"Besides, a 1024x768 display uses 4MB of RAM. What's your point?"
A 1024x768 display, with no double buffering, windowing, or graphics preallocation whatsoever runs in 4M of VIDEO RAM. A GUI running on a 1024x768 display needs space for a video prebuffer, individual window buffers for each window class, numerous buffers for input and response handling, buffers for whatever bitmaps need displayed, etc. These add up in real world use.
Additionally, remember this thing has no hard drive - no place for swap to go. That 128M is the limit of usable VRAM, which is not the case on a 32M Win95 box. Windows, Amiga, and Apple wouldn't have even gotten off the ground if it weren't for the ability of a hard drive to act as additional RAM.
'fast' back in 1995 and 'fast' today are two very different things.
Just do yourself a favor. Pull out that old machine and boot and install Win95 on it. Still usable? Good, you get a cookie. Acceptably fast for modern everyday tasks? No, I didn't think so.
I have a 500MHz dell that I use on a daily basis. I run Slax on it, from HD, and have 384M of ram.
And yes, I have accepted that it takes two whole minutes to boot into KDE. Meanwhile, my old Win 3.11 486 took ten minutes to boot, and my work computer, a 2.45GHz running XP boots in under 20 seconds.
This machine occasionally clips windows, freezes up for seconds at a time if it's thinking too hard, and takes days to compile a kernel. My old 486 would take seconds to DISPLAY a window and could compile linux in a week.
My work compy can simultaneously use all the pretty of FlyaKiteOSX, transcode a video, download Slax and move windows around with WindowFX tricks simultaneously without skipping a beat, frame, or even getting the slightest bit choppy, and can compile Linux in under thirty minutes.
It all comes down to what Negroponte's expectations are. I've worked with Damn Small Linux on a 500MHz EPIA board from a 1G flash drive with 128M ram. Yes, it takes a while to load. Yes, Firefox is a bitch to use in a cramped environment like that. Yes, Openoffice (using GTK 1.2 - what DSL supports) is slow enough to be nearly useless.
These are feature-rich modern applications. Their codebase and memory requirements are huge because all functionality has been abstracted into largely independent bits. That's how unixes work; it's parts you assemble.
However, if you roll your own - restricting functionality to the absolute necessities all the way - you can have a blazing fast, memory peckish office suite and browser that do very specific things and little else.
It's all about priorities, and Negroponte should probably change his priorities a bit.
For example, Linux and Open Source in general will run on the cheaper-per-megahert ARM processor. ARMs have a 'sleep' mode that allows for intelligent power conservation without need for a hibernation mode, can drive a multitude of hardware, and would probably have been a better choice for the OLPC project.
Another priority should have been better RAM than 128M. For example, DSL runs on 128, but simply BLAZES at 192M with the toram boot option.
Question... Where did God come into this conversation?
No, seriously, I want to know. Cos I'm pretty sure this article is about a scientific find concerning fossil record evidence about evolution.
Bringing God into it is basically a null statement: waste of space.
Of course, it's possible you ARE a waste of space. It happens; there's a large number of people on this planet who happen to be wastes of space. They're called business majors.
"Bottom line is we are here. If we have evolved then we are uniquely suited to our environment due to millenia of nature working on us."
Preach on, apathist brother!
"It's a stupid argument, and stupid area of study."
I agree that while evolutionary study is not immediately practical, it may become useful in a number of ways in the future. All research is good research.
Meanwhile, some of the less apathetic humans on this planet DO, against all rational thought, want to know where they ultimately came from. Something like the interminable 'Why's that come from small children. "Where did it all come from" is a question borne in boredom that eventually eats into the very souls of the neurotic - so they must study.
The choir here has a number of sour voices. Geeks who, in their strange form of geekdom, believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created us all with his Devine Meaty Orbs of Meatness.
There are also some here who believe, in the face of all other evidence, that the Great Green Arkleseizure sneezed us out.
The fruitless, futile debate between the knowledgable and the useless thus rages on. Another day, another slashdot.
Dunno about you, but I took the biology classes, saw the processes, grew legs on the head of a fly.
Ok, that was kinda graphic, but you get my point. Where, in Sunday School, do they let you speak a small colony of bacteria into life? And no, I'm not making fun of your breath.
Anyway, the point is this: Science actually empowers those who study it. There is no belief; in fact, the main tenet of science is disbelief of possibly flawed results, and encouragement to test them.
This is not some hermit in a closed room whiling away his time writing about the ineffabilities of life, then promptly forbidding others to eff them. Science attempts to explain HOW to eff those ineffabilities, and asks anyone who has the brains to help in the effing.
Hm. I just said that aloud and it sounds a bit dirty.
On the other hand, ID has leaked into the scientific establishment. This is a problem; it's religiously-based pseudoscience. It pollutes research in a sneaky way - because without thinking too much about it, it's plausable.
I've heard arguments here and there: It's impossible to create a DNA strand complex as a human's by throwing random numbers at a wall for centuries (like they never heard of genetic AI techniques); an 'indivisible structure' couldn't have evolved (like they never heard of microbiological repurposing); while microevolution has been proven, macroevolution hasn't (driven (by survival) small change * time == large change, guys).
Non of 'em have quite flown with me.
The fundamentalists survive mostly on spreading FUD; all the IDers have left is the uncertainty and doubt aspects (Fear of God's Divine Wrath isn't there). We can't let that sort of shit grind our scientific community to a halt. It's not fair to science OR God.
It's the ram that's an issue. For example, I have a 500MHz seven year old Dell here. It's got 192M RAM. I'm running KDE 3.5, and guess what, long as I use Konqueror, it's nice and perky. Pop open Firefox, though, and it gets a bit slow.
Not only that, but you can avoid certain aspects of DLL Hell, if you standardise a few portions of Linux. For example, while it's too slow a machine to use ESD or multichannel Alsa (trust me on this; I'm posting with my 500MHz clunker), aRts works wonderfully. Build your applications with arts-only support. Or, for example, when given the choice, stick with zlib over bz2; it's faster, which seems to be the premium here.
Extending the metaphor, if Linux were a person, it would have about seven thousand limbs by now; it's not that the code is thick, it's that when you're supporting everything, you have to weigh a bit more.
8) No matter how well you optimize it, you should not expect any GUI OS to run like a modern system with only 128M of RAM (graphics take memory - even monochrome graphics). He should seriously reconsider the amount of RAM; even just 64 more megs would make it fly by comparison.
7) uCLibc and Busybox should be placed in/tmp (ramdisk) as an image, mounted read-write, and included into the filesystem just below the writable portion of the union stack (provide EXTREMELY fast access to what would be the two most commonly used files)
1) He should be using a 2.4 kernel 2) He should probably be using a uCLibc 2.4 kernel 3) He should by using uCLibc in general for the distro 4) He should be using Busybox 5) He should be using the -O3 compiler flag for debug builds, and scaling back to -O2 for software that doesn't work quite right 6) He should be using a compressed firmware filesystem for system files, with a union handling writable areas, ala Slax.
Unless you have a patent lawyer. Then, while your lawyer fills out 'vacuum' with enough legalese to confuse the reviewers, the whole process is transparent on your end.
The carbon generated by burning biofuels was sequestered by the plants that made the biofuels. And will be resequestered by the same plants. The idea here is that, since we have to grow enough crops to produce enough fuel, that it becomes a carbon cycle rather than dumping carbon that's been sequestered for centuries back into the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, ironfertilization seems to be a good solution to the problem of the excess carbon we've produced in the past century.
Ok, now go ahead and tell me how that's better than having a function - if slow - linux laptop for your family.
Library computers are excludable - only one person can use each at a given time. You end up with tragedy of the commons type situations, with people waiting to use the library computers. You don't have that with the $100 laptop.
Seriously, these things are about the price of a TI-86, and a lot more useful. They'd be great for american high-school and middle-school students. I don't see why the american market must be excluded from purchasing them.
I think that, probably, an open source DRM system would have to be a 'User can play it' / 'User can't play it' system.
Which is fine. If it's open source, I can tweak it to spit out the decrypted data for me to pipe where I like. I'll pay for online content if I can then go and do what I please with it.
Like transcode it to 320x240 and watch it on my PDA. Or burn it to a DVD for archival purposes. Or - and damn you if you can't take it - put it up on eMule and let it self redistribute to people who can't actually afford to make the purchase.
It's like collective purchasing. It's the way society adjusts pricing for nonexcludable items, and it only works if the free riders don't cost the principal anything (ie: sharing is more or less free).
If it weren't for filesharing, we'd have a lot of dead-weight costs on our hands (cost of media versus value of media), like we did in the early nineties.
Slashdot Mirror
Never EVER use flash as swap. Besides the slowness of it, you'll ruin your flash card in under a year of average use!
Oh.
You know, calling science by any other name doesn't make it any less reproducable.
Not exactly. Purpose built hardware does not a multipurpose computer make.
Sure, video toasters were wizards on video manipulation, but if you implement mpeg4 for one, it'll be able to do MAYBE 1 fps. If it's overclocked.
"Besides, a 1024x768 display uses 4MB of RAM. What's your point?"
A 1024x768 display, with no double buffering, windowing, or graphics preallocation whatsoever runs in 4M of VIDEO RAM. A GUI running on a 1024x768 display needs space for a video prebuffer, individual window buffers for each window class, numerous buffers for input and response handling, buffers for whatever bitmaps need displayed, etc. These add up in real world use.
Additionally, remember this thing has no hard drive - no place for swap to go. That 128M is the limit of usable VRAM, which is not the case on a 32M Win95 box. Windows, Amiga, and Apple wouldn't have even gotten off the ground if it weren't for the ability of a hard drive to act as additional RAM.
'fast' back in 1995 and 'fast' today are two very different things.
Just do yourself a favor. Pull out that old machine and boot and install Win95 on it. Still usable? Good, you get a cookie. Acceptably fast for modern everyday tasks? No, I didn't think so.
I have a 500MHz dell that I use on a daily basis. I run Slax on it, from HD, and have 384M of ram.
And yes, I have accepted that it takes two whole minutes to boot into KDE. Meanwhile, my old Win 3.11 486 took ten minutes to boot, and my work computer, a 2.45GHz running XP boots in under 20 seconds.
This machine occasionally clips windows, freezes up for seconds at a time if it's thinking too hard, and takes days to compile a kernel. My old 486 would take seconds to DISPLAY a window and could compile linux in a week.
My work compy can simultaneously use all the pretty of FlyaKiteOSX, transcode a video, download Slax and move windows around with WindowFX tricks simultaneously without skipping a beat, frame, or even getting the slightest bit choppy, and can compile Linux in under thirty minutes.
It all comes down to what Negroponte's expectations are. I've worked with Damn Small Linux on a 500MHz EPIA board from a 1G flash drive with 128M ram. Yes, it takes a while to load. Yes, Firefox is a bitch to use in a cramped environment like that. Yes, Openoffice (using GTK 1.2 - what DSL supports) is slow enough to be nearly useless.
These are feature-rich modern applications. Their codebase and memory requirements are huge because all functionality has been abstracted into largely independent bits. That's how unixes work; it's parts you assemble.
However, if you roll your own - restricting functionality to the absolute necessities all the way - you can have a blazing fast, memory peckish office suite and browser that do very specific things and little else.
It's all about priorities, and Negroponte should probably change his priorities a bit.
For example, Linux and Open Source in general will run on the cheaper-per-megahert ARM processor. ARMs have a 'sleep' mode that allows for intelligent power conservation without need for a hibernation mode, can drive a multitude of hardware, and would probably have been a better choice for the OLPC project.
Another priority should have been better RAM than 128M. For example, DSL runs on 128, but simply BLAZES at 192M with the toram boot option.
*yawn*
No, really man. If you're going to be a whack job, you should be posting on slashdot, not he-
Shit, I'm on the wrong site again.
Question... Where did God come into this conversation?
No, seriously, I want to know. Cos I'm pretty sure this article is about a scientific find concerning fossil record evidence about evolution.
Bringing God into it is basically a null statement: waste of space.
Of course, it's possible you ARE a waste of space. It happens; there's a large number of people on this planet who happen to be wastes of space. They're called business majors.
You're not a business major, now are you?
And
"Bottom line is we are here. If we have evolved then we are uniquely suited to our environment due to millenia of nature working on us."
Preach on, apathist brother!
"It's a stupid argument, and stupid area of study."
I agree that while evolutionary study is not immediately practical, it may become useful in a number of ways in the future. All research is good research.
Meanwhile, some of the less apathetic humans on this planet DO, against all rational thought, want to know where they ultimately came from. Something like the interminable 'Why's that come from small children. "Where did it all come from" is a question borne in boredom that eventually eats into the very souls of the neurotic - so they must study.
The choir here has a number of sour voices. Geeks who, in their strange form of geekdom, believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created us all with his Devine Meaty Orbs of Meatness.
There are also some here who believe, in the face of all other evidence, that the Great Green Arkleseizure sneezed us out.
The fruitless, futile debate between the knowledgable and the useless thus rages on. Another day, another slashdot.
Dunno about you, but I took the biology classes, saw the processes, grew legs on the head of a fly.
Ok, that was kinda graphic, but you get my point. Where, in Sunday School, do they let you speak a small colony of bacteria into life? And no, I'm not making fun of your breath.
Anyway, the point is this: Science actually empowers those who study it. There is no belief; in fact, the main tenet of science is disbelief of possibly flawed results, and encouragement to test them.
This is not some hermit in a closed room whiling away his time writing about the ineffabilities of life, then promptly forbidding others to eff them. Science attempts to explain HOW to eff those ineffabilities, and asks anyone who has the brains to help in the effing.
Hm. I just said that aloud and it sounds a bit dirty.
The article doesn't actually mention ID.
On the other hand, ID has leaked into the scientific establishment. This is a problem; it's religiously-based pseudoscience. It pollutes research in a sneaky way - because without thinking too much about it, it's plausable.
I've heard arguments here and there: It's impossible to create a DNA strand complex as a human's by throwing random numbers at a wall for centuries (like they never heard of genetic AI techniques); an 'indivisible structure' couldn't have evolved (like they never heard of microbiological repurposing); while microevolution has been proven, macroevolution hasn't (driven (by survival) small change * time == large change, guys).
Non of 'em have quite flown with me.
The fundamentalists survive mostly on spreading FUD; all the IDers have left is the uncertainty and doubt aspects (Fear of God's Divine Wrath isn't there). We can't let that sort of shit grind our scientific community to a halt. It's not fair to science OR God.
Not to seem stupid, but what on earth is a 'natural-material dogmatist'?
Windows 1.0 couldn't possibly have mutated into Windows XP.
Large changes come in small parts. A little less fur here, a little more defined a nose there.
I mean, seriously. You'd think you've never seen evidence of that sort of action in a retirement plan.
It's the ram that's an issue. For example, I have a 500MHz seven year old Dell here. It's got 192M RAM. I'm running KDE 3.5, and guess what, long as I use Konqueror, it's nice and perky. Pop open Firefox, though, and it gets a bit slow.
Not only that, but you can avoid certain aspects of DLL Hell, if you standardise a few portions of Linux. For example, while it's too slow a machine to use ESD or multichannel Alsa (trust me on this; I'm posting with my 500MHz clunker), aRts works wonderfully. Build your applications with arts-only support. Or, for example, when given the choice, stick with zlib over bz2; it's faster, which seems to be the premium here.
Extending the metaphor, if Linux were a person, it would have about seven thousand limbs by now; it's not that the code is thick, it's that when you're supporting everything, you have to weigh a bit more.
8) No matter how well you optimize it, you should not expect any GUI OS to run like a modern system with only 128M of RAM (graphics take memory - even monochrome graphics). He should seriously reconsider the amount of RAM; even just 64 more megs would make it fly by comparison.
7) uCLibc and Busybox should be placed in /tmp (ramdisk) as an image, mounted read-write, and included into the filesystem just below the writable portion of the union stack (provide EXTREMELY fast access to what would be the two most commonly used files)
1) He should be using a 2.4 kernel
2) He should probably be using a uCLibc 2.4 kernel
3) He should by using uCLibc in general for the distro
4) He should be using Busybox
5) He should be using the -O3 compiler flag for debug builds, and scaling back to -O2 for software that doesn't work quite right
6) He should be using a compressed firmware filesystem for system files, with a union handling writable areas, ala Slax.
Like expanding space jelly?
Unless you have a patent lawyer. Then, while your lawyer fills out 'vacuum' with enough legalese to confuse the reviewers, the whole process is transparent on your end.
The carbon generated by burning biofuels was sequestered by the plants that made the biofuels. And will be resequestered by the same plants. The idea here is that, since we have to grow enough crops to produce enough fuel, that it becomes a carbon cycle rather than dumping carbon that's been sequestered for centuries back into the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, iron fertilization seems to be a good solution to the problem of the excess carbon we've produced in the past century.
Ok, now go ahead and tell me how that's better than having a function - if slow - linux laptop for your family.
Library computers are excludable - only one person can use each at a given time. You end up with tragedy of the commons type situations, with people waiting to use the library computers. You don't have that with the $100 laptop.
Seriously, these things are about the price of a TI-86, and a lot more useful. They'd be great for american high-school and middle-school students. I don't see why the american market must be excluded from purchasing them.
Perhaps.
I think that, probably, an open source DRM system would have to be a 'User can play it' / 'User can't play it' system.
Which is fine. If it's open source, I can tweak it to spit out the decrypted data for me to pipe where I like. I'll pay for online content if I can then go and do what I please with it.
Like transcode it to 320x240 and watch it on my PDA. Or burn it to a DVD for archival purposes. Or - and damn you if you can't take it - put it up on eMule and let it self redistribute to people who can't actually afford to make the purchase.
It's like collective purchasing. It's the way society adjusts pricing for nonexcludable items, and it only works if the free riders don't cost the principal anything (ie: sharing is more or less free).
If it weren't for filesharing, we'd have a lot of dead-weight costs on our hands (cost of media versus value of media), like we did in the early nineties.
That reminds me:
What's the difference between a natural blonde and a bleach blonde?
Potential.