I vaguely remember a French/belgian scifi comic book precisely about this topic: making tornadoes for good or evil and what happens when they become uncontrollable. Schould be one of these (horrible site, click english then comic), can anyone tell me which one?
Apart from memory, a CPU and connectivity, what does a thin client need? Right, you missed keyboard and monitor adapters. Your proposal sounds more like a thin client than a thin server.
Could be interesting nevertheless, but it's just something different. A thin server should rather provide a small (public) HTML server, printer, DHCP, NTP, authentification, VPN - the usual stuff. For bittorrent, SAMBA/NFS storage, POP/IMAP or any other meaningful server task, you need ata/scsi periferals.
I don't know if TurboPascal is GC or not, but I don't remember explicitly allocating and freeing variables, so I guess so.
Pascal doesn't do automatic gabage collection, it provides Alloc and Free functions for dynamic memory management. Apparently you only bothered to write code using global and local (stack allocated) variables. But rest assure that any trivial piece of linked list code in Pascal has you doing the deallocation manually.
It was quite surprising that so few IT neurons (several hundred out of millions) for such a short period of time contained so much precise information.
That *is* an interesting result, since (computer) neural net research generally tends to favour a designs with a complete overkill in the number of neurons.
"If we could record a larger population of neurons simultaneously, we might find even more robust codes hidden in the neural patterns and extract even fuller information," Poggio said.
...Then again, they seem to be on the ever familiar track to the bigger is better dead-end. So indeed, nothing new here...
Or Strange Days, which could be considered a (lose) remake of Brainstorm.
Well, actually the article focusses on intercepting the sensoric data and making sense of it. I believe scientists have for some time been able to make sense of the basic sensoric data; stuff like using a cat's eye to produce webcam quality images. This research seems directed at interpreting the signals at a much deeper level.
Though very interesting, it's still a one-way extraction process (ie. *not* synthesis) which is just completely unrelated to anything i saw in The Matrix, but I may have stumbled into an excuse to view that movie again;-)
As pointed out in other posts, Linksys - being a hardware company - was perfectly happy with the FOSS community improving functionality of their hardware. The decision to switch to crippled wh & closed source sw has less to do with being able to make a profit out of hw that supports free software and more to do with Cisco buying Linksys.
On the comparison of free hardware vs. free software (I guess you mean as in beer?). Design and maintenance cost money. Thats the same for both soft and hardware (though FOSS is a pretty good solution to harness software costs). But - obviously - production & distribution of hardware costs money (since you need raw materials) whereas copying software costs nil, especially if customers have their own distribution channel.
Now explain why total costs of hardware + software should be intrincically higher if customers prefer to NOT use bundled software?
Finally, on competition: Why wouldn't you be able to compete with another hardware company when you already have a headstart? Linksys never spent a lot of money on software in the first place.
The story of [...] how you can turn a $60 router into a $600 router [...]
Or rather: The story of how you can gain market share by freeloading on a movement that lifts your $60 dollar hardware to a $600 level.
I mean: maybe the $600 hardware wouldn't be worth $600 in the first place if it weren't developed in a proprieatary world. I don't suppose they loose money on WRT54G items, its just that they've discovered a way to maximize company-wide profits by cashing more on hardware that supports GPL-licensed, thus cashing on the software itself. (Note that the old WRT54G hardware appears to remain available, but rebranded as WRT54GL, most probably at a higher price.)
-- The path of least resistence is steady deterioration: without constant effort/energy keeping information free, it becomes not free, as thermodynamics clearly states
I have similar education in CS and CL, worked in CL and AI/OR. IMHO, and as mentioned in others posts you're missing the more formal subjects. Scanning, parsing, translation, logic specialized to formal semantics, syntax and discourse should be in any basic Computational Linguistics (masters) course as well.
I agree, and moreover I think it's useless to try to understand any linguistic aspect without Computational Linguistics. Linguism sans formal methods is like numerology sans math or astrology vs. astronomy.
There's simply so much that CAN be done with NLP that not utilizing that knowledge in studying language aspects - such as in anthropoly - is just plain silly.
I bought Paul DuBois' third edition a while ago; read most of it. It's a thorough work, but my main complaint is that it doesn't provide a descent index. Many terms are just missing, or don't refer to the most relevant pages. The kind invitation to send suggestions for improvements to indexes@samspublishing.com isn't really tempting either...
Also, forward references to sections are a hasle as sections lack numbering (granularity is just chapters) and a page number isn't provided either. For a book this big (over 1200 pages) that is a big mistake cos it's bound to be used as a reference manual rather than another nice read.
Also, I took some time to collect typo's and (minor) errors and mailed those to Paul DuBois. I was a bit disappointed by him not responding....
(Notice that my comments are not intended to lift opinions on "The Definitive Guide to MySQL 5". Haven't read that, but from the looks of it, DuBois' book still seems superiour.
>Even a dual athlon (multi-core or not) is likely to have an internal NUMA architecture.
Yes, but the grandparent post still holds, in that there's hardly a difference between a well threaded app on a single processor compared to shared memory/numa multiprocessor SMP. That kind of parallelism stops scaling at 4, maybe 8 cores.
From there on, memory/communication bandwidth becomes the bottleneck, adding more cores does not change speed. That's where the big decisions need to be made at the application level. That where programs become distributed programs. Clustering, grids and massively parallel problem solving impacts not just harware, but all levels of systems design, including application programming.
High performance parallel programming typically involves finding the best trade off between algorithms from a theoretical complexity viewpoint and algorirthms that are easyly distributed, finding a balance between cpu use and communication use, network topology, scalability, schedulability and numerous other buzz words that are relatively meaningless in desktop/server size single, dual, quad core sharde memory/numa architectures. Parallel is BIG
>In America, the water bottles are all type 3 and 5. Can't recycle that.
My final remark on the plastic issue: In the Netherlands (and most european countries I've visited) most if not all plastic bottles are either PET or a close relative thereof; most softdrink and beer bottles (glass or plastic) are recollected using a stationary system; PVC is used mainly for certain corrosive substances. That probably explains why our views on this differ.
>References please. I don't take "your word for it" as an acceptable resource.
A reference about some of the difficulties of recycling non-ferro metal can be found in the NRC (a thourough, though slightly right-wing newspaper, to european standards). I hope you can use Babelfish to some make sense of it. If not, this reference will be usefull. This backs your remark that recycled aluminium saves a lot of resources compare to using bauxite. Approximately the same percentage of iron and aluminium are recollected (40-45%), though aluminium has a larger market share than iron in cans in the UK as well (more optimistic numbers from US are here. A great resource for statistics is the official dutche statistics bureau http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/start.asp?LA=en&DM= SLEN&lp=Search/Search">CBS. Supposing 50% of aluminium is recycled, the other half is produced from bauxite, using 20 more energy (cite: 155MJ/kg, http://www.st.hhs.nl/~ipo_kon/aluminium/aluminium. htm). Same for steel, would contribute 30MJ/kg, so even including ferro's higher melting point that argues in favour of steel. (Steel and steel oxide are usually recycled as by products of ore furnaces anyway.) This is just focussing on energy and disregarding toxins; Dutch ecoindicator for aluminium is 19.60 steel is 4.66 but that may well be a political thing. On top, your get the realtively cheap separation thing using magnetism.
> Also, quit with your snide little passive agressive jabs at me - it discredits you.
Sorry for that, I apoligize if I offended you with my childish behaviour. Guess I just got anoyed about your beat on my alleged Scandinavian nationality.;-)
You are so off base. (I guess we just keep misinterpreting each other)
For the record, I'm *not* scandinavian, I live in a european country that hardly has any mining resources whatsoever. With 16 million people on a tiny piece of land we have enough problems already, which off course doesn't acquit us of our responsibilities in a global economy/ecology. (Yes, we send shipwrecks to asia, yes we have troops in Iraq, yes, we produce bio-fuels from soya grown on burned rain forrest - that doen't mean I approve.)
No, I'm not Swedish and I don't propagate a political agenda of a company or government. I get my information from visiting other countries and I read newspapers. I was under the impression we were debating the pros & cons of glas vs. PET and iron vs. aluminium, rather than flaming on another USA vs. rest of the world issue. Environmental issues arise on a global scale and are difficult enough without political agendas. And I didn't even know there was a connection between the (world-wide) popularity of aluminium and the US having a finger in it. (Though yes, like almost anyone I agree that throtling down US industries' pollution would be a great contribution to ecology, if only to give a good example to China.;-)
That said, on the glass/PET issue: I've seen some pretty convincing statistics that argue 1. In favour of recycling bottles, rather than the material they are made of 2. (Contrary to what I thought) the complete cycle (production, transportation, cleaning, reuse of materials, loss) favours plastic over glass (close to a factor of two). Similar statistics for aluminium & iron cans. At some point alumium had a weight advantage which made it slightly more attractive for airlines. Than they found they were able to produce thinner iron cans leading to a net lower weight, and again fully recyclable from normal houshold garbage.
OK. I'm using the same argumens, so I'll stop. Evidentally, we've based our conclusions on different statistics, propaganda, hearsay or other sources. Actually, the thing that surprises me most is that there's a controversy *at all* on these subjects. For the last ten years I haven't heard any trustworthy argument pro aluminium on this side of the ocean, while the plastic/glass thing is something I personally discovered not too long ago - but I double-checked those numbers and found them pretty solid as well. I guess news travels slow or just doesn't travel everywhere;-)
On plastic, see this link on PET (polyethylene terephthalate). I especially like the line that says:
The main virtue of PET is that it is fully recyclable. Unlike other plastics, its polymer chains can be recovered for additional use. PET has a resin identification code of 1.
The only thing preventing 100% in practice is the harder PVC butt, which occasionally cannot be removed properly. (That's exactly the same for PVC butts on glass bottles.) Glass is heavier, breaks easily and has higher melting point. The first two are responsible for higher transportation costs (both monetary and environmental). The last points to higher production costs. The negative is that glass (or sand) is a "cheaper" and less poluting resource, since it's not a CH itself.
As for aluminium, please point me to details on aluminium recycling as an environmental success. - Heating and cooling it destroys most of its crystaline structure. - Melting or welding is likely to trigger oxydizing due to it highly reactive properties. - It's a "heavy metal" (not in weight, but in its (mildly) poluting properties). - It's less strong (per mass) than most Fe based alloys. Worst, however, is that it's very hard to gather aluminium from household garbage, whereas iron is easy. Most recycled aluminium is produced either from larger parts of scrap (planes, cars) or in the production process itself (which is a lame statistic) or from cans collected trough a separate recycling channel (with unnecessary logistic overhead) in some scandinavian countries.
In practice, much aluminium is simply produced from ore using very inefficient processes (using electrolysis, which typically requires 20x more energy than recycling) in third world countries that can only compete due to neglegance of safity for employees and environment.
Aluminium is cheap as dismantling an oil tanker in asia is cheap: not a drop of pollution on US soil.
Just as a sidenote (don't know if this contradicts or supports your views): - Bottles: Producing and transporting glass bottles requires much more energy than plastic (PE, PET), because they are heavier and less robust. Glass bottles can typically be recycled 10 times before they are melted and reused. PET bottles can be reused 150 times, with the PVC buts being the main obstacle. Dont buy throw away bottles, but if you have to, buy plastic. - Cans: Recycling aluminium is close to impossible while producing them (especially getting the raw bauxite) is very polluting. Iron cans, on the other hand, are easyly separated from ordinary trash (using magnetism) and is (relatively) easy to recycle. Buy iron cans.
> What kind of pleasure can be had from doing this kind of hacking? After a while, doesn't it just become old hat?
True, that's what happens to all industries while professionalizing. I guess it's similar to people willing to work in arms industry, so this doesn't just concern foreign governments.
One of these? I think my dad had one of those. At the time I owned & used an HP28, which allows programming but has an awful keyboard (non-qwerty take a while to get used to). Ran for 100 hours on a couple of AAA if I remember correctly!
IMHO opinion neither has a display that's acceptable nowadays. Even a game console has colour and hi-res. (downside is of course that energy requirements are likely to double...)
I agree on keyboard and one or two usb ports (who needs pcmcia?) and I'd probably prefer bluetooth over 802.11, since the latter consumes considerably more power. You don't need an FPU to speed-up Google earth since the bottle neck is going to be the bleutooth-GPRS/UMTS/EDGE/GSM connection anyway in every cases where it would be useful.
I guess you could just order some stock laptop chassis, w/ keyboard, screen, and even batteries but sans mainboard. Would it be hard to find a small one with no-nonsense design?
The blurb makes it sound like this is essentially a way to quickly switch the hardware from one AP to another, buffering packets until the hardware is connected to the proper AP.
Great idea! That would allow you to switch access points while you're on the move; similar to ordinary cellular networks. The buffering would indeed create some latency, but if both connections are already established it should hardly be noticeble.
Wouldn't a proper software-defined radio be the real solution, allowing connections to 2 APs simultaneously with only one antenna?
Yes, but if I remember correctly it is pretty complicated to actually handle parallel radio signals using 802.11b. More likely, it would come down to a form of time sharing with consequently higher latency. Guess they just choose the way of least resistance given that Wifi cards are a relatively cheap component in perspective of longhorn/vista's hardware requirements.
Anyway, being able to switch AP with low latency would considerably close the gap between wireless voip and gsm phones.
I don't see the point in carrying a 3 kg laptop around if it dies after 3 hours of normal use. That's why, in reality laptops are just a poor man's solution to having multiple synchronized desktops. Poor in that the small keyboards and ergonomically ilplaced screens could easily be replaced by a barebone system (well, a really small one). Laptops are rarely used "in the field". It's a bit like carrying a complete, but downsized kitchen stove on a hiking trip.
I want a laptop that's *really* portable (1kg at most) has no moving parts (who needs a cdrom in the field; who needs a *ventilator*). And yes, I want a laptop that runs for a day or two. I want to be able to take a laptop with me on long trips - unplugged. I want to be able to do some programming while I'm on holiday.
If that means loosing the 128MB videocard + GPU - fine with me. If it means trading a 100GB drive for 1GB solid state - I don't care. Even scaling back from XScale to a 20MHz ARM3 isn't a problem. And as to my final wish - low boot time - that's where RISCOS could have an edge over Linux, even with hybernation.
...But I guess the only thing that comes close to these specs is a Palm device with a descent keyboard.
I'm not sure what your argument is, so please explain it to a slashdot known-no. Pick a Random header file and point out where you don't see #ifdefs that somehow relate to the used architecture.
Next, go to the directory marked as "common platform-independent kernel sources" and type "asm" to prove that no assembly is in there. See what i mean?
Now explain to me why this code is fundamentally easier to port to, say, XScale processors, than is Linux? Or 80286, for that matter?
Yes, in theory all machine specific aspects could be encapsulated in a single (set of) modules. But in reality, stuff like conceptually different memory models, endian, stack direction are bound to leak through different levels within the OS.
This may work for you now, but notice that this way of life could trigger: 1) Allergy to chemicals (may take time to develop) 2) Worse allergic response in case you sleep in a normal bed, occasionally
Just a hint to bystanders: don't try this at home. Don't do apply these extreme measures unless a medically qualified person advises you to. And don't be afraid to ask for a second oppinion.
As mentioned in other threads: A certain level of contamination is just part of a natural biotope that has evolved with humans, and that has proven to be mostly harmless to most people in most cases for a very long time. NONE of the available pesticides has been tested that long.
I think you are under estimateing some of the costs. (ping-pong;-)
Boards with video out, sound, and all the other stuff people take for granted, are quite more expensive than the typical bare kits. You can't spend over 50 (us$) on a laptop "mainboard". And indeed, a lot of cost are in ordering different alternatives and testing how well they fit your needs (this is basically man-hours). Once you've narrowed that to one or two alternatives, you need another bunch of man hours to port stuff and get it working (typically, half a year, 1-3 people). Next comes the hard part: testing and QA, but you could argue skipping this phase since the small userbase cannot justify these efforts. (But things could get messy when this fire back.)
In your case, you just skipped that phase directly to a production environment where hardware gets cheaper and the software basically "works".
btw I totally agree that a simple long batterylife XScale (or multiple StrongARMs) laptop would rock! I'm not entirely sure if I would run RISC OS, though. The UI is good en very fast, but - as mentioned in neighbouring threads - the backend is a bit lacky.
Again on topic with the article, I would not consider buying it unless RISCOS (complete sources) would be free as in "cannot be taken hostage again by RISCOS Ltd., Castle, Pace or any company". I want everyone (including myself) to have free access to it.
Nothing irks me more than the "most popular = best" mentality...
Well, there certainly are more important things in my life to irk about than "most popular = best" mentality. OK, I agree on matters like x86 being better than all other architectures simply because it's used predominantly or even because its the fastest (in desktopland). x86 is shite on almost all design aspects. ARM has great design value, as do Sparc, Power and Alpha.
That said, it's also kind of sad to watch what's left of the Acorn/Archimedes/Iyonic community. I guess there ARE some "merits that make RISCOS an attractive alternative", but with close to no life left these merits are getting smaller and smaller compared to vivacious "free alternatives" (Linux, BSD).
On topic of the orig article, what merits does RISCOS have that it would loose if it were open sourced? Or conversely, what companies have found a viable way to profit from its IP and get development back on rails? Or why would anyone without innate affinity to Acorn or its legacy be tempted to switch to it?
Many developers have begged Acorn to open source stuff when they proved unable to further develop it. Given the fringe nature and the hostage on IP, I - for one - moved on.
A.5 GHz XScale would make for a good RISCOS experience. However, a high-powered (battery-sucking) Pentium emulator is likely to run at a workablespeed too. And no ARM, StrongARM, XScale is going to outperform a mainstream x86 in native desktop speed, simply because it was neither designed or taylored for it and did not have the momentum to evolve on the same scale.
More importantly, however, is that an emulator is only software. This is relatively cheap to develop and VERY cheap to produce, whereas any hardware development is quite expensive. You could easily spend you first 50.000 on selecting the SBC that best suits your needs. (not just getting the boards, but invetsing time to study them. Then you need to either port a licensend version of the OS to the new hardware (or emulate RISCOS compliant hardware). By that time , the SBC may not be available any more, spec may have changed, etc. Even on relatively simple systems under high time presure with adequate staff (like in case of tomtom go navigator) this seldomly takes less than a year.
You will have burned close to half a million, sans marketing and you'll probably make less than 100 per item shipped. Ie. this won't work for a market as small as RISCOS. Compare this to any skilled software engineer writing an ARM emulator in a few weeks or months. (Actually, some decent emulators are already available for free.
This is a completely new insight to me. Could you illustrate this with a few examples?
I think you confuse RISCOS (which to my knowledge was only Acorn and Acorn descended machines) with ARM processors (which show up in PDAs, cell phones, routers, and washing machines). But I could be wrong; references?!?
Slashdot Mirror
I vaguely remember a French/belgian scifi comic book precisely about this topic: making tornadoes for good or evil and what happens when they become uncontrollable. Schould be one of these (horrible site, click english then comic), can anyone tell me which one?
Apart from memory, a CPU and connectivity, what does a thin client need? Right, you missed keyboard and monitor adapters. Your proposal sounds more like a thin client than a thin server.
Could be interesting nevertheless, but it's just something different. A thin server should rather provide a small (public) HTML server, printer, DHCP, NTP, authentification, VPN - the usual stuff. For bittorrent, SAMBA/NFS storage, POP/IMAP or any other meaningful server task, you need ata/scsi periferals.
I don't know if TurboPascal is GC or not, but I don't remember explicitly allocating and freeing variables, so I guess so.
Pascal doesn't do automatic gabage collection, it provides Alloc and Free functions for dynamic memory management. Apparently you only bothered to write code using global and local (stack allocated) variables. But rest assure that any trivial piece of linked list code in Pascal has you doing the deallocation manually.
That *is* an interesting result, since (computer) neural net research generally tends to favour a designs with a complete overkill in the number of neurons.
Or Strange Days, which could be considered a (lose) remake of Brainstorm.
;-)
Well, actually the article focusses on intercepting the sensoric data and making sense of it. I believe scientists have for some time been able to make sense of the basic sensoric data; stuff like using a cat's eye to produce webcam quality images. This research seems directed at interpreting the signals at a much deeper level.
Though very interesting, it's still a one-way extraction process (ie. *not* synthesis) which is just completely unrelated to anything i saw in The Matrix, but I may have stumbled into an excuse to view that movie again
As pointed out in other posts, Linksys - being a hardware company - was perfectly happy with the FOSS community improving functionality of their hardware. The decision to switch to crippled wh & closed source sw has less to do with being able to make a profit out of hw that supports free software and more to do with Cisco buying Linksys.
On the comparison of free hardware vs. free software (I guess you mean as in beer?). Design and maintenance cost money. Thats the same for both soft and hardware (though FOSS is a pretty good solution to harness software costs). But - obviously - production & distribution of hardware costs money (since you need raw materials) whereas copying software costs nil, especially if customers have their own distribution channel.
Now explain why total costs of hardware + software should be intrincically higher if customers prefer to NOT use bundled software?
Finally, on competition: Why wouldn't you be able to compete with another hardware company when you already have a headstart? Linksys never spent a lot of money on software in the first place.
The story of [...] how you can turn a $60 router into a $600 router [...]
Or rather: The story of how you can gain market share by freeloading on a movement that lifts your $60 dollar hardware to a $600 level.
I mean: maybe the $600 hardware wouldn't be worth $600 in the first place if it weren't developed in a proprieatary world. I don't suppose they loose money on WRT54G items, its just that they've discovered a way to maximize company-wide profits by cashing more on hardware that supports GPL-licensed, thus cashing on the software itself. (Note that the old WRT54G hardware appears to remain available, but rebranded as WRT54GL, most probably at a higher price.)
--
The path of least resistence is steady deterioration: without constant effort/energy keeping information free, it becomes not free, as thermodynamics clearly states
I have similar education in CS and CL, worked in CL and AI/OR. IMHO, and as mentioned in others posts you're missing the more formal subjects. Scanning, parsing, translation, logic specialized to formal semantics, syntax and discourse should be in any basic Computational Linguistics (masters) course as well.
I agree, and moreover I think it's useless to try to understand any linguistic aspect without Computational Linguistics. Linguism sans formal methods is like numerology sans math or astrology vs. astronomy.
There's simply so much that CAN be done with NLP that not utilizing that knowledge in studying language aspects - such as in anthropoly - is just plain silly.
I bought Paul DuBois' third edition a while ago; read most of it. It's a thorough work, but my main complaint is that it doesn't provide a descent index. Many terms are just missing, or don't refer to the most relevant pages. The kind invitation to send suggestions for improvements to indexes@samspublishing.com isn't really tempting either...
Also, forward references to sections are a hasle as sections lack numbering (granularity is just chapters) and a page number isn't provided either. For a book this big (over 1200 pages) that is a big mistake cos it's bound to be used as a reference manual rather than another nice read.
Also, I took some time to collect typo's and (minor) errors and mailed those to Paul DuBois. I was a bit disappointed by him not responding....
(Notice that my comments are not intended to lift opinions on "The Definitive Guide to MySQL 5". Haven't read that, but from the looks of it, DuBois' book still seems superiour.
>Even a dual athlon (multi-core or not) is likely to have an internal NUMA architecture.
Yes, but the grandparent post still holds, in that there's hardly a difference between a well threaded app on a single processor compared to shared memory/numa multiprocessor SMP. That kind of parallelism stops scaling at 4, maybe 8 cores.
From there on, memory/communication bandwidth becomes the bottleneck, adding more cores does not change speed. That's where the big decisions need to be made at the application level. That where programs become distributed programs. Clustering, grids and massively parallel problem solving impacts not just harware, but all levels of systems design, including application programming.
High performance parallel programming typically involves finding the best trade off between algorithms from a theoretical complexity viewpoint and algorirthms that are easyly distributed, finding a balance between cpu use and communication use, network topology, scalability, schedulability and numerous other buzz words that are relatively meaningless in desktop/server size single, dual, quad core sharde memory/numa architectures. Parallel is BIG
>In America, the water bottles are all type 3 and 5. Can't recycle that.
= SLEN&lp=Search/Search">CBS. Supposing 50% of aluminium is recycled, the other half is produced from bauxite, using 20 more energy (cite: 155MJ/kg, http://www.st.hhs.nl/~ipo_kon/aluminium/aluminium. htm). Same for steel, would contribute 30MJ/kg, so even including ferro's higher melting point that argues in favour of steel. (Steel and steel oxide are usually recycled as by products of ore furnaces anyway.) This is just focussing on energy and disregarding toxins; Dutch ecoindicator for aluminium is 19.60 steel is 4.66 but that may well be a political thing.
My final remark on the plastic issue: In the Netherlands (and most european countries I've visited) most if not all plastic bottles are either PET or a close relative thereof; most softdrink and beer bottles (glass or plastic) are recollected using a stationary system; PVC is used mainly for certain corrosive substances. That probably explains why our views on this differ.
>References please. I don't take "your word for it" as an acceptable resource.
A reference about some of the difficulties of recycling non-ferro metal can be found in the NRC (a thourough, though slightly right-wing newspaper, to european standards). I hope you can use Babelfish to some make sense of it. If not, this reference will be usefull. This backs your remark that recycled aluminium saves a lot of resources compare to using bauxite.
Approximately the same percentage of iron and aluminium are recollected (40-45%), though aluminium has a larger market share than iron in cans in the UK as well (more optimistic numbers from US are here. A great resource for statistics is the official dutche statistics bureau http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/start.asp?LA=en&DM
On top, your get the realtively cheap separation thing using magnetism.
> Also, quit with your snide little passive agressive jabs at me - it discredits you.
Sorry for that, I apoligize if I offended you with my childish behaviour. Guess I just got anoyed about your beat on my alleged Scandinavian nationality.;-)
You are so off base. (I guess we just keep misinterpreting each other)
;-)
For the record, I'm *not* scandinavian, I live in a european country that hardly has any mining resources whatsoever. With 16 million people on a tiny piece of land we have enough problems already, which off course doesn't acquit us of our responsibilities in a global economy/ecology. (Yes, we send shipwrecks to asia, yes we have troops in Iraq, yes, we produce bio-fuels from soya grown on burned rain forrest - that doen't mean I approve.)
No, I'm not Swedish and I don't propagate a political agenda of a company or government. I get my information from visiting other countries and I read newspapers. I was under the impression we were debating the pros & cons of glas vs. PET and iron vs. aluminium, rather than flaming on another USA vs. rest of the world issue. Environmental issues arise on a global scale and are difficult enough without political agendas. And I didn't even know there was a connection between the (world-wide) popularity of aluminium and the US having a finger in it. (Though yes, like almost anyone I agree that throtling down US industries' pollution would be a great contribution to ecology, if only to give a good example to China.;-)
That said, on the glass/PET issue: I've seen some pretty convincing statistics that argue
1. In favour of recycling bottles, rather than the material they are made of
2. (Contrary to what I thought) the complete cycle (production, transportation, cleaning, reuse of materials, loss) favours plastic over glass (close to a factor of two).
Similar statistics for aluminium & iron cans. At some point alumium had a weight advantage which made it slightly more attractive for airlines. Than they found they were able to produce thinner iron cans leading to a net lower weight, and again fully recyclable from normal houshold garbage.
OK. I'm using the same argumens, so I'll stop. Evidentally, we've based our conclusions on different statistics, propaganda, hearsay or other sources. Actually, the thing that surprises me most is that there's a controversy *at all* on these subjects. For the last ten years I haven't heard any trustworthy argument pro aluminium on this side of the ocean, while the plastic/glass thing is something I personally discovered not too long ago - but I double-checked those numbers and found them pretty solid as well. I guess news travels slow or just doesn't travel everywhere
The only thing preventing 100% in practice is the harder PVC butt, which occasionally cannot be removed properly. (That's exactly the same for PVC butts on glass bottles.)
Glass is heavier, breaks easily and has higher melting point. The first two are responsible for higher transportation costs (both monetary and environmental). The last points to higher production costs. The negative is that glass (or sand) is a "cheaper" and less poluting resource, since it's not a CH itself.
As for aluminium, please point me to details on aluminium recycling as an environmental success.
- Heating and cooling it destroys most of its crystaline structure.
- Melting or welding is likely to trigger oxydizing due to it highly reactive properties.
- It's a "heavy metal" (not in weight, but in its (mildly) poluting properties).
- It's less strong (per mass) than most Fe based alloys.
Worst, however, is that it's very hard to gather aluminium from household garbage, whereas iron is easy. Most recycled aluminium is produced either from larger parts of scrap (planes, cars) or in the production process itself (which is a lame statistic) or from cans collected trough a separate recycling channel (with unnecessary logistic overhead) in some scandinavian countries.
In practice, much aluminium is simply produced from ore using very inefficient processes (using electrolysis, which typically requires 20x more energy than recycling) in third world countries that can only compete due to neglegance of safity for employees and environment.
Aluminium is cheap as dismantling an oil tanker in asia is cheap: not a drop of pollution on US soil.
Just as a sidenote (don't know if this contradicts or supports your views):
- Bottles: Producing and transporting glass bottles requires much more energy than plastic (PE, PET), because they are heavier and less robust. Glass bottles can typically be recycled 10 times before they are melted and reused. PET bottles can be reused 150 times, with the PVC buts being the main obstacle. Dont buy throw away bottles, but if you have to, buy plastic.
- Cans: Recycling aluminium is close to impossible while producing them (especially getting the raw bauxite) is very polluting. Iron cans, on the other hand, are easyly separated from ordinary trash (using magnetism) and is (relatively) easy to recycle. Buy iron cans.
> What kind of pleasure can be had from doing this kind of hacking? After a while, doesn't it just become old hat?
True, that's what happens to all industries while professionalizing. I guess it's similar to people willing to work in arms industry, so this doesn't just concern foreign governments.
One of these? I think my dad had one of those. At the time I owned & used an HP28, which allows programming but has an awful keyboard (non-qwerty take a while to get used to). Ran for 100 hours on a couple of AAA if I remember correctly!
IMHO opinion neither has a display that's acceptable nowadays. Even a game console has colour and hi-res. (downside is of course that energy requirements are likely to double...)
I agree on keyboard and one or two usb ports (who needs pcmcia?) and I'd probably prefer bluetooth over 802.11, since the latter consumes considerably more power. You don't need an FPU to speed-up Google earth since the bottle neck is going to be the bleutooth-GPRS/UMTS/EDGE/GSM connection anyway in every cases where it would be useful.
I guess you could just order some stock laptop chassis, w/ keyboard, screen, and even batteries but sans mainboard. Would it be hard to find a small one with no-nonsense design?
Great ideas, now let's start a company!
Great idea! That would allow you to switch access points while you're on the move; similar to ordinary cellular networks. The buffering would indeed create some latency, but if both connections are already established it should hardly be noticeble.
Yes, but if I remember correctly it is pretty complicated to actually handle parallel radio signals using 802.11b. More likely, it would come down to a form of time sharing with consequently higher latency. Guess they just choose the way of least resistance given that Wifi cards are a relatively cheap component in perspective of longhorn/vista's hardware requirements.
Anyway, being able to switch AP with low latency would considerably close the gap between wireless voip and gsm phones.
Then we're right on the same track afterall.
...But I guess the only thing that comes close to these specs is a Palm device with a descent keyboard.
I don't see the point in carrying a 3 kg laptop around if it dies after 3 hours of normal use. That's why, in reality laptops are just a poor man's solution to having multiple synchronized desktops. Poor in that the small keyboards and ergonomically ilplaced screens could easily be replaced by a barebone system (well, a really small one). Laptops are rarely used "in the field". It's a bit like carrying a complete, but downsized kitchen stove on a hiking trip.
I want a laptop that's *really* portable (1kg at most) has no moving parts (who needs a cdrom in the field; who needs a *ventilator*). And yes, I want a laptop that runs for a day or two. I want to be able to take a laptop with me on long trips - unplugged. I want to be able to do some programming while I'm on holiday.
If that means loosing the 128MB videocard + GPU - fine with me. If it means trading a 100GB drive for 1GB solid state - I don't care. Even scaling back from XScale to a 20MHz ARM3 isn't a problem. And as to my final wish - low boot time - that's where RISCOS could have an edge over Linux, even with hybernation.
I'm not sure what your argument is, so please explain it to a slashdot known-no. Pick a Random header file and point out where you don't see #ifdefs that somehow relate to the used architecture.
Next, go to the directory marked as "common platform-independent kernel sources" and type "asm" to prove that no assembly is in there. See what i mean?
Now explain to me why this code is fundamentally easier to port to, say, XScale processors, than is Linux? Or 80286, for that matter?
Yes, in theory all machine specific aspects could be encapsulated in a single (set of) modules. But in reality, stuff like conceptually different memory models, endian, stack direction are bound to leak through different levels within the OS.
This may work for you now, but notice that this way of life could trigger:
1) Allergy to chemicals (may take time to develop)
2) Worse allergic response in case you sleep in a normal bed, occasionally
Just a hint to bystanders: don't try this at home. Don't do apply these extreme measures unless a medically qualified person advises you to. And don't be afraid to ask for a second oppinion.
As mentioned in other threads: A certain level of contamination is just part of a natural biotope that has evolved with humans, and that has proven to be mostly harmless to most people in most cases for a very long time. NONE of the available pesticides has been tested that long.
I think you are under estimateing some of the costs. (ping-pong ;-)
Boards with video out, sound, and all the other stuff people take for granted, are quite more expensive than the typical bare kits. You can't spend over 50 (us$) on a laptop "mainboard". And indeed, a lot of cost are in ordering different alternatives and testing how well they fit your needs (this is basically man-hours). Once you've narrowed that to one or two alternatives, you need another bunch of man hours to port stuff and get it working (typically, half a year, 1-3 people). Next comes the hard part: testing and QA, but you could argue skipping this phase since the small userbase cannot justify these efforts. (But things could get messy when this fire back.)
In your case, you just skipped that phase directly to a production environment where hardware gets cheaper and the software basically "works".
btw I totally agree that a simple long batterylife XScale (or multiple StrongARMs) laptop would rock! I'm not entirely sure if I would run RISC OS, though. The UI is good en very fast, but - as mentioned in neighbouring threads - the backend is a bit lacky.
Again on topic with the article, I would not consider buying it unless RISCOS (complete sources) would be free as in "cannot be taken hostage again by RISCOS Ltd., Castle, Pace or any company". I want everyone (including myself) to have free access to it.
Nothing irks me more than the "most popular = best" mentality...
Well, there certainly are more important things in my life to irk about than "most popular = best" mentality. OK, I agree on matters like x86 being better than all other architectures simply because it's used predominantly or even because its the fastest (in desktopland). x86 is shite on almost all design aspects. ARM has great design value, as do Sparc, Power and Alpha.
That said, it's also kind of sad to watch what's left of the Acorn/Archimedes/Iyonic community. I guess there ARE some "merits that make RISCOS an attractive alternative", but with close to no life left these merits are getting smaller and smaller compared to vivacious "free alternatives" (Linux, BSD).
On topic of the orig article, what merits does RISCOS have that it would loose if it were open sourced? Or conversely, what companies have found a viable way to profit from its IP and get development back on rails? Or why would anyone without innate affinity to Acorn or its legacy be tempted to switch to it?
Many developers have begged Acorn to open source stuff when they proved unable to further develop it. Given the fringe nature and the hostage on IP, I - for one - moved on.
A .5 GHz XScale would make for a good RISCOS experience. However, a high-powered (battery-sucking) Pentium emulator is likely to run at a workablespeed too. And no ARM, StrongARM, XScale is going to outperform a mainstream x86 in native desktop speed, simply because it was neither designed or taylored for it and did not have the momentum to evolve on the same scale.
More importantly, however, is that an emulator is only software. This is relatively cheap to develop and VERY cheap to produce, whereas any hardware development is quite expensive. You could easily spend you first 50.000 on selecting the SBC that best suits your needs. (not just getting the boards, but invetsing time to study them. Then you need to either port a licensend version of the OS to the new hardware (or emulate RISCOS compliant hardware). By that time , the SBC may not be available any more, spec may have changed, etc. Even on relatively simple systems under high time presure with adequate staff (like in case of tomtom go navigator) this seldomly takes less than a year.
You will have burned close to half a million, sans marketing and you'll probably make less than 100 per item shipped. Ie. this won't work for a market as small as RISCOS. Compare this to any skilled software engineer writing an ARM emulator in a few weeks or months. (Actually, some decent emulators are already available for free.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Softgun_ARM_Emulator
http://www.skyeye.org/index.shtml
http://www.arm.com/support/ARMulator.html
This is a completely new insight to me. Could you illustrate this with a few examples?
I think you confuse RISCOS (which to my knowledge was only Acorn and Acorn descended machines) with ARM processors (which show up in PDAs, cell phones, routers, and washing machines). But I could be wrong; references?!?