Actually, Ron Paul is *the* strongest advocate of any candidate D or R for cutting military budget. He is also the strongest proponent of bringing a swift end to middle east occupation and closing many bases in the over countries we have 'em in.
Search for Ron Paul's response on defense spending during the Oct. 18 debate in Las Vegas. Or, check out http://www.ronpaul2012.com/the-issues/national-defense/ : Today, however, hundreds of thousands of our fighting men and women have been stretched thin all across the globe in over 135 countries – often without a clear mission, any sense of what defines victory, or the knowledge of when they’ll be permanently reunited with their families.
Acting as the world’s policeman and nation-building weakens our country, puts our troops in harm’s way, and sends precious resources to other nations in the midst of an historic economic crisis.
Taxpayers are forced to spend billions of dollars each year to protect the borders of other countries, while Washington refuses to deal with our own border security needs.
EFI is a specification, not an implementation, where the core pieces are still controlled (And _never_ opened up) by vendors and is usually still a big wad of real mode assembly that nobody wants to touch. There is no 100% open-source EFI-compliant BIOS implementation. The specification alone for EFI is over 1,000 pages.
To top it all off, to even begin development on stuff like Tianocore you need to agree to draconian licensing terms such as: "You acknowledge and agree that You will not, directly or indirectly: (i) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the underlying source code or underlying ideas or algorithms of the Software; (ii) modify, translate, or create derivative works based on the Software; (iii) rent, lease, distribute, sell, resell or assign, or otherwise transfer rights to the Software; or (iv) remove any proprietary notices in the Software." ( https://www.tianocore.org/nonav/servlets/LegalNotices?type=TermsOfService ).
So I guess your question is sort of like asking why people don't like to use proprietary drivers, even though there are some out there that work very well. The nice thing about Macs is that Apple seems to have went out of their way to make EFI invisible to the user. I don't trust that this will happen on most other pieces of hardware. The BIOS belongs out of the way, IMHO.
>>I might try it if someone had it running on the exact same hardware, down to part #'s for the ram.
Fortunately, you don't need exact matching hardware to recover from a botched BIOS update if you have a socketed BIOS chip. The flash memory your BIOS is stored on can be easily removed, placed in someone else's computer with a compatible socket (It can be a whole different architecture, even), and reprogrammed with the vendor's BIOS using Linux+Windows compatible utilities such as Flashrom ( http://linuxbios.org/Flashrom ), vendor-provided flash utilities which usually run in DOS, or through Linux MTD. There are even services set up to do it for you ( http://www.badflash.com/ ) if you don't have access to another mainboard with a compatible socket.
Unfortunately, BIOS upgrades can become necessary after purchasing a machine if only to support more advanced CPUs (Remember the transition to dual-core CPUs?), to get power management right, etc. The lesson: If you're worried about BIOS updates, buy a motherboard with a socketed BIOS.
One would think 'Linux hacker' implies one willing to utterly defile the system's existing software, ie, make the first priority to install Damn Small Linux (Or similar distro) on the thing. What your saying seems similar to saying that cheap Dells aren't good for Linux hackers because they come with Windows XP Home Edition installed. Linux hackers are not who the OLPC's target users are--Linux hackers are gonna go off and do their own thing anyway.
And did it ever occur to you that maybe, just *maybe* searching forums and fighting flame wars to figure out how to compile a kernel isn't the best way to educate people? Maybe the focus should be on things like arithmetic, reading, and writing rather than fighting one's own operating system to be the l33test kid in the shantytown. Remember, these aren't meant to teach kids about Linux, they're meant as a classroom aid.
Re:Since when is a corporation "cool"?
on
The Google Phone?
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· Score: 1
Spend about 30 seconds reading the source of this "news" ( http://www.olpcnews.com/ ) and you'll see this "Wayan" guy takes every opportunity to berate the project.
Yep. Download pirated software (or any software) from an untrustworthy source and you deserve what you get. Heck, even trusted sources can distribute software with malware built in: http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/ . And this goes for open source, too--I don't think many people bother to audit the code responsible for running their computer.
The only thing I'm curious about is what legit vendors, ie CompUSA, Circuit City, Dell, etc. will do or how their current practices will change. I've never bought a computer from one of those sources, but I do know they tend to bundle a bunch of junk with Windows such as AOL trials and other crap like that. Perhaps this will make that problem even worse, or maybe it won't change anything at all.
Just a reminder to everyone--Open Firmware is a specification, not an implementation. An open implementation currently available is OpenBIOS which can be used in conjunction with LinuxBIOS.
>>Okay that limits the scope of this project to primarily legacy hardware?
Nope. It works great with current hardware as well. AMD's been particularly helpful and has developers contributing quite often. Rev. F Opterons are already supported, for example.
>>Okay, so ignore the old PPC macs laying around as Linux already has drivers.
LinuxBIOS supports some PPCs, I'm not exactly sure which ones. Pease check wiki.linuxbios.org at a later time (When it's not slashdotted) for more info.
>>So this is a replacement for BIOS on legacy machines allowing Linux to run on them even if the Linux drivers for the boards were never written.
It's a replacement for legacy BIOSes that places responsibility of a lot of hardware initialization in the OS (Which most OS kernels do anyway). I think "Linux" in LinuxBIOS is more of a historical reference now. Some of the older work was called "LOBOS" (Linux OS Boots the OS). Other OSes such as FreeBSD, Windows 2000, and Plan 9 can boot from LinuxBIOS as well.
"You acknowledge and agree that You will not, directly or indirectly: (i) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the underlying source code or underlying ideas or algorithms of the Software; (ii) modify, translate, or create derivative works based on the Software; (iii) rent, lease, distribute, sell, resell or assign, or otherwise transfer rights to the Software; or (iv) remove any proprietary notices in the Software."
This is a compulsory licensing agreement which developers must agree to before even hopping on board with Tianocore.
When I saw this headline I immediately thought of this article, an interview with Jen-Hsun Huang (CEO: nVidia) by Wired dated July '02. In it, the intention of overthrowing Intel is made quite clear, and ironically enough they even mention the speculation from a time when it was rumored that nVidia and AMD would merge.
It's actually a very good article for those interested in nVidia's history and Huang's mentality. Paul Otellini ought to be afraid. Very afraid.
I call bullsh*t as well. Apple fanboys will buy *anything* Jobs tells them to and pay dearly for it, even if it is just an incremental update in OS X. This cartoon illustrates the point quite nicely: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=14 568
I don't see why you're worried about "crappy ports." Anyone seeking to make a profit off of a games in any operating system, including MacOS or GNU/Linux, is going to need to keep their level of quality up no matter if they use Transgaming technologies or do a native port.
At least now MacOS users will have a few extra titles made available that would otherwise remain out of reach.
I must admit to having skimmed over the interview. For the most part, my opinion of MPlayer as a functional piece of software has remained very high, but interest in the project has been waning. This article entitled "MPlayer: The project from hell" outlines some of the frustrations I had before I found a distro with a good package manager that could compensate for my newbie-ness. Back then, MPlayer really was superior to everything else (As far as I knew), and I've just stuck with it since. Maybe the attitude has changed by now, but MPlayer still got a black eye because manually trying to install it an exercise in frustration. Here's an example:
"Don't get me wrong. There is documentation. It is scattered, and often incomplete, and carries the same attitude I had seen elsewhere, but it is there. An example of that attitude, taken verbatim from the FAQ:
Q: I compiled MPlayer with libdvdcss/libdivxdecore support, but when I try to start it, it says: error while loading shared libraries: lib*.so.0: cannot load shared object file: No such file or directory
I checked the file and it is there in/usr/local/lib.
A: What are you doing on Linux? Can't you install a library? Why do we get these questions? It's not MPlayer specific at all! Add/usr/local/lib to/etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig. Or install it to/usr/lib, because if you can't solve the/usr/local problem, you are careless enough to do such things.
Perhaps instead of taking the time to flame the person asking the question, the smart aleck could have simply answered the question graciously, then spent the time saved by skipping the flames fixing bugs in the installation script."
And not only that, but I want my $300 graphics card I bought to play UT2004 and Quake 4 on to perform like a $300 graphics card. This is one area where nVidia's proprietary driver hasn't been touched in the past five years or so. The driver not only works (For most), but it works about as well as the Windows driver.
That's not to say the opensource driver people can't develop a great driver given the necessary documentation, just that sometimes proprietary drivers aren't all bad. And as someone else mentioned, we may as well have the freedom to choose both--Just don't cry to the kernel developers when a proprietary driver breaks something.
They are to be given out by government agencies. The motivation for making it as cheap as possible is to help connect as many people as possible, even if it means making compromises on system capabilities (So long as it's adequate to get people connected).
The architecture (AMD Geode 2) was chosen because of its *extremely* low power consumption--The whole thing takes up around ten watts to operate if memory serves (About six for the mainboard, RAM, and CPU and four for the rest). You simply cannot buy a good embedded system from Dell, and you certainly can't buy one that is as rugged and portable as the OLPC systems. And remember--A lot of the places these laptops are going will probably not have a stable enough power grid to plug in and charge a 'normal' laptop regularly.
Another noteworthy thing about this project is that it's going to be based on entirely free software. Free as in beer, and free as in speech, right down to the BIOS (LinuxBIOS in this case). And seeing how LinuxBIOS + GNU/Linux breaks their dreams of controlling everyone's machine via "Trusted Computing" (Or whatever they're calling it these days) I doubt Intel and Microsoft are very fond of the deployment of this machine on a grand scale. Their own greed has caused them to be cut out of the picture like a cancer.
OLPC is on the virge of doing what the fossils in these companies and in governments have only been able to talk about for the past several years--Bridge the digital divide. I'll bet the FSF people are happy they can now have their 100% free software+firmware laptop, though maybe not in the form they were expecting it;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Ron Paul outlined a very detailed plan on slashing $1T in his first year, balance the budget, and make significant inroads toward paying the nearly $15T debt: http://www.ronpaul2012.com/the-issues/ron-paul-plan-to-restore-america/
...as opposed to the complex solutions we have now that are also wrong :-P
Actually, Ron Paul is *the* strongest advocate of any candidate D or R for cutting military budget. He is also the strongest proponent of bringing a swift end to middle east occupation and closing many bases in the over countries we have 'em in.
Search for Ron Paul's response on defense spending during the Oct. 18 debate in Las Vegas. Or, check out http://www.ronpaul2012.com/the-issues/national-defense/ :
Today, however, hundreds of thousands of our fighting men and women have been stretched thin all across the globe in over 135 countries – often without a clear mission, any sense of what defines victory, or the knowledge of when they’ll be permanently reunited with their families.
Acting as the world’s policeman and nation-building weakens our country, puts our troops in harm’s way, and sends precious resources to other nations in the midst of an historic economic crisis.
Taxpayers are forced to spend billions of dollars each year to protect the borders of other countries, while Washington refuses to deal with our own border security needs.
EFI is a specification, not an implementation, where the core pieces are still controlled (And _never_ opened up) by vendors and is usually still a big wad of real mode assembly that nobody wants to touch. There is no 100% open-source EFI-compliant BIOS implementation. The specification alone for EFI is over 1,000 pages.
To top it all off, to even begin development on stuff like Tianocore you need to agree to draconian licensing terms such as: "You acknowledge and agree that You will not, directly or indirectly: (i) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the underlying source code or underlying ideas or algorithms of the Software; (ii) modify, translate, or create derivative works based on the Software; (iii) rent, lease, distribute, sell, resell or assign, or otherwise transfer rights to the Software; or (iv) remove any proprietary notices in the Software." ( https://www.tianocore.org/nonav/servlets/LegalNotices?type=TermsOfService ).
So I guess your question is sort of like asking why people don't like to use proprietary drivers, even though there are some out there that work very well. The nice thing about Macs is that Apple seems to have went out of their way to make EFI invisible to the user. I don't trust that this will happen on most other pieces of hardware. The BIOS belongs out of the way, IMHO.
>>I might try it if someone had it running on the exact same hardware, down to part #'s for the ram.
Fortunately, you don't need exact matching hardware to recover from a botched BIOS update if you have a socketed BIOS chip. The flash memory your BIOS is stored on can be easily removed, placed in someone else's computer with a compatible socket (It can be a whole different architecture, even), and reprogrammed with the vendor's BIOS using Linux+Windows compatible utilities such as Flashrom ( http://linuxbios.org/Flashrom ), vendor-provided flash utilities which usually run in DOS, or through Linux MTD. There are even services set up to do it for you ( http://www.badflash.com/ ) if you don't have access to another mainboard with a compatible socket.
Unfortunately, BIOS upgrades can become necessary after purchasing a machine if only to support more advanced CPUs (Remember the transition to dual-core CPUs?), to get power management right, etc. The lesson: If you're worried about BIOS updates, buy a motherboard with a socketed BIOS.
One would think 'Linux hacker' implies one willing to utterly defile the system's existing software, ie, make the first priority to install Damn Small Linux (Or similar distro) on the thing. What your saying seems similar to saying that cheap Dells aren't good for Linux hackers because they come with Windows XP Home Edition installed. Linux hackers are not who the OLPC's target users are--Linux hackers are gonna go off and do their own thing anyway.
And did it ever occur to you that maybe, just *maybe* searching forums and fighting flame wars to figure out how to compile a kernel isn't the best way to educate people? Maybe the focus should be on things like arithmetic, reading, and writing rather than fighting one's own operating system to be the l33test kid in the shantytown. Remember, these aren't meant to teach kids about Linux, they're meant as a classroom aid.
Yes, as this cartoon illustrates.
Spend about 30 seconds reading the source of this "news" ( http://www.olpcnews.com/ ) and you'll see this "Wayan" guy takes every opportunity to berate the project.
Yep. Download pirated software (or any software) from an untrustworthy source and you deserve what you get. Heck, even trusted sources can distribute software with malware built in: http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/ . And this goes for open source, too--I don't think many people bother to audit the code responsible for running their computer.
The only thing I'm curious about is what legit vendors, ie CompUSA, Circuit City, Dell, etc. will do or how their current practices will change. I've never bought a computer from one of those sources, but I do know they tend to bundle a bunch of junk with Windows such as AOL trials and other crap like that. Perhaps this will make that problem even worse, or maybe it won't change anything at all.
Just a reminder to everyone--Open Firmware is a specification, not an implementation. An open implementation currently available is OpenBIOS which can be used in conjunction with LinuxBIOS.
>>Okay that limits the scope of this project to primarily legacy hardware?
Nope. It works great with current hardware as well. AMD's been particularly helpful and has developers contributing quite often. Rev. F Opterons are already supported, for example.
>>Okay, so ignore the old PPC macs laying around as Linux already has drivers.
LinuxBIOS supports some PPCs, I'm not exactly sure which ones. Pease check wiki.linuxbios.org at a later time (When it's not slashdotted) for more info.
>>So this is a replacement for BIOS on legacy machines allowing Linux to run on them even if the Linux drivers for the boards were never written.
It's a replacement for legacy BIOSes that places responsibility of a lot of hardware initialization in the OS (Which most OS kernels do anyway). I think "Linux" in LinuxBIOS is more of a historical reference now. Some of the older work was called "LOBOS" (Linux OS Boots the OS). Other OSes such as FreeBSD, Windows 2000, and Plan 9 can boot from LinuxBIOS as well.
uhhh: https://www.tianocore.org/nonav/servlets/LegalNoti ces?type=TermsOfService
"You acknowledge and agree that You will not, directly or indirectly: (i) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the underlying source code or underlying ideas or algorithms of the Software; (ii) modify, translate, or create derivative works based on the Software; (iii) rent, lease, distribute, sell, resell or assign, or otherwise transfer rights to the Software; or (iv) remove any proprietary notices in the Software."
This is a compulsory licensing agreement which developers must agree to before even hopping on board with Tianocore.
When I saw this headline I immediately thought of this article, an interview with Jen-Hsun Huang (CEO: nVidia) by Wired dated July '02. In it, the intention of overthrowing Intel is made quite clear, and ironically enough they even mention the speculation from a time when it was rumored that nVidia and AMD would merge.
It's actually a very good article for those interested in nVidia's history and Huang's mentality. Paul Otellini ought to be afraid. Very afraid.
Unfortunately, they'll all choke on a shared memory bus :-)
I call bullsh*t as well. Apple fanboys will buy *anything* Jobs tells them to and pay dearly for it, even if it is just an incremental update in OS X. This cartoon illustrates the point quite nicely: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=14 568
I don't see why you're worried about "crappy ports." Anyone seeking to make a profit off of a games in any operating system, including MacOS or GNU/Linux, is going to need to keep their level of quality up no matter if they use Transgaming technologies or do a native port.
At least now MacOS users will have a few extra titles made available that would otherwise remain out of reach.
No doubt there's still a lot of room for Python, but since you brought up the bookstore metric: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/12/ruby_boo k_sales_surpass_python.html
What's wrong with him meeting his wife on-line in a particularly geeky manner? Did you forget that you're reading Slashdot?
LinuxBIOS ( http://www.linuxbios.org/ ) has good support for recent AMD-based boards. I don't think there is a similar free VGA BIOS project, though.
I must admit to having skimmed over the interview. For the most part, my opinion of MPlayer as a functional piece of software has remained very high, but interest in the project has been waning. This article entitled "MPlayer: The project from hell" outlines some of the frustrations I had before I found a distro with a good package manager that could compensate for my newbie-ness. Back then, MPlayer really was superior to everything else (As far as I knew), and I've just stuck with it since. Maybe the attitude has changed by now, but MPlayer still got a black eye because manually trying to install it an exercise in frustration. Here's an example:
/usr/local/lib.
/usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig. Or install it to /usr/lib, because if you can't solve the /usr/local problem, you are careless enough to do such things.
"Don't get me wrong. There is documentation. It is scattered, and often incomplete, and carries the same attitude I had seen elsewhere, but it is there. An example of that attitude, taken verbatim from the FAQ:
Q: I compiled MPlayer with libdvdcss/libdivxdecore support, but when I try to start it, it says: error while loading shared libraries: lib*.so.0: cannot load shared object file: No such file or directory
I checked the file and it is there in
A: What are you doing on Linux? Can't you install a library? Why do we get these questions? It's not MPlayer specific at all! Add
Perhaps instead of taking the time to flame the person asking the question, the smart aleck could have simply answered the question graciously, then spent the time saved by skipping the flames fixing bugs in the installation script."
And not only that, but I want my $300 graphics card I bought to play UT2004 and Quake 4 on to perform like a $300 graphics card. This is one area where nVidia's proprietary driver hasn't been touched in the past five years or so. The driver not only works (For most), but it works about as well as the Windows driver.
That's not to say the opensource driver people can't develop a great driver given the necessary documentation, just that sometimes proprietary drivers aren't all bad. And as someone else mentioned, we may as well have the freedom to choose both--Just don't cry to the kernel developers when a proprietary driver breaks something.
They are to be given out by government agencies. The motivation for making it as cheap as possible is to help connect as many people as possible, even if it means making compromises on system capabilities (So long as it's adequate to get people connected).
The architecture (AMD Geode 2) was chosen because of its *extremely* low power consumption--The whole thing takes up around ten watts to operate if memory serves (About six for the mainboard, RAM, and CPU and four for the rest). You simply cannot buy a good embedded system from Dell, and you certainly can't buy one that is as rugged and portable as the OLPC systems. And remember--A lot of the places these laptops are going will probably not have a stable enough power grid to plug in and charge a 'normal' laptop regularly.
http://www.pakin.org/complaint/
Just select "Pres." and use George W. Bush for the name. Now you have the same source as the NY Times!
Another noteworthy thing about this project is that it's going to be based on entirely free software. Free as in beer, and free as in speech, right down to the BIOS (LinuxBIOS in this case). And seeing how LinuxBIOS + GNU/Linux breaks their dreams of controlling everyone's machine via "Trusted Computing" (Or whatever they're calling it these days) I doubt Intel and Microsoft are very fond of the deployment of this machine on a grand scale. Their own greed has caused them to be cut out of the picture like a cancer.
;-)
OLPC is on the virge of doing what the fossils in these companies and in governments have only been able to talk about for the past several years--Bridge the digital divide. I'll bet the FSF people are happy they can now have their 100% free software+firmware laptop, though maybe not in the form they were expecting it
>>In fact, a lot of things need to happen first because children in developing countries can benefit from a laptop computer.
True, which is why the laptops are being distributed to developing countries with a stable government rather than warzones.