Loki was a little different. For the most part, everyone WANTED to work there, and believed in the company. It's easy to believe promises and speculations when you trust the administration and have a sense of a common goal.
This is just speculation, but I think ARM is putting a lot of pressure on MIPS in the embedded market. The ARM is almost as much of a pleasure to work with as MIPS at the assembly level, and it uses very little power. This is why Intel's StrongARM version of the ARM has found its way into many PDA's and other portable devices.
Aren't these the exact goals of Kylix? I haven't used it myself, but from what I've seen it is an intuitive programming language suitable for general application development, with a nice GUI system.
We're vulnerable now, but don't worry! Congress can just pass a few laws making it illegal to talk or think about technical vulnerabilities, and we'll all be safe. I feel better already.
(I'm only half kidding... rather than develop secure cell phone technology, the phone industry got some laws passed making it illegal to make, sell, or even discuss the workings of scanners with the ability to receive the cell phone frequency range -- nevermind the fact that you can do this with an old UHF TV from before the frequencies were reallocated! The result? An INCREDIBLY vulnerable phone network, but the ability to legally fuck anyone who pissed the wrong people off. This was a topic of discussion at the SE2600 404 meeting last night...)
-John
Re:Market research would have solved a lot.
on
A Loki Timeline
·
· Score: 2
If I recall correctly, the PPC ports were done mostly for fun after hours, and the Alpha port of Civ:CTP was done on contract with a volunteer.
Out of curiosity, do they allow remote access to ports 25 and 110?
If so, I suspect many technically inclined people will start running their own mail servers.
I run an IMAP server on my home box, and it's made life a LOT easier.
Heh. I implemented Blowfish back in high school, using readily-available information. It didn't require any exceptional level of skill, just a basic knowledge of crypto and the ability to translate an algorithm into code.
For those who don't know, Blowfish is a very strong cipher that supports up to 448-bit keys.
Just for kicks, I changed 2 lines of the code and made an "exportable" version with 32-bit keys.
Crypto export laws are a complete joke. The US does not have a monopoly on strong encryption; it's not as if we are supplying some scare resource to the rest of the world. If a 17 year old geek could implement strong encryption on a laptop in his bedroom, I am fairly certain a ring of terrorists could do the same.
On the other hand, these laws do cause a considerable hassle for law-abiding organizations that wish to add security to their products. Therefore I believe that these laws are detrimental and should be repealed immediately.
The game download page is not ready yet, but you can find many of these games on the authors' home pages. I highly recommend downloading them -- there were some really good submissions. And by all means don't just download the top three. Almost all of the entries are worth a look.
Although some were disappointed that their games didn't win, everyone has been very polite and understanding. That says a lot about the open source/free software development community. It really was a pleasure to deal with everyone involved in the contest.
The RIAA et al may be busy litigating, but with the rise of peer to peer networks, everyone with an Internet connection has instant access to almost any sort of music or other data he or she desires.
That is a big win for consumers. And by their nature, peer to peer networks are difficult to target legally.
They may not last forever, but for now, consumers have some incredibly powerful tools at their disposal.
Terrorism is using violence or other unlawful means to achieve political ends.
Vandalism is using unlawful means just for the hell of it. Crime usually does terrify people. That doesn't mean every criminal is a terrorist. Hell, I was terrified over final exams this semester. That doesn't mean my profs are terrorists.:-)
There's a fine line in some cases, but unless a worm writer is working for some political cause and deliberately trying to frighten people in order to change their viewpoints, then the definition of terrorist does not fit. Vandal, perhaps. Maybe even burglar in some cases. Or, more descriptively, "author of a destructive program." But not terrorist.
There is a disturbing trend of identifying every sort of criminal as a terrorist, because that word carries a certain fear factor with it. Which sounds better: "We apprehended those delinquent web site crackers!", or "We apprehended those evil cyber-terrorists!"? Which would be more likely to get one promoted or secure more agency funding?
The Jornada is almost identical to the iPaq hardware-wise.
The main problem is that the StrongARM is awful at math. Integer addition, subtraction, and multiplication are fine, but there is no integer division instruction, and there is no floating point support at all (software only). The StrongARM is a nice, fast CPU for everything but math. (Some versions of the ARM line have math coprocessors, but they generally aren't used in handhelds.)
Unfortunately, Quake uses floating point math, and lots of it. So it's going to be slow, and until handhelds have hardware math coprocessors, there's not a lot that can be done about it.
Note that Doom (a port of the PrBoom project, specifically) runs just fine on the iPaq. As far as I know (could be wrong), Doom uses almost no floating point math.
BTW, various people have successfully compiled SDL on the iPaq (running Linux of course; not sure about WinCE). I didn't do the Doom port, but reportedly it was a very simple port.
Recognizing arbitrary handwriting is difficult. So to make the task easier, Graffiti uses a less ambiguous alphabet.
How is that patentable? Computer science's *usual* approach to difficult problems is to make them less general, and this seems like a completely obvious way to do it. Ok, maybe I can understand a patent on a particularly innovative *method* for recognizing Graffiti characters (for instance, some new way of feeding the data into a neural network). But this appears to be a patent on any recognition system that uses a unistroke alphabet even remotely like Xerox's.
Out of morbid curiosity, I developed my own Graffiti-like input system a while back. It used a completely different mathematical trick than any other recognizer I know of (email me if you're interested, I'd be happy to share), and it could be trained to recognize almost any unistroke alphabet. I wonder if it would be covered by this patent, even though it's not limited strictly to the Graffiti alphabet and it uses a completely different algorithm.
As an interesting data point, I showed my system to an AI guy at Georgia Tech, and he was not impressed at my system's capabilities. He said I was sidestepping the problem by requiring unistroke characters.
That said, I am not surprised that Xerox got a patent on this, nor that it was held to be enforceable. I just think it is absurd.
Linux runs just fine on modern Macs.
I recommend Yellow Dog Linux, in particular.
Macs are basically PC hardware with PowerPC processors instead of x86. For instance, my iBook has an IDE hard drive and an ATI Rage 128 video chipset (which XFree86 supports). The audio chip is a Texas Instruments part. Documentation is available from TI, and there is a Linux driver.
I'm a diehard Linux geek, and I find OS X quite to my liking.
I recently bought an iBook with OS X. At first it was meant primarily to be a secondary console, and an experiment in the Macintosh world. But recently I've found myself using OS X for more and more of my daily computing.
OS X is not without its flaws; the package system stinks, the X server (XFree86 port actually) is a little slow, and porting applications can be a bit of an inconvenience, but the environment is pleasant to use, and the underlying UNIX system is easily accessible.
After installing bash, XFree86 (XDarwin), GTK+, GIMP, and XEmacs, OS X leaves little to be desired.
OS X goes all out with antialiasing; almost all fonts rendering is antialiased, which makes Web surfing and document reading much more pleasant. The graphics system certainly takes a toll on the system's performance, but in my opinion it's worth it.
Please do not judge OS X from versions prior to 10.1. 10.0's performance was horrible. It has gotten much faster.
Apple: PLEASE bring back springloaded folders -- OS X needs them!
Seems like everyone hates spam with a passion, except maybe the spammers themselves, and from what I've gathered they're generally pretty clueless. Why would people mess up one of the few effective lines of defense?
Maybe I'm just being naive, but I think this could actually work.
It is true that there will probably be fewer third party apps for this platform. However,
a) Qt is a popular and well known API. Writing Qt apps is a hell of a lot easier than writing Palm OS apps.
b) WinCE development is of little interest to the hordes of Linux developers out there.
c) The ARM processor is quite powerful, and many existing Linux apps can be ported directly to the PDA. For instance, I ported my modplayer directly to the iPAQ. I ended up reworking the mixing system to get rid of floating point math, but the port was mostly straightforward. The main problem is the smaller screen, and hence user interface issues, but Qt makes this a bit easier. Some of the OHH people (see below) are working on a version of GTK with improved support for PDA displays.
d) There is a sizeable Open Handhelds community out there. Try http://www.handhelds.org, or #handhelds.org on OPN. These people are actively working on making open source PDA development viable.
e) Several large companies (Compaq, Sharp, HP (before the merger), etc) are interested in alternatives to Windows CE. Per-unit license fees add up quickly when you're mass producing units. Linux has no per-seat licensing, and the ARM port of the kernel is quite stable and mature.
I agree that Linux probably won't see the developer backing of WinCE (currently PocketPC 2002) or Palm OS, but it's definitely not out on a limb by itself, like VTech's VTOS (on the Helio PDA).
a) install Red Hat 7.1 on a laptop
b) download a standard WINE RPM and install it
c) edit a config file to set a few paths
d) pop in Starcraft CD and play
I am skeptical that this startup has anything useful to offer, but I wish them the best.
GPS is, in my opinion, one of the coolest things the Dept of Defense has done. Sure, you can criticize them for controlling an important world resource, but keep in mind that they took the initiative to design and build this resource, at the cost of billions of dollars. There's nothing stopping any country from launching its own navigation satellites, but until they come up with that kind of money and sufficient technology, I think it's pretty damn nice of the US to provide the service for free.
I have a portable GPS receiver (Magellan 315, highly recommended), and I love it. I've never used it for anything really serious, just a bit of mountain hiking. Set a waypoint at your house, and it's impossible to get totally lost. Geocaching (http://www.geocaching.com) is also a lot of fun -- I've found two caches so far.
As for backwards compatibility, keep in mind that the military would need to upgrade all of its hardware too, which would be pretty expensive. I don't think they'll break backwards compatibility unless they have to. If they suddenly rendered existing GPS receivers obsolete, I suspect there would be a large public outcry, and the DoD really doesn't need bad PR, especially now...
YDL (2.0 at least) is also more or less a recompile of Red Hat, but it doesn't seem half-assed at all. I've been running it on my iBook2. It's just a Linux box. I've been very happy with it so far.
As for some of the earlier comments about using Linux version OS X, here is why I switched: I found myself running all of my old Linux apps on XDarwin anyway (XFree86 port), and just about every piece of free software I downloaded had to be ported, with changes at least to the build environment and often to the code. It became incredibly annoying, and I decided that if I was going to treat this machine like it was a Linux system, it might as well be a Linux system. So I installed YDL 2.0 and never looked back.
The native OS X stuff is very nice, and it's by far the prettiest OS I've ever seen. It'll be really great once more applications and ports appear. I understand OS X.1 is faster and more stable already. But for the time being, Linux is far superior to OS X for my purposes.
OS X is both CPU and memory bound. Even with sufficient memory, it is a bit sluggish. A more powerful processor would help a lot.
This particular machine is just barely too slow to play DivX movies. A little more memory bandwidth would go a long way.
Finally, the iBook makes a great Linux laptop. It is incredibly portable, has a very nice battery life (albeit probably a bit less with the mod), and all of the hardware (minus the FireWire port) is supported. I assure you I can find plenty of uses for increased CPU power on a Linux machine. Linux flies on this system already -- with a little more CPU, it would be truly wicked.
That said, I don't think I'll void my warranty. But as soon as the 1-year warranty has expired, I'll give this a shot.
Slashdot Mirror
Loki was a little different. For the most part, everyone WANTED to work there, and believed in the company. It's easy to believe promises and speculations when you trust the administration and have a sense of a common goal.
-John (former Loki contractor)
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst
Look in his "gallery of DMCA abuses".
-John
This is just speculation, but I think ARM is putting a lot of pressure on MIPS in the embedded market. The ARM is almost as much of a pleasure to work with as MIPS at the assembly level, and it uses very little power. This is why Intel's StrongARM version of the ARM has found its way into many PDA's and other portable devices.
-John
Aren't these the exact goals of Kylix? I haven't used it myself, but from what I've seen it is an intuitive programming language suitable for general application development, with a nice GUI system.
-John
We're vulnerable now, but don't worry! Congress can just pass a few laws making it illegal to talk or think about technical vulnerabilities, and we'll all be safe. I feel better already.
(I'm only half kidding... rather than develop secure cell phone technology, the phone industry got some laws passed making it illegal to make, sell, or even discuss the workings of scanners with the ability to receive the cell phone frequency range -- nevermind the fact that you can do this with an old UHF TV from before the frequencies were reallocated! The result? An INCREDIBLY vulnerable phone network, but the ability to legally fuck anyone who pissed the wrong people off. This was a topic of discussion at the SE2600 404 meeting last night...)
-John
If I recall correctly, the PPC ports were done mostly for fun after hours, and the Alpha port of Civ:CTP was done on contract with a volunteer.
-John
Out of curiosity, do they allow remote access to ports 25 and 110?
If so, I suspect many technically inclined people will start running their own mail servers.
I run an IMAP server on my home box, and it's made life a LOT easier.
-John
Heh. I implemented Blowfish back in high school, using readily-available information. It didn't require any exceptional level of skill, just a basic knowledge of crypto and the ability to translate an algorithm into code.
For those who don't know, Blowfish is a very strong cipher that supports up to 448-bit keys.
Just for kicks, I changed 2 lines of the code and made an "exportable" version with 32-bit keys.
Crypto export laws are a complete joke. The US does not have a monopoly on strong encryption; it's not as if we are supplying some scare resource to the rest of the world. If a 17 year old geek could implement strong encryption on a laptop in his bedroom, I am fairly certain a ring of terrorists could do the same.
On the other hand, these laws do cause a considerable hassle for law-abiding organizations that wish to add security to their products. Therefore I believe that these laws are detrimental and should be repealed immediately.
-John
The game download page is not ready yet, but you can find many of these games on the authors' home pages. I highly recommend downloading them -- there were some really good submissions. And by all means don't just download the top three. Almost all of the entries are worth a look.
Although some were disappointed that their games didn't win, everyone has been very polite and understanding. That says a lot about the open source/free software development community. It really was a pleasure to deal with everyone involved in the contest.
-John (one of four SDL game contest judges)
Not at all.
The RIAA et al may be busy litigating, but with the rise of peer to peer networks, everyone with an Internet connection has instant access to almost any sort of music or other data he or she desires.
That is a big win for consumers. And by their nature, peer to peer networks are difficult to target legally.
They may not last forever, but for now, consumers have some incredibly powerful tools at their disposal.
-John
Terrorism is using violence or other unlawful means to achieve political ends.
:-)
Vandalism is using unlawful means just for the hell of it. Crime usually does terrify people. That doesn't mean every criminal is a terrorist. Hell, I was terrified over final exams this semester. That doesn't mean my profs are terrorists.
There's a fine line in some cases, but unless a worm writer is working for some political cause and deliberately trying to frighten people in order to change their viewpoints, then the definition of terrorist does not fit. Vandal, perhaps. Maybe even burglar in some cases. Or, more descriptively, "author of a destructive program." But not terrorist.
There is a disturbing trend of identifying every sort of criminal as a terrorist, because that word carries a certain fear factor with it. Which sounds better: "We apprehended those delinquent web site crackers!", or "We apprehended those evil cyber-terrorists!"? Which would be more likely to get one promoted or secure more agency funding?
Isn't that "meta-terrorism" of sorts? Hrmmm...
-John
The Jornada is almost identical to the iPaq hardware-wise.
The main problem is that the StrongARM is awful at math. Integer addition, subtraction, and multiplication are fine, but there is no integer division instruction, and there is no floating point support at all (software only). The StrongARM is a nice, fast CPU for everything but math. (Some versions of the ARM line have math coprocessors, but they generally aren't used in handhelds.)
Unfortunately, Quake uses floating point math, and lots of it. So it's going to be slow, and until handhelds have hardware math coprocessors, there's not a lot that can be done about it.
Note that Doom (a port of the PrBoom project, specifically) runs just fine on the iPaq. As far as I know (could be wrong), Doom uses almost no floating point math.
BTW, various people have successfully compiled SDL on the iPaq (running Linux of course; not sure about WinCE). I didn't do the Doom port, but reportedly it was a very simple port.
-John
Recognizing arbitrary handwriting is difficult. So to make the task easier, Graffiti uses a less ambiguous alphabet.
How is that patentable? Computer science's *usual* approach to difficult problems is to make them less general, and this seems like a completely obvious way to do it. Ok, maybe I can understand a patent on a particularly innovative *method* for recognizing Graffiti characters (for instance, some new way of feeding the data into a neural network). But this appears to be a patent on any recognition system that uses a unistroke alphabet even remotely like Xerox's.
Out of morbid curiosity, I developed my own Graffiti-like input system a while back. It used a completely different mathematical trick than any other recognizer I know of (email me if you're interested, I'd be happy to share), and it could be trained to recognize almost any unistroke alphabet. I wonder if it would be covered by this patent, even though it's not limited strictly to the Graffiti alphabet and it uses a completely different algorithm.
As an interesting data point, I showed my system to an AI guy at Georgia Tech, and he was not impressed at my system's capabilities. He said I was sidestepping the problem by requiring unistroke characters.
That said, I am not surprised that Xerox got a patent on this, nor that it was held to be enforceable. I just think it is absurd.
-John
Linux runs just fine on modern Macs.
I recommend Yellow Dog Linux, in particular.
Macs are basically PC hardware with PowerPC processors instead of x86. For instance, my iBook has an IDE hard drive and an ATI Rage 128 video chipset (which XFree86 supports). The audio chip is a Texas Instruments part. Documentation is available from TI, and there is a Linux driver.
-John
I'm a diehard Linux geek, and I find OS X quite to my liking.
I recently bought an iBook with OS X. At first it was meant primarily to be a secondary console, and an experiment in the Macintosh world. But recently I've found myself using OS X for more and more of my daily computing.
OS X is not without its flaws; the package system stinks, the X server (XFree86 port actually) is a little slow, and porting applications can be a bit of an inconvenience, but the environment is pleasant to use, and the underlying UNIX system is easily accessible.
After installing bash, XFree86 (XDarwin), GTK+, GIMP, and XEmacs, OS X leaves little to be desired.
OS X goes all out with antialiasing; almost all fonts rendering is antialiased, which makes Web surfing and document reading much more pleasant. The graphics system certainly takes a toll on the system's performance, but in my opinion it's worth it.
Please do not judge OS X from versions prior to 10.1. 10.0's performance was horrible. It has gotten much faster.
Apple: PLEASE bring back springloaded folders -- OS X needs them!
-John
Seems like everyone hates spam with a passion, except maybe the spammers themselves, and from what I've gathered they're generally pretty clueless. Why would people mess up one of the few effective lines of defense?
Maybe I'm just being naive, but I think this could actually work.
-John
It is true that there will probably be fewer third party apps for this platform. However,
a) Qt is a popular and well known API. Writing Qt apps is a hell of a lot easier than writing Palm OS apps.
b) WinCE development is of little interest to the hordes of Linux developers out there.
c) The ARM processor is quite powerful, and many existing Linux apps can be ported directly to the PDA. For instance, I ported my modplayer directly to the iPAQ. I ended up reworking the mixing system to get rid of floating point math, but the port was mostly straightforward. The main problem is the smaller screen, and hence user interface issues, but Qt makes this a bit easier. Some of the OHH people (see below) are working on a version of GTK with improved support for PDA displays.
d) There is a sizeable Open Handhelds community out there. Try http://www.handhelds.org, or #handhelds.org on OPN. These people are actively working on making open source PDA development viable.
e) Several large companies (Compaq, Sharp, HP (before the merger), etc) are interested in alternatives to Windows CE. Per-unit license fees add up quickly when you're mass producing units. Linux has no per-seat licensing, and the ARM port of the kernel is quite stable and mature.
I agree that Linux probably won't see the developer backing of WinCE (currently PocketPC 2002) or Palm OS, but it's definitely not out on a limb by itself, like VTech's VTOS (on the Helio PDA).
-John
Counterstrike also works.
But point taken.
From last week:
a) install Red Hat 7.1 on a laptop
b) download a standard WINE RPM and install it
c) edit a config file to set a few paths
d) pop in Starcraft CD and play
I am skeptical that this startup has anything useful to offer, but I wish them the best.
-John
GPS is, in my opinion, one of the coolest things the Dept of Defense has done. Sure, you can criticize them for controlling an important world resource, but keep in mind that they took the initiative to design and build this resource, at the cost of billions of dollars. There's nothing stopping any country from launching its own navigation satellites, but until they come up with that kind of money and sufficient technology, I think it's pretty damn nice of the US to provide the service for free.
I have a portable GPS receiver (Magellan 315, highly recommended), and I love it. I've never used it for anything really serious, just a bit of mountain hiking. Set a waypoint at your house, and it's impossible to get totally lost. Geocaching (http://www.geocaching.com) is also a lot of fun -- I've found two caches so far.
As for backwards compatibility, keep in mind that the military would need to upgrade all of its hardware too, which would be pretty expensive. I don't think they'll break backwards compatibility unless they have to. If they suddenly rendered existing GPS receivers obsolete, I suspect there would be a large public outcry, and the DoD really doesn't need bad PR, especially now...
-John
YDL (2.0 at least) is also more or less a recompile of Red Hat, but it doesn't seem half-assed at all. I've been running it on my iBook2. It's just a Linux box. I've been very happy with it so far.
As for some of the earlier comments about using Linux version OS X, here is why I switched: I found myself running all of my old Linux apps on XDarwin anyway (XFree86 port), and just about every piece of free software I downloaded had to be ported, with changes at least to the build environment and often to the code. It became incredibly annoying, and I decided that if I was going to treat this machine like it was a Linux system, it might as well be a Linux system. So I installed YDL 2.0 and never looked back.
The native OS X stuff is very nice, and it's by far the prettiest OS I've ever seen. It'll be really great once more applications and ports appear. I understand OS X.1 is faster and more stable already. But for the time being, Linux is far superior to OS X for my purposes.
-John
Nonsense.
OS X is both CPU and memory bound. Even with sufficient memory, it is a bit sluggish. A more powerful processor would help a lot.
This particular machine is just barely too slow to play DivX movies. A little more memory bandwidth would go a long way.
Finally, the iBook makes a great Linux laptop. It is incredibly portable, has a very nice battery life (albeit probably a bit less with the mod), and all of the hardware (minus the FireWire port) is supported. I assure you I can find plenty of uses for increased CPU power on a Linux machine. Linux flies on this system already -- with a little more CPU, it would be truly wicked.
That said, I don't think I'll void my warranty. But as soon as the 1-year warranty has expired, I'll give this a shot.
-John
We're bombing command and radar installations (confirmed destroyed), as well as dropping food and supplies in other areas.
A relatively good speech by Bush, I thought.
-John
Watcom C++ was a very solid product all around. 32-bit flat model DOS(4G) was only one of its targets.
In particular, Watcom's optimizer was well respected.
-John
A 10Mbit mirror at Georgia Tech is here. -John