The home may survive, but if it's beachfront, you may find the distance from your bunker to the waves is a lot less when you emerge after the hurricane.
yeah. i mention sthapatyaveda in another post, but the "rules" for sthapatyaveda include never putting a building in a valley, or under a cliff, or within 1 mile of any kind of large body of water. there are about 30 "rules" for choosing a site, and, when you look at them and actually think about them, they actually make a hell of a lot of sense. the one "don't pick a plot that's been abandoned by nature i.e. has no animals or birds on it" is just... well... we know that animals have more instinctive sense than humans! "don't pick a plot that has a strange smell or has unclear air" is blindingly obvious, but so many people overrule that for other considerations, and then wonder why they get sick!
as a race we can be pretty stupid, to be honest, about the kinds of things we put up with for the most... irrational reasons.
there's a type of vedic architecture principles called "vaastu", the other word used is sthapatyaveda - it's thousands of years old. a temple built according to "vaastu" architecture principles has withstood tornados and wind speeds of 150mph. i believe golden mean ratio is used extensively, integrated into over *1,000* measurements of the building's dimensions and proportions.
the exact effect this sort of integrated mathematical design has on the weather is just astonishing. that california brush fire in 2003 swept across a series of plots built according to sthapatyaveda: i heard that the only homes which were damaged were those where the people who "broke the rules" by putting in a swimming pool had the fence singed. http://www.wereldvrede.nl/sthapatyavedafantastic.htm
think about it, though: these people attribute "desire" to the "weather", but i believe there's a much more rational explanation: the extensive use of golden mean ratio in the proportions of the building setting up resonance patterns in the wind as the brush fire approached, causing pockets of air surrounding the building, against which the general direction of the fire *literally* had no quotes choice quotes but to change direction. i think it will be the same thing with that temple in india - the one that withstood 150mph winds.
of course, these days, for anyone in the building trade to quotes believe quotes that this is even remotely possible would require supercomputers and fluid dynamics analysis, none of which i believe any modern building company would of course be even slightly interested in doing, because they couldn't claim it was "their technology" with "their patents" on it. muuch better to make buster-bunker style buildings of course:)
yeah i checked out the WebOS source code: there's no phone application, and no infrastructure for supporting phone modems, so you cannot even write a phone app because there's no libraries to call through to the hardware. they're "working on" replacing the bluetooth stack - it's like... huh? they've gone back to square one. the whole point of this eco-system is to bring a *solution* to the table, not *part* of a solution that would take 10 man-years for the free software community to make use of it! that's insane! they broke the rule in the "cathedral & bazaar" of at least releasing a first version that's _vaguely_ useful.
there's a fundamental problem with all these vaccines, which is summed up flippantly as "what doesn't kill ya makes ya stronger". many people - many of them doctors - recognise that letting their kids happily play in the dirt encourages their immune systems to go into overdrive - not just because of the regular influx of dirt but also because of the happiness.
by vaccinating children against various disease - by giving their immune systems an "easy ride" - their immune systems simply do not develop to the same extent that a child would if they had the actual disease and had to fight for their life.
the very first time we fight for our lives - for our right to live - is when we are born. we *literally* fight for breath, when being sqeezed out of our mums. vaccinations ESPECIALLY ones that are enforced on us by governments are removing our right to fight for our lives, and they're bringing up generation after generation of adults that have immune systems that simply haven't been properly developed at an early age.
the long-term effects on entire populations leaves me deeply concerned.
no doubt there will be plenty of people reading this who will be outraged. they will try to tell me "how could you possibly sit there and write or believe such absolute shit? if it was YOUR child, you would not be so cocky" and the answer is "yes i would. i would sit by my daughter's bed-side, nursing her patiently back to health, loving her and being happy with and for her. because happiness and *not* giving in to the 'shit' is exactly what life is all about."
and no, we have *NOT* vaccinated our daughter. the reports on the detrimental effects and case studies on the long-term health of children are out there; they're just not widely published because a) governments don't want to spread the very panic that they created and spread in the first place b) there's too much money to be made from mass-produced vaccines.
in the 1960s there was a "foot & mouth" outbreak in the UK. nobody slaughtered any cows. they just went "oops, i've got a sore on my lip, oh dear i'd better keep away from people and not kiss them", and the herds were isolated and that was the end of it.
fast-forward 40 years and we have mass panic *and* we have mass-vaccinations. with the masses having their immune systems weakened *because* of the mass-vaccinations, is it any surprise that they go into hysterics, spread the news all over the internet in real-time and accelerate and exacerbate the panic?
so this isn't actually about the actual vaccinations at all. it's about people coping with and adjusting to global instant communications.
While I dig the principle behind it, lacking the space/ability to run external cooling, adequate power, or backwards-compatible high speed IO, it seems more like a solution in search of a problem than a truly beneficial design, at least from the consumer perspective.
the EOMA-68 specification includes backwards-compatibility through the three key buses: USB3 (which can do all the way back to USB1.1), SATA-III (which can do all the way down to 150mbit/s if you really get stuck), and Gigabit Ethernet (which can do 10 as well as 100). all of these are through auto-negotiation.
the reason for specifying a 3.5 watt limit is precisely *because* this is a mass-volume standard. in mass-volume products you simply do *not* put in moving parts like fans. the margins are too tight to have things fail and be returned under warranty.
we're taking a bit of a risk by allowing the 8mm version to be up to 10 watts and allowing fans to be included on-board. but, we're not pursuing that right now - just concentrating on the less risky higher-volume version.
think about it, though: with geometries shrinking all the time, in 3-5 years time we'll be laughing about 3.5 watts:)
I do not see any point in coding styles whatsoever.
then you have never worked on a free software collaborative project; you have never submitted patches to free software projects; you have never worked for a large software engineering firm with ISO9001 (Software TickIT) practices in place; in fact you have probably never worked with revision control tools ever in your life.
please allow me to know exactly who you are so that i never, ever employ you or allow you to go anywhere *near* any of the free software projects i am involved in or will be involved in, in the future.
It's so easy to run a code formatter on something now that someone else can read code however they like if it's really important.
running a code formatter and then creating a patch automatically includes your modifications in amongst a bunch of whitespace modifications, by violating the golden rule of submitting single-purpose patches.
even if you were to submit a patch with a massive white-space "code formatting" modification, the existing developers would, quite rightly, tell you to fuck off. if you committed it *without* asking them then they'd be fully justified in complaining and, if you persisted, in getting you fired.
a key in the statement you wrote is "read the code". if your sole job is "reading the code", then you're not really truly involved in the development. i'm assuming that you're a useful contributor: that means you have to submit modifications. forcing *your* coding style - especially when you've clearly and up-front stated that you don't see any point in *any* coding styles - onto everyone else is bound to cause serious problems.
bottom line is: i'm not impressed. fortunately, this conversation allows everyone else to understand *why* coding styles are important.
the censorship by china isn't the big story. let's look at what's going on, recently. we've had huawei blocked from sales of equipment in the U.S. citing "bugs and vulnerabilities"; ZTE just got banned from being supplied with Cisco equipment; very VERY large ISPs responded by cancelling orders and removing Cisco's routers citing "bugs and vulnerabilities" - this is just *some* of the background.
there appears to be an ongoing series of retaliations, and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest bit if there's a dirty tricks unit in e.g. the CIA tasked with coming up with absolute lying-through-their-teeth shit pushed as "news", in order to discredit China's politicians. if that was the case, can you at all blame a country which has access to censorship equipment from using it to cut out such complete rubbish?
yes. for example: roger hayes was arrested, tried and imprisoned in true nazi-style *without* the right to representation or even the right to speak. the "judge" merely spelled out his "crimes" and then passed "sentence". i'm amazed that his case hasn't been taken up by human rights activists and made headline news. http://www.ukcolumn.org/article/roger-hayes-arrested-tried-secret-court-imprisoned
actually, i'm not surprised it hasn't made headline news.
i did exactly that, tepples. the responses *in the dispute resolution* page were so violent, abusive and dis-trusting, with one editor claiming that i was "deliberately hiding behind an anonymous IP address for the sole purpose of causing maximum damage to wikipedia", were themselves so clearly against wikipedia's policies that i simply went "fuck this" and walked away.
there is a serious problem in wikipedia which is that the culture of encouraging and trusting new contributors is completely breaking down, with the "mature" editors using wikipedia's policies to *bully* those with less knowledge of the "rules", forcing themselves and their views onto newer contributors.
i've also encountered problems, especially with technical articles where the "common wisdom" is terribly misinformed. i won't mention which articles because i was so alarmed and intimidated by the unwelcoming way in which those people who were better informed of wikipedia's "policies" used those policies to bully their way towards reverting everything back towards the ignorant and technically mis-informed perspectives left me feeling very much like i never want to edit wikipedia ever again.
the problem with these particular articles is that they are highly scientifically technical, yet quite obscure at the same time. one of them people wanted to believe that the technology would fail: it is therefore full of a scientific "review" which, wrongly, concludes that the technology could not possibly work. the other, people want to believe that the technology would *succeed*. and, because there *are* no successful examples of that technology, there are no successful products out there which can be used to demonstrate that the wikipedia article is plain wrong and misleading people!
in both cases, the lack of citeable material resulted in an edit war verging on vandalism, and in the end i went "fuck it, i don't need the hassle" and walked away. in neither case were the reviewers welcoming: in one case they actually believed that *i* was the vandal, in direct contravention of wikipedia's "welcoming" policy which is supposed to assume that all contributors are acting with integrity. in fact what had happened was that i had not logged in, so was editing by IP address purely by mistake, and, because of what followed and the level of intimidation and abuse directed at me i am extremely glad that i *did* make that mistake.
IMHO if chromebook wants to sell more than a tablet it must work as a real laptop, and a linux distro is at the moment the only way to have a complete personal computing experience on arm.
this is only really going to happen when ARM SoC vendors get out of the "vertical market" mentality, and stop trying to control everything. this is a really in-depth topic so i'll describe it briefly (yes, briefly - despite appearances)
the problem is that ARM SoCs have typically come from the "embedded" space, as "appliances", where android is now also considered to be an "appliance". what that means is that typically a device is designed by the SoC vendor themselves (a "reference design"), the software is written by the SoC vendor themselves, and the whole package sold, usually as a GPL-violating product, to factories who do NOT have ANY software expertise AT ALL.
these factories receive a set of instructions: 1) make PCB 2) assemble PCB in case 3) insert "boot sd/mmc card" to flash OS onto device 4) pack in box 5) sell box.
the chromebook is absolutely *no* exception to this.
what we're doing with the Rhombus Tech initiative, through the EOMA-68 hardware specification, is drawing a line in the sand, where the CPU is now on a Credit-Card-sized "module" along with the RAM and NAND Flash, but that's only half the story. because the CPU Cards can go into literally *any* EOMA-68-compliant mass-volume device, the CPU *has* to be considered to be "General Purpose". every CPU *has* to be "open" (or, alternatively, the burden is on the proprietary software vendor (e.g. apple or microsoft) or on the GPL-violating vendor to support literally every possible combination of devices that could possibly be out there or imagined).
so we're turning things around: turning SoCs back towards where they ought to be (and are already in the x86 world): general-purpose processors that can run any OS.
We are tracking your IP address: we know where you live: so that you comprehend the consequences of air strikes, would you like to have the "Military Drone Strike" demonstrated at your home address? Please press "Yes" "No" or "Don't know" to have a missile express-delivered to your home within seconds.
Also, maybe the chineese promissing* that the A10 will have an entirely free stack helped a bit on this decision.
* As far as I know, they still didn't deliver it... But just the promisse should be enough to change Broadcom's strategy.
yes, that's the whole point. you play one company off against the other. the first one that *actually* goes and releases full GPL-compliant source code of their 3D GPU for example, i will INSTANTLY be recommending it to our clients. our clients are PRC State-Sponsored companies: one of them has a production capacity of 20 million units a *week*.
regarding the A10: *sigh* yeah i know. they can't actually release the source code of MALI, because that's locked down by ARM playing silly-buggers, including deleting public requests on ARM's forums for them to release the source code, *and* despite loads of ARM employees repeatedly advising ARM that releasing the source code is in ARM's best interests.
so we have to rely on the limadriver project, basically, which is making good progress.
we know that Allwinner made a promise to look at releasing the source code of the CedarX audio/video engine, but again, there, i think there will be more mileage out of reverse-engineering it. a "wrapper" has been written which traps system calls, giving a clear idea of what's going on.
the last part, the DDR3 "setup" phase, has already been reverse-engineered. it was a few hundred lines of assembler, that's all. so, the boot process is at least entirely free software.
' Compared to the actual logic or cache on the cpu the number of transistors that the translation takes is minimal and not a big deal especially when you consider the size of cpus nowadays.
it's not the number of transistors that's actually so important as it is the number of times you have to change them from 1s to 0s and back. i read somewhere, so don't take this as gospel, that the register bank of any CPU takes something like a whopping 30% of a general purpose processor's power budget.
so a memory cache, 1st or 2nd level, would not be so power-hungry as a register bank, because you only change a few bits of any one cache entry at a time. a register bank on a 64-bit architecture, however, on average 64 bits are going to change on any two-operand calculation.
the point is that the instruction "translation", which includes shuffling the data around, has to operate at the "rated" i.e. the external i.e. the x86 clock speed. this *will* consume lots of power - i can't say how much: we need an intel engineer to tell us, and that's not going to happen.
bottom line is that AMD and Intel, with x86 "translation", are onto a losing game. intel only keeps ahead - one step ahead - by having access to geometries 1.5 times smaller than the competition. with ARM processors in 28nm being better, power-wise, than x86 processors in 20nm, and yet still offering "good enough computing" performance, both AMD and Intel are *definitely* going to lose out. AMD already is. Intel's just had a wake-up call: http://bit.ly/Ra0RIH
i've met someone who also had a tumour develop behind his ear - the same one where he was using a phone. over 15 years ago he was a sales executive, on the road a lot, and he had one of those "brick" mobile phones. they had to be powerful because the number of cell towers was less than it is now. again, he was holding the device up to his ear for over 6 hours a day.
the problem was that it took 13 years for the tumour to develop to the point where it became painful enough for him to notice something was wrong. by the time he noticed it, the tumour was one centimetre diameter. he's retired, now, having had surgery.
there's a strange fact that people have missed, here: in France, Category L7e cars (350kg, under 20HP) actually have *less* accidents, and so the insurance is lower. the reason why, i believe, is that these cars are so underpowered and, despite passing crash tests with flying colours they "look" unsafe, that both the drivers themselves and also other road users treat them with much more caution.
if, for example, you have a large vehicle that can do 0-60 in 9 seconds, and you are behind a small vehicle that can do 0-60 in 30, the rate of acceleration is so much what you are not used to that you would immediately realise, just from the look of the other car, that the driver in front of you is not "putting it on": his car *really* can't accelerate any quicker. automatically, you've just adjusted, slowed down, and will now be paying attention.
increased attention means increased awareness. increased awareness means less accidents.
so, far from being "unsafer", these Category L7e "micro-cars", apart from having insane fuel economy (100mpg is not uncommon) actually create a "sea of cautious respect" around them. this could be so much horse-shit speculation, but the insurance statistics speak for themselves.
I use modern computers. At work my computer has 32 GB of memory. At home I have 16 GB of memory. My laptop has 8 GB. I honestly could not care less how much memory Firefox uses because it can't use enough for any of these computers to care
baconbits.... um... my main computer is a 2006 24in imac with a 2ghz dual-core xeon and 2gb of RAM. oh, and debian gnu/linux booting grub2-efi of course. it's *really* struggling with the number of tabs that i keep open (over 50).
but here's the thing: i actually consider myself lucky to have 2gb of RAM. i don't fucking well have enough money to go buying new computers right now and i resent what you're implying by saying "yeah who cares, just get more RAM, what's the big deal??"
you're aware that many ARM systems - many of them 1.5ghz - cannot run more than 1gb of RAM? i'm working on an initiative to reduce power consumption and the price of computing, and you're saying "yeah who cares, just get more RAM, what's the big deal??"
i'm just pointing out that just because *you* happen to have lots of resources, it doesn't mean that everyone else in the world does, ok?
If you have a better plan for long-term control of carbon emissions than cutting our dependency on the internal combustion (and diesel) engine, I'd love to hear it.
yes. i do. the details are here http://lkcl.net/ev and the plan is to create a parallel hybrid 4-seat vehicle weighing only 350kg, with a drag coefficient below 0.15 and using a 2-stroke diesel engine based around the bourke design, producing only about 5kW along-side a 10kW electric motor.
the reason for only 350kg is because it's the E.U Category L7e maximum limit - "Heavy Quadricycle". the reduction in materials gives a two-fold benefit: reduced production cost but also reduced running costs (less friction and less weight to accelerate or overcome gravity).
the 0.15 drag coefficient can be achieved using a special bodywork design that i've come up with, which does *not* compromise passenger safety by requiring them to be squished into an unattractive lethal bullet-shaped vehicle that would fall over sideways at the first corner.
the reason for the parallel hybrid is because it's a lower cost than series hybrid.
the reason for putting in an ultra-efficient diesel engine is because expecting people to get away from fossil fuels in the immediate future is asking for trouble. you need a transition technology that bridges the gap until the infrastructure can handle the replacement.
all of this makes a fuel economy target of 200mpg+ really quite straightforward to achieve. that alone reduces carbon emissions and smog.
if you'd like to support this project please do contact me. i live in hope that people reading this are more than just curious that someone is designing something like this and is prepared to help fund it as well.
yep. User Mode Linux is definitely too complicated to use for any real serious business work, as any slashdotter knows. we should all be using the latest and greatest version of windows with a large coloured tile of applications full-screen, just like a mind-map except regular and safe and already laid out with the paths predefined, so that we don't have to think or use any creativity at all. yes! that's it! we should all get lobotomies, stare at pretty squares and be happy to live in our brainwashed state. no need for User Mode Linux at all.
Dealing with stall currents is tough on EV design.
most people don't know what stall currents are. several wikifascists took issue with improvements to the "wheel hub motor" wikipedia page, recently, when facts were presented that showed that the efficiency of EV motors is far, far worse at low RPMs than any ICE vehicle ever could be.
for those people not familiar with "stall currents", stall conditions for an electric motor is when it is operating at or just above 0 RPM (i.e. stall). not only is the motor not moving (so there's not enough air circulation), but the electric wire, as an inductor, is capable of absorbing far more current. that just means more heat is produced, and that the efficiency is lower. a typical EV motor can be only 12 to 15% efficient (!!) at its lower RPMs! avoiding this worst-case situation is flat-out impossible with a Direct-Drive (Wheel Hub) motor. for a bicycle that doesn't matter so much (you can always pedal), but for a car it's a serious problem.
this is why VW's XL1 concept car has a *seven* speed automatic gearbox. electric motors have to be kept in their optimal efficiency band, just like an ICE does. it's complicated! much more complicated.
"Put simply, the automobile has not undergone a fundamental change in design or use since Henry Ford rolled out the Model T more than a century ago. At least that’s what I thought until I spent a week with the Tesla Model S."
you've bought the kool-aid by quoting this. the reason why slashdot people don't like pure electric vehicles is because they are more intelligent than the average person and can work out that there's a hard limit on the rare earth metals and on copper; they can do the math, scaling these resources up to mass-production levels in their imagination; they can do some rough back-of-envelope figures on the power consumption required to keep all-electric vehicles on the road in mass-volume numbers and they know that it simply doesn't add up.
i don't even need to bother to look up the stats on the tesla to know that it's environmentally hostile. it'll weight about 1000kg, which is three times more than it needs to weigh. due to its size it will have about the same drag coefficient and wind resistance losses as any other standard vehicle on the road. these two things when combined tell me that it's environmentally hostile. add in the amount of copper, neodymium and lithium that goes into it and you just know that there's something deeply, deeply wrong with that nytimes article. the journalist has bought the kool-aid, and so have you. please stop and think.
there's something very very wrong with converting pre-existing ICE cars to electric. look up the phrase "mass decompounding" for a clue, but in essence it's that a ICE vehicle is designed around carrying one very large heavy object which is typically 15% of the mass of the vehicle: the engine.
the *correct* thing - ecologically - is to design and build a vehicle that's right for the environment, based around the most efficient kind of drivetrain: parallel hybrid. it's possible then to get below 350kg, still carry 4 passengers, and only need about 15kW (20HP) even to reach 65 to 70mph. the problem is that for the average person, designing an entirely new vehicle from scratch is pretty much beyond their time and resources. the problem for manufacturers is, as anyone who has read "The Other side of Innovation" knows, to throw away the entire "efficient business production model" which has been highly optimised to make ICE vehicles and start from scratch - this is virtually impossible for them. (then there is the problem of laws regarding spare parts - but all of this is outlined here http://lkcl.net/ev/hybridcars_article.html)
so we are left with a rather shitty situation in which the only way in which the average person may make themselves "feel better about the environment" is to purchase an above-average amount of one rare earth metal (lithium), purchase an above-average amount of another rare earth metal whose extraction methods are seriously environmentally questionable (neodymium), purchase an excessive amount of a metal which is increasingly becoming in short supply (copper), throw far more of these materials into an excessively-heavy and over-engineered vehicle than should really be necessary, and call this utter waste of resources "progress".
even manufacturers trying to make us "feel better about the environment" by designing parallel hybrids - they're doing so by taking pre-existing 1.5 tonne vehicle designs and shoe-horning in expensive batteries and expensive motors (which adds to the weight and the cost) and everyone wonders why they stop making the vehicles when the government subsidies stop.
all-electric cars are a DEFINITE no - regardless of whether they're made by the average person or made by a manufacturer. we simply don't have enough lithium or other battery material to go round, for everyone in the world to have an all-electric vehicle. we also don't have enough copper or neodymium for everyone in the world to have 1.5 tonne (average weight) vehicles. we also don't have the Grid Infrastructure in cities to cope with the extra power. major cities in 3rd world and emerging markets are *ALREADY* on brown-outs, overload, or 3-day weeks.
the bottom line is that we *have* to get the power usage down, resource usage down (less weight equals less materials), and the best way to do that is with a 10kW electric motor in combination with a 2-stroke 5kW diesel engine as a Parallel Hybrid. the size of each of those two engines can be made absolutely tiny, yet there's enough power to do 70mph (eventually).
and if this all sounds like "talk" - it's not. my vehicle's also listed on evalbum.com. the main web site: http://lkcl.net/ev. i have a 2nd design in the planning phase: it's a 4-seater. given the issues and challenges involved in getting vehicles out there, if you'd *really* like to help the environment, then help me make sure these designs get put into production - please don't spend $14,000 on converting a pre-existing vehicle: consider spending $8,000 on a light-weight vehicle that's designed to be efficient in the first place.
well, it said "ask anything", so anything it is. hi woz: you've seen a lot of changes in computing. i grew up with computers from age 8 at school where we had a commodore pet 3032. my parents bought me a squish-board (zx-spectrum) aged 11. i went to imperial, learned about virtual memory, and refused to buy another computer until the 486 was reasonably affordable. then it all really went to hell in a handbasket for about 15 years, with windows and x86 hardware pretty much dominating absolutely everything, until these mini computers - beagleboard, android hand-helds etc. - came along.
now we've got miniature computers coming out of our ears, but they're mostly GPL violating (http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/8991.html for details) and so the ability of the average person to actually *own* their own hardware - by having full control of it - is practically zero. whereas everyone *thought* that android would bring us cheap, low-cost hardware that could be adapted for any purpose is quickly turning into a nightmare for privacy advocates, with free software developers locked out and unable to help due to the massive burden of reverse-engineering required before even beginning to help out.
i know of one engineer in australia who has a stack of android tablets 12in high. every single one of them is a total waste of money. he wanted to use them as a low-cost engineering platform. can he get the kernel sources and u-boot source code in order to turn them into useful useable hardware that would help his business and help his clients save money? can he f***. this is a *ridiculous* situation.
so that's why i began the rhombus tech project, and defined the EOMA-68 standard: to put free software developers together with china-based factories, so that mass-produced mass-volume hardware would come out being fully GPL-compliant and have a vibrant support community behind every product, the day it hits the shelves. for everyone's benefit. the problem is: it's taking too long to get the project off-the-ground. everyone who truly understands the goals of the project absolutely loves it, but everyone i speak to - from factories to ODMs to free software developers to the potential investors - is "waiting for something to happen". what would you recommend? can you help at all.... you *did* say "any question":)
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yes. breathing kills you, didn't you know? everyone who has ever breathed has died. therefore you should not breathe: it will kill you.
The home may survive, but if it's beachfront, you may find the distance from your bunker to the waves is a lot less when you emerge after the hurricane.
yeah. i mention sthapatyaveda in another post, but the "rules" for sthapatyaveda include never putting a building in a valley, or under a cliff, or within 1 mile of any kind of large body of water. there are about 30 "rules" for choosing a site, and, when you look at them and actually think about them, they actually make a hell of a lot of sense. the one "don't pick a plot that's been abandoned by nature i.e. has no animals or birds on it" is just... well... we know that animals have more instinctive sense than humans! "don't pick a plot that has a strange smell or has unclear air" is blindingly obvious, but so many people overrule that for other considerations, and then wonder why they get sick!
as a race we can be pretty stupid, to be honest, about the kinds of things we put up with for the most... irrational reasons.
there's a type of vedic architecture principles called "vaastu", the other word used is sthapatyaveda - it's thousands of years old. a temple built according to "vaastu" architecture principles has withstood tornados and wind speeds of 150mph. i believe golden mean ratio is used extensively, integrated into over *1,000* measurements of the building's dimensions and proportions.
the exact effect this sort of integrated mathematical design has on the weather is just astonishing. that california brush fire in 2003 swept across a series of plots built according to sthapatyaveda: i heard that the only homes which were damaged were those where the people who "broke the rules" by putting in a swimming pool had the fence singed. http://www.wereldvrede.nl/sthapatyavedafantastic.htm
think about it, though: these people attribute "desire" to the "weather", but i believe there's a much more rational explanation: the extensive use of golden mean ratio in the proportions of the building setting up resonance patterns in the wind as the brush fire approached, causing pockets of air surrounding the building, against which the general direction of the fire *literally* had no quotes choice quotes but to change direction. i think it will be the same thing with that temple in india - the one that withstood 150mph winds.
of course, these days, for anyone in the building trade to quotes believe quotes that this is even remotely possible would require supercomputers and fluid dynamics analysis, none of which i believe any modern building company would of course be even slightly interested in doing, because they couldn't claim it was "their technology" with "their patents" on it. muuch better to make buster-bunker style buildings of course :)
yeah i checked out the WebOS source code: there's no phone application, and no infrastructure for supporting phone modems, so you cannot even write a phone app because there's no libraries to call through to the hardware. they're "working on" replacing the bluetooth stack - it's like... huh? they've gone back to square one. the whole point of this eco-system is to bring a *solution* to the table, not *part* of a solution that would take 10 man-years for the free software community to make use of it! that's insane! they broke the rule in the "cathedral & bazaar" of at least releasing a first version that's _vaguely_ useful.
there's a fundamental problem with all these vaccines, which is summed up flippantly as "what doesn't kill ya makes ya stronger". many people - many of them doctors - recognise that letting their kids happily play in the dirt encourages their immune systems to go into overdrive - not just because of the regular influx of dirt but also because of the happiness.
by vaccinating children against various disease - by giving their immune systems an "easy ride" - their immune systems simply do not develop to the same extent that a child would if they had the actual disease and had to fight for their life.
the very first time we fight for our lives - for our right to live - is when we are born. we *literally* fight for breath, when being sqeezed out of our mums. vaccinations ESPECIALLY ones that are enforced on us by governments are removing our right to fight for our lives, and they're bringing up generation after generation of adults that have immune systems that simply haven't been properly developed at an early age.
the long-term effects on entire populations leaves me deeply concerned.
no doubt there will be plenty of people reading this who will be outraged. they will try to tell me "how could you possibly sit there and write or believe such absolute shit? if it was YOUR child, you would not be so cocky" and the answer is "yes i would. i would sit by my daughter's bed-side, nursing her patiently back to health, loving her and being happy with and for her. because happiness and *not* giving in to the 'shit' is exactly what life is all about."
and no, we have *NOT* vaccinated our daughter. the reports on the detrimental effects and case studies on the long-term health of children are out there; they're just not widely published because a) governments don't want to spread the very panic that they created and spread in the first place b) there's too much money to be made from mass-produced vaccines.
in the 1960s there was a "foot & mouth" outbreak in the UK. nobody slaughtered any cows. they just went "oops, i've got a sore on my lip, oh dear i'd better keep away from people and not kiss them", and the herds were isolated and that was the end of it.
fast-forward 40 years and we have mass panic *and* we have mass-vaccinations. with the masses having their immune systems weakened *because* of the mass-vaccinations, is it any surprise that they go into hysterics, spread the news all over the internet in real-time and accelerate and exacerbate the panic?
so this isn't actually about the actual vaccinations at all. it's about people coping with and adjusting to global instant communications.
While I dig the principle behind it, lacking the space/ability to run external cooling, adequate power, or backwards-compatible high speed IO, it seems more like a solution in search of a problem than a truly beneficial design, at least from the consumer perspective.
the EOMA-68 specification includes backwards-compatibility through the three key buses: USB3 (which can do all the way back to USB1.1), SATA-III (which can do all the way down to 150mbit/s if you really get stuck), and Gigabit Ethernet (which can do 10 as well as 100). all of these are through auto-negotiation.
the reason for specifying a 3.5 watt limit is precisely *because* this is a mass-volume standard. in mass-volume products you simply do *not* put in moving parts like fans. the margins are too tight to have things fail and be returned under warranty.
we're taking a bit of a risk by allowing the 8mm version to be up to 10 watts and allowing fans to be included on-board. but, we're not pursuing that right now - just concentrating on the less risky higher-volume version.
think about it, though: with geometries shrinking all the time, in 3-5 years time we'll be laughing about 3.5 watts :)
I do not see any point in coding styles whatsoever.
then you have never worked on a free software collaborative project; you have never submitted patches to free software projects; you have never worked for a large software engineering firm with ISO9001 (Software TickIT) practices in place; in fact you have probably never worked with revision control tools ever in your life.
please allow me to know exactly who you are so that i never, ever employ you or allow you to go anywhere *near* any of the free software projects i am involved in or will be involved in, in the future.
It's so easy to run a code formatter on something now that someone else can read code however they like if it's really important.
running a code formatter and then creating a patch automatically includes your modifications in amongst a bunch of whitespace modifications, by violating the golden rule of submitting single-purpose patches.
even if you were to submit a patch with a massive white-space "code formatting" modification, the existing developers would, quite rightly, tell you to fuck off. if you committed it *without* asking them then they'd be fully justified in complaining and, if you persisted, in getting you fired.
a key in the statement you wrote is "read the code". if your sole job is "reading the code", then you're not really truly involved in the development. i'm assuming that you're a useful contributor: that means you have to submit modifications. forcing *your* coding style - especially when you've clearly and up-front stated that you don't see any point in *any* coding styles - onto everyone else is bound to cause serious problems.
bottom line is: i'm not impressed. fortunately, this conversation allows everyone else to understand *why* coding styles are important.
the censorship by china isn't the big story. let's look at what's going on, recently. we've had huawei blocked from sales of equipment in the U.S. citing "bugs and vulnerabilities"; ZTE just got banned from being supplied with Cisco equipment; very VERY large ISPs responded by cancelling orders and removing Cisco's routers citing "bugs and vulnerabilities" - this is just *some* of the background.
there appears to be an ongoing series of retaliations, and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest bit if there's a dirty tricks unit in e.g. the CIA tasked with coming up with absolute lying-through-their-teeth shit pushed as "news", in order to discredit China's politicians. if that was the case, can you at all blame a country which has access to censorship equipment from using it to cut out such complete rubbish?
yes. for example: roger hayes was arrested, tried and imprisoned in true nazi-style *without* the right to representation or even the right to speak. the "judge" merely spelled out his "crimes" and then passed "sentence". i'm amazed that his case hasn't been taken up by human rights activists and made headline news. http://www.ukcolumn.org/article/roger-hayes-arrested-tried-secret-court-imprisoned
actually, i'm not surprised it hasn't made headline news.
Not all Wikipedia editors are as obtuse as you claim. Let me reiterate the comment I made on the submission: If particular editors are violating Wikipedia's policy against ownership-like behavior by not allowing a consensus to form after discussion of a reverted edit on an article's talk page, consider using the various dispute resolution means in the Wikipedia community.
i did exactly that, tepples. the responses *in the dispute resolution* page were so violent, abusive and dis-trusting, with one editor claiming that i was "deliberately hiding behind an anonymous IP address for the sole purpose of causing maximum damage to wikipedia", were themselves so clearly against wikipedia's policies that i simply went "fuck this" and walked away.
there is a serious problem in wikipedia which is that the culture of encouraging and trusting new contributors is completely breaking down, with the "mature" editors using wikipedia's policies to *bully* those with less knowledge of the "rules", forcing themselves and their views onto newer contributors.
i've also encountered problems, especially with technical articles where the "common wisdom" is terribly misinformed. i won't mention which articles because i was so alarmed and intimidated by the unwelcoming way in which those people who were better informed of wikipedia's "policies" used those policies to bully their way towards reverting everything back towards the ignorant and technically mis-informed perspectives left me feeling very much like i never want to edit wikipedia ever again.
the problem with these particular articles is that they are highly scientifically technical, yet quite obscure at the same time. one of them people wanted to believe that the technology would fail: it is therefore full of a scientific "review" which, wrongly, concludes that the technology could not possibly work. the other, people want to believe that the technology would *succeed*. and, because there *are* no successful examples of that technology, there are no successful products out there which can be used to demonstrate that the wikipedia article is plain wrong and misleading people!
in both cases, the lack of citeable material resulted in an edit war verging on vandalism, and in the end i went "fuck it, i don't need the hassle" and walked away. in neither case were the reviewers welcoming: in one case they actually believed that *i* was the vandal, in direct contravention of wikipedia's "welcoming" policy which is supposed to assume that all contributors are acting with integrity. in fact what had happened was that i had not logged in, so was editing by IP address purely by mistake, and, because of what followed and the level of intimidation and abuse directed at me i am extremely glad that i *did* make that mistake.
wikipedia has a lot to answer for.
IMHO if chromebook wants to sell more than a tablet it must work as a real laptop, and a linux distro is at the moment the only way to have a complete personal computing experience on arm.
this is only really going to happen when ARM SoC vendors get out of the "vertical market" mentality, and stop trying to control everything. this is a really in-depth topic so i'll describe it briefly (yes, briefly - despite appearances)
the problem is that ARM SoCs have typically come from the "embedded" space, as "appliances", where android is now also considered to be an "appliance". what that means is that typically a device is designed by the SoC vendor themselves (a "reference design"), the software is written by the SoC vendor themselves, and the whole package sold, usually as a GPL-violating product, to factories who do NOT have ANY software expertise AT ALL.
these factories receive a set of instructions:
1) make PCB
2) assemble PCB in case
3) insert "boot sd/mmc card" to flash OS onto device
4) pack in box
5) sell box.
the chromebook is absolutely *no* exception to this.
what we're doing with the Rhombus Tech initiative, through the EOMA-68 hardware specification, is drawing a line in the sand, where the CPU is now on a Credit-Card-sized "module" along with the RAM and NAND Flash, but that's only half the story. because the CPU Cards can go into literally *any* EOMA-68-compliant mass-volume device, the CPU *has* to be considered to be "General Purpose". every CPU *has* to be "open" (or, alternatively, the burden is on the proprietary software vendor (e.g. apple or microsoft) or on the GPL-violating vendor to support literally every possible combination of devices that could possibly be out there or imagined).
so we're turning things around: turning SoCs back towards where they ought to be (and are already in the x86 world): general-purpose processors that can run any OS.
We are tracking your IP address: we know where you live: so that you comprehend the consequences of air strikes, would you like to have the "Military Drone Strike" demonstrated at your home address? Please press "Yes" "No" or "Don't know" to have a missile express-delivered to your home within seconds.
Also, maybe the chineese promissing* that the A10 will have an entirely free stack helped a bit on this decision.
* As far as I know, they still didn't deliver it... But just the promisse should be enough to change Broadcom's strategy.
yes, that's the whole point. you play one company off against the other. the first one that *actually* goes and releases full GPL-compliant source code of their 3D GPU for example, i will INSTANTLY be recommending it to our clients. our clients are PRC State-Sponsored companies: one of them has a production capacity of 20 million units a *week*.
regarding the A10: *sigh* yeah i know. they can't actually release the source code of MALI, because that's locked down by ARM playing silly-buggers, including deleting public requests on ARM's forums for them to release the source code, *and* despite loads of ARM employees repeatedly advising ARM that releasing the source code is in ARM's best interests.
so we have to rely on the limadriver project, basically, which is making good progress.
we know that Allwinner made a promise to look at releasing the source code of the CedarX audio/video engine, but again, there, i think there will be more mileage out of reverse-engineering it. a "wrapper" has been written which traps system calls, giving a clear idea of what's going on.
the last part, the DDR3 "setup" phase, has already been reverse-engineered. it was a few hundred lines of assembler, that's all. so, the boot process is at least entirely free software.
' Compared to the actual logic or cache on the cpu the number of transistors that the translation takes is minimal and not a big deal especially when you consider the size of cpus nowadays.
it's not the number of transistors that's actually so important as it is the number of times you have to change them from 1s to 0s and back. i read somewhere, so don't take this as gospel, that the register bank of any CPU takes something like a whopping 30% of a general purpose processor's power budget.
so a memory cache, 1st or 2nd level, would not be so power-hungry as a register bank, because you only change a few bits of any one cache entry at a time. a register bank on a 64-bit architecture, however, on average 64 bits are going to change on any two-operand calculation.
the point is that the instruction "translation", which includes shuffling the data around, has to operate at the "rated" i.e. the external i.e. the x86 clock speed. this *will* consume lots of power - i can't say how much: we need an intel engineer to tell us, and that's not going to happen.
bottom line is that AMD and Intel, with x86 "translation", are onto a losing game. intel only keeps ahead - one step ahead - by having access to geometries 1.5 times smaller than the competition. with ARM processors in 28nm being better, power-wise, than x86 processors in 20nm, and yet still offering "good enough computing" performance, both AMD and Intel are *definitely* going to lose out. AMD already is. Intel's just had a wake-up call: http://bit.ly/Ra0RIH
i've met someone who also had a tumour develop behind his ear - the same one where he was using a phone. over 15 years ago he was a sales executive, on the road a lot, and he had one of those "brick" mobile phones. they had to be powerful because the number of cell towers was less than it is now. again, he was holding the device up to his ear for over 6 hours a day.
the problem was that it took 13 years for the tumour to develop to the point where it became painful enough for him to notice something was wrong. by the time he noticed it, the tumour was one centimetre diameter. he's retired, now, having had surgery.
there's a strange fact that people have missed, here: in France, Category L7e cars (350kg, under 20HP) actually have *less* accidents, and so the insurance is lower. the reason why, i believe, is that these cars are so underpowered and, despite passing crash tests with flying colours they "look" unsafe, that both the drivers themselves and also other road users treat them with much more caution.
if, for example, you have a large vehicle that can do 0-60 in 9 seconds, and you are behind a small vehicle that can do 0-60 in 30, the rate of acceleration is so much what you are not used to that you would immediately realise, just from the look of the other car, that the driver in front of you is not "putting it on": his car *really* can't accelerate any quicker. automatically, you've just adjusted, slowed down, and will now be paying attention.
increased attention means increased awareness. increased awareness means less accidents.
so, far from being "unsafer", these Category L7e "micro-cars", apart from having insane fuel economy (100mpg is not uncommon) actually create a "sea of cautious respect" around them. this could be so much horse-shit speculation, but the insurance statistics speak for themselves.
I use modern computers. At work my computer has 32 GB of memory. At home I have 16 GB of memory. My laptop has 8 GB. I honestly could not care less how much memory Firefox uses because it can't use enough for any of these computers to care
baconbits.... um... my main computer is a 2006 24in imac with a 2ghz dual-core xeon and 2gb of RAM. oh, and debian gnu/linux booting grub2-efi of course. it's *really* struggling with the number of tabs that i keep open (over 50).
but here's the thing: i actually consider myself lucky to have 2gb of RAM. i don't fucking well have enough money to go buying new computers right now and i resent what you're implying by saying "yeah who cares, just get more RAM, what's the big deal??"
you're aware that many ARM systems - many of them 1.5ghz - cannot run more than 1gb of RAM? i'm working on an initiative to reduce power consumption and the price of computing, and you're saying "yeah who cares, just get more RAM, what's the big deal??"
i'm just pointing out that just because *you* happen to have lots of resources, it doesn't mean that everyone else in the world does, ok?
If you have a better plan for long-term control of carbon emissions than cutting our dependency on the internal combustion (and diesel) engine, I'd love to hear it.
yes. i do. the details are here http://lkcl.net/ev and the plan is to create a parallel hybrid 4-seat vehicle weighing only 350kg, with a drag coefficient below 0.15 and using a 2-stroke diesel engine based around the bourke design, producing only about 5kW along-side a 10kW electric motor.
the reason for only 350kg is because it's the E.U Category L7e maximum limit - "Heavy Quadricycle". the reduction in materials gives a two-fold benefit: reduced production cost but also reduced running costs (less friction and less weight to accelerate or overcome gravity).
the 0.15 drag coefficient can be achieved using a special bodywork design that i've come up with, which does *not* compromise passenger safety by requiring them to be squished into an unattractive lethal bullet-shaped vehicle that would fall over sideways at the first corner.
the reason for the parallel hybrid is because it's a lower cost than series hybrid.
the reason for putting in an ultra-efficient diesel engine is because expecting people to get away from fossil fuels in the immediate future is asking for trouble. you need a transition technology that bridges the gap until the infrastructure can handle the replacement.
all of this makes a fuel economy target of 200mpg+ really quite straightforward to achieve. that alone reduces carbon emissions and smog.
if you'd like to support this project please do contact me. i live in hope that people reading this are more than just curious that someone is designing something like this and is prepared to help fund it as well.
yep. User Mode Linux is definitely too complicated to use for any real serious business work, as any slashdotter knows. we should all be using the latest and greatest version of windows with a large coloured tile of applications full-screen, just like a mind-map except regular and safe and already laid out with the paths predefined, so that we don't have to think or use any creativity at all. yes! that's it! we should all get lobotomies, stare at pretty squares and be happy to live in our brainwashed state. no need for User Mode Linux at all.
um... if security is so lax, why aren't all those terrorists out there taking advantage of these security lapses? something doesn't add up here.
Dealing with stall currents is tough on EV design.
most people don't know what stall currents are. several wikifascists took issue with improvements to the "wheel hub motor" wikipedia page, recently, when facts were presented that showed that the efficiency of EV motors is far, far worse at low RPMs than any ICE vehicle ever could be.
for those people not familiar with "stall currents", stall conditions for an electric motor is when it is operating at or just above 0 RPM (i.e. stall). not only is the motor not moving (so there's not enough air circulation), but the electric wire, as an inductor, is capable of absorbing far more current. that just means more heat is produced, and that the efficiency is lower. a typical EV motor can be only 12 to 15% efficient (!!) at its lower RPMs! avoiding this worst-case situation is flat-out impossible with a Direct-Drive (Wheel Hub) motor. for a bicycle that doesn't matter so much (you can always pedal), but for a car it's a serious problem.
this is why VW's XL1 concept car has a *seven* speed automatic gearbox. electric motors have to be kept in their optimal efficiency band, just like an ICE does. it's complicated! much more complicated.
"Put simply, the automobile has not undergone a fundamental change in design or use since Henry Ford rolled out the Model T more than a century ago. At least that’s what I thought until I spent a week with the Tesla Model S."
you've bought the kool-aid by quoting this. the reason why slashdot people don't like pure electric vehicles is because they are more intelligent than the average person and can work out that there's a hard limit on the rare earth metals and on copper; they can do the math, scaling these resources up to mass-production levels in their imagination; they can do some rough back-of-envelope figures on the power consumption required to keep all-electric vehicles on the road in mass-volume numbers and they know that it simply doesn't add up.
i don't even need to bother to look up the stats on the tesla to know that it's environmentally hostile. it'll weight about 1000kg, which is three times more than it needs to weigh. due to its size it will have about the same drag coefficient and wind resistance losses as any other standard vehicle on the road. these two things when combined tell me that it's environmentally hostile. add in the amount of copper, neodymium and lithium that goes into it and you just know that there's something deeply, deeply wrong with that nytimes article. the journalist has bought the kool-aid, and so have you. please stop and think.
there's something very very wrong with converting pre-existing ICE cars to electric. look up the phrase "mass decompounding" for a clue, but in essence it's that a ICE vehicle is designed around carrying one very large heavy object which is typically 15% of the mass of the vehicle: the engine.
the *correct* thing - ecologically - is to design and build a vehicle that's right for the environment, based around the most efficient kind of drivetrain: parallel hybrid. it's possible then to get below 350kg, still carry 4 passengers, and only need about 15kW (20HP) even to reach 65 to 70mph. the problem is that for the average person, designing an entirely new vehicle from scratch is pretty much beyond their time and resources. the problem for manufacturers is, as anyone who has read "The Other side of Innovation" knows, to throw away the entire "efficient business production model" which has been highly optimised to make ICE vehicles and start from scratch - this is virtually impossible for them. (then there is the problem of laws regarding spare parts - but all of this is outlined here http://lkcl.net/ev/hybridcars_article.html)
so we are left with a rather shitty situation in which the only way in which the average person may make themselves "feel better about the environment" is to purchase an above-average amount of one rare earth metal (lithium), purchase an above-average amount of another rare earth metal whose extraction methods are seriously environmentally questionable (neodymium), purchase an excessive amount of a metal which is increasingly becoming in short supply (copper), throw far more of these materials into an excessively-heavy and over-engineered vehicle than should really be necessary, and call this utter waste of resources "progress".
even manufacturers trying to make us "feel better about the environment" by designing parallel hybrids - they're doing so by taking pre-existing 1.5 tonne vehicle designs and shoe-horning in expensive batteries and expensive motors (which adds to the weight and the cost) and everyone wonders why they stop making the vehicles when the government subsidies stop.
all-electric cars are a DEFINITE no - regardless of whether they're made by the average person or made by a manufacturer. we simply don't have enough lithium or other battery material to go round, for everyone in the world to have an all-electric vehicle. we also don't have enough copper or neodymium for everyone in the world to have 1.5 tonne (average weight) vehicles. we also don't have the Grid Infrastructure in cities to cope with the extra power. major cities in 3rd world and emerging markets are *ALREADY* on brown-outs, overload, or 3-day weeks.
the bottom line is that we *have* to get the power usage down, resource usage down (less weight equals less materials), and the best way to do that is with a 10kW electric motor in combination with a 2-stroke 5kW diesel engine as a Parallel Hybrid. the size of each of those two engines can be made absolutely tiny, yet there's enough power to do 70mph (eventually).
and if this all sounds like "talk" - it's not. my vehicle's also listed on evalbum.com. the main web site: http://lkcl.net/ev. i have a 2nd design in the planning phase: it's a 4-seater. given the issues and challenges involved in getting vehicles out there, if you'd *really* like to help the environment, then help me make sure these designs get put into production - please don't spend $14,000 on converting a pre-existing vehicle: consider spending $8,000 on a light-weight vehicle that's designed to be efficient in the first place.
allo woz,
well, it said "ask anything", so anything it is. hi woz: you've seen a lot of changes in computing. i grew up with computers from age 8 at school where we had a commodore pet 3032. my parents bought me a squish-board (zx-spectrum) aged 11. i went to imperial, learned about virtual memory, and refused to buy another computer until the 486 was reasonably affordable. then it all really went to hell in a handbasket for about 15 years, with windows and x86 hardware pretty much dominating absolutely everything, until these mini computers - beagleboard, android hand-helds etc. - came along.
now we've got miniature computers coming out of our ears, but they're mostly GPL violating (http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/8991.html for details) and so the ability of the average person to actually *own* their own hardware - by having full control of it - is practically zero. whereas everyone *thought* that android would bring us cheap, low-cost hardware that could be adapted for any purpose is quickly turning into a nightmare for privacy advocates, with free software developers locked out and unable to help due to the massive burden of reverse-engineering required before even beginning to help out.
i know of one engineer in australia who has a stack of android tablets 12in high. every single one of them is a total waste of money. he wanted to use them as a low-cost engineering platform. can he get the kernel sources and u-boot source code in order to turn them into useful useable hardware that would help his business and help his clients save money? can he f***. this is a *ridiculous* situation.
so that's why i began the rhombus tech project, and defined the EOMA-68 standard: to put free software developers together with china-based factories, so that mass-produced mass-volume hardware would come out being fully GPL-compliant and have a vibrant support community behind every product, the day it hits the shelves. for everyone's benefit. the problem is: it's taking too long to get the project off-the-ground. everyone who truly understands the goals of the project absolutely loves it, but everyone i speak to - from factories to ODMs to free software developers to the potential investors - is "waiting for something to happen". what would you recommend? can you help at all. ... you *did* say "any question" :)