[the original article wonders why intel hasn't broken into the mobile space, successfully]
Intel's flagship CPU design consumes far too much power, and that really is the end of the matter. I really don't understand why people don't understand this.
The entire x86 architecture is optimised for speed and low latency, whereas ARM processors are optimised for low power, trading that low power for higher latency.
The interesting thing is that the latency trade-offs made in ARM (and MIPS) processor designs becomes... very much less relevant as the CPU geometries go down. 28nm means that ARM CPUs can easily run at 2.5ghz, and MIPS CPUs at somewhere around 2ghz. Combine these CPUs with modern 1066 DDR3 RAM i find it difficult to see how Intel and AMD, with their highly speed-optimised - and bloated - CISC architectures can beat the price-performance and performance-per-watt metrics in the all-important "good enough for most people" bracket.
Sure Intel and AMD's offerings will always be "fastest", but do you really need a Six or Eight Core 4ghz CPU costing $1000 to do a few emails, when a $7 750mhz Dual-Core MIPS will do the exact same job?
So right now, we're witnessing a series of "ship-jumping" moves - the blind leading the blind - in desperate bids to stay afloat, where the sensible companies are sticking with Free Software OSes, based around the Linux Kernel, because it's Free Software and the Linux Kernel that can run on absolutely any platform, and Windows simply can't.
Microsoft cut off the DEC Alpha, PowerPC and MIPS platforms, over 15 years ago in order for Windows NT to compete internally with Windows 95; now they're paying the price and they're going to take down with them anyone else who clings to their coat-tails.
duhh! all you have to do is get it out of the premises, then follow disassembly instructions. why not just put "free ippad, here!" on the screens? honestly:)
the majority of Android tablets are GPL violating, making it seriously risky for E.U. and U.S.A. companies to import them. GPL compliance, which is important for the Linux Kernel portion (which everyone forgets about, including google), is running at about 2%, and those are usually the ones designed in the E.U. or the U.S.A, which end up being more expensive and so less attractive.
everyone's forgetting about intel's consumer division Set-Top-Box CPU, which is specifically banned / restricted (by intel themselves) from being sold as a Laptop / Desktop CPU. it's a SoC with an embedded 1ghz Intel Atom Core, combined with PowerVR SGX 3D and 1080p60 HD Video playback, which means that to do HDTV the Intel CPU Core is idling at about 3%. it does NOT use Intel's own GMA Graphics, nor Intel's own MPEG decoder, because they're too crap.
why am i mentioning this CPU? because it only has HDMI 1.4 - absolutely no LVDS, VGA or RGB/TTL out. why is that? it's to *stop* people from bypassing the DRM!
the holywood companies etc. are so paranoid, and so "in control" that even companies like Intel bow to them and create this kind of insane restricted cartel hardware.
i remain deeply unimpressed and i am hoping that the reduced price and the "freedom" afforded by the Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean markets (irony to call the Chinese markets "free" but that's by comparison to what hollywood+intel are up to), results in at least *some* mass-market CPUs being at least open enough to work with.
but, one thing that stops that is the fact that many of these Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean companies have to utilise Linux (because it's not Intel). that means that they are typically ignorant of the GPL; that means that they treat the Free Software Community's hard work and efforts with blatant disregard.
So, for those people reading this who actually want to make a difference: start doing GPL investigations of products and their firmware, get onto the gpl-violations mailing list, help to pressurise these Asian companies to comply, by educating them on their obligations. each person who does that takes up that company's time, to the point where eventually, like Ingenic did and VIA have (finally) and amazingly even Telechips recently, they will get the message and release GPL source code.
It's not just ARM Cortex CPUs: it's the Telechips ARM11 (which is causing headaches for the sheer number of GPL violations Chinese products), but also there are MIPS SoC processors coming out as well - *all* of them use either proprietary NVIDIA, proprietary Vivante, proprietary MALI or proprietary PowerVR.
now, i've spoken to Richard Stallman about this and it may surprise you that he pointed out that these proprietary libraries are actually classed as "System Libraries" under the GPL. so, the proprietary libraries aren't the problem. and, neither are the GPL Linux Kernel drivers because these are typically "shared memory shims" which allow the proprietary userspace libraries to gain access to the memory-mapped 3D hardware's registers.... the problem is the proprietary firmware blob that needs to be "uploaded" to the 3D engine in order for it to BECOME a 3D engine. that's "non-free" and it's a bitch.
the irony is that if these 3D companies opened up their engines, they would be able to benefit massively from the Free Software Community's work on Gallium3D and LLVMpipe.
so the first manufacturer that creates a SoC CPU which has truly "open" 3D graphics is onto a winner: much lower ongoing development costs because of Free Software Community support, for a start.
however, any company that has "true" OpenGL rather than "embedded" OpenGL has a bit of a problem: their engines typically consume an entire IC far bigger than these SoC! but not only that, they're targetted at CMOS which is very, very power-hungry (8 watts minimum is considered to be "low power"!). CMOS, even when the IC is doing nothing, still consumes power, and that's unacceptable in the SoC embedded space, where the entire CPU only requires 1 watt absolute max and that's in 45nm running at 1.2ghz! if you come down to say 400mhz you can get away with around 0.1 watts or less!
the game is changing, significantly, and the "traditional" CPU "leaders" have to realise this (they have to. it's the consumer who isn't aware!). so to illustrate: a MIPS processor, with only 74,000 gates, can easily be put into a quad-core arrangement and then be run at well over 2ghz in 28nm, without any massive design effort. that means you can get over 8ghz of processing power out of a few hundred thousand gates! (contrast that to a few tens of MILLIONs of gates, from an Intel or AMD CPU). and as MIPS RISC CPUs are a far, far simpler design, it costs far less. it's the same story with ARM (but less so - their architecture has got complicated, with the Cortex range as it's based on a Harvard Architecture, now).
so over the next year, you can expect to see 45nm and 28nm MIPS dual-core and quad-core CPUs coming out at under $USD 10, possibly even as little as $5. this makes me laugh when i see AMD being so happy that their latest lowest-cost offering is $75, it really does. and i find it absolutely stunning and bewildering that Intel comes up with prices of $300 for their top-end CPUs.
remember: the chinese government have been working on a *SIXTEEN* core 1ghz MIPS called the Loongsong 3 for a good couple of years, now. 1000 of those cores will result in them taking the number one spot in the Supercomputer race, and the machine will fit into a room, not a warehouse.
the problem is that intel actually haven't been able to write a decent 3D driver, period. it's simply not an area where they have sufficient programming expertise.
so ironically, it falls to the free software community to come up with innovative solutions such as LLVMpipe and Gallium3D to provide the answers.
Gallium3D is a low-level "pipe" API which can be implemented on top of any GPU engine. OpenGL Reference Implementations such as MesaGL can then be put through the c-to-LLVM compiler and you automatically get SIMD and proper parallelism, properly optimised. and if the back-end engine is a Gallium3D-compliant GPU you get even better performance. this was a trick that apple deployed, with great success.
sorry i didn't notice that the question was "what can i do for open source" and the first thing your friend can do is read rms essays on why that should be "free software" (more accurately "software libre" in french). the difference really does matter: anyone - even microsoft - can claim that "access to source code is open" (for $USD 1m, and if you use it in any projects or products, then they will sue the f88* out of you. but it's STILL an "open source" license, because the source code is "open", right?)
There is one area where prosecuting GPL violations is, at present, completely ineffective, and it's across the non-PRC / PRC international barrier. As I understand it, the rules are that it is necessary to either be a Chinese National or have a Chinese Company in order to prosecute Copyright Violation. However, i have heard that there is a Law Firm in Bristol who manage to successfully prosecute Copyright and other violations in China.
It would be extremely useful for someone to help the Software Freedom Law Centre to be able to successfully pursue GPL Copyright Violations against Chinese Factories. Not least is, as Neil mentions, the fact that it would simply be useful to help out AT ALL with the sheer overwhelming number of GPL violations cases. The busybox Copyright holders alone have a list which as of last month was well over 300 separate cases which they have to actively double-check and then pursue.
"it's a shame that no one from Wikileaks could be troubled to consider the potential repercussions of this particular exposure."
NO. WRONG.
it's a shame that no-one criticising wikileaks realises that mugabe is an insane criminal and murderer who will take advantage of *anything*.
it takes wikileaks reporting to expose mugabe by "triggering" him to act out his true (insane) nature, for the world to observe how inappropriate a leader he really is.
the days of living in the shadows are over, and the leaders and dictators of the world, as well as the rest of us, need to wake up and realise this.
i read a sci-fi story once, i forget who it was by, where some space travellers found themselves in a situation where their computer failed. so they taught themselves maths, plotted the stars, learned to do trigonometry in their heads, and over the course of many months, the 30 or so travellers managed to work in parallel to calculate an approximate but accurate enough path to get themselves within range of rescuers.
then, there is another sci-fi story, called "The End of Eternity", which dates back to when the title "Computer" was utilised in exactly the same way as "Professor" is utilised, now. the hero of the story was a human named "Computer Harkan". Computer. "one who computes".
the point of mentioning these two things is very very simple: prior to modern "computers", parallel "Computing" algorithms were commonplace, well known, and heavily relied on. Along came "computers" and - you know what's coming next - exceedingly rapidly, all that incredibly valuable "parallel" expertise was lost, in favour of single-step, single-process algorithms. i believe we're paying for that loss of expertise, somewhat.
pledgemusic.com - this is an alternative business model. kickstarter.com - this is an alternative business starter model.
however for software, the model is radically different. once you're into "self-funding", the next version, once completed, is almost pure profit thanks to the internet. there's no "physical goods" to produce. if it's data, it can be hosted, and it can be distributed for virtually nothing.
so under these circumstances, "pay what you like" actually makes sense.
and, remember also, you can always put advertising onto the "pay" page, which can, in certain circumstances, earn you more than you could for the data-based products being sold! there are plenty of sites which give you 10-step guides on how to do this... but as always, you always need to begin with that niche "good idea" in the first place...
now we can see why google bought on2 and provided (eventually) a royalty-free license for anyone implementing free software versions of the VP8 algorithm.
also we can see why the BBC developed "DIRAC" several years ago by combining the best algorithms they could find from *expired* patents.
so when you have situations where both ends of the (video) conversation can be controlled, there do exist "ways out" that terminate the possibility for patent trolls to get at you. (such as, for example, youtube being controlled by google and eventually transmitting VP8-encoded video and also android and webkit having VP8 receiver CODECs)... it's just that there is still a sticking-point (due to the amounts of money invested) where the "de-facto" standard comes out of an organisation where patents are the norm. so i think this is a good thing, ultimately, for these big players to be smacked about and to lose billions off their profit margins. perhaps they will start to pursue similar strategies that google has with VP8, and the BBC did with DIRAC.
this "tug-of-war" between the "top" companies is why i created pyjamas-desktop, maintaining pyjs (the python-to-javascript compiler) and am giving thought to extending pyjs to output flash actionscript (it's very close to javascript).
pyjamas applications are written in python, and, across _five_ web browser types and now as of last week _six_ different web browser engine types, the applications themselves - python scripts - genuinely do not give a stuff about the underlying technology being used.
this is how *we* "win" - by making whoever "wins" the browser "wars" effectively irrelevant. MSHTML, webkit, xulrunner, it's all the same.
http://pyjs.org/ if you're interested in the concept - perhaps someone will eventually follow in the footsteps here and get RubyJS back up-and-running (it's on rubyforge), and perhaps create a port of GWT to the desktop as well, and maybe, god help us, even a perl version of pyjamas / GWT.
oh thank god for that. i read "no longer allowed to bring pencils or pens" and i misread it as "no longer allowed to bring penises". hum, must be something wrong with me...
these morons have missed the point that enshrined in patent law is the right to create a single copy of an invention, for the purposes of allowing the copyer to "further improve upon the invention".
* the Mafiaa is after file indexing sites, because the index allows people to "break the law"
* now 3D printers are being classified as "law-breaking" tools.
* nobody goes after weapons manufacturers and suppliers to prevent and prohibit weapons manufacturers and suppliers from putting the means to kill people into the hands of "irresponsible" people.
so... let me get this straight: it's okay to kill people but it's not okay to be creative and innovative?
the point has been entirely missed, and blame placed on ASCII [correlation is not causation]. when you look at the early languages - FORTH, LISP, APL, and later even Awk and Perl, you have to remember that these languages were living in an era of vastly less memory. FORTH interpreters fit into 1k with room to spare for goodness sake! these languages tried desperately to save as much space and resources as possible, at the expense of readability.
it's therefore easy to place blame onto ASCII itself.
then you have compiled languages like c, c++, and interpreted ones like Python. these languages happily support unicode - but you look at free software applications written in those languages and they're still by and large kept to under 80 chars in length per line - why is that? it's because the simplest tools are not those moronic IDEs; the simplest programming tools for editing are straightfoward ASCII text editors: vi and (god help us) emacs. so by declaring that "Thou Shalt Use A Unicode Editor For This Language" you've just shot the chances of success of any such language stone dead: no self-respecting systems programmer is going to touch it.
not only that, but you also have the issue of international communication and collaboration. if the editor allows Kanji, Cyrillic, Chinese and Greek, contributors are quite likely to type comments in Kanji, Cyrillic, Chinese and Greek. the end-result is that every single damn programmer who wants to contribute must not only install Kanji, Cyrillic, Chinese and Greek unicode fonts, but also they must be able to read and understand Kanji, Cyrillic, Chinese and Greek. again: you've just destroyed the possibility of collaboration by terminating communication and understanding.
then, also, you have the issue of revision control, diffs and patches. by moving to unicode, git svn bazaar mercury and cvs all have to be updated to understand how to treat unicode files - which they can't (they'll treat it as binary) - in order to identify lines that are added or removed, rather than store the entire file on each revision. bear in mind that you've just doubled (or quadrupled, for UCS-4) the amount of space required to store the revisions in the revision control systems' back-end database, and bear in mind that git repositories such as linux2.6 are 650mb if you're lucky (and webkit 1gb) you have enough of a problem with space for big repositories as it is!
but before that, you have to update the unix diff command and the unix patch command to do likewise. then, you also have to update git-format-patch and the git-am commands to be able to create and mail patches in unicode format (not straight SMTP ASCII). then you also have to stop using standard xterm and standard console for development, and move to a Unicode-capable terminal, but you also have to update the unix commands "more" and "less" to be able to display unicode diffs.
there are good reasons why ASCII - the lowest common denominator - is used in programming languages: the development tools revolve around ASCII, the editors revolve around ASCII, the internationally-recognised language of choice (english) fits into ASCII. and, as said right at the beginning, the only reason why stupid obtuse symbols instead of straightforward words were picked was to cram as much into as little memory as possible. well, to some extent, as you can see with the development tools nightmare described above, it's still necessary to save space, making UNICODE a pretty stupid choice.
lastly it's worth mentioning python's easy readability and its bang-per-buck ratio. by designing the language properly, you can still get vast amounts of work done in a very compact space. unlike, for example java, which doesn't even have multiple inheritance for god's sake, and the usual development paradigm is through an IDE not a text editor. more space is wasted through fundamental limitations in the language and the "de-facto" GUI development environment than through any "blame" attached to ASCII.
read ron paul's book, "End the Fed". it's an incredibly well-written and well-informed book, showing the disastrous economic reality that is the United States. the financially irresponsible decisions made by successive governments is merely stacking up trouble, and the longer it is "delayed" by further irresponsible decisions, the larger the crash will be.
the main problem is that the U.S. dollar is the de-facto international reserve currency. this is why china has had a policy, for the past 18 months at least, of lending to all but the U.S. - and i mean really large amounts of money - but on the condition that the reserve currency is the RMB. and given the stability and growth rate of china's economy, it's a good deal.
several months back, a very frustrated U.S. General said that it would be a good idea to respond with conventional military strikes in response to cyber "warfare". the problem with that, and the problem with using the word "warfare" at all, is that "warfare" falls under the international treaties that make up the geneva convention.
to spell it out: should someone make a physically violent attack on a citizen of another country who did nothing more than accept an open invitation to manipulate infrastructure which should never have been open in the first place, then all citizens of that country have the right - THE RIGHT - to respond with physical violence against ALL the attacking country's citizens, and against ALL assets and territories of the attacking country.
put simply: no matter what the "excuse", if you attack one country's citizens, you have declared war on that country, and they can LEGITIMATELY attack back.
this is the definition of war.
so it is very, very stupid to link the two words "cyber" and "war" in the same sentence.
regarding the espionage issue and the infrastructure issue: it's very very simple. the best way to protect assets is not to connect them to the outside world! sometimes i have difficulty understanding why this is not understood. it's very simple: pull out the plug! to fail to take this simple precaution is to INVITE attack, and the consequences have to be accepted!
but yes: the "ownership" issue is very telling. america and europe's reliance on cheap chinese products basically places them entirely into china's debt. they really aren't kidding when they say "we own you" - why do you think the U.S. is devaluing its currency so rapidly! they're playing exactly the same trick that Hitler's government played on its war reparations of the first world war.... we live in interesting times, boys and girls...
i prefer durex featherlite (non-latex) oh wait, not that size? right, right _keyboards_, riiight. hey, do you mean the microsoft ergonomic one with the full-sized up/down/left/right arrows? those are brilliant, i got 2 of them because i actually wear keyboards out within 2 years. if you can find a MS keyboard (with full-sized arrow keys) GET IT because they're gorgeous. avoid the ones with the 3/4-sized arrow keys like the plague. see? smaller _isn't_ better. okay, now i'm really confused. what are we talking about, here, again?
10 years ago i got the people at work to pay for a swivel chair and a split keyboard that was mounted on the arm-rests. it was well fucking cool. despite being a touch-typist for 15 years at that point i still found it took me 2 weeks to get used to typing on a keyboard that was out of sight: i learned quickly that even peripheral vision was getting me to move my hands to the right places. the funniest bit was the space-bar: there were two of them. but, i wasn't _quite_ the touch-typist i thought i was. so i would be tappity-tappity-BAMouch gently switch to using right thumb to press the space-bar instead of hitting unyielding plastic with the left...... but by far and above the coolest thing was peoples' faces when they came into my cubicle. a 17-in monitor running 7 linux consoles at 80x50 (consolechars -f default8x9), with me sitting 6ft back because i had my feet up on the desk, typing at 170wpm on this weird fucking keyboard - the combination of apparent insolence, laid-back attitude with obvious signs of non-stop frenzied activity at distances that made their eyes water trying to discern what the fuck i was doing just... yeah - i enjoyed working there:)
Slashdot Mirror
[the original article wonders why intel hasn't broken into the mobile space, successfully]
Intel's flagship CPU design consumes far too much power, and that really is the end of the matter. I really don't understand why people don't understand this.
The entire x86 architecture is optimised for speed and low latency, whereas ARM processors are optimised for low power, trading that low power for higher latency.
The interesting thing is that the latency trade-offs made in ARM (and MIPS) processor designs becomes... very much less relevant as the CPU geometries go down. 28nm means that ARM CPUs can easily run at 2.5ghz, and MIPS CPUs at somewhere around 2ghz. Combine these CPUs with modern 1066 DDR3 RAM i find it difficult to see how Intel and AMD, with their highly speed-optimised - and bloated - CISC architectures can beat the price-performance and performance-per-watt metrics in the all-important "good enough for most people" bracket.
Sure Intel and AMD's offerings will always be "fastest", but do you really need a Six or Eight Core 4ghz CPU costing $1000 to do a few emails, when a $7 750mhz Dual-Core MIPS will do the exact same job?
So right now, we're witnessing a series of "ship-jumping" moves - the blind leading the blind - in desperate bids to stay afloat, where the sensible companies are sticking with Free Software OSes, based around the Linux Kernel, because it's Free Software and the Linux Kernel that can run on absolutely any platform, and Windows simply can't.
Microsoft cut off the DEC Alpha, PowerPC and MIPS platforms, over 15 years ago in order for Windows NT to compete internally with Windows 95; now they're paying the price and they're going to take down with them anyone else who clings to their coat-tails.
duhh! all you have to do is get it out of the premises, then follow disassembly instructions. why not just put "free ippad, here!" on the screens? honestly :)
all but GaiaManager can be found here:
http://gitorious.org/ps3free
there's also a story:
http://www.ps3-hacks.com/2011/01/29/dmcaed-ps3-git-repositories-cloned/
but the site is a bit... busy right now.
the majority of Android tablets are GPL violating, making it seriously risky for E.U. and U.S.A. companies to import them. GPL compliance, which is important for the Linux Kernel portion (which everyone forgets about, including google), is running at about 2%, and those are usually the ones designed in the E.U. or the U.S.A, which end up being more expensive and so less attractive.
everyone's forgetting about intel's consumer division Set-Top-Box CPU, which is specifically banned / restricted (by intel themselves) from being sold as a Laptop / Desktop CPU. it's a SoC with an embedded 1ghz Intel Atom Core, combined with PowerVR SGX 3D and 1080p60 HD Video playback, which means that to do HDTV the Intel CPU Core is idling at about 3%. it does NOT use Intel's own GMA Graphics, nor Intel's own MPEG decoder, because they're too crap.
why am i mentioning this CPU? because it only has HDMI 1.4 - absolutely no LVDS, VGA or RGB/TTL out. why is that? it's to *stop* people from bypassing the DRM!
the holywood companies etc. are so paranoid, and so "in control" that even companies like Intel bow to them and create this kind of insane restricted cartel hardware.
i remain deeply unimpressed and i am hoping that the reduced price and the "freedom" afforded by the Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean markets (irony to call the Chinese markets "free" but that's by comparison to what hollywood+intel are up to), results in at least *some* mass-market CPUs being at least open enough to work with.
but, one thing that stops that is the fact that many of these Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean companies have to utilise Linux (because it's not Intel). that means that they are typically ignorant of the GPL; that means that they treat the Free Software Community's hard work and efforts with blatant disregard.
So, for those people reading this who actually want to make a difference: start doing GPL investigations of products and their firmware, get onto the gpl-violations mailing list, help to pressurise these Asian companies to comply, by educating them on their obligations. each person who does that takes up that company's time, to the point where eventually, like Ingenic did and VIA have (finally) and amazingly even Telechips recently, they will get the message and release GPL source code.
It's not just ARM Cortex CPUs: it's the Telechips ARM11 (which is causing headaches for the sheer number of GPL violations Chinese products), but also there are MIPS SoC processors coming out as well - *all* of them use either proprietary NVIDIA, proprietary Vivante, proprietary MALI or proprietary PowerVR.
now, i've spoken to Richard Stallman about this and it may surprise you that he pointed out that these proprietary libraries are actually classed as "System Libraries" under the GPL. so, the proprietary libraries aren't the problem. and, neither are the GPL Linux Kernel drivers because these are typically "shared memory shims" which allow the proprietary userspace libraries to gain access to the memory-mapped 3D hardware's registers. ... the problem is the proprietary firmware blob that needs to be "uploaded" to the 3D engine in order for it to BECOME a 3D engine. that's "non-free" and it's a bitch.
the irony is that if these 3D companies opened up their engines, they would be able to benefit massively from the Free Software Community's work on Gallium3D and LLVMpipe.
so the first manufacturer that creates a SoC CPU which has truly "open" 3D graphics is onto a winner: much lower ongoing development costs because of Free Software Community support, for a start.
however, any company that has "true" OpenGL rather than "embedded" OpenGL has a bit of a problem: their engines typically consume an entire IC far bigger than these SoC! but not only that, they're targetted at CMOS which is very, very power-hungry (8 watts minimum is considered to be "low power"!). CMOS, even when the IC is doing nothing, still consumes power, and that's unacceptable in the SoC embedded space, where the entire CPU only requires 1 watt absolute max and that's in 45nm running at 1.2ghz! if you come down to say 400mhz you can get away with around 0.1 watts or less!
the game is changing, significantly, and the "traditional" CPU "leaders" have to realise this (they have to. it's the consumer who isn't aware!). so to illustrate: a MIPS processor, with only 74,000 gates, can easily be put into a quad-core arrangement and then be run at well over 2ghz in 28nm, without any massive design effort. that means you can get over 8ghz of processing power out of a few hundred thousand gates! (contrast that to a few tens of MILLIONs of gates, from an Intel or AMD CPU). and as MIPS RISC CPUs are a far, far simpler design, it costs far less. it's the same story with ARM (but less so - their architecture has got complicated, with the Cortex range as it's based on a Harvard Architecture, now).
so over the next year, you can expect to see 45nm and 28nm MIPS dual-core and quad-core CPUs coming out at under $USD 10, possibly even as little as $5. this makes me laugh when i see AMD being so happy that their latest lowest-cost offering is $75, it really does. and i find it absolutely stunning and bewildering that Intel comes up with prices of $300 for their top-end CPUs.
remember: the chinese government have been working on a *SIXTEEN* core 1ghz MIPS called the Loongsong 3 for a good couple of years, now. 1000 of those cores will result in them taking the number one spot in the Supercomputer race, and the machine will fit into a room, not a warehouse.
the world's changing very very fast.
the problem is that intel actually haven't been able to write a decent 3D driver, period. it's simply not an area where they have sufficient programming expertise.
so ironically, it falls to the free software community to come up with innovative solutions such as LLVMpipe and Gallium3D to provide the answers.
Gallium3D is a low-level "pipe" API which can be implemented on top of any GPU engine. OpenGL Reference Implementations such as MesaGL can then be put through the c-to-LLVM compiler and you automatically get SIMD and proper parallelism, properly optimised. and if the back-end engine is a Gallium3D-compliant GPU you get even better performance. this was a trick that apple deployed, with great success.
sorry i didn't notice that the question was "what can i do for open source" and the first thing your friend can do is read rms essays on why that should be "free software" (more accurately "software libre" in french). the difference really does matter: anyone - even microsoft - can claim that "access to source code is open" (for $USD 1m, and if you use it in any projects or products, then they will sue the f88* out of you. but it's STILL an "open source" license, because the source code is "open", right?)
There is one area where prosecuting GPL violations is, at present, completely ineffective, and it's across the non-PRC / PRC international barrier. As I understand it, the rules are that it is necessary to either be a Chinese National or have a Chinese Company in order to prosecute Copyright Violation. However, i have heard that there is a Law Firm in Bristol who manage to successfully prosecute Copyright and other violations in China.
It would be extremely useful for someone to help the Software Freedom Law Centre to be able to successfully pursue GPL Copyright Violations against Chinese Factories. Not least is, as Neil mentions, the fact that it would simply be useful to help out AT ALL with the sheer overwhelming number of GPL violations cases. The busybox Copyright holders alone have a list which as of last month was well over 300 separate cases which they have to actively double-check and then pursue.
"it's a shame that no one from Wikileaks could be troubled to consider the potential repercussions of this particular exposure."
NO. WRONG.
it's a shame that no-one criticising wikileaks realises that mugabe is an insane criminal and murderer who will take advantage of *anything*.
it takes wikileaks reporting to expose mugabe by "triggering" him to act out his true (insane) nature, for the world to observe how inappropriate a leader he really is.
the days of living in the shadows are over, and the leaders and dictators of the world, as well as the rest of us, need to wake up and realise this.
oo - please post your ~/.fvwmrc online somewhere! *excited*. i run fvwm too, i run fvwm too!
i read a sci-fi story once, i forget who it was by, where some space travellers found themselves in a situation where their computer failed. so they taught themselves maths, plotted the stars, learned to do trigonometry in their heads, and over the course of many months, the 30 or so travellers managed to work in parallel to calculate an approximate but accurate enough path to get themselves within range of rescuers.
then, there is another sci-fi story, called "The End of Eternity", which dates back to when the title "Computer" was utilised in exactly the same way as "Professor" is utilised, now. the hero of the story was a human named "Computer Harkan". Computer. "one who computes".
the point of mentioning these two things is very very simple: prior to modern "computers", parallel "Computing" algorithms were commonplace, well known, and heavily relied on. Along came "computers" and - you know what's coming next - exceedingly rapidly, all that incredibly valuable "parallel" expertise was lost, in favour of single-step, single-process algorithms. i believe we're paying for that loss of expertise, somewhat.
pledgemusic.com - this is an alternative business model. kickstarter.com - this is an alternative business starter model.
however for software, the model is radically different. once you're into "self-funding", the next version, once completed, is almost pure profit thanks to the internet. there's no "physical goods" to produce. if it's data, it can be hosted, and it can be distributed for virtually nothing.
so under these circumstances, "pay what you like" actually makes sense.
and, remember also, you can always put advertising onto the "pay" page, which can, in certain circumstances, earn you more than you could for the data-based products being sold! there are plenty of sites which give you 10-step guides on how to do this... but as always, you always need to begin with that niche "good idea" in the first place...
now we can see why google bought on2 and provided (eventually) a royalty-free license for anyone implementing free software versions of the VP8 algorithm.
also we can see why the BBC developed "DIRAC" several years ago by combining the best algorithms they could find from *expired* patents.
so when you have situations where both ends of the (video) conversation can be controlled, there do exist "ways out" that terminate the possibility for patent trolls to get at you. (such as, for example, youtube being controlled by google and eventually transmitting VP8-encoded video and also android and webkit having VP8 receiver CODECs) ... it's just that there is still a sticking-point (due to the amounts of money invested) where the "de-facto" standard comes out of an organisation where patents are the norm. so i think this is a good thing, ultimately, for these big players to be smacked about and to lose billions off their profit margins. perhaps they will start to pursue similar strategies that google has with VP8, and the BBC did with DIRAC.
this "tug-of-war" between the "top" companies is why i created pyjamas-desktop, maintaining pyjs (the python-to-javascript compiler) and am giving thought to extending pyjs to output flash actionscript (it's very close to javascript).
pyjamas applications are written in python, and, across _five_ web browser types and now as of last week _six_ different web browser engine types, the applications themselves - python scripts - genuinely do not give a stuff about the underlying technology being used.
this is how *we* "win" - by making whoever "wins" the browser "wars" effectively irrelevant. MSHTML, webkit, xulrunner, it's all the same.
http://pyjs.org/ if you're interested in the concept - perhaps someone will eventually follow in the footsteps here and get RubyJS back up-and-running (it's on rubyforge), and perhaps create a port of GWT to the desktop as well, and maybe, god help us, even a perl version of pyjamas / GWT.
Domain Name: TORRENT-FINDER.COM
Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.
Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com/
Name Server: NS1.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM
Name Server: NS2.SEIZEDSERVERS.COM
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientRenewProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: serverDeleteProhibited
Status: serverTransferProhibited
Status: serverUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 24-nov-2010
Creation Date: 30-dec-2005
Expiration Date: 30-dec-2011
oh thank god for that. i read "no longer allowed to bring pencils or pens" and i misread it as "no longer allowed to bring penises". hum, must be something wrong with me...
these morons have missed the point that enshrined in patent law is the right to create a single copy of an invention, for the purposes of allowing the copyer to "further improve upon the invention".
has anyone noticed that:
* the Mafiaa is after file indexing sites, because the index allows people to "break the law"
* now 3D printers are being classified as "law-breaking" tools.
* nobody goes after weapons manufacturers and suppliers to prevent and prohibit weapons manufacturers and suppliers from putting the means to kill people into the hands of "irresponsible" people.
so... let me get this straight: it's okay to kill people but it's not okay to be creative and innovative?
the point has been entirely missed, and blame placed on ASCII [correlation is not causation]. when you look at the early languages - FORTH, LISP, APL, and later even Awk and Perl, you have to remember that these languages were living in an era of vastly less memory. FORTH interpreters fit into 1k with room to spare for goodness sake! these languages tried desperately to save as much space and resources as possible, at the expense of readability.
it's therefore easy to place blame onto ASCII itself.
then you have compiled languages like c, c++, and interpreted ones like Python. these languages happily support unicode - but you look at free software applications written in those languages and they're still by and large kept to under 80 chars in length per line - why is that? it's because the simplest tools are not those moronic IDEs; the simplest programming tools for editing are straightfoward ASCII text editors: vi and (god help us) emacs. so by declaring that "Thou Shalt Use A Unicode Editor For This Language" you've just shot the chances of success of any such language stone dead: no self-respecting systems programmer is going to touch it.
not only that, but you also have the issue of international communication and collaboration. if the editor allows Kanji, Cyrillic, Chinese and Greek, contributors are quite likely to type comments in Kanji, Cyrillic, Chinese and Greek. the end-result is that every single damn programmer who wants to contribute must not only install Kanji, Cyrillic, Chinese and Greek unicode fonts, but also they must be able to read and understand Kanji, Cyrillic, Chinese and Greek. again: you've just destroyed the possibility of collaboration by terminating communication and understanding.
then, also, you have the issue of revision control, diffs and patches. by moving to unicode, git svn bazaar mercury and cvs all have to be updated to understand how to treat unicode files - which they can't (they'll treat it as binary) - in order to identify lines that are added or removed, rather than store the entire file on each revision. bear in mind that you've just doubled (or quadrupled, for UCS-4) the amount of space required to store the revisions in the revision control systems' back-end database, and bear in mind that git repositories such as linux2.6 are 650mb if you're lucky (and webkit 1gb) you have enough of a problem with space for big repositories as it is!
but before that, you have to update the unix diff command and the unix patch command to do likewise. then, you also have to update git-format-patch and the git-am commands to be able to create and mail patches in unicode format (not straight SMTP ASCII). then you also have to stop using standard xterm and standard console for development, and move to a Unicode-capable terminal, but you also have to update the unix commands "more" and "less" to be able to display unicode diffs.
there are good reasons why ASCII - the lowest common denominator - is used in programming languages: the development tools revolve around ASCII, the editors revolve around ASCII, the internationally-recognised language of choice (english) fits into ASCII. and, as said right at the beginning, the only reason why stupid obtuse symbols instead of straightforward words were picked was to cram as much into as little memory as possible. well, to some extent, as you can see with the development tools nightmare described above, it's still necessary to save space, making UNICODE a pretty stupid choice.
lastly it's worth mentioning python's easy readability and its bang-per-buck ratio. by designing the language properly, you can still get vast amounts of work done in a very compact space. unlike, for example java, which doesn't even have multiple inheritance for god's sake, and the usual development paradigm is through an IDE not a text editor. more space is wasted through fundamental limitations in the language and the "de-facto" GUI development environment than through any "blame" attached to ASCII.
read ron paul's book, "End the Fed". it's an incredibly well-written and well-informed book, showing the disastrous economic reality that is the United States. the financially irresponsible decisions made by successive governments is merely stacking up trouble, and the longer it is "delayed" by further irresponsible decisions, the larger the crash will be.
the main problem is that the U.S. dollar is the de-facto international reserve currency. this is why china has had a policy, for the past 18 months at least, of lending to all but the U.S. - and i mean really large amounts of money - but on the condition that the reserve currency is the RMB. and given the stability and growth rate of china's economy, it's a good deal.
clearly, it does not fit with your belief structure: it is beyond your ability to cope, so you dismiss it.
ironically it's worth pointing out that the story is probably beyond the journalist's ability to cope as well, resulting in much garblement.
but - yeah. please read between the lines, and try not be quite so dismissive. there's more going on here than meets the eye.
several months back, a very frustrated U.S. General said that it would be a good idea to respond with conventional military strikes in response to cyber "warfare". the problem with that, and the problem with using the word "warfare" at all, is that "warfare" falls under the international treaties that make up the geneva convention.
to spell it out: should someone make a physically violent attack on a citizen of another country who did nothing more than accept an open invitation to manipulate infrastructure which should never have been open in the first place, then all citizens of that country have the right - THE RIGHT - to respond with physical violence against ALL the attacking country's citizens, and against ALL assets and territories of the attacking country.
put simply: no matter what the "excuse", if you attack one country's citizens, you have declared war on that country, and they can LEGITIMATELY attack back.
this is the definition of war.
so it is very, very stupid to link the two words "cyber" and "war" in the same sentence.
regarding the espionage issue and the infrastructure issue: it's very very simple. the best way to protect assets is not to connect them to the outside world! sometimes i have difficulty understanding why this is not understood. it's very simple: pull out the plug! to fail to take this simple precaution is to INVITE attack, and the consequences have to be accepted!
but yes: the "ownership" issue is very telling. america and europe's reliance on cheap chinese products basically places them entirely into china's debt. they really aren't kidding when they say "we own you" - why do you think the U.S. is devaluing its currency so rapidly! they're playing exactly the same trick that Hitler's government played on its war reparations of the first world war. ... we live in interesting times, boys and girls...
i prefer durex featherlite (non-latex) oh wait, not that size? right, right _keyboards_, riiight. hey, do you mean the microsoft ergonomic one with the full-sized up/down/left/right arrows? those are brilliant, i got 2 of them because i actually wear keyboards out within 2 years. if you can find a MS keyboard (with full-sized arrow keys) GET IT because they're gorgeous. avoid the ones with the 3/4-sized arrow keys like the plague. see? smaller _isn't_ better. okay, now i'm really confused. what are we talking about, here, again?
10 years ago i got the people at work to pay for a swivel chair and a split keyboard that was mounted on the arm-rests. it was well fucking cool. despite being a touch-typist for 15 years at that point i still found it took me 2 weeks to get used to typing on a keyboard that was out of sight: i learned quickly that even peripheral vision was getting me to move my hands to the right places. the funniest bit was the space-bar: there were two of them. but, i wasn't _quite_ the touch-typist i thought i was. so i would be tappity-tappity-BAMouch gently switch to using right thumb to press the space-bar instead of hitting unyielding plastic with the left... ... but by far and above the coolest thing was peoples' faces when they came into my cubicle. a 17-in monitor running 7 linux consoles at 80x50 (consolechars -f default8x9), with me sitting 6ft back because i had my feet up on the desk, typing at 170wpm on this weird fucking keyboard - the combination of apparent insolence, laid-back attitude with obvious signs of non-stop frenzied activity at distances that made their eyes water trying to discern what the fuck i was doing just... yeah - i enjoyed working there :)