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Comment Re:AMD might stand a chance (Score 1) 213

Note the article says ARM *server* processors. In that market, GPUs are totally irrelevant, power usage is secondary to performance, and price of the CPU is a distant third.

Power usage translates directly into heat, so if you have a CPU that takes 10x less power you can cram 10x more of them onto the same server.

Comment Re:Direct video access? (Score 1) 128

Unfortunately this means every write to the display now has to go via the kernel instead of going direct.

No, if you mmap() the framebuffer you (as in the application) write directly to video memory (of course, what you say is true if the application uses lseek() and write() instead, but why would it?). The reason it's slower is because drivers make the GPU do all the heavy lifting. The only abstract thing about the Linux framebuffer is that you don't have to map the memory yourself, the kernel drivers do it for you.

Comment Re:Toy (Score 1) 206

If this board had a few spare GPIO pins brought out to a header there really wouldn't be a reason for Pi to exist at this point.

Except that it costs twice as much and draws more power, so it you don't need all the extra functionality it's a waste of money and electricity.

Not that I'm saying it's not needed. There probably will be a larger, more expensive version of the Raspberry Pi.

Comment Re:Wayland vs X (Score 1) 315

x11vnc is not limited to X. It can also remote control a console session on a Linux framebuffer device, and a few other things. Also, from TFA:

- Jesse has been playing around a bit with some remote Wayland support using libvncserver. He's apparently had some success with this and expects to push some code upstream soon.

So there are already people working on it.

Image

Recession Cuts Operation That Uses Hair To Clean Up Oil 119

Matter of Trust, a nonprofit that uses human hair scraps to make mats to clean up oil spills, finds itself with 18,000 pounds of hair and nobody to process it. Lisa Gautier, who runs the organization, says that the recession has closed many of the textile makers that produced the mats and the warehouse that stored them. Unfortunately for Lisa the hair keeps piling up. From the article: "Hair is good at soaking up oil because, up close, the strands are shaped like a palm tree with scalelike cuticles. Drops of oil naturally cling inside those cuticles, says Blair Blacker, chief executive of the World Response Group. A pound of hair can pick up one quart of oil in a minute, and it can be wrung out and reused up to 100 times, Mrs. Gautier says."

Comment Re:Still too big (Score 1) 492

Phone electronics are already small enough. Most of a smartphone's power usage is its screen, and most of its weight is its battery. Shrinking the screen will lower the phone's power consumption, thus allowing for a smaller battery.

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