The Year of Linux on the Desktop. Desktop's outdated. What we want now is Linux on the smartphone......and you know? with Android, that could even happen. Some colleagues are actually working on getting it to work on our chip. Of course, it's just another new contender against Symbian and Windows CE...
Funny, I recently read a similar idea in a SF short story in Asimov's*. The character had built a supercomputer out of dumpster-dived wifi-enabled smartphones. Mesh networking, voice recognition, it's all included.
Anybody wanna try implementing it?:)
*Hormiga Canyon by Rudy Rucker and (?). Can't remember authors exactly, and Asimov's magazine website doesn't provide a bilbiography. In fact, their whole website is pretty shitty by today's standards. For an SF magazine, the irony is terrible.
Lego now has far too many custom parts, it's a bit more like building some flat pack furniture that a chance to be creative. You do realize how cliche that saying is? I said it already back in the 80's. It's been said ever since they made something else than the basic 2 by 4.
People seem to think that you can't solve this from inside the box. Ser Olmy ap Sennon believed the same, until the simulated Jart found a way outside the simulation.
Poor to nonexistant connectivity. Try asking the average ISP for an ipv6 address and they'll just look at you funny. It's not just consumer ISPs either - this business park I'm in at the moment has *no idea* what ipv6 is and has no timescale to look at it either.
You know, I just can't help but point out that my french consumer ISP, Free, has enabled IPv6 for its users just last week. I've just started playing around with it, and I notice that most of its own services don't have AAAA records, but hey, its a start. This ISP is pretty good, historically offering the cheapest rates in France for the most service. We get triple-play (unlimited landline phone, TV, internet up to 20Mpbs) ADSL for a flat-rate 30E.
They're far behind our northern, japanese and korean counterparts, though, so I guess I'll have to move there soon...
It is perfectly possible to compile Python programs, for example, to a pyc binary. They aren't any more "scripts" than a.out.
Pedantic mode ON A.pyc is python source code compiled to bytecode. That bytecode is then interpreted by the Python virtual machine which executes appropriate machine code, sort of like the Java VM (though I don't think the Python VM does JIT compilation to machine code). This is different from a.out (or the more modern alternative, ELF), which contains real machine code, which is executed by the processor, not by a virtual machine. Pedantic mode OFF
Now I agree that.pyc isn't script. However I've have yet to see people exchanging.pyc files instead of the original script*, so I don't believe they're relevant.
So the senior manager is happy with the arrangement? Great. Guess what: that kind of guy deals with people all day long. It makes sense to make it easier for him to interact with people. But not for me. I'm a hardcore techie. I spend days not interacting with people, fighting with the code, and I need my concentration. Every time I get interrupted, I need about 20 minutes to get back to work properly. Yep, I'm in a cubicle. I hear everything that happens around me, and maybe I'm just not good enough to blank it out. I regularly have to reserve meeting rooms just to have a little peace and quiet to be able to think.
Yeah, I'm mad because my request for noise-isolating headphones was turned down. Does it show?
I'm gonna start my own kid's show, Darwin Street. It will feature lots of colorful characters doing dangerous, emulatable things. Too late. And they've made a successful business out of it:)
I hate these meetings because I have to constantly be the guy that says 'No'. My worst fear for Slashdot is that someday someone with deep enough pockets comes along with a check so big that someone in the company with a shortsighted view of the future is willing to cash over top of my objections.
Tell us about that "Intel Technology Center" thing that hung around for a while (I just now noticed is gone)? How did that come about? What did you feel about it? Where'd it go?
What i want to know is, will they change the license of the software after purchase?
Well, sure, most probably: it's what Microsoft Does(tm). However, it won't change anything for versions previously released under real open-source licenses. It's called a "fork".
However, will users follow microsoft's versions, or the free forked versions? That's the interesting question that only time will tell.
Why are blog posts of people who don't know what they're talking about ending up on the slashdot front page?
To provoke discussion within the (sometimes) better informed slashdot crowd.
With these kind of articles, I regularly read up the comments before the article itself, and most of the time I get a better picture of reality through a couple of highly-moderated comments.
Though for every good +5 comment, I find two crap +5 comments.
Who needs trust as long as you've got powerpoint and can read the Word documents you're sent in the mail? You were modded funny? With my experience with family and at the workplace, that's *insightful*!
Except in the NASA case, they goal was the traditional engineering one: efficiecy. Whats particular in this case was the goal to 1) *avoid* certain design characteristics and 2) because of patents
Remember, "the current patent system is bad, mmkay?"
Especially as you have to "waste" engineering effort to work around it.
well, Sun is a corporate entity with a final motive of making money.
The FSF is a non-profit organization with a final motive of keeping software free.
That said, it has been argued that Sun are nice guys regarding open-source today, but you never know how they'll act tomorrow (if SCO taught us anything).
Slashdot Mirror
You're repeating the exact questions from the abortion debate in the USA. You must be new here, or not american ;)
It's by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling, and you can find the beginning here. (Thanks Google!)
Funny, I recently read a similar idea in a SF short story in Asimov's*. The character had built a supercomputer out of dumpster-dived wifi-enabled smartphones. Mesh networking, voice recognition, it's all included.
:)
Anybody wanna try implementing it?
*Hormiga Canyon by Rudy Rucker and (?). Can't remember authors exactly, and Asimov's magazine website doesn't provide a bilbiography. In fact, their whole website is pretty shitty by today's standards. For an SF magazine, the irony is terrible.
Bah, I'll return to my Meccano.
Can't make it faster? Make more. Another multiprocessing application. Can I haz multiprocessor network card plz?
When can I have a quantum graphics card that displays all possible pictures at the same time ?
People seem to think that you can't solve this from inside the box. Ser Olmy ap Sennon believed the same, until the simulated Jart found a way outside the simulation.
reference
You know, I just can't help but point out that my french consumer ISP, Free, has enabled IPv6 for its users just last week. I've just started playing around with it, and I notice that most of its own services don't have AAAA records, but hey, its a start.
This ISP is pretty good, historically offering the cheapest rates in France for the most service. We get triple-play (unlimited landline phone, TV, internet up to 20Mpbs) ADSL for a flat-rate 30E.
They're far behind our northern, japanese and korean counterparts, though, so I guess I'll have to move there soon...
I thought the XO laptops had a kill switch to disable them if they leaked out from their target demographic (african schools), into secondary markets?
Isn't the article's premise the exact situation which the OLPC designers feared?
Of course, the article mentions "a sample of the XO laptop", so I hope this this specific laptop wasn't obtained through such a secondary market...
Pedantic mode ON
A
This is different from a.out (or the more modern alternative, ELF), which contains real machine code, which is executed by the processor, not by a virtual machine.
Pedantic mode OFF
Now I agree that
*Outside of Py2exe
For some reason, I read that as *eaten*...
So the senior manager is happy with the arrangement? Great. Guess what: that kind of guy deals with people all day long. It makes sense to make it easier for him to interact with people.
But not for me. I'm a hardcore techie. I spend days not interacting with people, fighting with the code, and I need my concentration. Every time I get interrupted, I need about 20 minutes to get back to work properly.
Yep, I'm in a cubicle. I hear everything that happens around me, and maybe I'm just not good enough to blank it out. I regularly have to reserve meeting rooms just to have a little peace and quiet to be able to think.
Yeah, I'm mad because my request for noise-isolating headphones was turned down. Does it show?
What, don't all scientific writers use some form of TeX? I'm shocked. Shocked to the core!
Yes, in this field, "minimizing the memory footprint" is very important.
Tell us about that "Intel Technology Center" thing that hung around for a while (I just now noticed is gone)? How did that come about? What did you feel about it? Where'd it go?
Well, sure, most probably: it's what Microsoft Does(tm). However, it won't change anything for versions previously released under real open-source licenses. It's called a "fork".
However, will users follow microsoft's versions, or the free forked versions? That's the interesting question that only time will tell.
To provoke discussion within the (sometimes) better informed slashdot crowd.
With these kind of articles, I regularly read up the comments before the article itself, and most of the time I get a better picture of reality through a couple of highly-moderated comments.
Though for every good +5 comment, I find two crap +5 comments.
So which one's yours?
Who needs trust as long as you've got powerpoint and can read the Word documents you're sent in the mail?
You were modded funny? With my experience with family and at the workplace, that's *insightful*!
In my book, this circumvention technique *is* innovation.
Except in the NASA case, they goal was the traditional engineering one: efficiecy. Whats particular in this case was the goal to 1) *avoid* certain design characteristics and 2) because of patents
Remember, "the current patent system is bad, mmkay?"
Especially as you have to "waste" engineering effort to work around it.
well, Sun is a corporate entity with a final motive of making money.
The FSF is a non-profit organization with a final motive of keeping software free.
That said, it has been argued that Sun are nice guys regarding open-source today, but you never know how they'll act tomorrow (if SCO taught us anything).