I'd be interested to know when they filed that patent.
The BBC had Teletext from about 1972, according to Wikipedia, which used exactly this setup. Anyone who saw the Dr. Who story "Robots of Death" (Jan 1977) or other stories from that era may have noticed the computer displays which also used teletext or a similar system. I think there were already ICs on the market to implement it for you, probably because of the teletext industry.
However...open hardware is a fundamentally different thing. No one has chip fabs in their basement. So someone will have to pay big money to make the masks and tape-out and test the hardware. Unless some major vendor picks up the design and mass produces it lots of 100s of thousands, the price per CPU is going to be stupidly more expensive than an off-the-shelf CPU/motherboard or embedded system.
I remember reading somewhere about companies that will actually do short runs of chips for you. Memory is hazy, but IIRC it's typically done on a process several generations behind using older equipment that would probably be idle otherwise. I think what they do is stick different customers' parts on the same wafer or something like that... Wish I could remember where I heard about it.
Why, if they were x86 Android tablets, why wouldn't they be able to run Android apps? The apps are running on top of Dalvik anyway so the processor underneath it all doesn't really matter.
I think a lot of games and things use the NDK. IIRC Android 2.3 added the ability to write entirely native games. The NDK doesn't quite seem to support x86 code generation yet, though they're working on it. Once they get that going, devs will still have to tell it to build an x86 library as well as the ARM one...
Oh, I haven't tried it recently. There is also a mac version, but I don't know whether that will still run either.
I do remember that Lazarus wouldn't run under WINE at the time, but again, I haven't tried it for a while.
You might want to look up Lazarus. It was a total conversion for Dungeon Siege - fan made, but very well done. I was one of those folks who couldn't really get into anything pre-Ultima 6, though I did play Ultima 4 end to end.
Amen, mod parent up. Troll? wtf? what shill modded troll?
Well, I suspect the reason it is considered a troll is because it rewrites history and ignores the facts in order to support its conclusion.
Stuff like ignoring the thriving DOS games market prior to 1998 or so when Windows finally took over. Brushing OpenGL and SDL under the carpet. I imagine that picking things like nethack and freeciv as a snapshot of linux gaming when you had Wolfenstein 3D, Sauerbraten and various other 3D-accelerated games was what pushed the moderators over the edge. I certainly wouldn't pick Solitaire as an example of what windows gaming looked like, and I loathe Windows.
Addendum, for those too pressed for time to watch the entire 6:20 demo, the intro finishes at 1:11. Highlights include the face-through-the-wall at 3:13 and the hula-hoop scene at 4:35.
The NDK doesn't really allow access to the UI and writing one from scratch in Java was not a prospect I really fancied. It was easier to just stick Linux on it.
I hadn't considered the possibility of QT on Android, though - an android build of Kate would be ideal. Wouldn't help with GIMP or Pidgin, mind.
I have one. The main problems with it are that in Android, there is a certain lack of applications I need (can't seem to find a decent text editor / wordprocessor, for one).
Under Linux, you get all the software (Pidgin, proper text editors with undo and stuff, GIMP and so on) and it's handy for playing with ARM ports of software, but the battery life is only about 3.5 hours. If you want to keep Android there it has to run off the SD card, which is very slow, even with a class 10 card. I might try installing on the machine's internal flash, though - see if that is quicker or less power-hungry.
On mine, I actually disabled the graphics acceleration in Ubuntu - it tended to leave it a little unstable, but it also stopped the VT switching from working, which I didn't like.
Also it is worth mentioning that the 2.2 update did bad things to the bootloader and prevented linux from booting either. It took a bit of fiddling before I was able to reinstall the 2.1 bootloader and I still haven't repaired android after that.
In summary, it's a nice little machine, but I found Android too limiting and linux isn't really mature on this platform yet. With some kind of extended battery it would kick ass, though.
FFS... 88000 people can't go "missing" in such a short time. It's technically impossible. Why?!
Well, besides the fact that 88000 people take up quite a lot of space and someone would pretty fucking soon notice them and proclaim them dead or found (identified or not) - you can't really know that there are 88000 people missing unless you can actually account for 88000 names. Or at least 88000 bodies.
While I agree with the gist of what you're saying about the lack of verification and fact-checking, I do think you lack vision with this part.
I am in a UK town 3 miles across, its population is listed around 49'000. If two such towns were suddenly obliterated by a 10m high wave, 98'000 missing would likely be a lowball estimate.
I'm running a 7270 with the Lab firmware. The moment it came up it created an IPv6 tunnel before I had even configured it.
It should be interesting to see whether it is able to skip that step entirely when my ISP finally rolls out V6 later this year, after 8 years of sticking their fingers in their ears and going "La la la" about IPv4 depletion. Now if only I can get my web hosts to stop doing that too...
Just as important to note is the failure mode for flash memory is for it to become read-only;
Are you sure? I was under the impression that it worked like EPROM, where the bits were set high by the erase cycle and data was written by grounding the bits which needed to be zero.
That being the case, it's more likely that the data would be corrupted (since it would fail to set bits anymore) which is actually the sort of thing one of my old USB keys started to do.
'Course, there might well be logic in the controller to detect this and put the drive into read-only mode when it runs out of non-defective blocks, but I don't think that would be an inherent property of flash drives and certainly not one you'd want to rely on.
I'm gonna take a guess at the cause: somebody decided to use a Microsoft product to control a critical system on which people's lives depend.
Is that even allowed under the license agreement? I do remember Java always said it couldn't be used for ATC and nuclear power systems... doesn't Windows say something like that too?
I see this NokiaSoft alliance as being either really stupid or really smart. I'm not sure which, though. Nokia didn't want Android since they'd be nothing but a hardware vendor at that point.
That's the insane part, since Microsoft is supposed to be outright draconian about the hardware spec. Under this deal, Nokia basically get to choose the colour of the device, AFAIK.
QT will be taken out and shot as soon as possible.... Things like enhancing QT in some way to make it compatible with some pointless and unused feature of Windows PhoneOS. After a few of these it will be cheaper to just kill QT.
Then KDE will be screwed.
It will be messy, yes. But this happened before with Xfree86->Xorg, it's happening now with OpenOffice.org->LibreOffice and if QT shows any signs of sickness it's pretty certain that will be forked too, if only by the KDE folks.
FWIW I don't see QT ever being compatible with WP7, since you can only develop in Silverlight for that or at a pinch, C#. Not even managed C++...
I prefer Google's approach, myself. The Windows CE emulator used to do what Apple does, as did Symbian.
Not only did it mean - in both cases - that the emulator ran many times faster than the actual hardware, the fact that they were doing a WINE approach to the target OS meant that lots of things which worked fine in the emulator would die horribly on the actual device. Maybe Apple actually did a decent job of it, but I've seen this approach go wrong more times than I care to remember.
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Hmm, if it was US Pat. 3426344, it was filed in 1966.
I'd be interested to know when they filed that patent.
The BBC had Teletext from about 1972, according to Wikipedia, which used exactly this setup. Anyone who saw the Dr. Who story "Robots of Death" (Jan 1977) or other stories from that era may have noticed the computer displays which also used teletext or a similar system. I think there were already ICs on the market to implement it for you, probably because of the teletext industry.
However...open hardware is a fundamentally different thing. No one has chip fabs in their basement. So someone will have to pay big money to make the masks and tape-out and test the hardware. Unless some major vendor picks up the design and mass produces it lots of 100s of thousands, the price per CPU is going to be stupidly more expensive than an off-the-shelf CPU/motherboard or embedded system.
I remember reading somewhere about companies that will actually do short runs of chips for you. Memory is hazy, but IIRC it's typically done on a process several generations behind using older equipment that would probably be idle otherwise. I think what they do is stick different customers' parts on the same wafer or something like that... Wish I could remember where I heard about it.
Why, if they were x86 Android tablets, why wouldn't they be able to run Android apps? The apps are running on top of Dalvik anyway so the processor underneath it all doesn't really matter.
I think a lot of games and things use the NDK. IIRC Android 2.3 added the ability to write entirely native games. The NDK doesn't quite seem to support x86 code generation yet, though they're working on it. Once they get that going, devs will still have to tell it to build an x86 library as well as the ARM one...
We're sorry Nokia, we don't know of anyone surviving Microsoft deals.
Sybase and Citrix are the only ones that spring to mind. I'd say this one is going to play out more like Sendo, though.
Using Microsoft Visual Studio and C# I can easily target my projects at Xbox, Win 7 mobile and PC with minimal code changes.
Er, wouldn't that mean a total rewrite of the engine and all the libraries it uses when you need to target other consoles, the Mac, Android, iOs, etc?
Oh, I haven't tried it recently. There is also a mac version, but I don't know whether that will still run either. I do remember that Lazarus wouldn't run under WINE at the time, but again, I haven't tried it for a while.
You might want to look up Lazarus. It was a total conversion for Dungeon Siege - fan made, but very well done. I was one of those folks who couldn't really get into anything pre-Ultima 6, though I did play Ultima 4 end to end.
Amen, mod parent up. Troll? wtf? what shill modded troll?
Well, I suspect the reason it is considered a troll is because it rewrites history and ignores the facts in order to support its conclusion.
Stuff like ignoring the thriving DOS games market prior to 1998 or so when Windows finally took over. Brushing OpenGL and SDL under the carpet. I imagine that picking things like nethack and freeciv as a snapshot of linux gaming when you had Wolfenstein 3D, Sauerbraten and various other 3D-accelerated games was what pushed the moderators over the edge. I certainly wouldn't pick Solitaire as an example of what windows gaming looked like, and I loathe Windows.
Addendum, for those too pressed for time to watch the entire 6:20 demo, the intro finishes at 1:11. Highlights include the face-through-the-wall at 3:13 and the hula-hoop scene at 4:35.
Am I the only one who remembers the demo scene? Pure DOS. No DirectX.
Stars, Wonders of the World (1995) - (Contains brief cartoon nudity near start).
Good thing you can compile one yourself!
The NDK doesn't really allow access to the UI and writing one from scratch in Java was not a prospect I really fancied. It was easier to just stick Linux on it.
I hadn't considered the possibility of QT on Android, though - an android build of Kate would be ideal. Wouldn't help with GIMP or Pidgin, mind.
I have one. The main problems with it are that in Android, there is a certain lack of applications I need (can't seem to find a decent text editor / wordprocessor, for one).
Under Linux, you get all the software (Pidgin, proper text editors with undo and stuff, GIMP and so on) and it's handy for playing with ARM ports of software, but the battery life is only about 3.5 hours. If you want to keep Android there it has to run off the SD card, which is very slow, even with a class 10 card. I might try installing on the machine's internal flash, though - see if that is quicker or less power-hungry.
On mine, I actually disabled the graphics acceleration in Ubuntu - it tended to leave it a little unstable, but it also stopped the VT switching from working, which I didn't like.
Also it is worth mentioning that the 2.2 update did bad things to the bootloader and prevented linux from booting either. It took a bit of fiddling before I was able to reinstall the 2.1 bootloader and I still haven't repaired android after that.
In summary, it's a nice little machine, but I found Android too limiting and linux isn't really mature on this platform yet. With some kind of extended battery it would kick ass, though.
FFS... 88000 people can't go "missing" in such a short time. It's technically impossible. Why?! Well, besides the fact that 88000 people take up quite a lot of space and someone would pretty fucking soon notice them and proclaim them dead or found (identified or not) - you can't really know that there are 88000 people missing unless you can actually account for 88000 names. Or at least 88000 bodies.
While I agree with the gist of what you're saying about the lack of verification and fact-checking, I do think you lack vision with this part.
I am in a UK town 3 miles across, its population is listed around 49'000. If two such towns were suddenly obliterated by a 10m high wave, 98'000 missing would likely be a lowball estimate.
Well, there's also the "data evaporated because the charge gate is too small" failure mode...
I'm running a 7270 with the Lab firmware. The moment it came up it created an IPv6 tunnel before I had even configured it.
It should be interesting to see whether it is able to skip that step entirely when my ISP finally rolls out V6 later this year, after 8 years of sticking their fingers in their ears and going "La la la" about IPv4 depletion. Now if only I can get my web hosts to stop doing that too...
Just as important to note is the failure mode for flash memory is for it to become read-only;
Are you sure? I was under the impression that it worked like EPROM, where the bits were set high by the erase cycle and data was written by grounding the bits which needed to be zero.
That being the case, it's more likely that the data would be corrupted (since it would fail to set bits anymore) which is actually the sort of thing one of my old USB keys started to do.
'Course, there might well be logic in the controller to detect this and put the drive into read-only mode when it runs out of non-defective blocks, but I don't think that would be an inherent property of flash drives and certainly not one you'd want to rely on.
So you might have to buy a computer that isn't incredibly overpriced?
That's not much consolation if you need to run Mac software on it.
I'm gonna take a guess at the cause: somebody decided to use a Microsoft product to control a critical system on which people's lives depend.
Is that even allowed under the license agreement? I do remember Java always said it couldn't be used for ATC and nuclear power systems... doesn't Windows say something like that too?
I see this NokiaSoft alliance as being either really stupid or really smart. I'm not sure which, though. Nokia didn't want Android since they'd be nothing but a hardware vendor at that point.
That's the insane part, since Microsoft is supposed to be outright draconian about the hardware spec. Under this deal, Nokia basically get to choose the colour of the device, AFAIK.
QT will be taken out and shot as soon as possible. ... Things like enhancing QT in some way to make it compatible with some pointless and unused feature of Windows PhoneOS. After a few of these it will be cheaper to just kill QT.
Then KDE will be screwed.
It will be messy, yes. But this happened before with Xfree86->Xorg, it's happening now with OpenOffice.org->LibreOffice and if QT shows any signs of sickness it's pretty certain that will be forked too, if only by the KDE folks.
FWIW I don't see QT ever being compatible with WP7, since you can only develop in Silverlight for that or at a pinch, C#. Not even managed C++...
Dammit, dammit, dammit. I hoped that link was about the M&M exchange rate.
Kill-switch for NASDAQ...?
I prefer Google's approach, myself. The Windows CE emulator used to do what Apple does, as did Symbian.
Not only did it mean - in both cases - that the emulator ran many times faster than the actual hardware, the fact that they were doing a WINE approach to the target OS meant that lots of things which worked fine in the emulator would die horribly on the actual device. Maybe Apple actually did a decent job of it, but I've seen this approach go wrong more times than I care to remember.
I get a piano sonata and the ICANN logo. Just now I heard someone clicking their fingers so I guess that's a test card while they fix something.