drives in a server and you use raid 5 (purely to speed up recovery, multiple servers provide the real redudancy), that is over 900000 papers on a server.
Now suppose said server costs a thousand pounds a year for hosting and periodic replacement and you want one on each continent for redundancy. You are talking £7000 per year.
That is less than a penny per paper per year.
Unless you want to protect against the end of civilisation or something I just don't see any reason digitally archiving papers should be all that expensive. Certainly it should be a tiny fraction of the cost of paper archives.
the NBN will be leasing access to ducting and exchange space until fiber is no longer needed.
Unless there is a MAJOR breakthrough (e.g. quantum teleportation turns out to be a viable communications method rather than just a lab curiosity) some form of cabled communication (be it copper, fiber or something we haven't invented yet) is likely to be needed for the forseable future. Having a bunch of independent channels just gives you so much more bandwidth and reliability than the shared channel given by free space communication methods. Yes you can use directional antennas and MIMO to improved the shared channel situation a bit but it is still very limited comared to a cabled system.
It's not really limited to HTML/JS based apps, there are plenty of conventional apps that update themselves without asking for permission first.
Yes in some cases you can make and restore backups and find a way to block the app from autoupdating but if the app has an activiation system it may not be possible to activate your restored backup without updating first and/or the app may rely on network services that insist on an updated version.
Afaict you can write fast efficient code in java but to do so you have to fight the language due to it's lack of parameter pass by reference and the implicit pointer in all it's compound types.
Suppose you have a function that returns a complex number, in a sane language you'd just have a complex type which could live on the stack and return it or pass it by reference/pointer. In java to avoid a heap allocation with every call you have to make arrangements to have a relatively long lived object that stores the complex number maintained by code in the parent.
Suppose you want an array of complex numbers, in a sane language you'd just declare an array of the aforementioned complex number type which could live in a single block of memory. In Java you would have to either use two paralell arrays or have a pointer to an object for every entry in the array.
In the old days if an upgrade removed functionality it was annoying but you could always reinstall from your original media and not install the updates (or install an older update since in the old days most devs made standalone update installers available) but with online activation and/or digital distribution systems that may no longer be an option.
I noted the article still thinks a CD/DVD/BluRay player is normal. Aren't they obsolete already?
Not really. They are still the primary way to install most commercial software (including windows itself) and they are still the cheapest option if you want to hand someone some data without any hope of getting your media back.
The only off the shelf machines i've seen without an optical drive are ultraportable laptops and some ultra-small form factor desktops.
What can you do with a modern smartphone in 1994? No youtube, twitter, facebook, gmail, no 3G, not even GPRS, no not even GSM
GSM was arround in europe by 1994. Unfortunately I don't think most modern smartphones support conventional GSM data calls anymore but you should at least be able to use it for voice calls.
there is no usb to load the battery
i'm sure you could find some way to bodge on a power supply. Soldering irons, solder and voltage regulators all existed in 1995. Worst case pop the battery out and charge it with a bench PSU.
Getting data in and out of the device would indeed be a big problem unless you took a wi-fi access point as well.
An object above the earths equator and stationary with respect to the earth has an effective weight of (actual weight)-(centrifugal force). As distance increases weight decreases and centrifugal force increases. At the height we call "geostationary orbit" the effective weight is zero (hence why something can remain stationary relative to the earth at that altitude without a tether). Beyond that height the effective weight is negative.
So assuming a space elavator is defined as "a cable leading into space supported by centrifugal force" then there HAS to be mass beyond geostationary orbit, otherwise the cable would just go slack.
You could in principle build a 400KM tall tower but there are two problems with that idea
1: the forces on it would probablly be even harder to handle than those on a space elavator cable. An object in tension naturally stays straight, an object in compression is (relatively) easilly bent/broken out of the way. 2: Even though at the top of the tower you would be at a higher altitude than the ISS you still WOULD NOT be in orbit. If you jumped off you would begin falling to the ground
I'm not trying to dispute your claims, or belittle you in any way, but... how many people buy a $35 computer and expect to be able to have 10 tabs open in Firefox?
I'm guessing the answer will be "too many", i'm betting the support forums will be hell for quite a while until it's documented just what the two pi models can and can't do
BTW "model 8" in my post should have said "model A", there is no such thing as a "model 8" pi
Afaict if oracle wins on some patents they will likely be able to get an injunction against google using stuff covered by those patents. If google can't work around them (that is find a way to do what they need to do without stepping on the patent) they will basically be forced to come to some licensing agreement with oracle and since oracle will have them over a barrel said agreement is unlikely to be cheap.
Worse it's not 128/256 for the arm. The memory is split between arm and GPU and the minimum GPU allocation is 32MB with more apparently required for full GPU functionality. So on a model 8 you are talking a maximum of 96MB available for the arm and more likely 64MB
The pi will be great for some things but don't expect to be able to have tens of firefox tabs open like you can on a desktop.
Re:Intel charges both predatory & monopolistic
on
AMD: What Went Wrong?
·
· Score: 1
That is still only four things and two of them should have pretty negligable CPU load. Yeah going from a single to a dual would probablly benefit your scenario a lot and going from a dual to a quad might help a bit but a fast dual will probablly still be better than a slow quad and a fast quad will almost certainly be better than a slow 6-8 core chip.
Lightsquared were/are a sattelite communications provider and owned a peice of spectrum intended for sattelite downlink (where signal power at earths surface would be very low) close (spectrally) to GPS. According to wikipedia they got permission to make ancillary use of this spectrum terrestrially and are now trying to get permission to use it for pure terrestrial cellular devices. However terrestrial transmitters mean much stronger signals at the earths surface. Signals that are close in spectrum and widely different in power are problematic due to imperfect filters and nonlinearities in both tranmitters and receivers.
If they succeed they will make a mint, if they fail then it will likely be a massive hit to thier buisness. Especially if in the process of failing they were to lose the ability to run any terrestrial services in the band.
It's kind of like buying land/buildings with the intent ot trying to get "planning permission"* to build something and/or to change the use of the property. If you get the permission you can make a shitload of money but if the council decides your planned use is inappropriate for the area you can be stuck with property you can't do much with.
* This is a UK term, I dunno what the american equivilent is
Re:Intel charges both predatory & monopolistic
on
AMD: What Went Wrong?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
We've yet to see where Bulldozer can go and it's definitely a design aimed at a 6+ core future.
Throwing cores at the problem isn't really a solution for the desktop. Most desktop apps are still single threaded and even games are usually unable to use more than four cores.
The big question has to be: why are AMD losing money?
Becuase intel are both bigger and technically ahead (both better designs and better processes afaict). This means a few things.
1: Intel can almost certainly produce equivalent/better chips to anything AMD can make at a lower cost. 2: Intel can produce chips that are faster than anything AMD can make. These chips can be sold with no competition (at prices that go up by big chunks for each minor step-up in performance). 3: Intel can spread their R&D costs over more units.
AMD got ahead of intel briefly because intel went up a dead-end with the pentium 4 but intel fixed that with the C2D and afaict AMD CPUs havebeen behind intel ones ever since. Afaict AMD has an advantage in integrated graphics but Intel is working hard to try and destroy that too and any serious gamer will probablly go discrete anyway.
Where AMD has chosen to not compete
I'm pretty sure that if AMD COULD compete in the high end desktop market they would. The very existence of the FX brand implies that they want to.
A physical library never* copies the book. If one copy is donated the library owns one copy and can only loan it to one person at a time. If a user steals the book the library no longer has it and must obtain another copy before they can lend it out again. A user could copy the book themselves but doing so is generally a PITA so few people do unless they are really desperate to have a copy of an out of print book. One copy made and sold by the publisher equals one copy in circulation.
An electronic "library" must copy the book to even be able to operate. It therefore becomes FAR harder to enforce that the number of copies in circulation is the same as the number of copies made/authorised by the publisher.
I don't know if the site in this article even had the pretense of operating like a library or if they just let users download whatever they want.
* at least not for current in-print books, I beleive there may be exceptions in some cases/countries for rare books.
Their FAQ talks about removing it from your "computer and synced devices" but makes no mention of removing stuff from iTMS accounts. Do they really have an agreement with apple or other method for removing stuff from iTMS accounts? (it seems unlikely to me that apple would cooperate in such a venture given that they need to keep in the record companies good books)
The perception is that when something is cheap, it is of low value so it doesn't matter if you consume too much of it.
mmm, it's basic economics, if something is cheap then you don't worry about how much of it you are using. If you do then you will likely be driven out of buisness by someone who doesn't.
One problem is in a lot of places there are a lot of people with rights to draw from the same aquifer. Since each individually makes up a tiny portion of the load on the aquifer none of them individually have any motivatation to reduce what they take from it even if the current overall take rate is unsustainable.
mmm, looks the persian QNAT method avoids a lot of evaporation losses and doesn't need power but it also can only be constructed in specific terrain and looks highly labor intensive to construct.
A compromise could be to keep the pumps from the american method but deliver the water through soil seepage like the persians do.
DSA has it's own problems. Most notably merely USING your key to generate a signature with a broken random number generator can be enough to reveal it to an attacker. Thankfully PGP doesn't use openssl and while it's POSSIBLE to use the same keys for ssh and pgp the impression I got is that not many people do.
In a text processing program the tiniest change to character spacing rules or line breaking rules or margin rules or image placement rules can radically change the way a document is rendered. So the only way to keep complete compatibility is to NEVER change any existing behaviour of the rendering engine. In a calculation program the tiniest change in formula imlementation can change the calculated results.
The problem with word processors and spreadsheets is they blur the line between input and output. The user is continuously looking at the output so the user thinks of the file as storing the output but what is really being stored is the input. So they load the file into a program with a slightly different engine and get surprised when the results of thier poorly formed (remember the user doesn't see the input so they don't see how horriblly unstructured it is) turn into a mess.
Frankly I find it damn impressive that OOo/Lo do as good a job of dealing with MS office documents as they do.
Slashdot Mirror
DO you have a source that backs up that outlandish claim?!
It's not simply a linux board
I'd disagree there.
It's a full-featured, power-efficient desktop computer
No more so than many other arm linux boards are, yes you can run it as a desktop but you can do that with other arm linux boards as well provided they have video output. Heck they don't even include the SD card that is required to boot the thing. Also would you really want a desktop with only 224 megabytes of usable ram?
Also note that the Pi only comes with the board iself, PSU and storage are both extras (on most arm linux boxes i've dealt with at least storage is included and sometimes PSU too).
this in a world where any equivalent product tends to be sold for around 10 times that amount.
It's not as much as 10x unless you are comparing products that are far from comparable.
When I looked at farnell earlier today IIRC they were listing the pi at arround £26, other arm boards i've looked at are nowhere near 10 times that. They range from just over twice the price of a Pi for a board that is better than the Pi in some ways and worse in others (beaglebone which afaict has a better processor, the same memory, more GPIO but no HDMI port) to arround 5x the price of a pi for a board that is far better than the Pi (panda or imx.53 quickstart).
The hardware is actually based on a mobile phone SOC, not a router SOC. That means more memory and a GPU but it also means the ethernet is stuck behind USB.
I agree though that even given the fact it's less than half the price of the cheapest comparable linux board i've previously seen (the beaglebone) the buzz round the thing is still insane.
Inherently FLACs dont have to be CD quality* but in most cases they probbablly are.
Music is usually realeased by artists in CD quality. The MP3 and AAC files sold on digital distirbution services and distributed on pirate networks are a result of applying lossy compression to the "CD quality" files the artists release..
I would expect the FLAC files released by any self respecting release group (whether legit or pirate) to be a lossless encoding of what the artist released.
Of course it is possible to produce a flac file from a downsampled version of the original audio and it is also possible to produce a FLAC from a file that has already been through lossy compression and then decoded but frankly i'd expect such files to be pretty rare even on open sharing services. Those who know about and use FLAC are mostly those who care about audio quality AFAOCT.
You can also have FLAC files in better than CD quality but only if the artist has released the music in such a form which afaict most don't.
* That is 44.1 kHz, 16 bit no lossy compression.
though long-term preservation of data is also surprisingly expensive if you're actually serious
Afaict jounal papers are usually well under 10 megabyte each. That means you can fit over three hundred thousand of them on a modern hard drive.
Lets say you can put four drives in a server and you use raid 5 (purely to speed up recovery, multiple servers provide the real redudancy), that is over 900000 papers on a server.
Now suppose said server costs a thousand pounds a year for hosting and periodic replacement and you want one on each continent for redundancy. You are talking £7000 per year.
That is less than a penny per paper per year.
Unless you want to protect against the end of civilisation or something I just don't see any reason digitally archiving papers should be all that expensive. Certainly it should be a tiny fraction of the cost of paper archives.
Still i'd rather have a language with features I don't want than a language that is lacking features I do want.
even down to the timing of the adverts in the middle of big football matches!
Afaict the real fun comes when a world cup match has gone to "sudden death" penalties and every other shot is a potential end to the game.
the NBN will be leasing access to ducting and exchange space until fiber is no longer needed.
Unless there is a MAJOR breakthrough (e.g. quantum teleportation turns out to be a viable communications method rather than just a lab curiosity) some form of cabled communication (be it copper, fiber or something we haven't invented yet) is likely to be needed for the forseable future. Having a bunch of independent channels just gives you so much more bandwidth and reliability than the shared channel given by free space communication methods. Yes you can use directional antennas and MIMO to improved the shared channel situation a bit but it is still very limited comared to a cabled system.
It's not really limited to HTML/JS based apps, there are plenty of conventional apps that update themselves without asking for permission first.
Yes in some cases you can make and restore backups and find a way to block the app from autoupdating but if the app has an activiation system it may not be possible to activate your restored backup without updating first and/or the app may rely on network services that insist on an updated version.
Afaict you can write fast efficient code in java but to do so you have to fight the language due to it's lack of parameter pass by reference and the implicit pointer in all it's compound types.
Suppose you have a function that returns a complex number, in a sane language you'd just have a complex type which could live on the stack and return it or pass it by reference/pointer. In java to avoid a heap allocation with every call you have to make arrangements to have a relatively long lived object that stores the complex number maintained by code in the parent.
Suppose you want an array of complex numbers, in a sane language you'd just declare an array of the aforementioned complex number type which could live in a single block of memory. In Java you would have to either use two paralell arrays or have a pointer to an object for every entry in the array.
In the old days if an upgrade removed functionality it was annoying but you could always reinstall from your original media and not install the updates (or install an older update since in the old days most devs made standalone update installers available) but with online activation and/or digital distribution systems that may no longer be an option.
I noted the article still thinks a CD/DVD/BluRay player is normal. Aren't they obsolete already?
Not really. They are still the primary way to install most commercial software (including windows itself) and they are still the cheapest option if you want to hand someone some data without any hope of getting your media back.
The only off the shelf machines i've seen without an optical drive are ultraportable laptops and some ultra-small form factor desktops.
What can you do with a modern smartphone in 1994? No youtube, twitter, facebook, gmail, no 3G, not even GPRS, no not even GSM
GSM was arround in europe by 1994. Unfortunately I don't think most modern smartphones support conventional GSM data calls anymore but you should at least be able to use it for voice calls.
there is no usb to load the battery
i'm sure you could find some way to bodge on a power supply. Soldering irons, solder and voltage regulators all existed in 1995. Worst case pop the battery out and charge it with a bench PSU.
Getting data in and out of the device would indeed be a big problem unless you took a wi-fi access point as well.
An object above the earths equator and stationary with respect to the earth has an effective weight of (actual weight)-(centrifugal force). As distance increases weight decreases and centrifugal force increases. At the height we call "geostationary orbit" the effective weight is zero (hence why something can remain stationary relative to the earth at that altitude without a tether). Beyond that height the effective weight is negative.
So assuming a space elavator is defined as "a cable leading into space supported by centrifugal force" then there HAS to be mass beyond geostationary orbit, otherwise the cable would just go slack.
You could in principle build a 400KM tall tower but there are two problems with that idea
1: the forces on it would probablly be even harder to handle than those on a space elavator cable. An object in tension naturally stays straight, an object in compression is (relatively) easilly bent/broken out of the way.
2: Even though at the top of the tower you would be at a higher altitude than the ISS you still WOULD NOT be in orbit. If you jumped off you would begin falling to the ground
I'm not trying to dispute your claims, or belittle you in any way, but... how many people buy a $35 computer and expect to be able to have 10 tabs open in Firefox?
I'm guessing the answer will be "too many", i'm betting the support forums will be hell for quite a while until it's documented just what the two pi models can and can't do
BTW "model 8" in my post should have said "model A", there is no such thing as a "model 8" pi
Afaict if oracle wins on some patents they will likely be able to get an injunction against google using stuff covered by those patents. If google can't work around them (that is find a way to do what they need to do without stepping on the patent) they will basically be forced to come to some licensing agreement with oracle and since oracle will have them over a barrel said agreement is unlikely to be cheap.
Worse it's not 128/256 for the arm. The memory is split between arm and GPU and the minimum GPU allocation is 32MB with more apparently required for full GPU functionality. So on a model 8 you are talking a maximum of 96MB available for the arm and more likely 64MB
The pi will be great for some things but don't expect to be able to have tens of firefox tabs open like you can on a desktop.
That is still only four things and two of them should have pretty negligable CPU load. Yeah going from a single to a dual would probablly benefit your scenario a lot and going from a dual to a quad might help a bit but a fast dual will probablly still be better than a slow quad and a fast quad will almost certainly be better than a slow 6-8 core chip.
As I understand it
Lightsquared were/are a sattelite communications provider and owned a peice of spectrum intended for sattelite downlink (where signal power at earths surface would be very low) close (spectrally) to GPS. According to wikipedia they got permission to make ancillary use of this spectrum terrestrially and are now trying to get permission to use it for pure terrestrial cellular devices. However terrestrial transmitters mean much stronger signals at the earths surface. Signals that are close in spectrum and widely different in power are problematic due to imperfect filters and nonlinearities in both tranmitters and receivers.
If they succeed they will make a mint, if they fail then it will likely be a massive hit to thier buisness. Especially if in the process of failing they were to lose the ability to run any terrestrial services in the band.
It's kind of like buying land/buildings with the intent ot trying to get "planning permission"* to build something and/or to change the use of the property. If you get the permission you can make a shitload of money but if the council decides your planned use is inappropriate for the area you can be stuck with property you can't do much with.
* This is a UK term, I dunno what the american equivilent is
We've yet to see where Bulldozer can go and it's definitely a design aimed at a 6+ core future.
Throwing cores at the problem isn't really a solution for the desktop. Most desktop apps are still single threaded and even games are usually unable to use more than four cores.
The big question has to be: why are AMD losing money?
Becuase intel are both bigger and technically ahead (both better designs and better processes afaict). This means a few things.
1: Intel can almost certainly produce equivalent/better chips to anything AMD can make at a lower cost.
2: Intel can produce chips that are faster than anything AMD can make. These chips can be sold with no competition (at prices that go up by big chunks for each minor step-up in performance).
3: Intel can spread their R&D costs over more units.
AMD got ahead of intel briefly because intel went up a dead-end with the pentium 4 but intel fixed that with the C2D and afaict AMD CPUs havebeen behind intel ones ever since. Afaict AMD has an advantage in integrated graphics but Intel is working hard to try and destroy that too and any serious gamer will probablly go discrete anyway.
Where AMD has chosen to not compete
I'm pretty sure that if AMD COULD compete in the high end desktop market they would. The very existence of the FX brand implies that they want to.
A physical library never* copies the book. If one copy is donated the library owns one copy and can only loan it to one person at a time. If a user steals the book the library no longer has it and must obtain another copy before they can lend it out again. A user could copy the book themselves but doing so is generally a PITA so few people do unless they are really desperate to have a copy of an out of print book. One copy made and sold by the publisher equals one copy in circulation.
An electronic "library" must copy the book to even be able to operate. It therefore becomes FAR harder to enforce that the number of copies in circulation is the same as the number of copies made/authorised by the publisher.
I don't know if the site in this article even had the pretense of operating like a library or if they just let users download whatever they want.
* at least not for current in-print books, I beleive there may be exceptions in some cases/countries for rare books.
Their FAQ talks about removing it from your "computer and synced devices" but makes no mention of removing stuff from iTMS accounts. Do they really have an agreement with apple or other method for removing stuff from iTMS accounts? (it seems unlikely to me that apple would cooperate in such a venture given that they need to keep in the record companies good books)
The perception is that when something is cheap, it is of low value so it doesn't matter if you consume too much of it.
mmm, it's basic economics, if something is cheap then you don't worry about how much of it you are using. If you do then you will likely be driven out of buisness by someone who doesn't.
One problem is in a lot of places there are a lot of people with rights to draw from the same aquifer. Since each individually makes up a tiny portion of the load on the aquifer none of them individually have any motivatation to reduce what they take from it even if the current overall take rate is unsustainable.
Compare US irrigation methods:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Irrigation1.jpg [wikipedia.org]
with Persian Qanat methods:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat [wikipedia.org]
mmm, looks the persian QNAT method avoids a lot of evaporation losses and doesn't need power but it also can only be constructed in specific terrain and looks highly labor intensive to construct.
A compromise could be to keep the pumps from the american method but deliver the water through soil seepage like the persians do.
So DSA keys are safer it would seem.
DSA has it's own problems. Most notably merely USING your key to generate a signature with a broken random number generator can be enough to reveal it to an attacker. Thankfully PGP doesn't use openssl and while it's POSSIBLE to use the same keys for ssh and pgp the impression I got is that not many people do.
http://rdist.root.org/2009/05/17/the-debian-pgp-disaster-that-almost-was/
Office documents are fundamentally fragile.
In a text processing program the tiniest change to character spacing rules or line breaking rules or margin rules or image placement rules can radically change the way a document is rendered. So the only way to keep complete compatibility is to NEVER change any existing behaviour of the rendering engine. In a calculation program the tiniest change in formula imlementation can change the calculated results.
The problem with word processors and spreadsheets is they blur the line between input and output. The user is continuously looking at the output so the user thinks of the file as storing the output but what is really being stored is the input. So they load the file into a program with a slightly different engine and get surprised when the results of thier poorly formed (remember the user doesn't see the input so they don't see how horriblly unstructured it is) turn into a mess.
Frankly I find it damn impressive that OOo/Lo do as good a job of dealing with MS office documents as they do.