Not my official HP hat on, folks. I'm making this posting on my own, not speaking for the company.
Before you protest too much: They are adding Linux positions, and the money has to come from somewhere.
HP has been transitioning its processor operation to Intel for years. HP partnered with Intel to develop the IA-64 architecture. Did anyone think that PA-RISC would continue in parallel to that forever?
The world has some very serious single-source issues regarding high-end silicon in general. The fabrication lines have become so incredibly expensive as chips become more dense that most companies have given up on new CPU fab construction. And you can't make new chips with those old FABs. Perhaps we'll be lucky and there will be a revolution in microfabrication technology, but I've not heard of one on the horizon.
Another place where this hurts us is in high-end graphics, where we are down to two manufacturers.
I'd like to see more work on Open Sourced processor designs that run in field-programmable logic. This is a place where we can innovate without the expense of a fab, and then when we have good ideas that get proven, people can fab them.
What if the debris is in a counter-rotating orbit to the net? You get a collission at miles per second, a hole in the net, and more orbiting debris. If you want to match orbits with every piece of sizable debris up there in order to scoop it up, you need enough delta-V to do so. That would be an extremely large amount of fuel.
Hm. I was thinking that the energy just goes to maintain the orbit. Remember, it's not perfect vaccumm out there, there is atmospheric drag, like what brought down Skylab. Making electricity from orbital kinetic energy is problematical.
How do you reliably vaporise something? First, you have to make sure you've hit and melted every piece, despite the fact that pieces are flying around due to the vapor boiling off them. Then, you have to dissipate it so well that no pieces coalesce into a globule. I doubt it's possible. All you would do is turn it into a micrometoroid storm, a nice big cloud guaranteed to kill any vaccumm suit it hits.
Again, it's important to keep debris together. Small pieces carry the same energy as big pieces (as an aggregate), and if in the same orbit as the original piece, might do as much damage.
Disintegrated debris is just smaller debris in the same orbit. It becomes more troublesome because it's more spread out. You want to keep it in one piece and deorbit it that way.
I wonder if space debris could be deorbited by using laser light as a sort of retro-rocket? Light exerts pressure, and although this is a very small amount of pressure, it will accumulate if you keep pushing. So, put up a satellite with lasers, not powerful enough to melt debris but powerful enough to give it a little push. Push on the debris with the laser light from ahead of its orbit. The satellite gains some orbital energy, the debris loses some. Eventually, the debris deorbits.
The developer of the GPS experiment is Bdale Garbee, a long-time Debian developer, who is presently working on the Debian IA64 port at HP's Linux lab. Bdale uses Debian to host development, I'm not sure if he uses it to run ground-station software but it's likely.
Wow, someone who knows first-hand. Of course most of what I know of this comes from AMSAT, and while I have a few friends who work on the birds, I never have. AMSAT are the people who have been making microsats, and on the other hand they're the ones with the low budgets and sometimes a technological lag (although they lead a surprising amount of the time).
What about latch-up and RAM? Use dynamic RAM and power it down between refresh cycles?
Rad-hard '386? Is it a static version? I was aware that Harris did a fully static '286. AMSAT flew an ARM, and that probably has the most MIPS per mA, but due to the problems with P3D I don't think they've gotten much chance to test it.
You have to get the heat to somewhere that you can radiate it. Also, it's sometimes 300F on one side, and -100F on the other side of the satellite, so you pipe heat around just to gain a degree of temperature stability.
There are some significant challenges in building "smart satellites".
Solar radiation is an extremely serious problem for any computer in space. To be rad-hard, chips need to be made of silicon on sapphire, which means a $1 embedded processor suddenly costs twenty thousand dollars. This is not material cost, it's because the economies of scale in production of terrestrial processors are what drives the cost down. Nobody can afford sapphire RAM banks, and thus memories get a flipped bit per orbit, in general. The only way they keep working is that there is a "washing" process that scans memory and does ECC correction continuously. Shielding is simply too heavy to be practical (send up a lead-clad satellite, and your rocket becomes 10 times as large to boost the weight).
Because it's available in sapphire and is flight-proven, the microprocessor of choice for controlling satellites is the 1802. Remember the RCA Cosmac Elf? Most of you weren't born when that was a popular hobby computer
I was surprised to find that the Phase 3D satellite boots up with no ROM. Hardware loads RAM directly from a radio modem. They couldn't afford a ROM they could trust.
Heat is a problem, too. Heat sinks don't work so well without an atmosphere to carry away heat. You have to pipe heat around with heat-pipes filled with a phase-change gas, and then radiate the heat away.Bruce
That's taking it to the point of absurdity. Computers, cryptography, and the internet are empowering tools, but they are not weapons in the sense that a firearm or even an aircraft is a weapon. To take your perspective to the point of absurdity, should we then prohibit ownership of pillows and bathtubs by individuals because they can be used to smother and drown? Of course not. Should we prohibit individual ownership of aircraft? No. Firearms? Well, another Open Source evangelist talks way too much about that, to our detriment, IMO, so I'll stay mum.
PGP empowers people to exchange secrets. Computers empower people to run flight simulators and much else. The internet empowers people to meet each other, organize, and exchange data. All are used for great good, and some evil. One of the things that threaten government and large industry the most is the fact that these technologies empower the individual in a way that only government and industry were empowered before. They would like to use the excuse that these technologies can be used for crime to remove them from everybody's hands.
What strikes me about this tragic disaster is the way government is targeting technologies that are not connected with the crime, simply because the implication that they could be used is there, using the need to protect the people as a hollow justification to remove our rights.
You haven't used a self-referential and self-negating acronym. Essential for any Free Software project. Thus, it should be NCL, for NCL's a Consistent License.
Every few months I get email from someone complaining about the commercial product that uses their code, while the commercial party offers no cooperation and often doesn't even acknowledge their contribution. And the letter invariably ends "and I guess it's our own fault for not using the GPL".
BSD licensing and all of its work-alikes are fine as long as you want to consciously make a gift of your code rather than exchange in sharing. But so many folks seem to just hear "GPL is bad" messages like yours without getting to the "GPL's there to protect your own goals" part.
Agreed, I still don't like patents. But rather than fine people who apply when there's prior art, it should simply be easier to invalidate the patent. Their filing and legal fees would be fine enough.
The GPL requires patents embedded in GPL code to be available for everyone's free use. This can be implemented by making the patents available for use in GPL programs. Victor thought he was already doing this, what happened here is simply the resolution of a small issue of GPL compatibility. So, Victor gets to use the patent to enforce his revenue stream and pay for more Free software, Free Software users get to use the patent for free, and as far as I can tell everyone wins.
This is not really about enforcing the GPL, it didn't get close to that point. All we had was a short public dialogue. Enforcement is something that happens in court. I wouldn't even count an out-of-court settlement as enforcement, that's just avoiding the issue because the defandant thinks that a successful enforcement would be likely or doesn't think it's worthwhile to mess around in court. This was way far from anything like that.
Well, think of the last time I showed this much venom: LinuxOne. This is not so much of a fly-by-night as LinuxOne was, but I am sensing a lack of integrity. That tends to raise my hackles, especially when I am (albeit peripheraly) involved.
I last spoke with LGP in March, when Linas Vespas and the GNOMoney folks, Heimdall Linux, and a few other companies were all talking about bringing suit against LGP. I told LGP that they were blowing their reputation. That was our last communication. It's clear that they just abandoned their other companies (except for Ximian) in order to pursue the Corel opportunity. I don't have any of their secrets, and would not be revealing them if I had any, but I am under no other obligation to them now.
My primary goal here is that folks in the community don't get hurt in dealing with them.
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Before you protest too much: They are adding Linux positions, and the money has to come from somewhere.
HP has been transitioning its processor operation to Intel for years. HP partnered with Intel to develop the IA-64 architecture. Did anyone think that PA-RISC would continue in parallel to that forever?
The world has some very serious single-source issues regarding high-end silicon in general. The fabrication lines have become so incredibly expensive as chips become more dense that most companies have given up on new CPU fab construction. And you can't make new chips with those old FABs. Perhaps we'll be lucky and there will be a revolution in microfabrication technology, but I've not heard of one on the horizon.
Another place where this hurts us is in high-end graphics, where we are down to two manufacturers.
I'd like to see more work on Open Sourced processor designs that run in field-programmable logic. This is a place where we can innovate without the expense of a fab, and then when we have good ideas that get proven, people can fab them.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Again, it's important to keep debris together. Small pieces carry the same energy as big pieces (as an aggregate), and if in the same orbit as the original piece, might do as much damage.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
What about latch-up and RAM? Use dynamic RAM and power it down between refresh cycles?
Rad-hard '386? Is it a static version? I was aware that Harris did a fully static '286. AMSAT flew an ARM, and that probably has the most MIPS per mA, but due to the problems with P3D I don't think they've gotten much chance to test it.
Bruce
Bruce
Comment added here to get by the slashcode postcomment compression filter.
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Solar radiation is an extremely serious problem for any computer in space. To be rad-hard, chips need to be made of silicon on sapphire, which means a $1 embedded processor suddenly costs twenty thousand dollars. This is not material cost, it's because the economies of scale in production of terrestrial processors are what drives the cost down. Nobody can afford sapphire RAM banks, and thus memories get a flipped bit per orbit, in general. The only way they keep working is that there is a "washing" process that scans memory and does ECC correction continuously. Shielding is simply too heavy to be practical (send up a lead-clad satellite, and your rocket becomes 10 times as large to boost the weight).
Because it's available in sapphire and is flight-proven, the microprocessor of choice for controlling satellites is the 1802. Remember the RCA Cosmac Elf? Most of you weren't born when that was a popular hobby computer
I was surprised to find that the Phase 3D satellite boots up with no ROM. Hardware loads RAM directly from a radio modem. They couldn't afford a ROM they could trust.
Heat is a problem, too. Heat sinks don't work so well without an atmosphere to carry away heat. You have to pipe heat around with heat-pipes filled with a phase-change gas, and then radiate the heat away.Bruce
Bruce
What strikes me about this tragic disaster is the way government is targeting technologies that are not connected with the crime, simply because the implication that they could be used is there, using the need to protect the people as a hollow justification to remove our rights.
Bruce
Bruce
You obviously haven't tried 0.9.4 . It's really quite good, both faster and much less buggy than previous releases. I was very pleasantly surprised.
Hey, I've had my own criticisms of Mozilla. But it looks as if they may have been right, and the rest of us may have been wrong.
Bruce
BSD licensing and all of its work-alikes are fine as long as you want to consciously make a gift of your code rather than exchange in sharing. But so many folks seem to just hear "GPL is bad" messages like yours without getting to the "GPL's there to protect your own goals" part.
Bruce
Bruce
The license is here.
Bruce
P.S. This useless text added to pass the slashcode "postercomment compression filter", which seems to penalize brief replies.
Thanks
Bruce
This is not really about enforcing the GPL, it didn't get close to that point. All we had was a short public dialogue. Enforcement is something that happens in court. I wouldn't even count an out-of-court settlement as enforcement, that's just avoiding the issue because the defandant thinks that a successful enforcement would be likely or doesn't think it's worthwhile to mess around in court. This was way far from anything like that.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
I last spoke with LGP in March, when Linas Vespas and the GNOMoney folks, Heimdall Linux, and a few other companies were all talking about bringing suit against LGP. I told LGP that they were blowing their reputation. That was our last communication. It's clear that they just abandoned their other companies (except for Ximian) in order to pursue the Corel opportunity. I don't have any of their secrets, and would not be revealing them if I had any, but I am under no other obligation to them now.
My primary goal here is that folks in the community don't get hurt in dealing with them.
Thanks
Bruce