neverm0re's comments

Kevin Horton/Kevtris is the first person I've seen do an FPGA NES, about eight years ago, with almost complete mapper support no less: http://www.kevtris.org/Projects/console/index.html

If you click through the quaint image map it's actually a fairly detailed description of what he did. Actually, explore his whole site, Kevin was a true emulation scene legend and his projects were all wild.

Is she influential? I think she's Dale Bozzio: The Next Generation down to the fashion (since who the fuck remembers the 80s, right?) with a bit of Madonna and Gwen Stefani along the way. In another fifteen years we'll see someone else doing the same schtick and most people will not remember any previous iteration of it.

The link to the image was posted here nine days ago[1], it wasn't missed. These sorts of 'Execute a few basic commands to do something on the RPi' posts are becoming a bit ridiculous and fluffy.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4812749

> All they have to do is compile ffmpeg in software only mode.

Let them eat cake!

Fetching this PDF is a bit problematic right now, so have a mirror:

http://www.mediafire.com/view/?qyx13hkdvt0e594

Except that totally overlooks the fact there are parts of the world where they could implement their own MPEG-2 decoder legally as they do not have software patents. Instead, because of this blob system without documentation they're forced to pay for it. How is this in any way not contrary to goals of education?

We're still talking about a woman who posted the following piece to the foundation's frontpage for lulz: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1901

Yes, the guy was out there -- but does waving chat logs like this around for people to gawk at really belong on the front page of a supposedly educational foundation's website? It sure did get linked around, so it's certainly advertising... but by no means is it educational and it's still very much the general antagonistic and lulzy behavior I've come to expect from these people and how they choose to run their community and maintain their web presence.

At the end of the day, the RPi only feels 'educational' flavored for marketing for me. It may not for you, that's cool too. People are going to do educational things with the RPi, but they're going to do it in spite of how the RPi Foundation are running things since now the meme of this board being 'educational' has been cemented.

... Though given they're already talking about on their own blog[1] how the board may not be around in a few years, I suspect we'll have another 'educational' board (with a new Broadcom chip, natch) to purchase for cheap. It'll be just as revolutionary as the others on the market at the time, I'm sure.

[1]: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2519

What part of their educational goals involve publicly antagonizing their users? The behavior of their PR and their forum moderators does not resemble any open academic environment I've ever seen. It does, however, resemble Tumblr.

It's pretty simple. The RPi is an advertising campaign for Broadcom's VideoCore IV processor, which is part of why the RPi is so cheap. Broadcom is uncomfortable with the reality that software is eating hardware, so they've decided to artificially bolster the value of their hardware by selling it back to you incrementally with their own buggy software. Until they lose interest in maintaining it, of course.

Community resources? The Raspberry Pi has almost zero hardware documentation, a closed black box controlled by a massive binary blob and an absolutely despotic PR disaster named Liz Upton who actively insults and derides developers and others in the RPi community.

Here's a fun excerpt from http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2221 :

Liz: ... keep trying to rustle up some outrage if it gives you a kick; I’d recommend finding something else to do soon, though. We don’t want you developing an ulcer.

Developer: Am I allowed to be outraged by the fact that it’s not really open, since I see no mention of actual documentation for the hardware? Or by this: http://www.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ ? Can I get outraged by that?

Liz: Well you /could/, but you wouldn’t half look silly.

Nice going, Liz. That's right, anyone who actually wants to make full utilization of the hardware they paid for is 'silly' and we're only rustling up outrage for 'kicks' when you post a press release announcing how open source you really aren't.

Here, have a nine page thread of people complaining they were banned under weak, insane excuses like 'concern trolling' because they dared to mention things like 'your supplier isn't sending me anything' and 'My SD card gets corrupted when I unplug the device sometimes': https://www.element14.com/community/thread/20081

It's got massive hype since it's a $35 Beagleboard, but otherwise it's bringing nothing new to the table that hasn't been done by others and increasingly done better by other devices.

The remainder of the situation seems to be a collection of people more interested in their awards, hype and press releases than their actual users and developers on their forums. Frankly, there's quite a few ARM SoC boards out there with GPIO pins and all the bells and whistles of the Pi, many of them have even beefier hardware. None of them have this horrible baggage and all of them will run the same software for the most part.

So that's great that many people are going to target this device, but it's hardly an 'exclusive port' to the RPi. The real bet to back is Linux on ARM.

Personally, this board gets me much more hot than the RPi and prices are only going to come down on similar future boards: http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Richard Miller posted his release email over on the 9fans list: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/comp.os....

It includes an important setup tip. Have fun!

This article is pretty sad when you realize that what he's teaching pales in comparison to what search engines in the nineties were offering. Google has actually /stripped away/ advanced search functionality and dumbed down the search engine.

Still the bible on web searching: http://www.searchlores.org/indexo.htm

I've found using SICP in TexInfo format over at http://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-texi/ to be quite useful when you throw it into Emacs with a Racket acting as a REPL and a scratch buffer, like so: http://i.imgur.com/J3lI1.png

You don't seem to understand that Android already is first. This is a $100 Android box with an 'app store of its very own!' and not much beyond that. We've already got Android and it's not difficult to make a similar enclosure. We've already got better hardware! The cost of porting from Ouya to other Android consoles in general is almost assuredly trivial to possibly zero depending how lazy they are about their software stack (i.e. no real reason to deviate from typical Android practices). All they have to differentiate themselves with is what they've added to Android and so far it looks like 'not much'. There's no reason for exclusivity on Ouya.

How about never? The Ouya is a pig-in-a-poke at best. There's nothing compelling about it that you couldn't do with an ARM evaluation board (in fact, it's more limited), the average console gamer opinion regarding it is 'meh' and it will be obsolete the moment it arrives as what you can buy for $100~ in the ARM SoC space is getting crazier every minute.

The Mali-400 on http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.ph... is already posting better benchmarks than the Tegra3 on the Ouya and the CPUs are the same core, this one slightly lower clocked. Sure the price is a bit higher than the Ouya for a dev board, but that's something you can buy right now. And they're only going to be better and cheaper by the time the Ouya hits, which if I might remind is still five months away if everything goes to plan. Might as well be eternity at the rate cellphone hardware evolves.

Really, all they've done is sold a case and gave us some simple interface mockups. Even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ouya_software is completely underwhelming and resembles the total lack of commitment other DOA consoles like the NGage had going for them.

You can expect Asia to be cranking out a new Ouya-like every few months. It's the software stack on these devices that is significant, as the hardware is now practically free. Hell, it's even open source: https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/ *

(* Mali-400 GPU still not fully reverse engineered. As usual, GPUs are the FOSS barrier -- still, there's hope: http://limadriver.org/)

There's new players all the time and a lot of mom-n-pop type shops out there that actually can reliably deliver 100Mbps and 1Gbps pipes, though some are certainly shady.

I've named the ones I feel comfortable mentioning, but if you really want to know more about what's out there, there's a number of forums like Web Hosting Talk where the actual companies maintain presences to run promotional deals -- and there's a lot of public opinions aired about how said companies are doing. There's going to be some rather uninformed opinions aired, but most people can tell you when there's a real problem.

Compare their budget servers against other budget servers and they're going to lose out on CPU, RAM and bandwidth tier for the price you pay. Not everyone who is cheaper is offering inferior service, either. While I am sure I could negotiate a nice deal with Softlayer, I'd rather deal with people who are offering a better value up front. But perhaps I'm biased, as I tend to provision quite a few cheap machines for ESXi farms and I don't need nor want anyone's support beyond prompt hardware replacement and their network performing as expected.

The hardware Softlayer is offering looks ancient, Xeons from 2006, only a paltry 5GB/mo bandwidth tier as initial offering -- this page looks stuck in time, like what you could get maybe three~four years ago in dedicated hosting.

Even Cari.net, which I think prices a bit higher than others is offering more for the money. I've had several dozen machines with them since 2006 without issue, top notch support. I also use the really cheap and no-frills folks like Ubservers for when I want a bunch of disposable cheap dedicated machines. Their support is absolutely shit, but by god are they cheap and the bandwidth real. I've been through probably dozen and some change of these guys and that's really all that matters is cheap solid bandwidth and a vague sense of support.

This is the real Silicon Valley story here: Bath salts, rectal suppositories, associating with gangsters in Central America... the most compelling read since Hans Reiser dropped his wife like an arbitrary block pointer.

I'm actually startled that this might become the new debate: what strains of marijuana are 'good' and 'bad' and which in the cannabidiol group are 'good' and 'bad'. People actually have serious conditions that are treated specifically by THC, which is capable of adjusting serotonin levels. This is significant for a number of conditions such as migraines and depression.

Please do not generalize like this because it's actually harmful to active patients.