For many years, users of M$’s OS have pompously touted as one of the advantages of being locked in to M$’s OS was the ability to play DVDs, “out of the box”. Well, that’s no longer going to be the case. M$ and its “partners” have a problem with small cheap computers. The licensing fees add up and since most users of PCs don’t play DVDs, including that licence in the mix is too much.

“Windows Media Player will continue to be available in all editions, but without DVD playback support. For optical discs playback on new Windows 8 devices, we are going to rely on the many quality solutions on the market, which provide great experiences for both DVD and Blu-Ray.

So much for all that hardware “working with” that other OS… So much for “backwards compatibility”. Times are changing.

see The Register – Windows Media DVD Playback Dead

I have a notebook PC that I was using in the North. I got it from my son who moved on to something better but it has 2 gB RAM and 1.6gHz Core 2 CPU. The thing I really hate about it is the sucky hard drive:
“hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 1792 MB in 2.00 seconds = 896.43 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 118 MB in 3.01 seconds = 39.19 MB/sec”

That may be reasonable in the notebook world but it’s not what I want for storage. The last place I worked has RAID 1 SCSI (4X) shared around the lab. Even old Beast has RAID 1 SATA II (3X).“hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 3392 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1695.96 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 236 MB in 3.01 seconds = 78.40 MB/sec”

…but “the little woman” noticed that it was sitting unused on a shelf. I mainly trot it out for its SD card reader these days, or for visitors. She wants it for the women in the family to use when they are mobile and wanting more than a smart phone. So, I began to reconfigure it. I took out all my services like DHCP, HTTP, TFTP, etc. and added all kinds of multimedia applications. One young lady is taking a course in multimedia so can use lots of razzle-dazzle. I added blender, vlc, audacity, FreeMind etc. to my usual ffmpeg, sox, gimp and imagemagick. I took out the databases and Debian GNU/Linux repositories. I doubt they will use those, except to file images… Maybe I will put LAMP + Gallery back in…

I did some major surgery with a change from GNOME to XFCE4 and populated the “panel” with stuff I thought they would like, including xfce4-weather-plugin.

Things left to do: set up wicd for their multiple wireless connections. For some reason it’s not working and I used wpa_supplicant which works fine for a single connection…

It would have been faster just to re-install, but I enjoy the tinkering and just used APT. No effort is too great to please the ladies in my life.

A KDE-group is behind the production and distribution of a new tablet designed to run FLOSS from top to bottom. GNU/Linux on an ARMed tablet should give performance benefits. The gadget runs a 1gHz ARM A9. The OS is Mer which is derived from MeeGo. The first batch sold out and a second batch with more RAM is in the works. You can sign up to receive notification by e-mail when the product will be available in your area.

I like the specs:
“

• 7 inch multi-touch capacitive screen (800×480)
• 1 GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor with Mali 400 GPU
• 1GB DDR2 RAM
• 4 GB Nand Flash Disk
• Wireless Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g (3G via USB External)
• 1.3 MP built-in front facing camera
• HDMI 1080P Output
• 2 USB ports
• MicroSD slot
• 3.5 mm audio jack
• Hardware volume and power buttons
• 4 dimensional Gsensor
• Battery: 3000mAH @ 7.4v
• Weight: 355 grams

“

Will this be Pogson’s first tablet/ARMed device? It’s cheap enough at $265 and I can hook a big monitor and keyboard to it.

see MakePlayLive.com

When an ARM processor can run at 3gHz+ are desktop applications far behind? 28nm has done wonders for power-consumption as well as cranking up the speed limit. There are very few uses for that kind of power in mobile devices but there certainly is in non-mobile/desktop/server applications. TSMC has recently started cranking out 28nm chips and states that they can reach 3.1gHz “under typical conditions”.

The new devices will soon be reaching consumers and Wintel will have nothing competitive in the same price-range. Intel’s Atom tops out at 1.86gHz at a much higher power-consumption. M$ has nothing that runs on the new chips until about Q4 2012… and is expected to have a tiny share.

This is great news for OEMs, retailers and consumers who still care about MIPS (Millions of Instructions Per Second). People love small cheap computers and they love them even more when they are faster. People love small cheap computers running Android/Linux.

see Digitimes – TSMC 28nm ARM Cortex-A9 test chip reaches beyond 3GHz