Linux hits the world (cont #2)
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Linux hits the world (cont #2)
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 ML1 Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 20406 Credit: 7,508,002 RAC: 20 
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One part of a new hope: Baked in Britain, the millionth Raspberry Pi For British computing this is quite a day. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that a million of the tiny cheap computers aimed at transforming education have now been made in the UK. ... BBC plans to help get the nation coding The BBC's director general, Tony Hall, has announced plans to "bring coding into every home, business and school in the UK". It comes 30 years on from a BBC push to make computing mainstream by putting BBC Micro computers in the majority of schools. In a speech to staff, Mr Hall said that the initiative would launch in 2015. "We want to inspire a new generation to get creative with coding, programming and digital technology," he said. Government and technology experts are becoming increasingly worried that vital computing skills are no longer being taught in schools. Meanwhile interest in higher-education IT and computing courses is falling, giving rise to fears about a massive skills gap. ... ... After mounting criticism of ICT as a subject concentrating on office skills rather than anything more in-depth, the government acted to scrap the curriculum in search of something better. From Codecademy to Raspberry Pi to CoderDojo, all kinds of initiatives are springing up with the aim of transforming the way children understand computers. But there's a problem - many teachers feel they lack the skills and the materials needed to teach coding. ... There is a lot of potential openly available from the wealth of FLOSS and GNU/Linux... IT is what we make it... Martin See new freedom: Mageia Linux Take a look for yourself: Linux Format The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3) ID: 1425740 ·  |
OzzFan     Send message Joined: 9 Apr 02 Posts: 15691 Credit: 84,761,841 RAC: 28 
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ArsTechnica has an excellent write-up about Google's slow push to control Andriod: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/ Another case of vendor lockin? Is Google afraid it's mighty empire will fall at the hands of truly open source? All as a means to control the open market? I might want to start looking into ditching my Gmail account. ID: 1431490 · |
Gary Charpentier  Send message Joined: 25 Dec 00 Posts: 30706 Credit: 53,134,872 RAC: 32
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ArsTechnica has an excellent write-up about Google's slow push to control Andriod: First, get the patent, then grant the copyleft .... 
ID: 1431514 · |
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ML1 Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 20406 Credit: 7,508,002 RAC: 20
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ArsTechnica has an excellent write-up about Google's slow push to control Andriod: Thanks for that - a very good article and a very good find. And from my own personal view all sadly far too coercively true. The comments to the article are rather apt also. This is where the GPLv3 is needed, backed up by sharp and fast legislators to avoid us falling into the trap of yet another grand Monopolist. FLOSS is after all only a highly versatile tool. It is up to us how that tool is used... IT is what we allow it to be... Martin See new freedom: Mageia Linux Take a look for yourself: Linux Format The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3) ID: 1431604 · |
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OzzFan Send message Joined: 9 Apr 02 Posts: 15691 Credit: 84,761,841 RAC: 28
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The comments to the article are rather apt also. The comments on ArsTechnica are usually some of the more interesting discussions on the internet. ID: 1431605 · |
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OzzFan Send message Joined: 9 Apr 02 Posts: 15691 Credit: 84,761,841 RAC: 28
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It looks like the iPad Air scores a very low 2 out of 10 score in iFixIt: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/11/ifixit-ipad-air-shares-components-with-iphone-5s-is-hard-to-repair/ Move over Microsoft Surface 2 Pro and MacBook Pro? It seems that iFixIt loves to hand out low scores on many tech items these days. Perhaps their reviews should be taken with a grain of salt when you consider that the appropriately trained techs should have the tools necessary to do the job? ID: 1436474 · |
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ML1 Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 20406 Credit: 7,508,002 RAC: 20
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... when you consider that the appropriately trained techs should have the tools necessary to do the job? Why specially design something to need expensive special tools and ridiculous procedures to drive the expense of repair/change into something exorbitant/impossible?... All a Marketing game?... There are well known methods for design for test and design for maintainability... No special tools or expensive specialist technicians needed. So. another example for early landfill filling: iPad Air peels off in RACY PICS, reveals 'worst batt ever' to wide-eyed geeks Apple slab twice as repairable as Microsoft's Surface 2 tab... ...Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the iPad Air is only one small step away from being as fiendishly difficult to repair as the Surface 2. The low, low repairability score ... is certainly nothing to be proud of... Expensively throw expensive IT away?... IT is what we make it... Martin See new freedom: Mageia Linux Take a look for yourself: Linux Format The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3) ID: 1437049 · |
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ML1 Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 20406 Credit: 7,508,002 RAC: 20
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Feast upon a fistful of alternative freedoms: Fed up with Windows? Linux too easy? Get weird, go ALTERNATIVE Something really different to broaden your worldview It's hard to believe, looking at the modern computing world, but there is still more to life than Windows or Unix… and today, most of the alternatives run on vanilla x86 hardware and are free. Most of them need considerably lower resources than the market-leaders, too... Note the histories there and for just how much we all rely upon FLOSS developments... All despite (and sometimes in spite of) the worst of the proprietary take-downs and slap-downs and other restrictive silliness and vandalism... IT is what we make it and what we allow it to become... Martin See new freedom: Mageia Linux Take a look for yourself: Linux Format The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3) ID: 1437056 · |
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OzzFan Send message Joined: 9 Apr 02 Posts: 15691 Credit: 84,761,841 RAC: 28
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... when you consider that the appropriately trained techs should have the tools necessary to do the job? Ummm.... because most people don't have time, inclination, technical know-how, care or desire to do it themselves? ID: 1437091 · |
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ML1 Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 20406 Credit: 7,508,002 RAC: 20
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... when you consider that the appropriately trained techs should have the tools necessary to do the job? Nope. Try again? Note: There are well known methods for design for test and design for maintainability... No special tools or expensive specialist technicians needed. IT is what we allow it to be... Martin See new freedom: Mageia Linux Take a look for yourself: Linux Format The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3) ID: 1437407 · |
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ML1 Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 20406 Credit: 7,508,002 RAC: 20
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... Neither is breaking the law or the rules. So... You advocate for IT cartels and anti-competitive practices and consumer lock-in practices and deliberate Marketed obsolescence to coerce/force consumers to consume sooner/more at artificially grater expense?... For example, the example for the graphics pads just now listed is that those devices must be thrown away once the rechargeable batteries can no longer be recharged. That enforces a typical lifespan of perhaps 2 to 5 years depending on the battery, quality of charger, and type of use. Designing in to permit an easy change of battery is of minimal cost. Instead, for those examples, a dead battery consigns a perfectly good expensive device to the rubbish dump. No choice. On a second level, destructively gluing in place the components makes such as memory upgrades or SSD replacement effectively impossible. Those components can be expected to have a reasonable lifespan so such 'tamper-proof' construction is in more of the grey area of Marketing mark-up for the better specs. (Even if the better specs in reality should be trivial upgrades.) All a part of the Marketing game? My view is that some aspects are. However, I view the vandalism rife with the demonstrated "lock-in" tricks to be a few Marketing steps too far for the good of anyone... Is that why Europe keeps on extracting multimillion Euro/Dollar fines on certain IT companies?... IT is what we allow it to be... Martin See new freedom: Mageia Linux Take a look for yourself: Linux Format The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3) ID: 1437509 · |
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OzzFan Send message Joined: 9 Apr 02 Posts: 15691 Credit: 84,761,841 RAC: 28
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... when you consider that the appropriately trained techs should have the tools necessary to do the job? That merely state's one's opinion that design can be done in a way that allows the average person to repair their own stuff. What it does not is refute what I stated. Most people aren't interested in repairing their own stuff - they'd take it to someone who knows how. So we go back to the trained professionals who have the tools, knowledge and motivation (pay) to be able to repair these things. The "repairability factor" truly is overblown. ID: 1437569 · |
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ML1 Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 20406 Credit: 7,508,002 RAC: 20
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... when you consider that the appropriately trained techs should have the tools necessary to do the job? So... We can agree on that one. ... Most people aren't interested in repairing their own stuff Possibly so. Then also most have no education or practical skills to be able to do so. Comes back to education again... - they'd take it to someone who knows how. So we go back to the trained professionals who have the tools, knowledge and motivation (pay) to be able to repair these things. Which is fine when the devices are designed to be serviceable. HOWEVER: What we have here are perfectly easily serviceable expensive devices being deliberately designed to make servicing and upgrading impractical. All for the sake of 'sharp' business practices... The "repairability factor" truly is overblown. Hardly. As a purely "consumer" throw-it-away society slave to Marketing silliness, we expensively trash our planet all the more quickly. Is that a good thing? Only good if you're the small few stealing the profits at the expense of the planet for everyone else... Design for upgrade and "re-skinning" can be easily and effectively done, just as is seen for the multitude of covers and "bumpers" that you can buy as a fashion item for your mobile phone... The expensive phone hardware stays the same yet Marketing can have a fair fun day changing the looks however might be wanted. Far better than being forced to trash the lot for the sake of a dead battery... IT is what we allow it to be... Martin See new freedom: Mageia Linux Take a look for yourself: Linux Format The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3) ID: 1437801 · |
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Terror Australis Send message Joined: 14 Feb 04 Posts: 1817 Credit: 262,693,308 RAC: 44 
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That merely state's one's opinion that design can be done in a way that allows the average person to repair their own stuff. Something as simple as changing a battery is not a "repair". It is something that should be possible to perform without total disassembly of the unit. The same might be said of display replacement and SSD and memory upgrades. These last ones are probably not something the average user would want to attempt, but, the manufacturers could make life a bit easier for the tech where simple repairs are required. T.A. ID: 1437853 · |
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ML1 Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 20406 Credit: 7,508,002 RAC: 20
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To try to bring the at present banal forums back to some real-world action that actually does have impact for the world's technology dependent countries, a few recent developments in the (deliberately) unseen world of the Linux kernel: Linux 3.12 Kernel Released; Linux 4.0 Planning Talked Up ... November 03, 2013 As was anticipated, the Linux 3.12 kernel was released this afternoon. The Linux 3.12 kernel is a mighty big update but beyond announcing its debut, Linus Torvalds also made mention of a delay in the Linux 3.13 merge window and has begun expressing possible plans for a Linux 4.0 release in about one year's time. For the Linux 3.12 kernel news, see the articles earlier today for a Linux 3.12 kernel feature overview... AMD Lands Open-Source "Hawaii" GPU Driver Code The Linux 3.13 kernel that is just entering mainline development stages already has Radeon DPM and HDMI audio by default. However, now there's another Radeon DRM-Next pull and it provides support for the brand new AMD R9 290 "Hawaii" GPUs! ... NVIDIA Dropping 32-bit Linux Support For CUDA If you are reliant upon NVIDIA's CUDA computing parallel computing platform, hopefully you're running 64-bit Linux. NVIDIA announced their plans on Friday to deprecate the 32-bit Linux x86 CUDA Toolkit and the 32-bit Linux CUDA driver. ... ... This 32-bit dropping announcement is only in relation to their Compute Unified Device Architecture components and not the binary 32-bit NVIDIA Linux GPU driver itself. ... NVIDIA 331.20 Supports New Kernels, NvFBCOpenGL ... NVIDIA had been struggling with Linux 3.11/3.12 kernel support to the extent that AMD's Catalyst driver even worked earlier but the 331.20 Linux GPU driver released today has the workaround for supporting these recent kernel releases. ... ... The Solaris and FreeBSD drivers have been updated too. Intel Releases Updated Linux GPU Tools ... The new release is intel-gpu-tools 1.5 and it's coming ahead of their quarterly Intel Linux graphics driver package release. The intel-gpu-tools 1.5 release has improvements to their test infrastructure, Haswell improvements and DPF tool support, Stereo/3D support for the test display, support for Gen7 GPU performance counters, improvements to the VBT decoder, new tools to read legacy VGA registers, new helpers in the test library, new test-cases and other improvements, regression test support, and other low-level changes to please driver developers. More details... The Linux 3.13 Kernel Is Already Super Exciting ... Here's just a few things to expect so far but it's already gearing up to be a super exciting release and perhaps the best of 2013. Among the changes we know already that are going to be in Linux 3.13 that make it particularly great include: ... Linux 3.13 To Receive Multi-Queue Block Layer ... The multi-queue block layer will allow Linux to perform significantly better for disk IOPS while reducing latency with multi-queue SSD access on multi-core systems. The multi-queue block layer that will be merged into the Linux 3.13 kernel tries to balance I/O workload across multiple CPU cores, reduce cache-line sharing, provide similar functionality to SQ, and allow for multiple hardware queues. Testing of the multi-queue block layer shows for a significant increase in disk IOPS as the number of CPU cores increase, compared to virtually no difference with the single-queue block layer. The multi-queue block layer can yield improvements in the range of 3.5 to 10 times greater IOPS, 10 to 38x reduction in latency, supports multiple hardware queues, and actually yields simpler driver development. ... Note that by some opinions, "nVidia" are very much the secretive uncooperative bad-boys of the FLOSS world. The continuing impressive developments for the 'reverse engineered' and 'independently developed' FLOSS driver for nVidia may yet force them to come onboard rather than being outdone! In amongst all the geekie announcements, in summary, the Linux kernel romps yet further way ahead of anything else so far in existence for general purpose computer system kernels. The x3 to x38 improvements for the parallel orchestration of SSD/HDD data access is impressive. Nothing like that is being done anywhere on other general purpose systems... IT is very much what we make it, Martin See new freedom: Mageia Linux Take a look for yourself: Linux Format The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3) ID: 1441082 · |
Sirius B   Send message Joined: 26 Dec 00 Posts: 24881 Credit: 3,081,182 RAC: 7 
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ID: 1446968 · |
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ML1 Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 20406 Credit: 7,508,002 RAC: 20
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Interesting report..... Thanks for that. That is quite a story and quite an eye-opener... IT is what we make it and the users allow it to become... Martin See new freedom: Mageia Linux Take a look for yourself: Linux Format The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3) ID: 1448260 · |
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ML1 Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 20406 Credit: 7,508,002 RAC: 20
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Quite an eye-opener is this "tech-help" article and the comments responses! Jack Schofield: "Linux laptops: should you avoid buying Windows?" I'm looking for a new laptop, but I can't stand Microsoft Windows. I've recently come across Novatech, who sell operating system-free computers... ... So, my general advice is to buy a Windows laptop -- because you will usually get a better quality product for less money -- and then dual-boot your distro of choice. While you might not like Windows, that's beside the point. Windows runs millions of useful programs (including the vast majority of open source programs) and games, and it supports most printers and other peripherals. Some day you may need Windows, so why not keep it around?... ... Technically you might be happy with a Novatech, but the ThinkPad brand still carries a lot of cachet, and if you are marketing yourself to other people -- which, essentially, you are -- then I think it's worth having. Or you could buy an Acer for less, thanks to the economies of scale generated by Microsoft Windows. Phew! Understandably, the comments to that article are quite 'hot' and also rather amusing in strange ways... All a sign of the old guard not understanding the avalanche of change to a new world that can offer Freedom? There are lots of comments but this one lists just one of many possibilities: There's too many Jack, run!!!!! ;-) See also Linux Pre-Loaded for a list of PC/Laptop suppliers with Linux already installed for you. IT is what we allow it to be... Martin See new freedom: Mageia Linux Take a look for yourself: Linux Format The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3) ID: 1454368 · |
James Sotherden  Send message Joined: 16 May 99 Posts: 10436 Credit: 110,373,059 RAC: 54
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OK. I see a few vendors ofering Linux. Good for them. But will it catch on? Only if the users can make it do what they want it to do. Maybe this is the start of slowly chipping away at the other two main OS's.  [/quote]Old James ID: 1454377 · |
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ML1 Send message Joined: 25 Nov 01 Posts: 20406 Credit: 7,508,002 RAC: 20
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OK. I see a few vendors ofering Linux. Good for them. But will it catch on?... It already has in various parts of the world. Here's one success story in spite of the personal intervention of Steve Ballmer himself: (What!? He couldn't even give it away?!!) Munich signs off on Open Source project Linux and OpenOffice now humming away... The German city of Munich has declared that its famous move to open source software is over and a success. Munich famously decided to go open source back in 2003, citing a desire to be independent of big, bad, vendor-land and save a few Euros along the way. To that end the city decided to adopt Linux on the desktop and server, open-source productivity tools and free software everywhere. A decade later, ... declares that the system has received a “project acceptance certificate†and that “ the IT project is formally completed and … in regular operation.â€... The first trickles of an ever expanding deluge of freedom and change?... IT is what we make it... Martin See new freedom: Mageia Linux Take a look for yourself: Linux Format The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3) ID: 1454662 · |
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