Re: Subtle my ass

but, but, but...

US prices listed very rarely include sales tax. UK prices very rarely _don't_ include sales tax (VAT). At 20% VAT, £319 would become around £380, so only £20 more not £80 more. And since the UK pricing is all (reasonable) guesswork by the reporter, it seems pointless getting worked up about it now.

sigh.

> CD will give perfect playback of anything in the 0 to 22 KHz range (Nyquists theorum)

You're assuming the quantisation is only happening in 1 dimension (time). There's also the amplitude quantisation, which is done to 16bits with CD. SACD and other HD formats use more bits for the amplitude. So no, CDs will _NOT_ give "perfect" playback of anything up to 22kHz - neither will SACD etc, but they will be closer. However, it will give good enough playback for 99% of the situations people listen in (given low quality amplification, background noise, imperfect ears, not sitting in the optimal position etc etc).

Personally I don't think my ears are good enough to tell the difference between a decent MP3 rip at ~192k VBR and 320k (or lossless for that matter). I haven't heard a really bad mp3 for many years (I remember the Xing mp3 ripper was really fast, back in the days when most encoders were slower than real time, but could produce some terrible results).

Re: OT, what's with the sics then?

They're not trying to pluralise the word. In this case "broadband's" is a contraction of "broadband is", and thus the apostrophe seems justified, and the [sic] does not.

Re: This attitude

The name "Pirate Party" in itself doesn't help their cause though. I don't support the ability to "pirate" material purchased by others (which is what I understand pirating to mean). I do support the ability to use material I have purchased on devices I own. The "pirate" naming suggests an attitude which isn't likely to win them friends or supporters in the standards meetings.

Re: Maybe

{quote}

To people saying it's not offensive because Bill Gates is a foreigner, what would YOU say if Bill Gates walked up to the queen of England, slapped her round the face and said FUCK YOU. We need to be more careful.

{quote}

That only makes sense if Bill Gates genuinely wouldn't have known that to be offensive. Since that would be considered extremely offensive in America too, I think it's a particularly bad example.

Explanation

Since what Fry said contains some truth, though "first" is always going to be a contentious point, perhaps you'd care to give us an article spelling out what he "should" have said and why what he did say is so laughably wrong, rather than your smug posturing?

This just doesn't seem to be on the scale of Fry's previous attempted explanations.

Re: Pardon?

I'm using Mint not Ubuntu (as mentioned), so no I don't have all my searches going via Canonical. It's a shame you haven't got your hardware setup to work with Linux, but these things go both ways. I've had more problems with hardware drivers on the Windows side than the Linux side so far on my laptop (drivers not playing nicely with Win8 - I thought it would be a good idea to take the plunge and move to a new OS for a new laptop, given that support for XP would be dropped going forwards... probably a poor decision...).

Whatever system you have, if your hardware and software don't work together it can be very painful - with Linux you have to hope that your hardware is popular enough that somebody has written drivers for it. With Windows you have to hope that whichever company produced the hardware also produced decent drivers in the first place, or can be bothered to support them, since the source code is closed.

Pardon?

I installed (dual boot) Mint 14 on a laptop which already had Windows 8 installed recently and it was all very straightforward. Boot the livedvd, check that it all works fine on your hardware (it did), run the installer and use that to set up the partitions. All installed in under 15 minutes. All very straight forward - not sure which bit you struggled with.

Fine?

I hate the keyboard on the iPhone, and the one on the iPad. Having got used to Swype, and keys showing multiple characters that you can long-press to get, the lack of these features really annoy me on Apple devices.

Also - I've not used the iPhone much, but does it have the same word prediction feature as on the iPad? If so, that's one thing which winds me up more than anything else I've used on any other device. Why would it default to replacing the word I was typing with a completely random wrong one? Sure, show me options that look like words it knows about, but let me choose when to use a different one. And how about automatically adding (or offering to add) words I type frequently for which I have to override it's spell checker to the dictionary for me?

iTunes?

Why would you call it iTunes? I've got an ipad but I've never used iTunes. I've downloaded lots of apps through the handy app on there called, erm, "App Store". Yes I know that I could use connect my iPad to a computer and use iTunes on there to download apps, but that just seems perverse.

Not that I agree that Apple should be able to trademark the term App Store. The should have called it iStore or something if they wanted a unique, trademarkable name.

@Daniel Palmer

But a Beaglebone is about £60 as far as I can tell. I can get 2 Pis for that. Also, what is the capability of the GPU in the Beaglebone (I can't see any reference to one from a quick google). Can it play 1080p video? I'm missing the bit where this is better performing and lower/same priced.

FWIW I partially agree about the overcooked announcement - in particular the part where the suggest that other vendors should follow suit, since there is still a large binary blob (though not of ARM code). However, I don't think what has been achieved should be underestimated, even if it doesn't go as far as people might like.

Re: Will this allow making the Roku useful?

I'm not sure why you'd start with a Roku box if you don't want the Roku UI?

You'd have to hack the firmware (non-trivial as it's probably encrypted) and then write drivers for the various bits of hw on the box (wifi/bluetooth - may be relatively straightforward - standard linux drivers may be available, I'm not sure). And then you'd have something with the functionality of a Raspberry Pi. Why not start with a Raspberry Pi and make life simpler?

And there are various options for media streaming to a Roku - I use Roksbox which works very well and will stream from anything running any web server. $10 I think - but there are other options - even some free ones if you're streaming from a Windows PC.

Re: err (Lee Dowling)

I'm not sure what your argument is here. The foundation has now released _all_ the ARM-side code as open source under one licence or another. They don't claim to have done anything else. They have released the drivers - drivers which drive the GPU firmware. That's what the ARM-side drivers do.

The GPU firmware isn't going to be open-sourced, so let it go. It's closely tied with the hardware, and would provide more detail on the workings of the hardware (which is all commercially confidential) than Broadcom is prepared to release. That's their decision, and the rantings of a few people on comment forums really isn't going to sway them - you really don't _need_ this information, however much you might like to have it for your own purposes. This has nothing to do with the Raspberry Pi foundation. It's a commercial decision by Broadcom and it really doesn't matter how much you moan about it, it isn't going to change.

Feel free to modify the provided ARM-side code to support hardware acceleration using OpenGLES, display output, tv control etc, on any OS which you choose to port. That's what releasing this code allows - nothing more, nothing less.

Re: +1

Except that I think James Hughes knows _exactly_ what's in the download. Have a downvote yourself.

Re: What ever about the fine detail...

Does Intel have an ARM licence for Cortex cores? That's not to say they couldn't get one, but I don't think they're likely to. It's hard to sell your own-design chips (for which I'd imagine they would get a much greater margin than an ARM design) if you don't even seem to have confidence in their capabilities yourself.

Not just massive megapixels

This isn't just about the megapixels. The sensor size (1/1.2in) is such that each of those pixels is larger than many phone (or compact) cameras, making them usable individually (ie without binning). So you get zoom functionality without significant loss of quality. Or alternatively take pictures at 5MPx (plenty for most uses) and get the benefits of pixel binning (good low-light performance etc).

Re: Lockup when maxed out

Have you got a decent power supply for it. I had exactly the same thing in XBMC until I tried with an iPad power supply and Nokia USB->micro USB charger cable (ie a nice, thick cable).

The requirements for the device are 700mA - I'd make sure your power supply is up to the job. RS and Farnell both sell ones which should be suitable (not tried either though).

"The Arduino is fit for purpose".

Yes, however it's fit for a different purpose, since that's a much more bare metal device - you can't run a full OS such as linux on there. Not saying that's bad - it's for a different market.

"highly tolerant and fully documented"

Early days with the Pi. Hopefully both of these will come - though I don't think it's particularly intolerant at the moment.

"There's even clones."

There's certainly not likely to be any clones using the same SoC, but a bit of competition in the marketplace wouldn't go amiss...

Re: too much of a salesman

It is a perfectly usable computer. It isn't really suitable as a desktop replacement, which the reviewer makes perfectly clear, however that's not the only possible purpose of a computer, and nor is it the target market.

As an HTPC (again, not the target market, but that doesn't mean it's not usable as one) - it's probably far more capable than your Atom netbook, since it has an inbuilt GPU capable of 1080p decode (and OpenGL ES 2.0 HW accelerated graphics). Currently not everything makes use of this acceleration, but these are early days. I downloaded the Raspbmc beta yesterday and that certainly looks promising.

Re: Waiting to pre-order...

I think most of the hardware instabilities are due to poor power supply. The spec requires a power supply capable of supplying 700mA. Many micro USB chargers only supply 500mA. Also, if you're using a power supply with a USB socket and supplying your own cable, make sure you use a decent cable with thick wires. If you don't have sufficient power you'll get random lockups every now and again.

I'm currently using an iPad charger with a Nokia USB->micro USB cable and that's rock solid. Farnell and RS both sell suitable power supplies.

The main version of mint is based on Ubuntu, and uses the Ubuntu repositories for most things, so if you want something which isn't in the standard repos you can just follow the instructions for the relevant ubuntu version directly on Mint (v12 will be based on Ubuntu 11.11). It gives the best of both worlds - most third party sources seem to offer Ubuntu repos, but you don't have to use the dreadful Unity UI.

Uncommon on Linux

Of course, on most (all?) Linux distros you don't tend to download executables via a web browser. The vast majority of software is installed via the fairly secure apt-get mechanism (or equivalent), in a similar manner to the walled-garden app stores now becoming so popular elsewhere. So actually most new users are very unlikely to end up having problems not being able to run stuff they've just downloaded via a web browser, because they simply don't need to in the first place.

Dr Dre ain't exactly a spring chicken...

He started out in NWA in 1986, was instrumental in Eminem's early career, and he seems to be having something of a comeback at the moment.

Foxit used to be good...

but recent versions have been bloated, slow and unreliable. Firefox integration is rubbish also.

I find Reader X pretty good - the best version of Adobe Reader for a long time. Startup times and memory usage seem much improved since v7-9. I recently removed foxit completely and replaced it with Adobe reader, after being a long-time foxit user. Happy with it so far

But you can have both anyway

I used to use PLT and never noticed any DAB (or FM) reception problems at home (since rearranging things and running cabling to get gigabit ethernet connection I no longer use the PLT kit). I'm guessing it depends on the exact PLT kit used, the state of the wiring and the positioning of the radio, so I don't think there's any need to be alarmist about this.

really?

I thought he kept his cool very well and _didn't_ abuse the woman who was clearly not listening, lying and being generally very unhelpful. She wouldn't have texted the code without reading out all her script (which she didn't even start until the end).