On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 2:16 AM, Bari Ari <[email protected]> wrote: > What exactly is the reference design? A tablet or??
don't know - usually they have "everything including the kitchen sink". i know that the little factory in china have obtained the reference design, but they are incredibly busy. also it doesn't help that the "Great Firewall of China" is in the way (looovely). > Why don't we get the hardware specs and provide better CAD files to the > companies making boards with them. because they're only available under NDA from the SoC manufacturers, who are at first somewhat shocked at the factory's complete lack of software expertise and then "resigned" to dealing with the situation by entirely developing a complete design - all on their own and *including* the complete software package. this is the situation i'm working to break them free from, by putting them in touch with Free Software Developers. this is the situation i'm working to break them free from, by putting them in touch with Free Software Developers. exactly why, when this situation only *prevents* the SoC manufacturers from selling their own SoCs, isn't clear. i _have_ been explaining this to them, but even the CEOs of these SoC companies in China aren't actually allowed to make .. y'know... something called "decisions"! they are effectively puppets, answering to their "superiors" (the money people), who flatly refuse to let them do anything other than what they have been dictated and authorised to do. so it is a cultural thing. we just have to work with the system as it is, for now, and show them a better way, later. > Part of the problem is inexperienced > hardware 'engineers' generating some pretty awful boards that almost > work. yes. that's usually the smaller factories, and they usually succeed only with things under 400mhz. that's why that Skytone Alpha 400 took off so well: Ingenic sold something like 25 million jz4740 CPUs before MIPs caught up with them and went "oi! license! naoooww, sunshine" :) luckily, these guys in the little factory i have access to aren't inexperienced [they just don't have any software expertise]. my friend adam however can tell you some interesting stories about the continuous cycle of experimentation he's witnessed :) > Why put all this software effort into buggy hardware when we could > also provide board stuffers with solid design files? there is more than one way to skin a cat, bari. there is "experienced design" and then there is "rapid incremental design". there's a beautiful description in "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", aka "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson, in which nanotechnology is used to seek out the missing copy of the Primer (ultra-high-grade nanotechnology book). Dr X's nanotes are varied, often fail, but are so numerous that it is obvious that they are designed by genetic algorithms and by trial-and-error. the Neo-Victorians nanotes are clearly "engineered". clinical, calculated - and yet also fixed and rigid. we _know_ that evolution works, and we know that when evolutionary algorithms are put into a fast spin cycle, the results are staggering. read Ian Macleod's sci-fi books for references to the "Fast Folk", where people are run inside "nanotech soup computers" that run 1000s to 10s of 1000s of times faster than "real time". eventually, they evolve into a civilisation that discovers how to manipulate the universe so that they can break out of the box. the scientists, knowing when roughly this will happen, nuke the box each time destroying the nanotech computer "soup" before the civilisation within it can reach that point (singularity). civilisation genocide, described casually "in passing" in this way, in later books, because an entire book was dedicated to the subject some years ago (when they _didn't_ nuke the nanotech civilisation and it broke free), earlier in the series. and, in china, the factory PCB costs are cheap. they can operate on a fast spin-cycle. it's messy but _one_ of them - like brownian motion - occasionally pops to the surface. the point of keeping an eye on all these factories is to catch the one that actually does a decent job, snapshot their designs and put them into mass-production *before* brownian motion sucks them back down, randomly, into the genetic soup. l. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/capweedwv-yr06sivlddbn9sw5whngrseww0vqocfczpimah...@mail.gmail.com
