Posts by Synonymous Howard 358 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Apr 2011
a) Nope .. the market is by no means saturated yet .. billions more devices could be sold.
b) Poor spec would be a problem .. but no one knows what the spec is yet .. so wait and see.
c) No it is not. I have a 3.5" smartphone and a 10" ipad .. 7" would be a nice single device compromise if 3G is included.
In consumer devices, common sense does not always apply.
The Pi has the GPIO which is very useful and consumes less than 4 watts in use (the APC is said to run at 13.5 watts) but competition is indeed great.
The APC looks like the guts of a GoogleTV STB hence Android makes sense ... I've been considering a 7inch tablet to play with Android .. this looks a better bet ... (I'm still using my 2-year old 1st gen iPad so dont really need another tablet form factor).
I now have a Pi and its great as an embedded system platform .. I might get an APC as a Thin Client / Media Centre .. need to see how close to $49 they actual get it out the door for .. I'm betting on £49 for the UK when VAT and delivery is added on.
The hardware is okay IF you have a stable power-supply. The main problem seems to be driving USB ports .. basically if need more than 2 usb devices you MUST use a good POWERED hub and use a decent power supply (>1amp) on that as well.
I've managed to get 7 usb devices hung off a single powered hub and communicating okay so far .. I will be trying out 3G dongles, web cams, wifi, bluetooth, OBDII, keypads, VOIP handsets etc to see what it can cope with.
I've seen a few application panics under Arch Linux .. theory is that the USB/Ethernet chip driver is "sub-optimal" at the moment (not unusual for Linux in my experience !-).
The "£16" Pi is the future"Model A" coming later in the year and will be £16 + delivery + VAT (and should be inclusive of case I believe). Wish The Register would get the basic facts right.
The "£30" Pi is the current "Model B" which costs £21.60 (a fair exchange rate for $35) plus VAT and delivery. Its slighly less than £30 from Farnell / Element14 when delivered in the UK.
The RasPi foundation FAQ has always stated the pricing was $25 (A) or $35 (B) PLUS taxes and delivery. The fact they have managed to get 2 global distributors on-board and kept the baseline price the same everywhere (delivery and taxes vary country by country) .. is pretty good going for an NPO.
I believe the RasPi foundation would be very happy if someone in China produces an even cheaper "PC" as well.
I got my first one from RS last week and it seems to work fine (key is decent pwr supply) .. this one is going in the car for OBDII / GPS / 3G Access Point / front+rear webcam trip recording / HUD, all using open source and as cheap and low-power as possible components.
I'm still trying to work out if this Bong person is being serious or this is some work of utter English sarcasm. I'm hoping for the later otherwise I'm not sure it has any right to be on the Register ... or at least not this far past April 1st (which was quite a poor showing this year anyway).
I wrote up an A-level compsci project on my TRS-80 Model I Level II and printed it out on a daisywheel printer that was ear-shatteringly loud! (even inside an "acoustic cover"). I'm sure it was even louder than the golfball and line printers at Uni.
Happy Days (yes that was on the telly as well).
I wrote up major parts of my CompSci PhD on a Z88 whilst sitting in the sunshine in the backgarden (in LaTex). Uploaded it on to a Sun 3 to typeset via a serial comms app I wrote on the Sun. It was either a Z88 or a Psion MC400 but the Z88 won on cost.
Still have the neat little machine, stuck in my retro collection along with my original TRS-80 Model I Level II (bought out of my paper-round money) and somewhere between 20 and 30 other machines .. including quite a range of early portable ones (unfortunately no Osbourne 1 though).
The 4/4S is too small and too angular for me .. my 3GS is slow in comparison but the feel of it makes me not want to change yet.
A liquid-metal shell with curved (fits hand) back with glass in it to allow a more traditional antenna placement, would be a good start. With a 4.3 - 5 inch screen (could drop physical home button to give more room without going too much wider) ... they could keep the pixel count the same just by making them slightly larger and still keep "retina" marketing term (ala iPad3).
NFC .. meh
LTE 4G .. wait til 2014 in UK ... drains battery too much
If kids want the real low-level stuff then they or you could buy a FIGnition (http://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition/buy-it) @ £20, solder it together and program it in Forth. You will even get the 80's style 'joy' of extreme direct typing in of programs on an 8-button keyboard and trying to write the shortest lunar lander.
However, people are missing the point when they glibly say... "you can use any available PC to learn programming on" or "linux is too high level to learn how computers work".
The RasPi offers a lot of things...
+ An EXTREMELY cheap (~£30 delivered in the UK for Model B) standalone 'PC' which can be used for almost any type of home computing out of the box and programmed on directly (no AVR/PIC programming PC required). So it will allow kids to 'own' their own PC that they can plug in to their TV in bedrooms and get beyond just playing games if they want to. So exposure to personal computing outside of a rigid and somewhat limited school ICT curriculum with the ability to learn by breaking/hacking things.
+ The RasPi has GPIO pins available for direct hardware level hacking and there is a 'Gertboard' on its way which expands the low-level I/O capabilities (and you have to solder it together). Other 'add-on' boards are planned as well (including an on-board camera).
Personally, I'm just happy to get a very cheap, very small, very low-power, Unix-based single board PC that I can use to create any number of low-level home/car-automation projects with .. but with full support for high-level scripting and programming languages .. to create your own "Internet of Things".
The fact that the profit made from the hundreds of thousands of RasPi's being sold will be ploughed back in to creating teaching materials, hardware add-ons and supporting the development of computer science courses within schools is a rather nice side-effect.
Haha. Actually I'm less interested in the Alarm element (I live in an area of the UK where there is zero crime anyway .. its spooky but its true) ... I'm more interested in linking the PIR / door activations / Alarm set/unset events to the heating system so it does not heat the house up when no one is in etc.
11. Car PC - with usb hub linking: gps, 3g dongle, front+rear cameras, ODBC-II connector, scrolling LED status display ... all running off a 12v 7ah sla slave battery .. will suck much less juice than the current netbook version.
12. Central Heating / Water controller ... hardware interfacing using GPIO pins ... wireless usb running web server allowing remote control using iphone/ipad html5 interface .. networked to one-wire weather station to inside/outside temps, baro, wind etc ... keeps history of weather status and manual heating actuations to learn heating habits.
13. House Alarm ... GPIO hardware interfacing to existing alarm zones .. remote monitoring/alerting .. PIR / door monitoring for movements .. runs off same alarm supply with ups.
Indeed .. I understand the 6am start now .. although at this rate the time for the "initial interest" to fall off might be longer than a few hours and so "real customers" of RS + Farnells might be a bit peeved if they can't get on from 9am 8-(
I've only been able to "register an interest" on RS which seems to be the wrong page anyway.
All computers are state machines at their heart 8-)
PIC based solutions are relatively complex to do and really not that cheap for hacking compared to the general purpose Linux-based Raspberry Pi where you have no end of choice of programming / script languages and you get the extra grunt to run daemons and perform complex development tasks all without a host PC ... you also get access to many more interface options through the built-in ethernet and usb connections. Plus the Broadcom SoC in the Pi gives a good collection of GPIO pins for hardware interfacing [http://elinux.org/Rpi_Low-level_peripherals]. All that for $35 + vat + delivery (but please don't all rush out and try to buy any next week as I want at least 3 !)
Another interesting cheap alternative is the AtMega168 based FIGnition [http://sites.google.com/site/libby8dev/fignition] running Forth and you build it yourself (in <2 hours) .. runs off usb power supply and works really well but is sadly lacking in GPIO pins 8-(
I have plans to build my own controller using a Raspberry Pi which will ..
+ control the boiler, valves and pump using the GPIO interface (s/s relays, push-buttons) to existing 'manual' controller
+ web interface/dashboard (iPhone/iPad/Android compatible) for remote control and graphs etc
+ keep history of on/off states and link to my one-wire weather station for both inside/outside temperature/pressure
+ using tha data implement a learning function of manual usage plus a form of auto-control based on weather forecasting (e.g. from both own weather station and wunderground 'local' forecasts).
Should keep me busy for a few months.
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/technology/2010/01/apple_tablet_3d.html
which appears to date back to research done by Apple in 2007 ...
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/12/11/apple-exploring-3d-desktop-and-application-interfaces/
Anyone get LG's patent numbers covering that telly?
Actually Apple have learned that they don't have to bundle extras to get people to buy them and hence they make more profit. They used to bundle extra items with their products but no don't bother.
You do (or at least did) get a cleaning cloth though and a very nice unboxing experience 8-) Apple have a 3rd Party eco-system for cases etc and so people can take crumbs from their table.
and you will see precisely what Asus is copying. Competition is good and will force Apple to innovate again.
My wife has taken my 11 inch Air as her own as she claims it is the perfect size for her and prefers it to a tablet. I've not seen her so enthusiast about any tech before and I have 30 years of it to hand (could open the house as a computer museum!)
These thin light and solidly sturdy designs are the future of laptops as predicted by Apple a few years ago.
(and indeed I have 3 handbuilt FreeBSD NAS boxes running ZFS totalling more than 12Tb - fantastic gb/£)
But I suspect that ZFS on OSX will be rather nice with the new Thunderbolt connected drives (http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/26/macworld-2012-wdc-shows-off-mybook-thunderbolt-duo/) that are coming out ... certainly more bandwidth than NAS.
It depends on how 'locked down' the OS is .. some work PCs are deliberately restricted because having a general purpose computing device just is not required for most users and a security risk. Tablets/phones users have very little need for traditional compilers but I can see a use for the creation of 'macro' style interactions to perform common complex actions .. these might appear in time.
I've compiled C code on mobile devices before (e.g. Sharp Zaurus) and I've written BASIC programs on Tandy/Sharp 8-bit PCs such as the Model 100 and Pocket PCs .. You've got a Java VM on Android and you can run gcc as well.
and for the majority of people a tablet and connected TV is all they need .. in fact I see a tablet or large smartphone per person and shared TV screens (as output devices for tablet controllers rather than interactive TV) as being the norm for personal 'computing' requirements.
Desktop/Tower PCs are for niche (power) users, laptops/air/lights are for business and some home users and tablets/smartphones for everyone else.
Most people just have no requirement for anything other than media browsing/consumption ... giving them complex OSes on super-fast hardware is just pointless; with the right software, less hardware) is more.
Its still a free market and so publishers are free to develop their own authoring tools and give them away. Don't like Apple's distribution terms, don't use "iBooks Author" and use a free or costly alternative.
To me what would be more interesting to see if this is limited by an (unenforceable) EULA or is using a DRM mechanism. If its the first then I can see an opportunity for some Open Source software to "strip" any iBooks specific content from the Apple enhanced ePub3 format and even reformat it to remove anything that could be deemed to identify it as "produced using iBooks Author". Apple would then have a big difficulty in proving which format was used to package the content originally, i.e. someone made it in ePub3 format and then imported it in to iBooks Author and added the "extended" content ... or was it the other way around??
Especially if you say you want to leave and 3India passes you on to "customer retention" in 3UK .. then you get a great deal and don't need to leave 8-)
I ordered a 3rd SIM on their website and it turned me down .. so I complained and said I would break the other 2 contracts (I had been a customer of over 2 years nothing extra to payoff) if I didn't get the 3rd as that was the whole point of keeping it in the same company. 3UK retention (nice lady in Scotland) sorted out the SIM order and gave me a 50% discount.
So now I have 2 x 1Gb + 1 x 2Gb mobile broadband SIMs (mifi, iphone and ipad) for a grand total of £15.59 per month. And the coverage has increased over the last few years and the speed appears to have gone up as well .. I even use the mifi as a backup for the ADSL line when it goes wobbly.
You can stream / load / play any non-DRM h.264 video on an iPad as well. Transcode streaming is available with apps such as "Air Play", "VLC Streamer", "ML Player", etc.
Let me say that again ... you can play ANY non-DRM video on an iPad as well. "Fair Use" stripping of DRM from DVDs is also easy these days, so BUY'em and rip'em .. disk space is cheap (well, was until a few weeks ago).
DRM is a short term "necessary evil" .. necessary for the content providers to think they can protect their wares from freeloaders .. I can put up with that if it keeps the content flowing.
Fail for the Author that is 8-)
There are free and native iPad apps for 4OD, BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, BBC News (live News24 streaming and videos) and also, of course, http://ipad.tvcatchup.com/ for live freeview streaming. Plus the built-in YouTube player works very well.
Oh and if you have an AppleTV you can AirPlay stream most of those over to that as well [BBC News only streams audio over AirPlay though!].
And if you have a Mac + Elgato EyeTV tuner(s) you can stream that live tv and recordings to the iPad (and also on to the AppleTV).
It "just works" (tm).
my experience of pay-by-wave has been much more miss than hit with a less than 25% success rate even with the retailers that have the right readers installed.
I've tried slow waves, fast waves, down/up, up/down, towards/backwards, waggling, holding it still, you name it .... still less than 1 in 4 works and you end up having to put the card in the slot and use a pin to stop yourself looking like a complete numpty. Barclaycard adverts it is not.
So it does not worry me about wave-by-hacking and when not in use my cards reside in an all metal case (Faraday would be proud).
which is the DRM / TPM use of keys to secure access to data .. whether it is for security or for content-control.
The delay could indeed have been put down to the "Trustworthy Computing" which was Craig Mundie's exposition of 4 pillars of improving their business "going forward" - "1.Security, 2.Privacy, 3.Reliability, 4.Business [ahem] Integrity". It was a massive task to steer that particular Titanic and they've come a long way but everyone else has caught up and in many places overtaken MS .. so MS are becoming less relevant to people these days.
really not a problem.
Now that is not to say that Lion is a big improvement to Snow Leopard .. hint: in some ways it is, in some ways its not .. I have a Macbook Air which came with Lion on but I've not yet been inclined to upgrade the other macs .. waiting for some other software to be upgraded first.
Or is it just me that has had the completely opposite experience (iPodding since 2002, XP since 2008), with mostly rock solid iPod/iPad/iPhone upgrades - single exception being iOS5 for the iPhone 3GS which failed the upgrade once and needed a single restore (and with a pleasant surprise that no data or configuration settings were lost!).
XP has just about got stable (at SP3 + many many many patches) on my company laptop but it does need another rebuild (windows explorer can randomly hang or crash) as I'm sure its going to shoot itself in the head soon [wait a sec, just completing the backup].
Got collared whilst walking through a Smiths on the weekend and had a play with one .. quite nice and moderately useful (I have a 3G iPad1 so enjoyed the comparison) .. still not completely convinced by eInk (noticed the better page turning) but ebooks in general are good and as I only use books for reference purposes (not novels) they are a great idea .. having access to thousands of reference books with search facilities and annotations would be really useful especially when there is no easy internet access.
If the other Kindles make it over the pond then next year could be when ereaders get a shakedown and we get cheaper (subsidised) devices which could be hacked and extended!
I think I'd rather see an Apple TV version 3 box to plug in to an HDMI TV rather than a full Apple TV set.
An Apple TV 3 would be great if it had the following additions ...
+ Bluetooth for optional keyboard to make it easy to enter search and login account text.
+ Dual tuners with the option for more tuners via USB/Thunderbolt
+ Freeview/Freesat HD tuners for the UK .. others tuners for around the world
+ Optional use of NAS drives / iTunes for storing recorded programmes - to keep content owners happy this could be done using iPlayer/4OD/etc style expiry dates.
I can see Apple going for the bluetooth keyboard option but the rest just does not gel with their current view of content ownership and streaming.
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