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Submission + - Wayland 1.1 Released With Raspberry Pi Support (phoronix.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Six months after the release of Wayland 1.0, versions 1.1 of Wayland and Weston have been released. Wayland/Weston 1.1 brings new back-end support for the Raspberry Pi, Pixman renderer, Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), and FBDEV frame-buffer device. Wayland/Weston 1.1 also introduces a modules SDK, supports the EGL buffer-age extension, touch-screen calibration support, and numerous optimizations and bug-fixes.

Comment Re:Oh Liz, arrogant arrogant Liz... (Score 5, Informative) 108

I think I found your comment, it makes for a fun contrast. This week Liz Upton Said:

Soon there will be more Made in the UK Pis in the world than their Made in China cousins. This is wonderful news for us; and it’s great news for Welsh manufacturing.

but last year she told you:

The Union Jack emblazoned, UK-only board for angry lunatics^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpatriots is a charming idea, but it's not remotely realistic.

you told her:

Finally, I'll say only this: if you want to curb the amount of arguments in this forum then you could at least try to tone down the propensity to post passive-agressive and provocative comments. It doesn't look well for a charity dedicated to an educational project to have its PR done by someone who is unable to have a polite and educated conversation. Take care.

So she signed off with:

I've had a better idea. I've removed your posting privileges, along with Sylvain's. My preferred sort of aggression is aggressive-aggression. Take care.

I think we should all take care and put on out tin helmets.

Comment Re:Like to know more (Score 5, Informative) 108

I think what happened was after the foundation complained that it couldn't find a suitable UK manufacturer they were approached by someone at the Sony contract manufacturing plant at Pencoed ( near Bridgend ) who had studied the board and calculated they could make it profitably at the foundation's target price.

The Sony plant ( it used to be one of Europe's biggest TV plants ) takes on small production runs for third party designs. They had to introduce a new POP facility to manufacture the Pi there . There is quite a long article about the factory process here.

Here is the story about the half a million Welsh Pi and a summary about move to Wales.

Comment Re: Obsolete Processor (Score 5, Interesting) 81

by Kingston (#43052931) Attached to: The Raspberry Pi Turns One
Here is something surprising I read on the Raspberry PI blog yesterday, according to a Broadcom engineer called Dom Cobley, talking about Eben Upton the originator of the Raspberry Pi project:

"The ARM was snuck into 2835 as a bit of skunkworks from Eben, who had these wild ideas about the general public being able to buy a breakout board for our chip and program it themselves. Sounded great to me, but far-fetched."

You are right about the chip, the Roku 2 media players all use the Broadcom BCM2835.
Technology

Submission + - The Raspberry Pi Turns One (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The Raspberry Pi turned one yesterday and marking the occasion the credit card-sized computer's main distributor Farnell element14 announced the month of March as the Raspberry Pi month. The company also baked a cake on the occasion. Raspberry PI was first launched on 29 February 2012 in the UK and it was received with a huge amount of enthusiasm by students and researchers alike. The Pi has had quite an eventful year with researchers building a Raspberry Pi cluster; release of an official turbo mode patch; 512 MB RAM upgrade; launch of Pi Store; sales of over a million units; and release of Minecraft Pocket Edition.

Comment Isn't it about the API ? (Score 1) 93

by Kingston (#42870175) Attached to: Mojang Releases <em>Minecraft: Pi Edition</em> For the Raspberry Pi
I thought the point of this release was to support the teaching of python to children on the Raspberry Pi. My son and his friends are big minecraft fans and he is quite excited about the possibilities of the new programming interface. I don't know if it will be possible but he wants to have wars with his friends, where they program each other into traps. I have only had a few minutes to look at it but it looks like fun, you can do stuff like

for myblks in range(10): world.setBlock(1,1,0+myblks,3)

to make a bridge in front of you.

The Raspberry Pi was only ever supposed to be a fun toy for kids to have in their bedrooms, to learn something about computers or electronics. I don't think it was ever pitched as a fire breathing replacement for you i7 gaming rig. That said it is very capable as an XBMC machine ( Raspbmc ) and plays old games like openarena and Quake 3 very nicely.

Comment Re:Read their complaint again (Score 1) 305

by Kingston (#42797007) Attached to: Piriform Asks BleachBit To Remove Winapp2.ini Importer
The file that Bleachbit users are being encouraged to import is the winapp2.ini file hosted on www.winapp2.com. The original winapp.ini file which is copyright piriform is not involved in this question.

The source of the entries in the winnapp2.ini file is AFAIK the many hundreds of postings on the winapp2.ini forum on forum.pririform.com. Piriform includes the following on it's website terms of use

"You may not reproduce or copy the content of our Website in any form without prior permission. We reserve the right to withdraw this permission for any reason without notice and to demand that you immediately remove any copyrighted material."

As a different question they also include the following:

"This terms of use and permissions within and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with it or its subject matter or formation shall be governed by and construed in accordance with English law and submitted to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts."

I believe the OP is based in America, how would jurisdiction work in this case?
Google

Google To Digitize Millions of Old Newspaper Pages 201

Posted by kdawson from the all-the-news-that-fits-we-print dept.
hhavensteincw writes "On Monday Google detailed new plans to digitize millions of newspaper pages with articles, photographs, and headlines intact so they can be accessed and searched online. 'Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written,' Google said in a blog post. 'It's our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.' For example, Google noted the availability of an original article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1969 about the landing on the moon." When you search the news archive for, e.g., "Chicago fire" or "Rosenberg trial," a significant fraction of the result pages cost money to view.
Privacy

Speculation On Large-Scale Phone Location Snooping 234

Posted by kdawson from the what-may-be dept.
An anonymous reader recommends a speculative blog entry by Chris Soghoian up on CNet. Soghoian makes a convincing case that the NSA could be using loopholes in the law to gather real-time location information on the mobile phones of millions of people. There is no hard evidence that this is happening, but the blog post sheds light on the dense undergrowth of companies populating the wireless space that could be easy pickings for a National Security Letter with a gag order attached. "While these household names of the telecom industry [AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint] almost certainly helped the government to illegally snoop on their customers, statements by a number of legal experts suggest that collaboration with the NSA may run far deeper into the wireless phone industry. With over 3,000 wireless companies operating in the United States, the majority of industry-aided snooping likely occurs under the radar, with the dirty work being handled by companies that most consumers have never heard of."
Microsoft

The London Stock Exchange Goes Down For Whole Day 792

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the at-least-no-one-died-...-yet dept.
Colin Smith writes "TradElect, the Microsoft .Net based trading platform for the London Stock Exchange, was offline for about seven hours, meaning that their 5-nines SLAs are shot for approximately the next 100 years. The TradElect system was launched back in June of 2007 and was designed for increased speed and system capacity."
Linux Business

Linux Pre-Installs In the UK Hit 2.8% 289

Posted by kdawson from the small-but-encouraging dept.
schliz alerts us to a story out of the UK PC distribution channel. It seems that the percentage of systems pre-installed with Linux has gone up 28 times since Vista shipped, from 0.1% in January 2007 to 2.8% last June. Still not huge numbers, but Apple did OK for years with similar market share figures. Linux's headway comes in the face of the marketing money that manufacturers pass out to distributors, money that has historically been important to their profits: "In the late 1990s competition was so keen that distributors were said to sell at or below cost and take their profit direct from the marketing funds they received from vendors. Vendors nowadays keep watch to see their marketing funds are actually spent on marketing, but distribution runs on single figure profits and vendor marketing funds are a crucial aid."
Microsoft

Why Microsoft Cozied up to Open Source at OSCON 325

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the guarded-optimism dept.
This year at OSCON it seemed that you couldn't throw a stone without hitting someone from Microsoft (and in fact, I'm sure several people did). They were working very hard to make themselves known, and working desperately to change public opinion of Microsoft's involvement in the open source community. Linux.com's Nathan Willis took a look at what they were preaching, with a hefty dose of skepticism, and tries to postulate what the "angle" is. Of course, the powers that be at Microsoft may have finally seen the writing on the wall and felt the pressure from Google enough to alter their strategy a bit. For now I guess we'll have to wait with guarded optimism (or laughable contempt, depending on how old/jaded you are).
Displays

Microsoft Engineers Invent Displays That Top LCDs For Efficiency 283

Posted by timothy from the fewer-electrons-means-more-money-for-food dept.
MechEMark writes with this excerpt from a hope-inspiring article at the IEEE Spectrum, which says "Researchers from Microsoft say they've built a prototype of a display screen using a technology that essentially mimics the optics in a telescope but at the scale of individual display pixels. The result is a display that is faster and more energy efficient than a liquid crystal display, or LCD, according to research reported yesterday in Nature Photonics ... The design greatly increases the amount of backlight that reaches the screen. The researchers were able to get about 36 percent of the backlight out of a pixel, more than three times as much light as an LCD can deliver. But Microsoft senior research engineer Michael Sinclair says that through design improvements, he expects that number to go up — theoretically, as high as 75 percent."
The Internet

How To Deal With Internet Bullies? 724

Posted by timothy from the warning-link-contains-classic-deep-trolling dept.
creyes123 writes "I run a free website with an online model airplane design calculator. The number of registered users has quickly climbed and I've gotten many compliments. Out of nowhere, a fellow shows up and proceeds to bad mouth the calculator in a posting in one of my forums. After I politely point out that he's mistaken and should have looked at the documentation before posting, he changes the subject and bad mouths a different 'flaw.' The cycle repeats a few more times, with no apparent end in sight. I want to encourage folks to share their opinions, but constructive criticism was clearly not his goal. I feel that the whole episode was just a massive time waster for me. What did I do to deserve this? Could I have handled this better?"

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