Able to upgrade not just the speed but manufacturer of CPU?


I am not dismissing them. You suggested that there were plenty of other chip manufacturers who could provide for us instead of nVidia and Allwinner, and I pointed out that they currently have no offerings. Without offerings, they do not make good reasons to dismiss nVidia and Allwinner as options. Sure, they may possibly provide something in the future, but as I mentioned before, we should consider new options if they become available.

No, I said there are plenty of chip manufacturers who could potentially provide for us in the future. They do not need any current offerings, that's part of the future bit.

Also, whether Allwinner changes their legal practices or not, we are not forced to ignore them. CHIP uses an Allwinner SoC. There's not anything that legally prevents us from purchasing from Allwinner.

Not legally, but how would the community react if we used Allwinner?

Even Exophase, who actually seems to be supporting Rockchip over Allwinner, doesn't see the GPL violations as reasons to dismiss Allwinner:

That's fine, I don't have to agree with everyone.

Wow, you are really trying to twist my words. I said that you conveniently ignored my comments about nVidia in making your statement that paints me as an Allwinner supporter.

-God Ginrai

I tried to point out that your remarks about me ignoring your comments about nVidia weren't true. I don't have to comment on your comments about nVidia at all, yet I gave you an explanation of what my opinion on the matter is. I don't appreciate you trying to paint me as opposing nVidia.

In your case you have defended Allwinner regardless of what you've said about nVidia.
 
Contemporary art, be it music, movies, games or paintings document the history of culture and society. There's no such thing as "enough art", because there's never any "future art" already made. For example the types of games made document well the advances in technology and changes in society in the visuals, themes and plots they involve. None of those games could've captured the zeitgeist as well as they all combined have. In addition, no game made in the past reflects present, and as such cannot be a commentary on it. One could argue most "art" created doesn't deserve the title and from an art standpoint I'd agree, but even those document what was sold, listened to and considered something people like at the time it was released.

Furthermore, there's still novel art being made. I believe the world is a nicer place with, for example, some of the recent-ish games like braid, the bridge and undertale. I do love many older games, like earthbound, but there's only so many that actually do anything thought-provoking. Sure, if I defined "entertained" as "consuming entertainment" I could just slap youtube on autoplay today and probably never see the same video twice, but I do not think I'd enjoy myself for long. The specific content of the entertainment matters, not just the quantity.

The problem is that there's no telling how much culture needs to be produced for those few gems to appear. They may be the product of someone being inspired by a single line said in a paint-by-numbers first person shooter at a specific point, which provoked a thought in the future developer's mind. The best way to produce more good art is to provide a fertile soil to produce more art. Of course, this should be balanced with other needs of society and the current copyright regimen is way out of line, but new art isn't worthless.

As I said, there will always be some culture still produced. In the UK, for example, we have (and have had for a long while): the BBC (public broadcaster, paid for by a special tax on televisions -- likely soon to be internet as well), the Arts Council (funded by general taxation and lotery grants, itself funds opera, theatre art galleries and classical music etc.), advertising-funded TV, FOSS games, YouTube etc.. Any combination of these could replace what is "lost" (or "purged":cool:) by copyright abolition. Perhaps production values would not be so high, but the BBC's output suggests otherwise. Or people may read more books, as those are comparatively cheap to produce.

Despite that, I dispute that new "art" (a least professionally-produced music, games and video) is so important -- particularly in its current quantity. People have other things to to (at worst, those suffering withdrawal could take up amateur dramatics). Documentation of culture and society is well served by those trashy cat videos and celebrity gossip and such; historians of the future shall have no trouble (assuming the data is preserved well). Indeed, a sudden decline in certain types of music, video and computer games would give the historians a lot of stuff to talk about (and such a decline would, indeed, demonstrate some important tendencies of our society, not least the relative value of different aspects of culture). For "contemporary commentary", which generally does not remain relevant for very long (and, so, for which copyright protection has little value), such as topical comedy and news, well, we have enough without more permanent types and copyright will hardly affect it.

Perhaps my view is skewed, though, as I hardly ever bother with new "art". I generally only bother with things that I have observed people discussing for years since their releases. As such, I have hardly ever experienced any "zeitgeist" from a film or music. Games are a little different, as the graphics changed so much in the period from 1988 to 2008 (I play few games released before 1988, so far) and then stagnated, but I would hardly call that "zeitgeist".

A final note: in our current system, a huge amount of stuff is produced, and then effectively discarded, and a small proportion of it is considered brilliant. In a system with free modification of everything, fewer things might be produced, but with more variations of them and with overall improvement over time. Xonotic, for instance, is not the same now as it was (as Nexuiz?) 10 years ago, but the important things are unchanged. In 10 years it may be even slicker (on a desktop computer, assuming they do not (stupidly) try to change the interface to accommodate other devices, like the soon-to-be-super-successful Pyra). Imagine what a little state funding would do to all these FOSS games?
 
Yeah, I don't want the government trying to inject themselves in all of the art I enjoy.
 
No, I said there are plenty of chip manufacturers who could potentially provide for us in the future. They do not need any current offerings, that's part of the future bit.

"could" already implies a potential. I already acknowledged that it was a potential in my statement. Now if you would read the following statements in the part you quoted, you would see my explanation of why I pointed out they have no offerings.

Not legally, but how would the community react if we used Allwinner?

There would be some who would be disappointed, but if it was the only realizable option, or other options were worse, I do believe that most would accept it.

That's fine, I don't have to agree with everyone.

The point was to show you that there were people who did not see GPL violations as a reason to dismiss a manufacturer altogether, not to get you to agree with them.

I tried to point out that your remarks about me ignoring your comments about nVidia weren't true. I don't have to comment on your comments about nVidia at all, yet I gave you an explanation of what my opinion on the matter is. I don't appreciate you trying to paint me as opposing nVidia.

I am not trying to paint you as someone opposing nVidia, nor have I inadvertently done so. I told you before that my problem is with you trying to set me up as someone intent on supporting just Allwinner.

In your case you have defended Allwinner regardless of what you've said about nVidia.

I'll defend anyone with a viable SoC willing to sell to EvilDragon until we have better options to choose from. The point is to keep options open.

Yes, we're also in contact with HiSilicone. Right now their SoCs are exclusively for Huawei, sadly.

That's unfortunate.

-God Ginrai
 
"could" already implies a potential. I already acknowledged that it was a potential in my statement. Now if you would read the following statements in the part you quoted, you would see my explanation of why I pointed out they have no offerings.

I've already addressed these points previously. I won't repeat myself or go into more detail other than once again point out that out of those I mentioned (which was not a complete list) Broadcom looks like the best bet to me if they decide to get back into the high performance market.

There would be some who would be disappointed, but if it was the only realizable option, or other options were worse, I do believe that most would accept it.

While you do have a point I don't see Allwinner ever becoming the only option for a CPU board.

The point was to show you that there were people who did not see GPL violations as a reason to dismiss a manufacturer altogether, not to get you to agree with them.

There are plenty of people who disagree with me and I'm not going to pretend there aren't. A lot of them are probably even here on the forums but I do believe most people active on the forum has enough respect for GPL to see why I avoid Allwinner.

I am not trying to paint you as someone opposing nVidia, nor have I inadvertently done so. I told you before that my problem is with you trying to set me up as someone intent on supporting just Allwinner.

I may have misunderstood your comments about me and nVidia but I'm certainly not trying to claim you only support Allwinner. I know fully well you support nVidia which is why I didn't even bring them up in the first place. I simply didn't see them as relevant to the discussion of Allwinner.

I'll defend anyone with a viable SoC willing to sell to EvilDragon until we have better options to choose from. The point is to keep options open.

So will I but we clearly have different criteria for "viable". For now I consider the OMAP5 superior to whatever Allwinner has. As others have stated before in this thread there's no reason to pick an SoC for upgrades at this time anyway.
 
broadcom would be fun, even if it's not super high GHz (just have something super power efficient would be great to me :)). maybe we can get some pi-heads to create a pyra-compatible daughterboard, to get exposure in that community. (maybe offer a pyra reward?) there's tons of community offerings there if we have compatibility with Raspberry Pi's, e.g. Mathematica and etc.

we'd need to be able to breakout the GPIOs though and/or camera, somehow, to get some of those guys really interested!

[edit]someone mentioned earlier the parallella people, and i'm looking at their github page (https://github.com/parallella) and it seems like they're super open with their sw development. that's a big plus in my book, and they have plans for future stuff. (though they maybe don't have plans for a gpu...)
 
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I've already addressed these points previously. I won't repeat myself or go into more detail other than once again point out that out of those I mentioned (which was not a complete list) Broadcom looks like the best bet to me if they decide to get back into the high performance market.

I don't remember you explaining why it makes sense that a company that does not currently have a product is a good reason to dismiss a company that does. As the point I've been making is "do not dismiss what is possible", you would have either needed to make such a point, or both of our signals are crossed here.

While you do have a point I don't see Allwinner ever becoming the only option for a CPU board.

"Only"? Yea, I find that unlikely, too. But "one of the only", I can see. Right now, the only options that I am aware of are Allwinner, Intel, nVidia, and maybe Rockchip? "Options" meaning people who have SoCs that would make a good fit and will sell to EvilDragon, not just people who have SoCs that would make a good fit.

There are plenty of people who disagree with me and I'm not going to pretend there aren't. A lot of them are probably even here on the forums but I do believe most people active on the forum has enough respect for GPL to see why I avoid Allwinner.

And as I mentioned in an earlier post: If an SoC that meets our requirements appears, with Linux support and no GPL violations, I am all for it.

I may have misunderstood your comments about me and nVidia but I'm certainly not trying to claim you only support Allwinner. I know fully well you support nVidia which is why I didn't even bring them up in the first place. I simply didn't see them as relevant to the discussion of Allwinner.

Yea, the way you were wording it seemed to me like you were trying to pin me to Allwinner, which made me feel like I was becoming the "guy who hates GPL", even tho' I do believe it is good. That's why I tried to express that it wasn't just Allwinner that I believed needed to be considered.

So will I but we clearly have different criteria for "viable". For now I consider the OMAP5 superior to whatever Allwinner has. As others have stated before in this thread there's no reason to pick an SoC for upgrades at this time anyway.

I'm not saying the OMAP5 is not viable. But you can't create an upgrade board that replaces an OMAP5 with.... an OMAP5. You know what I mean? And I'm not suggesting picking the SoC for the upgrade yet, but merely keeping the options open while designing the upgrade board.

-God Ginrai
 
And I'm not suggesting picking the SoC for the upgrade yet, but merely keeping the options open while designing the upgrade board.
Isn't the design of any upgrade board going to depend heavily on which SoC it's going to support? Seems kind of pointless to try designing such a board before the SOC is chosen. All the generic elements are already there in the OMAP5 CPU board design.

-Neelix
 
Property rights are distinct from copyright.
Doesn't belong here given the thread's theme, but copyright is a form and set of rights pertaining to intellectual property.
 
^ Doesn't change the fact that copyright is a set of laws pertaining to the concept of intellectual property; doesn't matter if anyone believes the term itself is, by virtue of its application, overgeneralized.
 
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Isn't the design of any upgrade board going to depend heavily on which SoC it's going to support? Seems kind of pointless to try designing such a board before the SOC is chosen. All the generic elements are already there in the OMAP5 CPU board design.

-Neelix

To an extent. However, if EvilDragon intends to add any new features to the device through upgrades, that would also most likely be on the CPU board. But yes, there's a lot that will hinge on what SoC is used.

-God Ginrai
 
Doesn't belong here given the thread's theme, but copyright is a form and set of rights pertaining to intellectual property.
Calling it property was the best move the copyright extremists have done so far. It evokes associations to tangible property, for which scarcity is a natural state, contrary to the intangible, where it must be enforced artificially. That's my main problem with the term. Copyright, patents and trademarks have very specific ways of functioning that tangible property does not have. By calling these things property, people generally internally consider tangible property morals and laws to apply implicitly, which they shouldn't, given that the two are worlds apart. It also makes it easier to call infringers "thieves", as now it's not a specially granted monopoly that's being infringed upon, it's "property" being "stolen", which evokes much stronger feelings in the population. I'm not one for full copyright abolishment, but this kind of rhetoric trickery of calling one thing another to associate them with each other is not OK.

I understand the practical use of the shorthand "intellectual property" to refer to "intangible things for which we have the power to stop others from using", but because of the strong values and history associated with the term "property" and the by design temporary nature of the control over intangibles I'd like there to be another term for it. "Temporary intellectual monopolies", "temporarily restricted works", even "protected works" or something else would be far more descriptive. The name should reflect the fact that they are a specially granted temporary exceptions to individual freedoms regarding pieces of information.

My sympathies to the artists and developers actually getting the short end of the infringement stick, but I think it would be better to have an honest conversation using different words for different things.
 
I understand the practical use of the shorthand "intellectual property" to refer to "intangible things for which we have the power to stop others from using", but because of the strong values and history associated with the term "property" and the by design temporary nature of the control over intangibles I'd like there to be another term for it. [...] The name should reflect the fact that they are a specially granted temporary exceptions to individual freedoms regarding pieces of information.
Works for me. The sooner certain individuals and groups can no longer invoke outdated and imprecise legal defintions as means of avoiding accountability, the better. :)

My sympathies to the artists and developers actually getting the short end of the infringement stick, but I think it would be better to have an honest conversation using different words for different things.
Well, in my experience, an awful lot of copyright infringers don't just want to have their cake; they want to eat it, too. For free, no fucks given. Anyway, no need for another tedious discussion about IP and assorted legislation here, especially since we're OT.
 
I don't remember you explaining why it makes sense that a company that does not currently have a product is a good reason to dismiss a company that does. As the point I've been making is "do not dismiss what is possible", you would have either needed to make such a point, or both of our signals are crossed here.

No, what I said (or at least what I meant) was that Allwinner has issues with GPL and then I proceeded to list other manufacturers producing ARM cores. Again, they are not competitive today but they do have potential.

On that note, an interesting idea would be to use an external GPU over the PCIe bus most of those chips offer, but I'm pretty sure that would ruin the power efficiency. Might be useful for a desktop dock or something.

"Only"? Yea, I find that unlikely, too. But "one of the only", I can see. Right now, the only options that I am aware of are Allwinner, Intel, nVidia, and maybe Rockchip? "Options" meaning people who have SoCs that would make a good fit and will sell to EvilDragon, not just people who have SoCs that would make a good fit.

Currently nVidia won't sell to ED but I do agree they would make a good fit. Intel isn't ARM but I guess it would be healthy for the market to have an x86 option.

We both know were we two stand on Allwinner but what matters for the Pyra is what the community thinks. Unfortunately I think our lengthy discussion is preventing others from commenting on Allwinner because they don't want to get pulled into our back and forth quoting. I would imagine most people not having a firm position on the issue either, but that's just speculation on my part.

And as I mentioned in an earlier post: If an SoC that meets our requirements appears, with Linux support and no GPL violations, I am all for it.

Right, but I don't think anyone would oppose that. It's the best case scenario after all.

Yea, the way you were wording it seemed to me like you were trying to pin me to Allwinner, which made me feel like I was becoming the "guy who hates GPL", even tho' I do believe it is good. That's why I tried to express that it wasn't just Allwinner that I believed needed to be considered.

That's not at all what I was trying to say. I find the idea of you hating GPL ridiculous and would defend you on supporting GPL if it ever came up. You don't need to hate GPL to want an Allwinner chip. It is a conflict of interest but we deal with these all the time (such as battery life vs game performance).

If you want some background info I've been running Linux as my main OS for a decade and kept proprietary software away as much as possible. Having the freedom which that brings makes you very reluctant to support an SoC without official open source drivers which is why I also avoid nVidia GPUs with the exception of Tegra (which does have an open official GPU driver). I used to run nVidia but I got sick of nVidia deciding when I could upgrade my kernel and switched to ATI (though that was not the only reason).

I'm not saying the OMAP5 is not viable. But you can't create an upgrade board that replaces an OMAP5 with.... an OMAP5. You know what I mean? And I'm not suggesting picking the SoC for the upgrade yet, but merely keeping the options open while designing the upgrade board.

I think you misinterpreted what I said, I meant there's no need for an upgrade board at all until we have the devices in our hands and can accurately judge whether the OMAP5 is sufficient for what we're using it for. The demo board was already capable of running pretty heavy tasks so I wonder what all this extra power in an upgrade board would be useful for.

I think this is getting a bit silly now; we're constantly getting sidetracked and we're just repeating ourselves on what we think of Allwinner. Most of what I wrote above probably doesn't add much to the discussion anyway so I think my replies will be reduced to a few lines from now on.

Also there's a very interesting discussion of copyright going on here now.
 
We both know were we two stand on Allwinner but what matters for the Pyra is what the community thinks. Unfortunately I think our lengthy discussion is preventing others from commenting on Allwinner because they don't want to get pulled into our back and forth quoting. I would imagine most people not having a firm position on the issue either, but that's just speculation on my part.
I am opposed to using AllWinner, more for others than myself. As seen in the IP discussion, my views on it are very complicated, with the end goal being making things "better" for everyone in the future. It isn't the back and forth that is keeping me out of it, but you did hit on it here:
I think this is getting a bit silly now; we're constantly getting sidetracked and we're just repeating ourselves on what we think of Allwinner. Most of what I wrote above probably doesn't add much to the discussion anyway so I think my replies will be reduced to a few lines from now on.
This is why I tapped out. As I said earlier, I would rather have nothing than to financially support a company I feel is actively damaging things I care about in a way that is unacceptable to me. It is obvious that both sides will not accept where the other stands, and this can be revisited in a year or two when it really matters. Everyone just gets frustrated discussing it now.
 
*In German they go a step further and don't call it thievery, but robbery. Visualise that for a moment. :)

I have issues with people characterising copyright infringement as theft, let alone robbery - theft deprives the original owner of property, copyright infringement doesn't. Theft is a criminal offence, copyright infringement is usually dealt with in the civil courts. But 'copyright infringement' is an awful term, and goes so way to explain why people look for a more convenient term.

Personally I don't have an issue calling it 'piracy', despite what RMS says, as it's usually pretty obvious from context to determine if the act was committed on the high seas with the threat of violence or not - I'm not aware of any instances of copyright infringement committed in the middle of the atlantic yet, but perhaps somebody has torrented something over 3G from a cargo ship.
 
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