*lol* - bloody hell, a 4-digit slashdotter. yeah i didn't actually create a login, took me a while...

:)

i reserve them for emphasis, articles, books and proper nouns. it's a hang-over from when i had RSI that was so bad i couldn't open jars and had to use two hands to turn the key to get into my house, back in 1996, reverse-engineering samba and not really getting paid enough to eat properly that winter. that, and i heard that because the human brain sees lower-case more often, it's easier on the eyes. so, i made a decision, and i'm sticking with it. nobody's given me a good compelling reason to change my mind: it's something i'll have to decide for myself.

yeah - 'innit great? ... i tell you what: you take over. if you're prepared to deal with the suppliers and the free software community and keep up-to-date with the SoC vendors and so on, knock yourself out - i'm not going to stop you.

MALI's not actually owned by ARM, afaict, it's still licensed by ARM from Mediatek. the engineers *inside* ARM have been banging on at ARM to get this resolved. the management are not listening.

why use the A10? because it's around $7.50 in very large volumes, that's why. all its competitors are around the $11 to $12 mark. the other reason is: allwinner are actually trying, within the best of their ability and understanding, to actually work with the free software community. some things they Grok, others they don't. it's challenging, but it's exciting.

ahh, these 5-figure contributors. in myyy daaay, we dreeeaamed of having a 5-figure slashdot number :)

yeah. so those that don't honour the GPL, we don't give them any money. good eh?

good question! this first one was always going to be the hardest. it's taken.... almost a year to eventually find all the parts and suppliers. Mid-Mount HDMI was a bitch to track down. we'll still need to do the PCMCIA casework, and so on, which will need $6k for the endplate to be modified.

once that first one is done, however, we'll not only have pre-established relationships with all the suppliers, but we'll likely already have spare stock of some of the parts, *and* have the schematics to be able to cut/paste to create the next one, and so on and so forth.

so i fully expect subsequent cards to be vaaastly quicker development time. but, even there, it depends on the level of cooperation of the SoC vendor. if they don't provide EVB schematics, we can expect the PCB development to take longer. etc. etc.

remember - this is a project which will be going for at least the next decade. we're just getting started.

you might not - but there are a few people who don't know, and who want to find out for themselves. it's good that they do that, because when it all goes to shit, they're the ones who it's easiest to work with. it's not just academic for them: they now KNOW what the problem is (because they lost money or time over it)

well, take a look at the allwinnertech.com web site. the community surrounding the allwinner a10 processor has grown sufficiently large that a number of community-driven entrepreneurial boards such as the cubieboard, hackberry and so on are actually listed as "Dev Boards" on allwinner's official web site.

if you recall HTC had a keyboard-based phone? techies and geeks loved it. when HTC's next phone wasn't a keyboard-based one, it absolutely tanked.

bottom line: don't underestimate the level of influence that free software people can have.

it's much more fundamental than that. these are factories that in some cases quite literally make shoes, or jumpers, or... socks and handbags on the same floor or building. the owner went one day "i know i'll diversify: let me just go buy some PCB manufacturing equipment". the level of software expertise they have is LITERALLY zero. they buy ready-made designs, ready-made [GPL-violating] software images, and so on.

I like free stuff, but the religion which is Free Software seem to lose sight of the fact that the rest of the world isn't as interested as they are.

well, you need to read the articles online about how the Linux Steam/Valve Team got together with the Intel 3D Graphics Team. one of them described it as "the most productive work meeting they'd ever had".

there really *is* a business case for using free software. tie that in with the fact that many engineers buy stacks of tablets hoping to be able to buy 1,000 of them and use them as the basis for their custom products, but then they find that no, the source code isn't available, and bear in mind that geeks are some of the most influential people on forums which the average users frequent, and you start to realise that it's a bit bigger than you think.

well, to be honest, i mean, what exactly are they going to "steal" here? think about it: linux is more expensive than windows because the number of CDs that it goes onto is greater. and if they "steal" the source code, and try to "hoard" it? congratulations to them: they just cut themselves off from community resources! so i'm really not that concerned about the software, although it's both hilarious and often frustrating to watch them try.

with the EOMA projects, however, it's a different matter: not because it's "stealing" per se but because of the risk of non-interoperability. i've posted about this before, about my uncle (anthony pickford) who used patent law to protect against dangerous copy-cat medicines [which were killing people - literally]. so we've followed his example, and have submitted 3 patents. patents tend not to go down too well in amongst the free software community - myself included - so i made them as extreme as i possibly could, on the grounds that i hope like hell that any companies which we ever need to go after will actually complain enough to get the patent system itself limited or shut down.

both! no wait - i'd rather shoot the horse-sized duck, make a fantastic meal out of it (quack) then tame the horses and sell them to circuses world-wide.

yaay always wanted to do that :)

that's right - i don't. that's why i'm asking peoples' input.

that's right: it doesn't. the idea is to get it made, with as little risk as possible, using building blocks that have been proven as much as is possible.

anything that's in the "planning" phase doesn't exist until it actually exists. what's wrong with that? if everyone followed the line you're proposing, nobody would ever make anything, would they?

tell me about it. please share your concerns. this is not being sarcastic: i need to know. i need to know what the right questions to ask are, because i don't know.

you are absolutely, absolutely dead wrong. waaayyyy off base.

and how's that working out in the android community? you've seen the list of GPL violations as people mistake "android equals linux", yeah? it's a serious problem, and it's why i started the whole rhombus-tech initiative: to get free software developers involved right from the beginning in the mass-volume industry, right the way through to sales in hypermarket retail stores. the "dream" if you will is for free software people to be able to walk into a supermarket and go go "fuckin'A! i helped write the software for that! you wanna buy one of these, grandma, i can replace the OS in no time, with something that i can manage remotely for you".

you have to remember that the BSD license was designed and written at a time when everyone trusted (because they knew them personally) everyone else in the industry. *everyone* shared source code. then fuckers like apple came along and went "thank you very much. BYE". at one point, microsoft's NT Team took the TCP/IP BSD-licensed stack, and put it directly into MSRPC (because winsock was so shit). it's almost 20 years later that Wine have finally reverse-engineered MSRPC. i really don't understand people who don't understand why the GPL is so necessary, i really don't.

it's clear that you're used to the x86 world. there's not a single embedded processor in existence that has memory controllers with those kinds of bandwidth. the fastest i've ever heard of is the AM3894 (and its DM counterparts) which has, if i recall correctly, two 32-bit 1666mhz DDR3 RAM interfaces.

not even the absolute latest ARM Cortex A15 from samsung has 128-bit or 192-bit memory interfaces.

please try to get some perspective, here. we're not building a 100-watt processor. i'm concerned about it going over 3 watts: i'd rather it was 1.5. that's a hell of a difference. it's well-known in the embedded world that you trade performance, power and latency, and it's well-known that that's an acceptable trade-off. if it wasn't, there would not be hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets in the world.