It didn't help that even the parts EA wasn't squeezing for cash(at least not visibly) were also pretty unexciting:
Teeny-tiny cities, 'agent-based' simulations that purpoted to simulate realistic people and then delivered inchoate little ants that stumbled around randomly filling dwellings and jobs as they bumped into them, cryptic and at times deeply inscrutable simulation behavior.
A pure cash grab would actually have been better: Take a mixture of SC2000 and SC4000, implement in any reasonably contemporary 3d engine, sit back and dribble out new art assets, building types, and assorted other flavor as DLC. That would have been overt creative bankruptcy; but it would have been a basically sound game.
Isn't that a trifle reductive? It is true that you'll need multiple speakers surrounding the subject in order to convincingly fake apparent direction and the like(though you can do fairly well with only two headphones, since they only have two ears and the stereo separation will be extremely good); but you can have arbitrarily many speakers and it isn't "3d audio" unless the signal going to each one has been crafted so as to present the illusion of sound location, distance, and so on; and you can have mere stereo sound that attempts to push the spatial illusion particularly hard, quite possibly to the point of exaggeration or some sort of trickery designed to create a greater sense of stereo separation than is physically available.
In this case, the point of the standard appears to be making it easier to take '3d audio' information(whether recorded in N.m channels, or from a 3d engine of some kind) and crunching it down into the stereo outputs that will convey the effect best on headphones.
Be aware, though: while, indeed, quite hard to kill(a sharp object will do it; but silicone elastomers are quite untroubled by most chemicals that you'd be willing to let near your hands, and such keyboards are sealed enough that spills are largely irrelevant), the keyfeel of such keyboards is...different... The keys sort of 'squish' down and sideways when pressed, very much something that takes getting used to.
If, for some reason, your keyboard needs to be sprayed down with nasty solvents or disinfectants or something on a routine basis the silicone ones are much, much cheaper than the classy, purpose-built, stainless steel ones; but the keyfeel is pretty iffy.
based on the IBM model M. You will not need a new keyboard again for a good many years.
Model M keyboards do not 'die'. On occasion, one will be called to Valhalla to feast with the heroes of legend for eternity; so replacements aren't out of the question; but that's pretty much the only failure mode.
...and I still wouldn't go anywhere near that ground. Too many pink mist incidents in places that have been subject to GROUND searches.
It sounds like the target market is places where the problem is along the lines of "Hey, impoverished local government, you have a zillion acres of variously vegetated former combat zone and no idea where to even start sending in the deminers. Would you prefer to guess blindly or have a (relatively) cheap map with 'probably some bombing over here' marked where applicable?"
Given how much of the world's UXO and especially ill-documented mines fall in places that are poor, somewhat weakly governed, and not necessarily equipped with even decent topographical maps for their entire area, there is probably a lot of room for solutions that can beat 'peasants finding them one limb at a time' as long as they don't cost too much.
It's like healthcare: Sure, "Go to a first world teaching hospital with a superb reputation" isn't a bad idea; but for the almost-everyone who would find that advice irrelevant, there's a lot to be said for trying to take on the low hanging fruit, given that the alternative is basically nothing.
Here's a hint: those out-of-control teachers had no say in choosing the contractor for this test, nor in overpaying them; and they won't be seeing a cut of the administration costs(except in the weak sense that they'll be administered on school days, which are days teachers are paid to work).
Perhaps more importantly, who do you think would end up selling you those 'robots or TV's', and how much do you think you'd end up paying for them, if Pearson is currently able to score 100 million for handing out a bunch of bubble sheets(with the staff already present in schools doing most of the actual handling and proctoring)?
If you can't successfully order a prosaic little test without getting gouged by the contractor, that's typically a very compelling sign that you aren't ready to go shopping for more advanced gizmos.
"they want to know that my quarter horse has the blood of these horses running through it, not copies of it"
Unless American quarter horses are sinister equine vampires of some kind, I'm fairly sure that no quarter horse has the blood of any other quarter horse, let alone multiple quarter horses, running through it. That's just not this 'heredity' stuff works.
Numerous homeopathic remedies can treat mild dehydration(though you have to watch your electroyte balance; because there isn't much there there). Take that, Big Pharma!
Targeting files that can easily be replaced by exactly the same means that they were gotten in the first place doesn't seem like a super brilliant move.
Also, targeting fanatical TES players makes a visit from the Dark Brotherhood a virtual certainty.
"Sweet mother, sweet mother, send your child unto me..."
They might mean 'complex' in the sense that an arduous isn't going to do much without access to a real computer with the dev tools installed; and won't do much that is visible without some basic electrical bodging to connect LEDs and switches or the like. Based on the photos, it looks like they went for something that includes some rudimentary display capabilities by default and may even be modestly programmable without hooking it up to a full PC. That would arguably make it 'less complex' in terms of integration into a classroom. In terms of onboard hardware, I'd be shocked if it isn't more complex than most arduinos. They have good reasons(maturity, code base, and tool chain count for a lot); but Arduinos have actually stuck with rather retro chips and changed only slowly, even as Cortex-M0s and such have come to offer rather more punch for about the same money.
One slightly surprising thing: if you are going to the trouble of spinning a totally new device, why not stick a thumb in TI's eye(and save money), by making that totally new device a calculator-styled system that also has some GPIO and onboard or external programmability?
I can understand the desire to jump into hardware when what you want is currently unavailable(while it arguably failed, the OLPC XO was something that simply wasn't available for purchase until they showed that they were serious about being willing to build them. It was mostly eclipsed by commercial offerings not too much later; but at the time there wasn't anything quite like it, certainly not for the price); but 'relatively friendly intro dev boards' isn't really a category that currently feels neglected. If anything, it is booming. What is the incentive for the BBC to spin yet-another-slightly-different board, rather than glom on to the existing product or product family closest to their needs and focus on a combination of curriculum/documentation and tool chain polish to ensure smooth use in education, even when the teacher isn't a microcontroller geek?
I don't know why this fact escapes some people; but that's (one of) the problems with the 'trust me' argument. Sure, maybe I do trust you with my very life as a sworn blood brother who saved my life a dozen times at great peril to his own and whatnot. That's heartwarming. Doesn't matter a bit when you retire and your successor takes over.
In practice, it's even worse, since there are usually organizational incentives to ratchet up the transgressions(pollsters say that the public is concerned about crime? Politicians respond by promising to Get Tough and pushing the use of previously underexplored capabilities, game over.) Any system that depends on 'trust' in a person or agency is, in fact, not really a rule of law; but a rule of the hopefully-continued discretion of that person or agency.
I've never understood the willingness to use(or the willingness to accept often enough to make using worthwhile) the "Just trust us and our discretion!" argument.
So, benefit of the doubt, maybe they are telling the truth when they say "During the hearing, the state's attorneys avowed that the Public Prosecution does not take the law lightly, and would not call on the law to request data in case of a bicycle theft." Fan-fucking-tastic. Even if I do believe them, do I have any reason to suspect that their successors will be as disciplined, or even as interested? No, no I don't.
It seems like some sort of category error, possibly related to the fact that (in evolutionary terms) we were basically living in tiny kin groups about 10 minutes ago; but in political science terms we haven't really been doing that in a millennium or two. "Trust" is all well and good(actually, very good, it has all sorts of advantages in making things go smoothly and reducing stress and anxiety) among people you interact with; but it's a dangerous thing to extend to institutions, except in its(quite different) sense of 'something is "trusted" if the overall correct function of the system depends on that thing behaving as expected, and there are not external constraints that will assure this'.
When it comes to neighbors, friends, and the like, sure, "trust" is a good thing. When it comes to institutions, the most trustworthy person is the one who says "I'd like to think that you'd find me personally trustworthy, if you knew me socially; but in my official capacity, I don't want you to have to trust me. You should have independent safeguards that would function even if I were a total shitweasel.
In this sort of law enforcement case, if they are so responsible and all, and would never use the law for minor purposes, why does the law allow for use in minor cases? Shouldn't it be uncontroversial to principle-of-least privilege and eliminate the possibility of such use? After all, law enforcement has already said that they have no interest in such capabilities, so surely they won't mind?
Pretty much(it's not entirely clear why they even brought 'open source' into it). The only difference I can see, at least from some 'open standards' initiatives in hardware, is that they are particularly interested in avoiding the bane of 'standards based' not-really-standards, which tend to crop up with things like IPMI, DASH, ASF, and so on.
They don't just want "Well, yeah, it's unique to my hardware and only really works with management consoles I've blessed; but it transfers all its blobs with totally compliant SOAP or whatever!", they are really aiming at 'I shouldn't even know who I bought this from without checking the vendor portion of the MAC address or looking up the serial number". Whether they'll get that, I don't know.
What surprises me is that (while the concerns about discovery, transparency, and national archive access are relevant and important, and not clearly satisfied by this arrangement) there hasn't been more discussion of the security and handling-of-classified-materials aspect.
I get the impression that the Secretary of State likely deals with sensitive materials at work from time to time. I similarly get the impression that, if somebody with access to classified material were discovered to have taken a huge pile of it home and stored it in their garage, they might face some rather unpleasant questions and some...'career limitations' in the future.
Even if she is being 100% forthright with the National Archives, and absolutely everything there is on the up and up; in what sense didn't she have a big pile of classified documents just stored at home under who-knows-what security protocols implemented by god-knows-who? Are you actually allowed to do that? Do only little contractors get squished? What's the deal?
The hardware that the OCP, and companies it represents, are interested in tends to be the slightly bigger stuff: They are outfits whose business depends on running a lot of servers and switches and storage; who have gotten large enough that they are trying to push back against the convenient; but expensive and lock-in prone, vendor-specific tools, interfaces, chassis designs, etc. provided by HP, Dell, Cisco, etc.
When they say that they 'need a supply chain', it's because they are really only interested in partially killing off the traditional enterprise hardware vendor. Being able to call, say, Dell, order however many R730s, with the level of warranty support(from 'statutory minimum, if any, to '4+ years of on-site-within-4-hours) you want; and have them all show up, assembled as ordered, on the loading dock is extremely convenient. Practically essential if you don't want to set up an in-house whitebox assembly line.
They still want that sort of supplier service: call up, tell them what you want and what, if any, warranty you want, have them arrive at your door; but they want to standardize, as much as possible, hardware between vendors, so you would barely notice whether you are popping in HP, Dell, Supermicro, etc. modules, everything will just fit and they'll all report the same values and respond to the same commands from your management system.
That's more customer service than hobbyist procurement(which has its place, random pacific rim vendors on ebay have their quirks; but they sure are cheap, and often do have what you require); they just want to be able to get that logistics expertise; but decoupled from the traditional branded faceplates and ill-standardized LOM intefaces and various other delightful aspects of dealing with hardware vendors.
As best I can tell, 'open source hardware'(in the sense used by the Open Compute Project, and their ilk, not the sense implied by users of the gear logo, who are much closer to OSS in meaning and intent) is much closer to what would be open/cooperative development of APIs in the software world.
The Open Compute Project doesn't really care, certainly not enough to compromise the list of vendors willing to work with them; about your PCB layouts, or your firmware code, or your mask rights; but they are very clear that they don't want to pay for your fancy proprietary blade chassis, or get locked into your 'management ecosystem' with your vendor-specific LOM card and management dashboard: they want servers that comply with mechanical and electrical standards that make them interchangeable, and support specific(usually fairly bare-bones; but standard across vendors) hardware management interfaces. They don't care how you do that, or what is inside your box, they just want your box to slot into their infrastructure, rather than attempting to dictate it.
They definitely aren't 'open hardware' in the GNU sense of 'open' as a moral imperative, and they are only weakly similar to 'open' in the OSS sense of 'open, because it has turned out to be a productive development model as well as allowing internal customization'. They are really much closer to discerning buyers of proprietary components: They don't really care how the black box works, you can keep your secrets if you want; but they want to be in control of what interfaces and features the black box requires and provides. Like buying a GPU: most customers don't care about the silicon, or the firmware, or even the drivers(so long as they are available and not a total pile of shit); but they definitely expect it to support OpenGL, and DirectX if on Windows.
Given that the Open Compute Project people are mostly large scale operators of servers, this focus isn't really a surprise: OEMs are already pretty good at silicon development(and you'd have to have very specific needs, or substantial talent and fab capability, to beat what you can get off the shelf), and they can fabricate sheet metal and design and stuff PCBs as efficiently as you'd expect given the brutal margins in the business; but (in part because of those brutal margins), they've historically tried to gain control over the customer at the interface/API layer. Their cheap crap simply won't promise, and often won't implement, any mechanical, airflow, electrical, or management interface standardization whatsoever(so even if bolting rack ears to consumer desktops seemed like a plan just crazy enough to work, even getting all of them to PXE boot might not happen); and their classy stuff is usually designed to work best when everything else in the datacenter is also purchased from them or their buddies.
The OCP and the companies it represents have little to gain by trying to displace the OEMs at building silicon or stuffing PCBs, they just want to change the game so that they call the shots on how the datacenter fits together, and OEMs compete to be chosen to build the interchangeable modules, rather than OEMs using partially or wholly proprietary interfaces in order to drive vendor lock in.
If you were 'in the parts around Istanbul', that might have made a difference. As is not uncommon generally, or terribly different from arrangements right here at home, your results may vary between some of the more cosmopolitan urban areas and the electorate out in pious hickville.
Pious hickville won the last round at the polls, which is why the current government alternates between highly controversial 'development' projects practically designed to rub the uppity urbanites' noses in it and pandering to reactionary tendencies; but it hardly enjoys a strong mandate in doing this. Unfortunately, you don't actually need a strong mandate, just an electoral majority and a willingness to act like you have a strong mandate.
The obvious reason why this line of research is 'starting' now is that it is only with contemporary solid-state RF hardware that HAARP's sinister mind control can be miniaturized sufficiently for use on rodents in the laboratory, rather than mixed nuts worldwide.
I'm not a subject matter expert; but I've read that drivers take it pretty hard. Apparently knowing that the physics of braking fast enough to avoid the person who jumped in front of your train just don't work out isn't the same as feeling that.
In this specific case, there is the problem of the chosen method being rather hard on the driver of the train and everyone trying to commute on it; so I'd hardly need deity-level powers to advocate trying to keep people off the tracks; but I'd be less enthusiastic about hunting them further.
Since we've made remarkably limited advances in the treatment of patients who think that the world is worth escaping; we've decided to just start blocking the exits. On the plus side, we have some emotionally salient anecdotes, of the sort that will probably cheer you right up unless you are one of those pesky people we can't really treat!
Slashdot Mirror
It didn't help that even the parts EA wasn't squeezing for cash(at least not visibly) were also pretty unexciting:
Teeny-tiny cities, 'agent-based' simulations that purpoted to simulate realistic people and then delivered inchoate little ants that stumbled around randomly filling dwellings and jobs as they bumped into them, cryptic and at times deeply inscrutable simulation behavior.
A pure cash grab would actually have been better: Take a mixture of SC2000 and SC4000, implement in any reasonably contemporary 3d engine, sit back and dribble out new art assets, building types, and assorted other flavor as DLC. That would have been overt creative bankruptcy; but it would have been a basically sound game.
Isn't that a trifle reductive? It is true that you'll need multiple speakers surrounding the subject in order to convincingly fake apparent direction and the like(though you can do fairly well with only two headphones, since they only have two ears and the stereo separation will be extremely good); but you can have arbitrarily many speakers and it isn't "3d audio" unless the signal going to each one has been crafted so as to present the illusion of sound location, distance, and so on; and you can have mere stereo sound that attempts to push the spatial illusion particularly hard, quite possibly to the point of exaggeration or some sort of trickery designed to create a greater sense of stereo separation than is physically available.
In this case, the point of the standard appears to be making it easier to take '3d audio' information(whether recorded in N.m channels, or from a 3d engine of some kind) and crunching it down into the stereo outputs that will convey the effect best on headphones.
Be aware, though: while, indeed, quite hard to kill(a sharp object will do it; but silicone elastomers are quite untroubled by most chemicals that you'd be willing to let near your hands, and such keyboards are sealed enough that spills are largely irrelevant), the keyfeel of such keyboards is...different... The keys sort of 'squish' down and sideways when pressed, very much something that takes getting used to.
If, for some reason, your keyboard needs to be sprayed down with nasty solvents or disinfectants or something on a routine basis the silicone ones are much, much cheaper than the classy, purpose-built, stainless steel ones; but the keyfeel is pretty iffy.
based on the IBM model M. You will not need a new keyboard again for a good many years.
Model M keyboards do not 'die'. On occasion, one will be called to Valhalla to feast with the heroes of legend for eternity; so replacements aren't out of the question; but that's pretty much the only failure mode.
...and I still wouldn't go anywhere near that ground. Too many pink mist incidents in places that have been subject to GROUND searches.
It sounds like the target market is places where the problem is along the lines of "Hey, impoverished local government, you have a zillion acres of variously vegetated former combat zone and no idea where to even start sending in the deminers. Would you prefer to guess blindly or have a (relatively) cheap map with 'probably some bombing over here' marked where applicable?"
Given how much of the world's UXO and especially ill-documented mines fall in places that are poor, somewhat weakly governed, and not necessarily equipped with even decent topographical maps for their entire area, there is probably a lot of room for solutions that can beat 'peasants finding them one limb at a time' as long as they don't cost too much.
It's like healthcare: Sure, "Go to a first world teaching hospital with a superb reputation" isn't a bad idea; but for the almost-everyone who would find that advice irrelevant, there's a lot to be said for trying to take on the low hanging fruit, given that the alternative is basically nothing.
Here's a hint: those out-of-control teachers had no say in choosing the contractor for this test, nor in overpaying them; and they won't be seeing a cut of the administration costs(except in the weak sense that they'll be administered on school days, which are days teachers are paid to work).
Perhaps more importantly, who do you think would end up selling you those 'robots or TV's', and how much do you think you'd end up paying for them, if Pearson is currently able to score 100 million for handing out a bunch of bubble sheets(with the staff already present in schools doing most of the actual handling and proctoring)?
If you can't successfully order a prosaic little test without getting gouged by the contractor, that's typically a very compelling sign that you aren't ready to go shopping for more advanced gizmos.
"they want to know that my quarter horse has the blood of these horses running through it, not copies of it"
Unless American quarter horses are sinister equine vampires of some kind, I'm fairly sure that no quarter horse has the blood of any other quarter horse, let alone multiple quarter horses, running through it. That's just not this 'heredity' stuff works.
What's it like to have no soul?
Universally the case?
Numerous homeopathic remedies can treat mild dehydration(though you have to watch your electroyte balance; because there isn't much there there). Take that, Big Pharma!
Targeting files that can easily be replaced by exactly the same means that they were gotten in the first place doesn't seem like a super brilliant move.
Also, targeting fanatical TES players makes a visit from the Dark Brotherhood a virtual certainty.
"Sweet mother, sweet mother, send your child unto me..."
They might mean 'complex' in the sense that an arduous isn't going to do much without access to a real computer with the dev tools installed; and won't do much that is visible without some basic electrical bodging to connect LEDs and switches or the like. Based on the photos, it looks like they went for something that includes some rudimentary display capabilities by default and may even be modestly programmable without hooking it up to a full PC. That would arguably make it 'less complex' in terms of integration into a classroom. In terms of onboard hardware, I'd be shocked if it isn't more complex than most arduinos. They have good reasons(maturity, code base, and tool chain count for a lot); but Arduinos have actually stuck with rather retro chips and changed only slowly, even as Cortex-M0s and such have come to offer rather more punch for about the same money.
One slightly surprising thing: if you are going to the trouble of spinning a totally new device, why not stick a thumb in TI's eye(and save money), by making that totally new device a calculator-styled system that also has some GPIO and onboard or external programmability?
I can understand the desire to jump into hardware when what you want is currently unavailable(while it arguably failed, the OLPC XO was something that simply wasn't available for purchase until they showed that they were serious about being willing to build them. It was mostly eclipsed by commercial offerings not too much later; but at the time there wasn't anything quite like it, certainly not for the price); but 'relatively friendly intro dev boards' isn't really a category that currently feels neglected. If anything, it is booming. What is the incentive for the BBC to spin yet-another-slightly-different board, rather than glom on to the existing product or product family closest to their needs and focus on a combination of curriculum/documentation and tool chain polish to ensure smooth use in education, even when the teacher isn't a microcontroller geek?
I don't know why this fact escapes some people; but that's (one of) the problems with the 'trust me' argument. Sure, maybe I do trust you with my very life as a sworn blood brother who saved my life a dozen times at great peril to his own and whatnot. That's heartwarming. Doesn't matter a bit when you retire and your successor takes over.
In practice, it's even worse, since there are usually organizational incentives to ratchet up the transgressions(pollsters say that the public is concerned about crime? Politicians respond by promising to Get Tough and pushing the use of previously underexplored capabilities, game over.) Any system that depends on 'trust' in a person or agency is, in fact, not really a rule of law; but a rule of the hopefully-continued discretion of that person or agency.
I've never understood the willingness to use(or the willingness to accept often enough to make using worthwhile) the "Just trust us and our discretion!" argument.
So, benefit of the doubt, maybe they are telling the truth when they say "During the hearing, the state's attorneys avowed that the Public Prosecution does not take the law lightly, and would not call on the law to request data in case of a bicycle theft." Fan-fucking-tastic. Even if I do believe them, do I have any reason to suspect that their successors will be as disciplined, or even as interested? No, no I don't.
It seems like some sort of category error, possibly related to the fact that (in evolutionary terms) we were basically living in tiny kin groups about 10 minutes ago; but in political science terms we haven't really been doing that in a millennium or two. "Trust" is all well and good(actually, very good, it has all sorts of advantages in making things go smoothly and reducing stress and anxiety) among people you interact with; but it's a dangerous thing to extend to institutions, except in its(quite different) sense of 'something is "trusted" if the overall correct function of the system depends on that thing behaving as expected, and there are not external constraints that will assure this'.
When it comes to neighbors, friends, and the like, sure, "trust" is a good thing. When it comes to institutions, the most trustworthy person is the one who says "I'd like to think that you'd find me personally trustworthy, if you knew me socially; but in my official capacity, I don't want you to have to trust me. You should have independent safeguards that would function even if I were a total shitweasel.
In this sort of law enforcement case, if they are so responsible and all, and would never use the law for minor purposes, why does the law allow for use in minor cases? Shouldn't it be uncontroversial to principle-of-least privilege and eliminate the possibility of such use? After all, law enforcement has already said that they have no interest in such capabilities, so surely they won't mind?
Pretty much(it's not entirely clear why they even brought 'open source' into it). The only difference I can see, at least from some 'open standards' initiatives in hardware, is that they are particularly interested in avoiding the bane of 'standards based' not-really-standards, which tend to crop up with things like IPMI, DASH, ASF, and so on.
They don't just want "Well, yeah, it's unique to my hardware and only really works with management consoles I've blessed; but it transfers all its blobs with totally compliant SOAP or whatever!", they are really aiming at 'I shouldn't even know who I bought this from without checking the vendor portion of the MAC address or looking up the serial number". Whether they'll get that, I don't know.
What surprises me is that (while the concerns about discovery, transparency, and national archive access are relevant and important, and not clearly satisfied by this arrangement) there hasn't been more discussion of the security and handling-of-classified-materials aspect.
I get the impression that the Secretary of State likely deals with sensitive materials at work from time to time. I similarly get the impression that, if somebody with access to classified material were discovered to have taken a huge pile of it home and stored it in their garage, they might face some rather unpleasant questions and some...'career limitations' in the future.
Even if she is being 100% forthright with the National Archives, and absolutely everything there is on the up and up; in what sense didn't she have a big pile of classified documents just stored at home under who-knows-what security protocols implemented by god-knows-who? Are you actually allowed to do that? Do only little contractors get squished? What's the deal?
The hardware that the OCP, and companies it represents, are interested in tends to be the slightly bigger stuff: They are outfits whose business depends on running a lot of servers and switches and storage; who have gotten large enough that they are trying to push back against the convenient; but expensive and lock-in prone, vendor-specific tools, interfaces, chassis designs, etc. provided by HP, Dell, Cisco, etc.
When they say that they 'need a supply chain', it's because they are really only interested in partially killing off the traditional enterprise hardware vendor. Being able to call, say, Dell, order however many R730s, with the level of warranty support(from 'statutory minimum, if any, to '4+ years of on-site-within-4-hours) you want; and have them all show up, assembled as ordered, on the loading dock is extremely convenient. Practically essential if you don't want to set up an in-house whitebox assembly line.
They still want that sort of supplier service: call up, tell them what you want and what, if any, warranty you want, have them arrive at your door; but they want to standardize, as much as possible, hardware between vendors, so you would barely notice whether you are popping in HP, Dell, Supermicro, etc. modules, everything will just fit and they'll all report the same values and respond to the same commands from your management system.
That's more customer service than hobbyist procurement(which has its place, random pacific rim vendors on ebay have their quirks; but they sure are cheap, and often do have what you require); they just want to be able to get that logistics expertise; but decoupled from the traditional branded faceplates and ill-standardized LOM intefaces and various other delightful aspects of dealing with hardware vendors.
As best I can tell, 'open source hardware'(in the sense used by the Open Compute Project, and their ilk, not the sense implied by users of the gear logo, who are much closer to OSS in meaning and intent) is much closer to what would be open/cooperative development of APIs in the software world.
The Open Compute Project doesn't really care, certainly not enough to compromise the list of vendors willing to work with them; about your PCB layouts, or your firmware code, or your mask rights; but they are very clear that they don't want to pay for your fancy proprietary blade chassis, or get locked into your 'management ecosystem' with your vendor-specific LOM card and management dashboard: they want servers that comply with mechanical and electrical standards that make them interchangeable, and support specific(usually fairly bare-bones; but standard across vendors) hardware management interfaces. They don't care how you do that, or what is inside your box, they just want your box to slot into their infrastructure, rather than attempting to dictate it.
They definitely aren't 'open hardware' in the GNU sense of 'open' as a moral imperative, and they are only weakly similar to 'open' in the OSS sense of 'open, because it has turned out to be a productive development model as well as allowing internal customization'. They are really much closer to discerning buyers of proprietary components: They don't really care how the black box works, you can keep your secrets if you want; but they want to be in control of what interfaces and features the black box requires and provides. Like buying a GPU: most customers don't care about the silicon, or the firmware, or even the drivers(so long as they are available and not a total pile of shit); but they definitely expect it to support OpenGL, and DirectX if on Windows.
Given that the Open Compute Project people are mostly large scale operators of servers, this focus isn't really a surprise: OEMs are already pretty good at silicon development(and you'd have to have very specific needs, or substantial talent and fab capability, to beat what you can get off the shelf), and they can fabricate sheet metal and design and stuff PCBs as efficiently as you'd expect given the brutal margins in the business; but (in part because of those brutal margins), they've historically tried to gain control over the customer at the interface/API layer. Their cheap crap simply won't promise, and often won't implement, any mechanical, airflow, electrical, or management interface standardization whatsoever(so even if bolting rack ears to consumer desktops seemed like a plan just crazy enough to work, even getting all of them to PXE boot might not happen); and their classy stuff is usually designed to work best when everything else in the datacenter is also purchased from them or their buddies.
The OCP and the companies it represents have little to gain by trying to displace the OEMs at building silicon or stuffing PCBs, they just want to change the game so that they call the shots on how the datacenter fits together, and OEMs compete to be chosen to build the interchangeable modules, rather than OEMs using partially or wholly proprietary interfaces in order to drive vendor lock in.
If you were 'in the parts around Istanbul', that might have made a difference. As is not uncommon generally, or terribly different from arrangements right here at home, your results may vary between some of the more cosmopolitan urban areas and the electorate out in pious hickville.
Pious hickville won the last round at the polls, which is why the current government alternates between highly controversial 'development' projects practically designed to rub the uppity urbanites' noses in it and pandering to reactionary tendencies; but it hardly enjoys a strong mandate in doing this. Unfortunately, you don't actually need a strong mandate, just an electoral majority and a willingness to act like you have a strong mandate.
On the plus side, plenty of extra room for expansion. On the minus side, the commute still utterly sucks for 99.999% of it.
The obvious reason why this line of research is 'starting' now is that it is only with contemporary solid-state RF hardware that HAARP's sinister mind control can be miniaturized sufficiently for use on rodents in the laboratory, rather than mixed nuts worldwide.
I'm not a subject matter expert; but I've read that drivers take it pretty hard. Apparently knowing that the physics of braking fast enough to avoid the person who jumped in front of your train just don't work out isn't the same as feeling that.
In this specific case, there is the problem of the chosen method being rather hard on the driver of the train and everyone trying to commute on it; so I'd hardly need deity-level powers to advocate trying to keep people off the tracks; but I'd be less enthusiastic about hunting them further.
Since we've made remarkably limited advances in the treatment of patients who think that the world is worth escaping; we've decided to just start blocking the exits. On the plus side, we have some emotionally salient anecdotes, of the sort that will probably cheer you right up unless you are one of those pesky people we can't really treat!
That sounds like a real dick move on their part.