Posts by James Hughes 1 2645 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
Absolutely wrong. Dinning had nothing to do with the tuning or software development on recent the Symbian Nokia smartphones, which is where the real image quality is. As far as I know he was a 'product evangelist' (His words), basically marketing, and not technical at all.
Nokia have already lost the majority of the team who worked on the N8 and 808. Dinning's 'loss' won't make much difference.
For its last 6 months to release, and spoke to him once (conference call), one does have to wonder how much imaging input he did have on the project.
in my opinion, not that much. He does seem extremely good at bigging himself up though.
There were many people both at Nokia and Broadcom who deserve the plaudits for the 808. He isn't one of them.
Sounds like you have very early boards. The latest ones do not suffer from the hot LAN chip - this was a wiring fault caused by a less than comprehensive datasheet. It jsut gets hot thoruhg - shouldn't affect anything else. Also, the polyfuses are replaced with 0ohm resistors on the latest boards so power shouldn't be so much of an issue. You can mod you boards if you want to to get the same effect.
As to the USB connector - well, rough handling can break anything.
Banning on the forums - bollocks. Very few people have been banned. To say it is a regular occurrence is completely wrong. In one year I have banned about 5 people (excluding spammers who don't count). Please don't let the tiny minority of people who have been banned (and for bloody good reason too) tell you otherwise- they fucked up and now spend there whole time whining about it (although even they have quietened down recently), making the whole place sound like some draconian concentration camp which it plainly isn't. It's just sour grapes.
USB drivers. Massive improvement over the last 6 months. I suggest anyone still having problems upgrade to the latest kernel and drivers - the vast majority of people should no longer see problems. That said, there are still some areas being looked at. Considering there are nearly a million boards out there, we now get only a few reported issues. If you still have problems after trying the latest code, then report them on the Raspberry Pi forum - we need to know specific issues so they can be investigated.
Hmm I think you'll find Linux desktop share is between 2 and 5%, although some think it may be as high at 10% worldwide. Supercomputers is over 90%, and mobile devices, well, Android seems quite popular. When you factor those numbers in to the total number of PC's around, it's still what's known in the trade as a 'really big number' - or puddle as you seem to like it phrased.
Since your numbers are out of date, perhaps you attitude is as well - have you taken a look at Unity or Gnome Shell recently?
Did you get your Wii from Mars or somewhere? My children love it, it's never gone wrong and figures shows its by far the most reliable console. You are tarring an entire product sales with your one bad experience - sorry, but that doesn't count. Tons of problems? Bollocks. 5 years I've had mine, and none whatsoever. Or do you include batteries running on in the remotes?
This is probably news to you, but almost EVERYTHING is now made as cheaply as possible. Phones, cars, houses, consoles. It's the way of the world. BUT, that doesn't necessarily mean it's crap.
As to the Wii being crap. Well, I think your'e crap too Mr Mulligan. Your statement is nonsense. It's obviously NOT crap, as shown by the multi millions of satisfied customised. I've had one for years, the children still love it, and it's never gone wrong.
I've a suggestion to you - you don't like Nintendo stuff- don't buy any, and if you don't buy any, feel free to not comment about it.
Er, what? No-one anywhere said Linux cannot get bugs. Its likely to have the same number of bugs per line when originally written as any other piece of software.
On the other hand, it does have a lot of people peer reviewing it, which means the bugs count drops faster than closed source code.
Have you ever, ever, actually used Unity - I presume not because your comment makes no sense if you actually had used it. I suspect you read some headlines, formed an opinion and are now spouting that opinion off without actually, you know, trying it out?
Well, I use Linux (Ubuntu + Unity)on a netbook, and it's not broken. I also use it on a desktop, and an elderly parent uses on his (different) desktop. All working fine (esp. compared with my other half's Vista machine - you want broken?). So what, actually, is broken?
I do wonder why people write comment's like yours, then give no reason whatsoever as to why they have that opinion. I'd not have a problem if there was some accompanying evidence or reason which showed you had a problem, but just saying 'broken' doesn't really cut the mustard.
That so many of the comments here are by command line users who seem to look down on graphical desktops. As a command line user from BBC micro and DOS days, I bloody love graphical UI's. Once they appeared I was as happy as a pig in shit. Much easier to understand and explain to people. It the 'command line or nothing' attitude that puts many people off Linux, and the people commenting above are the reason. 'My way or the highway' is NOT a good advert.
I use Linux every day and Windows XP/7everyday, I use Unity, but also use the command line when I need to. Graphical desktops are great for the vast majority of users, but the command line is great when you need to drop down to it. It's not an 'either or' situation, and I wish the extremists could get that through their heads.
Complimentary at the moment, but give it a couple of years and handsets will be more than capable of dealing with the average processing load requirements of a desktop. Get home, plug the phone in to docking station - hey presto - there's your desktop.
There will always be outliers - people who need lots and lots of ooomph, developers for example, but even that is changing with the ability to offload compute tasks to GPU's, and even mobile GPU's are surprising powerful.
Interesting times.
Read this review, and the one for the similar YouView device linked. Need some advice. I do have a sat dish (no idea if it works, installed by previous owner), but currently use Freeview and have a Humax Freeview PVR (9600?) which works nicely -0 been very pleased with that.
Wondering about upgrading to an HD version, but also want media streaming from USB attached HD as the offspring have lost the Cyclones remote and it woudl be good to combine things.
What should I get? Should I stick with freeview HD, or go YouView, or should I get FreeSat? Which device?
Decisions, decisions....
Sound similar to my contact experience when I was much younger than I am now. Pain in the arse to even get them in my eyes, then felt like I was staring down a kaleidoscope half the time, with associated pain.
Slight red hair (No, not enough to be ginger), fair skin,although blue eyes. Now in my mid/late forties, need reading glasses AND long ranges ones. It's a right PITA. Age is a bitch.
Was it Apple that developed the screen, or the screen supplier? I presume it went like this.
Apple : We want a higher res screen at same thickness
Supplier: Er, OK, we can do the dev work on that for you, and then you buy loads - M'Kay?
Apple: ..but don't sell them to anyone else, M'Kay...
Supplier; M'Kay.
Apple : We also need a faster GPU to run the higher res screen
Supplier2 (Imagination Tech) : M'kay, we'll do the dev work on that then you buy loads, M'kay
Apple : M'kay.
So suppliers do the R&D and building, Apple, really, just gave them a spec, which I don't really regard as innovation.
That I had to deal with when fielding the Raspberry Pi complainers after their launch (and even now!), it makes my heart glad to see Google, with all their muscle and cash, had exactly the same problems. And if it really was only 30k units ( I don't believe that btw), the Raspberry Pi's >100k looks, well, quite something.
Raspberry Pi on course to sell 900k by end of year, 1 million (ish) in first year of sale. Just thought I'd mention it.
Well, for the other half really, but for the most part I've been reading for two years and haven't paid for anything. There''s lot of high quality free books out there, many on Amazon itself.
Also get various free mags/feeds forwarded for free via Calibre.
I'm not feeling particularly tied in.
Whilst there may actually be some patent validity to this one, I'd like to public domain my thoughts on cooling, so people like Apple cannot patent it.
Phones are getting faster and faster, and there will come a time were active cooling is necessary when the CPU's are running at full tilt. However, I reckon you normally only need full tilt when using your phone as your desktop (yes, they are soon to be powerful enough to take over most of the tasks of a desk or laptop) - which means docked in front of a monitor/keyboard
Now I propose that the phone/tablet docking station has the low volume fan, and pumps air in to a socket on the device, thereby cooling the device when its is running at full tilt. You could even use a peltier to get it really cool. Phone can communicate its temperature to the docking station (NFC, or hardwired) to tell the fan how hard to run.
Undock, fan turns off, CPU's in phone are turned down to keep temps under control.
Now not much technical innovation - just the concept of the fan being in the docking station. I fully expect this to have already been thought of, but decided to post anyway, just in case!
Since, I believe, he got a PhD in High Energy Particle Physics, and the following ( Extract from Wikipaedophile)
" particle physicist, a Royal Society University Research Fellow, PPARC Advanced Fellow and Professor at the University of Manchester. He is a member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. He is working on the R&D project of the FP420 experiment in an international collaboration to upgrade the ATLAS and the CMS experiment by installing additional, smaller detectors at a distance of 420 metres from the interaction points of the main experiments.[12]"
That, in my book, makes him a top flight boffin.
What he said, except I never thought he was a prick, just someone who worked and worked at an idea until he got it to work.
The only thing wrong with my ball Dyson is that I got the small one designed for flats, rather than the big one for houses. So the lead and hose is a a bit short.
By Christ, it's a good vacuum cleaner though. 5 years old, still running well.
Now nicked my parents big ball one (too heavy for the AP's), and that's even better!
Why does providing a cheap as chips device that can be used for teach AND other stuff make you sad? The teaching side has NOT been forgotten. And this announcement IS a big thing (it's not just the code, but the philosophy), please read up on it. It's not just a matter of 'having a clue', although I've noted that although some of the commenters may have a clue, they certainly don't have any manners.
Previous poster right - I already know what in there.
In fact, Lee Dowling is correct, the drivers are in fact mostly wrappers to a set of calls made to the GPU, via the VCHIQ driver which handles the actual message passing interface to the GPU. But that wasn't the point. The point is that previously the Arm side code was closed source (libEGL, libOGLES, libVG etc), so no-one knew what the messages were to do the multitude of available operations. Now that information is published, and people can use the code to make their own userland libraries for whatever OS they want to.
So although Mr Dowling is technically correct, he is being rather miserly in his attitude - this is a BIG THING to have got a BIG COMPANY like Broadcom to spend a lot of time and money making the source available and ready to release. He is belittling the huge amount of effort expended to get to this point. - technical effort AND legal effort - by saying 'its just a wrapper' .
Of course, you describe pretty much how ALL drivers for embedded firmware devices work. They are in effect simple wrappers in to the functionality provided by the hardware. If you regard the GPU as a electronic device, with an interface, then everything you need to have to drive that interface is now open source. That's what drivers do. And this is the first time this has been done for ANY SoC.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
