That isn't blindness, it's marketing-caliber evil. Essentially, the corpse is just a pawn in a ghoulish little rebranding exercise. "Catholicism: Not as nutty as our reputation would lead you to expect."
It's just a bunch of bones, so it isn't a huge deal; but they are using, rather than honoring, him here.
Trouble is, religions have this nasty habit of attempting to make claims that are, in fact, empirically verifiable (or, typically, falsifiable), and then throwing a fit when science calls them on it.
For sufficiently vacuous definitions of religion, and definitions of science that bend over backwards to be purely descriptive, the two are compatible. However, as an empirical matter, incompatibilities are frequently observed.
They might be control freaks just for the hell of it; but it would arguably be a quite irrational act on their part.
If you are Apple, and have a potent mix of good marketshare and unbeatable mindshare, you can get away with pissing people off, if you think that it is in your interest.
If you are a carrier, trying to whip every last nickel out of your "2 year contract and stiff ETF" serfs, you don't have to care, you're the phone company.
If, on the other hand, you've just spent 1.2billion on a nice, but rather getting hammered in the marketplace, OS, it probably isn't a good time to upset that OS's most enthusiastic fanboys and developers.
If they decide that prospective commercial developers want a War On Piracy(tm), or if they ink some sort of ghastly "Premium Content" deal, any amount of evil is possible; but so long as they are focused on "not losing", they should remain fairly cooperative.
In terms of hardware, HP has(within the limitations imposed by Intel and physics) pretty much been-there-done-that in terms of Wintel Tablets. Their TC1100, with ULV Pentium M, up to 2BG of RAM, 802.11b/g, bluetooth, and fully detachable keyboard was among the high-water marks of the genre. The only difference from what you mention is that the screen was stylus based, both because capacitive displays of that size weren't really available yet, and because XP really requires fairly fine pointing precision, unless you are running at an annoying low resolution, or have managed to get everything working with a nonstandard DPI setting.
They also have their line of "touchsmart" desktops, which run full Windows, have finger-touch screens(in the 20-inch range), and some vendor shovelware designed to give you some touch stuff to do. They aren't bad, per se, you don't pay much of a premium over standard wintel all-in-ones, and the touch can be a fun gimmick, but you don't exactly see them sprouting on every desk. As far as I can tell, the trouble is that, as long as the number of Windows boxes without touch vastly exceeds the number with, "touch support" is going to be an afterthought. MS has done about as well as can be expected in natively rendering touch events into mouse activity, so using applications that don't care is certainly possible; but it isn't terribly pleasant. There aren't many applications that explicitly go beyond that(aside from a few that support some gestures or something, or esoteric warehouse management stuff, and other bespoke specialty things).
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against people wanting Windows-based tablets. Given that building one will basically involve chopping the keyboard off a netbook and springing for a more expensive display, I'm sure that they'll get their wish. However, Windows-based tablets have been tried, off and on, for ages(Windows 3.1 had a Pen-computing add-on) and it has just never worked that well, outside of niche situations with a limited set of bespoke applications(at which point, unless your volume is tiny, you could probably get a ruggedized CE device with 4 times the battery life to do the job).
It is stylistically pretty similar to OSX(mostly FOSS guts, more or less proprietary UI and core applications), though it arguably leans slightly closer to "open" than OSX does. If only for lack of time and manpower, Palm didn't do very much to the stock linux layer(whereas, while it is a certified UNIX and all that, OSX is a bit of a culture shock coming from Linux or one of the classic BSDs) and the WebOS UI layer is largely rendered in HTML+CSS+javascript in a webkit-based system.
It isn't like android, where there is, in fact, an OSS release that you can actually download and build and go(except for proprietary Google components); but architecturally it is basically near-stock Linux(arguably more "stock" than Android's Linux layer) along with Webkit, with a few platform-specific javascript extensions to support program access to specific hardware features.
It isn't exactly the successor to OpenMoko; but it is basically a conglomeration of OSS components, and its "SDK" is extremely close to web development, with a few nonstandard bits and pieces for local application and hardware access stuff.
If people were so serious about buying Windows based slates, the sales of "Tablet PCs" wouldn't have been sucking for the last decade.
Also, "WebOS" implies that its UI layer is based on web technologies, not that it is browser-only. Support for local applications is pretty much exactly the same as Android. And, with native plugins, support for native code might even be said to be slightly better; but certainly no worse.
Amusingly, Texas is particularly bad. In addition to "controlled substances", they have "controlled glassware". You need the permission of the state to own such sinister items as Erlenmeyer flasks.
Luckily, they can still wave "don't tread on me" flags with impunity, so it's ok...
Re:Days of Garage Inventor long gone(if ever exist
on
Scientific R&D At Home?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
That's only partially true. Your chances of doing something interesting in physics are probably ~0, unless you have an untapped well of mathematical genius that you've failed to notice. On the other hand, biology and astronomy are fields that suffer from having truly enormous research targets. There are plenty of expensive astronomy devices pointed at objects suspected of being particularly interesting; but astronomy as a field could really use a full-sky, all-night, all-year, survey in the "dedicated amateur" range of hardware quality. You aren't going to score a nobel for elucidating the physics of novel ultradistant pulsars; but being the only person with a 10-inch reflector focused on that bit of the sky is totally doable. Whether that bit of the sky does anything useful, of course, is a matter of luck.
In Bio, you can probably discover a dozen novel microorganisms is just about any pool of slimy water large enough to drown in. You'll have to do a lot of slogging to learn enough about it to publish(if there were a faster way, grad students would be graduating faster), and you probably won't be lucky enough to find one that does anything wildly cool; but simply finding one should be doable enough. Even larger stuff like insects is pretty under-cataloged in many locations. Again, your odds of finding a particularly notable bug aren't huge; but enough slogging will almost certainly yield pictures and specimens of something that nobody has ever come up with a latinate name for. Whether this motivates you is another question; but the sample set is just so enormous that, as long as you have a decent microscope/camera, and perhaps a budget for ordering genetic sequences of stuff, a novel organism should just be a matter of effort.
Assuming you have some requisite talent, and enough budget for a decent tinkering shop, you can probably do some novel applied science/engineering(albeit probably not based on novel principles), as long as you stay away from areas of commercial interest. The field of "best approximation, for ~$100, of Thing X that normally starts at ~$20,00" has been a tinker's classic for ages. Your work won't exactly represent an advance(the usual price tag isn't just because the commercial guys are price gouging); but it may well be novel and creative. In certain cases, often being pursued by deeply underfunded NGOs, such work could even be of humanitarian significance(think solar ovens, for instance, the field of solar power is overwhelmingly dominated by semiconductor guys doing stuff with novel quantum-well fabrication in order to eke out that extra.5% theoretical max efficiency, or old school thermodynamics/hardcore plumbing and engineering outfits who know how to integrate thousands of meters of high pressure steam tubes in an efficient and reliable way. However, if you can come up with a better design for something that will cook dinner for under $10 in plywood, paint, and tinfoil, there's about a billion people who could stop burning down their ecosystems for charcoal...).
In politics, there is something referred to as the "Overton Window". Essentially, the range of policy positions that are considered "serious", "practical", "respectable", etc. This doesn't mean that everything in the window has a chance of being executed(the opposition party(s) for instance, are virtually always inside this window, and they often don't get what they want); but anything outside the window doesn't even need to be argued against. It can simply be dismissed as "extreme", "unrealistic", "out-of-touch", and so forth.
However, groups outside of the window, while they cannot get what they want(under the political process, nothing stopping them from just shooting some people), do have the effect of gradually pushing the window in one direction or another. I'm not sure whether this happens because people use frequency of hearing an opinion as a heuristic for its popularity, or because having an extremist to point to allows former extremists to claim moderate credentials: "No, my plan to privatize virtually every state function I can is wholly reasonable. Look at those crazy libertarians... Now there is extreme." "No, I just support solid common sense and common decency to our fellow citizens, I'm not a wacko like those communists."
In the case of "online privacy"(such as it is), Facebook's little two-steps-forward-one-step-back-I-apologize-to-anyone-who-was-offended game is playing out an essentially similar dynamic. Every time they do something extreme, the new "moderate" position they "retreat" to is just a little bit further in the direction they want. They aren't just feeling out public opinion, they are working to shape it.
While(unless your time is worth about $.30 an hour) these make lousy primary machines(and, unfortunately, due to the fact that many of them are cheap junk, they don't have compensating advantages like 15 hour battery lives, or ultralight weight), that doesn't mean they are without use.
~$80-$100 for a complete embedded system, with LCD and inputs, and a reasonable set of peripherals opens up all sorts of interesting projects, if you can get your OS of choice on there.
I don't know why linux hasn't supplanted CE in this area; but I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that most of the low-end ARM-based "netbooks" are pretty much the direct architectural descendants of the pocketPCs of old, just in a different case/form factor.
With Linux on ARM is that ARM devices are substantially less standardized that x86s are when it comes to such niceties as the preboot/early stage of boot process.
Because of the decades-long Wintel monopoly, pretty much any x86 board(with the exception of a few oddball embedded things and OLPCs), boots in almost the same way. Worst case, the ACPI implementation is so shot that you have to boot with -noacpi in order to get the kernel up and running.
ARM devices, though, have had considerable freedom to do their own thing, so long as the vendor provided a BSP that papered over the weirdness enough to run the OS of the customer's choice(historically WinCe/VXworks, more recently this has included Linux). On the plus side, this has meant some fairly interesting capabilities in some of the bootloaders. On the minus side, this has meant a multitude of bootloaders(a few OSS, redboot, u-boot), some fairly common, and some horrid oddball crap that even Google has only heard mentioned a few times.
If you can get the kernel booted, userland is not such a big deal. Debian has had a pretty decent one for a while, and the Ubuntu guys have recently been doing some "suitable for low-rez screens" type polishing. The issue will be figuring out the bootloader. And, of course, there is absolutely no assurance that the drivers for whatever oddball devices are crammed into the cheapo SoiCs in these things exist, or work properly.
If you get to the stage of "what distro do I want", you are ahead of the game.
The difference is that programs are mathematical constructs and thus(if you are willing to take the time, and possibly constrain the set of programs it is possible for you to write) you can prove their behavior.
Probably because, at least in theory, the rules of Virtual security are more favorable?
In the real world, security is hard because matter is malleable. When an armored vehicle gets blown up, we don't say that it "failed to validate its inputs". It just didn't have enough armor. Even in cases where it survives, all it would have taken is larger projectile, or one moving a bit faster... When somebody pulls an SQL injection or something, though, it is because the targeted program did something wrong, not because of the inescapable limitations of matter.
The only real class of security issues that mirror real-world attacks are DOS attacks and the like, because computational capacity, memory, and bandwidth are finite.
Do you actually think that all IT and PC security companies have a giant cartel going, where they all secretly agree to suck? Somehow including all the "independent security researchers", which includes anybody with a computer, a clue, and some free software?
Seriously? If there were some magic bullet, the temptation for one cartel member to make a giant pile of cash on it would be overwhelming.
Much more troublesome, for security, is the fact that there are no known methods of secure computing that are economically competitive with insecure ones, not to mention the issue of legacy systems.
You can buy a lot of low end sysadmins re-imaging infected machines for what it would cost to write a fully proven OS and application collection that matches people's expectations.
I suspect that this action is one part "Hey, assuming you don't need strong legal assurance, writing a license is trivial" and one part "PETA likes publicity.
If PETA had devoted major resources to getting into software licensing, that would obviously be stupid. However, this seems to fairly clearly be the product of a single animal-rights enthusiast who just decided to write a quick mod of the standard BSD license. Probably took an afternoon, and was done on that individual's initiative. Once done, it is only logical, and fully in line with their past behavior, for PETA to use it as a publicity mechanism. "PETA releases software license" is enough in the "news of the weird/human interest/oddball filler" area, that it should get some play on a slow news day, and at virtually zero cost.
Whether the publicity will be of any broader use is another question; but it seems like a cheap source of such.
Bringing "do no harm" into a software licence will(assuming anything other than toy software every gets thus licensed) really give the courts some exercise.
Ethics has, more or less since its inception, been tying itself in knots with ever subtler and more clever hypothetical conundra concerning harm, what it is, whether one can inflict lesser harm to avert greater, etc. Even better, to know whether you are "harming" something, you pretty much have to have decided what that something's interests are.
Obviously, using HPL-licensed firmware in my PuppyGrinder-3000 is probably not going to fly. What about using it in my WolfBot: Aibo's revenge deer population control device? Some direct harm is done; but nasty disease/starvation population crashes are averted. Anybody who has made it through PHIL-101 should be able to think of numerous similar examples.
Also potentially amusing, this is perhaps the only software license I know(other than perhaps the not-publicly-disclosed ones regarding DRM system robustness), where a software bug could put you in violation of the license. A radiotherapy machine would be compliant, a radiotherapy machine with a slight but troublesome bug in the dosing algorithm wouldn't be.
They seem to be aware of that:
"As great as we think this license is, it has a number of limitations and drawbacks:
* It's incompatible with the Open Source Initiatives (OSI) definition of open-source software, since it does not comply with their 6th condition "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor".
* It is not considered "free software" according to the Free Software Foundation (FSF), since it does not comply with their requirement "The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0)".
* It adds to the problematic proliferation of software licenses in the open-source community.
* It is not compatible with any version of GPL. This is a major drawback, since it prevents the combination of HPL and GPL licensed software. Read a good argument for why software should comply with GPL in the article "Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else.".
There's also the consideration that, if you are designing an API that you hope will see broad 3rd-party uptake, you are probably better off making it comprehensive and internally sensible and consistent, rather than starting small and hoping that the additions you tack on in the future don't become a perverse mess.
If it turns out, after the fact, that 90% of your users just want easy access to 10% of it, it isn't exactly impossible to have a trivial_subset library that sits on top, and makes it easy for people with limited needs to use that part of the API.
Now, if the API is internally inconsistent or perverse in some way, it certainly deserves criticism. If it is merely overkill for the easiest 90% of projects that might use it, that's just to be expected.
That(for better or for worse) is the difference between a patent and a copyright.
IIRC, IBM held no patents critical to the implementation of an "IBM compatible"(they probably had some stuff that we relevant; but could be worked around). They held copyrights over their BIOS code, and their circuit boards, and the masks of any ICs they designed; but copyright only means "you cannot duplicate this specific thing". When Compaq cleanroomed a compatible implementation from scratch, copyright had nothing to say on the matter. Patents, on the other hand, say "you cannot, independently or otherwise, implement this specific thing".
That is why VP8 is in potential hot water. The algorithms and methods themselves are patented, so it doesn't matter how independent your implementation is(if independent implementation were good enough, VP8 would be irellevant. x.264 is, to the best of my understanding, a completely independent implementation of h264; but it is still on shaky ground wherever software patents are valid).
There's this obscure little company, called AT&T, used to sell telegraphs or somesuch, that seems to disagree...
Also, the money quote from the "president of licensing and business development for MPEG LA": "We, as a company, don't make any assurances that all essential patents are included."
Statistically, implementing something with the MPEG LA's blessing almost certainly reduces the number of companies that will potentially be suing you(if only by the number of members of the MPEG LA...); but it only takes one to tangle you in a very nasty lawsuit, risking a major payout, or even an injunction against your product.
Not only were the machines similar they were virtually identical. Unless you were looking at the case badge, or the PCI vendor strings, you would have been hard-pressed to tell which was which. Same intel silicon, very similar HDDs and optical drives(not that that really mattered, neither party was willing to quote anything other than a capacity, so the brands we got in the test boxes were assurances of nothing). The RAM was within spitting distance of one another and(again), the vendors would assure us of nothing other than "X capacity, verified compatible) so it wasn't as though the specifics of the test samples told us much.
We ended up going with Dell, just because they were cheaper, their driver download pages are modestly less unpleasant, and their "ImageDirect" tool is actually pretty handy.
Unless you have particular reason to believe otherwise, exhaustive benchmarking will be a waste of your, and the exec's time. The only exception that I can think of would be if you were advocating for something unusual but potentially interesting(ie. Most corporate desktops are brutally I/O bound, straining under the load of A/V, constant patches and updates, and so forth. SSDs would make them fly, comparatively. Particularly if your company actually has a lot of expensive people running around, a "number of minutes from cold boot to productivity" benchmark could be eye-opening.)
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That isn't blindness, it's marketing-caliber evil. Essentially, the corpse is just a pawn in a ghoulish little rebranding exercise. "Catholicism: Not as nutty as our reputation would lead you to expect."
It's just a bunch of bones, so it isn't a huge deal; but they are using, rather than honoring, him here.
Trouble is, religions have this nasty habit of attempting to make claims that are, in fact, empirically verifiable (or, typically, falsifiable), and then throwing a fit when science calls them on it.
For sufficiently vacuous definitions of religion, and definitions of science that bend over backwards to be purely descriptive, the two are compatible. However, as an empirical matter, incompatibilities are frequently observed.
They might be control freaks just for the hell of it; but it would arguably be a quite irrational act on their part.
If you are Apple, and have a potent mix of good marketshare and unbeatable mindshare, you can get away with pissing people off, if you think that it is in your interest.
If you are a carrier, trying to whip every last nickel out of your "2 year contract and stiff ETF" serfs, you don't have to care, you're the phone company.
If, on the other hand, you've just spent 1.2billion on a nice, but rather getting hammered in the marketplace, OS, it probably isn't a good time to upset that OS's most enthusiastic fanboys and developers.
If they decide that prospective commercial developers want a War On Piracy(tm), or if they ink some sort of ghastly "Premium Content" deal, any amount of evil is possible; but so long as they are focused on "not losing", they should remain fairly cooperative.
In terms of hardware, HP has(within the limitations imposed by Intel and physics) pretty much been-there-done-that in terms of Wintel Tablets. Their TC1100, with ULV Pentium M, up to 2BG of RAM, 802.11b/g, bluetooth, and fully detachable keyboard was among the high-water marks of the genre. The only difference from what you mention is that the screen was stylus based, both because capacitive displays of that size weren't really available yet, and because XP really requires fairly fine pointing precision, unless you are running at an annoying low resolution, or have managed to get everything working with a nonstandard DPI setting.
They also have their line of "touchsmart" desktops, which run full Windows, have finger-touch screens(in the 20-inch range), and some vendor shovelware designed to give you some touch stuff to do. They aren't bad, per se, you don't pay much of a premium over standard wintel all-in-ones, and the touch can be a fun gimmick, but you don't exactly see them sprouting on every desk. As far as I can tell, the trouble is that, as long as the number of Windows boxes without touch vastly exceeds the number with, "touch support" is going to be an afterthought. MS has done about as well as can be expected in natively rendering touch events into mouse activity, so using applications that don't care is certainly possible; but it isn't terribly pleasant. There aren't many applications that explicitly go beyond that(aside from a few that support some gestures or something, or esoteric warehouse management stuff, and other bespoke specialty things).
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against people wanting Windows-based tablets. Given that building one will basically involve chopping the keyboard off a netbook and springing for a more expensive display, I'm sure that they'll get their wish. However, Windows-based tablets have been tried, off and on, for ages(Windows 3.1 had a Pen-computing add-on) and it has just never worked that well, outside of niche situations with a limited set of bespoke applications(at which point, unless your volume is tiny, you could probably get a ruggedized CE device with 4 times the battery life to do the job).
It is stylistically pretty similar to OSX(mostly FOSS guts, more or less proprietary UI and core applications), though it arguably leans slightly closer to "open" than OSX does. If only for lack of time and manpower, Palm didn't do very much to the stock linux layer(whereas, while it is a certified UNIX and all that, OSX is a bit of a culture shock coming from Linux or one of the classic BSDs) and the WebOS UI layer is largely rendered in HTML+CSS+javascript in a webkit-based system.
It isn't like android, where there is, in fact, an OSS release that you can actually download and build and go(except for proprietary Google components); but architecturally it is basically near-stock Linux(arguably more "stock" than Android's Linux layer) along with Webkit, with a few platform-specific javascript extensions to support program access to specific hardware features.
It isn't exactly the successor to OpenMoko; but it is basically a conglomeration of OSS components, and its "SDK" is extremely close to web development, with a few nonstandard bits and pieces for local application and hardware access stuff.
If people were so serious about buying Windows based slates, the sales of "Tablet PCs" wouldn't have been sucking for the last decade.
Also, "WebOS" implies that its UI layer is based on web technologies, not that it is browser-only. Support for local applications is pretty much exactly the same as Android. And, with native plugins, support for native code might even be said to be slightly better; but certainly no worse.
Amusingly, Texas is particularly bad. In addition to "controlled substances", they have "controlled glassware". You need the permission of the state to own such sinister items as Erlenmeyer flasks.
Luckily, they can still wave "don't tread on me" flags with impunity, so it's ok...
That's only partially true. Your chances of doing something interesting in physics are probably ~0, unless you have an untapped well of mathematical genius that you've failed to notice. On the other hand, biology and astronomy are fields that suffer from having truly enormous research targets. There are plenty of expensive astronomy devices pointed at objects suspected of being particularly interesting; but astronomy as a field could really use a full-sky, all-night, all-year, survey in the "dedicated amateur" range of hardware quality. You aren't going to score a nobel for elucidating the physics of novel ultradistant pulsars; but being the only person with a 10-inch reflector focused on that bit of the sky is totally doable. Whether that bit of the sky does anything useful, of course, is a matter of luck.
.5% theoretical max efficiency, or old school thermodynamics/hardcore plumbing and engineering outfits who know how to integrate thousands of meters of high pressure steam tubes in an efficient and reliable way. However, if you can come up with a better design for something that will cook dinner for under $10 in plywood, paint, and tinfoil, there's about a billion people who could stop burning down their ecosystems for charcoal...).
In Bio, you can probably discover a dozen novel microorganisms is just about any pool of slimy water large enough to drown in. You'll have to do a lot of slogging to learn enough about it to publish(if there were a faster way, grad students would be graduating faster), and you probably won't be lucky enough to find one that does anything wildly cool; but simply finding one should be doable enough. Even larger stuff like insects is pretty under-cataloged in many locations. Again, your odds of finding a particularly notable bug aren't huge; but enough slogging will almost certainly yield pictures and specimens of something that nobody has ever come up with a latinate name for. Whether this motivates you is another question; but the sample set is just so enormous that, as long as you have a decent microscope/camera, and perhaps a budget for ordering genetic sequences of stuff, a novel organism should just be a matter of effort.
Assuming you have some requisite talent, and enough budget for a decent tinkering shop, you can probably do some novel applied science/engineering(albeit probably not based on novel principles), as long as you stay away from areas of commercial interest. The field of "best approximation, for ~$100, of Thing X that normally starts at ~$20,00" has been a tinker's classic for ages. Your work won't exactly represent an advance(the usual price tag isn't just because the commercial guys are price gouging); but it may well be novel and creative. In certain cases, often being pursued by deeply underfunded NGOs, such work could even be of humanitarian significance(think solar ovens, for instance, the field of solar power is overwhelmingly dominated by semiconductor guys doing stuff with novel quantum-well fabrication in order to eke out that extra
In politics, there is something referred to as the "Overton Window". Essentially, the range of policy positions that are considered "serious", "practical", "respectable", etc. This doesn't mean that everything in the window has a chance of being executed(the opposition party(s) for instance, are virtually always inside this window, and they often don't get what they want); but anything outside the window doesn't even need to be argued against. It can simply be dismissed as "extreme", "unrealistic", "out-of-touch", and so forth.
However, groups outside of the window, while they cannot get what they want(under the political process, nothing stopping them from just shooting some people), do have the effect of gradually pushing the window in one direction or another. I'm not sure whether this happens because people use frequency of hearing an opinion as a heuristic for its popularity, or because having an extremist to point to allows former extremists to claim moderate credentials: "No, my plan to privatize virtually every state function I can is wholly reasonable. Look at those crazy libertarians... Now there is extreme." "No, I just support solid common sense and common decency to our fellow citizens, I'm not a wacko like those communists."
In the case of "online privacy"(such as it is), Facebook's little two-steps-forward-one-step-back-I-apologize-to-anyone-who-was-offended game is playing out an essentially similar dynamic. Every time they do something extreme, the new "moderate" position they "retreat" to is just a little bit further in the direction they want. They aren't just feeling out public opinion, they are working to shape it.
While(unless your time is worth about $.30 an hour) these make lousy primary machines(and, unfortunately, due to the fact that many of them are cheap junk, they don't have compensating advantages like 15 hour battery lives, or ultralight weight), that doesn't mean they are without use.
~$80-$100 for a complete embedded system, with LCD and inputs, and a reasonable set of peripherals opens up all sorts of interesting projects, if you can get your OS of choice on there.
I don't know why linux hasn't supplanted CE in this area; but I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that most of the low-end ARM-based "netbooks" are pretty much the direct architectural descendants of the pocketPCs of old, just in a different case/form factor.
With Linux on ARM is that ARM devices are substantially less standardized that x86s are when it comes to such niceties as the preboot/early stage of boot process.
Because of the decades-long Wintel monopoly, pretty much any x86 board(with the exception of a few oddball embedded things and OLPCs), boots in almost the same way. Worst case, the ACPI implementation is so shot that you have to boot with -noacpi in order to get the kernel up and running.
ARM devices, though, have had considerable freedom to do their own thing, so long as the vendor provided a BSP that papered over the weirdness enough to run the OS of the customer's choice(historically WinCe/VXworks, more recently this has included Linux). On the plus side, this has meant some fairly interesting capabilities in some of the bootloaders. On the minus side, this has meant a multitude of bootloaders(a few OSS, redboot, u-boot), some fairly common, and some horrid oddball crap that even Google has only heard mentioned a few times.
If you can get the kernel booted, userland is not such a big deal. Debian has had a pretty decent one for a while, and the Ubuntu guys have recently been doing some "suitable for low-rez screens" type polishing. The issue will be figuring out the bootloader. And, of course, there is absolutely no assurance that the drivers for whatever oddball devices are crammed into the cheapo SoiCs in these things exist, or work properly.
If you get to the stage of "what distro do I want", you are ahead of the game.
The difference is that programs are mathematical constructs and thus(if you are willing to take the time, and possibly constrain the set of programs it is possible for you to write) you can prove their behavior.
Probably because, at least in theory, the rules of Virtual security are more favorable?
In the real world, security is hard because matter is malleable. When an armored vehicle gets blown up, we don't say that it "failed to validate its inputs". It just didn't have enough armor. Even in cases where it survives, all it would have taken is larger projectile, or one moving a bit faster... When somebody pulls an SQL injection or something, though, it is because the targeted program did something wrong, not because of the inescapable limitations of matter.
The only real class of security issues that mirror real-world attacks are DOS attacks and the like, because computational capacity, memory, and bandwidth are finite.
Do you actually think that all IT and PC security companies have a giant cartel going, where they all secretly agree to suck? Somehow including all the "independent security researchers", which includes anybody with a computer, a clue, and some free software?
Seriously? If there were some magic bullet, the temptation for one cartel member to make a giant pile of cash on it would be overwhelming.
Much more troublesome, for security, is the fact that there are no known methods of secure computing that are economically competitive with insecure ones, not to mention the issue of legacy systems.
You can buy a lot of low end sysadmins re-imaging infected machines for what it would cost to write a fully proven OS and application collection that matches people's expectations.
GNU-Killbots are still legally unproblematic. Well, aside from the "killbot" part...
I suspect that this action is one part "Hey, assuming you don't need strong legal assurance, writing a license is trivial" and one part "PETA likes publicity.
If PETA had devoted major resources to getting into software licensing, that would obviously be stupid. However, this seems to fairly clearly be the product of a single animal-rights enthusiast who just decided to write a quick mod of the standard BSD license. Probably took an afternoon, and was done on that individual's initiative. Once done, it is only logical, and fully in line with their past behavior, for PETA to use it as a publicity mechanism. "PETA releases software license" is enough in the "news of the weird/human interest/oddball filler" area, that it should get some play on a slow news day, and at virtually zero cost.
Whether the publicity will be of any broader use is another question; but it seems like a cheap source of such.
Bringing "do no harm" into a software licence will(assuming anything other than toy software every gets thus licensed) really give the courts some exercise.
Ethics has, more or less since its inception, been tying itself in knots with ever subtler and more clever hypothetical conundra concerning harm, what it is, whether one can inflict lesser harm to avert greater, etc. Even better, to know whether you are "harming" something, you pretty much have to have decided what that something's interests are.
Obviously, using HPL-licensed firmware in my PuppyGrinder-3000 is probably not going to fly. What about using it in my WolfBot: Aibo's revenge deer population control device? Some direct harm is done; but nasty disease/starvation population crashes are averted. Anybody who has made it through PHIL-101 should be able to think of numerous similar examples.
Also potentially amusing, this is perhaps the only software license I know(other than perhaps the not-publicly-disclosed ones regarding DRM system robustness), where a software bug could put you in violation of the license. A radiotherapy machine would be compliant, a radiotherapy machine with a slight but troublesome bug in the dosing algorithm wouldn't be.
They seem to be aware of that:
"As great as we think this license is, it has a number of limitations and drawbacks: * It's incompatible with the Open Source Initiatives (OSI) definition of open-source software, since it does not comply with their 6th condition "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor". * It is not considered "free software" according to the Free Software Foundation (FSF), since it does not comply with their requirement "The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0)". * It adds to the problematic proliferation of software licenses in the open-source community. * It is not compatible with any version of GPL. This is a major drawback, since it prevents the combination of HPL and GPL licensed software. Read a good argument for why software should comply with GPL in the article "Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else.".
There's also the consideration that, if you are designing an API that you hope will see broad 3rd-party uptake, you are probably better off making it comprehensive and internally sensible and consistent, rather than starting small and hoping that the additions you tack on in the future don't become a perverse mess.
If it turns out, after the fact, that 90% of your users just want easy access to 10% of it, it isn't exactly impossible to have a trivial_subset library that sits on top, and makes it easy for people with limited needs to use that part of the API.
Now, if the API is internally inconsistent or perverse in some way, it certainly deserves criticism. If it is merely overkill for the easiest 90% of projects that might use it, that's just to be expected.
That(for better or for worse) is the difference between a patent and a copyright.
IIRC, IBM held no patents critical to the implementation of an "IBM compatible"(they probably had some stuff that we relevant; but could be worked around). They held copyrights over their BIOS code, and their circuit boards, and the masks of any ICs they designed; but copyright only means "you cannot duplicate this specific thing". When Compaq cleanroomed a compatible implementation from scratch, copyright had nothing to say on the matter. Patents, on the other hand, say "you cannot, independently or otherwise, implement this specific thing".
That is why VP8 is in potential hot water. The algorithms and methods themselves are patented, so it doesn't matter how independent your implementation is(if independent implementation were good enough, VP8 would be irellevant. x.264 is, to the best of my understanding, a completely independent implementation of h264; but it is still on shaky ground wherever software patents are valid).
There's this obscure little company, called AT&T, used to sell telegraphs or somesuch, that seems to disagree...
Also, the money quote from the "president of licensing and business development for MPEG LA": "We, as a company, don't make any assurances that all essential patents are included."
Statistically, implementing something with the MPEG LA's blessing almost certainly reduces the number of companies that will potentially be suing you(if only by the number of members of the MPEG LA...); but it only takes one to tangle you in a very nasty lawsuit, risking a major payout, or even an injunction against your product.
Not only were the machines similar they were virtually identical. Unless you were looking at the case badge, or the PCI vendor strings, you would have been hard-pressed to tell which was which. Same intel silicon, very similar HDDs and optical drives(not that that really mattered, neither party was willing to quote anything other than a capacity, so the brands we got in the test boxes were assurances of nothing). The RAM was within spitting distance of one another and(again), the vendors would assure us of nothing other than "X capacity, verified compatible) so it wasn't as though the specifics of the test samples told us much.
We ended up going with Dell, just because they were cheaper, their driver download pages are modestly less unpleasant, and their "ImageDirect" tool is actually pretty handy.
Unless you have particular reason to believe otherwise, exhaustive benchmarking will be a waste of your, and the exec's time. The only exception that I can think of would be if you were advocating for something unusual but potentially interesting(ie. Most corporate desktops are brutally I/O bound, straining under the load of A/V, constant patches and updates, and so forth. SSDs would make them fly, comparatively. Particularly if your company actually has a lot of expensive people running around, a "number of minutes from cold boot to productivity" benchmark could be eye-opening.)
Only root (and members of the 'gamete' group) have access to the nucleus0 device...
sudo dd if=genome.helix of=/dev/nucleus0