I have one of those on my vacuum cleaner, and I swear it makes it faster. It's like recompiling the sucker with -O4 -mfpmath=sse,387 -ffast-math -fweb -frename-registers -ftree-vectorize.
There is a tutorial at http://www.irregular-expression.com/ for installing Debian on a Nexus One that runs directly on the hardware, no chroot. The only catch is that you need a PC hooked up to the device in order to initiate booting.
This also sounds like the Nokia tablets. They can be booted with a kernel provided by a PC via USB, so new kernels can be tested without flashing. I guess Android devices do need some way of updating the OS, including the kernel, so there should be a way to permanently install another OS.
You can boot Ubuntu on a Nexus One. And Win95, should you be masochistic enough to try it.
I also run PSX4DROID as a playstation emulator!
The only Ubuntu/Nexus installations I can find are running in a chroot, like the Debian that grandparent mentions. Win95 wouldn't run natively anyway.
Android devices are fairly limited compared to most computers, so I would like to run a real distro, instead of layers of emulation. In fact, native binary applications should run faster than the bytecode apps in Android.
I wonder the same thing about Toshiba Dynabook AC100. It is an Nvidia Tegra 250 based netbook running Android, and to my great surprise it is available in at least one consumer electronics chain here in Finland (Tekniset).
The Tegra seems like a relatively open platform, in that there are plenty of Linux resources and a Gentoo installation guide available, at least for the devkit. But I wonder if any of the consumer versions are similarly updateable. Kernel upgrades seem like a hassle in any case, since there is no bootloader, but the kernel has to be flashed into the firmware (much like in the Nokia tablets).
I agree, though I'm ashamed to admit that I'm somewhat used to mouse scrolling as well. My current laptop doesn't have dedicated home/pgup/pgdn/end keys, and I like having a scroll level between a full page-height (pgup/dn) and one or two lines (arrows).
Nevertheless, my general feeling is that many people are shunning old technologies simply for the sake of being old, and reinventing the (scroll)wheel into something that doesn't do anything more or better than the old one. (If you think text-based interfaces are useless, please stop reading and writing.)
One of my favourites is the logical extension of a scroll wheel, a kind of trackball on a mouse. Even without considering the keyboard, the setup looks hopelessly redundant. You already have a 2D pointing device, but apparently people are stuck on only one of its functions (moving the cursor), so another pointing device is added for other functions. It's like the Internet keys on a keyboard, making the computer look more like an appliance, where one button does only one thing. (Yo dawg, we heard you like 2D pointing devices, so we put a 2D pointing device in your 2D pointing device, so you can point while you point.)
Use the space bar (and shift+spacebar, to go backwards, at least in Chrome).
I do use the space bar, but the equivalent of Page Up is not consistent across applications. Sometimes it is B (oldskool unix applications), sometimes Shift+Space (browsers), sometimes something completely different. Adding to the confusion, Page Down is not same as Space in some applications, for example some PDF readers: one goes to the next page, the other scrolls down.
I have a laptop so I use keyboard scrolling quite a bit (Home, Page Up, Page Down, and End are in a nice column on the right side, something Sony did well IMHO).
My previous Toshiba and Fujitsu laptops had those as well, I must say I miss that column. The keyboards are probably somewhat generic and used across manufacturers; I have a Deltaco mini keyboard that looks very much like an older laptop keyboard in a separate case, with the column and everything.
A half keyboard for the right hand would be nice, as I mouse on the left. I'm right-handed, and my right hand is much more at home on the keyboard; even the arrows and pgup/dn etc. are on the right side! Many keyboards also have a number pad on the right, so mousing on the left keeps it closer to the active typing area, which is nice when you need both hands for extensive typing.
Back in the day, we had these arrow and page up/down keys that you could use for scrolling a page. Nowadays, many laptops don't even have dedicated pgup/pgdn/home/end, they are only available via the Fn key. Apparently, nobody uses the keyboard any more, since the mouse is so much easier for everything. I predict that future computers will have no keyboard, but instead the mouse will have about 100 buttons for typing.
The biggest sitting problem (for Americans, at least) outside of work is that our cities, our jobs, and even our recreation is not really intended for pedestrians.
I think the biggest problem is that "pedestrian" is a bit like "pederast". I'll rather take the car than be confused with one of those.
A related recommendation would be a Stokke chair. The company philosophy is that humans are not meant to sit still, and certainly not at an overly tight 90-degree angle between the torso and the thighs. Most of their chairs have a slightly rocking design, whereby your body will find a natural balance, depending on the task.
I cringe whenever somebody uses "bandwidth" to mean data transmission rate. It is not exactly contradictory, though, as the two quantities are proportional to each other (when you ignore other factors). The use of "broadband" as a marketing term is particularly annoying, as if a certain modulation technique would guarantee higher channel capacity. But I guess people have a propensity for using fancy technical terms, even when they are incorrect.
Then people tell me, language changes, get over it. IMHO, language should be evolving into a higher complexity, in order to describe an increasingly complex world. Collapsing several meanings into one word is the complete opposite of this.
I extrapolate that future people will be content with the single word "ugh", whose meaning is apparent from the context.
The Itanium is slow as shit because Intel didn't bother to give it out-of-order execution like every other modern processor has.
X86 didn't have OoO until the Pentium Pro, and new x86 models are still being produced without it, for instance Intel Atom and Via C7. So maybe it is a question of implementation, not architecture?
My impression of the name "Bulldozer" is something that gets a lot of shit done, but also spends a shitload of space and power. I thought both mobile and server worlds were moving into lighter and more efficient architectures, but I guess we just have to keep on using x86 for our closed software.
(Power-efficient x86 brings to mind names such as Intel Atom and Via Nano, but neither is particularly impressive when you compare them to real mobile/embedded architectures such as ARM and MIPS.)
You are mostly right, but copper isn't going anywhere from the face of Earth. You can still mine it from the great dumpster continuum, while helium is actually disappearing from the atmosphere into space.
computers are so expensive and PS3s are so cheap, this is the only option that some people have. There aren't many pieces of consumer electronics that can run linux, you know.
You can run Linux on any ugly x86 box, but this is not enough for everybody. I am interested in the possibilities of the Cell processor, and the nice and quiet case would be a great bonus. If your only argument is "running Linux", then you can have my old Pentium MMX box and knock yourself out. It runs Linux, and it should run Windows as well, so obviously it should cover everyone's computing needs.
I also think that having a nice CPU limited to playing closed games (a political limitation, not technical) is a hideous waste of resources that ought to be a criminal offense.
You should be able to do everything on that NAS alone. I run a Gentoo server on a Buffalo Linkstation Live, with the only difference that its Marvell ARM CPU is a little slower and there is a little less RAM, compared to the Sheevaplug.
For my purposes, the Sheevaplug has the problem that any sizeable storage needs its own power supply. Thus it negates all of the size and power consumption arguments. Linkstations and similar devices come with a hard drive or two on the same power supply. If you actually need the CPU at 1.2 GHz and a little more RAM, get a newer Linkstation Pro.
A Mersenne number is any integer of the form 2^n - 1. If this number happens to be prime, it is called a Mersenne prime. The summary clearly means Mersenne primes, not Mersenne numbers.
Why does every "scandal" now have -gate appended onto the end of it? It wasn't called "Watergate" because it was a scandal about water...
A new kind of phenomenon is often named after its first, or most famous instance. For example, websites are now being slashdotted even in cases where Slashdot is not involved. Snowclone was originally a modification of the "Eskimos have N words for snow" cliche, but now it means a more general term for cliche variations.
ROM's are slow too, that is why on PC motherboards is only a single (8 bit) Flash/Eprom which is copied to the much faster RAM at startup. For microcontrollers the slow ROM is not a problem as clock speeds are relatively slow compared to desktop CPU's
That was kind of my point -- at the moment, RAM is fast and everything else is slow, so we design our systems around these limitations. This, in turn, limits the range of new technologies we might want to develop.
Back in the day, machines used to run straight from a ROM, with some RAM available as well. Some embedded systems still do this. In a sense we have taken a step backwards, having to copy stuff onto RAM in order to use it.
Of course, right now the only affordable choices are to use hard drives or flash with DRAM. It's not like we have to live with their limitations forever. Flash, in particular, was never really meant for frequent writing; it is a form of EEPROM. Even getting back its role as a ROM, where you could execute code directly, would be interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
I have one of those on my vacuum cleaner, and I swear it makes it faster. It's like recompiling the sucker with -O4 -mfpmath=sse,387 -ffast-math -fweb -frename-registers -ftree-vectorize.
This is a nanochip.
There is a tutorial at http://www.irregular-expression.com/ for installing Debian on a Nexus One that runs directly on the hardware, no chroot. The only catch is that you need a PC hooked up to the device in order to initiate booting.
This also sounds like the Nokia tablets. They can be booted with a kernel provided by a PC via USB, so new kernels can be tested without flashing. I guess Android devices do need some way of updating the OS, including the kernel, so there should be a way to permanently install another OS.
You can boot Ubuntu on a Nexus One. And Win95, should you be masochistic enough to try it. I also run PSX4DROID as a playstation emulator!
The only Ubuntu/Nexus installations I can find are running in a chroot, like the Debian that grandparent mentions. Win95 wouldn't run natively anyway.
Android devices are fairly limited compared to most computers, so I would like to run a real distro, instead of layers of emulation. In fact, native binary applications should run faster than the bytecode apps in Android.
I wonder the same thing about Toshiba Dynabook AC100. It is an Nvidia Tegra 250 based netbook running Android, and to my great surprise it is available in at least one consumer electronics chain here in Finland (Tekniset).
The Tegra seems like a relatively open platform, in that there are plenty of Linux resources and a Gentoo installation guide available, at least for the devkit. But I wonder if any of the consumer versions are similarly updateable. Kernel upgrades seem like a hassle in any case, since there is no bootloader, but the kernel has to be flashed into the firmware (much like in the Nokia tablets).
I agree, though I'm ashamed to admit that I'm somewhat used to mouse scrolling as well. My current laptop doesn't have dedicated home/pgup/pgdn/end keys, and I like having a scroll level between a full page-height (pgup/dn) and one or two lines (arrows).
Nevertheless, my general feeling is that many people are shunning old technologies simply for the sake of being old, and reinventing the (scroll)wheel into something that doesn't do anything more or better than the old one. (If you think text-based interfaces are useless, please stop reading and writing.)
One of my favourites is the logical extension of a scroll wheel, a kind of trackball on a mouse. Even without considering the keyboard, the setup looks hopelessly redundant. You already have a 2D pointing device, but apparently people are stuck on only one of its functions (moving the cursor), so another pointing device is added for other functions. It's like the Internet keys on a keyboard, making the computer look more like an appliance, where one button does only one thing. (Yo dawg, we heard you like 2D pointing devices, so we put a 2D pointing device in your 2D pointing device, so you can point while you point.)
Use the space bar (and shift+spacebar, to go backwards, at least in Chrome).
I do use the space bar, but the equivalent of Page Up is not consistent across applications. Sometimes it is B (oldskool unix applications), sometimes Shift+Space (browsers), sometimes something completely different. Adding to the confusion, Page Down is not same as Space in some applications, for example some PDF readers: one goes to the next page, the other scrolls down.
I have a laptop so I use keyboard scrolling quite a bit (Home, Page Up, Page Down, and End are in a nice column on the right side, something Sony did well IMHO).
My previous Toshiba and Fujitsu laptops had those as well, I must say I miss that column. The keyboards are probably somewhat generic and used across manufacturers; I have a Deltaco mini keyboard that looks very much like an older laptop keyboard in a separate case, with the column and everything.
A half keyboard for the right hand would be nice, as I mouse on the left. I'm right-handed, and my right hand is much more at home on the keyboard; even the arrows and pgup/dn etc. are on the right side! Many keyboards also have a number pad on the right, so mousing on the left keeps it closer to the active typing area, which is nice when you need both hands for extensive typing.
Back in the day, we had these arrow and page up/down keys that you could use for scrolling a page. Nowadays, many laptops don't even have dedicated pgup/pgdn/home/end, they are only available via the Fn key. Apparently, nobody uses the keyboard any more, since the mouse is so much easier for everything. I predict that future computers will have no keyboard, but instead the mouse will have about 100 buttons for typing.
BTRFS is not that unstable really.. I have been running for a few months now, since the on-disk file structure was finalized.
Which kernel are you running? 2.6.35.4 is the latest stable version, and menuconfig says that Btrfs has an unstable disk format.
The biggest sitting problem (for Americans, at least) outside of work is that our cities, our jobs, and even our recreation is not really intended for pedestrians.
I think the biggest problem is that "pedestrian" is a bit like "pederast". I'll rather take the car than be confused with one of those.
A related recommendation would be a Stokke chair. The company philosophy is that humans are not meant to sit still, and certainly not at an overly tight 90-degree angle between the torso and the thighs. Most of their chairs have a slightly rocking design, whereby your body will find a natural balance, depending on the task.
I cringe whenever somebody uses "bandwidth" to mean data transmission rate. It is not exactly contradictory, though, as the two quantities are proportional to each other (when you ignore other factors). The use of "broadband" as a marketing term is particularly annoying, as if a certain modulation technique would guarantee higher channel capacity. But I guess people have a propensity for using fancy technical terms, even when they are incorrect.
Then people tell me, language changes, get over it. IMHO, language should be evolving into a higher complexity, in order to describe an increasingly complex world. Collapsing several meanings into one word is the complete opposite of this.
I extrapolate that future people will be content with the single word "ugh", whose meaning is apparent from the context.
The Itanium is slow as shit because Intel didn't bother to give it out-of-order execution like every other modern processor has.
X86 didn't have OoO until the Pentium Pro, and new x86 models are still being produced without it, for instance Intel Atom and Via C7. So maybe it is a question of implementation, not architecture?
My impression of the name "Bulldozer" is something that gets a lot of shit done, but also spends a shitload of space and power. I thought both mobile and server worlds were moving into lighter and more efficient architectures, but I guess we just have to keep on using x86 for our closed software.
(Power-efficient x86 brings to mind names such as Intel Atom and Via Nano, but neither is particularly impressive when you compare them to real mobile/embedded architectures such as ARM and MIPS.)
You are mostly right, but copper isn't going anywhere from the face of Earth. You can still mine it from the great dumpster continuum, while helium is actually disappearing from the atmosphere into space.
computers are so expensive and PS3s are so cheap, this is the only option that some people have. There aren't many pieces of consumer electronics that can run linux, you know.
You can run Linux on any ugly x86 box, but this is not enough for everybody. I am interested in the possibilities of the Cell processor, and the nice and quiet case would be a great bonus. If your only argument is "running Linux", then you can have my old Pentium MMX box and knock yourself out. It runs Linux, and it should run Windows as well, so obviously it should cover everyone's computing needs.
I also think that having a nice CPU limited to playing closed games (a political limitation, not technical) is a hideous waste of resources that ought to be a criminal offense.
You should be able to do everything on that NAS alone. I run a Gentoo server on a Buffalo Linkstation Live, with the only difference that its Marvell ARM CPU is a little slower and there is a little less RAM, compared to the Sheevaplug.
For my purposes, the Sheevaplug has the problem that any sizeable storage needs its own power supply. Thus it negates all of the size and power consumption arguments. Linkstations and similar devices come with a hard drive or two on the same power supply. If you actually need the CPU at 1.2 GHz and a little more RAM, get a newer Linkstation Pro.
A Mersenne number is any integer of the form 2^n - 1. If this number happens to be prime, it is called a Mersenne prime. The summary clearly means Mersenne primes, not Mersenne numbers.
Why does every "scandal" now have -gate appended onto the end of it? It wasn't called "Watergate" because it was a scandal about water...
A new kind of phenomenon is often named after its first, or most famous instance. For example, websites are now being slashdotted even in cases where Slashdot is not involved. Snowclone was originally a modification of the "Eskimos have N words for snow" cliche, but now it means a more general term for cliche variations.
...GNU/Hurd
FTFY.
ROM's are slow too, that is why on PC motherboards is only a single (8 bit) Flash/Eprom which is copied to the much faster RAM at startup. For microcontrollers the slow ROM is not a problem as clock speeds are relatively slow compared to desktop CPU's
That was kind of my point -- at the moment, RAM is fast and everything else is slow, so we design our systems around these limitations. This, in turn, limits the range of new technologies we might want to develop.
Back in the day, machines used to run straight from a ROM, with some RAM available as well. Some embedded systems still do this. In a sense we have taken a step backwards, having to copy stuff onto RAM in order to use it.
Of course, right now the only affordable choices are to use hard drives or flash with DRAM. It's not like we have to live with their limitations forever. Flash, in particular, was never really meant for frequent writing; it is a form of EEPROM. Even getting back its role as a ROM, where you could execute code directly, would be interesting.
That's what She SaiD.