Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 29th Feb 2012 09:47 UTC
This morning, I experienced the nerd equivalent of a Black Friday $50 iPad sale. At 07:00 CET, the first batch of the much-anticipated Raspberry Pi went on sale, and while Raspberry Pi itself was very properly prepared, the two large international retailers actually selling the device weren't - despite warnings from Raspberry Pi about the enormous amount of traffic that would come their way, the two sites crumbled to dust within seconds. There's good news too - the cheaper model A has seen its RAM doubled at no additional cost.
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RE: some details I learnt today
by Morgan on Thu 1st Mar 2012 13:43
in reply to "some details I learnt today"
Member since:2005-06-29
Thank you for this information!
If it's the same for us Yanks, it looks like mine will be from a future batch. I'm scheduled to receive my unit around the end of April.
So...12,000 orders just in Australia with who knows how many yet to process? I think I'm going to reevaluate my earlier estimate of about 100,000 people interested in this device. It sounds like it might be four or five times that at the very least! That's a huge community for a just-released device, and I hope Broadcom is paying attention and really does plan on opening up the video drivers.
RE[2]: some details I learnt today
by renox on Thu 1st Mar 2012 16:38
in reply to "RE: some details I learnt today"
Member since:2005-07-06
I hope Broadcom is paying attention and really does plan on opening up the video drivers.
Uh? 1) people are buying the product without an open driver, why do you think that this encourage Broadcom to open the driver?
That's wishful thinking not logic.
2) I've never seen any hint that Broadcom has a plan on opening the video drivers, just that someone is working on reverse engineering the driver for the GPU.
But given that for AMD and NVidia, the opensource drivers provides only modesetting, some 3D acceleration and (AFAIK) no video acceleration, I wouldn't expect much for the Mali video drivers.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/20/13 6:17 UTC, submitted by MOS6510
"In the first episode of Microsoft's new film series 'On the Whiteboard', Editor Pamela Woon chats with two-time Oscar winner Randy Thom about the (often underestimated) importance of sound in human-technology interactions. Thom, the lead sound designer at Skywalker Ranch who worked on films such as The Incredibles, Castaway and Forrest Gump, says that people rarely consider the significance of those signature sounds that come from their trusty devices, whether it be a cell phone, a computer or a tablet."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/19/13 23:02 UTC, submitted by M.Onty
"Microsoft has sensationally abandoned its controversial plans to restrict the sharing of XBox One games, and has also removed daily online authentication requirements for its forthcoming console", reports The Guardian. They had no choice. Still a good move.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/19/13 22:28 UTC
"A snippet of code in the Steam digital distribution platform has revealed that Valve may be planning to let users easily share their games with friends in the future. The Verge has verified the code's authenticity, which was originally spotted by a member of the NeoGAF gaming forum; the code references a 'shared game library' and a notification that would alert a user when their games are currently in use by a borrower." This would change the, uh, game.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:33 UTC
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
Linked by Anonymous on 06/18/13 22:26 UTC
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:25 UTC
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:45 UTC
"I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:32 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)".
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:58 UTC
"The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:52 UTC
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.More News »
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Member since:
2012-02-29
RS is actually a really well reapected company for electrical/electronic parts in Australia. We use them for all our Universiry stuff.
Element 14 (Farnell in Australia), seems to be fine.
To the people who thought it looked more like a social site,
It sounds like that's because you were on the forum/community site...
My earlier thought that everyone was told they had none in stock was correct.
Element14 called me today to check my credit card details, so i talked to them for a bit.
So far (11 hours ago), theyd processed 12,000 orders in Australia, with anothee 50 pages more to process. (I dont know how maby on each page though)
I was also told that right now no orders have been associated with being part of the first batch,
and that once the order of the orders had been sorted, and therefore who gets one from the first batch,
The buyers will be notified by email as to where they stand.
First batch people should receive theirs mid march,
The rest in april.
To the people who thought the distributors were crap,
You try and run a multi national company that is simultaneously releasing a product with such high demand ans have less down time.
They were down for less than an hour, that's pretty good really.