I agree that the BIOS must be free. It runs on the host CPU, and malware/spyware in the BIOS can do just about anything - especially with virtual machine technology. I am glad that FSF is insisting on open BIOS.
However, we are talking about *device* firmware here. You know, like inside your disk drive or USB wireless stick. Are they going to insist that their mice and keyboards have open firmware? Yes, open/free hardware is a worthy project, but it really should not try to piggy back on free *software*.
Why does everyone keep saying "president-elect" Obama, when the Electoral College hasn't voted yet? (And the scheduled Supreme Court consideration of his natural born citizen status is still ahead of us.)
There is a huge difference between cards with proprietary drivers, and cards with proprietary firmware. Drivers run in your OS, are OS dependent, and have significant security risk. Binary drivers are evil (like from Nvidia).
Proprietary firmware, on the other hand, does *not* run in the OS - it runs on the card. The binary firmware blob is OS independent - works for Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, BeOS, whatever. It is CPU independent - the card generally doesn't care whether the host system is PowerPC, Intel, or ARM. While there is a small chance that firmware can be a security risk (since it gets DMA access to memory), it is far more remote than binary drivers.
There is no reason to object to a binary firmware blob - unless there is some stupid restriction on redistributing it (Hi, Broadcom). All it does is save money by replacing a ROM (RAM is cheaper than ROM) - and makes firmware upgrades trivial.
I can't believe FSF is objecting to this. Someone should do a parody of their new guidelines - with instructions on how to remove all PROMs from the motherboard, I/O cards, disk drives, etc. All those PROMs contain secret proprietary firmware. We can't be buying hardware with proprietary secrets now, can we?
Seriously, they should simply require binary firmware to be freely redistributable - giving you the same same freedom as if it was in ROM.
SSDs do not allow you to directly read/write/erase flash memory. The firmware includes a flash translation layer that lets the host read/write 512 byte sectors just like any other drive. Sectors do *not* have a fixed location on the disk. Writing a sector simply appends it to the current erase block, and updates the translation table (also an append). When it runs out of blank blocks, it picks one to erase based on its wear leveling algorithm and garbage collection, and copies any live sectors to a fresh erase block. Just like a HDD, there are plenty of spare erase blocks, which are needed for the copying garbage collection and for when erase blocks go bad.
While the basic function of FTL is open, the wear leveling and garbage collection algorithms are fiercely proprietary. (The best ones actually count how many times a block has been erased and keep the counts even - and do this at high data rates.) This is OK for now because there is also fierce competition, and the code runs only in firmware on the device - not on the host. (Same as the controller code on a HDD.) Should the SSD market ever shake out into a monopoly, the basic FTL ideas are available.
as this corporate behavior is, all you scumbags violating copyright to save a buck provided the excuse. (Although I must admit, I've never actually observed copyright violations via internet - the teens around here make "mix" CDs of their favorite tracks to give to their friends, but don't share stuff online.)
does that mean they will now sell me a low end laptop without Windows? (Preferably with FreeDos and diagnostics, but Ubuntu would be Ok, since that is popular.)
Coca tea is natural and healthful, containing a tiny, tiny amount of cocaine. The original Coca-Cola was coca tea, cola, sugar, and carbonation. (The modern version is decocainized - similar to decaffeinating.) It is only because people refine the cocaine into a pure form that it becomes dangerously addictive. And then some criminally selfish people sell the cocaine on the street to extract money from people now controlled by the chemical.
IMO, they should decriminalize all "natural" drugs, from peyote to green mulberries to marijuana to coca leaf to opium to frogs, and keep the synthetic and refined stuff (LSD, meth, heroine, cocaine, etc) by prescription only (and recreation is not a reason for a prescription).
I know two people who blew their brains on drugs. The "drug" was nutmeg (in large doses). Our street is littered with mulberries (unripe mulberries are hallucinogenic). Marijuana grows on the police station lawn as a weed (Fairfax, VA). Attempting to control everyday natural products is just insane - and just leads to police arresting whomever they please.
"You are under arrest for possession of marijuana." "Huh?" [click][click]"Thought you could grow it in your front lawn without us noticing, did you?" Thinks, "Damn, forgot the broadleaf killer again..."
Yeah, why waste tax payers money on arresting criminals after the fact? Arresting them *before* the crime saves a ton of money and waste. Arresting criminals pre-crime is especially important in cases like this (or like murder) where the crime cannot be undone.
With all the bad experiences related, I thought I'd add my good experiences. Ours came a week before Christmas. It worked great. It is as fast and has as much memory as the email/imap/vpn/squid server used by one of my clients remote offices. The only thing that is too slow is the Flash plugin that runs Webkins - but I don't really want my daughter playing Webkins all the time anyway. With current releases, I get 5 hour battery life - better than any full size laptop at our house. The 10" screen is razor sharp and the sun mode and ebook mode are great. It is a big hit with the kids in the neighborhood. I use it myself a lot because I can curl up with it in an easy chair.
The bad news: It took some updating and playing to get to the above. The keyboard is too small for an adult, but USB keyboards work fine. Here are the things that made it slow as delivered:
1) The FFS2 filesystem is slow and eats a lot of memory. Running from a USB drive - even a fast 8GB flash drive - is much faster. Doing so is poorly supported as of yet - although there is a test project for a SDHC card OLPC distro based on Fedora 9. There are also Ubuntu ports to run from USB or SDHC card.
2) Adding swap space (via USB or SDHC card) is a big improvement.
3) The Sugar software is vastly improved in speed between the version delivered in last years G1G1 and the current 767. Each update brought speed improvements in Sugar. The applications were always reasonably fast (except flash plugin for browser and memorize).
4) The first update to support suspend to ram also removed power from the SDHC card without the proper hardware protocol, and then wrote over the partition table on wakeup. NOT cool. (Apparently fixed now. Moral - remove SDHC before testing base OLPC updates.)
Note that G1G1 will be distributed by Amazon this year. They should do a better job than the volunteers did in last years.
Of the old media, newspapers are the best. You can get right and left versions, and you will usually find the info they would rather hide buried at the end of the 3rd continuation of the article on page 25. There is still some remnant of journalistic integrity.
TV, by its very nature, can only present a tiny slice of information. So the reporter has to be highly selective in what information he presents. The selection process is highly biased, no matter how objective the reporter tries to be. And these days, they don't try. So it is nearly impossible to get a non-misleading snapshot of events from TV, whether Fox or NBC. And then there are the outright fabrications (CBS).
I dropped newspapers because it was more trouble to chase down the crucial facts they try to hide (but feel compelled to include somewhere) than it was to google for opposing views. When google figures out how to politically bias search results (if they haven't already), then we are really in trouble.
Oh for the *really* old media (1960), where reporters were determined to get to the bottom of a story, and looked for the dirt on *all* the candidates. Or maybe that picture was fabricated by Hollywood. I wasn't alive back then.
I ditched the TV 20 years ago, and the newspaper 5 years ago. I don't understand why anyone listens to the "main stream media" anymore. My in-laws think everything they see on TV "news" is Gospel, however.
I flew across the US with my daughter, and I immediately turned off the in flight "entertainment" system on our seats. Well, I turned the brightness and volume all the way down - you couldn't actually turn the dang things off. The attendants kept walking by, seeing our screens dark, and without talking to me, rushing to the front of the cabin to announce, "Please be patient, we need to reboot the in-flight movie system." This happened about 6 times before they finally figured out that I was turning them off on purpose.
Sometimes people think there is a steganographic message, when there isn't. The Bible Codes are an example. The idea is that God hid secret messages in the Bible which are revealed by equidistant letter spacing. Never mind that such "messages" can be found by ELS in any sufficient large work. Practitioners never seem to find the messages until after they become relevant...
In Sorcery and Cecelia (or maybe it started in the sequel), the heroines knit fashionable items for each other, and code the message in the pattern of knits and purls.
I used to buy the RedHat boxed sets before they were dropped. Although I can download a distro in a reasonable time via cable, it is a pain burning and labeling disks - and I liked putting the RedHat stickers on my boxes. Maybe there is a profit center with traditional distribution for Ubuntu.
My dad ordered an Ubuntu DVD from a 3rd party distributor - and it was defective, so we had to burn our own anyway.
Failing that, there must be a market for supporting the laptops and netbooks being preinstalled with Ubuntu these days.
Unless your email is one of those "free" accounts, you should publish authentication for it (you do run your own email server, don't you?). SPF and maybe DKIM. Anything that sends out "you have a virus" responses (when any virus email is obviously forged) is a spammer. They get automatically blacklisted on my system. Check the authentication on your incoming mail also. Track reputation by authentication status.
You are limited in what you can do about phone numbers, but email has lots of tools available.
Rev 13:16-17 He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.
Why do we keep voting for the lizards? There are two small subtle things to push:
1) Restore the US house of representatives to 1 per 40000 or so citizens - as was the case until 1910, when they fixed the number at 435, which is 1 per 700000 or so at present.
2) Push for approval voting (vote for up to N) at the local level (already in place in many places) and ultimately for the election of electors, senators, and representatives. Plurality voting locks in a two party system and keeps the lizards in power. We've lost sight of the fact that the people in Washington are supposed to be *state* politicians whose job is to represent the state in Washington.
While most republicans did ignore the looming crisis, McCain not only warned that mortgages needing reform before they imploded, but signed onto bills to do just that - including in 2007 (although it was likely too late by then). He was ridiculed by both sides of the aisle. And yes, I am aware of how Bush fanned the flames of the mortgage mess.
By arresting and confiscating the property of people suspected of actual copyright violation without the need for actual evidence, you scare honest people away from legal fair use and creative reuse. And the more rebellious sort will figure they're screwed no matter what, and ignore copyright law completely.
Speeding and drag racing are not issues. Cars mangled in the parking lot are the issue. ("Ooops! I pulled in too far!") There are exceptions, of course - I even know some of them.
No one modded you up, but kudos anyway. That sounds like a workable scheme - but it still costs twice as much disk io. There is probably a way to optimize that as well. I wonder also if having two IVs on disk is a security weakness?
The problem is the IV for CBC never changes for a given sector - mainly because there is no provision to atomically write both a 512 byte sector and its 48+ bit IV. I *have* read about a disk designed for full disk encryption which provides 520 byte sectors instead of 512 byte sectors. That completely solves the problem.
Some disk encryption uses non-atomic sector writes (store IVs in a separate physical sector). This risks data loss should one get updated but not the other.
I will note that the problem is more easily completely solved for flash media - where it is easier to (atomically) tag sectors with additional data.
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I agree that the BIOS must be free. It runs on the host CPU, and malware/spyware in the BIOS can do just about anything - especially with virtual machine technology. I am glad that FSF is insisting on open BIOS.
However, we are talking about *device* firmware here. You know, like inside your disk drive or USB wireless stick. Are they going to insist that their mice and keyboards have open firmware? Yes, open/free hardware is a worthy project, but it really should not try to piggy back on free *software*.
Why does everyone keep saying "president-elect" Obama, when the Electoral College hasn't voted yet? (And the scheduled Supreme Court consideration of his natural born citizen status is still ahead of us.)
There is a huge difference between cards with proprietary drivers, and cards with proprietary firmware. Drivers run in your OS, are OS dependent, and have significant security risk. Binary drivers are evil (like from Nvidia).
Proprietary firmware, on the other hand, does *not* run in the OS - it runs on the card. The binary firmware blob is OS independent - works for Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, BeOS, whatever. It is CPU independent - the card generally doesn't care whether the host system is PowerPC, Intel, or ARM. While there is a small chance that firmware can be a security risk (since it gets DMA access to memory), it is far more remote than binary drivers.
There is no reason to object to a binary firmware blob - unless there is some stupid restriction on redistributing it (Hi, Broadcom). All it does is save money by replacing a ROM (RAM is cheaper than ROM) - and makes firmware upgrades trivial.
I can't believe FSF is objecting to this. Someone should do a parody of their new guidelines - with instructions on how to remove all PROMs from the motherboard, I/O cards, disk drives, etc. All those PROMs contain secret proprietary firmware. We can't be buying hardware with proprietary secrets now, can we?
Seriously, they should simply require binary firmware to be freely redistributable - giving you the same same freedom as if it was in ROM.
SSDs do not allow you to directly read/write/erase flash memory. The firmware includes a flash translation layer that lets the host read/write 512 byte sectors just like any other drive. Sectors do *not* have a fixed location on the disk. Writing a sector simply appends it to the current erase block, and updates the translation table (also an append). When it runs out of blank blocks, it picks one to erase based on its wear leveling algorithm and garbage collection, and copies any live sectors to a fresh erase block. Just like a HDD, there are plenty of spare erase blocks, which are needed for the copying garbage collection and for when erase blocks go bad.
While the basic function of FTL is open, the wear leveling and garbage collection algorithms are fiercely proprietary. (The best ones actually count how many times a block has been erased and keep the counts even - and do this at high data rates.) This is OK for now because there is also fierce competition, and the code runs only in firmware on the device - not on the host. (Same as the controller code on a HDD.) Should the SSD market ever shake out into a monopoly, the basic FTL ideas are available.
as this corporate behavior is, all you scumbags violating copyright to save a buck provided the excuse. (Although I must admit, I've never actually observed copyright violations via internet - the teens around here make "mix" CDs of their favorite tracks to give to their friends, but don't share stuff online.)
does that mean they will now sell me a low end laptop without Windows? (Preferably with FreeDos and diagnostics, but Ubuntu would be Ok, since that is popular.)
Coca tea is natural and healthful, containing a tiny, tiny amount of cocaine. The original Coca-Cola was coca tea, cola, sugar, and carbonation. (The modern version is decocainized - similar to decaffeinating.) It is only because people refine the cocaine into a pure form that it becomes dangerously addictive. And then some criminally selfish people sell the cocaine on the street to extract money from people now controlled by the chemical.
IMO, they should decriminalize all "natural" drugs, from peyote to green mulberries to marijuana to coca leaf to opium to frogs, and keep the synthetic and refined stuff (LSD, meth, heroine, cocaine, etc) by prescription only (and recreation is not a reason for a prescription).
I know two people who blew their brains on drugs. The "drug" was nutmeg (in large doses). Our street is littered with mulberries (unripe mulberries are hallucinogenic). Marijuana grows on the police station lawn as a weed (Fairfax, VA). Attempting to control everyday natural products is just insane - and just leads to police arresting whomever they please.
"You are under arrest for possession of marijuana."
"Huh?"
[click][click]"Thought you could grow it in your front lawn without us noticing, did you?"
Thinks, "Damn, forgot the broadleaf killer again..."
"The damage is already been done"
Yeah, why waste tax payers money on arresting criminals after the fact? Arresting them *before* the crime saves a ton of money and waste. Arresting criminals pre-crime is especially important in cases like this (or like murder) where the crime cannot be undone.
I meant to say "overtaxed volunteers". It was simply a matter of biting off too much.
With all the bad experiences related, I thought I'd add my good experiences. Ours came a week before Christmas. It worked great. It is as fast and has as much memory as the email/imap/vpn/squid server used by one of my clients remote offices. The only thing that is too slow is the Flash plugin that runs Webkins - but I don't really want my daughter playing Webkins all the time anyway. With current releases, I get 5 hour battery life - better than any full size laptop at our house. The 10" screen is razor sharp and the sun mode and ebook mode are great. It is a big hit with the kids in the neighborhood. I use it myself a lot because I can curl up with it in an easy chair.
The bad news: It took some updating and playing to get to the above. The keyboard is too small for an adult, but USB keyboards work fine. Here are the things that made it slow as delivered:
1) The FFS2 filesystem is slow and eats a lot of memory. Running from a USB drive - even a fast 8GB flash drive - is much faster. Doing so is poorly supported as of yet - although there is a test project for a SDHC card OLPC distro based on Fedora 9. There are also Ubuntu ports to run from USB or SDHC card.
2) Adding swap space (via USB or SDHC card) is a big improvement.
3) The Sugar software is vastly improved in speed between the version delivered in last years G1G1 and the current 767. Each update brought speed improvements in Sugar. The applications were always reasonably fast (except flash plugin for browser and memorize).
4) The first update to support suspend to ram also removed power from the SDHC card without the proper hardware protocol, and then wrote over the partition table on wakeup. NOT cool. (Apparently fixed now. Moral - remove SDHC before testing base OLPC updates.)
Note that G1G1 will be distributed by Amazon this year. They should do a better job than the volunteers did in last years.
Of the old media, newspapers are the best. You can get right and left versions, and you will usually find the info they would rather hide buried at the end of the 3rd continuation of the article on page 25. There is still some remnant of journalistic integrity.
TV, by its very nature, can only present a tiny slice of information. So the reporter has to be highly selective in what information he presents. The selection process is highly biased, no matter how objective the reporter tries to be. And these days, they don't try. So it is nearly impossible to get a non-misleading snapshot of events from TV, whether Fox or NBC. And then there are the outright fabrications (CBS).
I dropped newspapers because it was more trouble to chase down the crucial facts they try to hide (but feel compelled to include somewhere) than it was to google for opposing views. When google figures out how to politically bias search results (if they haven't already), then we are really in trouble.
Oh for the *really* old media (1960), where reporters were determined to get to the bottom of a story, and looked for the dirt on *all* the candidates. Or maybe that picture was fabricated by Hollywood. I wasn't alive back then.
the Norse trickster god. Seems like a better name for a language.
I ditched the TV 20 years ago, and the newspaper 5 years ago. I don't understand why anyone listens to the "main stream media" anymore. My in-laws think everything they see on TV "news" is Gospel, however.
I flew across the US with my daughter, and I immediately turned off the in flight "entertainment" system on our seats. Well, I turned the brightness and volume all the way down - you couldn't actually turn the dang things off. The attendants kept walking by, seeing our screens dark, and without talking to me, rushing to the front of the cabin to announce, "Please be patient, we need to reboot the in-flight movie system." This happened about 6 times before they finally figured out that I was turning them off on purpose.
Sometimes people think there is a steganographic message, when there isn't. The Bible Codes are an example. The idea is that God hid secret messages in the Bible which are revealed by equidistant letter spacing. Never mind that such "messages" can be found by ELS in any sufficient large work. Practitioners never seem to find the messages until after they become relevant...
In Sorcery and Cecelia (or maybe it started in the sequel), the heroines knit fashionable items for each other, and code the message in the pattern of knits and purls.
I used to buy the RedHat boxed sets before they were dropped. Although I can download a distro in a reasonable time via cable, it is a pain burning and labeling disks - and I liked putting the RedHat stickers on my boxes. Maybe there is a profit center with traditional distribution for Ubuntu.
My dad ordered an Ubuntu DVD from a 3rd party distributor - and it was defective, so we had to burn our own anyway.
Failing that, there must be a market for supporting the laptops and netbooks being preinstalled with Ubuntu these days.
Unless your email is one of those "free" accounts, you should publish authentication for it (you do run your own email server, don't you?). SPF and maybe DKIM. Anything that sends out "you have a virus" responses (when any virus email is obviously forged) is a spammer. They get automatically blacklisted on my system. Check the authentication on your incoming mail also. Track reputation by authentication status.
You are limited in what you can do about phone numbers, but email has lots of tools available.
Rev 13:16-17 He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name.
Why do we keep voting for the lizards? There are two small subtle things to push:
1) Restore the US house of representatives to 1 per 40000 or so citizens - as was the case until 1910, when they fixed the number at 435, which is 1 per 700000 or so at present.
2) Push for approval voting (vote for up to N) at the local level (already in place in many places) and ultimately for the election of electors, senators, and representatives. Plurality voting locks in a two party system and keeps the lizards in power. We've lost sight of the fact that the people in Washington are supposed to be *state* politicians whose job is to represent the state in Washington.
While most republicans did ignore the looming crisis, McCain not only warned that mortgages needing reform before they imploded, but signed onto bills to do just that - including in 2007 (although it was likely too late by then). He was ridiculed by both sides of the aisle. And yes, I am aware of how Bush fanned the flames of the mortgage mess.
By arresting and confiscating the property of people suspected of actual copyright violation without the need for actual evidence, you scare honest people away from legal fair use and creative reuse. And the more rebellious sort will figure they're screwed no matter what, and ignore copyright law completely.
Didn't you ever watch Hogan's Heroes? You tunnel back in to help the others and play tricks on the commandant.
Speeding and drag racing are not issues. Cars mangled in the parking lot are the issue. ("Ooops! I pulled in too far!") There are exceptions, of course - I even know some of them.
No one modded you up, but kudos anyway. That sounds like a workable scheme - but it still costs twice as much disk io. There is probably a way to optimize that as well. I wonder also if having two IVs on disk is a security weakness?
The problem is the IV for CBC never changes for a given sector - mainly because there is no provision to atomically write both a 512 byte sector and its 48+ bit IV. I *have* read about a disk designed for full disk encryption which provides 520 byte sectors instead of 512 byte sectors. That completely solves the problem.
Some disk encryption uses non-atomic sector writes (store IVs in a separate physical sector). This risks data loss should one get updated but not the other.
I will note that the problem is more easily completely solved for flash media - where it is easier to (atomically) tag sectors with additional data.