printer drivers have little (or nothing) to do with the kernel, they live in user space.
Re:802.11s can run on generic WLAN hardware?
on
Linux 2.6.26 Out
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's part of the mac80211 layer, so it in theory supports any mac80211 driver, that is a 'soft MAC' WiFi chipset. There are minor driver changes required to support mesh (basically adding mesh beacons) and right now the zd1211rw and B43 drivers work. We have more details here: http://o11s.org/trac B43 is your best bet at the moment, if you have a few of those, give the HOWTO on the o11s website a try and you can have your own mesh network.
Eventually other soft-MAC chipsets can work, such as Intel's iwlwifi, Ralink, etc. At the moment beaconing is broken in rt2x000 so Ralink won't work, but that will probably be fixed soon.
For what it's worth, there's nothing under the XO's keyboard that gets hot. The motherboard is behind the screen, the keyboard piece is just the keyboard and touchpad.
Technically, they don't really become unreadable, there's just an uncorrectable bit flip or two (out of say, 128KB) and that block gets marked "bad" and then it's not used anymore. Whatever data it contained is still there though, and you could read it if you wanted to. That said, on an SSD there is an onboard controller that abstracts away the Flash itself, so I suppose that it might not provide any interface to reading "bad" blocks, other than that there's really nothing stopping you.
I was curious so I looked up the embedded system inside the robot, it's an 8-bit Atmel AVR with supporting hardware. I figured that the Tux-shaped robot would at least be running Linux internally, for example they could have used a Gumstix board or the like. That said, AVR development is pretty fun (and you get to use gcc rather than some vendor tools) and this thing looks like a neat embedded toy.
With ThinkPads it's just a matter of whether you get "integrated" (Intel) or "discrete" (ATI/NVidia) graphics, and in this case I doubt they'll jam "discrete" graphics into a smaller form factor, especially where battery life and heat count so much. My guess is that it has Intel graphics, in which case things should work fine. The WiFi will probably be a MiniPCI / ExpressCard deal as usual, in which case you can choose Intel's chipset.
It _is_ a USB NIC. That is, when you plug it into your PC via USB, it charges and also comes up as a USB network interface... It's a really neat platform, though not very consumer-ready. The next version has about twice the clock rate and some other nice improvements, and that one could probably be used as a pretty good phone as well as a development platform.
It has two ports. You can have more with USB dongles (I've had pretty good luck with Linksys USB Ethernet interfaces, though make sure you get the USB 2.0 versions, some stores still have the slower models around).
Ooh, I have one of these, and it's kind of a mixed bag. The people who make them don't really seem to have enough Linux experience to really set this thing up so that it makes sense out of the box, definitely buy it only if you're planning to reinstall Linux on it.
I expected at least a serial terminal out of the box so that I wouldn't have to plug in a display. It has an RS232 port (via RJ11 jack and adapter cable), and it is a semi-embedded little box. However they didn't enable it in/etc/inittab. Damn. On to Ethernet though, surely it ships with an ssh server running out of the box? Nope. On to plugging in a keyboard and display...
It does come with Gentoo out of the box (not sure why they picked that distribution), with KDE (ugh) and some various other software. I used UNetbootin (http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html) to install Ubuntu via the network, because the BIOS that shipped on my Fit-PC didn't have working PXE boot (they've since fixed that). Afterward, I enabled the serial console and SSH server, configured the network interfaces, installed the applications I needed (SVN server) and stashed the Fit-PC somewhere and forgot about it, as I had originally intended.
Overall, I like the Fit-PC, but I wish they had taken more care with the out-of-box experience and even the PC itself (the reset button, for example, is not exposed, and there's no soft-power way to shut the thing off since it has no other buttons). I do like the dual network interfaces, RS232, and low power and quiet operation, but there are tons of other similar Geode-based boxes out there, so this isn't too unique.
Finally, the Geode is going away. I wonder what the next semi-embedded x86 chip of choice will be.
I have one of these boards sitting right here, their claim is true. However you should see the Linux it boots into in 1.1-1.3 seconds. Needless to say, it's extremely stripped down and it can't do a whole lot, but it's great for adding just the embedded software you need and having a real usable product. Boot that board off an SD card with Debian and you'll see a more typical boot time.
It's not too surprising that the CTO of a web browser company wants us to use XHTML and CSS for this, but that doesn't make it a good idea.
XHTML and CSS are mainly for representing information in a web browser, they are great for that. Word processing is in many ways a whole different world and it makes sense to have a different format there (though one also defined by XML like XHTML is). Namely, CSS lacks a lot of the physical positioning stuff that a word processor needs, concepts such as page breaks, and so on (some things it does have, but they are generally never implemented and probably aren't enough anyhow).
XHTML is also meant for people to hand-write, it's a simple markup representing simple text. Word processing is never marked up by hand, the documents can be very complex, and anyone not looking at the source programatically will indeed think that it's a memory dump between angle brackets. That doesn't mean that it's a bad format, it's just not meant to be read that way.
Really, I don't think XHTML is the solution everywhere and pretty much any format is fine in word processing land as long as its truly open (not in the MS sense) and text-based.
Right. Dell PC prices are highly subsidized by the sheer amount of crap that they pre-load. However in Linux it can be the same as the current situation: open the box and unpack the new PC, format the hard disk, and re-install the OS...
Personally, I just care that they'll have to use Linux-supported hardware (Intel wireless + video and so on). If one distribution runs, I can assume that my favorite one will work as well. As a ThinkPad user, I am upset about Lenovo's handling of the ThinkPad line, so this move might just get me to buy a Dell as my next laptop.
"The computers on tv? They have voice commands, can log onto any service automatically and always have the right file just a keypress away."
That's because it's easier to do on film without shoving a bunch of mundane user interface stuff into the story line. Just like movie characters don't use the bathroom unless it's useful to the plot and stuff like that.
"Neither does your car, just ask your local mechanic how often they got to fix cars after their owner put in the wrong fuel. Why doesn't your car warn you before you put in the wrong nozzle? Because the tech ain't ready for it yet. One day it will, just as your car nowadays warns you when the oil is out (the oil light was once an innovation)."
Wrong fuel? Like Diesel in a gasoline engine? Yeah, those nozzles are designed not to fit correctly. Gasoline but wrong octane? This was once a problem but modern engines (ie: since the late 1980's) have knock sensors. They detect knock (early detonation from using a lower octane fuel in a high-compression motor) and retard the timing accordingly. There's no need for nozzle differences and the owner's handbook and other printed materials tell you the minimum octane rating.
The 'oil light' has been present on almost every car ever made. It used to indicate low oil pressure, which is a result of either simply not having enough oil, having a failing oil pump, or the like. Now they also have electronic level meters hooked up to that light, but that's not a major improvement, it's just that people don't bother using the dip stick.
That's the beauty of open source: never obsolete. Even after they're old, after the manufacturer stops support and loses interest (or goes out of business), OSS/documented products can be hacked to remain useful. Meanwhile closed systems will indeed wind up in the dump. The OLPC is a very open system and I see it being useful for a long long time simply because a developer or hacker could make it do anything they want.
no, you'll have bigger problems
on
AmigaOS 4
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In the year 2038, you will have a much bigger problem than arguing about Amiga:
For MySQl, PHP 5 and its MySQLi extension provide prepared statements and the like to improve things in the way you're suggesting. Earlier versions really didn't, and on top of that there is the magic quotes 'feature' that really mixes things up (and, I hear, is due for removal soon).
My main gripes have been the complete lack of namespace support, dumping everything into one global space and making it relatively easy to screw up. PHP also plays fast and loose with variables, which at times is convenient but often leads to ambiguities that can have unforeseen consequences. Things like using uninitialized variables are marked as a very low warning priority (not shown by default). Pre-PHP5, the OO features were very lacking, often making it pretty worthless to try to write code that way. Not necessarily security issues, but they definitely contribute.
I just really care about this project, it means a lot to me and I believe in it. I guess I get really defensive about all the FUD being spread about it. Here's an example of a website set up as a FUD/astroturfing thing whose purpose is to make people see the OLPC as a very bad thing:
You see enough of this crap and then you start to get kind of upset (at least, I do). I don't know who hired that guy, for instance, but they really ought to be ashamed.
They'll most likely be assembled in Taiwan and mainland China, you know, like where all your current electronics are assembled. I don't know how to put this eloquently, but the OLPC is an empowerment and education project so that those kids will grow up with skills and access to information (like you have), enabling them to have a nicer life later and improve their own country/economy. The $100 price is due to economies of scale, subsidies, etc.
As for your ignorance of the language and people of Brazil... wow. But the other reply explained that to you.
Slashdot Mirror
printer drivers have little (or nothing) to do with the kernel, they live in user space.
It's part of the mac80211 layer, so it in theory supports any mac80211 driver, that is a 'soft MAC' WiFi chipset. There are minor driver changes required to support mesh (basically adding mesh beacons) and right now the zd1211rw and B43 drivers work. We have more details here:
http://o11s.org/trac
B43 is your best bet at the moment, if you have a few of those, give the HOWTO on the o11s website a try and you can have your own mesh network.
Eventually other soft-MAC chipsets can work, such as Intel's iwlwifi, Ralink, etc. At the moment beaconing is broken in rt2x000 so Ralink won't work, but that will probably be fixed soon.
For what it's worth, there's nothing under the XO's keyboard that gets hot. The motherboard is behind the screen, the keyboard piece is just the keyboard and touchpad.
Technically, they don't really become unreadable, there's just an uncorrectable bit flip or two (out of say, 128KB) and that block gets marked "bad" and then it's not used anymore. Whatever data it contained is still there though, and you could read it if you wanted to. That said, on an SSD there is an onboard controller that abstracts away the Flash itself, so I suppose that it might not provide any interface to reading "bad" blocks, other than that there's really nothing stopping you.
I was curious so I looked up the embedded system inside the robot, it's an 8-bit Atmel AVR with supporting hardware. I figured that the Tux-shaped robot would at least be running Linux internally, for example they could have used a Gumstix board or the like. That said, AVR development is pretty fun (and you get to use gcc rather than some vendor tools) and this thing looks like a neat embedded toy.
With ThinkPads it's just a matter of whether you get "integrated" (Intel) or "discrete" (ATI/NVidia) graphics, and in this case I doubt they'll jam "discrete" graphics into a smaller form factor, especially where battery life and heat count so much. My guess is that it has Intel graphics, in which case things should work fine. The WiFi will probably be a MiniPCI / ExpressCard deal as usual, in which case you can choose Intel's chipset.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/proposed_classified_bill_will
Rep. John Haller (R-PA) introduces a bill that will allocate (classified) dollars over the next (classified) years to fight flesh-eating (classified).
and for what it's worth, he's speaking Russian the whole time, not Ukrainian.
It _is_ a USB NIC. That is, when you plug it into your PC via USB, it charges and also comes up as a USB network interface... It's a really neat platform, though not very consumer-ready. The next version has about twice the clock rate and some other nice improvements, and that one could probably be used as a pretty good phone as well as a development platform.
It has two ports. You can have more with USB dongles (I've had pretty good luck with Linksys USB Ethernet interfaces, though make sure you get the USB 2.0 versions, some stores still have the slower models around).
Ooh, I have one of these, and it's kind of a mixed bag. The people who make them don't really seem to have enough Linux experience to really set this thing up so that it makes sense out of the box, definitely buy it only if you're planning to reinstall Linux on it.
/etc/inittab. Damn. On to Ethernet though, surely it ships with an ssh server running out of the box? Nope. On to plugging in a keyboard and display...
I expected at least a serial terminal out of the box so that I wouldn't have to plug in a display. It has an RS232 port (via RJ11 jack and adapter cable), and it is a semi-embedded little box. However they didn't enable it in
It does come with Gentoo out of the box (not sure why they picked that distribution), with KDE (ugh) and some various other software. I used UNetbootin (http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html) to install Ubuntu via the network, because the BIOS that shipped on my Fit-PC didn't have working PXE boot (they've since fixed that). Afterward, I enabled the serial console and SSH server, configured the network interfaces, installed the applications I needed (SVN server) and stashed the Fit-PC somewhere and forgot about it, as I had originally intended.
Overall, I like the Fit-PC, but I wish they had taken more care with the out-of-box experience and even the PC itself (the reset button, for example, is not exposed, and there's no soft-power way to shut the thing off since it has no other buttons). I do like the dual network interfaces, RS232, and low power and quiet operation, but there are tons of other similar Geode-based boxes out there, so this isn't too unique.
Finally, the Geode is going away. I wonder what the next semi-embedded x86 chip of choice will be.
That 'plague' has to do with electrolytic capacitors. Please take a look at this image:
j pg
http://wiki.laptop.org/images/1/10/Proto-a-front.
Note the near-absence of electrolytic caps, especially the junky through-hole ones you find on your typical motherboard.
Uruguay is a shithole country, eh?
Many of those commands look kind of similar to das u-boot, perhaps they modified it? If so, someone should request the source...
I have one of these boards sitting right here, their claim is true. However you should see the Linux it boots into in 1.1-1.3 seconds. Needless to say, it's extremely stripped down and it can't do a whole lot, but it's great for adding just the embedded software you need and having a real usable product. Boot that board off an SD card with Debian and you'll see a more typical boot time.
It's not too surprising that the CTO of a web browser company wants us to use XHTML and CSS for this, but that doesn't make it a good idea.
XHTML and CSS are mainly for representing information in a web browser, they are great for that. Word processing is in many ways a whole different world and it makes sense to have a different format there (though one also defined by XML like XHTML is). Namely, CSS lacks a lot of the physical positioning stuff that a word processor needs, concepts such as page breaks, and so on (some things it does have, but they are generally never implemented and probably aren't enough anyhow).
XHTML is also meant for people to hand-write, it's a simple markup representing simple text. Word processing is never marked up by hand, the documents can be very complex, and anyone not looking at the source programatically will indeed think that it's a memory dump between angle brackets. That doesn't mean that it's a bad format, it's just not meant to be read that way.
Really, I don't think XHTML is the solution everywhere and pretty much any format is fine in word processing land as long as its truly open (not in the MS sense) and text-based.
Right. Dell PC prices are highly subsidized by the sheer amount of crap that they pre-load. However in Linux it can be the same as the current situation: open the box and unpack the new PC, format the hard disk, and re-install the OS...
Personally, I just care that they'll have to use Linux-supported hardware (Intel wireless + video and so on). If one distribution runs, I can assume that my favorite one will work as well. As a ThinkPad user, I am upset about Lenovo's handling of the ThinkPad line, so this move might just get me to buy a Dell as my next laptop.
"The computers on tv? They have voice commands, can log onto any service automatically and always have the right file just a keypress away."
That's because it's easier to do on film without shoving a bunch of mundane user interface stuff into the story line. Just like movie characters don't use the bathroom unless it's useful to the plot and stuff like that.
"Neither does your car, just ask your local mechanic how often they got to fix cars after their owner put in the wrong fuel. Why doesn't your car warn you before you put in the wrong nozzle? Because the tech ain't ready for it yet. One day it will, just as your car nowadays warns you when the oil is out (the oil light was once an innovation)."
Wrong fuel? Like Diesel in a gasoline engine? Yeah, those nozzles are designed not to fit correctly. Gasoline but wrong octane? This was once a problem but modern engines (ie: since the late 1980's) have knock sensors. They detect knock (early detonation from using a lower octane fuel in a high-compression motor) and retard the timing accordingly. There's no need for nozzle differences and the owner's handbook and other printed materials tell you the minimum octane rating.
The 'oil light' has been present on almost every car ever made. It used to indicate low oil pressure, which is a result of either simply not having enough oil, having a failing oil pump, or the like. Now they also have electronic level meters hooked up to that light, but that's not a major improvement, it's just that people don't bother using the dip stick.
That's the beauty of open source: never obsolete. Even after they're old, after the manufacturer stops support and loses interest (or goes out of business), OSS/documented products can be hacked to remain useful. Meanwhile closed systems will indeed wind up in the dump. The OLPC is a very open system and I see it being useful for a long long time simply because a developer or hacker could make it do anything they want.
In the year 2038, you will have a much bigger problem than arguing about Amiga:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
It's a Cortex-A8, check wikipedia. Those are new ARM cores that run in the 600-800MHz and possibly 1GHz range and are quiet capable.
For MySQl, PHP 5 and its MySQLi extension provide prepared statements and the like to improve things in the way you're suggesting. Earlier versions really didn't, and on top of that there is the magic quotes 'feature' that really mixes things up (and, I hear, is due for removal soon).
My main gripes have been the complete lack of namespace support, dumping everything into one global space and making it relatively easy to screw up. PHP also plays fast and loose with variables, which at times is convenient but often leads to ambiguities that can have unforeseen consequences. Things like using uninitialized variables are marked as a very low warning priority (not shown by default). Pre-PHP5, the OO features were very lacking, often making it pretty worthless to try to write code that way. Not necessarily security issues, but they definitely contribute.
Huh? The driver for it is completely open source. The firmware is a firmware image downloaded into the processor just like in any other WiFi 'card'.
I am sick too, similar situation. Sorry.
I just really care about this project, it means a lot to me and I believe in it. I guess I get really defensive about all the FUD being spread about it. Here's an example of a website set up as a FUD/astroturfing thing whose purpose is to make people see the OLPC as a very bad thing:
http://olpcnews.com/
You see enough of this crap and then you start to get kind of upset (at least, I do). I don't know who hired that guy, for instance, but they really ought to be ashamed.
They'll most likely be assembled in Taiwan and mainland China, you know, like where all your current electronics are assembled. I don't know how to put this eloquently, but the OLPC is an empowerment and education project so that those kids will grow up with skills and access to information (like you have), enabling them to have a nicer life later and improve their own country/economy. The $100 price is due to economies of scale, subsidies, etc.
As for your ignorance of the language and people of Brazil... wow. But the other reply explained that to you.