Amped
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Review:Fun read. I suspect the whole premise is nonsense, but at least it's nonsense outside my area of expertise so I could ignore it ;-) |
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Review:Fun read. I suspect the whole premise is nonsense, but at least it's nonsense outside my area of expertise so I could ignore it ;-) |
It sucks because it's expensive. Or at least it's expensive for how lame the hardware provided is.
The other day I got a Mele a1000 box for which I will do a full review soon, I hope. But I really need to get the word out: this thing kicks Raspberry PI in the ass so hard it's not even funny.
For starters, it costs twice as much. Which may seem bad, but trust me, even at twice the cost, it's cheaper. Because if you are the kind of person for whom the $35 makes a difference, then you are also probably someone who doesn't have a HDMI-capable TV or monitor. And the Mele works with HDMI, but also with RCA connectors and VGA, which means pretty much any TV or monitor manufactured in the last 20 years will work in a pinch. You can repurpose ancient monitors (1024x768 CRTs from 1996? WORKS FINE) that are available everywhere.
Also, it comes with Wifi, wihch the Pi doesn't. And of course Ethernet, too.
It comes with 4GB of internal storage and 512MB of RAM. The Pi? None and 256mb. See a pattern here? You pay twice as much and it comes with more than twice as much hardware in it.
Also, it has two USB connectors (1 in the Pi model A, 2 in the Pi model B).
One important feature: it comes in a box. A nice, sturdy, small box, that can be nicely placed so that it doesn't break apart.
The CPU is several times faster and several generations more modern. The GPU is slightly less powerful, but you won't notice, the only thing the Pi can do with that GPU is decode video really quick, for anything remotely interesting the CPU is a bottleneck.
And both are proprietary, but at least someone is working on open Mali400 drivers.
The Mele is useful out of the box, you can just install Ubuntu on it, or use Android, which is open source. It's fully rooted, you don't need to do anything strange to install other operating systems in it (just like the Pi!) except that since the CPU is so much better, it can just do stuff easier.
Did I mention that while the Pi has only a SD card for storage while the Mele has 4GB of flash, and a SD slot, and an eSata slot? And that using that it could be a nice small file server?
And the kicker: it's not a charity. It's $70 because you are paying a business to create the things, and doesn't depend on getting severely discounted chips from Broadcom, it just is a good product at a good price. And that's just awesome because it means in 2 years we will have something about as powerful as the Mele at the Pi's pricepoint, and something much more powerful at the Mele's price, and that's sustainable, because the people who are building it and designing it, and selling it, and shipping it, are making a living out of it, while kicking the ass of the charity. And that's good. And if you want 100000 of these, you order them, and you get them, instead of having to pre-buy, and wait months, and see them ship in tiny batches.
So, buy this, or something like it.
Also: $92.60 with free shipping
Since I have a small kid, I know stuff other people don't. Specifically, I know that a surveillance state is forthcoming and that noone will care. Noone that matters that is. Because they all will have learned about it when they are three. So, by 2035, the expectation of privacy will be: None.
There is a classic south american leftist book called "To Read Donald Duck" that explains, from a marxist-theorist point of view, how Donal Duck forges the public conscience. If Dorfman saw one episode of Special Agent Oso he would have an aneurysm. Let me summarise every episode:
Adorable Kid in any country. The show specifically shows what country it is, and the characters have localized features, names and dresses.
Adorable Kid has a problem.
His predicament is filmed by a robot ladybug, which reports via a satellite to an unnamed organization.
The misterious boss called "Mr. Dos" (By the way, the chief of the argentinian secret service is called "Señor Cinco". Just saying!) assigns the mission to one of his "agents", usually our main character, Oso.
Oso uses advanced technology to find Adorable Kid, and with the guidance of his "Paw Pilot" (how dated is that?), teaches Kid the three easy steps to solve his predicament.
Oso learns a valuable lesson for his apparently endless Special Agent training program.
This is wrong at so many levels it's hard to keep track of them, but let's try anyway.
There is an unnamed organization that has the resources to know when every kid can't tie his shoes, and send an agent to help.
Every ladybug may be a robotic satellite-capable surveillance device.
This organization will send agents to get in contact with kids in any country without any adult supervision.
They have unlimited resources, including space stations, artificially intelligent bird-robocopters.
Their agents are not only good, kind and helpful, they are adorable stuffed animals.
The message is so blunt that it's not even mildly hidden to require marxist analysis, this cartoon says, loud and clear, that unnamed organizations look at everything you do, but it's for your own good, and when those organizations enter your life, it's only to help you and protect you, and in the process, these virtuous groups become even more virtuous.
Having lived in latin america in the 70s and 80s, I can say: bugger, we wished for that to be so! In reality, these things usually hire very few stuffed animals, and quite a bunch of plain old animals.
The constant surveillance is not even thought about, it's just assumed to be there, there is no consideration that kids deserve, need or even have privacy or a privacy expectation, the ladybugs routinely film the kids in their homes or even bedrooms, and send the images to a satellite for automated monitoring. Jeremy Bentham lacked the imagination and technical resources to imagine this, so he had to put his prisoners in a circle, to be watched by mere human guards.
So, what can we do? Probably nothing. I fully expect my kid to grow up with no expectation of privacy, and no concept of doing things outside the purview of a government, officially or unofficially.
Is that evil? Maybe, but it will be their normal. Just like we don't expect to have silence, or private electronic communications unless we take specific measures (you all know that, right?), and we expect all our online actions to be tracked by someone (you do expect that, right?)
My hope is a world of hypocrites, who have a public facade and a secret life. I can only hope my son will become Batman.
Version 3.0.1 of Nikola my static site generator is ready for initial user testing.
I have merged a bunch of patches from Kay Hayen and Kadefor:
disqus_developer is gone
addthis buttons are optional (controlled by a new option)
You can have more than one static files folder to be merged into output.
Image galleries support uppercase extensions.
Templates can not link to CSS that is empty/missing
Better Google Sitemaps
Preserve (some) metadata when copying files, like timestamps
Don't overwrite existing posts with doit new_post
Generate valid URLs from unicode titles
So, if you want to try it out:
https://github.com/ralsina/nikola/zipball/3.0.1
I will make it a real release if nothing bad shows up before sunday or monday.
I have been flooded by awesome patches for Nikola by different contributors, so there will be a new release very soon. In the meantime, see what happens if someone with design skills does a theme for it:
The author says he's polishing it and will be done in a few days.