The OLPC is not designed for that. Passing on our cast-offs to someone who can use them is one thing, and it's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself (unless it ends up overloading the electricity / telecoms infrastructure or mucking up established working practices) but OLPC aims to be something radically different.
The ultimate aim is for some future revision of the OLPC design to be manufactured in the third world for use in the third world, thus breaking their dependency on the West. In order for this to be realised, every aspect of the design has to be as open as possible. That in and of itself does not absolutely preclude Windows -- all it would take would be for Microsoft to release the Source Code and allow independent distribution. (Not that they're going to, because it goes totally against their business model; but you have to understand that it's their choice. Microsoft won't, not can't.)
Third world countries don't need Windows; be it Vista, XP, or 98. Not even 3.1. They need their own alternative which doesn't involve taking money -- any amount, however small -- out of their economies to make multi-billionaires even richer. If there was no such thing as Open Source, they'd actually be better off with pencils and paper. But there is, and that -- coupled with the availability of computers -- will create jobs for local programmers. Local programmers buy goods in local shops, pay local taxes, eat in local restaurants, donate to local good causes and take their families to visit local tourist attractions: the money that you pay them stays in the local economy. And soon, of course, with the design being open, there will be local computer factories making even more Mk. III and IV OLPCs.
There's a tired old cliché about teaching a man to fish vs. giving a man a fish. Well, it's not enough to teach a man to fish if you're just going to force him to use your own expensive, proprietary bait.
Solar energy does not necessarily mean photovoltaic panels! You can build a solar water heater which uses the sun's rays to heat water. You probably need a pump to circulate the water (it's usual to mount the collector on the roof where it will be above the water storage tank, so no convection circulation), but that is using only at most a few tens of watts compared to the kilowatts available as heat. Nothing to stop you powering the pump by PV, though, since it is only ever going to be needed when the sun is shining. Better to use a displacement pump than a centrifugal pump, since the former includes non-return valves (preventing reverse convection circulation from cooling the tank at night) and is more tolerant of voltage fluctuations (centrifugal pumps do nothing at all below some critical RPM). You can power a Sterling engine from the sun, if you have some way to dispose of the heat. It is even possible to produce steam from a solar boiler.
I think you mean a hundred 20 watt bulbs. I checked all the light bulbs in my house, and the biggest I can find are two 36-watt tubes in the attic. Most are 18 or 20 watts, with a few 11 or 12 watt ones in table lamps.
No, that's what you think you want, because that's what you're used to from Windows and you haven't yet felt the benefits of having binaries compiled by someone other than the author of the package. What you really want is a massive repository with every piece of software ever written in it, and a decent package management system (i.e., anything but RPM). Try Debian or Gentoo. Note that the latter compiles everything from source by default, yet isn't really any the worse for it (compiling most things takes longer than downloading).
Note that even the mighty Debian isn't perfect, because it still has separate "developers'" packages -- they're just called foo-dev as opposed to foo-devel. One day, I'll hack apt to make it automagically fetch a corresponding -dev package if there is one -- unless somebody beats me to it.
How about us who don't want to recompile everything whenever a new kernel release comes out? It is a freaking pain in the butt.
No it isn't. That's a filthy lie made up by people who want to sell you pre-compiled binaries and stop you mucking about with the Source Code, and nobody who can spell 'make clean && make install' believes it. (Or you could use Gentoo, which automates the recompilation; or a distribution using pre-compiled.rpm or.deb binary packages, which will have been recompiled for you by the distro's own team.)
Anyway, not everything will change at one time. You only need to recompile such applications and libraries as actually break.
"Theft", you say. Theft is unlawfully taking something that belongs to another person, with intent permanently to deprive them of it {so it's generally a defence to theft that you believed the former owner intended to destroy the article, since you can argue that you intended only temporarily to deprive them of it [for however long it would have taken them to destroy it]; though if the article derives value from the manner of its destruction [for example, a cream cake that they intended to destroy by eating it] then this defence may not work}.
Please explain what exactly it is that Apple no longer have, that they used to have before your alleged "theft" occurred?
Also, versioning file systems existed back in the days of the PDP-11.
This is one of the things I missed when I moved from VMS on a VAX 11/750 {or it might have been a 780?} to MS-DOS on a '286. The commands were kind of similar between the two OSes, though DOS didn't have EVE -- which for me was the killer app. Version numbers, EVE, case-insensitivity and commands that were not "telegraphese" {there not being such a word as "txtspk" in those days when mobile phones were analogue, half-duplex [you squoze a switch in the handset when you wanted to speak, and let go to listen to what the other person was saying] devices operating on VHF and where you had to know roughly where the receiver was, as each transmitter mast had its own STD code} were among the reasons why I preferred VMS to Unix.
Great days. Of course, Unix won in the end..... it does that because after using it for awhile, the things you hated it for at first stop bothering you, and eventually start making sense. Maybe it's got cat powers!
The Linux kernel will never, ever have a stable ABI. Compatibility across versions is guaranteed only at the Source Code level, not the binary level. This is 100% intentional, and the only people it really hurts are those who would deny us access to the Source Code. And they deserve it.
I have an engineering degree, which is about as close as you can get to being a physicist without actually being a physicist, and you are exactly correct.
Engaging the dynamo on a bicycle makes pedalling harder. A bulb failing makes it easier.
The end result will be to increase the fuel consumption of cars using the stretch of road. It's absolutely not free energy -- it's paid for by the motorist.
Don't know what fuel costs in the states but here in the UK, we are already paying the equivalent of over US$2 for unleaded.
The PIR sensors do detect body heat. However, they only respond to changes in the background level. Usually that means warm objects moving, but it can also mean stationary objects changing temperature suddenly.
They generally work by using an array of Fresnel lenses to focus IR onto two opto-sensors, which form the bottom half of a Wheatstone bridge {the top half is two simple fixed resistances}. The voltage output from the bridge will normally be stable. However, if the infrared image changes, one or the other sensor will start receiving a different amount of light. Its resistance will change, and so will the output from the bridge. The output is fed into a differentiator and compared against a threshhold so as to guard against false triggering by thermostatically-controlled heaters &c.
You can knock up a quick-and-dirty motion sensor using two ORP12s and an array of magnifying glasses; use a mechanical AVO and watch the needle kick if something moves. (The "real" ones have the opto-sensors and the necessary op-amps on the same silicon substrate, in an IR-transparent envelope.)
The problem with this is that doors which are designated as "emergency exits" and fitted with "dead man's bar" latches are usually not industrially-rated. The door companies know that they aren't going to be used that often, and so use cheaper materials and components (even residential doors are heavier-duty than emergency doors). Management get to save a few bob and impose another stupid rule (emergency exits are not to be used except in an emergency). Everyone's a winner!
I know this because in the factory where I used to work, one of the buildings had an emergency exit which, for many workers, was much more convenient than the main doors. This door actually broke from over-use and the firm refused to replace it, saying we had invalidated the guarantee by opening it too often!
The BBC produce some of the world's finest television content, and this is mostly due to the way they are funded. If the BBC relied on advertising sponsorship, programmes would end up being made to suit the advertisers. If the BBC relied on general taxation, programmes would end up being made to suit the government.
The BBC is in the pockets of nobody but viewers. If that changes, the quality of programmes WILL worsen. Look to the communist system (where factories are run for the benefit of lazy workers) and the capitalist system (where factories are run for the benefit of rich shareholders) for examples of how things can go wrong when production is tailored to anyone other than the poor sod who has to spend their hard-earned on your products.
What I want to know about the digital switchover is why, given that every TV receiver will have to be replaced, did they not at the same time mandate that every receiver must be capable of accepting a smartcard for decoding? Then there would be no more need for TV detector vans and bully-boy tactics of the licence enforcement people (often used indiscriminately against non-TV-owners). If you haven't bought a viewing card, you can't watch TV. Simple as that. It would mean that the licence would be payable per receiver, not per address as it is at present, but there are ways of dealing with that especially if viewing cards are not tied to specific receivers (just like the old analogue Sky viewing cards; any card used to work in any machine, it was only the move to digital when they put the dog in that manger). People living alone but with two sets would need only one card (or maybe one for the TV and one for whatever takes the place of the VCR), which could be inserted into whichever one they were watching at the time. It would open up whole new business opportunities, e.g. "limited hours" viewing cards for people who don't watch enough TV to justify the full licence fee, or other situations (holiday homes would have TV sets but no card; short-duration cards would be available from the camp shop, if you forgot to bring yours with you from home).
My suspicion is that they just enjoy intimidating people for the hell of it, and mechanical enforcement would take all the fun out of it.
Absolutely. Best thing about Sky Plus is this: Change channels on time for the start of the programme you want to watch, then go off and do something else for 10 minutes or thereabouts. Return to TV. Rewind to beginning of programme. (Now you are 10 minutes behind the live broadcast; more if you pause or rewind it.) Fast-forward through adverts.
Worst thing about it is the time display, which by default -- and I haven't found out where to change it -- is AM/PM, not VCR-style. This frankly does my head in.
And that's only the case because the boot process has to be started under control of the BIOS. If the hardware already knew how to read an LVM disk, there'd be no such limitation. As it stands, a PC BIOS only just about knows how to read a given numbered sector from a disk. This is a great step backward from even the 8-bit home computers, many of which had ROM-based OSs far more capable than a PC's BIOS.
AIX is a unix implementation, just like Linux. In theory, the one is a drop-in replacement for the other. (As we know, in practice, theory and practice are not the same.) The differences are in the details; Linux seems to run on anything with a mains lead, whereas AIX is tightly bound to IBM hardware.
Really, this is a non-story; just like saying that instead of buying their bread from Warburtons they are going to start buying it from Kingsmill, or saying that they are going to buy circuit breakers from MK instead of Volex. It's a nice promotional piece for IBM, no doubt, but that's about all it is. A standardised product originally sourced from one manufacturer is going to be sourced from a different manufacturer instead.
Now, if they were moving over to Windows or something, then we could worry. As things stand, the worst they will have to do is recompile some of their applications. And they retain the option to revert back at any stage in future.
The 6510 is to all intents and purposes a 6502, but with a different pin assignment and some onboard I/O ports. In the C64, these are used for bank switching so as to be able to address more than 64KB of memory.
The Spectrum didn't have hardware sprites -- it had only a 256x192 monochrome bitmapped display, with colour added (almost as an afterthought) on a charcell-by-charcell basis -- two colours, plus two extended attributes, per charcell. Whilst this kept the memory demand down, it also made for "interesting" effects when objects entered the same charcell.
The Spectrum's display was generated almost entirely by the ULA; in contrast to the ZX81's display which was generated entirely by the CPU. This allowed the machine to run at the ZX81's FAST speed, whilst maintaining a display as in SLOW mode. Scanlines were not arranged in the "expected" order (effectively, bits 0-2 of the scanline number were swapped with bits 3-5).
Due to the way the Spectrum reads the colour attributes once per scan line, it's actually possible to get a distinct pair of colours within each row of a charcell; though only part of the width of the screen can then be used, since the palette-switching operation itself takes time.
You can run a nuclear power station with purely mechanical control systems, if you so desire. You just need to turn on the coolant pump when the temperature rises above a certain minimum point, and ram neutron-absorbing material into the core if the temperature rises above a second, higher fixed point. On some level, a nuclear reactor is equivalent to a fuel-burning stove with a back boiler. Just a very big one, which if it goes wrong will spew out very hot coals over a very large area, is all.
Because NOBODY could POSSIBLY work out for themselves, from first principles, how to set off a nuclear chain reaction, could they? It's no secret that a nucleus contains protons (positively-charged) and neutrons (uncharged), only holds together because the attraction between particles happens to match exactly the repulsion between similarly-charged particles, and this delicate balance wight well be upset by firing some sort of particle into that lot with sufficient KE.....
No, these back'ard a-rabs will never figger that shee-yit out fer theyselves!
Once again we have a situation where several pieces of closed-source software from several vendors act in concert to do something other than they were supposed to do.
Is anyone surprised by this?
Here's a fact for you to chew on: If you had the source code to the complete software stack, someone could have fixed it by now.
Don't blame Toshiba, don't blame Microsoft, don't blame Apple. Blame your government for allowing software vendors to conceal Source Code from users in the first place. Food manufacturers have to label their ingredients and nutritional content. Cigarette manufacturers have to label their tar and nicotine. It's time software manufacturers were kicked into touch as well. Stop deluding yourselves -- keeping the Source Code secret from users benefits nobody. It doesn't stop unauthorised copying, it just pisses users off by ensuring they can't fix their own problems.
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The OLPC is not designed for that. Passing on our cast-offs to someone who can use them is one thing, and it's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself (unless it ends up overloading the electricity / telecoms infrastructure or mucking up established working practices) but OLPC aims to be something radically different.
The ultimate aim is for some future revision of the OLPC design to be manufactured in the third world for use in the third world, thus breaking their dependency on the West. In order for this to be realised, every aspect of the design has to be as open as possible. That in and of itself does not absolutely preclude Windows -- all it would take would be for Microsoft to release the Source Code and allow independent distribution. (Not that they're going to, because it goes totally against their business model; but you have to understand that it's their choice. Microsoft won't, not can't.)
Third world countries don't need Windows; be it Vista, XP, or 98. Not even 3.1. They need their own alternative which doesn't involve taking money -- any amount, however small -- out of their economies to make multi-billionaires even richer. If there was no such thing as Open Source, they'd actually be better off with pencils and paper. But there is, and that -- coupled with the availability of computers -- will create jobs for local programmers. Local programmers buy goods in local shops, pay local taxes, eat in local restaurants, donate to local good causes and take their families to visit local tourist attractions: the money that you pay them stays in the local economy. And soon, of course, with the design being open, there will be local computer factories making even more Mk. III and IV OLPCs.
There's a tired old cliché about teaching a man to fish vs. giving a man a fish. Well, it's not enough to teach a man to fish if you're just going to force him to use your own expensive, proprietary bait.
Solar energy does not necessarily mean photovoltaic panels! You can build a solar water heater which uses the sun's rays to heat water. You probably need a pump to circulate the water (it's usual to mount the collector on the roof where it will be above the water storage tank, so no convection circulation), but that is using only at most a few tens of watts compared to the kilowatts available as heat. Nothing to stop you powering the pump by PV, though, since it is only ever going to be needed when the sun is shining. Better to use a displacement pump than a centrifugal pump, since the former includes non-return valves (preventing reverse convection circulation from cooling the tank at night) and is more tolerant of voltage fluctuations (centrifugal pumps do nothing at all below some critical RPM). You can power a Sterling engine from the sun, if you have some way to dispose of the heat. It is even possible to produce steam from a solar boiler.
Twenty 100 watt bulbs?
I think you mean a hundred 20 watt bulbs. I checked all the light bulbs in my house, and the biggest I can find are two 36-watt tubes in the attic. Most are 18 or 20 watts, with a few 11 or 12 watt ones in table lamps.
No, that's what you think you want, because that's what you're used to from Windows and you haven't yet felt the benefits of having binaries compiled by someone other than the author of the package. What you really want is a massive repository with every piece of software ever written in it, and a decent package management system (i.e., anything but RPM). Try Debian or Gentoo. Note that the latter compiles everything from source by default, yet isn't really any the worse for it (compiling most things takes longer than downloading).
Note that even the mighty Debian isn't perfect, because it still has separate "developers'" packages -- they're just called foo-dev as opposed to foo-devel. One day, I'll hack apt to make it automagically fetch a corresponding -dev package if there is one -- unless somebody beats me to it.
Anyway, not everything will change at one time. You only need to recompile such applications and libraries as actually break.
"Theft", you say. Theft is unlawfully taking something that belongs to another person, with intent permanently to deprive them of it {so it's generally a defence to theft that you believed the former owner intended to destroy the article, since you can argue that you intended only temporarily to deprive them of it [for however long it would have taken them to destroy it]; though if the article derives value from the manner of its destruction [for example, a cream cake that they intended to destroy by eating it] then this defence may not work}.
Please explain what exactly it is that Apple no longer have, that they used to have before your alleged "theft" occurred?
Also, versioning file systems existed back in the days of the PDP-11.
This is one of the things I missed when I moved from VMS on a VAX 11/750 {or it might have been a 780?} to MS-DOS on a '286. The commands were kind of similar between the two OSes, though DOS didn't have EVE -- which for me was the killer app. Version numbers, EVE, case-insensitivity and commands that were not "telegraphese" {there not being such a word as "txtspk" in those days when mobile phones were analogue, half-duplex [you squoze a switch in the handset when you wanted to speak, and let go to listen to what the other person was saying] devices operating on VHF and where you had to know roughly where the receiver was, as each transmitter mast had its own STD code} were among the reasons why I preferred VMS to Unix.
..... it does that because after using it for awhile, the things you hated it for at first stop bothering you, and eventually start making sense. Maybe it's got cat powers!
Great days. Of course, Unix won in the end
The Linux kernel will never, ever have a stable ABI. Compatibility across versions is guaranteed only at the Source Code level, not the binary level. This is 100% intentional, and the only people it really hurts are those who would deny us access to the Source Code. And they deserve it.
I have an engineering degree, which is about as close as you can get to being a physicist without actually being a physicist, and you are exactly correct.
Engaging the dynamo on a bicycle makes pedalling harder. A bulb failing makes it easier.
The end result will be to increase the fuel consumption of cars using the stretch of road. It's absolutely not free energy -- it's paid for by the motorist.
Don't know what fuel costs in the states but here in the UK, we are already paying the equivalent of over US$2 for unleaded.
The PIR sensors do detect body heat. However, they only respond to changes in the background level. Usually that means warm objects moving, but it can also mean stationary objects changing temperature suddenly.
They generally work by using an array of Fresnel lenses to focus IR onto two opto-sensors, which form the bottom half of a Wheatstone bridge {the top half is two simple fixed resistances}. The voltage output from the bridge will normally be stable. However, if the infrared image changes, one or the other sensor will start receiving a different amount of light. Its resistance will change, and so will the output from the bridge. The output is fed into a differentiator and compared against a threshhold so as to guard against false triggering by thermostatically-controlled heaters &c.
You can knock up a quick-and-dirty motion sensor using two ORP12s and an array of magnifying glasses; use a mechanical AVO and watch the needle kick if something moves. (The "real" ones have the opto-sensors and the necessary op-amps on the same silicon substrate, in an IR-transparent envelope.)
The problem with this is that doors which are designated as "emergency exits" and fitted with "dead man's bar" latches are usually not industrially-rated. The door companies know that they aren't going to be used that often, and so use cheaper materials and components (even residential doors are heavier-duty than emergency doors). Management get to save a few bob and impose another stupid rule (emergency exits are not to be used except in an emergency). Everyone's a winner!
I know this because in the factory where I used to work, one of the buildings had an emergency exit which, for many workers, was much more convenient than the main doors. This door actually broke from over-use and the firm refused to replace it, saying we had invalidated the guarantee by opening it too often!
The BBC produce some of the world's finest television content, and this is mostly due to the way they are funded. If the BBC relied on advertising sponsorship, programmes would end up being made to suit the advertisers. If the BBC relied on general taxation, programmes would end up being made to suit the government.
The BBC is in the pockets of nobody but viewers. If that changes, the quality of programmes WILL worsen. Look to the communist system (where factories are run for the benefit of lazy workers) and the capitalist system (where factories are run for the benefit of rich shareholders) for examples of how things can go wrong when production is tailored to anyone other than the poor sod who has to spend their hard-earned on your products.
What I want to know about the digital switchover is why, given that every TV receiver will have to be replaced, did they not at the same time mandate that every receiver must be capable of accepting a smartcard for decoding? Then there would be no more need for TV detector vans and bully-boy tactics of the licence enforcement people (often used indiscriminately against non-TV-owners). If you haven't bought a viewing card, you can't watch TV. Simple as that. It would mean that the licence would be payable per receiver, not per address as it is at present, but there are ways of dealing with that especially if viewing cards are not tied to specific receivers (just like the old analogue Sky viewing cards; any card used to work in any machine, it was only the move to digital when they put the dog in that manger). People living alone but with two sets would need only one card (or maybe one for the TV and one for whatever takes the place of the VCR), which could be inserted into whichever one they were watching at the time. It would open up whole new business opportunities, e.g. "limited hours" viewing cards for people who don't watch enough TV to justify the full licence fee, or other situations (holiday homes would have TV sets but no card; short-duration cards would be available from the camp shop, if you forgot to bring yours with you from home).
My suspicion is that they just enjoy intimidating people for the hell of it, and mechanical enforcement would take all the fun out of it.
That should be "A historic day", or maybe "An 'istoric day". "Historic" begins with a H. And H, as in "Hibs", is a consonant.
Absolutely. Best thing about Sky Plus is this: Change channels on time for the start of the programme you want to watch, then go off and do something else for 10 minutes or thereabouts. Return to TV. Rewind to beginning of programme. (Now you are 10 minutes behind the live broadcast; more if you pause or rewind it.) Fast-forward through adverts.
Worst thing about it is the time display, which by default -- and I haven't found out where to change it -- is AM/PM, not VCR-style. This frankly does my head in.
You mean it comes with its own electrical generator?
Or is there some other expansion for SMIT besides Sociedade Municipal de Iluminação e Tração?
And that's only the case because the boot process has to be started under control of the BIOS. If the hardware already knew how to read an LVM disk, there'd be no such limitation. As it stands, a PC BIOS only just about knows how to read a given numbered sector from a disk. This is a great step backward from even the 8-bit home computers, many of which had ROM-based OSs far more capable than a PC's BIOS.
Only because Singapore has the death penalty for even breathing out of turn.
AIX is a unix implementation, just like Linux. In theory, the one is a drop-in replacement for the other. (As we know, in practice, theory and practice are not the same.) The differences are in the details; Linux seems to run on anything with a mains lead, whereas AIX is tightly bound to IBM hardware.
Really, this is a non-story; just like saying that instead of buying their bread from Warburtons they are going to start buying it from Kingsmill, or saying that they are going to buy circuit breakers from MK instead of Volex. It's a nice promotional piece for IBM, no doubt, but that's about all it is. A standardised product originally sourced from one manufacturer is going to be sourced from a different manufacturer instead.
Now, if they were moving over to Windows or something, then we could worry. As things stand, the worst they will have to do is recompile some of their applications. And they retain the option to revert back at any stage in future.
The 6510 is to all intents and purposes a 6502, but with a different pin assignment and some onboard I/O ports. In the C64, these are used for bank switching so as to be able to address more than 64KB of memory.
The Spectrum didn't have hardware sprites -- it had only a 256x192 monochrome bitmapped display, with colour added (almost as an afterthought) on a charcell-by-charcell basis -- two colours, plus two extended attributes, per charcell. Whilst this kept the memory demand down, it also made for "interesting" effects when objects entered the same charcell.
The Spectrum's display was generated almost entirely by the ULA; in contrast to the ZX81's display which was generated entirely by the CPU. This allowed the machine to run at the ZX81's FAST speed, whilst maintaining a display as in SLOW mode. Scanlines were not arranged in the "expected" order (effectively, bits 0-2 of the scanline number were swapped with bits 3-5).
Due to the way the Spectrum reads the colour attributes once per scan line, it's actually possible to get a distinct pair of colours within each row of a charcell; though only part of the width of the screen can then be used, since the palette-switching operation itself takes time.
You can run a nuclear power station with purely mechanical control systems, if you so desire. You just need to turn on the coolant pump when the temperature rises above a certain minimum point, and ram neutron-absorbing material into the core if the temperature rises above a second, higher fixed point. On some level, a nuclear reactor is equivalent to a fuel-burning stove with a back boiler. Just a very big one, which if it goes wrong will spew out very hot coals over a very large area, is all.
Yeah indeed.
.....
Because NOBODY could POSSIBLY work out for themselves, from first principles, how to set off a nuclear chain reaction, could they? It's no secret that a nucleus contains protons (positively-charged) and neutrons (uncharged), only holds together because the attraction between particles happens to match exactly the repulsion between similarly-charged particles, and this delicate balance wight well be upset by firing some sort of particle into that lot with sufficient KE
No, these back'ard a-rabs will never figger that shee-yit out fer theyselves!
Once again we have a situation where several pieces of closed-source software from several vendors act in concert to do something other than they were supposed to do.
Is anyone surprised by this?
Here's a fact for you to chew on: If you had the source code to the complete software stack, someone could have fixed it by now.
Don't blame Toshiba, don't blame Microsoft, don't blame Apple. Blame your government for allowing software vendors to conceal Source Code from users in the first place. Food manufacturers have to label their ingredients and nutritional content. Cigarette manufacturers have to label their tar and nicotine. It's time software manufacturers were kicked into touch as well. Stop deluding yourselves -- keeping the Source Code secret from users benefits nobody. It doesn't stop unauthorised copying, it just pisses users off by ensuring they can't fix their own problems.