It's funny how, on articles about things everyone here knows about, like BitCoin or the Raspberry Pi, the summary wastes space explaining the context (ie. what BitCoin or RaspPi is), but on an article about something relatively obscure, it just throws model numbers and acronyms at you.
As far as I can discern without reading TFA, this is just some new ARM system-on-a-chip, not particularly revolutionary or powerful, but aimed at use in open-source environments.
absolutely! i'm a link whore, what can i say:)
ok - it's not limited to one particular ARM SoC, it's about a standard. actually, it's not about the standard. the actual goal is to bring about a revolution in the mass-volume computing appliances sector. i don't mention that too often because it sounds absolutely madly insanely ambitious, but it's what's actually going on here.
so let's look a bit further down the chain, at say rhombus tech. rhombus tech is the web site designed to help link free software developers with chinese factories. if you're familiar with the rampant level of GPL violations (google "mjg59 android gpl violations") in the chinese hardware sector you'll know how limiting that is. i have two friends - both engineers - who are VERY frustrated at being able to buy such incredibly cheap hardware, yet they CANNOT RE-PROGRAM it because not even the factories have the GPL source code! so the promise of cheap hardware is there, but the reality is that you can't use it.
this insane situation is what rhombus tech is setting out to break, by ONLY working with factories and SoC vendors that are willing to be GPL compliant right from the start. my role here is therefore to pre-vet the SoCs, get the documentation and source code sufficient to at least get something up and running, find a substitute low-cost affordable development system (e.g. the Mele A1000 and now the Mele A100G Quad in the case of the Allwinner SoCs), then get it into modular form and get it out there.
the modular form-factor - which includes the development of standards such as EOMA68 - is the real kicker though. i don't know if you're aware of the situation with regard to development of tablets and other hardware but it's insane. due to the high level of integration on ARM and MIPS SoCs, EACH AND EVERY PRODUCT REQUIRES TOTAL CUSTOMISATION. there is no BIOS: there is only u-boot (which must be customised) and the linux kernel (which must be customised). the turn-around time on products is such that in some cases the introduction of a new SoC can cause a MAJOR recession in the electronics industry in Shenzen. it happened before when the Allwinner A10 came out, because its price was (is) only around $7.50 when all of its competition was around $13, and it'll happen again.
so we've come up with EOMA-68 as a way to mitigate against this (and other) problems. example: i received the PCB PADS files from Allwinner for the A31 SoC. i got a basic EOMA-68 layout done in FIVE DAYS because all i had to do was throw together a set of libraries and circuits that i already had from the other 4 boards that i've done. so with this approach we could basically upgrade an ENTIRE product range - tablets, laptops, desktop systems, anything-that-takes-a-CPU-card - in about 3 weeks flat. that's just... unheard-of! imagine going to a factory and saying "we can upgrade all your product in 3 weeks! all your base are belong to us!" they would be telling that story for years down at the local pubs, about the day some crazy guy came in and said they could upgrade their entire product range in 3 weeks...... but that's literally what can be done here. do you see how powerful that is?
then there is the fact that the products, because they don't fundamentally change (it's only the CPU that gets faster), the factory can LITERALLY make them until the cows come home. or, more to the point, until a component goes end-of-life. but if they're making a 7in tablet chassis by the bucket-load,
well, i tell you what: you believe what you want to believe, and i'll follow my own instincts and make my own judgements, ok? come back in say 4 years and we'll compare notes on how our respective finances fared as a result of our beliefs.
please read senator ron paul's book. you'll see the graphs which show that the actual value of the USD is very subtly going down-hill.
also, did you note the fact that i said that "the rest of the world's currencies are forced to follow suit"? i said "the rest of the world's currencies are forced to follow the same policy".
this means that RELATIVELY SPEAKING, nobody notices what's going on, because the exchange rates all stay roughly the same.
it's only through things like bitcoin - which is a monetary market that goverments CANNOT manipulate [long-term] - that you see the REAL picture.
your statement tells me that you're not familiar with economics. when there's a fixed supply of currency, the value of the currency *increases* with its demand. so the apparent value - the amount you pay for good and services - appears to go DOWN because you hand over LESS coins for the exact same service / goods.
please read senator ron paul's book. you will begin to understand. ok?
somebody's been reading Senator Ron Paul's book "End the Fed":) if that turns out to be a mistaken assumption, read his book and come back! repeat until true:)
but seriously: you're absolutely right. the USD has basically been run on a hyperinflational policy in order to "help" america repay its trillion dollar debts. as of 2008 i believe that the US owed - just to china alone - enough money to average $7,500 per person. if however the $USD is *devalued* then, why, of course that $7500 can be paid easily!!!
uunnnfortunately, the $USD is the world's reserve currency. so basically what this means is that *every* country must follow the exact same hyperinflational monetary policy so as to not get screwed.
it's only going to take one country to say "fuck this, we've had enough" and the system begins to unwind.
now, with bitcoin - exactly as you said, paulpach - you *CAN'T* fuck with bitcoin like this... because inflation is NOT POSSIBLE. there is - and always will be - a limited supply. therefore, what *MUST* happen - over the long term - is that the exchange rate for bitcoin against *ALL* hyper-inflational currencies *MUST* go up.
if you've read any of Tom Holt's books, you'll know what happens when a high-value currency gets cashed out: in one of Tom's books, someone exchanges $BOH 12 for "real-world" currencies and causes a major melt-down of the international exchanges. hilarious:)
bottom line: the value of bitcoins will, as economic pressure on their limited supply increases, go UP.
and for how long has ACARS and ADS-B been insecure? that's what's so embarrassing about these things. skype being insecure since it was created, relying on security-through-obscurity just as adobe does for RTMP, such that the russian govt has had the ability to eavesdrop on skype for at least the past 4 years.... and *not* told anyone about it.
it's the same here. someone *somewhere* will have been exploiting ACARS and ADS-B... and not telling anyone that they're doing it. conferences like these are a wake-up call to the idiots who believe that nobody - ever - will work out their "security".
the question is: when will they learn to get proper security reviews *before* designing the protocol??
i can. it's like playing music through grated cheese. it's typically cymbals, trumpets and other complex sounds that i notice particularly are affected.
an associate who worked for a Real-time Audio restoration company - his job was to spot audio discrepancies such as phase errors on old mono tracks that had been incorrectly recorded in stereo - could tell even *more* than i could ever notice.
basically it entirely depends on YOU. if your aural cortex and your ears are sufficiently developed / not-damaged, you WILL notice - it's as simple as that.
the geneva convention is very clear. if a citizen of a country is physically attacked by soldiers from another country, it is AUTOMATICALLY a declaration of war by the attacking country. once that declaration has been made - whether it be implicit or explicit - that declaration AUTOMATICALLY gives ALL citizens of the country that has been attacked the right to retaliate against all and any assets and citizens of the attacking country.
as i have mentioned repeatedly on slashdot for some years now whenever the words "cyber" and "war" are mentioned in the same sentence, it is incredibly stupid and very very dangerous to make this association.
the other issue is very very simple: any country that has critical infrastructure assets connected directly to the internet is ASKING FOR TROUBLE, period. disconnect them from the public internet and set up a separate network, for god's sake! if you don't know how to do that, ask your Dept of Defense for advice. they do it all the time. if you're too lazy to do that, or too cost-careless, then please quit your job: you're too irresponsible to be in charge of your country's critical infrastructure.
the documentation on ancient "vimanas" is staggeringly comprehensive. the most-studied portions of these documents by westerners are those on metallurgy (and electro-magnetism). how to find the metal ores. how to mine them. how to build the crucibles and the furnaces needed to smelt the metals, and so on. (http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vimanas/vimanas21.htm)
what is simply beyond most western peoples' belief is that it would even be possible for the ancient indians to have this kind of technology, and the associated weaponry that goes with it.
however, as we learn more - including NASA learning about and independently rediscovering Mercury-driven Ion Drives - it kinda shames our european arrogance to think that we could possibly have been "the first" to discover powered flight. that's powered flight *in this era*, not first powered flight *ever*.
god help us when someone actually takes this ancient documentation seriously and starts reproducing some of the weaponry though.
how about all of us calling this company up, several times a day, and *politely* telling them what we think? the sheer number of calls would, just from them having to answer the phone, cause them to lose money, as well as make it clear that we're not impressed.
mr reizel: i did a prior post covering the software freedom aspect of what you wrote, but it's just as important to recognise that the linux kernel is a one-man show, effectively. if you don't like what mr linus has to say, then tough shit.
the GNU/Hurd project is therefore a fall-back - a safety net, so to speak. unfortunately it deviates from even what FreeBSD does, in its layout and presentation at userspace level [because it uses RPC message-passing between kernel and userspace], so they've given themselves a bit more to chew than the handful of people involved in it could really handle. fortunately however there is plenty of device driver code kicking around that they can bootstrap themselves up from.
they've achieved a hell of a lot. so please give them some encouragement - and preferably some money.
mr reizel: if you've ever sat down and thought out a set of principles, then decided to stick to them no matter what happens, then you will understand. forget that it's about "software freedom" for a moment: just sit down and think, "have i ever actually come up with some principles, and am i prepared to dedicate my life to those principles and ethics"?
if the answer is "no" then for fuck's sake please stop criticising people who *have* decided that their principles are more important to them than any amount of money. because what you are saying is that we should not respect people who stick to their principles if there is money to be made. or obtained. or received. and i'm very alarmed that you clearly do not see that that's what you've said, otherwise you probably wouldn't have said it.
there's a little-known story that the linux kernel was first conceived by a small group of individuals in a military environment. they sat down, just after the "Unix Wars" and when Windows 3.1 came out, and they went [in summary], "shit. if this continues, windows - which we can see is a pile of shit even without the NSA or GCHQ looking at it, because we know about things like virtual memory - is going to be taken up in our secure environments merely because it's $100 not $10,000 and then foreigners will be able to go for a stroll through any of our government files".
[fast-forward btw to a recent complaint a few years back from a U.S. Senator about why the NSA punishes microsoft by not allowing windows to be installed on any of its office machines....]
back to the story: one of the individuals, a norweigan major, was then tasked to go off and "groom" any individual that he could find who had the potential to create a full "Free" operating system. the person he found: Linus Torvalds. you should be able to work out the rest of the picture.
now, i don't know if you're aware of this but many of the fears that that small group had have in fact already come true. i worked at NC3A (NATO Research) a few years ago: i was shocked to find that *every* single desktop system ran Windows NT (XP). which is absolutely insane - and that's in a military research environment. the reason: they were sold on a minor item - $USD 5m and MS "Office" licenses thrown in for free.
and this was just around the time when that Sony BMG "root kit" was doing the rounds. U.S. Military staff, bored of staring at nothing, would put a CD into the computer, and a complete list of classified files on that machine would be shipped over the internet to a server run by Sony.
i'm mentioning "military" because it should have obvious immediate ramifications where money should *not* be a deciding factor in the equation, but you can see clearly that it quite obviously has been, and the consequences of various Military instituations around the world *not* sticking to their principles - out of sheer ignorance or monetary over-ride - are very serious.
but the point being made applies just as equally to everyone else in a *non* military environment: you really really cannot trust proprietary software. you've seen enough dilbert cartoons to know why.
so that's the software freedom aspect dealt with. i'd best do the other bit in another post.
i envy - and rave about - anyone who has a nokia 6310i. it's a phone. it makes phone calls. it receives and sends SMS. it has a two **WEEK** battery life (and that's active i.e. switched on 24x7, waiting for incoming calls). it takes a standard nokia phone charger. it weighs 100 grammes, it's slim, and if you really need it, you can use it to connect to the internet with GPRS via bluetooth, to connect a laptop or any other device. if you ever find a nokia 6310i at a market, they're flat-out gone in under an hour. the 2nd-hand market in replacement batteries for them is enormous. oh, and the menu is dead simple and highly intuitive to use.
now. what was the question again? oh yes: who wants the most features on a phone. i don't. if i want something that has internet connectivity, i'll get something that has a built-in 3G modem, is portable, yet has a keyboard.
you will see that GSM was started as far back as 1982. GSM includes GPRS, which includes a means to combine simultaneous voice and data into a single transmission.
there will be plenty more examples like this. i recommend that you find lots of examples, but any one of those examples can be used to tell these patent trolls to go fuck themselves.
if you are actively involved in free software, you automatically qualify for free assistance from the Software Freedom Law Centre. phone them up, immediately. do not hang around. also you did the right thing asking around: do more of that, and specifically ask people to find prior art. look up what newegg did. the article was on here last week.
a friend of mine made a freedom of information request recently, and was surprised to find that his question was responded to using zendesk. so he looked up the IP address and, on discovering that the IP address was in the U.S., made some pointed enquiries as to why his confidential details, as well as UK Government matters, were being stored in a jurisdiction outside of the sovereignty of the UK.
the best one though was learning that UK MPs have been issued with ippads. which is great. confidential UK business can be snooped on by not just the U.S. govt but by a U.S. Corporation, and UK MPs can be "advertised at", and sold commercial music and entertainment services that they have absolutely no business letting in to Parliament.
wasn't there a guy who said that he only hired english language students because computer science students couldn't communicate or do basic logical reasoning effectively? when working in teams, the ability to reason and communicate is far more important. so this guy, i can't remember who he was (anyone find a link?) said that he found it much more effective to hire people with good english language skills and to train them to program, than to try to hire people who could program and to try to get them to speke engleeeesh.
the advantage of that approach - if microsoft actually encouraged english to be taught at schools - would be that kids would actually learn like, y'know, quite a bit more than just how to program? and i could begin to get a little less stressed and have to refer people to this kind of site: http://www.apostrophe.org.uk/page4.html
that newegg had to go to court at all indicates that "the system" is a failure. software is mathematics. mathematics is unpatentable. it was a lower-court ruling ignoring the supreme court which resulted in the mistaken impression that software can be patented: U.S. law *actually* says that only a hardware-software *combination* may be patented, i.e. something like an electronic cash register, or a calculator. if someone makes better software that runs on e.g. TI's hardware then, under U.S. Patent Law, that alternative software *cannot* be patent infringing. the problem is that it's going to take someone to stand up, just like newegg did, but this time to take it all the way through to the supreme court. and that's the problem: the cost of taking things to court. if patent litigation was zero cost to the defendant, including taking things all the way to the supreme court, *then* the system would not be unequal, and would be sorted out pretty damn fast.
get him a russian army surplus tank. tell him his mission, should he choose to accept it, is to convert its valve-based electronics over to modern silicon circuits.
...my uncle (anthony pickford) who used patent law to protect against dangerous copy-cat medicines [which were killing people - literally].
I would not use patent law to protect prospective customers against a lethal machine. Even in China, building a product that kills its user is an inherently limiting prospect.
yeah, in china, because our clients are State-Sponsored factories, it's their business that would be disrupted and threatened. so we just give them the name of the product, and let them go beat them up. or whatever it is that they do in china to people who kill end-users.
i mentioned this in the original post: the use of patent law (by my uncle) to track down the criminals was extremely innovative. remember that they had absolutely no idea who was supplying the killing-drugs, and the only people who would know was Customs and Excise. but they weren't telling. so they sued a random company for patent infringement that they *suspected* of importing the killing-drugs, *knowing* that they would lose, but during the pre-trial they made a "Discovery Request" to the Inland Revenue.
they lost the case, but they then sued the Inland Revenue when the Inland Revenue refused to comply with the request. they lost that case, appealed, took it to the High Court, lost that case, appealed to the House of Lords, where my uncle was able to make a presentation and got the law changed. it's now part of UK Law that a 3rd party *must* comply with a "Discovery Request". prior to that case, there was no precedent: any 3rd party could refuse to comply.
he was an incredible man, my uncle. very intelligent, very very angry and intolerant, but he was amazingly good at his job. of 36 changes to UK Law over the past 50 years, *EIGHTEEN* of those changes were down to him. including the modifications to the Dangerous Dogs Act.
I knew a guy ten or fifteen years ago that had had the same problem, were you a Quake player? If so, was your in-game and internet name "crash"? I've lost track of all those guys.
ha - no:) i was however an avid "descent" and "descent 2" player - i got some 386s and 486s, set up a network in my house and invited friends round. yes that's descent and descent 2 the *proprietary* version, not the free software version.
then i got into "dark reign", and even invented the "zombies-in-the-underground-transport" thing that ended up on the "hints and tips" because it was so successful at creating mayhem: i would go after the artillery because they had a significant latency on load-and-fire which couldn't be stopped, so they had a habit of blowing each other up and everything around them whenever one of the suicide zombies popped up in their midst.
but no - it wasn't the gaming, it was the 16 hour days doing reverse-engineering and packet analysis in cold temperatures and only being 65kg (i'm 6ft 1) that really did it.
Are you willing to release some sort of board using the EOMA standard under an open hardware licence (e.g. CERN's or TAPR's) that gives legal protection to people making (open) derivative products?
love to!
While I can understand why you would like to keep control of the standard with patents, that approach may make the EOMA standard unusable for open hardware projects.
i'm glad you said "may", because i would have to contradict you, and i don't like doing that. we thought this through: the patents will come with an automatic royalty-free grant for any product that's FSF-Endorseable, written in stone into the papers associated publicly with the patent. yes, i'm keenly aware that there aren't that many FSF-Endorsed products: it's something i want to encourage.
If not, using the EOMA standard in my projects isn't worth living in fear of a lawsuit, and I can't in good conscience pass them on to other people with this hidden risk.
it's not hidden: i've mentioned it a number of times. actually, every time this issue comes up i've answered it, that there's been a plan in place even as the patents were being conceived. i really *am* a free software advocate, not a free software band-wagon-jumper.
If you'd like to make money off of people making money using your standard for closed hardware I have no issue with that. If you are worried about compatibility and hardware damage, however, some sort of (copyrighted) certification logo may be much friendlier to open source community.
well... we'll have to look at that as-and-when it happens. if a product's scope is small, i honestly don't think we'll be particularly concerned. and, also, remember: the CPU Cards are where we'll most likely find that people are having to buy these off-the-shelf from mass-volume manufacturers. it's mainly the mass-volume manufacturers that we're concerned about. a few engineers developing alpha-grade hardware and selling 100 to 1,000 units, knowing full well that they and their clients are taking a risk plugging a card into a board? yeahh, i'm not so worried.
but, a competitor company that's making a million units a week and they're incompatible and short-circuit existing customer's products??? that's bad.
An example of this kind of scheme is the USB standard; if you don't see the USB logo on a piece of hardware you know that you are taking a risk by plugging it into your computer. This has prevented catastrophes on the consumer side, but still allowed the open hardware community to experiment and share freely with each other and the world. While you could argue that allowing people to distribute non-compliant hardware risks fires and other safety problems, this hasn't really been a significant issue with USB.
well, that's because USB devices and USB chips come with built-in protection. here it's a different matter. if someone badly or even *deliberately* designs a card which is non-interoperable, and its use shorts out the power lines to ground, there's no over-voltage protection and chances are it'll damage something.
so i know what you mean, and chances are that we'll have to review things on a case-by-case basis and be encouraging to open hardware designers (i want them to succeed!), but we cannot risk letting it get into a free-for-all - it's simply too dangerous, and it would be irresponsible of us. remember, there's something called an "estoppel defense". if we "turn a blind eye" to an "open hardware" platform, and it gets copied and turns into a million-a-month product, and it turns out to have a hardware flaw, what then? the million-a-month company could claim "well you didn't contact the small company when they were doing 100 a month, so we don't have to pay either".
it's a tough one - but the idea is to use the patents to protect the *whole* EOMA community, *not* as a means to stifle innovation as they're presently used. please remember: i'm a free software advocate. i'm working with and from within the system; i'm not looking for ways to *exploit* the free software community, i'm looking for ways to make them relevant!
one of them's on arm-netbooks. he tells me they're really excited, and rooting for this project. i'll be sooo glad when the first card's out, and then the first product (looks like it'll be the vivaldi tablet). lots else going on, it's mad.
If you're going to be distributing your source anyway why does it matter?
Are they really going to do extra work to change the source significantly for free? It'll just be the same as whatever you gave them to load onto the hardware.
well, yes, they [pick any hardware engineer as an example] might well want - or need - to do extra work. many of these low-cost tablets for example have USB buses. that means printers, keyboards, specially-designed hardware devices, future products not currently supported by the linux kernel, DVB-T USB dongles, 3G dongles, GNURadio products, SDR Radio dongles with that low-cost RA-Link chipset and so on.... if you haven't got the linux kernel headers and the original kernel config, you're f*****d - you can't guarantee that any.ko modules that you compile will actually work.... that's assuming that you can gain access to the system-level in the first place.
if the driver is _really_ out-of-date wrt the version of the kernel that's on there, such that you have to do a complete and full rebuild of the kernel, you're f****d unless you have the full build toolchain and know the boot process... and in some cases now have the key which allows you to sign the kernel so that it *can* be booted.
then also what happens if the bootloader (e.g. u-boot) doesn't do what you want? for example, it doesn't boot off of the USB-to-SATA device that your customer has asked you to connect up.
so it's actually really really important to have full source code and toolchain. without them, anyone wishing to make use of all this low-cost hardware in order to set up a business or remain competitive simply... can't even consider it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny how, on articles about things everyone here knows about, like BitCoin or the Raspberry Pi, the summary wastes space explaining the context (ie. what BitCoin or RaspPi is), but on an article about something relatively obscure, it just throws model numbers and acronyms at you.
As far as I can discern without reading TFA, this is just some new ARM system-on-a-chip, not particularly revolutionary or powerful, but aimed at use in open-source environments.
absolutely! i'm a link whore, what can i say :)
ok - it's not limited to one particular ARM SoC, it's about a standard. actually, it's not about the standard. the actual goal is to bring about a revolution in the mass-volume computing appliances sector. i don't mention that too often because it sounds absolutely madly insanely ambitious, but it's what's actually going on here.
so let's look a bit further down the chain, at say rhombus tech. rhombus tech is the web site designed to help link free software developers with chinese factories. if you're familiar with the rampant level of GPL violations (google "mjg59 android gpl violations") in the chinese hardware sector you'll know how limiting that is. i have two friends - both engineers - who are VERY frustrated at being able to buy such incredibly cheap hardware, yet they CANNOT RE-PROGRAM it because not even the factories have the GPL source code! so the promise of cheap hardware is there, but the reality is that you can't use it.
this insane situation is what rhombus tech is setting out to break, by ONLY working with factories and SoC vendors that are willing to be GPL compliant right from the start. my role here is therefore to pre-vet the SoCs, get the documentation and source code sufficient to at least get something up and running, find a substitute low-cost affordable development system (e.g. the Mele A1000 and now the Mele A100G Quad in the case of the Allwinner SoCs), then get it into modular form and get it out there.
the modular form-factor - which includes the development of standards such as EOMA68 - is the real kicker though. i don't know if you're aware of the situation with regard to development of tablets and other hardware but it's insane. due to the high level of integration on ARM and MIPS SoCs, EACH AND EVERY PRODUCT REQUIRES TOTAL CUSTOMISATION. there is no BIOS: there is only u-boot (which must be customised) and the linux kernel (which must be customised). the turn-around time on products is such that in some cases the introduction of a new SoC can cause a MAJOR recession in the electronics industry in Shenzen. it happened before when the Allwinner A10 came out, because its price was (is) only around $7.50 when all of its competition was around $13, and it'll happen again.
so we've come up with EOMA-68 as a way to mitigate against this (and other) problems. example: i received the PCB PADS files from Allwinner for the A31 SoC. i got a basic EOMA-68 layout done in FIVE DAYS because all i had to do was throw together a set of libraries and circuits that i already had from the other 4 boards that i've done. so with this approach we could basically upgrade an ENTIRE product range - tablets, laptops, desktop systems, anything-that-takes-a-CPU-card - in about 3 weeks flat. that's just... unheard-of! imagine going to a factory and saying "we can upgrade all your product in 3 weeks! all your base are belong to us!" they would be telling that story for years down at the local pubs, about the day some crazy guy came in and said they could upgrade their entire product range in 3 weeks... ... but that's literally what can be done here. do you see how powerful that is?
then there is the fact that the products, because they don't fundamentally change (it's only the CPU that gets faster), the factory can LITERALLY make them until the cows come home. or, more to the point, until a component goes end-of-life. but if they're making a 7in tablet chassis by the bucket-load,
well, i tell you what: you believe what you want to believe, and i'll follow my own instincts and make my own judgements, ok? come back in say 4 years and we'll compare notes on how our respective finances fared as a result of our beliefs.
please read senator ron paul's book. you'll see the graphs which show that the actual value of the USD is very subtly going down-hill.
also, did you note the fact that i said that "the rest of the world's currencies are forced to follow suit"? i said "the rest of the world's currencies are forced to follow the same policy".
this means that RELATIVELY SPEAKING, nobody notices what's going on, because the exchange rates all stay roughly the same.
it's only through things like bitcoin - which is a monetary market that goverments CANNOT manipulate [long-term] - that you see the REAL picture.
does that make sense?
your statement tells me that you're not familiar with economics. when there's a fixed supply of currency, the value of the currency *increases* with its demand. so the apparent value - the amount you pay for good and services - appears to go DOWN because you hand over LESS coins for the exact same service / goods.
please read senator ron paul's book. you will begin to understand. ok?
somebody's been reading Senator Ron Paul's book "End the Fed" :) if that turns out to be a mistaken assumption, read his book and come back! repeat until true :)
but seriously: you're absolutely right. the USD has basically been run on a hyperinflational policy in order to "help" america repay its trillion dollar debts. as of 2008 i believe that the US owed - just to china alone - enough money to average $7,500 per person. if however the $USD is *devalued* then, why, of course that $7500 can be paid easily!!!
uunnnfortunately, the $USD is the world's reserve currency. so basically what this means is that *every* country must follow the exact same hyperinflational monetary policy so as to not get screwed.
it's only going to take one country to say "fuck this, we've had enough" and the system begins to unwind.
now, with bitcoin - exactly as you said, paulpach - you *CAN'T* fuck with bitcoin like this... because inflation is NOT POSSIBLE. there is - and always will be - a limited supply. therefore, what *MUST* happen - over the long term - is that the exchange rate for bitcoin against *ALL* hyper-inflational currencies *MUST* go up.
if you've read any of Tom Holt's books, you'll know what happens when a high-value currency gets cashed out: in one of Tom's books, someone exchanges $BOH 12 for "real-world" currencies and causes a major melt-down of the international exchanges. hilarious :)
bottom line: the value of bitcoins will, as economic pressure on their limited supply increases, go UP.
and for how long has ACARS and ADS-B been insecure? that's what's so embarrassing about these things. skype being insecure since it was created, relying on security-through-obscurity just as adobe does for RTMP, such that the russian govt has had the ability to eavesdrop on skype for at least the past 4 years.... and *not* told anyone about it.
it's the same here. someone *somewhere* will have been exploiting ACARS and ADS-B... and not telling anyone that they're doing it. conferences like these are a wake-up call to the idiots who believe that nobody - ever - will work out their "security".
the question is: when will they learn to get proper security reviews *before* designing the protocol??
i can. it's like playing music through grated cheese. it's typically cymbals, trumpets and other complex sounds that i notice particularly are affected.
an associate who worked for a Real-time Audio restoration company - his job was to spot audio discrepancies such as phase errors on old mono tracks that had been incorrectly recorded in stereo - could tell even *more* than i could ever notice.
basically it entirely depends on YOU. if your aural cortex and your ears are sufficiently developed / not-damaged, you WILL notice - it's as simple as that.
the geneva convention is very clear. if a citizen of a country is physically attacked by soldiers from another country, it is AUTOMATICALLY a declaration of war by the attacking country. once that declaration has been made - whether it be implicit or explicit - that declaration AUTOMATICALLY gives ALL citizens of the country that has been attacked the right to retaliate against all and any assets and citizens of the attacking country.
as i have mentioned repeatedly on slashdot for some years now whenever the words "cyber" and "war" are mentioned in the same sentence, it is incredibly stupid and very very dangerous to make this association.
the other issue is very very simple: any country that has critical infrastructure assets connected directly to the internet is ASKING FOR TROUBLE, period. disconnect them from the public internet and set up a separate network, for god's sake! if you don't know how to do that, ask your Dept of Defense for advice. they do it all the time. if you're too lazy to do that, or too cost-careless, then please quit your job: you're too irresponsible to be in charge of your country's critical infrastructure.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vimanas/vimanas.htm
the documentation on ancient "vimanas" is staggeringly comprehensive. the most-studied portions of these documents by westerners are those on metallurgy (and electro-magnetism). how to find the metal ores. how to mine them. how to build the crucibles and the furnaces needed to smelt the metals, and so on. (http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vimanas/vimanas21.htm)
what is simply beyond most western peoples' belief is that it would even be possible for the ancient indians to have this kind of technology, and the associated weaponry that goes with it.
however, as we learn more - including NASA learning about and independently rediscovering Mercury-driven Ion Drives - it kinda shames our european arrogance to think that we could possibly have been "the first" to discover powered flight. that's powered flight *in this era*, not first powered flight *ever*.
god help us when someone actually takes this ancient documentation seriously and starts reproducing some of the weaponry though.
how about all of us calling this company up, several times a day, and *politely* telling them what we think? the sheer number of calls would, just from them having to answer the phone, cause them to lose money, as well as make it clear that we're not impressed.
mr reizel: i did a prior post covering the software freedom aspect of what you wrote, but it's just as important to recognise that the linux kernel is a one-man show, effectively. if you don't like what mr linus has to say, then tough shit.
the GNU/Hurd project is therefore a fall-back - a safety net, so to speak. unfortunately it deviates from even what FreeBSD does, in its layout and presentation at userspace level [because it uses RPC message-passing between kernel and userspace], so they've given themselves a bit more to chew than the handful of people involved in it could really handle. fortunately however there is plenty of device driver code kicking around that they can bootstrap themselves up from.
they've achieved a hell of a lot. so please give them some encouragement - and preferably some money.
mr reizel: if you've ever sat down and thought out a set of principles, then decided to stick to them no matter what happens, then you will understand. forget that it's about "software freedom" for a moment: just sit down and think, "have i ever actually come up with some principles, and am i prepared to dedicate my life to those principles and ethics"?
if the answer is "no" then for fuck's sake please stop criticising people who *have* decided that their principles are more important to them than any amount of money. because what you are saying is that we should not respect people who stick to their principles if there is money to be made. or obtained. or received. and i'm very alarmed that you clearly do not see that that's what you've said, otherwise you probably wouldn't have said it.
there's a little-known story that the linux kernel was first conceived by a small group of individuals in a military environment. they sat down, just after the "Unix Wars" and when Windows 3.1 came out, and they went [in summary], "shit. if this continues, windows - which we can see is a pile of shit even without the NSA or GCHQ looking at it, because we know about things like virtual memory - is going to be taken up in our secure environments merely because it's $100 not $10,000 and then foreigners will be able to go for a stroll through any of our government files".
[fast-forward btw to a recent complaint a few years back from a U.S. Senator about why the NSA punishes microsoft by not allowing windows to be installed on any of its office machines....]
back to the story: one of the individuals, a norweigan major, was then tasked to go off and "groom" any individual that he could find who had the potential to create a full "Free" operating system. the person he found: Linus Torvalds. you should be able to work out the rest of the picture.
now, i don't know if you're aware of this but many of the fears that that small group had have in fact already come true. i worked at NC3A (NATO Research) a few years ago: i was shocked to find that *every* single desktop system ran Windows NT (XP). which is absolutely insane - and that's in a military research environment. the reason: they were sold on a minor item - $USD 5m and MS "Office" licenses thrown in for free.
and this was just around the time when that Sony BMG "root kit" was doing the rounds. U.S. Military staff, bored of staring at nothing, would put a CD into the computer, and a complete list of classified files on that machine would be shipped over the internet to a server run by Sony.
i'm mentioning "military" because it should have obvious immediate ramifications where money should *not* be a deciding factor in the equation, but you can see clearly that it quite obviously has been, and the consequences of various Military instituations around the world *not* sticking to their principles - out of sheer ignorance or monetary over-ride - are very serious.
but the point being made applies just as equally to everyone else in a *non* military environment: you really really cannot trust proprietary software. you've seen enough dilbert cartoons to know why.
so that's the software freedom aspect dealt with. i'd best do the other bit in another post.
i envy - and rave about - anyone who has a nokia 6310i. it's a phone. it makes phone calls. it receives and sends SMS. it has a two **WEEK** battery life (and that's active i.e. switched on 24x7, waiting for incoming calls). it takes a standard nokia phone charger. it weighs 100 grammes, it's slim, and if you really need it, you can use it to connect to the internet with GPRS via bluetooth, to connect a laptop or any other device. if you ever find a nokia 6310i at a market, they're flat-out gone in under an hour. the 2nd-hand market in replacement batteries for them is enormous. oh, and the menu is dead simple and highly intuitive to use.
now. what was the question again? oh yes: who wants the most features on a phone. i don't. if i want something that has internet connectivity, i'll get something that has a built-in 3G modem, is portable, yet has a keyboard.
based on a very quick search, you can tell them to go fuck themselves. here's the patent:
http://www.google.com/patents/US5506866?printsec=abstract#v=onepage&q&f=false
it's originally by AT&T. it's a patent on the means to combine simultaneous voice and data onto a single line. the submission date is in 1993.
however, if you look at this: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/gsm/gsm_overview.htm
you will see that GSM was started as far back as 1982. GSM includes GPRS, which includes a means to combine simultaneous voice and data into a single transmission.
there will be plenty more examples like this. i recommend that you find lots of examples, but any one of those examples can be used to tell these patent trolls to go fuck themselves.
if you are actively involved in free software, you automatically qualify for free assistance from the Software Freedom Law Centre. phone them up, immediately. do not hang around. also you did the right thing asking around: do more of that, and specifically ask people to find prior art. look up what newegg did. the article was on here last week.
a friend of mine made a freedom of information request recently, and was surprised to find that his question was responded to using zendesk. so he looked up the IP address and, on discovering that the IP address was in the U.S., made some pointed enquiries as to why his confidential details, as well as UK Government matters, were being stored in a jurisdiction outside of the sovereignty of the UK.
the best one though was learning that UK MPs have been issued with ippads. which is great. confidential UK business can be snooped on by not just the U.S. govt but by a U.S. Corporation, and UK MPs can be "advertised at", and sold commercial music and entertainment services that they have absolutely no business letting in to Parliament.
all good fun, eh?
wasn't there a guy who said that he only hired english language students because computer science students couldn't communicate or do basic logical reasoning effectively? when working in teams, the ability to reason and communicate is far more important. so this guy, i can't remember who he was (anyone find a link?) said that he found it much more effective to hire people with good english language skills and to train them to program, than to try to hire people who could program and to try to get them to speke engleeeesh.
the advantage of that approach - if microsoft actually encouraged english to be taught at schools - would be that kids would actually learn like, y'know, quite a bit more than just how to program? and i could begin to get a little less stressed and have to refer people to this kind of site: http://www.apostrophe.org.uk/page4.html
that newegg had to go to court at all indicates that "the system" is a failure. software is mathematics. mathematics is unpatentable. it was a lower-court ruling ignoring the supreme court which resulted in the mistaken impression that software can be patented: U.S. law *actually* says that only a hardware-software *combination* may be patented, i.e. something like an electronic cash register, or a calculator. if someone makes better software that runs on e.g. TI's hardware then, under U.S. Patent Law, that alternative software *cannot* be patent infringing. the problem is that it's going to take someone to stand up, just like newegg did, but this time to take it all the way through to the supreme court. and that's the problem: the cost of taking things to court. if patent litigation was zero cost to the defendant, including taking things all the way to the supreme court, *then* the system would not be unequal, and would be sorted out pretty damn fast.
point him at this article.
http://www.tanksforsale.co.uk/Surplus%20Russian%20BMP1%20APCs%20%20for%20sale.html
get him a russian army surplus tank. tell him his mission, should he choose to accept it, is to convert its valve-based electronics over to modern silicon circuits.
...my uncle (anthony pickford) who used patent law to protect against dangerous copy-cat medicines [which were killing people - literally].
I would not use patent law to protect prospective customers against a lethal machine. Even in China, building a product that kills its user is an inherently limiting prospect.
yeah, in china, because our clients are State-Sponsored factories, it's their business that would be disrupted and threatened. so we just give them the name of the product, and let them go beat them up. or whatever it is that they do in china to people who kill end-users.
i mentioned this in the original post: the use of patent law (by my uncle) to track down the criminals was extremely innovative. remember that they had absolutely no idea who was supplying the killing-drugs, and the only people who would know was Customs and Excise. but they weren't telling. so they sued a random company for patent infringement that they *suspected* of importing the killing-drugs, *knowing* that they would lose, but during the pre-trial they made a "Discovery Request" to the Inland Revenue.
they lost the case, but they then sued the Inland Revenue when the Inland Revenue refused to comply with the request. they lost that case, appealed, took it to the High Court, lost that case, appealed to the House of Lords, where my uncle was able to make a presentation and got the law changed. it's now part of UK Law that a 3rd party *must* comply with a "Discovery Request". prior to that case, there was no precedent: any 3rd party could refuse to comply.
he was an incredible man, my uncle. very intelligent, very very angry and intolerant, but he was amazingly good at his job. of 36 changes to UK Law over the past 50 years, *EIGHTEEN* of those changes were down to him. including the modifications to the Dangerous Dogs Act.
it's a hang-over from when i had RSI
I knew a guy ten or fifteen years ago that had had the same problem, were you a Quake player? If so, was your in-game and internet name "crash"? I've lost track of all those guys.
ha - no :) i was however an avid "descent" and "descent 2" player - i got some 386s and 486s, set up a network in my house and invited friends round. yes that's descent and descent 2 the *proprietary* version, not the free software version.
then i got into "dark reign", and even invented the "zombies-in-the-underground-transport" thing that ended up on the "hints and tips" because it was so successful at creating mayhem: i would go after the artillery because they had a significant latency on load-and-fire which couldn't be stopped, so they had a habit of blowing each other up and everything around them whenever one of the suicide zombies popped up in their midst.
but no - it wasn't the gaming, it was the 16 hour days doing reverse-engineering and packet analysis in cold temperatures and only being 65kg (i'm 6ft 1) that really did it.
Are you willing to release some sort of board using the EOMA standard under an open hardware licence (e.g. CERN's or TAPR's) that gives legal protection to people making (open) derivative products?
love to!
While I can understand why you would like to keep control of the standard with patents, that approach may make the EOMA standard unusable for open hardware projects.
i'm glad you said "may", because i would have to contradict you, and i don't like doing that. we thought this through: the patents will come with an automatic royalty-free grant for any product that's FSF-Endorseable, written in stone into the papers associated publicly with the patent. yes, i'm keenly aware that there aren't that many FSF-Endorsed products: it's something i want to encourage.
If not, using the EOMA standard in my projects isn't worth living in fear of a lawsuit, and I can't in good conscience pass them on to other people with this hidden risk.
it's not hidden: i've mentioned it a number of times. actually, every time this issue comes up i've answered it, that there's been a plan in place even as the patents were being conceived. i really *am* a free software advocate, not a free software band-wagon-jumper.
If you'd like to make money off of people making money using your standard for closed hardware I have no issue with that. If you are worried about compatibility and hardware damage, however, some sort of (copyrighted) certification logo may be much friendlier to open source community.
well... we'll have to look at that as-and-when it happens. if a product's scope is small, i honestly don't think we'll be particularly concerned. and, also, remember: the CPU Cards are where we'll most likely find that people are having to buy these off-the-shelf from mass-volume manufacturers. it's mainly the mass-volume manufacturers that we're concerned about. a few engineers developing alpha-grade hardware and selling 100 to 1,000 units, knowing full well that they and their clients are taking a risk plugging a card into a board? yeahh, i'm not so worried.
but, a competitor company that's making a million units a week and they're incompatible and short-circuit existing customer's products??? that's bad.
An example of this kind of scheme is the USB standard; if you don't see the USB logo on a piece of hardware you know that you are taking a risk by plugging it into your computer. This has prevented catastrophes on the consumer side, but still allowed the open hardware community to experiment and share freely with each other and the world. While you could argue that allowing people to distribute non-compliant hardware risks fires and other safety problems, this hasn't really been a significant issue with USB.
well, that's because USB devices and USB chips come with built-in protection. here it's a different matter. if someone badly or even *deliberately* designs a card which is non-interoperable, and its use shorts out the power lines to ground, there's no over-voltage protection and chances are it'll damage something.
so i know what you mean, and chances are that we'll have to review things on a case-by-case basis and be encouraging to open hardware designers (i want them to succeed!), but we cannot risk letting it get into a free-for-all - it's simply too dangerous, and it would be irresponsible of us. remember, there's something called an "estoppel defense". if we "turn a blind eye" to an "open hardware" platform, and it gets copied and turns into a million-a-month product, and it turns out to have a hardware flaw, what then? the million-a-month company could claim "well you didn't contact the small company when they were doing 100 a month, so we don't have to pay either".
it's a tough one - but the idea is to use the patents to protect the *whole* EOMA community, *not* as a means to stifle innovation as they're presently used. please remember: i'm a free software advocate. i'm working with and from within the system; i'm not looking for ways to *exploit* the free software community, i'm looking for ways to make them relevant!
one of them's on arm-netbooks. he tells me they're really excited, and rooting for this project. i'll be sooo glad when the first card's out, and then the first product (looks like it'll be the vivaldi tablet). lots else going on, it's mad.
If you're going to be distributing your source anyway why does it matter?
Are they really going to do extra work to change the source significantly for free? It'll just be the same as whatever you gave them to load onto the hardware.
well, yes, they [pick any hardware engineer as an example] might well want - or need - to do extra work. many of these low-cost tablets for example have USB buses. that means printers, keyboards, specially-designed hardware devices, future products not currently supported by the linux kernel, DVB-T USB dongles, 3G dongles, GNURadio products, SDR Radio dongles with that low-cost RA-Link chipset and so on. ... if you haven't got the linux kernel headers and the original kernel config, you're f*****d - you can't guarantee that any .ko modules that you compile will actually work.... that's assuming that you can gain access to the system-level in the first place.
if the driver is _really_ out-of-date wrt the version of the kernel that's on there, such that you have to do a complete and full rebuild of the kernel, you're f****d unless you have the full build toolchain and know the boot process... and in some cases now have the key which allows you to sign the kernel so that it *can* be booted.
then also what happens if the bootloader (e.g. u-boot) doesn't do what you want? for example, it doesn't boot off of the USB-to-SATA device that your customer has asked you to connect up.
so it's actually really really important to have full source code and toolchain. without them, anyone wishing to make use of all this low-cost hardware in order to set up a business or remain competitive simply... can't even consider it.