As far as I can see, this is a port of QT embedded (QT with a framebuffer backend). That means it won't be QT as most developers know it, and it won't be capable of running most pre-existing applications without some modification. Qt/E uses its own windowing system, there is no xorg or X11 compatibility layer, which the build systems of many applications expect, and your application will be running as the only software writing the framebuffer, rather than in a desktop environment. Many (most?) existing QT desktop apps aren't going to run on this without having some porting work done. The only app I can think of that does support QT/Embedded is MythTV, but IMHO the QT/Embedded port is run by almost noone, and is buggy. When I played around with it, I eventually gave up and installed xorg and used the QT/Xorg port.
The Pi does sound awesome, and I expect we will see a variety of different environments and graphical/launcher/desktop layers (direct framebuffer, Xorg, Wayland, single apps, multi-apps with launchers, Android, full LXDE/Gnome/KDE/.. desktop etc.) before people come to some kind of agreement as to what works best for this thing.
Unfortunately the large companies appear able to play the system, and don't seem to care about patent losses as long as they are able to threaten others with their own patent portfolio. How many large awards have we seen against Microsoft? Sun won $20 million, SPX $62 million, Eolas $521 million, VirnetX $106 million, i4i $290 million, Alcatel-Lucent $1.5 billion (overturned by judge!), reduced to $70 million, Uniloc $388 million. That isn't pocket change, and yet Microsoft is still a big supporter of patents.
But the threat of a product ban is a big one. I wonder what would happen if some holder of a fundamental patent won a case against Microsoft Windows and refused to license the patent *at any cost*. It's a shame they could work around the i4i patent.
Get rid of patents. China has shown that patents are not necessary for a growing economy. Europe (officially) has no software patents, and yet there are plenty of software developers in Europe, thus proving that patents are not necessary for the industry. Innovation? X-Prize style awards. If the prospect of a $10 million prize can get private companies competing to develop a space vehicle, then the same principle can be used to encourage innovation and competition in any industry. The government giving a monopoly to one manufacturer does not encourage innovation and competition - it does the exact opposite, anyone with an understanding of communist-era industry could clearly see that.
If a patent holder needs to satisfy some rule about "having a product on the market", they will just contract someone to build a really crappy prototype, and put it on the market at a stupidly high price.
Terrorism: Flying jetliners into buildings in a way sure to get good media coverage and keeping the threat of the possibility of it happening again ambiguous.
You are assuming that the attacks were intended to cause terror in the general population. What if the attacks were intended as an act of war? Taking control of an enemy's infrastructure and using it to attack military targets (which the Pentagon and the White House would qualify as) sounds like guerrilla warfare. What if the aim of the attacks was to draw the U.S. into a larger conflict based in the Middle East, on territory where they could fight more effectively, which was apparently Bin Laden's stated plan? That would be a valid military goal, wouldn't it?
There are many such "civilian" things that are considered valid military targets by the U.S.: telephone networks (when the enemy military has it's own comms networks, so destroying the civilian system does not affect them), civilian electricity infrastructure (electric plants, city substations etc.), civilian fuel supplies, factories that manufacture everything from baby milk powder to paint, the foreign embassy of a non-combatant nation (an "accident" - the only bombing in that war directed by the CIA. Hmm.), and even "unfriendly" media (actually Al Jazeera has been bombed several times, their Kabul offices were bombed, their Baghdad offices were bombed, their Basra offices were bombed, and the Basra Sheraton was bombed when the only guests were Al Jazeera journalists.) Precision guided bombs, hardly ever miss, right? And it was only 70 years ago when the Allies considered carpet bombing of the civilian population to be a valid military tactic (justified because civilians were obviously working in the factories making war items).
Also there are plenty of people who consider police stations valid targets - the Israelis have hit police stations in Gaza and the West Bank, killing numerous policemen, the IRA used to target police stations, etc.
Who said terrorism had to have an aim of inducing fear in the general population? Why would attacks intended to induce terror in a sub-group of the population, like an ethno-religious minority, not be considered terrorism? Attacks against the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan are considered terrorism by many Americans, and by that definition attacks against the British military in North America would also be classified as terrorism.
Some Linux distributions nobble in-app auto-updaters, because the application is installed via their standard apt/yum package repositories. There is no need to treat one application as a special case, that requires a special updater, when you have proper package management.
There's a vulnerability in iTunes but it's not that vulnerability that installs the malware.
Yes it is. From TFA:
"Evilgrade leveraged a flaw in the updater mechanism for iTunes that could be exploited on Windows systems. Amato described the vulnerability:
"The iTunes program checks that the binary is signed by Apple but we can inject content into the description as it opens a browser, with a malicious binary so that the user thinks its from Apple"
The only way you can argue that the updater isn't at fault is if you are going to blame the exploit that installs the malware? But by that definition, a manufacturer would never be assigned any blame for vulnerabilities, it would always be the person doing the exploiting. Does that make sense? Try this: "Microsoft bears no responsibility for any holes in Windows, even when it knows about them and doesn't fix them. The blame lies entirely with the exploit." Do you still agree with this logic when the manufacturer of the system is Microsoft, rather than Apple?
If I post the link to that particular website right here on Slashdot, by your logic that would mean Slashdot is now infested with spyware too.
Bad analogy. Slashdot isn't used as part of a Software Update system by software installed on the desktops of millions of people. Your iTunes updater isn't going to prompt you to install a new update - verified as being from Apple - because of a Slashdot post.
The figure of 250 kWh/day includes all energy (gas heating, transport etc.), not just electricity, see references at Sustainable energy without the hot air: Red reflections. Secondly, household electricity consumption does not reflect actual usage, since most people spend most of their days at work (or school etc.). Workplaces are significant consumers of energy. Read the book.
The average American consumes about 250 kWh per day. If we all raised
our standard of consumption to an average American level, the green pro-
duction stack would definitely be dwarfed by the red consumption stack.
What about the average European and the average Brit? Average Eu-
ropean consumption of “primary energy” (which means the energy con-
tained in raw fuels, plus wind and hydroelectricity) is about 125 kWh per
day per person. The UK average is also 125 kWh per day per person.
These official averages do not include two energy flows. First, the “em-
bedded energy” in imported stuff (the energy expended in making the stuff)
is not included at all. We estimated in Chapter 15 that the embedded energy
in imported stuff is at least 40 kWh/d per person. Second, the official
estimates of “primary energy consumption” include only industrial energy
flows – things like fossil fuels and hydroelectricity – and don’t keep
track of the natural embedded energy in food: energy that was originally
harnessed by photosynthesis.
In areas with a lot of sun, if you can get a majority of buildings to install solar heating/cooling/lighting and photovoltaic, and some local storage, you can make a big dent in the energy requirements (from coal) in a particular region.
Unfortunately it doesn't even come close. From this book: if you cover every south facing rooftop with solar panels you get 10 square meters of solar panels per person, which provides energy of 5 kWh per day per person. Current Western energy usage is estimated at 250 kWh per day. Those figures are based on the UK, where average sun level is 60% of the level at the equator. So moving the panels to Africa is only going to get us an extra 66%, so we still aren't meeting even 5% of our current energy needs (and then you would have to deal with transmission loss etc.). It isn't going to make a big dent...
Yes, energy density is a problem. If every single rain drop that fell on the Britain were exploited perfectly (100% capture of energy from first impact to sea level), then the whole lot would meet about 3% of the nation's current energy consumption. (Figures from Sustainable energy without the hot air: hydroelectric). Photovolatic farming also has big problems. To meet our current daily energy use with PV solar would require 20% of the land to be covered in panels, and to do it on a scale to power the UK alone would require 500 times all the photovoltaics in the whole world today. We either need some huge advances in science, or to seriously lower our energy consumption.
Unfortunately for our society, the original poster is mostly correct. Please read this book: Sustainable energy without the hot air. The author is a big proponent of sustainable energy, but reading the calculations on energy density you begin to realise what a huge problem we are facing. The book is a free download, or you can buy the dead tree version. There's no reason to not be educated on this issue.
The problem is that the water is too hot to re-use for cooling, and cooling it would in turn require time and energy. It's therefore easier to pump the hot water out to sea and forget about it. It is used as heating water in some places, but this has problem, see Sustainable energy without the hot air: Combined heat and power: "Delivering useful heat to a customer always reduces the electricity produced to some degree. The true net gains from combined heat and
power are often much smaller than the hype would lead you to believe."
The emissions cost is kind of reflected in the price, because energy costs money, and there is a correlation between energy used during manufacturing and emissions. There have been many analyses of solar power; a typical panel has an energy yield ratio of between 4 and 7 (ref. Sustainable energy without the hot air). So it generates 4 to 8 times more energy than it costs to manufacture, transport and install.
2. Nuclear does not look promising, but it is an interesting one. Currently we get less than 3% of our daily Western life energy from nuclear plants. Nuclear would last 1000 years if we each used 0.55 kWh per day. But we don't - Westerners use about 250 kWh per day. We would need to ramp up production 40 times to cover our current daily usage. If we tried to cover all of our energy needs with nuclear, we will run out in of (currently known) recoverable reserves in 25 years. Ocean extraction of uranium is possible, but currently costs 10 times more than mining ore. Maintaining our current life styles on 10x energy cost isn't feasible: we would need some major technology developments here...
I'm afraid biomass does not appear to be the answer. See Sustainable energy without the hot air - solar biomass. I recommend reading it, it's a well thought out book, with free electronic versions (epub/pdf) for download.
For the OWS movement, any deaths caused by the government will be accidental.
Chinese say the same about Tank Man. They say there is no difference between Tiananmen and the Bonus Army. Who talks about the time Chinese tanks rolled into Tiananmen to crush protest? Nobody. Who talks about the time U.S. tanks rolled into Washington D.C. to crush protest? Nobody. So they equate the two events as the same. Maybe they are right.
That may be true, but the converse may also be just as true: Tax decreases are only a temporary solution at best. See "taxes on the nation's highest-earners are close to the lowest they've ever been." Has *your* income tax rate fallen 56% in the last 50 years? That was a huge decrease, and it's only now that people are realising that it might not have been sustainable... but it is also very difficult to reverse (much harder than, say, letting inflation erode the savings of millions of people, which is an issue the politicians should really be tackling...).
All of the integer ops are executed in those units, so yes, they are important. Every single loop and jump and code branch executed by the processor is dependent on some integer arithmetic being performed at as low latency as possible. Even on a completely FPU-less system, you'd be surprised exactly how little floating point ops are actually necessary. Without an FPU you can still do: compiling, digital simulations, run kernels and do virtualization, web/file/database etc. serving, networking, cryptography.
Look at the Sun T1/T2 CPUs, they are designed to have low-FPU power because the market they target doesn't care : "One of the limitations of the T1 design is that a single floating point unit (FPU) is shared between all 8 cores, making the T1 unsuitable for applications performing a lot of floating point mathematics. However, since the processor's intended markets do not typically make much use of floating-point operations, Sun does not expect this to be a problem. Sun provides a tool for analysing an application's level of parallelism and use of floating point instructions to determine if it is suitable for use on a T1 or T2 platform."
"Of note are the patents Apple asserted in its Delaware filing: one, patent 7,657,849, covers multitouch gestures, but only in a limited use case - unlocking the phone. The second, number 7,479,949, covers multitouch heuristics to determine how a device should interpret multitouch input, and was patented by Steve Jobs himself as well as a number of other co-assignees. The other patents in question are number 7,362,331, covering moving objects within a GUI; 7,469,381, covering list scrolling; 5,920,726, covering the management and recovery of a power failure by a digital camera; 7,633,076, covering how a device senses what a user is doing via the use of multiple sensors; 5,848,105, a co-channel filtering patent; 7,383,453, covering the conservation of power by a voltage reduction to the instruction portion of the processor; 5,455,599, an object-oriented graphical system, and 6,424,354, an event notification system for propagating object-change information."
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can see, this is a port of QT embedded (QT with a framebuffer backend). That means it won't be QT as most developers know it, and it won't be capable of running most pre-existing applications without some modification. Qt/E uses its own windowing system, there is no xorg or X11 compatibility layer, which the build systems of many applications expect, and your application will be running as the only software writing the framebuffer, rather than in a desktop environment. Many (most?) existing QT desktop apps aren't going to run on this without having some porting work done. The only app I can think of that does support QT/Embedded is MythTV, but IMHO the QT/Embedded port is run by almost noone, and is buggy. When I played around with it, I eventually gave up and installed xorg and used the QT/Xorg port.
The Pi does sound awesome, and I expect we will see a variety of different environments and graphical/launcher/desktop layers (direct framebuffer, Xorg, Wayland, single apps, multi-apps with launchers, Android, full LXDE/Gnome/KDE/.. desktop etc.) before people come to some kind of agreement as to what works best for this thing.
Unfortunately the large companies appear able to play the system, and don't seem to care about patent losses as long as they are able to threaten others with their own patent portfolio. How many large awards have we seen against Microsoft? Sun won $20 million, SPX $62 million, Eolas $521 million, VirnetX $106 million, i4i $290 million, Alcatel-Lucent $1.5 billion (overturned by judge!), reduced to $70 million, Uniloc $388 million. That isn't pocket change, and yet Microsoft is still a big supporter of patents.
But the threat of a product ban is a big one. I wonder what would happen if some holder of a fundamental patent won a case against Microsoft Windows and refused to license the patent *at any cost*. It's a shame they could work around the i4i patent.
Get rid of patents. China has shown that patents are not necessary for a growing economy. Europe (officially) has no software patents, and yet there are plenty of software developers in Europe, thus proving that patents are not necessary for the industry. Innovation? X-Prize style awards. If the prospect of a $10 million prize can get private companies competing to develop a space vehicle, then the same principle can be used to encourage innovation and competition in any industry. The government giving a monopoly to one manufacturer does not encourage innovation and competition - it does the exact opposite, anyone with an understanding of communist-era industry could clearly see that.
If a patent holder needs to satisfy some rule about "having a product on the market", they will just contract someone to build a really crappy prototype, and put it on the market at a stupidly high price.
The Constitution only governs federal law. The basis for most of the laws of the U.S. was English common law. Law of the United States
Terrorism: Flying jetliners into buildings in a way sure to get good media coverage and keeping the threat of the possibility of it happening again ambiguous.
You are assuming that the attacks were intended to cause terror in the general population. What if the attacks were intended as an act of war? Taking control of an enemy's infrastructure and using it to attack military targets (which the Pentagon and the White House would qualify as) sounds like guerrilla warfare. What if the aim of the attacks was to draw the U.S. into a larger conflict based in the Middle East, on territory where they could fight more effectively, which was apparently Bin Laden's stated plan? That would be a valid military goal, wouldn't it?
There are many such "civilian" things that are considered valid military targets by the U.S.: telephone networks (when the enemy military has it's own comms networks, so destroying the civilian system does not affect them), civilian electricity infrastructure (electric plants, city substations etc.), civilian fuel supplies, factories that manufacture everything from baby milk powder to paint, the foreign embassy of a non-combatant nation (an "accident" - the only bombing in that war directed by the CIA. Hmm.), and even "unfriendly" media (actually Al Jazeera has been bombed several times, their Kabul offices were bombed, their Baghdad offices were bombed, their Basra offices were bombed, and the Basra Sheraton was bombed when the only guests were Al Jazeera journalists.) Precision guided bombs, hardly ever miss, right? And it was only 70 years ago when the Allies considered carpet bombing of the civilian population to be a valid military tactic (justified because civilians were obviously working in the factories making war items).
Also there are plenty of people who consider police stations valid targets - the Israelis have hit police stations in Gaza and the West Bank, killing numerous policemen, the IRA used to target police stations, etc.
Who said terrorism had to have an aim of inducing fear in the general population? Why would attacks intended to induce terror in a sub-group of the population, like an ethno-religious minority, not be considered terrorism? Attacks against the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan are considered terrorism by many Americans, and by that definition attacks against the British military in North America would also be classified as terrorism.
Some Linux distributions nobble in-app auto-updaters, because the application is installed via their standard apt/yum package repositories. There is no need to treat one application as a special case, that requires a special updater, when you have proper package management.
There's a vulnerability in iTunes but it's not that vulnerability that installs the malware.
Yes it is. From TFA:
"Evilgrade leveraged a flaw in the updater mechanism for iTunes that could be exploited on Windows systems. Amato described the vulnerability: "The iTunes program checks that the binary is signed by Apple but we can inject content into the description as it opens a browser, with a malicious binary so that the user thinks its from Apple"
The only way you can argue that the updater isn't at fault is if you are going to blame the exploit that installs the malware? But by that definition, a manufacturer would never be assigned any blame for vulnerabilities, it would always be the person doing the exploiting. Does that make sense? Try this: "Microsoft bears no responsibility for any holes in Windows, even when it knows about them and doesn't fix them. The blame lies entirely with the exploit." Do you still agree with this logic when the manufacturer of the system is Microsoft, rather than Apple?
If I post the link to that particular website right here on Slashdot, by your logic that would mean Slashdot is now infested with spyware too.
Bad analogy. Slashdot isn't used as part of a Software Update system by software installed on the desktops of millions of people. Your iTunes updater isn't going to prompt you to install a new update - verified as being from Apple - because of a Slashdot post.
The average American consumes about 250 kWh per day. If we all raised our standard of consumption to an average American level, the green pro- duction stack would definitely be dwarfed by the red consumption stack. What about the average European and the average Brit? Average Eu- ropean consumption of “primary energy” (which means the energy con- tained in raw fuels, plus wind and hydroelectricity) is about 125 kWh per day per person. The UK average is also 125 kWh per day per person. These official averages do not include two energy flows. First, the “em- bedded energy” in imported stuff (the energy expended in making the stuff) is not included at all. We estimated in Chapter 15 that the embedded energy in imported stuff is at least 40 kWh/d per person. Second, the official estimates of “primary energy consumption” include only industrial energy flows – things like fossil fuels and hydroelectricity – and don’t keep track of the natural embedded energy in food: energy that was originally harnessed by photosynthesis.
In areas with a lot of sun, if you can get a majority of buildings to install solar heating/cooling/lighting and photovoltaic, and some local storage, you can make a big dent in the energy requirements (from coal) in a particular region.
Unfortunately it doesn't even come close. From this book: if you cover every south facing rooftop with solar panels you get 10 square meters of solar panels per person, which provides energy of 5 kWh per day per person. Current Western energy usage is estimated at 250 kWh per day. Those figures are based on the UK, where average sun level is 60% of the level at the equator. So moving the panels to Africa is only going to get us an extra 66%, so we still aren't meeting even 5% of our current energy needs (and then you would have to deal with transmission loss etc.). It isn't going to make a big dent...
Yes, energy density is a problem. If every single rain drop that fell on the Britain were exploited perfectly (100% capture of energy from first impact to sea level), then the whole lot would meet about 3% of the nation's current energy consumption. (Figures from Sustainable energy without the hot air: hydroelectric). Photovolatic farming also has big problems. To meet our current daily energy use with PV solar would require 20% of the land to be covered in panels, and to do it on a scale to power the UK alone would require 500 times all the photovoltaics in the whole world today. We either need some huge advances in science, or to seriously lower our energy consumption.
Unfortunately for our society, the original poster is mostly correct. Please read this book: Sustainable energy without the hot air. The author is a big proponent of sustainable energy, but reading the calculations on energy density you begin to realise what a huge problem we are facing. The book is a free download, or you can buy the dead tree version. There's no reason to not be educated on this issue.
The problem is that the water is too hot to re-use for cooling, and cooling it would in turn require time and energy. It's therefore easier to pump the hot water out to sea and forget about it. It is used as heating water in some places, but this has problem, see Sustainable energy without the hot air: Combined heat and power: "Delivering useful heat to a customer always reduces the electricity produced to some degree. The true net gains from combined heat and power are often much smaller than the hype would lead you to believe."
The emissions cost is kind of reflected in the price, because energy costs money, and there is a correlation between energy used during manufacturing and emissions. There have been many analyses of solar power; a typical panel has an energy yield ratio of between 4 and 7 (ref. Sustainable energy without the hot air). So it generates 4 to 8 times more energy than it costs to manufacture, transport and install.
1. Biomass can only meet a small amount of our energy needs. If we devote 75% of land to growing biofuels, and burn it all, we get about 10% of our current energy consumption.
2. Nuclear does not look promising, but it is an interesting one. Currently we get less than 3% of our daily Western life energy from nuclear plants. Nuclear would last 1000 years if we each used 0.55 kWh per day. But we don't - Westerners use about 250 kWh per day. We would need to ramp up production 40 times to cover our current daily usage. If we tried to cover all of our energy needs with nuclear, we will run out in of (currently known) recoverable reserves in 25 years. Ocean extraction of uranium is possible, but currently costs 10 times more than mining ore. Maintaining our current life styles on 10x energy cost isn't feasible: we would need some major technology developments here...
(Figures from Sustainable Energy without the hot air. Read it, it's free to download and full of interesting figures.)
The food and water problem is an energy problem.
I'm afraid biomass does not appear to be the answer. See Sustainable energy without the hot air - solar biomass. I recommend reading it, it's a well thought out book, with free electronic versions (epub/pdf) for download.
Hmmm.. we ruined people by telling them that their lives didn't have to be boring? Interesting... The other perspective: "Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About".
It your expectation that those students should be allowed to set up permanent camps there? Yes or no?
Why not? We tolerate far worse.
For the OWS movement, any deaths caused by the government will be accidental.
Chinese say the same about Tank Man. They say there is no difference between Tiananmen and the Bonus Army. Who talks about the time Chinese tanks rolled into Tiananmen to crush protest? Nobody. Who talks about the time U.S. tanks rolled into Washington D.C. to crush protest? Nobody. So they equate the two events as the same. Maybe they are right.
That may be true, but the converse may also be just as true: Tax decreases are only a temporary solution at best. See "taxes on the nation's highest-earners are close to the lowest they've ever been." Has *your* income tax rate fallen 56% in the last 50 years? That was a huge decrease, and it's only now that people are realising that it might not have been sustainable... but it is also very difficult to reverse (much harder than, say, letting inflation erode the savings of millions of people, which is an issue the politicians should really be tackling...).
btw It's worth reading the rest of that Business Insider article, they do have some interesting points regarding the current economic situation.
All of the integer ops are executed in those units, so yes, they are important. Every single loop and jump and code branch executed by the processor is dependent on some integer arithmetic being performed at as low latency as possible. Even on a completely FPU-less system, you'd be surprised exactly how little floating point ops are actually necessary. Without an FPU you can still do: compiling, digital simulations, run kernels and do virtualization, web/file/database etc. serving, networking, cryptography.
Look at the Sun T1/T2 CPUs, they are designed to have low-FPU power because the market they target doesn't care : "One of the limitations of the T1 design is that a single floating point unit (FPU) is shared between all 8 cores, making the T1 unsuitable for applications performing a lot of floating point mathematics. However, since the processor's intended markets do not typically make much use of floating-point operations, Sun does not expect this to be a problem. Sun provides a tool for analysing an application's level of parallelism and use of floating point instructions to determine if it is suitable for use on a T1 or T2 platform."
Apple sued HTC in March 2010 From that article:
"Of note are the patents Apple asserted in its Delaware filing: one, patent 7,657,849, covers multitouch gestures, but only in a limited use case - unlocking the phone. The second, number 7,479,949, covers multitouch heuristics to determine how a device should interpret multitouch input, and was patented by Steve Jobs himself as well as a number of other co-assignees. The other patents in question are number 7,362,331, covering moving objects within a GUI; 7,469,381, covering list scrolling; 5,920,726, covering the management and recovery of a power failure by a digital camera; 7,633,076, covering how a device senses what a user is doing via the use of multiple sensors; 5,848,105, a co-channel filtering patent; 7,383,453, covering the conservation of power by a voltage reduction to the instruction portion of the processor; 5,455,599, an object-oriented graphical system, and 6,424,354, an event notification system for propagating object-change information."