Yeah. I hate to be elitist about this, but it seems pretty reasonable. I might also suggest that humor points not be counted for karma purposes- while I enjoy reading funny posts, the authors of said posts (which are much more likely than a good, serious post to get a 5) really shouldn't get so much karma credit for it. Keep up the good work, Rob- someday, people will study your code to see how to make internet conversations that work for large numbers of people. I do believe that this is the first time anyone has seriously tried to make anything like this work- and the quasi-experimentation that you have done will be a source for the next group that tries to apply this technique to more serious fields of endeavour.
I know this sounds pathetic, but there is a page in the www.lego.com domain where Lego specifically explains that it is company policy to refer to them only as Lego bricks. They specifically condemn the use of the phrase "legos" and, IIRC, directly exhort parents to correct their children when the kids use the plural and not the "proper" phrasing. That was one of the sicker examples of management-speak I've ever seen... ~luge
You are correct- the lego side of things is not running Java. There is currently an attempt to write a JVM for the lego, but it has not (as far as I can tell) made any progress for months. ~luge
I would guess it is probably a reiserfs reference. That is apparently very usable, and if it is only a build time option, I can't imagine it would interfere too much with anything else- thus, a possiblity for later inclusion. ~tieguy
Dunno how many of you have ever worked with government before, but my aunt (who works for an unnamed, county level government in Florida) is now managing a brand-spanking new AIX system for her employer. To get a new piece of software, she had to wage a couple of weeks long campaign with her management, with memos, meetings, the whole nine yards. In the end, after all of that effort, she was denied. The piece of software she wanted? The one that took so much trouble to get? sudo. Uhuh. GPL'd, publicly available, sudo. Needless to say, the poor woman is also stuck with vi- she says she spends 1/2 of her time teaching other people that. She dreams of the day she can get emacs. That is the bureaucratic mindset in govm't IT these days. So, don't hold your breath about Linux. They'll probably have to read every single line of code before it ever gets installed- and by that time, we'll be at kernel 4.0. Argh... ~tieguy
The article specifically quotes an MS official as saying that if the NSA asked for source for "national security reasons," then MS would happily give it to them. What a surprise, huh? ~luge
Seriously- I had no idea they had a bad rep. Is it a particular decision, product or license? Also, considering they are GPLing the backend to their installer, do you think it will cause any problems for Debian? ~luge
That just undid a whole bunch of moderation in this thread. Argh. I thought you could post in a thread after your moderation points were used up. Oh well...
that those with good karma be the only ones allowed to m2 moderate? Or, alternately, those who have done a significant quantity of posting? I think meta moderation will be significantly more time/patience consuming to do right, and those who are willing to read and post quality stuff might be substantially more likely to take the time to do a good job with meta-moderation. Just my two cents- luge (who is busy picturing Rob rubbing his meta-lamp to summon the GOR, Gor Over Rob...)
The X group, despite having one of the most complex support tasks of any debian maintainer, is also consistently one of the fastest to respond when upstream upgrades. More power to them... (and, of course, more power to the upstream guys who provide stuff to keep the Debian maintainers busy...) -luge
Since the article is pretty short on details, I thought I'd throw out some notes:
1) The Lego uses a Hitachi H8-300 chip, which is a target for gcc, so compiling code for the chip is merely a matter of rebuilding gcc as a cross-compiler.
2) Strictly speaking, LegOS is not an OS but a library, which you compile along with your actual code to give you OS-like features: threading, time management, etc. It also frees you from lego's arbitrary limit on variables (only 32! with no data structures! eww...) and other such problems.
Umm... that's all the geek info I can think of off the top of my head. URLs: The Official LegOS homepage. LUGNET, which is a discussion area for all types of lego stuff. the robotics list there serves as the main discussion area for LegOS development and use. The Internals page. Already mentioned here on/. by Russ Nelson. EmuLegOS. An emulator for LegOS. Gives you a yellow box on your screen, just as if you owned a Lego brick yourself:) Also very useful for debugging. My HOWTO. More or less the official documentation. Enjoy.
There has been some discussion on the lugnet robotics forums about this. IIRC, they are targeting it for Xmas release. However, as I understand it, Lego is also planning on releasing RCX 1.5 for the holidays, so I'd imagine that O'Reilly might delay their book so as not to be immediately obsoleted. -luge
1) I've been pretty active with LegOS for quite some time. It is not new; rather, it is nearly a year old and has been under active development for most of this time. There already are several developers- not more than 3 or 4, really, but enough to keep this type of project going. Kekoa has done almost all of the grunt work on the HW end, and from that Markus and a couple of others took care of basically all of the code. From there, it has basically already taken on a life of it's own- there is a cross-platform emulator helpful for code debugging, substantial documentation (to toot my own horn) and it is being used in other projects (as the base for a networking project and a projected JVM.)
2) It will never be like Mozilla, not just because the people working on it are not employed by LegOS, but because the complete system is ~10K lines of code. That means that slackers like me can actually read, understand, and even once in a blue moon fix the code- unlike Mozilla, which, while a great project, has a ridiculous learning curve.
At the time, nearly 1/2 of Florida was Everglades, and probably 2/3 of the state qualified as swamp. So, yeah, lots of people were sold "waterfront" that was in fact entirely 6" deep in water and dozens of miles from any coast or river. -luge (a once and future floridian)
I'm certainly not advocating government control, but since it is not present, some other force has to be present to limit/coerce/constrain the beast. Generally speaking, the market plays that role, but specific incidents have to occur to bring information to the attention of the market. ~luge
I knew about the port thing (it was in some of the early press releases) but not the password detail. If you open source it, a more virulent version will be out soon anyway. ~luge P.S. What license will the source be under?
But it allows not just the user to do it- also anyone who happens to know what port BO is installed on, without a password, as long as the program is running. THAT is a design defect. ~luge (besides, there are no "permissions" in 95/98- which was the original target.)
The article makes an interesting analogy, claiming that CDC releasing BO in order to force MS to clean up is the equivalent of the American Medical Association polluting meat with e. coli to force a cleanup by meat suppliers. However, the article ignores the point that the government has created channels by which the meat suppliers can be regulated, and that nature provides regular e. coli outbreaks to check on our precautions. Since the only oversight on MS is the market, and there is no such thing as a "natural" security problem, problems must be highlighted by human groups like the CDC, and the market must be manipulated in order to get a response.
Anyway, that's my two cents- I'd love to find the author's email to let him know, but I can't find it. Any clue? -Luge
Generally speaking, digital is vastly more expensive (short-term) than standard film. Yes, digital effects are cheaper than filming stop-motion shots, but those are done completely in a computer. The cameras and associated electronic equipment for filming the real world digitally are absurdly expensive, and not getting any cheaper. Furthermore, they are basically untested- Lucas would be the first to shoot an entire film digitally, and so he would also be the first to discover (and be forced to deal with) any serious shortcomings in the technique. ~luge
Not quite... while you are correct about the download issue, source must be available to anyone for whom binaries are available, in the same medium. I.E., if binaries are *publicly* available on CDs, source must also be *publicly* available on CDs- not just to those who pay for binaries, but also to others in the general public. If binaries are only available to your co-workers or people within your corporation, then you need only make source available within your corporation. ~luge
First, absolutely correct about the flaming part- it is my understanding that most POSIX compliant code will compile right out of the box on Be, which would mean that a lot of their backend stuff could be completely standard and available elsewhere.
However, it would still be nice if a) they released a complete list of GPL programs they use, and b) if they allowed some independent code auditor to assure they had not modified the code in any way. Microworkz has not been known for their wonderful management practices in the past, and this might be another example of their corner cutting. While I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, they should provide a mechanism by which we can check if that trust has been earned or not.
Second, what about Be? I can't imagine them letting these folks use any of their work without paying some nice licensing fees. This type of box is not going to help the high-end image Be wants to project, so I can't imagine them giving it away (as they promised/threatened to do in exchange for OEM share.) How, then, can Microworkz make it so cheap? Hmm...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. I hate to be elitist about this, but it seems pretty reasonable. I might also suggest that humor points not be counted for karma purposes- while I enjoy reading funny posts, the authors of said posts (which are much more likely than a good, serious post to get a 5) really shouldn't get so much karma credit for it.
Keep up the good work, Rob- someday, people will study your code to see how to make internet conversations that work for large numbers of people. I do believe that this is the first time anyone has seriously tried to make anything like this work- and the quasi-experimentation that you have done will be a source for the next group that tries to apply this technique to more serious fields of endeavour.
If you want a real programming language for the legos, check out legOS. Full C and C++ support for your legos.
~luge
I know this sounds pathetic, but there is a page in the www.lego.com domain where Lego specifically explains that it is company policy to refer to them only as Lego bricks. They specifically condemn the use of the phrase "legos" and, IIRC, directly exhort parents to correct their children when the kids use the plural and not the "proper" phrasing. That was one of the sicker examples of management-speak I've ever seen...
~luge
You are correct- the lego side of things is not running Java. There is currently an attempt to write a JVM for the lego, but it has not (as far as I can tell) made any progress for months.
~luge
I would guess it is probably a reiserfs reference. That is apparently very usable, and if it is only a build time option, I can't imagine it would interfere too much with anything else- thus, a possiblity for later inclusion.
~tieguy
Dunno how many of you have ever worked with government before, but my aunt (who works for an unnamed, county level government in Florida) is now managing a brand-spanking new AIX system for her employer. To get a new piece of software, she had to wage a couple of weeks long campaign with her management, with memos, meetings, the whole nine yards. In the end, after all of that effort, she was denied. The piece of software she wanted? The one that took so much trouble to get? sudo. Uhuh. GPL'd, publicly available, sudo. Needless to say, the poor woman is also stuck with vi- she says she spends 1/2 of her time teaching other people that. She dreams of the day she can get emacs. That is the bureaucratic mindset in govm't IT these days. So, don't hold your breath about Linux. They'll probably have to read every single line of code before it ever gets installed- and by that time, we'll be at kernel 4.0. Argh...
~tieguy
The article specifically quotes an MS official as saying that if the NSA asked for source for "national security reasons," then MS would happily give it to them. What a surprise, huh?
~luge
Seriously- I had no idea they had a bad rep. Is it a particular decision, product or license? Also, considering they are GPLing the backend to their installer, do you think it will cause any problems for Debian? ~luge
That just undid a whole bunch of moderation in this thread. Argh. I thought you could post in a thread after your moderation points were used up. Oh well...
that those with good karma be the only ones allowed to m2 moderate? Or, alternately, those who have done a significant quantity of posting? I think meta moderation will be significantly more time/patience consuming to do right, and those who are willing to read and post quality stuff might be substantially more likely to take the time to do a good job with meta-moderation. Just my two cents-
luge
(who is busy picturing Rob rubbing his meta-lamp to summon the GOR, Gor Over Rob...)
The X group, despite having one of the most complex support tasks of any debian maintainer, is also consistently one of the fastest to respond when upstream upgrades. More power to them... (and, of course, more power to the upstream guys who provide stuff to keep the Debian maintainers busy...)
-luge
I take that back. Holy crap indeed. Thank goodness for free school email (not that it wasn't cracked in January, but whatever...)
-luge
Looks like it is gone now- could anyone describe it?
-luge
Since the article is pretty short on details, I thought I'd throw out some notes:
/. by Russ Nelson. :) Also very useful for debugging.
1) The Lego uses a Hitachi H8-300 chip, which is a target for gcc, so compiling code for the chip is merely a matter of rebuilding gcc as a cross-compiler.
2) Strictly speaking, LegOS is not an OS but a library, which you compile along with your actual code to give you OS-like features: threading, time management, etc. It also frees you from lego's arbitrary limit on variables (only 32! with no data structures! eww...) and other such problems.
Umm... that's all the geek info I can think of off the top of my head. URLs:
The Official LegOS homepage.
LUGNET, which is a discussion area for all types of lego stuff. the robotics list there serves as the main discussion area for LegOS development and use.
The Internals page. Already mentioned here on
EmuLegOS. An emulator for LegOS. Gives you a yellow box on your screen, just as if you owned a Lego brick yourself
My HOWTO. More or less the official documentation. Enjoy.
Good luck- help Lego back into the black-
luge
There has been some discussion on the lugnet robotics forums about this. IIRC, they are targeting it for Xmas release. However, as I understand it, Lego is also planning on releasing RCX 1.5 for the holidays, so I'd imagine that O'Reilly might delay their book so as not to be immediately obsoleted.
-luge
A couple of thoughts on this:
1) I've been pretty active with LegOS for quite some time. It is not new; rather, it is nearly a year old and has been under active development for most of this time. There already are several developers- not more than 3 or 4, really, but enough to keep this type of project going.
Kekoa has done almost all of the grunt work on the HW end, and from that Markus and a couple of others took care of basically all of the code. From there, it has basically already taken on a life of it's own- there is a cross-platform emulator helpful for code debugging, substantial documentation (to toot my own horn) and it is being used in other projects (as the base for a networking project and a projected JVM.)
2) It will never be like Mozilla, not just because the people working on it are not employed by LegOS, but because the complete system is ~10K lines of code. That means that slackers like me can actually read, understand, and even once in a blue moon fix the code- unlike Mozilla, which, while a great project, has a ridiculous learning curve.
-luge
At the time, nearly 1/2 of Florida was Everglades, and probably 2/3 of the state qualified as swamp. So, yeah, lots of people were sold "waterfront" that was in fact entirely 6" deep in water and dozens of miles from any coast or river.
-luge (a once and future floridian)
I'm certainly not advocating government control, but since it is not present, some other force has to be present to limit/coerce/constrain the beast. Generally speaking, the market plays that role, but specific incidents have to occur to bring information to the attention of the market.
~luge
I knew about the port thing (it was in some of the early press releases) but not the password detail. If you open source it, a more virulent version will be out soon anyway.
~luge
P.S. What license will the source be under?
But it allows not just the user to do it- also anyone who happens to know what port BO is installed on, without a password, as long as the program is running. THAT is a design defect.
~luge
(besides, there are no "permissions" in 95/98- which was the original target.)
The article makes an interesting analogy, claiming that CDC releasing BO in order to force MS to clean up is the equivalent of the American Medical Association polluting meat with e. coli to force a cleanup by meat suppliers. However, the article ignores the point that the government has created channels by which the meat suppliers can be regulated, and that nature provides regular e. coli outbreaks to check on our precautions. Since the only oversight on MS is the market, and there is no such thing as a "natural" security problem, problems must be highlighted by human groups like the CDC, and the market must be manipulated in order to get a response.
Anyway, that's my two cents- I'd love to find the author's email to let him know, but I can't find it. Any clue?
-Luge
Generally speaking, digital is vastly more expensive (short-term) than standard film. Yes, digital effects are cheaper than filming stop-motion shots, but those are done completely in a computer. The cameras and associated electronic equipment for filming the real world digitally are absurdly expensive, and not getting any cheaper. Furthermore, they are basically untested- Lucas would be the first to shoot an entire film digitally, and so he would also be the first to discover (and be forced to deal with) any serious shortcomings in the technique.
~luge
That might speed up World Dominaton(tm) by a little bit, don't you think?
~luge
Not quite... while you are correct about the download issue, source must be available to anyone for whom binaries are available, in the same medium. I.E., if binaries are *publicly* available on CDs, source must also be *publicly* available on CDs- not just to those who pay for binaries, but also to others in the general public. If binaries are only available to your co-workers or people within your corporation, then you need only make source available within your corporation.
~luge
First, absolutely correct about the flaming part- it is my understanding that most POSIX compliant code will compile right out of the box on Be, which would mean that a lot of their backend stuff could be completely standard and available elsewhere.
However, it would still be nice if a) they released a complete list of GPL programs they use, and b) if they allowed some independent code auditor to assure they had not modified the code in any way. Microworkz has not been known for their wonderful management practices in the past, and this might be another example of their corner cutting. While I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, they should provide a mechanism by which we can check if that trust has been earned or not.
Second, what about Be? I can't imagine them letting these folks use any of their work without paying some nice licensing fees. This type of box is not going to help the high-end image Be wants to project, so I can't imagine them giving it away (as they promised/threatened to do in exchange for OEM share.) How, then, can Microworkz make it so cheap? Hmm...
my two cents-
~luge