Back in 1997 I did a live internet streaming event with Arthur C. Clarke, it was the first of it's type, and literally sent video across a 12 hr time difference to Chicago, even then Clarke was making internet history and I was privileged to be part of it.
I actually got to travel to Sri Lanka and meet him. It was truly the experience of a life time. I had been following the foot steps of many other great people. Astronauts, writer, Hollywood types and scientists that have all traveled there to meet him. I had lunch at his home, got to play ping pong with him, it was one of the few physical activities he was still up to. He showed me original sketches of the Space elevator that he and Buckminster fuller had drawn. Even gave me a signed copy of one of his books.
Unfortunately I was so broke at the time all I could afford was one of those 10 Dollar disposable cameras and none of the photo's I took came out, maybe the X-ray machine zapped em. The grand old British hotel there the Galle Face Hotel built in 1864 was incredible but was killing my finances at $150 per night. http://www.gallefacehotel.com/
The video streaming even was at UIUC in celebration of Hal's birthday. It was amazing to see the turn out. On the large theater screen he was larger then life and it really seems th e internet owes him a large debt of gratitude. For he has been an inspiration for so many.
Sri Lanka was Paradise. In spite of the Civil war, I have never been anywhere so majestic, the people were so hospitable, even strangers on the street were inviting me to there homes to have some food and drink with them. I must have walked every part of Colombo in the week I was there. The food was fantastic, the women were so beautiful, the ocean breeze and the sun sets. Oh the sun sets they put even the best ones in Santa Monica to shame. I still feel almost home sick for Sri Lanka even though I have only been there the one time. I can completely understand why he moved there. I would if I could also.
Never making it back there is something that I deeply regret. Hearing this news really drove that home this afternoon. Meeting him has been one of the defining moments in my life.
Godspeed Arthur.
For Clarke is for us techies far more significant to us then Prices Dianna ever was.
It's nice to see that this slashdot page it turning into a memorial. I wonder if more formal memorial services would happen around the world.
Yup your heard it.
In 1997 the TV show strange universe. I was on several times since I knew the producers.
I was an expert on hacking, Internet expert, Internet exposing personal information, cybersex, and internet addiction.
I have spent almost every waking moment I could since I was 7 or so in front of a computer and thinking about them, I am 40 now.
I program them at work, I use them in the morning before work and after work. Mostly programming, writing, email or IM.
They have always provided me a good living, help me find housing, transportation and most of the material things I need in life, even just about every girlfriend and even my wife.
In the past 30 years people were labeled as being addicted to TV and Video Games, junk food, fast food, sex, porn, sports, shopping, oil, taking on the phone, hell even exercise was labeled as an addiction. They tried to convinces us needed some sort of treatment to be cured of it.
I suppose if we go far enough back our ancestors were addicted to tools or fire. more recently electricity and light.
Be it Gas lighting in the early 1900's or electric lighting after that.
Look at how people reacted to blackouts in the 50's, 60's and 70's.
If you go even further back, we must have been addicted to waking upright, and eating meat, wearing cloths.
I suppose you could even say these first land based animals became addicted to air and light.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/addiction Addiction: the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.
Yes, de-evolving like the fall of modern society would be traumatic. Going back in time, were people didn't bathe, wear clean cloths, have fresh safe food, and having to use the pony express for comminication or having to walk everywhere to get around would be traumatic.
Someone should shoot all of these pontificating a-holes. They are really Luddites in disguise, labeling all forward progress and an addiction.
This is the very nature of forward progress, "that its cessation causes severe trauma."
Why should I feel ashamed of living my life at the bleeding edge of technological advancement, I am just an early adopter, in the future everyone will live like that.
I only stands to reason that we have evolved to be addicted or at least according to there definition, but it's that very type of addiction that has propelled our race to the top of the food chain.
I hope some day we will be addicted to Zero G, Terra forming, hyper intelligence, living for a 1000 years, neural interfaces, nano-bots, robotic servants and warp travel.
> don't have a clear separation between people that prepare the technology, and those that use it against the opposition.
If they are going to Hack or defend against hackers, then you can't have "people that prepare the technology".
Having prepared technology is fine for basic firewalls and virus scanners, but real hacking is dynamic real-time and ever changing.
I will give you a prime example, SPAM. SPAMMERS try to get past your mail filters, most canned SPAM filters really don't do a very good job. Only when you get to semi automated systems with humans behind it with developers along since changing code on the fly to react to each new threat can you really defend your self.
Now think that SPAM's were like scud missiles, sure you blocked 99% but that one that gets through it too much. In the case of a hacking attack, it's even worse. Because the ones that gets through could stay through undetected.
This is what has always amazed me with war. Why make mine fields? It would be far better to set of an silent alarm maybe magnetically attach a tracking device to the bottom of the enemy's ships, tanks and trucks. It's far more dangerous because you'd learn where they go, where they hid, and could find and destroy all of them at once, not just the first one that stumbles in by accident.
Well hacking can be like that. You get into a system, replace some component, and can log passwords, key, network traffic and get deeper entrenched into there system over time. Even when they think you've been stopped you can still have full access and now you know something about the defenders. I did this with Sun Micro for years, in 1992 they had 13,000 employees, and I had 9000 of there passwords... I sent them to there head of IT. see my Rtelnet on sourceforge. (it deliberately doesn't compile out of the box to block script kiddies, but it's a very simple fix if you know C)
As for the platforms to run on. Linux or BSD or anything with complete transparency. I am sorry but I want to be able to go over and change all pieces. With windows and it's dll's and registry's it's almost impossible to defend or even monitor, there are more holes in it then swiss cheese. Black boxes, it's just asking for trouble.
Heck I couldn't believe someone infected my linksys router once. It's a black box, had my Cable company not detected traffic patterns and shut my connection off I'd have never notices. Imagine if that had been someone intentionally interested in capturing my traffic and data/passwords. I'd never have know, and I usually and on top of things like that.
Many of my friends want to know why I run a lot of nonstandard stuff, my own code when there are packages out there. Simple, the off the shelf code/scripts kiddies stuff doesn't work. there are no 0 Day exploits or cert advisories.
I remember when the BSD telnet buffer overflow hit the streets. I ran BSD, but because I had an altered telnetd with some additional little tricks, it actually protected my system, and actually the systems I had hacked into as well.
SAS? Ok, what is that? Yes, OK now you get to hand me my A** on a plate. Your not talking about SAS software www.sas.com right?
Anyhow I didn't write that as a challenge. I don't think anyone would consider me Hard, but more like a Guru or Buddha. Where programming is my form of deep meditation, aka the Zone.
I tend the think of hard as more anarchist, dangerous types, I am not in that category, although the managers at Wells Fargo referred to me as a gun sling'n cowboy, stirring up all the stagnant COBOL programmers with my TCP/IP Internet talk in 1993. I still can't get over having registered wellsfargo.com and mcdonalds.com and a few other choice ones and just gave them to there rightful owners, but this was before there was any money in it.
Anyhow I am just good at these thing, but don't dress act or have some social group of hackers around me. When I was in top form, no one ever saw me or had any direct access to me, I didn't hand out or chat much. When I did it was over untraceable phone lines, or BBS's again over untraceable phone lines. I had a long list of rules on how not to get caught. Maybe someday I will write them up.
Although I do my best not too I still must look like a computer guy.
Like when I was in New York city meeting with a somewhat famous rapper(it's a long story), some 20 something kid off the street approached us. Expecting that he had recognized the rap artist we both where really shock when he ran up and asked me if I know what a preprocessor declaration was. Stunned I answered him and he ran off ecstatic. Even more stunned the rapper turned towards me a said WTF was that about? Sh*t I don't know, maybe he must have just won some sort of bet or something.
Very weird, of all the people walking down the street how many would know the answer? How would he know to ask me of all people? So I guess somehow I must give off that vibe, although I try not too.
I think there must be some body changes that come from 30+ years of being hunched over a computer screen since the age of 7.
I just don't see an army of educated IT security people being able to fend off self taught hackers, let alone even detect them.
I am not worried about the veterans, unless they are self taught. And in that case I'd make sure not to do anything that would leave them feeling betrayed. Think about what Kevin Mitnick did to the FBI after working with them. People don't realize, there are far better then Kevin out there. The best ones are the ones you'll never hear about, they are ghosts.
The best ones also have a strong sense of right and wrong, it's just different from what most peoples views are.
As for myself, being told I can't do or accomplish something is the strongest motivator.
It's not a conscious thing, it's almost obsessive compulsive and no malice or desire for any gain what so ever, nether data or money.
Just thrill or fulfillment of some deep subconscious need.
In high school I couldn't help when walking by a row of locker in an empty hallway to unlock 20 locker in a row that had master locks on them, then re-lock the locks on upside down. And see how fast I could do it. I'd won many bets that way.
Same for teacher bathrooms, the school safe. (just opened the door 1 inch then closed it again) They ended up putting me in charge of the schools computers in my senor year since I already had full access and knew much more then the consultant that they had that barely could update there COBOL source code. Over the years, I have built my own modems from scratch, build and sould the first PC sound devices, wrote the first code to play 6 Bit digital audio on the PC's internal speaker. Built early home made packet radios, spread spectrum radios on CB's.
Reverse engineered many BIOS/ boot ROM's, copy protection, viruses, crack games, AOL and Compuserve account, phreaked, security systems, vending machines, Cable TV, cell phones, GPS, you named it.
When one malicious hacker that messed with me later asked a friend to get a copy of 286 AMI Bios from me, I even put a defanged non-contagious version of Jerusalem B virus into it so that it installed the TSR portion every time he formatted a disk. Specifically so it would aways infect ever disk he touches. Specifically designed to get detected so no one would ever trust floppies from him. He used to be a big wares guy, but I put a quick end to that.
Over the years I have gotten into so many things and ever left a trace, just popped in, poked around, got board and moved on.
In the process I have learn so much and had written so much code, that I have become a seasoned kernel hacker in both BSD and Linux with a strength in networking.
Another thing people don't realize, Hacker don't aways have a specific target but meander, and see where it goes.
I think Bruce Schneider pointed out was they go the weak points, like don't open the lock but go in over the drop ceiling tiles.
The reality is that heavy lock is more likely to attract them if for no other reason then out of curiosity. What the hell is in there that requires so much security? It's like a giant puzzle and solving it, quenches ones curiosity.
Anyhow now that I probably said too much, just for the record, I stopped the illegal stuff a long long time ago, now that I have probably gotten myself on some watch list.
These days, I focus on understanding SPAM (towards blocking, tracing etc), defending DOS, P2P, ECIP and flow control, Video and data compression, mathematics, Cracking DRM and FOSS coding. It still fulfills the rebel side of me, and also accomplishes something useful.
With things like http request/response processing and Data Base is really more of data shoveling. Find the data, and dig it up and send it. Memory , Disk and Network throughput are the limiting factors not CPU number crunching.
> here is a stage that pretty much has to be single-threaded
http and DB is one single thread for each operation, but deal with many simultaneous operations handled in parallel. SMP/NUMA and other designs with multiple cpu's on a shared memory bus work very well for those applicaitons, but in that case each CPU handles one thread at a time, so each CPU allows for more parrelel threads to run. Each thread gets to share the memory and file system cache and internal structures. This only apply for a threaded model of programming.
Personally I am a big fan of loosely coupled parallel processors, More like Beowulf clusters or the way google architecture is done. In that case http requests are split out across many boxes, that don't share memory and don't even need much communication to respond to most requests. This also works well for DB/HTTP, and isn't threaded.
But what about number crunching? There are certain classes of problems that must be run sequentially, but for most people not working on the deeper understanding of the universe, this doesn't apply. The most common case for consumer level parallelism is Multimedia. Video, Audio, graphics rendering, compression, cryptography and maybe some day, AI. In these cases, arrays of small super fast processors would really help.
Back in 2000 I realized that 50 Million transistors of 4004 the first processor ever created, would out perform a P4 with the same transistor count done in the same fab running at the same clock rates. it would be over 10x faster I work out. But how to use such a device? I had been working with a 100 PC cluster of P4 based systems to do H.264 HDTV compression in realtime. I spread the compression function across the cluster using each system to work on a small part of the problem and flow the data across the CPU's.
Based on this I wanted to build an array of processors on one chip, but I am not a silicon person, just software, driver and some basic electronics. So I looked at various FPGA cores, Arm, MIPS, etc. Then I went to a talk giving by Chuck Moore, author of the language FORTH. He had been building his own CPU's for many years using his own custom tools.
I worked with Chuck Moore for about a year in 2001/2002 on creating a massive multi core processor based on Chucks stack processor.
The Idea was instead of having 1,2 or 4 large processor to have 49 (7 * 7) small light but fast processors in one chip. This would be for tacking a different set of problems then your classic cpus'. It wouldn't be for running and OS or word processing, but for Multimedia, and cryptography, and other mathematic problems.
The idea was to flow data across the array of processors. Each processor would run at 6Ghz, with 64K word of Ram each. 21 Bit wide words and bus (based off of F21 processor) this allows for 4x 5bit instructions on a stack processor that only has 32 instructions. Since it's a stack processor they run more efficiently. So in 16K transistors, 4000 gates, the F21 at 500 Mhz performed about the same as a 500Mhz 486 with JPEG compress and decompress. With the parallel core design instead of a common bus or network between the processors there would only be 4 connections into and out of each processor. These would be 4 registers that are shared with it's 4 neighboring processors that are laid out in a grid. So each chip would have a north, south, east and west register.
Data would be processed in whats called a systolic array, where each core would pick up some data, perform operations on it and pass it along to the next core.
The chips with a 7x7 grid of processors would expose the 28(4x7) bus lines off the edge processors, so that these could be tiled into a much larger grid of processors.
Each chip could perform around 117 Billion instructions per second at 1 Watt of power.
Unfortunately I was unable to raise money, partly because I couldn't' get any commitment from Chuck.
below is some links and other misc information on this project. Sorry it's not better organized. This was my project.
As some of you probably are aware, Comp-USA is going out of business for the past few months. Prices are slashed, I went to the one here in Goleta California, they had about 20 of those Novint Falcon controllers, they couldn't even give them away. The seemed to have been there for a while, long enough for the gloss to wear off the boxes and have a layer of dust on them. Interesting since the article make it seems like they just came out.
Even more Interesting was at 50% off they were listed at $300, which seems to be higher then retail prices.. listed in the article $189
Unless that lock is stored in some sort of (electric charges) basically flash memory on chip, there is nothing to stop someone from copying that chip with it's combination lock and all.
How would a manufactured be able to know the difference between a real chip vs. a knockoff. If (physical)electrically digital circuits both are identical including the locking mechanism. So there shouldn't be any protection.
At least for video the lifespan of both technologies are almost over. They are only around because of the RIAA and large media campaign against P2P networks with things like Comcast deliberately poising Torrent traffic.
I can download 1080i movies already on Bit Torrent. Why are they wasting time over plastic disks? Maybe to sell more players?
Cable companies are already setting up for another order of magnitude leap in data rates.
Docsis 3.0 will allow Cable operators to offer over 100Mbps to 160 Mbps internet access. Broadcast HDTV for 1920x1080 is only 20Mbps. www.8vsb.com
At least BlueRay will establish itself as the next level up from DVD-Rom with things like the BenQ BW1000 Blu-ray Writer. But people are already able to Pirate BlueRay and HD-DVD movies.
The establishment doesn't get it. They are still thinking about physical objects and not BIT's.
Renting and moving plastic disks around for movies will be as dead as vinyl in 5 years. Heck the most kids don't even bother with CD's because MP3's/audio files are much easier to deal with.
If we use any physical media it will be something like MicroSD cards in our Cell Phones to pick up movies from Blockbuster or some vending machines. At least those of up not cool enough to stream or download them off the net. Just swipe your phone past some pad and presto HD movies uploaded into your phone, play anywhere.
This is why Steve Job's is kicking everyone ass. I can't stand Apple, but they are the only ones that "get it" and are also in a position to do something about it.
And Radium is a decay product of Uranium, so we could just harvest the output of all of our nuclear power plants we could produce helium. Although I'm not so sure I'd want my kids to be playing with these new Helium balloons.
Then you just don't get it. And did exactly what I was complaining about.
That this issue has turned into another who killed John F. Kennedy. There is the official story and the other versions that get ripped apart not by logical argument but by people who don't look at it and just respond with an almost religious fervor.
If you have seen the amount of flame that I have received just for speculation of vaccination as being a problem, you'd understand maybe.
I agree, it's probably some combination of things.
I just can't believe that people are trying to justify injecting heavy metals know to cause brain problems into infants. Then call me crazy when I point it out.
Yup, any contradictory beliefs must be beaten down, that has been my experience. Just as in any beliefs or criticism that go against the large cooperate republican conservative mentality these days, all opposition will be beaten down, disrespected, humiliated, disregarded, labeled as crackpot, conspiracy theory or fringe.
Even this message I am sure will be labeled as flame bate, but I urge you to give this post some consideration that there is something more I am trying to point out, maybe a lesson to be learned.
Every post I have ever made on this subject gets hastily berated.
History has shown that there has been more to some of following then first meets the eye:
Global Warming. Increasing gas mileage and alternate energy Voting machine fraud, WMD's, Kennedy, John Lennon, Ghandi, Tim Leary, GM vs. Organic food. Smoking causing or not causing cancer, Marijuana Tesla, Laithwaite, Hutchinson, Darwin, Galileo, Copernicus, Columbus Perendev, Searl, Cold Fusion, The Earth Being round, String Theory, E8,Quantum Physics , Roswell Jesus, Moses, Noah, The Ark of the covenant, the chalice, Troy, 12/12/2012, the holocaust, revelations.
Yet all have been flamed, ripped on and disregarded without any logic.
Study the history of these things, and maybe you will start to see a different perspective of the world.
But for most these days, what's the difference, if it doesn't agree with your world view, Kill it rather then take a serious look and logical debate. So much for the hopes and efforts of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, these now seem like dead ideals.
So what ever happened Live and Let live. Or as someone I met in passing put it, What ever floats your boat.
If anything things like Charlie Wilson war and Iran Contra and Air America demonstrate that things can go down on much larger scale then you could ever imagine. Worse you'd never know or never believe it if told and shown absolute proof. You need to keep an open mind, both sides. Or are we just Lemmings doomed to follow our crowd where ever it leads?
Look, something is causing it, either come up with better suggestions, logical debates or back the (insert derogatory of choice) off.
We are paying around $15 per chip for the PXA270's right now and I know the price could easily come down, but the PXA3xx is the newer lower cost chips with increased speed and more I/O.
Anyhow I don't see anyone complaining about the processing power and graphics on the iPhone and that plays all kinds of cool graphics tricks.
In the mean time I also made the mistake of teaching some Chinese how to build the goggles, be never the the funding to keep them exclusive to my project. http://www.dnull.com/goggle/p.html BTW: I get them Whole Sale cheaper, and that site is not the manufacturer but a reseller.
My whole system BOM was $35 in quantity, technically what I had would do the job of the OLPC except for power consumption and it's wearable screens not laptop style, but maybe better if your herding goats. After all who cares about getting middle class kids cheaper PC's let mom buy them a new Laptop for $750.
Also SATA, no way, use SD Flash now. USB sure the kids in Africa and India will have all the latest USB gadgets as soon as Fry's open up a store there, NOT.
The Gold Leopard King PC is literally one chip, probably some 8 bit core, most likely downloaded from opencores.org with Pirated game roms and Sells for $5 (350 rupees). There probably using the same fabs for digital watches and calculators. I'd love to know how to find them.
We could put one or more 500 Mhz arms in one chip, 64Meg DRAM with 2 gigs of SD and a Kent Display and some simple wireless, Even a camera and get the whole BOM down to $20 to $30 in 100K volumes with about $10M in development. It would of course run stock Linux. The display wouldn't be fast for clear video, but slow video and good audio would be great. Or for a little more add a tiny 1x1 inch LCD for the video.
Again, why are they trying to build these things like High end Gaming machines. The point is to make something closer to the French Minitel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel, basically get them on the web, and E-mail and access to the worlds Knowledge and educational software. Not to be able to play WarCraft, surf porn and watch YouTube! Or worse yet create a larger army of 409 scammers.
Buy trying to play this venture using more traditional technology and , AMD, Intel, M$ etc, they just invited grinches to attack. Intel would have to kill this just to ensure there middle class parents
For OLPC I do they really need something to play HD video and compete with the latest Dell/Toshiba laptops,
I don't think so, these are for third world counties where something like a speak and spell would be high tech.
Personally they shouldn't be using LCD's anyhow the backlight are power hungry. I think Electronic Paper like E-Ink, and Kodak/Kent have developed and is now using in Jeff Bozos new E-book thing, Kindle ( I just keep thinking of Fahrenheit 451 on that one) http://www.kentdisplays.com/
The PXA uses MMX (like on Pentium's), I don't see what is proprietary for that, so what I can't use their proprietary libs, who cares.
I have been using PXA and Blackfin for video for a while now, and never even heard about proprietary libs/extensions, but again the first think I did was ignore any software tools from them and went straight to GAS and GCC.
Anyhow where I work Marvell has been more then happy to dump any documentation we want about these chips. They don't have any tech support for problems, so we are in RTFM mode when we get stuck. Fortunately things have been very smooth, even good JTAG tools.
I think ARM has far better ecosystem for tools, code and support then MIPS. I mean I have watched code I built for one embedded device run on several PDA and even an IPhone without recompile, blew my mind.
Arm has made some incredible strides towards standardization and multi vendors. There as so many cheap reference boards these days.
Most arm chips are made with Cell phones in mind as well, some support MMX and Jazelle Java extensions. Many have Micron CMOS camera chip interfaces and built in LCD drivers, and a mess of GPIO and MMC etc.
Linux and Uboot are a sweet combination on them also.
Look at PXA270 and PXA300 from Marvell & Blackfin (uC Linux) Also ARM is licensing there chip design for 8 Cents a copy, so you can easily make a ASIC based on arm.
Also another option is that there is already $5 computers in China and India. There not laptops and you need to connect them into a TV but still they have Keyboard, Mice, Game joysticks and 100's of pirated games on them. Even ones that can web surf. these are from a Chinese company called Gold Leopard King, but they are impossible to track down and contact, but the markets there are flooded with them.
http://ultimateconsoledatabase.com/famiclones/gold_leopard_king.htm The whole computer is just passive switches, and there is only one Chip in the entire PC, it's in the cartridge. Amazing thing, Perfect copies of Mario Brothers, Pac-man, Donkey Kong, Defender, Galaga, Dig Dug. I always get one for the kids when were in India, and just give it away when we leave, it's PAL video out, so we can't use it back in the USA.
It's just like trying to read someones poker face.
Checkpoints an searches for the past 100 years has been about smoking out the enemy's.
It counts on them loosing there nerve. Panicking, or exhibiting other unusual behavior that will give them away.
The actual searches have a very low success rate.
This is no different then a police traffic stop, the dude with drugs in his car will almost always run, or act deceptive and that will tip off the officer.
So now the "Terrorists" have trained and rehearsed and are much better at not tipping their hand, so on our side it we are now looking at micro expressions and other much subtler signs of deception.
But again this is nothing that an experienced police officer or Judge has already developed a natural and an almost 6th sense for. You just can't bullshit an old judge. 5 days a week 8 hours a day for years that is all they do. Just read people, then see the paperwork to see who was lying. After some point, then just know at a glance but still must go through the exercise of proving it.
I will just dump a mess of links from an old E-mail I did on this some time ago. It's all good stuff, Solar two in Mojave was also molten salt based. I knew someone who bought it after it failed and got to explore it before it was partly dismantled.
---------
Solar two was a flat mirror array.
Search google image search with
"solar two" Mojave
Excellent page on many technologies - Sorry it's in Spanish. http://g3nergy.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html
Search for "Australia to Build 154 MW Solar Energy Plant"
This one is identical in design to the one in the Mojave Dessert here.
It's so easy to just buy these parts in India, Pakistan Dubai and other places around there that they could easily build such clusters. Besides if they were smart, they just build the clusters here even and run everything here and just ship the results back on CD's. Even better yet, hack into 100's of idle web servers and use there CPU power.
I had a 100 CPU cluster in my garage doing GA and Video stuff, no one even thought twice about it.
I don't know why everyone thinks the US is the only place in the world with advanced technology. I was in ShenZhen China and India recently, both have computer markets that put anything I have seen in Silicon Valley, New York or Los Angeles to shame.
http://www.krsaborio.net/research/1990s/92/920311.htm
We have been billed more than US$40,000 just for the legal services we have used to ensure that our code will is technically and legally free from AT&T/USL trade secrets. Rob Kolstad
BTW: in that same page search for "Sokol"
Get the History Straight, Heck I was there. We were all labeled as Hackers, not just the stylistic fools that flaunted it.
>> by the 1990's The BSD's from Berkley were in full swing by then.
Not without a great fight, we all look a large risk and many paid a heavy price.
http://www.atrust.com/articles/berkeley
Recent publicity for Linux as an open source operating system has tended to obscure the fact that AT&T was a major contributor to the success of Linux by virtue of its legal actions against BSD. This artificial weakening of the major competitor was an important prerequisite of early Linux success.
Back in the days before Linux and FreeBSD, back when AT&T Bell Lab Unix ruled the earth. 70's and 80's AT&T Unix source code was somehow put in some national security list. Basically if you were caught with a copy of the source without having had paid or part of some University that paid the $60,000 source license, the Secret Service would come with guns drawn and seize every piece of electronics equipment on the premises.
There is little documentation that this had even happened and almost none of the victims ever received there hardware back.
I have seen this in many other areas too, it's a sound argument and I am sure much of that is true.
Yet, myself and others have observed a direct connection where a healthy active child upon getting vaccinated over night becomes almost unable to walk speak or have any awareness of there surroundings that persists for the rest of there lives. Maybe it's just some bad batches there were mixed up, I can't tell you.
Either way, I am not claiming that thimerosal or vaccines were responsible. And I do believe vaccines are needed.
I am just claiming that in spite of what much of that research reports, there is something is causing this wave of autism.
I have personally watched my 4 year old son who was talking playing chess melt away almost immediately after a vaccination into lump of child that couldn't even walk or talk, let alone play chess, this never improved. The effect was almost identical to a traumatic brain injury cause my mechanical means, but nothing like that happened, just the vaccination. He's 19 now and can hardly talk and still can't function. I have video to prove it! I have 3 other sons, all are incredibly smart as was the one who now has autism before his vaccination.
So you tell me what am I supposed to think. In 15 years I have not seen any answers only that this trend is getting worse and not one of these papers even reports what almost every parent I have ever talked to says, which is this happens within days of being vaccinated. Why are they still not reporting that in there studies!!!
If I have come to realize is studies are as objective as there funding sources. So you can cite papers all day long, but until they actually acknowledge what many are witnessing first hand, then these studies are rubbish.
Also Mercury is clearly know to cause brain damage similar to autism.
Did we need a study to prove lead was harmful before we could remove the lead from paint and gasoline first?
Why were they even willing to put our kids at risk, even if the odds were almost 0.
I mean look at the over reactive recalls on toys because 2 kids swallow some parts. But now we have 15 Million Autistic kids and but no one even wants to find alternatives to the obvious potential causes.
It's like debugging software. Sometimes we don't care what caused the problem, we just going about correcting anything that looks questionable and most of the time the problem get fixed. Why is this so hard to do when our children's futures are at stake.
So I applaud the parents who post there thoughts and experiences on youtube, I don't think anyone would consider them more accurate then well done science, but Mom's have over 100's of thousands of years evolved a ways to keep there kids safe and track down problems using there own ways. So what that some of there "old wives tales" and mis beliefs don't make a lot of sense scientifically, they are time tested to help kids survive and succeed, after all we are sitting here, right. Until the "Scientific community" gets off it's ass and find a fix for this someone has to do something.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in 1997 I did a live internet streaming event with Arthur C. Clarke, it was the first of it's type, and literally sent video across a 12 hr time difference to Chicago, even then Clarke was making internet history and I was privileged to be part of it.
I actually got to travel to Sri Lanka and meet him. It was truly the experience of a life time. I had been following the foot steps of many other great people. Astronauts, writer, Hollywood types and scientists that have all traveled there to meet him. I had lunch at his home, got to play ping pong with him, it was one of the few physical activities he was still up to. He showed me original sketches of the Space elevator that he and Buckminster fuller had drawn. Even gave me a signed copy of one of his books.
Unfortunately I was so broke at the time all I could afford was one of those 10 Dollar disposable cameras and none of the photo's I took came out, maybe the X-ray machine zapped em. The grand old British hotel there the Galle Face Hotel built in 1864 was incredible but was killing my finances at $150 per night. http://www.gallefacehotel.com/
The video streaming even was at UIUC in celebration of Hal's birthday.
It was amazing to see the turn out. On the large theater screen he was larger then life and it really seems th e internet owes him a large debt of gratitude. For he has been an inspiration for so many.
Sri Lanka was Paradise. In spite of the Civil war, I have never been anywhere so majestic, the people were so hospitable, even strangers on the street were inviting me to there homes to have some food and drink with them. I must have walked every part of Colombo in the week I was there. The food was fantastic, the women were so beautiful, the ocean breeze and the sun sets. Oh the sun sets they put even the best ones in Santa Monica to shame. I still feel almost home sick for Sri Lanka even though I have only been there the one time.
I can completely understand why he moved there. I would if I could also.
Never making it back there is something that I deeply regret. Hearing this news really drove that home this afternoon. Meeting him has been one of the defining moments in my life.
Godspeed Arthur.
For Clarke is for us techies far more significant to us then Prices Dianna ever was.
It's nice to see that this slashdot page it turning into a memorial. I wonder if more formal memorial services would happen around the world.
http://www.dnull.com/~sokol/clarke.html This is from the streaming even and some video clips of him.
I actually think this may be the longest clip up on youtube, somehow they must have allowed it to slip through there size restrictions.
Yup your heard it.
In 1997 the TV show strange universe. I was on several times since I knew the producers.
I was an expert on hacking, Internet expert, Internet exposing personal information, cybersex, and internet addiction.
I have spent almost every waking moment I could since I was 7 or so in front of a computer and thinking about them, I am 40 now.
I program them at work, I use them in the morning before work and after work. Mostly programming, writing, email or IM.
They have always provided me a good living, help me find housing, transportation and most of the material things I need in life, even just about every girlfriend and even my wife.
In the past 30 years people were labeled as being addicted to TV and Video Games, junk food, fast food, sex, porn, sports, shopping, oil, taking on the phone, hell even exercise was labeled as an addiction. They tried to convinces us needed some sort of treatment to be cured of it.
I suppose if we go far enough back our ancestors were addicted to tools or fire. more recently electricity and light.
Be it Gas lighting in the early 1900's or electric lighting after that.
Look at how people reacted to blackouts in the 50's, 60's and 70's.
If you go even further back, we must have been addicted to waking upright, and eating meat, wearing cloths.
I suppose you could even say these first land based animals became addicted to air and light.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/addiction
Addiction: the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.
Yes, de-evolving like the fall of modern society would be traumatic. Going back in time, were people didn't bathe, wear clean cloths, have fresh safe food, and having to use the pony express for comminication or having to walk everywhere to get around would be traumatic.
Someone should shoot all of these pontificating a-holes. They are really Luddites in disguise, labeling all forward progress and an addiction.
This is the very nature of forward progress, "that its cessation causes severe trauma."
Why should I feel ashamed of living my life at the bleeding edge of technological advancement, I am just an early adopter, in the future everyone will live like that.
I only stands to reason that we have evolved to be addicted or at least according to there definition, but it's that very type of addiction that has propelled our race to the top of the food chain.
I hope some day we will be addicted to Zero G, Terra forming, hyper intelligence, living for a 1000 years, neural interfaces, nano-bots, robotic servants and warp travel.
> don't have a clear separation between people that prepare the technology, and those that use it against the opposition.
If they are going to Hack or defend against hackers, then you can't have "people that prepare the technology".
Having prepared technology is fine for basic firewalls and virus scanners, but real hacking is dynamic real-time and ever changing.
I will give you a prime example, SPAM.
SPAMMERS try to get past your mail filters, most canned SPAM filters really don't do a very good job.
Only when you get to semi automated systems with humans behind it with developers along since changing code on the fly to react to each new threat can you really defend your self.
Now think that SPAM's were like scud missiles, sure you blocked 99% but that one that gets through it too much.
In the case of a hacking attack, it's even worse. Because the ones that gets through could stay through undetected.
This is what has always amazed me with war. Why make mine fields? It would be far better to set of an silent alarm maybe magnetically attach a tracking device to the bottom of the enemy's ships, tanks and trucks. It's far more dangerous because you'd learn where they go, where they hid, and could find and destroy all of them at once, not just the first one that stumbles in by accident.
Well hacking can be like that. You get into a system, replace some component, and can log passwords, key, network traffic and get deeper entrenched into there system over time. Even when they think you've been stopped you can still have full access and now you know something about the defenders. I did this with Sun Micro for years, in 1992 they had 13,000 employees, and I had 9000 of there passwords... I sent them to there head of IT. see my Rtelnet on sourceforge. (it deliberately doesn't compile out of the box to block script kiddies, but it's a very simple fix if you know C)
Read Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson 1984 http://www.c-program.com/kt/reflections-on-trusting.html
As for the platforms to run on. Linux or BSD or anything with complete transparency. I am sorry but I want to be able to go over and change all pieces. With windows and it's dll's and registry's it's almost impossible to defend or even monitor, there are more holes in it then swiss cheese.
Black boxes, it's just asking for trouble.
Heck I couldn't believe someone infected my linksys router once. It's a black box, had my Cable company not detected traffic patterns and shut my connection off I'd have never notices. Imagine if that had been someone intentionally interested in capturing my traffic and data/passwords. I'd never have know, and I usually and on top of things like that.
Many of my friends want to know why I run a lot of nonstandard stuff, my own code when there are packages out there.
Simple, the off the shelf code/scripts kiddies stuff doesn't work. there are no 0 Day exploits or cert advisories.
I remember when the BSD telnet buffer overflow hit the streets. I ran BSD, but because I had an altered telnetd with some additional little tricks, it actually protected my system, and actually the systems I had hacked into as well.
SAS? Ok, what is that? Yes, OK now you get to hand me my A** on a plate. Your not talking about SAS software www.sas.com right?
Anyhow I didn't write that as a challenge.
I don't think anyone would consider me Hard, but more like a Guru or Buddha.
Where programming is my form of deep meditation, aka the Zone.
I tend the think of hard as more anarchist, dangerous types, I am not in that category, although the managers at Wells Fargo referred to me as a gun sling'n cowboy, stirring up all the stagnant COBOL programmers with my TCP/IP Internet talk in 1993.
I still can't get over having registered wellsfargo.com and mcdonalds.com and a few other choice ones and just gave them to there rightful owners, but this was before there was any money in it.
Anyhow I am just good at these thing, but don't dress act or have some social group of hackers around me.
When I was in top form, no one ever saw me or had any direct access to me, I didn't hand out or chat much. When I did it was over untraceable phone lines, or BBS's again over untraceable phone lines. I had a long list of rules on how not to get caught. Maybe someday I will write them up.
Although I do my best not too I still must look like a computer guy.
Like when I was in New York city meeting with a somewhat famous rapper(it's a long story), some 20 something kid off the street approached us. Expecting that he had recognized the rap artist we both where really shock when he ran up and asked me if I know what a preprocessor declaration was. Stunned I answered him and he ran off ecstatic. Even more stunned the rapper turned towards me a said WTF was that about? Sh*t I don't know, maybe he must have just won some sort of bet or something.
Very weird, of all the people walking down the street how many would know the answer? How would he know to ask me of all people?
So I guess somehow I must give off that vibe, although I try not too.
I think there must be some body changes that come from 30+ years of being hunched over a computer screen since the age of 7.
I just don't see an army of educated IT security people being able to fend off self taught hackers, let alone even detect them.
I am not worried about the veterans, unless they are self taught. And in that case I'd make sure not to do anything that would leave them feeling betrayed. Think about what Kevin Mitnick did to the FBI after working with them. People don't realize, there are far better then Kevin out there. The best ones are the ones you'll never hear about, they are ghosts.
The best ones also have a strong sense of right and wrong, it's just different from what most peoples views are.
As for myself, being told I can't do or accomplish something is the strongest motivator.
It's not a conscious thing, it's almost obsessive compulsive and no malice or desire for any gain what so ever, nether data or money.
Just thrill or fulfillment of some deep subconscious need.
In high school I couldn't help when walking by a row of locker in an empty hallway to unlock 20 locker in a row that had master locks on them, then re-lock the locks on upside down. And see how fast I could do it. I'd won many bets that way.
Same for teacher bathrooms, the school safe. (just opened the door 1 inch then closed it again) They ended up putting me in charge of the schools computers in my senor year since I already had full access and knew much more then the consultant that they had that barely could update there COBOL source code.
Over the years, I have built my own modems from scratch, build and sould the first PC sound devices, wrote the first code to play 6 Bit digital audio on the PC's internal speaker. Built early home made packet radios, spread spectrum radios on CB's.
Reverse engineered many BIOS/ boot ROM's, copy protection, viruses, crack games, AOL and Compuserve account, phreaked, security systems, vending machines, Cable TV, cell phones, GPS, you named it.
When one malicious hacker that messed with me later asked a friend to get a copy of 286 AMI Bios from me, I even put a defanged non-contagious version of Jerusalem B virus into it so that it installed the TSR portion every time he formatted a disk. Specifically so it would aways infect ever disk he touches. Specifically designed to get detected so no one would ever trust floppies from him. He used to be a big wares guy, but I put a quick end to that.
Over the years I have gotten into so many things and ever left a trace, just popped in, poked around, got board and moved on.
In the process I have learn so much and had written so much code, that I have become a seasoned kernel hacker in both BSD and Linux with a strength in networking.
Another thing people don't realize, Hacker don't aways have a specific target but meander, and see where it goes.
I think Bruce Schneider pointed out was they go the weak points, like don't open the lock but go in over the drop ceiling tiles.
The reality is that heavy lock is more likely to attract them if for no other reason then out of curiosity. What the hell is in there that requires so much security? It's like a giant puzzle and solving it, quenches ones curiosity.
Anyhow now that I probably said too much, just for the record, I stopped the illegal stuff a long long time ago, now that I have probably gotten myself on some watch list.
These days, I focus on understanding SPAM (towards blocking, tracing etc), defending DOS, P2P, ECIP and flow control, Video and data compression, mathematics, Cracking DRM and FOSS coding. It still fulfills the rebel side of me, and also accomplishes something useful.
With things like http request/response processing and Data Base is really more of data shoveling. Find the data, and dig it up and send it. Memory , Disk and Network throughput are the limiting factors not CPU number crunching.
> here is a stage that pretty much has to be single-threaded
http and DB is one single thread for each operation, but deal with many simultaneous operations handled in parallel.
SMP/NUMA and other designs with multiple cpu's on a shared memory bus work very well for those applicaitons, but in that case each CPU handles one thread at a time, so each CPU allows for more parrelel threads to run.
Each thread gets to share the memory and file system cache and internal structures.
This only apply for a threaded model of programming.
Personally I am a big fan of loosely coupled parallel processors, More like Beowulf clusters or the way google architecture is done.
In that case http requests are split out across many boxes, that don't share memory and don't even need much communication to respond to most requests.
This also works well for DB/HTTP, and isn't threaded.
But what about number crunching? There are certain classes of problems that must be run sequentially, but for most people not working on the deeper understanding of the universe, this doesn't apply.
The most common case for consumer level parallelism is Multimedia. Video, Audio, graphics rendering, compression, cryptography and maybe some day, AI.
In these cases, arrays of small super fast processors would really help.
Back in 2000 I realized that 50 Million transistors of 4004 the first processor ever created, would out perform a P4 with the same transistor count done in the same fab running at the same clock rates. it would be over 10x faster I work out. But how to use such a device?
I had been working with a 100 PC cluster of P4 based systems to do H.264 HDTV compression in realtime. I spread the compression function across the cluster using each system to work on a small part of the problem and flow the data across the CPU's.
Based on this I wanted to build an array of processors on one chip, but I am not a silicon person, just software, driver and some basic electronics. So I looked at various FPGA cores, Arm, MIPS, etc. Then I went to a talk giving by Chuck Moore, author of the language FORTH. He had been building his own CPU's for many years using his own custom tools.
I worked with Chuck Moore for about a year in 2001/2002 on creating a massive multi core processor based on Chucks stack processor.
The Idea was instead of having 1,2 or 4 large processor to have 49 (7 * 7) small light but fast processors in one chip. This would be for tacking a different set of problems then your classic cpus'. It wouldn't be for running and OS or word processing, but for Multimedia, and cryptography, and other mathematic problems.
The idea was to flow data across the array of processors.
Each processor would run at 6Ghz, with 64K word of Ram each.
21 Bit wide words and bus (based off of F21 processor)
this allows for 4x 5bit instructions on a stack processor that only has 32 instructions.
Since it's a stack processor they run more efficiently. So in 16K transistors, 4000 gates,
the F21 at 500 Mhz performed about the same as a 500Mhz 486 with JPEG compress and decompress.
With the parallel core design instead of a common bus or network between the processors there would only be 4 connections into and out of each processor. These would be 4 registers that are shared with it's 4 neighboring processors that are laid out in a grid. So each chip would have a north, south, east and west register.
Data would be processed in whats called a systolic array, where each core would pick up some data, perform operations on it and pass it along to the next core.
The chips with a 7x7 grid of processors would expose the 28(4x7) bus lines off the edge processors, so that these could be tiled into a much larger grid of processors.
Each chip could perform around 117 Billion instructions per second at 1 Watt of power.
Unfortunately I was unable to raise money, partly because I couldn't' get any commitment from Chuck.
below is some links and other misc information on this project. Sorry it's not better organized.
This was my project.
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http://www.enumera.com/chip/
http://www.enumera.com/doc/Enumeradraft061003.htm
http://www.enumera.com/doc/analysis_of_Music_Copyright.html
http://www.enumera.com/doc/emtalk.ppt
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This was Jeff foxes independent web site, he work on the F21 with Chuck.
http://www.ultratechnology.com/ml0.htm
http://www.ultratechnology.com/f21.html#f21
http://www.ultratechnology.com/store.htm#stamp
http://www.ultratechnology.com/cowboys.html#cm
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http://www.colorforth.com/ 25x Multicomputer Chip
Chucks site. 25x has been pulled down, but it's accessible on archive.org.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.colorfo
As some of you probably are aware, Comp-USA is going out of business for the past few months.
Prices are slashed, I went to the one here in Goleta California, they had about 20 of those Novint Falcon controllers, they couldn't even give them away. The seemed to have been there for a while, long enough for the gloss to wear off the boxes and have a layer of dust on them.
Interesting since the article make it seems like they just came out.
Even more Interesting was at 50% off they were listed at $300, which seems to be higher then retail prices..
listed in the article $189
Unless that lock is stored in some sort of (electric charges) basically flash memory on chip, there is nothing to stop someone from copying that chip with it's combination lock and all.
How would a manufactured be able to know the difference between a real chip vs. a knockoff. If (physical)electrically digital circuits both are identical including the locking mechanism. So there shouldn't be any protection.
Understand for C++ : from (Scientific Toolworks, Inc ) is the best I have ever seen.
I highly recommend it. Well worth the $500 for it.
BlueRay / HD-DVD.
At least for video the lifespan of both technologies are almost over. They are only around because of the RIAA and large media campaign against P2P networks with things like Comcast deliberately poising Torrent traffic.
I can download 1080i movies already on Bit Torrent. Why are they wasting time over plastic disks? Maybe to sell more players?
Cable companies are already setting up for another order of magnitude leap in data rates.
Docsis 3.0 will allow Cable operators to offer over 100Mbps to 160 Mbps internet access.
Broadcast HDTV for 1920x1080 is only 20Mbps. www.8vsb.com
At least BlueRay will establish itself as the next level up from DVD-Rom with things like the BenQ BW1000 Blu-ray Writer. But people are already able to Pirate BlueRay and HD-DVD movies.
The establishment doesn't get it.
They are still thinking about physical objects and not BIT's.
Renting and moving plastic disks around for movies will be as dead as vinyl in 5 years.
Heck the most kids don't even bother with CD's because MP3's/audio files are much easier to deal with.
If we use any physical media it will be something like MicroSD cards in our Cell Phones to pick up movies from Blockbuster or some vending machines. At least those of up not cool enough to stream or download them off the net. Just swipe your phone past some pad and presto HD movies uploaded into your phone, play anywhere.
This is why Steve Job's is kicking everyone ass. I can't stand Apple, but they are the only ones that "get it" and are also in a position to do something about it.
And Radium is a decay product of Uranium, so we could just harvest the output of all of our nuclear power plants we could produce helium. Although I'm not so sure I'd want my kids to be playing with these new Helium balloons.
Then you just don't get it. And did exactly what I was complaining about.
That this issue has turned into another who killed John F. Kennedy. There is the official story and the other versions that get ripped apart not by logical argument but by people who don't look at it and just respond with an almost religious fervor.
If you have seen the amount of flame that I have received just for speculation of vaccination as being a problem, you'd understand maybe.
I agree, it's probably some combination of things.
I just can't believe that people are trying to justify injecting heavy metals know to cause brain problems into infants.
Then call me crazy when I point it out.
Yup, any contradictory beliefs must be beaten down, that has been my experience.
Just as in any beliefs or criticism that go against the large cooperate republican conservative mentality these days, all opposition will be beaten down, disrespected, humiliated, disregarded, labeled as crackpot, conspiracy theory or fringe.
Even this message I am sure will be labeled as flame bate, but I urge you to give this post some consideration that there is something more I am trying to point out, maybe a lesson to be learned.
Every post I have ever made on this subject gets hastily berated.
History has shown that there has been more to some of following then first meets the eye:
Global Warming.
Increasing gas mileage and alternate energy
Voting machine fraud, WMD's, Kennedy, John Lennon, Ghandi, Tim Leary,
GM vs. Organic food. Smoking causing or not causing cancer, Marijuana
Tesla, Laithwaite, Hutchinson, Darwin, Galileo, Copernicus, Columbus
Perendev, Searl, Cold Fusion, The Earth Being round, String Theory, E8,Quantum Physics , Roswell
Jesus, Moses, Noah, The Ark of the covenant, the chalice, Troy, 12/12/2012, the holocaust, revelations.
Yet all have been flamed, ripped on and disregarded without any logic.
Study the history of these things, and maybe you will start to see a different perspective of the world.
But for most these days, what's the difference, if it doesn't agree with your world view, Kill it rather then take a serious look and logical debate. So much for the hopes and efforts of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, these now seem like dead ideals.
So what ever happened Live and Let live. Or as someone I met in passing put it, What ever floats your boat.
If anything things like Charlie Wilson war and Iran Contra and Air America demonstrate that things can go down on much larger scale then you could ever imagine. Worse you'd never know or never believe it if told and shown absolute proof. You need to keep an open mind, both sides. Or are we just Lemmings doomed to follow our crowd where ever it leads?
Look, something is causing it, either come up with better suggestions, logical debates or back the (insert derogatory of choice) off.
I would really like to be able to talk directly with the OLPC People, I haven't made any attempts as of yet.
I have alway been very good at squeezing out the most from minimal hardware.
The PXA has a what they call "Wireless MMX" this is an FPU !! The similar MMX that is supported by the x86 processors!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/12/intel_ships_bulverde/
We are paying around $15 per chip for the PXA270's right now and I know the price could easily come down, but the PXA3xx is the newer lower cost chips with increased speed and more I/O.
Anyhow I don't see anyone complaining about the processing power and graphics on the iPhone and that plays all kinds of cool graphics tricks.
Why does OLPC care so much about MPEG4?
Last time I worked with a bunch of MIT Media Lab Weenies was on a project called charmed. they pushed me out and made something that looked like an old army canteen based on PC104.
http://creativetech.inn.leedsmet.ac.uk/staff/rb/Wearable.html
It never went anywhere. At the same time I was working on a 3rd gen of my wearable based on a new super chip that I was working on with Chuck Moore. http://www.intellasys.net/products/index.php this was based on http://www.colorforth.com/ X25 chip, sorry he pull that page down. http://www.ultratechnology.com/ml0.htm see X25
We did get a prototype wearable done from this.
In the mean time I also made the mistake of teaching some Chinese how to build the goggles, be never the the funding to keep them exclusive to my project. http://www.dnull.com/goggle/p.html BTW: I get them Whole Sale cheaper, and that site is not the manufacturer but a reseller.
My whole system BOM was $35 in quantity, technically what I had would do the job of the OLPC except for power consumption and it's wearable screens not laptop style, but maybe better if your herding goats. After all who cares about getting middle class kids cheaper PC's let mom buy them a new Laptop for $750.
Also SATA, no way, use SD Flash now. USB sure the kids in Africa and India will have all the latest USB gadgets as soon as Fry's open up a store there, NOT.
The Gold Leopard King PC is literally one chip, probably some 8 bit core, most likely downloaded from opencores.org with Pirated game roms and Sells for $5 (350 rupees). There probably using the same fabs for digital watches and calculators. I'd love to know how to find them.
We could put one or more 500 Mhz arms in one chip, 64Meg DRAM with 2 gigs of SD and a Kent Display and some simple wireless, Even a camera and get the whole BOM down to $20 to $30 in 100K volumes with about $10M in development. It would of course run stock Linux. The display wouldn't be fast for clear video, but slow video and good audio would be great. Or for a little more add a tiny 1x1 inch LCD for the video.
Again, why are they trying to build these things like High end Gaming machines. The point is to make something closer to the French Minitel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel, basically get them on the web, and E-mail and access to the worlds Knowledge and educational software. Not to be able to play WarCraft, surf porn and watch YouTube! Or worse yet create a larger army of 409 scammers.
Buy trying to play this venture using more traditional technology and , AMD, Intel, M$ etc, they just invited grinches to attack. Intel would have to kill this just to ensure there middle class parents
For OLPC I do they really need something to play HD video and compete with the latest Dell/Toshiba laptops,
I don't think so, these are for third world counties where something like a speak and spell would be high tech.
Personally they shouldn't be using LCD's anyhow the backlight are power hungry. I think Electronic Paper like E-Ink, and Kodak/Kent have developed and is now using in Jeff Bozos new E-book thing, Kindle ( I just keep thinking of Fahrenheit 451 on that one)
http://www.kentdisplays.com/
The PXA uses MMX (like on Pentium's), I don't see what is proprietary for that, so what I can't use their proprietary libs, who cares.
I have been using PXA and Blackfin for video for a while now, and never even heard about proprietary libs/extensions, but again the first think I did was ignore any software tools from them and went straight to GAS and GCC.
Anyhow where I work Marvell has been more then happy to dump any documentation we want about these chips. They don't have any tech support for problems, so we are in RTFM mode when we get stuck. Fortunately things have been very smooth, even good JTAG tools.
I think ARM has far better ecosystem for tools, code and support then MIPS. I mean I have watched code I built for one embedded device run on several PDA and even an IPhone without recompile, blew my mind.
Arm has made some incredible strides towards standardization and multi vendors. There as so many cheap reference boards these days.
Most arm chips are made with Cell phones in mind as well, some support MMX and Jazelle Java extensions.
Many have Micron CMOS camera chip interfaces and built in LCD drivers, and a mess of GPIO and MMC etc.
Linux and Uboot are a sweet combination on them also.
Look at PXA270 and PXA300 from Marvell & Blackfin (uC Linux)
Also ARM is licensing there chip design for 8 Cents a copy, so you can easily make a ASIC based on arm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
Also another option is that there is already $5 computers in China and India. There not laptops and you need to connect them into a TV but still they have Keyboard, Mice, Game joysticks and 100's of pirated games on them. Even ones that can web surf. these are from a Chinese company called Gold Leopard King, but they are impossible to track down and contact, but the markets there are flooded with them.
http://ultimateconsoledatabase.com/famiclones/gold_leopard_king.htm
The whole computer is just passive switches, and there is only one Chip in the entire PC, it's in the cartridge. Amazing thing, Perfect copies of Mario Brothers, Pac-man, Donkey Kong, Defender, Galaga, Dig Dug. I always get one for the kids when were in India, and just give it away when we leave, it's PAL video out, so we can't use it back in the USA.
It's just like trying to read someones poker face.
Checkpoints an searches for the past 100 years has been about smoking out the enemy's.
It counts on them loosing there nerve. Panicking, or exhibiting other unusual behavior that will give them away.
The actual searches have a very low success rate.
This is no different then a police traffic stop, the dude with drugs in his car will almost always run, or act deceptive and that will tip off the officer.
So now the "Terrorists" have trained and rehearsed and are much better at not tipping their hand, so on our side it we are now looking at micro expressions and other much subtler signs of deception.
But again this is nothing that an experienced police officer or Judge has already developed a natural and an almost 6th sense for.
You just can't bullshit an old judge. 5 days a week 8 hours a day for years that is all they do. Just read people, then see the paperwork to see who was lying. After some point, then just know at a glance but still must go through the exercise of proving it.
I will just dump a mess of links from an old E-mail I did on this some time ago. It's all good stuff, Solar two in Mojave was also molten salt based. I knew someone who bought it after it failed and got to explore it before it was partly dismantled.
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Solar two was a flat mirror array.
Search google image search with
"solar two" Mojave
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=yermo,+ca&ie=UTF8&ll=34.871919,-116.83416&spn=0.005915,0.010042&t=h&z=17&om=1
Take the link above and zoom out, just below and to the right is a Parabolic glass mirrors plant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Two
http://www.powerfromthesun.net/Chapter10/Chapter10new.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Solar_Two_2003.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Solar_Two_Heliostat.jpg
http://theothersolar.com/?m=200702
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1101-10.htm
http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/solar-central-power-towers.html
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/edu/dees/U4735/projections/pitman/solar.elec.jpg
http://fixedreference.org/2006-Wikipedia-CD-Selection/wp/s/Solar_power.htm
(search for "Solar two")
http://www.reia-nm.org/HTML_Docs/Solar_Thermal_Electrical.html
http://greatgreengadgets.com/gadgets/category/solar/
http://www.answers.com/topic/solar-thermal-energy
http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/2006/week44/index.html
Excellent page on many technologies - Sorry it's in Spanish.
http://g3nergy.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html
Search for "Australia to Build 154 MW Solar Energy Plant"
This one is identical in design to the one in the Mojave Dessert here.
http://ludb.clui.org/ex/i/CA4965/ Abandoned Solar Power Plant
It's so easy to just buy these parts in India, Pakistan Dubai and other places around there
that they could easily build such clusters.
Besides if they were smart, they just build the clusters here even and run everything here and just ship the results back on CD's. Even better yet, hack into 100's of idle web servers and use there CPU power.
I had a 100 CPU cluster in my garage doing GA and Video stuff, no one even thought twice about it.
I don't know why everyone thinks the US is the only place in the world with advanced technology.
I was in ShenZhen China and India recently, both have computer markets that put anything I have seen in Silicon Valley, New York or Los Angeles to shame.
have used to ensure that our code will is technically and legally free
from AT&T/USL trade secrets. Rob Kolstad
BTW: in that same page search for "Sokol"
Get the History Straight, Heck I was there.
We were all labeled as Hackers, not just the stylistic fools that flaunted it.
>> by the 1990's The BSD's from Berkley were in full swing by then.
Not without a great fight, we all look a large risk and many paid a heavy price.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SMG/is_n14_v12/ai_12737915
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/bsdi/930303.ruling.txt
http://www.atrust.com/articles/berkeley Recent publicity for Linux as an open source operating system has tended to obscure the fact that AT&T was a major contributor to the success of Linux by virtue of its legal actions against BSD. This artificial weakening of the major competitor was an important prerequisite of early Linux success.
AT&T Unix source code was somehow put in some national security list. Basically if you were caught with a copy of the source without having had paid or part of some University that paid the $60,000 source license, the Secret Service would come with guns drawn and seize every piece of electronics equipment on the premises.
There is little documentation that this had even happened and almost none of the victims ever received there hardware back.
http://www.chriswaltrip.com/sterling/crack2l.html the Chicago Task Force were now convinced that they had discovered an underground gang of UNIX software pirates, who were demonstrably guilty of interstate trafficking in illicitly copied AT&T source code. &
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/cs/cs/archive/CS142_SP96/notes16.html
This finally ended with Steve Jackson Games that managed to sue them for a similar seizure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._United_States_Secret_Service
I have seen this in many other areas too, it's a sound argument and I am sure much of that is true.
Yet, myself and others have observed a direct connection where a healthy active child upon getting vaccinated over night becomes almost unable to walk speak or have any awareness of there surroundings that persists for the rest of there lives. Maybe it's just some bad batches there were mixed up, I can't tell you.
John
So are you the smuck who modded me down?
Either way, I am not claiming that thimerosal or vaccines were responsible. And I do believe vaccines are needed.
I am just claiming that in spite of what much of that research reports, there is something is causing this wave of autism.
I have personally watched my 4 year old son who was talking playing chess melt away almost immediately after a vaccination into lump of child that couldn't even walk or talk, let alone play chess, this never improved.
The effect was almost identical to a traumatic brain injury cause my mechanical means, but nothing like that happened, just the vaccination. He's 19 now and can hardly talk and still can't function. I have video to prove it! I have 3 other sons, all are incredibly smart as was the one who now has autism before his vaccination.
So you tell me what am I supposed to think. In 15 years I have not seen any answers only that this trend is getting worse and not one of these papers even reports what almost every parent I have ever talked to says, which is this happens within days of being vaccinated. Why are they still not reporting that in there studies!!!
If I have come to realize is studies are as objective as there funding sources. So you can cite papers all day long, but until they actually acknowledge what many are witnessing first hand, then these studies are rubbish.
Also Mercury is clearly know to cause brain damage similar to autism.
Did we need a study to prove lead was harmful before we could remove the lead from paint and gasoline first?
Why were they even willing to put our kids at risk, even if the odds were almost 0.
I mean look at the over reactive recalls on toys because 2 kids swallow some parts.
But now we have 15 Million Autistic kids and but no one even wants to find alternatives to the obvious potential causes.
It's like debugging software. Sometimes we don't care what caused the problem, we just going about correcting anything that looks questionable and most of the time the problem get fixed. Why is this so hard to do when our children's futures are at stake.
So I applaud the parents who post there thoughts and experiences on youtube, I don't think anyone would consider them more accurate then well done science, but Mom's have over 100's of thousands of years evolved a ways to keep there kids safe and track down problems using there own ways.
So what that some of there "old wives tales" and mis beliefs don't make a lot of sense scientifically, they are time tested to help kids survive and succeed, after all we are sitting here, right.
Until the "Scientific community" gets off it's ass and find a fix for this someone has to do something.