OLinuXino A20-Lime2 ?

Further kudos for Olimex, from an entirely different angle.

They're a progressive and forward-looking outfit, and so their shop (link to A10-OLinuXino-LIME) is on IPv6.

All my Firefox's multiple 6's light up nicely:

Olimex is getting there through a Hurricane Electric tunnel, which demonstrates how anyone can get onto IPv6 even if their ISP doesn't support it natively.

Morgaine.

You know, I never even noticed they were on IPv6... I just take it for granted these days that IPv6 works seamlessly.

So how many did you order then ?

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

Well now that we know about their MarS board, it's looking like a conflict of interest between Farnell the distributor and E14/Embest the board manufacturer

That's somewhat to be expected, sell stuff you can make a bigger margin on first....  Stuff you manufacture yourself may also skip the queue and be something you'll have in your catalogue earlier.

If it was that simple, you'd expect the MarS to be a lot more prominent here, but it really isn't. The other problem with MarS is that the community around it is going to be tiny. There's decent enough communities around Boundary/Wand that it may not matter though.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Although it's not an area that sparks our interest much here, OLinuXino is definitely invading the Pi's media consumer territory.  This Olimex blog "QtAV running on A13-OLinuXino-WIFI with hardware acceleration" shows good video performance

I was watching that earlier...  From what I've been reading, it's still somewhat of a black art to get CedarX and all of the pieces working together. I've not investigated fully yet, but it seems that some parts are binary blobs too.  Very impressive demo anyway!

LIME + sata drive taped to the back of the TV running something like this is going to catch a lot of attention from the media player crowd I'd think.

Maybe the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing?

Certainly Embest building a board but Farnell not promoting it for them makes no business sense at all.  And you're totally right that without a community around it, it's going absolutely nowhere, which means that there won't be significant profits from it and so the development costs went down the drain.  And that in turn means that if this were a reason for not selling Wandboard / A20-OLinuXino then they'd be losing on the left hand as manufacturers and losing on the right hand as distributors as well.

The whole thing looks like mismanagement.  Maybe Farnell has gotten too big, and employees now no longer care?

Morgaine.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

Maybe Farnell has gotten too big, and employees now no longer care?

Possibly, but just as likely that SBC's are a tiny part of their overall business and that's why they don't get the resources.  They're certainly much more complicated to sell and support compared to reels of SMT resistors or whatever, so someone makes a business decision on what makes more sense.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Maybe Farnell has gotten too big,

and as someone who has a day job working for a company many times larger than farnell, I agree that getting too big is a problem. getting things done starts to require committee meetings and meetings to discuss the previous meeting etc..  That then leads to the possibility of the behemoth being too slow to react at times.

selsinork wrote:

 

They're certainly much more complicated to sell and support compared to reels of SMT resistors or whatever, so someone makes a business decision on what makes more sense.

The counter-argument to that though is that Farnell sell quite a number of SBCs, including earlier members of the OLinuXino range and BBB and SL and now MarS, so there's no sign of them optimizing for products that require less support.  And MarS is quite new, so there hasn't been a decision of that kind made only recently either.

Morgaine.

selsinork wrote:

 

and as someone who has a day job working for a company many times larger than farnell

Uh oh.

I'm just a minion    that's where things get problematic though, it's very difficult for normal workers to make a difference when everything requires sign-off five levels above my managers head

It's like a script from a bad episode of Star Trek, a whole planet gone insane with the clueless making the decisions and those who actually drive the technology of civilization forward having no say.  If I ever come across an Away Team shuttle, I'm out of here.

Morgaine.

PS. I also have a towel and my thumb ready in case other opportunities present themselves.  Vogon poetry is a calculated risk.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

It's like a script from a bad episode of Star Trek, a whole planet gone insane with the clueless making the decisions and those who actually drive the technology of civilization forward having no say.  If I ever come across an Away Team shuttle, I'm out of here.

It's also like almost every Dilbert cartoon.  I couldn't stand reading Dilbert when I worked for a large organization because it hit too close to home.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

It's like a script from a bad episode of Star Trek, a whole planet gone insane with the clueless making the decisions and those who actually drive the technology of civilization forward having no say.  If I ever come across an Away Team shuttle, I'm out of here.

It's also like almost every Dilbert cartoon.  I couldn't stand reading Dilbert when I worked for a large organization because it hit too close to home.

Dilbert reflects the cluelessness at the top of the business ladder adequately, but it doesn't really convey the inversion of the pyramid, where "top" always means most unproductive and uninformed and being one of the most productive and informed inevitably means that you're at the "bottom".

It's a total failure of organization for quality, and by design it makes companies Mankind's worst systems.

Morgaine.