Posts by Frumious Bandersnatch

I got an Odroid-x and the hidden Fedex charges put it to > £120.

Similar story for my X2, but I did what the hardkernel website suggested and called my local customs office before placing the order. They told me about the extra "customs clearance" charge that Fedex adds in. I guess that hardkernel could have done a better job on pointing out the surcharge that Fedex puts on it, but I can't fault them on their advice on contacting customs. I still went ahead with the order once I knew about the extra costs. Well worth it, I reckon.

As for Atom vs ARM systems, I actually did a bit of window shopping before ordering the X2. To be honest I couldn't actually find any Atom systems that were as good or as cheap. The one thing that the bare-bones Atom systems did have going for them was standard (mini) ATX and SATA ports for upgradability. They're still quite expensive compared to the ARM boards. Also, buying a cheap 2nd hand system was out for me because I was looking for something with low power usage and you don't get that with older Intel/AMD/Atom stuff.

I guess that in the next year we'll start seeing more ARM SoC with SATA, USB 3 and gigabit ethernet since there's definitely a market for it. Until then I can definitely live with flash/USB2 and 100Mbit ethernet.

Re: Someone

Aww, I'm sure they are to other crabs!

Well it's not crabs as such, but this Southpark episode is hilarious. The "The Thing" thing they did cracked me up.

busy OLTP database server

Although I don't have any direct experience with this, it seems that a lot of databases aren't well suited to using flash storage due to them not being optimised for that medium. The problem lies in the way that inserts and updates often have to make several updates on the on-disk indexes (B-trees or whatever) and each random write requires a read-blank-rewrite cycle on an entire disk block. Reads from the database, on the other hand, is something that does suit flash well since seeks are effectively free.

I don't have a link to any recent papers to hand, but if you search for "log structured database flash" you should turn up a few. The main advantage of log-structured databases is that inserts and updates only have to write once to the disk (with periodic rewrites for garbage collection to coalesce partially empty blocks). Thus you get very good write speed and since you're not going through as many of the read-blank-rewrite cycles that are typical of B-tree style indexes you should be able to extend the life of the disk by three times or more. Have a search for Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes (FAWN), too. It's slightly old, but it gives a good demonstration of the kind of speedups that log-structured databases + flash storage can achieve.

Re: Pb?

If he's normally researching lead, what qualifies him to talk about carbon?

For his next breakthrough ... a [carbon nanotube] Zeppelin.

Re: A bit of a spanner?

re: Ah. Passers by asking people stupid questions of people who are taking pictures in the street.

I disagree... I actually got quite a warm feeling on reading that part of the article. Nice to see that a passer-by would take the time to see if he was OK. And lets face it, taking photos by spinning around probably does look a bit crazy if you don't know what's going on.

Re: Curved monitors

Do it on the cheap:

http://paulbourke.net/dome/mirrordome/

Re: They should feel so proud

re: Copying another company to make 8Billion.......I feel proud for them!!

As it says in the article headline: bite me.

re: "you eat x spiders a year while you sleep"

Or the one about how the daddy long-legs (crane fly) is the most poisonous creature in the UK/Ireland, and has venom that can kill a man. Only fortunately for us, it can't bite through our skin...

(yes, this is a myth, but a very often repeated one).

Re: Goodness gracious

... while the [male] hero is either armoured head to toe or has the whole 'loincloth and a big chopper' thing going on.

Well if his chopper was called Brainbiter, then sometimes he'd go "sky clad" too.

Re: I still don't get…

Apple and Linux representing diametrically opposed design philosophies

Exactly that. Linux carries on the free and open aspect of Unix history, while Apple carries on the parts with all the litigation over copyrights, trademarks and such. OK, so the latter isn't actually anything to do with Unix as such, but it's a problem that has dogged Unix-like systems ever since people realised that it is actually valuable. At least Linux (and I guess the free BSDs to a lesser degree) managed to make most of the legal wranglings moot, apart from the SCO issue.

Re: excited states apparently exist in a contiuum between quantum states

that kind goes opposite to the meaning of quanta, doesn't it?

Yeah... "fractionalised quantum states" had me my scratching my head too. At least the article does a good job explaining why it's weird (and controversial).

Re: QED

Or to mangle a Billy Bragg quote... "something that every football fan knows, it only takes five fingers [if you include an opposable thumb as the fifth, it seems] to form a fiiiist"

Re: And these idiots at GCGQ are going to ...

Perhaps you mean mean?

Or, to use a word that cropped up in an article here on the Reg just a few days ago, niggardly.

Re: Counting spiders

Seems unlikely they could count to 8

Maybe they can count to 256?

Re: I wonder if ...

re: billion node cloud...

You keep mentioning that here. Care to mention how it fares in the face of Amdahl's Law?

Re: Ummm... this is a MODELED finding?

Oops. I just reread the article and I see the point you were making about greatly reduced costs. It was late and I guess I glossed over that entire sentence/paragraph just reading is as "all without government subsidies". Sorry about that.

Still, I'm heartened by what another commenter said above that the assumptions might be reasonably realistic for the US states the model was looking at, even if it's probably not applicable here in the west of Europe. It's nice to get some positive news on this whole issue, even if it is only applicable there.

Re: Demand has been phenomenal.

Do doo-da-doo-do.

Re: Your title is too long!

re: needing extra incentives to make Linux versions, I think that actually it shouldn't be that much of a burden to most developers to add Linux versions to an existing roster of Windows/Mac versions. The key, really, is that once you've got an OpenGL version working for the Mac platform, you won't need to do much to port this to Linux. After all, they've both got a fairly standard Unix heritage (not that most games use the OS for much anyway) and both have industry-standard OpenGL. The biggest problem is the variety of graphics hardware that Linux users might have driving their displays and what level of OpenGL the Linux drivers support, but that's really more of a problem for the users to sort out: if they want to be able to play games, they know that they have to shell out for decent graphics cards and do their homework in terms of checking whether the card is properly supported and being prepared to delve into the forums when things don't quite go to plan. If anything, it's the state of graphics drivers, though, and not Linux itself that is the main stumbling block for users. The graphics card manufacturers really need to do a much better job with its Linux drivers...

The real question is whether the market exists for Linux games. I think that there have been signs from a long way back that Linux users would love to have native games for their platform, and even that they'd be willing to pay a premium for them over the Windows versions. Like "Linux on the desktop", though, it always seems that proper gaming support is always 2--3 years off. It's very interesting to see this new Steam development and, to a lesser degree, the way that OpenGL (ES) has become the de-facto graphics tech on the various mobile platforms. I think that if things continue along the same arc, we will begin to see a lot more of a market for Linux gaming, though I think that the actual OS will not be as relevant as the division between games designed for DirectX, OpenGL and OpenGL ES.

Re: more than apps

The reality is, almost all the main Android apps have tablet layouts included in the APK.

Yup. I see this line or variations of it, such that Android layout looks shit because its too hard for developers to code for the myriad screen sizes (and orientation). In fact, if you've ever looked at the UI design parts of the Android SDK, you'll find that they have great support for tailoring the look of your app to differing screen sizes, and probably (like me) find it easy to understand and implement UI design using the SDK. In particular, they define various constants relating to screen size, dpi and relative icon size and so on so that you can either dynamically reorganise your UI at runtime, or pre-bake a set of default UIs and then select the one that's closest to the properties of the physical screen (or do a bit of both, if you wish). If you want to delve a bit into OpenGL, you can also create a mipmap for each icon and then interpolate to the correct scale, or you can just provided a set of fixed-resolution images and let Android select the best one.

More recent versions of Android (3.0) and up also have the idea of "Fragments" to make dynamically-scaled/rotated UIs even easier to build. More importantly, though, they make it easy to radically alter the UI layout depending of screen size and orientation, say by presenting a two-panel display on a large, landscape tablet, while omitting less important options (relegated to the action menu) from smaller or portrait displays.

As for the specific claim that media delivery is scaled up, you're surely having a laugh, right? Surely "media delivery" just means playing a video, and I can't imagine any media player that can't handle matching the video stream dimensions to the physical screen dimensions? Ludicrous.

Re: Prior art?

re: Spurious tacking on of "on a mobile device". I'm getting pretty sick of this. From now on when Apple come up with a "new" patent for something "on a mobile device", I'm going to run their patent through this page and rush down to the patent office so I can patent the new invention "on a mobile device - in bed!"

In fact, I''d love to filter Reg Comments through the same script (just to preserve some slim semblance of sanity in the world) but it appears that it doesn't support entering URLs any more.

Re: The times

Has support for Vista now finished?

Of course not. Just do what everyone else here does and nip over to alt.sysadmin.recovery.

Re: Sound quality?

I ordered a couple of Pi's for my brothers' xmas presents. I got to talking about it with one of them and it turns out he already had Pi and was trying to get it to work as a jukebox. He'd run into the same problem with poor quality audio output over the 3.5mm jack. HDMI audio output is perfect, but it would mean buying another cable and converter or of having an amp that accepts HDMI input. I did a bit of research and it turns out that this is a known problem with the headphone jack. There have been some things done on the software/driver side to improve the quality a little bit (basically eliminate nasty crackles and pops when audio output starts/stops). I didn't read any more about it, but it seems that overclocking might be one way to improve the situation (the CPU has to do a lot of the work that a dedicated sound chip should do). I was also curious as to whether buying the MPEG-2 codec license would improve the situation (isn't MP3 a sub-standard within MPEG-2?)

I guess I should really be looking for those answers over on the Pi forums, but I thought I'd just throw out those ideas here in the hopes that maybe someone knows whether they work or not.

Also, thumbs up for the article. I like reading about the Pi here.