Posts by James Hughes 1

Airbus takes flight from AWS. What happens next is critical

Typst is a modern alternative to Latex - we use it here for all sorts of docs (internal and external), and it works very well indeed generating PDF and/or HTML from easy to read markup.

Raspberry Pi OS ends open-door policy for sudo

Ltd, not Foundation.

Project Glasswing and open source software: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Hmm

People constantly complaining about all the security bugs in software.

Something finds security bugs in software.

People complaining that there not enough people to fix security bugs in software.

We know what day it is but these Raspberry Pi price hikes are no joke

Correct, nothing to do with going public. This is entirely due to RAM prices going up by a factor of 7 in the last 9 months.

Odd you should say going fully commercial. Raspberry Pi Ltd have been a fully commercial entity for 14 years since they split from the Foundation. The IPO made no difference to that, its just moved owner ship from the Foundation to the Public.

Good luck with finding alternatives - everything is going to suffer from the RAM prices hikes. This is not just affecting Raspberry Pi. Other SBC makers might be able to hold on to pricing for a bit longer, as their sales are relatively small and stock stays on the shelves longer, but they will have to raise prices, soon.

If you still want low costs, the Zero 2W is still at $15, and lower RAM varients of the Pi 4 and 5 have not changed, much, if at all.

Re: Only the Pi Zero and lower end Pis are a compelling case

The 3D and graphics drivers have been fully open source for years. Your understanding is wrong.

I use a Pi 5 as a desktop, works fine. micro HDMI? Great! Pi 5 USB ports can provide up to 1.6A spread ofver the 4 ports. Not quite 500mA each (USB spec), but good enough for 99.99% of use cases. Need more power? Use a powered USB hub.

Second hand PC/laptop prices are going to increase rapidly, as demand increases.

If you having to reboot a Pi every few weeks, you are doing a lot better than my brand new Dell laptop/Win11 which freezes and needs rebooting two or three times a week. And that was over £1000.

Re: Cover

You would lose that bet. RAM prices have gone up 7 fold. These price increases are solely down to that.

Raspberry Pi leans into semiconductors as sales climb – especially in US and China

Re: Compute Modules

The compute module IO boards are intended as development boards so that's why they have all the possible connectors. When creating a product you just build a baseboard that only has the connectors you want.

Re: Flaming the fans

About 70% of SBCs go to industry so that leaves about 30% going to makers, hobbyists and education. That 70% means the prices stay low for those other categories. Don't forget everybody pays the same price for Raspberry Pis, industry commercial, hobbyists etc. and there are no discounts for industrial customers or quantity buyers. So to say that the hobbyist is being left behind is not true, they benefit massively from the large economies of scale that having large numbers of industrial users gives Raspberry Pi.

Re: Not too worried here.

It really is amazing how many people just look at the flagship products and think that's the only product Raspberry Pi make when they in fact make an entire range from $15 upwards. $5 if you include the microcontroller boards.

Re: :RP2040/50 microcontrollers

Who needs a microcontroller running in GHz? Do you know anything at all about the microcontrollers market? To say its just blinking LEDs shows a remarkable lack of knowledge.

Your next car might need 300 GB of RAM, and so will autonomous robots

Re: over 300?

Just use a Raspberry Pi 500. Cheap, much lower power requirements, does all you need.

Age verification isn't sage verification when it's inside operating systems

And still better than the current incumbant.

By orders of magnitude.

Re: Why be surprised?

Of course it's sensible. It literally means less road deaths. If you are happy to trade off more death so you can get where you want to go 30s early, well, I think thats says lot.

Euro hosting giant hiking prices by up to 50% from April Fool's Day

No point in jumping ship

Seem to be qujite a few people (not just in this area) who say they'll just move to other providers/suppliers. Well, here's news for you. They WILL be increasing their prices, because this shitstorm affects EVERYONE.

Let them eat Pi: RAM shortage bumps Raspberry prices as much as $60

Re: FFS

I just read that FSF page, last updated in 2021, and very out of date. I'd put the Pi in the minor category now given the changes made in the last 5 years.

Re: PI is over.

Rubbish, as Pi sales figures show. 70% of Pis are sold to industrial or commercial customers, for lots of reasons. High quality HW, actual software support, long production dates, decent pricing. Loads of stuff sold to people to put in their own products, its a very cost effective way of getting processing power and control into a device. Lots of DIN rail mounted machine control/monitoring stuff is implemented using Pi for example (Revolution PI, Berghoff automation, OnLogic and many many more). Come to the Pi stand at Embedded world (Nurnberg, Germany) in March, and take a look, plenty of examples on hand.

Worth noting that Pi are not alone in having to put up prices - all the other SBC people will have to do the same, and given their much lower sales figures, they will struggle more with pricing.

FFS

That old and compllety out of date chestnut. The Pi 5 has almost no code running on the VPU at all - almost everything is now on the Arm side and open source, a deliberate effort by RP to get away from closed source code. The only remaining stuff is the bootloader, which gets the RAM up and running and boots the kernel, and some power/temperature management. Also worth noting that Raspberry Pi wrote most of that firmware (on all models), not Broadcom. So its actual Raspberry Pi proprietry, not Broadcom.

Why do people still think this stuff? Its been nearly 14 YEARS since the Pi1 was launched - stuff changes!

Raspberry Pi 5 gets LLM smarts with AI HAT+ 2

If a third party package requires the desktop to run (Official Pi camera applications etc do not ), why would the Pi people be able to do anything about it?

1. It's NOT the Pi Foundation. They are completely independant charity who do NOT do the HW/SW that people think of as Pi,. they just do the educational charity stuff. Raspberry Pi Ltd do the HW/SW that people use.

2. PiOS can be installed without any desktop - PiOS Lite. No dependencies on X/Wayland. So plenty of fucks given. The same applies to many other Linux OS that run on the Pi.

3. Putting the circuitry to support 5-28V would make all the boards much bigger and hotter. Not going to happen in the current form factors. Fitting everything on is hard enough as it is.

4. It IS a full-blown Linux system.

Optionally on top, rather than in.

Ultimate camouflage tech mimics octopus in scientific first

Re: A secret cloaking device made out of gold?

And we are back to Trump.

Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble

Why does this have downvotes?

Cheaper 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5 lands as memory costs go through the roof

Re: a1

So what is actually wrong with this? Pi's are used for practically every compute task out there, AI is just one of them. Raspberry Pi are not "riding the wave" by any stretch of the imagination. One AI product, targeted at video processing (which works pretty well), not LLMs.

Were you savaged by a Pi when young? Because you certainly seem to have a bee in that bonnet.

Re: Rasp pi

Yes, it's very annoying that even after 13 years (when they separated), people still think the Foundation is the one behind the hardware.

Yes, the DRAM prices hikes have been mad across the board - Google will find loads of PC manufacturers hiking prices. It's affecting everything.

Re: Slop, Slop, Crash, Reboot

Yup, I think that just about covers it.

Re: Ouch

But the socketed memory is more expensive than chip down....

Re: a1

Really? A general purpose computer than could be used for AI but usually isn't, and that's riding the wave?

Now if you mentioned the AI hat then maybe, but that's just one add-on product. So it's a really small wave.

Raspberry Pi OS, LMDE, Peppermint OS join the Debian 13 club

It's a time thing...

Hopefully once any kinks with Trixie are worked out, we'll have time for an x86 version. No promises, small team with lots to do.

Arduino has a new job selling chips for its new owner. Let's not pretend otherwise

1. It's not Raspberry Pi foundation, it's Raspberry Pi ltd. Foundation just own a lot of shares, but have nothing to do with product development at all.

2. The closed source firmware blob has got smaller and smaller with each generation of Pi. Nowadays on the Pi 5 it does very little. All the real work is now done in open source drivers.

3. The RP1 chip on the Pi5, which encompasses most of the Piness of the device is entirely designed and developed by Ltd, so they have complete control over it, Broadcom is irrelevant to it.

Raspberry Pi prices hiked as AI gobbles all the memory

Re: It doesn't look like the RPi's

Fingers crossed.

Wow, so much wrong in this post.

The firmware blob on the Pi5 (and now earlier models as well) does very little. Nowadays, it's really just thermal control and boot, it's there to get the system up and running, and to make sure the SoC doesn't overheat. Most of what used to be in the firmware (you know, 12 years ago) is now all open source Arm side code (3D, codec, cameras, display etc). Pi have put a lot of effort into getting as much out of the firmware and open-sourced as possible.

Because most of what used to be in the firmware is now in the kernel or userspace, that means a lot of it could be upstreamed, and has been. So the vanilla Linux will work. There are a few areas where code has not been upstreamed - anyone who has tried to upstream, knows how much of a PITA it can be - but it is still all open source in the Pi Github repo. Once Linux is booted, Linux is in control of everything except the thermal stuff. This is a good thing and means if Linux (or its own thernal control) crashes, the firmware can still stop the device overheating.

Basically your comment is about 8 years out of date and your comment on Debian, is, well, a bit weird.

What's a proprietary master OS? Pis run an almost vanilla Debian distribution of linux.

Re: It doesn't look like the RPi's

Because the fabs are all being moved to produce hbm memory instead of ddr4,which makes ddr4 prices go up as there is now a lack of supply.

FFS

1. Raspberry Pi trading diverged from the Foundation 13 years ago and has been run as a profit centre ever since. The IPO made little difference to that.

2. Freeloading? Raspberry Pi contribute a lot back to the Linux kernel, libcamera, MESA etc. If you are going to accuse people of freeloading, at least start with those who do not contribute back. Which is probably every other SBC supplier.

3. You can indeed get cheaper devices. There is a reason they are cheaper. Cheap Chinese chips, no support, crap warranty, no continuation of supply for a start. It's a long list.

Microsoft thinks cloud PCs might be overkill, starts streaming just apps under Windows 365

Re: But why?

Use typst. I've been impressed by it.

VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

I don't think the Chagos islands are quite the example you think they are.

Microsoft veteran's worst Windows bug was Pinball running at 5,000 FPS

IIRC, Commander Keen had this problem.

I would not class this as a bug - it's working as intended - just bad code.

And even that's a bit harsh. Worked fine!

Two scrubs, one Starship: Third time lucky for SpaceX?

Re: Well, the answer was 'No'

Disagree. It clearly worked. It's still a prototype, a few rough edges, but it worked. Starlink launches are going to be the bread and butter for starship. Ignore the moon shots, the real money is Starlink launches - get that working and by default you get a long way to the moon/Mars flights anyway.

Raspberry Pi RP2350 A4 update fixes old bugs and dares you to break it again

Re: Cheapskate

I can feel that burn from here.

Re: Cheapskate

"No wonder there were so many bugs in the first place."

For anyone who actually wants to know about the bugs rather than just grandstanding, all the known errata are listed in the datasheet, and this also states which have been fixed and which have been mitigated in the A4 stepping. https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2350/rp2350-datasheet.pdf, appendices C and E. 28 known errata on the A2, 11 full fixes in A3/A4, with a further 6 mitigated, leaving about 11, mostly very obscure but the datasheet has workarounds.

Re: There's a difference

Actually the old chips are also tolerant in the same way, Pi have just qualified that they do work. But as above, make sure things are powered up before using 5v, otherwise, phut.

Re: Cheapskate

Hands up anyone who knows how modern chip design and testing is done!

Not you elsergiovolador.

You really are showing a lack of knowledge of the domain here. Have you actually read the hacking challenge results and seen what was done to "hack" the original RP2350? It's pretty heavy duty stuff. In the same way that software, despite much testing, still has vulnerabilities, so does hardware. Hackers are clever people, especially the ones who figure out all these glitching attacks. And they also have lots of time to target very specific areas. If companies had as much time to do the same over the whole chip, they would do it, but it would take 20 years to get product out of the door and instead of 90cents, the RP2350 would cost $50. As a company, you simply cannot think of everything, or get it perfectly right all the time, and timescales limit the total testing possible. The RP2350 was designed and tested by very experienced people and went through a year of testing.

Re: Cheapskate

The reasons for the downvotes are because you clearly haven't read about the hacking challenge and the types of vulnerabilities discovered. None would be on any vendors test list.

US signals intention to rethink job H-1B lottery

I think you mean the right giving the impression they are doing more for the ordinary people. They are not, of course, but people believe them when they say they are.

Also odd that you mention media personalities on the left. The US president is the bigliest of media personalities. Bigger than anything on the left. Although he isn't hugely wealthy (because he's not a good businessman), he making sure he's getting that way.

xAI's Grok lurches into right-wing insanity, offers tips on assaulting man

Re: Once again ...

Why do you think it never will? Never is a REALLY long time.

America and Britain gear up with Project Flytrap to bring anti-drone kit to the battlefield

Re: Nothing to it

Go watch a drone race, and then say it's just clay shooting. Drones go MUCH faster than clays and swerve around just like clays don't.

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

Is that most work that humans actually do?

Linus Torvalds goes back to a mechanical keyboard after making too many typos

The 400 also uses the improved keyboard.