1) The http://www.tubedepot.com/diy-k-16ls.html 16W stereo tube amplifier kit. There's nothing like thermionics to get a gut feel for how electronics works. As a bonus - you will actually get something you might want to use for your effort.
2) The Spartan3E starter kit seemed to me to be good value in FPGA toys: http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail?name=122-1536-ND
3) silabs have some nice mixed-signal MCUs for analog dorking around. 8051 instruction set and a form factor that you can actually solder to something: http://www.silabs.com/tgwWebApp/public/web_content/products/Microcontrollers/en/mcu_developmenttools.htm
Instead of emailing them a message, why not put the message on your secure server and email them a link.
When they follow the link they can be prompted for a password that you have pre-arranged over the phone. From there they could securely download and read the email, or go further and download and install certificates and keys that you had created that could be used for future communication.
It seems unlikely to me that the Swedish government would bug phone calls as well as the internet - especially if neither the sender or the recipient lived in Sweden. Even if they are, how likely is it that they would connect the dots. They are probably only doing this because it is easy, low-hanging intelligence. But if you are paranoid, I'm sure you could find a way to do the initial key exchange sub rosa.
My Kindergardener going-on 1st grader more or less taught himself to read (we read to him and sang alphabet songs etc. and the school sang more alphabet songs and encouraged reading)
He now has the opportunity to be in a mixed 1st grade + 2nd grade class next year. This is, of course, a cost saving issue (and I'm not against cost saving in principal) but it's being tacitly promoted as a "hothouse" for the chosen first graders and I'm not wild about the idea. My concerns are...
1) Are the 2nd graders that will mix with the 1st graders those have special remedial needs
2) What happens with the social ties he's been forging with other 1st graders.
I'm beginning to think that the academic content of school for him is probably not as important as the social content right now and would be very happy if the school could get him to be confident, happy, well socialized among his peers and to love learning.
Either he or I can teach him the academics - for a few years to come at least.
1) Get Taxpayer $$s to design a vulnerable piece of shit 2) Charge more $$s to manufacture said VPOS 3) VPOS gets shot down --> more orders 4) Profit (more)...
Don't forget to patent blindingly obvious things too - like "container for transporting items", just to make it hard for anyone to invent anything worthwhile.
Seems one has to jeopardize one's livelihood over every small thing, like whether to accept a used PC or not. Hence I would have thought one could argue that accepting the PC as it was and using it for business was not a completely free choice. A man's gotta eat.
If Fiola's side of the story can be taken at face value, then presumably he can sue - not just for the loss of income, but for the damage to his reputation, emotional distress at the nature of the material etc.
Having said that - bandwagon rides are fun, so my gut feel is that Fiola was complicit in at least some way, even if he saw the computer behaving weirdly and did not report it. Perhaps this will help him establish that his reputation was tarnished by this whole episode.
It must be hard to draw the line, but it seems over zealous to me - after all, the scripts may only be a convenience measure to automate a perfectly do-able manual installation.
I don't see why Supermicro should be expected to teach everybody how to install, compile and use BB.
I'd hate SFLC to over-reach and create a bad precedent over something like this, there must be more egregious cases to pursue.
Just tell CNN and fox that it has been launched and that based on your calculations it should come back down somewhere in the region of, say, Los Angeles after completing 9 orbits.
Then just wait for people to phone in sightings / damage claims. I'm sure someone would respond - they are very public spirited.
But then you can only deliver shrunken versions of what's available today.
The coolness of the Hardware was what I mostly heard about as the program was coming together - without that "cool factor" and the $100 tag I don't think it would have had the credibility and impetus that it got from early on.
I think it had to have all it had (maybe more) to get anywhere at all, baby steps just would not have cut it.
But my son loves it, he's 6 and he loves playing sim city, even when I point out that his city has zero population and he clearly does not know what tax is. He will learn about taxes all too soon and in the mean time, he will learn about computing organically. I'm pleased that he has a chance to do so without being force fed "only one way to do things".
And I'm sure the kid who thought the internet was inside the OLPC has learned a lot through having an XO too.
Would there even be a classmate PC if not for XO. Would classmate have been as good as it is if XO and the new OLPC had not pointed the way for how all of these devices could be better. Will the next generation of XO and classmate and ee-whatever be better yet next time around. YBY sweet fat A.
Seems to me that Negroponte has achieved a great deal, and I suspect that there's a lot more to come and that the children are the winners.
I and many believe firmly that widespread education is a dire need as well as sustenance, and that the former could help provide the latter in years to come.
I wouldn't write Negroponte or OLPC off yet, the OLPC foundation (and the Intel classmate team, for what they do) has my sincere thanks.
The scouting and guiding movements are major organizations to which many children belong and to say that choosing whether or not to join in with your peers is a simple matter of choice, say like choosing between vanilla and chocolate ice cream, is willfully ignorant.
Scouting has had built for it a place in society as part of an implicit two-way deal, it is both a contributor to and a beneficiary of the commonwealth.
If they were barring blacks or people with disabilities they would rightly be hauled over the coals. Discrimination by religion and orientation are just as bad, and are unbecoming of an institution like Scouting, which should be open to all and cut out this discriminatory crap.
I suggest that someone create a fantastic application for the scouts that gets rolled out globally and then launches a gay advocacy and religious tolerance (is that an oxymoron) program with all of the contacts it collects.
After voting is done, print out a bar code and human readable number by way of a receipt. Give the voter the option to print further "receipts" that would correspond to having voted for any candidate they wished, so that they could potentially pretend to a third party that they had voted in any way they liked.
Any receipt number could be entered into the internet to show the voting that it represents, or scanned at wal-mart or something to show the same result.
The numbers chosen would be cryptographically signed so that independent authorities could distinguish genuine voter receipts from either totaly bogus ones, or ones that had been generated by the voter at the booth. Hold the key in escrow somewhere.
That way, anyone buying a vote can be given a receipt that shows that the vote was cast as purchased, but would not be able to tell if it was the actual vote that was registered.
Anyone casting a real vote can use the real receipt online as the parent poster suggests
There is no need to put a timestamp on the receipt or the voters name, and you can have a friend pick one up for you if you really want to show it to an employer.
Anyone looking up vast quantities of bogus votes could be rounded up and shot (subject to rounding errors)
So these are exams for 16 year olds; what is a 16 year old supposed to do with this education ?
I was educated in the UK, and I left school at 16 to start an apprenticeship - I'm not sure that there are many of those left.
If I had stayed at school I would have done "A" levels - the (at the time) horribly hard exams designed to stop people from going to university.
I'm not kidding, the public wanted value for the money they spent on university education and A levels were a way to screen out those that might struggle to make it. In some ways they help make a "4 year degree" only take 3 years to obtain in the UK.
If I had done the A levels and not gone to university I would have been considered an academic oddball, who really did not fit into the scheme well.
So there were two streams of people doing exams; the university-bound and the apprenticeship-bound and the exams were tailored to those needs.
Needs must have changed...
1) UK and other nations want to encourage further education, not put a barrier in the way
2) Many of the traditional forms of employment for 16 yr olds have gone, 16 years is a waypoint in a normal schooling to 18 now.
3) Universities have welcomed "nontraditional" academic backgrounds for years, and indication to me that the old way of doing exams was not considered optimal.
I think it's inappropriate to expect the exams to stay the same when their context has changed.
Given the lamentable scarcity of women in engineering, and the amount of knowledge that would be necessary to build up over a lifetime to achieve a sentient machine...
It seems to me quite plausible that the creator could be an elderly white-haired gentlemen with a long white beard. Now all we have to do is start a trend among scientists and engineers to dress in flowing white robes and to flood their labs with CO2 "smoke" and speak nonsense in a booming voice to truly fuck with the new creations' minds (again ?).
If your device is essentially an FPGA, then implementing the app-specific stuff in programmable logic and throwing in in an ARM IP core keeps the component count down.
I don't think you can get "Atom" as a VHDL IP core.
You only need a half dozen or so instructions to program the whole thing in brainfuck anyway.
I wonder why the Bus is being built to add future modules. I can't see them upgrading the satellites post-launch, and why over-build a bus to give capabilities that are not immediately needed when every ounce counts ?
Maybe I have the wrong idea, but I'm picturing an orbiting 19" rack with lots of blank panels and an over-sized power supply.
Slashdot Mirror
Things that have caught my eye include...
1) The http://www.tubedepot.com/diy-k-16ls.html 16W stereo tube amplifier kit. There's nothing like thermionics to get a gut feel for how electronics works. As a bonus - you will actually get something you might want to use for your effort.
2) The Spartan3E starter kit seemed to me to be good value in FPGA toys: http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail?name=122-1536-ND
3) silabs have some nice mixed-signal MCUs for analog dorking around. 8051 instruction set and a form factor that you can actually solder to something: http://www.silabs.com/tgwWebApp/public/web_content/products/Microcontrollers/en/mcu_developmenttools.htm
Instead of emailing them a message, why not put the message on your secure server and email them a link.
When they follow the link they can be prompted for a password that you have pre-arranged over the phone. From there they could securely download and read the email, or go further and download and install certificates and keys that you had created that could be used for future communication.
It seems unlikely to me that the Swedish government would bug phone calls as well as the internet - especially if neither the sender or the recipient lived in Sweden. Even if they are, how likely is it that they would connect the dots. They are probably only doing this because it is easy, low-hanging intelligence. But if you are paranoid, I'm sure you could find a way to do the initial key exchange sub rosa.
Or are you spamming ?
My Kindergardener going-on 1st grader more or less taught himself to read (we read to him and sang alphabet songs etc. and the school sang more alphabet songs and encouraged reading)
He now has the opportunity to be in a mixed 1st grade + 2nd grade class next year. This is, of course, a cost saving issue (and I'm not against cost saving in principal) but it's being tacitly promoted as a "hothouse" for the chosen first graders and I'm not wild about the idea. My concerns are...
1) Are the 2nd graders that will mix with the 1st graders those have special remedial needs
2) What happens with the social ties he's been forging with other 1st graders.
I'm beginning to think that the academic content of school for him is probably not as important as the social content right now and would be very happy if the school could get him to be confident, happy, well socialized among his peers and to love learning.
Either he or I can teach him the academics - for a few years to come at least.
I think the design suits the purpose...
1) Get Taxpayer $$s to design a vulnerable piece of shit
2) Charge more $$s to manufacture said VPOS
3) VPOS gets shot down --> more orders
4) Profit (more)...
Don't forget to patent blindingly obvious things too - like "container for transporting items", just to make it hard for anyone to invent anything worthwhile.
Seems one has to jeopardize one's livelihood over every small thing, like whether to accept a used PC or not. Hence I would have thought one could argue that accepting the PC as it was and using it for business was not a completely free choice. A man's gotta eat.
If Fiola's side of the story can be taken at face value, then presumably he can sue - not just for the loss of income, but for the damage to his reputation, emotional distress at the nature of the material etc.
Having said that - bandwagon rides are fun, so my gut feel is that Fiola was complicit in at least some way, even if he saw the computer behaving weirdly and did not report it. Perhaps this will help him establish that his reputation was tarnished by this whole episode.
Me too...
It must be hard to draw the line, but it seems over zealous to me - after all, the scripts may only be a convenience measure to automate a perfectly do-able manual installation.
I don't see why Supermicro should be expected to teach everybody how to install, compile and use BB.
I'd hate SFLC to over-reach and create a bad precedent over something like this, there must be more egregious cases to pursue.
I guess that's one other reason why IANAL.
I've never seen busybox on any of it and I generally buy a dozen or so servers per year (mostly from serversdirect.com).
If they're taking the piss I'll look out for an alternative for future purchases.
Just tell CNN and fox that it has been launched and that based on your calculations it should come back down somewhere in the region of, say, Los Angeles after completing 9 orbits.
Then just wait for people to phone in sightings / damage claims. I'm sure someone would respond - they are very public spirited.
Launch it from a jetliner - say Quito to Rio flight. I'm sure they wouldn't mind...
Is there any milage in ejecting the satellite from the sabot using HE.
Surely one could build a cannon.
The payload would have to be pretty robust, but on the legal side, perhaps it falls under the second amendment.
Maybe we should call it oil-9
You don't need a shallow sea - just drain the Cuyahoga River and turn the entire basin into a fuel fermenter.
I believe experiments in the 1930s through the 1960s were highly successful.
But then you can only deliver shrunken versions of what's available today.
The coolness of the Hardware was what I mostly heard about as the program was coming together - without that "cool factor" and the $100 tag I don't think it would have had the credibility and impetus that it got from early on.
I think it had to have all it had (maybe more) to get anywhere at all, baby steps just would not have cut it.
I think you need to kick start peoples' imagination from time to time too.
I have an XO - It has lots of flaws.
But my son loves it, he's 6 and he loves playing sim city, even when I point out that his city has zero population and he clearly does not know what tax is. He will learn about taxes all too soon and in the mean time, he will learn about computing organically. I'm pleased that he has a chance to do so without being force fed "only one way to do things".
And I'm sure the kid who thought the internet was inside the OLPC has learned a lot through having an XO too.
Would there even be a classmate PC if not for XO. Would classmate have been as good as it is if XO and the new OLPC had not pointed the way for how all of these devices could be better. Will the next generation of XO and classmate and ee-whatever be better yet next time around. YBY sweet fat A.
Seems to me that Negroponte has achieved a great deal, and I suspect that there's a lot more to come and that the children are the winners.
I and many believe firmly that widespread education is a dire need as well as sustenance, and that the former could help provide the latter in years to come.
I wouldn't write Negroponte or OLPC off yet, the OLPC foundation (and the Intel classmate team, for what they do) has my sincere thanks.
The scouting and guiding movements are major organizations to which many children belong and to say that choosing whether or not to join in with your peers is a simple matter of choice, say like choosing between vanilla and chocolate ice cream, is willfully ignorant.
Scouting has had built for it a place in society as part of an implicit two-way deal, it is both a contributor to and a beneficiary of the commonwealth.
If they were barring blacks or people with disabilities they would rightly be hauled over the coals. Discrimination by religion and orientation are just as bad, and are unbecoming of an institution like Scouting, which should be open to all and cut out this discriminatory crap.
I suggest that someone create a fantastic application for the scouts that gets rolled out globally and then launches a gay advocacy and religious tolerance (is that an oxymoron) program with all of the contacts it collects.
1) Maybe they shouldn't sell their vote if they are that stupid (then-again, maybe they should !)
2) The very existence of this scheme makes the vote unsellable
3) They don't have to print the dupe receipts, they don't even have to print a real receipt unless they want one.
plus this way, A voter can get $20 for every candidate on the ballot. Sounds like a good way to re-distribute wealth.
After voting is done, print out a bar code and human readable number by way of a receipt. Give the voter the option to print further "receipts" that would correspond to having voted for any candidate they wished, so that they could potentially pretend to a third party that they had voted in any way they liked.
Any receipt number could be entered into the internet to show the voting that it represents, or scanned at wal-mart or something to show the same result.
The numbers chosen would be cryptographically signed so that independent authorities could distinguish genuine voter receipts from either totaly bogus ones, or ones that had been generated by the voter at the booth. Hold the key in escrow somewhere.
That way, anyone buying a vote can be given a receipt that shows that the vote was cast as purchased, but would not be able to tell if it was the actual vote that was registered.
Anyone casting a real vote can use the real receipt online as the parent poster suggests
There is no need to put a timestamp on the receipt or the voters name, and you can have a friend pick one up for you if you really want to show it to an employer.
Anyone looking up vast quantities of bogus votes could be rounded up and shot (subject to rounding errors)
So these are exams for 16 year olds; what is a 16 year old supposed to do with this education ?
I was educated in the UK, and I left school at 16 to start an apprenticeship - I'm not sure that there are many of those left.
If I had stayed at school I would have done "A" levels - the (at the time) horribly hard exams designed to stop people from going to university.
I'm not kidding, the public wanted value for the money they spent on university education and A levels were a way to screen out those that might struggle to make it. In some ways they help make a "4 year degree" only take 3 years to obtain in the UK.
If I had done the A levels and not gone to university I would have been considered an academic oddball, who really did not fit into the scheme well.
So there were two streams of people doing exams; the university-bound and the apprenticeship-bound and the exams were tailored to those needs.
Needs must have changed...
1) UK and other nations want to encourage further education, not put a barrier in the way
2) Many of the traditional forms of employment for 16 yr olds have gone, 16 years is a waypoint in a normal schooling to 18 now.
3) Universities have welcomed "nontraditional" academic backgrounds for years, and indication to me that the old way of doing exams was not considered optimal.
I think it's inappropriate to expect the exams to stay the same when their context has changed.
Given the lamentable scarcity of women in engineering, and the amount of knowledge that would be necessary to build up over a lifetime to achieve a sentient machine...
It seems to me quite plausible that the creator could be an elderly white-haired gentlemen with a long white beard. Now all we have to do is start a trend among scientists and engineers to dress in flowing white robes and to flood their labs with CO2 "smoke" and speak nonsense in a booming voice to truly fuck with the new creations' minds (again ?).
A $75 laptop in a year's time - what's that? 3 Euro?
If your device is essentially an FPGA, then implementing the app-specific stuff in programmable logic and throwing in in an ARM IP core keeps the component count down.
I don't think you can get "Atom" as a VHDL IP core.
You only need a half dozen or so instructions to program the whole thing in brainfuck anyway.
I mean, with the right arrangement of magnets, could we get the brain to boot LILO ?
I wonder why the Bus is being built to add future modules. I can't see them upgrading the satellites post-launch, and why over-build a bus to give capabilities that are not immediately needed when every ounce counts ?
Maybe I have the wrong idea, but I'm picturing an orbiting 19" rack with lots of blank panels and an over-sized power supply.