Re:Not just developing countries
on
The Sub-$100 Laptop?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I say design the whole damn thing to run off 12V DC. You can use a voltage divider (a simple circuit made with a network resistors in parallel) internally to create +/-5V and +/-3.3V. Simply provide a round, 2 contact plug that says "12 VDC In".
The tricky part is the hard drives. They really want to see +/- 12V. I'm pretty sure, and please, someone correct me, that you could actually provide that by providing the +12V leg of the system with the straight power, and simply reversing the polarity of power coming in for the -12V. That is assuming that you can't find a hard drive that operates at 5V. I'm too lazy to research it.
Couple that with a diode to prevent the system from being damaged by reversed wires, and a big Cap to handle power dips and surges and you will have a Joe-proof computer.
Re:Loaded with Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg?
on
The Sub-$100 Laptop?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Great. So now not only do you have to teach the Children how to read and write in their own langauge, they have to learn better english than most native speaking children.
Come on, how many American teenagers do you know that have read H.G. Wells or Thomas Hardy... well, at least of their own free will.
As for the Wikipedia, it suffers from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy syndrome. A whole lot of contributers. Editors? You mean like Notepad?
There are a couple of nifty tricks they can use for the keyboard. Instead of keys, how about a pad that detects over which part of a template the users's finger interupted a light beam? Never wears out. Never lose a key. Internationaliziation is as simple as peeling away the sticker on the backing, and putting down a new graphic with the target language.
QWERTY may work well for english, but many languages have additional characters, and different statistical distributions of letter combinations. I've worked with German keyboards, where some of the keys are switched around, and there are shift combinations to generate the Umlauts and esszet. (The esszet is that character that looks like a B but is pronounced like a double s.)
You also have countries with completely different characters (like Cyrillic and Arabic.) Finding one good way to address all of them, without having to pump out several different production lines, is essential.
Smaller processors (with slower memory busses) don't require cooling fans, even in tropical climates.
If you have ever worked in a factory or with a piece of remote instrumentation, cooling fans are the bane of your existance. They die quietly, and next thing you know you have random crashes, or worse, damaged components. And they have a great way of sucking dust, dirt, and other undesirables into the inner workings of the machine.
Plus, you save on the cost of the fan, the cost of the connector for the fan, the cost of the holes in the PCB to run the pins to supply the fan, and can chop that much more power off the requirements for the supply. You also have one less part that needs to be assembled onto the final product.
All of that can add up to a few hundred thousand dollars of savings over a production run of a few million computers.
And for the record, a textbook program is NOT all that CPU intensive. There is not rule that says you can't scale the format to the capabilities of the machine.
For god's sake, you can boot linux on a toaster oven. What I'm interested in is what software do they plan to distribute with it.
Re:Not just developing countries
on
The Sub-$100 Laptop?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
They may have to control how they're sold/distributed to keep the developed world from snapping them all up
Why? If they sold well, you increase the volume produced, and the cost per unit decreases.
While you would certainly want to regulate how many are sold in what market, assuming you design it once, and design it right, mass production is your friend.
One item I think that should be introduced for portable, that would REALLY help the developing world, is repairability. There is no earthly reason why you can't design a laptop with an interchangable screen. And how about a standard battery connection system and package?
These are all things that would be impossible to market to the developed world, but would be essential to the developing world. They simply don't buy into the idea that you throw something that costs many times their yearly wages away after 2 years.
The WILL be putting out at least an Xserve with the 3 Ghz G5. The Cell is nice, but it's not designed to efficiently handle large multi-user environments.
It may be great for video editing, or 3d graphics processing, but the G5 is a lot better at walking and chewing gum at the same time. A large multi-user database, or a massive file server won't use the 8 64bit FPU's. But it will sure as hell use the dual instruction units.
(Pats shiny new G5 xserve)
I'm not saying the G5 or the Cell are bad. They are just designed to do different things. You wouldn't use a big rig truck for a Taxi, and you wouldn't use a Sedan to carry freight.
The PowerPC instructions core is simply to provide a way to leverage existing compilers against this new architecture. Sony learned, the hard way, that developers don't want to hear about a quirky new instruction set.
I hear you though. The Power5 is designed to handle large multi-process loads. This new Cell architecture, or at least this particular Cell chip, is designed for real time processing of large piles of data.
I'm not reliving computer architecture class... I'm not reliving computer architecture class... (open's eyes)... Whew
Actually I think that is more about Apple useing CELL in the future. Apple wouldn't license OS X to Sony.
They learned from their last attempt at clones that they make most of their money off the hardware. And if someone has a license to make knock offs of your product, they WILL try to compete with you on the high-end high-profit models over the low-end thin-margin ones.
And Sony is a high-end, high-profit brand name. You don't buy a Sony Viao because it's cheap. You buy it because it looks snazzy, and has a pile of ubilicils and software that strap to video and audio gear.
800 years to warp make a planet temporarily habitibal for Terrestrial life?
Why not expend a fraction of that energy and build a large space platform. Large enough to accomodate teeming billions, with a climate that is built from the ground up to be hospitiable for human life.
I like the idea of a massive ring with an air dam.
Run out of room? Build another.
If solar activity is getting you down, apply a massive impulse and take a ride to another solar system. You wouldn't care if the trip took 100,000 years if civilization came along for the ride.
Re:Dependencies?!?!? No, no, I use Slackware :)
on
Slackware 10.1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I can think of only one other industry that refers to its clientele as "Users", distribute "fixes" and maintain "dependencies".
The problem is, of course, that any type of Key system interfacing with any kind of computer equipment eventually pees out a series of ones and zeroes across an electrical or optical bus.
A truely dedicated cracker simply needs to know where to put the packet logger. Just look at the rash of phony ATMs, people will stick their cards and type their PINs into anything that looks legit.
And before you get into a mechanical lock, I would like to point out that to talk to the computer it too sets an electrical jumper.
And there is nothing preventing someone from sending an electronic copy of a biometric over a network.
Actually I've just gotten through stripping out password access to our servers with SSH. We were dictionary attacked against a test account, and someone moved in and set up shop breaking into other boxes on the net with that account (and our F@#$@ IP).
(Yes, Virginia, there are other authentication techniques out there.)
Problem I'm running into is that by the time spamassassin gets the message it's too late. It's already been delivered, and not only has bandwidth, CPU time and disk space been wasted, spamassassin itself requires quite a chunk of resources to run.
We have a dual 800mhz machine with 512Mb of RAM that just barely keeps up with the load. By just barely I mean load averages START at 1.0 and peak at 10.0.
I'm an old fogey from the days of passing interrupts to DOS. I miss it. But it's never coming back. Device drivers are far more complex. Almost everything is a data bus requiring traffic management, your PCI bus, USB, Firewire. There are pipelines to work with. The whole system has automations speaking to automations.
If you are going to teach C, it has to be restricted to an older platform where you are building a bootloader yourself (i386, Z80, arm). Otherwise all you end up teaching is how to pass data to an API, so you might as well stick with Java, C++, or that other language (C#).
That said, a knowledge of C, and how computers worked "back in the day" has helped me tremendously in finding and fixing problems in programs under Unix. (I distinctly remember recently hacking the Linux's USB driver to accomidate my new Sony Clie. Crap that was a year ago. I am an old fogey.)
Slashdot Mirror
The tricky part is the hard drives. They really want to see +/- 12V. I'm pretty sure, and please, someone correct me, that you could actually provide that by providing the +12V leg of the system with the straight power, and simply reversing the polarity of power coming in for the -12V. That is assuming that you can't find a hard drive that operates at 5V. I'm too lazy to research it.
Couple that with a diode to prevent the system from being damaged by reversed wires, and a big Cap to handle power dips and surges and you will have a Joe-proof computer.
Come on, how many American teenagers do you know that have read H.G. Wells or Thomas Hardy... well, at least of their own free will.
As for the Wikipedia, it suffers from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy syndrome. A whole lot of contributers. Editors? You mean like Notepad?
QWERTY may work well for english, but many languages have additional characters, and different statistical distributions of letter combinations. I've worked with German keyboards, where some of the keys are switched around, and there are shift combinations to generate the Umlauts and esszet. (The esszet is that character that looks like a B but is pronounced like a double s.)
You also have countries with completely different characters (like Cyrillic and Arabic.) Finding one good way to address all of them, without having to pump out several different production lines, is essential.
If you have ever worked in a factory or with a piece of remote instrumentation, cooling fans are the bane of your existance. They die quietly, and next thing you know you have random crashes, or worse, damaged components. And they have a great way of sucking dust, dirt, and other undesirables into the inner workings of the machine.
Plus, you save on the cost of the fan, the cost of the connector for the fan, the cost of the holes in the PCB to run the pins to supply the fan, and can chop that much more power off the requirements for the supply. You also have one less part that needs to be assembled onto the final product.
All of that can add up to a few hundred thousand dollars of savings over a production run of a few million computers.
And for the record, a textbook program is NOT all that CPU intensive. There is not rule that says you can't scale the format to the capabilities of the machine.
For god's sake, you can boot linux on a toaster oven. What I'm interested in is what software do they plan to distribute with it.
Why? If they sold well, you increase the volume produced, and the cost per unit decreases.
While you would certainly want to regulate how many are sold in what market, assuming you design it once, and design it right, mass production is your friend.
One item I think that should be introduced for portable, that would REALLY help the developing world, is repairability. There is no earthly reason why you can't design a laptop with an interchangable screen. And how about a standard battery connection system and package?
These are all things that would be impossible to market to the developed world, but would be essential to the developing world. They simply don't buy into the idea that you throw something that costs many times their yearly wages away after 2 years.
It may be great for video editing, or 3d graphics processing, but the G5 is a lot better at walking and chewing gum at the same time. A large multi-user database, or a massive file server won't use the 8 64bit FPU's. But it will sure as hell use the dual instruction units.
(Pats shiny new G5 xserve)
I'm not saying the G5 or the Cell are bad. They are just designed to do different things. You wouldn't use a big rig truck for a Taxi, and you wouldn't use a Sedan to carry freight.
I hear you though. The Power5 is designed to handle large multi-process loads. This new Cell architecture, or at least this particular Cell chip, is designed for real time processing of large piles of data.
I'm not reliving computer architecture class... I'm not reliving computer architecture class... (open's eyes) ... Whew
They learned from their last attempt at clones that they make most of their money off the hardware. And if someone has a license to make knock offs of your product, they WILL try to compete with you on the high-end high-profit models over the low-end thin-margin ones.
And Sony is a high-end, high-profit brand name. You don't buy a Sony Viao because it's cheap. You buy it because it looks snazzy, and has a pile of ubilicils and software that strap to video and audio gear.
Much like a Macintosh.
And people look at me funny when I say I would like to build my own...
Why not expend a fraction of that energy and build a large space platform. Large enough to accomodate teeming billions, with a climate that is built from the ground up to be hospitiable for human life.
I like the idea of a massive ring with an air dam.
Run out of room? Build another.
If solar activity is getting you down, apply a massive impulse and take a ride to another solar system. You wouldn't care if the trip took 100,000 years if civilization came along for the ride.
I can think of only one other industry that refers to its clientele as "Users", distribute "fixes" and maintain "dependencies".
You use a proxy server. You NAZI! IP Masquerading for freedom!
Ok, you and the folks who want Gentoo to distribute binaries, RedHat to be less commercial, and KDE to be more like Gnome.
(sarcasm)
A truely dedicated cracker simply needs to know where to put the packet logger. Just look at the rash of phony ATMs, people will stick their cards and type their PINs into anything that looks legit.
And before you get into a mechanical lock, I would like to point out that to talk to the computer it too sets an electrical jumper.
And there is nothing preventing someone from sending an electronic copy of a biometric over a network.
(Yes, Virginia, there are other authentication techniques out there.)
As soon as it's clear that there is a loophole, you bet the spammers will be on it like ugly on moose.
We have a dual 800mhz machine with 512Mb of RAM that just barely keeps up with the load. By just barely I mean load averages START at 1.0 and peak at 10.0.
You know, some of us have a life after 5:00.
(Too many worms packed their payload in zip files, and too many stupid users will willing to jump through hoops to double click on them.)
If you are going to teach C, it has to be restricted to an older platform where you are building a bootloader yourself (i386, Z80, arm). Otherwise all you end up teaching is how to pass data to an API, so you might as well stick with Java, C++, or that other language (C#).
That said, a knowledge of C, and how computers worked "back in the day" has helped me tremendously in finding and fixing problems in programs under Unix. (I distinctly remember recently hacking the Linux's USB driver to accomidate my new Sony Clie. Crap that was a year ago. I am an old fogey.)
IOW Java, or soon Java.
(Network engineer who implemented such a filter, and regularly has to bypass it.)
Now if we could just find Dorthy, the Lion and the Tinman...