So we have chips running at 1.1GHz, 553 MHz, 800MHz or 533MHz. And almost all people seem to think that these numbers are some kind of speed indicators, even at slashdot. Jesus!
How about a link to some actual benchmark figures? Have anyone seen any? I just looked at SPEC, but there was nothing there. What is the speed of these chips, really?
As a side note, I believe that the really interesting news is that the new EDEN chips use a nanoBGA packaging and are to be used in the new nanoITX form factor which is smaller than miniITX. At 120x120mm, the new motherboard is just slightly smaller than a CD enclosure!
The problem is that the engineers are deciding that Linux is a great way to save time and money in embedded environments without realizing that the viral nature of the GPL is going to screw their company.
As the story mentions, the BSD licensed products provide an easy alternative without the licensing issues. It just takes an awareness of the options to realize that using Linux in the first place is a silly idea for commercial products.
Exactly why would releasing the source code screw Cisco? Seriously? They sold 400,000 units and made millions of dollars from it!
I'm not saying that BSD is a bad alternative, but why should Cisco be so damned afraid of releasing the source? I think this is just a cultural thing with PHBs. I sincerely doubt that there is something revolutionary or unique there. Anyone could probably take any Red Hat distribution and build a similar router using off-the-shelf hardware.
What Cisco did, is that they packaged the whole thing into a dedicated low-cost box that is more easy to deploy than using old PC components. That reduced cost and the result is that they could sell 400,000 units and do a nice profit. It's not like you can't make money from using GPLed technology. So why should they be afraid of the opportunity?
Why not do a more radical case-mod? Build an aquarium and put the motherboard at the bottom. Remove all fans and put good heatsinks on. Have a longer SATA cable to the HD (and other peripherals) and put it outside of the aquarium. Fill the aquarium with a suitable clear liquid that don't affect the MB or electronic signals. Glycol?
Now I would have a passive glycol-cooled computer!
I wonder if this kind of cooling would work. I'm not sure how to calculate such things... Which is the best cooling fluid?
Ah yes, and if anyone know what the colored stuff in lava-lamps is, please tell me. Pouring some of that stuff in could make the case-mod very interesting...
I really respected Psion. They made usable PDAs long before the Palm computer was released. They came with a usable keyboard, yet had a small size to fit in a pocket. With long battery life.
I loved my Revo. It was small and had a great look. With a real keyboard. And the built in symbian OS and applications were great.
And now this! Too big for a PDA, and runs Windos for crissake! They have gone from innovative unique products to this totally uninteresting yet another WinThing. Bleh!
I just wonder what I shall replace my Revo with. It must have a good keyboard, yet fit in the pocket. Long batery life and some kind of built in networking. (Does WLAN kill batteries? Do I want bluetooth?) NO WINDOWS. Maybe a Zaurus 760? When are they released outside of Japan?
Using a laptop studio is not exactly new. For computer studio news, you should check out the Computer Music magazine. If you buy it in a newsstand you get a CD with lots of free studio and synthesizer software.
They also have an old article about laptop studios here. While using a laptop is cool, using a fast desktop system brings you considerably more power for your $$$. For serious music production, you need lots of performance, a large screen, and a good soundcard. All of which is more expensive when using a laptop.
Too bad this is one area where Linux is seriously behind Win or Mac:-(
That said, I have trouble with the base story. We've had full support for all the Indic (Devanagari-based) languages since Windows 2000 and Office 2000 shipped. So I don't see why on Earth we'd need to license the Indian technology.
Microsoft needs to do this to be able to embrace-extend-extinguish it.
I think it's a matter of using the right tools for the job. Secretaries shouldn't have to learn userland *nix just to type up a TPS cover sheet for their weekly memos.
But secretaries should have to learn userland WinXP? Using OpenOffice under (say) KDE to do memos is as easy as running XP.
That being said you can run GNU/Linux and get rooted just as easily as you could with Windows if you don't patch your system.
No you can't! Did you read the paper? With GNU/Linux I can set up the box with just those services I need. Microsoft won't let me do that with XP. There are too many bundled services with Windows that I can't (or is difficult to) remove or replace with something else.
Personally, I don't think Windows is ready for the internet yet.
What are you talking about? Everyone knows that RMS really stands for Record Management Services on OpenVMS. It is what you use to read and write files. Goes back to the PDP era.
In one of my VMS manuals, RMS-11 is a registered trademark by Digital Equipment. I wonder if they registered RMS too...
to my complete and utter astonishment, 64.94.110.11 has a working MTA listening on port 25 (why???)
That will help Verisign collect more working E-mail addresses to fill their database. Then they can sell those addresses to SPAM companies allowing this fantastic new internet service to generate some revenue for its owners.
Most modern phones have a camera. Why not just activate it and perform some image processing. Now you can determine how you tilt the phone just by looking through the camera.
Another nifty thing you could do; if the camera is on the back-side of your phone, you should be able to activate it and use the phone as an optical mouse. Just slide the phone on your desk, and the mouse pointer on the phone screen moves. Cute eh?
Maybe I should patent this and get rich? But now I have already written about it on slashdot. Too late. Damned slashdot, hindering innovation like this!
Now they should just port the UI and other frameworks from Symbian
Yes you can develop C++ code for Symbian, but to use their SDK you must use Windows.
Considering that Symbian presents themselves as the alternative to using software from Microsoft in their phones, I think it sux big time that all Symbian C++ developers must use Windows anyways. Clever!
How can Motorola sell a GPLed Linux device without showing the source? Do they have a separate copyright license from Linus and thousands of other people? What did that cost?
Has anyone tested a Motorola Linux phone? Can I download my own C apps to it? Do I get root access? Can I mess with the readio protocols and steal the ID number from another phone? Do I get source? Can I recompile the phone OS and reinstall it?
Linus has an interesting point here. But his technique would not work that easily on VMS (parameter passing conventions, process rights, quotas, file descriptor issues, etc). I know too little about Windows to know if that OS is equally vulnerable.
However, I still think that having the stack non-executable would be the right thing to do. One of the latest Windows SQL worms (I forget the name) sent an UDP packet that overflowed the buffer. Everything was in this single packet. I doubt this worm would have been possible if the stack was nonexecutable, even if the worm author tried a "Linus technique":-)
Corporations would develop their own distributions and make them as feature rich and easy to use as the Windows was. In other words the (alleged) superior security of linux distributions would be broken down in a day: The systems would enable logging in as root and would run all the conceivable daemons by default to avoid problems with third-party software.
You may have a point. But if there were several corporations creating Linux distros, they would probably have different features, default deamons, etc. Virus would not spread as easily as they do now.
Also, with Linux an interested user can decide by himself what stuff he wants to install. If I don't want to use IE, Outlook express, Mediaplayer, etc, because I think they are full of spyware and insecure, it is quite difficult to choose something else under Windows. Not so on Linux.
Monopolies are bad. They make viruses spread more easily.
Most stack buffer overrun problems (Blaster bug, etc) are possible because the stack is executable. Other systems, such as VMS on Alpha don't have executable stacks, making this kind of exploits very difficult to do.
At least, the problem seems to have been fixed in the x86-64 hardware, but the operating systems need to take advantage of it. See here.
So when will we see M$ take advantage of good simple security features in the hardware instead of trying to invent new fantastic schemes (Palladium)? Why wasn't buffer overflow attacks fixed 5-10 years ago? I'm not sure if earlier x86 chips allowed non-executable stacks, but if M$ were serious about security, they could certainy have requested that feature from Intel. It's not rocket science.
Manual translation requires creativity, which is considered by courts in evaluating the status of a work.
So to summarize, you are saying that if I manually compiled the GPLed readline package to something else (fortran? assembly?), then I could use it in proprietary programs and the GPL could not stop me.
And that I can't do the same with a book (translating from english to french) because there are other copyright rules for books.
While I don't agree with those notions, I must confess that IANAL, and have no idea how an American court would judge on the matter. Of course, the guy that decompiled the MPGEG driver lives in Italy, so what an American court would decide is not really relevant.;-)
Whether or not translating to a different language changes the expression sufficiently has not been tested in court.
I could argue that compiling source code to a binary is merely an (automatic) translation of the code from one language (C) to another (machine code). If this translation would not be viewed as a derivative work, then the GPL could not stop me from distributing binary-only copies of Free software. (I hope I'm not giving M$ any ideas now...)
How is a manual translation from machine code to C any different from automatic translation in the other direction?
AFAIK, a court has never stated that source code reconstructed from a binary is considered a copy, or even a derivative work. Copyright law does not prevent you from reading something, learning from it, and creating something else based on what you learned.
Wouldn't this be analogous to reading the book "The fellowship of the Ring", learning from it, and creating something else (a film) from what I learned? Surely, a film is considered to be a derivative work?
Another analogy; If I look at the GPLed readline source code, learn from it and translate it into FORTRAN code, would I be able to use that FORTRAN reimplementation of readline in my proprietary binary-only product? I don't think so. I think that merely translating a work into another language (french to english?) is indeed creating derivative works.
How many cases of patent cases has there really been throughout the years?
Have you heard about the SCO debacle? IBM is suing SCO over patents right now.
If you read the halloween documents, it becomes clear that Microsoft thinks that patents are one of the best ways to stop the Linux spread. When they interviewed users, they thought that IP issues over Linux was something that held them back from Linux adoption.
The most transparent technology there is at the moment for recording votes is for voters to tick boxes (or write numbers) on printed ballot papers and put them into ballot boxes.
In Sweden, we use a simplified version of this. Don't trust the voters with a pen! Each party has their own ballot with their name printed on it. You get them in the mail before the election, you get them when you vote and you have more ballots in your voting both.
Thus, 99% of all voters don't even need a pen.
The counting is done manually, and is 95% ready just a few hours after the voting is closed.
I would never trust any kind of "voting machine". There is no transparancy. Being an engineer, I can see too many ways to cheat with them.
(The exception (1%) is that you still CAN take a blank ballot and vote for whatever party you want, say the Donald Duck party. Those votes get counted too.)
As I am interested in CPU architecture, I tried to find some technical info on the chip. I didn't found much, except a large powerpoint file which I failed to download. Slashdot effect? I wonder if they can read/produce such.ppt files under their Midori Linux;-)
However, there is much more talk about their embedded character generator! This sounded very funny to me. A character generator in a CPU??!?!
After browsing around, I found that the vice president of Culturecom has been working 20 years with chinese character encodings. I guess the board of directors has a lot to say about what the chip real estate should be used for;-)
I also found this link explaining somewhat more. (Is it normal practice for UCLA to comment on market opportunities for Chinese companies in scientific papers?)
Anyway, Culturecom seems to have invented an encoding for chinese characters that encodes brush strokes. This seems to be a good idea, and is likely superior to the outline encoding used in TrueType. It is probably a nice algorithm. But they don't seem to want to publish this algorithm. The idea is to "embed" it in a chip, and sell the chips instead. ($25) Maybe this makes sense in china where patents and copyrights are routinely violated, but I personally think that the chip real estate could probably have a better use.
Speaking of copyright violations; their web site says that they are selling Midori Linux for only $50. I wonder if that includes source code and a GPL license?
I happen to know morse code but I rarely find a use for it anymore.
What I would really like to have is an option to my mobile phone that converts incoming SMS messages to morse code, beeping them out! With that feature I would not have to actually pick up the phone to read my SMS messages. Maybe this would be possible to program on the newer Java-enabled phones?
(The standard "ring tone" on my Nokia for a SMS message is... --... (SMS in morse). My feature is just one step beyond what the Nokia handset already provides!;-) )
Slashdot Mirror
So we have chips running at 1.1GHz, 553 MHz, 800MHz or 533MHz. And almost all people seem to think that these numbers are some kind of speed indicators, even at slashdot. Jesus!
How about a link to some actual benchmark figures? Have anyone seen any? I just looked at SPEC, but there was nothing there. What is the speed of these chips, really?
As a side note, I believe that the really interesting news is that the new EDEN chips use a nanoBGA packaging and are to be used in the new nanoITX form factor which is smaller than miniITX. At 120x120mm, the new motherboard is just slightly smaller than a CD enclosure!
The problem is that the engineers are deciding that Linux is a great way to save time and money in embedded environments without realizing that the viral nature of the GPL is going to screw their company.
As the story mentions, the BSD licensed products provide an easy alternative without the licensing issues. It just takes an awareness of the options to realize that using Linux in the first place is a silly idea for commercial products.
Exactly why would releasing the source code screw Cisco? Seriously? They sold 400,000 units and made millions of dollars from it!
I'm not saying that BSD is a bad alternative, but why should Cisco be so damned afraid of releasing the source? I think this is just a cultural thing with PHBs. I sincerely doubt that there is something revolutionary or unique there. Anyone could probably take any Red Hat distribution and build a similar router using off-the-shelf hardware.
What Cisco did, is that they packaged the whole thing into a dedicated low-cost box that is more easy to deploy than using old PC components. That reduced cost and the result is that they could sell 400,000 units and do a nice profit. It's not like you can't make money from using GPLed technology. So why should they be afraid of the opportunity?
Why not do a more radical case-mod? Build an aquarium and put the motherboard at the bottom. Remove all fans and put good heatsinks on. Have a longer SATA cable to the HD (and other peripherals) and put it outside of the aquarium. Fill the aquarium with a suitable clear liquid that don't affect the MB or electronic signals. Glycol?
Now I would have a passive glycol-cooled computer!
I wonder if this kind of cooling would work. I'm not sure how to calculate such things... Which is the best cooling fluid?
Ah yes, and if anyone know what the colored stuff in lava-lamps is, please tell me. Pouring some of that stuff in could make the case-mod very interesting...
I really respected Psion. They made usable PDAs long before the Palm computer was released. They came with a usable keyboard, yet had a small size to fit in a pocket. With long battery life.
I loved my Revo. It was small and had a great look. With a real keyboard. And the built in symbian OS and applications were great.
And now this! Too big for a PDA, and runs Windos for crissake! They have gone from innovative unique products to this totally uninteresting yet another WinThing. Bleh!
I just wonder what I shall replace my Revo with. It must have a good keyboard, yet fit in the pocket. Long batery life and some kind of built in networking. (Does WLAN kill batteries? Do I want bluetooth?) NO WINDOWS. Maybe a Zaurus 760? When are they released outside of Japan?
Using a laptop studio is not exactly new. For computer studio news, you should check out the Computer Music magazine. If you buy it in a newsstand you get a CD with lots of free studio and synthesizer software.
:-(
They also have an old article about laptop studios here. While using a laptop is cool, using a fast desktop system brings you considerably more power for your $$$. For serious music production, you need lots of performance, a large screen, and a good soundcard. All of which is more expensive when using a laptop.
Too bad this is one area where Linux is seriously behind Win or Mac
That said, I have trouble with the base story. We've had full support for all the Indic (Devanagari-based) languages since Windows 2000 and Office 2000 shipped. So I don't see why on Earth we'd need to license the Indian technology.
Microsoft needs to do this to be able to embrace-extend-extinguish it.
I think it's a matter of using the right tools for the job. Secretaries shouldn't have to learn userland *nix just to type up a TPS cover sheet for their weekly memos.
But secretaries should have to learn userland WinXP? Using OpenOffice under (say) KDE to do memos is as easy as running XP.
That being said you can run GNU/Linux and get rooted just as easily as you could with Windows if you don't patch your system.
No you can't! Did you read the paper? With GNU/Linux I can set up the box with just those services I need. Microsoft won't let me do that with XP. There are too many bundled services with Windows that I can't (or is difficult to) remove or replace with something else.
Personally, I don't think Windows is ready for the internet yet.
But what does electrical conductance have to do with boot times? 100 mS is 100 milliSiemens. Milliseconds is abbreviated ms.
What are you talking about? Everyone knows that RMS really stands for Record Management Services on OpenVMS. It is what you use to read and write files. Goes back to the PDP era.
In one of my VMS manuals, RMS-11 is a registered trademark by Digital Equipment. I wonder if they registered RMS too...
Now I see it!
Every confidential letter that you send with a missspeled E-mail address will be stored in Verisigns database as well. That's a good harvest!
to my complete and utter astonishment, 64.94.110.11 has a working MTA listening on port 25 (why???)
That will help Verisign collect more working E-mail addresses to fill their database. Then they can sell those addresses to SPAM companies allowing this fantastic new internet service to generate some revenue for its owners.
Most modern phones have a camera. Why not just activate it and perform some image processing. Now you can determine how you tilt the phone just by looking through the camera.
Another nifty thing you could do; if the camera is on the back-side of your phone, you should be able to activate it and use the phone as an optical mouse. Just slide the phone on your desk, and the mouse pointer on the phone screen moves. Cute eh?
Maybe I should patent this and get rich?
But now I have already written about it on slashdot. Too late. Damned slashdot, hindering innovation like this!
Now they should just port the UI and other frameworks from Symbian
Yes you can develop C++ code for Symbian, but to use their SDK you must use Windows.
Considering that Symbian presents themselves as the alternative to using software from Microsoft in their phones, I think it sux big time that all Symbian C++ developers must use Windows anyways. Clever!
(Can I get the source / recompile)
Yes to the first question. No to all the others
How can Motorola sell a GPLed Linux device without showing the source? Do they have a separate copyright license from Linus and thousands of other people? What did that cost?
Has anyone tested a Motorola Linux phone? Can I download my own C apps to it? Do I get root access? Can I mess with the readio protocols and steal the ID number from another phone? Do I get source? Can I recompile the phone OS and reinstall it?
Linus has an interesting point here. But his technique would not work that easily on VMS (parameter passing conventions, process rights, quotas, file descriptor issues, etc). I know too little about Windows to know if that OS is equally vulnerable.
:-)
However, I still think that having the stack non-executable would be the right thing to do. One of the latest Windows SQL worms (I forget the name) sent an UDP packet that overflowed the buffer. Everything was in this single packet. I doubt this worm would have been possible if the stack was nonexecutable, even if the worm author tried a "Linus technique"
Corporations would develop their own distributions and make them as feature rich and easy to use as the Windows was. In other words the (alleged) superior security of linux distributions would be broken down in a day: The systems would enable logging in as root and would run all the conceivable daemons by default to avoid problems with third-party software.
You may have a point. But if there were several corporations creating Linux distros, they would probably have different features, default deamons, etc. Virus would not spread as easily as they do now.
Also, with Linux an interested user can decide by himself what stuff he wants to install. If I don't want to use IE, Outlook express, Mediaplayer, etc, because I think they are full of spyware and insecure, it is quite difficult to choose something else under Windows. Not so on Linux.
Monopolies are bad. They make viruses spread more easily.
Most stack buffer overrun problems (Blaster bug, etc) are possible because the stack is executable. Other systems, such as VMS on Alpha don't have executable stacks, making this kind of exploits very difficult to do.
At least, the problem seems to have been fixed in the x86-64 hardware, but the operating systems need to take advantage of it. See here.
So when will we see M$ take advantage of good simple security features in the hardware instead of trying to invent new fantastic schemes (Palladium)? Why wasn't buffer overflow attacks fixed 5-10 years ago? I'm not sure if earlier x86 chips allowed non-executable stacks, but if M$ were serious about security, they could certainy have requested that feature from Intel. It's not rocket science.
Manual translation requires creativity, which is considered by courts in evaluating the status of a work.
;-)
So to summarize, you are saying that if I manually compiled the GPLed readline package to something else (fortran? assembly?), then I could use it in proprietary programs and the GPL could not stop me.
And that I can't do the same with a book (translating from english to french) because there are other copyright rules for books.
While I don't agree with those notions, I must confess that IANAL, and have no idea how an American court would judge on the matter. Of course, the guy that decompiled the MPGEG driver lives in Italy, so what an American court would decide is not really relevant.
/Per
Whether or not translating to a different language changes the expression sufficiently has not been tested in court.
I could argue that compiling source code to a binary is merely an (automatic) translation of the code from one language (C) to another (machine code). If this translation would not be viewed as a derivative work, then the GPL could not stop me from distributing binary-only copies of Free software. (I hope I'm not giving M$ any ideas now...)
How is a manual translation from machine code to C any different from automatic translation in the other direction?
AFAIK, a court has never stated that source code reconstructed from a binary is considered a copy, or even a derivative work. Copyright law does not prevent you from reading something, learning from it, and creating something else based on what you learned.
Wouldn't this be analogous to reading the book "The fellowship of the Ring", learning from it, and creating something else (a film) from what I learned? Surely, a film is considered to be a derivative work?
Another analogy; If I look at the GPLed readline source code, learn from it and translate it into FORTRAN code, would I be able to use that FORTRAN reimplementation of readline in my proprietary binary-only product? I don't think so. I think that merely translating a work into another language (french to english?) is indeed creating derivative works.
How many cases of patent cases has there really been throughout the years?
Have you heard about the SCO debacle? IBM is suing SCO over patents right now.
If you read the halloween documents, it becomes clear that Microsoft thinks that patents are one of the best ways to stop the Linux spread. When they interviewed users, they thought that IP issues over Linux was something that held them back from Linux adoption.
The most transparent technology there is at the moment for recording votes is for voters to tick boxes (or write numbers) on printed ballot papers and put them into ballot boxes.
In Sweden, we use a simplified version of this. Don't trust the voters with a pen! Each party has their own ballot with their name printed on it. You get them in the mail before the election, you get them when you vote and you have more ballots in your voting both.
Thus, 99% of all voters don't even need a pen.
The counting is done manually, and is 95% ready just a few hours after the voting is closed.
I would never trust any kind of "voting machine". There is no transparancy. Being an engineer, I can see too many ways to cheat with them.
(The exception (1%) is that you still CAN take a blank ballot and vote for whatever party you want, say the Donald Duck party. Those votes get counted too.)
As I am interested in CPU architecture, I tried to find some technical info on the chip. I didn't found much, except a large powerpoint file which I failed to download. Slashdot effect? I wonder if they can read/produce such .ppt files under their Midori Linux ;-)
;-)
However, there is much more talk about their embedded character generator! This sounded very funny to me. A character generator in a CPU??!?!
After browsing around, I found that the vice president of Culturecom has been working 20 years with chinese character encodings. I guess the board of directors has a lot to say about what the chip real estate should be used for
I also found this link explaining somewhat more. (Is it normal practice for UCLA to comment on market opportunities for Chinese companies in scientific papers?)
Anyway, Culturecom seems to have invented an encoding for chinese characters that encodes brush strokes. This seems to be a good idea, and is likely superior to the outline encoding used in TrueType. It is probably a nice algorithm. But they don't seem to want to publish this algorithm. The idea is to "embed" it in a chip, and sell the chips instead. ($25) Maybe this makes sense in china where patents and copyrights are routinely violated, but I personally think that the chip real estate could probably have a better use.
Speaking of copyright violations; their web site says that they are selling Midori Linux for only $50. I wonder if that includes source code and a GPL license?
I happen to know morse code but I rarely find a use for it anymore.
... -- ... (SMS in morse). My feature is just one step beyond what the Nokia handset already provides! ;-) )
What I would really like to have is an option to my mobile phone that converts incoming SMS messages to morse code, beeping them out! With that feature I would not have to actually pick up the phone to read my SMS messages. Maybe this would be possible to program on the newer Java-enabled phones?
(The standard "ring tone" on my Nokia for a SMS message is