I did. It isn't hard and mine is going to vote against it. Of course he is in the opposition so it isn't too surprising, but wherever you are in the UK you can write to your MP (by email- its very easy) and a letter writing campaign by valid constituents is going to be noticed. A facebook campaign isn't quite the same thing. Here is my letter and the response and here is where you go to write to your MP
WINE would probably run on ARM, but actually no, WINE doesn't solve the problem, unless you recompile the windows application in question for the ARM processor, then run it under WINE on ARM. QEMU would work, but I don't think the performance would be up to much. Best stick to Linux applications.
turned up at a client and they were all of a fluster. Everything infected, no idea what it was going to do next as it rampaged about the domain. They were terrified because: "we don't know what our computers are doing" which is the normal state when using proprietary software, they must be more used to it than I am. As a consultant the best thing for me to do was leave. I wouldn't attempt to do any work on someone elses infected computer, I don't want to end up owning the problem, and they didn't want to spend a day listening to me talking about how they should switch to a grown up operating system.
Put the keylock on and dial 112, 911 or 999 on any mobile, watch as it punches straight through the keylock and will dial. It will place the call over any mobile network it can reach, roaming or otherwise. Now try it with no credit on a pay as you go SIM. still works. Now take the SIM out. Still works.
to be fair, reading raw email headers is something not many people should ever have to do. Just open a mail and select view-source from the menus. Not hard at all. It does suck a bit that you have to open the mail first. There is also an API for parsing and processing mime entities. Not especially hard to use.
there should be a range of computers allowing each person to select their own ultimate compromise of features and price. Collaboration works better if everyone can join in. I have been working with Elonex in the UK on a couple of computers at the low end of the price spectrum, I am not allowed to use the c word to describe them, but they are as inexpensive as chips and dirt good value. The webbook is a VIA X86 laptop running Ubuntu, fairly traditional architecture. Below that is the One and OneT. The One has an X86 again, but not very quick. It is in an unusual and inovative form factor, basically a digital picture frame with a detachable keyboard. It retails at £99 which is not a lot. The OneT is a clamshell case and it is based on the Xburst chip which is a mipsel architecture (little endian MIPS instruction set). It comes with a simplified GUI and a single user operating system (which is marketing speak for everything running as root). I have it running Debian (text mode only so far). The important point is that with Linux who cares if it is an X86? this is perhaps the ultimate Software Freedom computer, it has no proprietary BIOS, it won't run Flash or pretty much any proprietary closed source stuff because they only get compiled for X86. In fact the processor isn't even running a proprietary instruction set. It runs the bits of MIPS that are no longer covered by copyright.
I have indeed been asked that very question, whilst looking for funding for a Free Software focussed enterprise. My answer was "nothing whatsoever, and we certainly wouldn't want to put any obstacles in the way of anyone else doing it, the more the merrier!"
I suspect this was not the answer he was looking for.
no, they bounce apart. The point of the black hole is that the two pool balls get stuck together when they collide. The KE goes into squishing them past all the repulsive forces until they are so squished that they are dense enough (same mass, smaller volume) that the gravitational force overpowers the repulsive forces and the escape velocity of the squished pair exceeds c.
would the black holes have all that Kinetic energy though? I thought they were to be formed by collision of two identical masses travelling at identical speeds in opposite directions. Sounds at rest to me.
the ones which may be occurring in the upper atmosphere are moving quite fast. Quite fast enough to escape the Earth, even if that means flying right through it (they probably won't hit anything on the way through, they are that small.) The LHC ones would be at rest, relative to the Earth, they would not escape, They would fall down to the centre of the Earth and oscillate about inside, perhaps eating the occasional atom that they score a direct hit on, or merging with other small black holes. Of course if the theory is right they would last a fraction of a nanosecond before evaporating. If they theory is wrong and a sustainable small black hole is generated that can eat atoms faster than it can evaporate then we could be in a spot of bother. A very very small spot of bother. All of us.
I am using Ubuntu 8.04 fully updated. The run.sh in the xf86-video-via-83.1.0 just gives me a ton of errors. I also tried going in to the X11R7 directory and following the instructions in the README to chmod +x a few files but this barfs on./configure and complains I don't have packages xorg-server, xvmc adn fontsproto. None of which are in the repos.
Well the same thing as a prototype for a different branding. It is not a MIPS chip. It is an Xburst which is a Chinese clone of the MIPS instruction set. It does not have a floating point unit and there is a recompiled toolchain that does not use the FPU, and this has been used to compile Linux for the MIPSel (little endian) architecture. Flash support is weird. There is no plugin for the browser, but there is a standalone application that can play a downloaded.swf file. The operating system is quite locked down and seems to be some kind of single-user linux. If anyone has any suggestions on how to reflash the thing with something sensible (like a minimal command line Debian/MIPS) then I would be most interested to hear them. Here is some info on the CPU.
/proc/cpuinfo
system type : JzRISC
processor : 0
cpu model : V4.15
BogoMIPS : 335.05
wait instruction : yes
microsecond timers : yes
tlb_entries : 32
extra interrupt vector : yes
hardware watchpoint : yes
VCED exceptions : not available
VCEI exceptions : not available
how about this for a decent start, take a supercavitating torpedo, filled with something buoyant. Tie a rock to it with a release mechanism and chuck it overboard. Get the hell out of the way and wait for it to hit the ocean floor and release. I have no idea what speed it would emerge at but some supercavitating torpedos might be able to do 800km/h. That is quite a bit of free energy for a flying start to the mission.
the energy required is to lift the 10g out of the earth's gravity well to the height of the orbit, plus the energy required to accelerate 10g to orbital velocity. Both are fairly easy calculations which I will leave as an exercise for the reader. That much kinetic energy is going to be required somehow, a gun gives it all in one go, a rocket carries on accelerating less violently for longer, but has to lift it's own fuel. This project needs a third way. Some kind of vehicle that accelerates (which might mean going at a constant speed upwards i.e. accelerating at 9.8ms^-2) but doesn't take it's own fuel with it, either picking up fuel on the way from the environment, or having fuel beamed up to it from the ground.
A heavy fuel rocket is going to spend almost all of it's energy lifting the fuel. With that strategy you might as well lift something a bit heavier. There are two parts to the problem, getting up, and getting fast. Really fast. The energy requirement for LEO is 32.1 to 38.6 MJ/kg according to wikipedia. lets say 35MJ/kg applied to 10g of payload, that is a total of 350KJ of kinetic energy that needs to be applied to the payload. The most efficient way to do this would be to dump all the energy in one go and fire it from a rail gun in a vacuum. So the easy answer is to strip the Earth of it's atmosphere, then use a rail gun. Plan B would be to use a balloon to do most of the "getting up" part of the problem, then use a rail gun to do the fast bit. I suspect neither of these plans are sufficiently wacky. Perhaps some exotic kite based thing magnetically surfing on the Aurora Borealis would work. I think the key is not to use your own energy, but find it on the way somehow. Solar would appear to be the obvious candidate, quite how you apply this at the edge of the atmosphere is not so simple. Action and reaction, things move forward by flinging stuff out the back. Rockets fling their exhaust, airplanes fling bits of atmosphere. This little payload isn't going to have stuff to fling, or an atmosphere to climb through. It could have lots of energy shone at it from below, the photons would bounce off and impart some thrust. Trouble is that is a lot of energy cost again. I guess a huge solar array could do it for free (within the rules you wouldn't have to pay for the array within the £999 budget) Getting an upward stream of energy to translate to a horizontal orbital velocity is another trick altogether.
It is perhaps the worse cite in the whole history of dubiously sourced facts. I have in fact now confused myself, I could have sworn it was a VIA until I re-read my own article stating it was AMD, now I am not so sure. Next time I get my hands on one I will cat/proc/cpuinfo and let you know what it thinks it has.
on reflection I can cite myself here where I said inaccurately that it was based on an AMD processor (it is a VIA I think) and I said it was based on Debian, which is half true, it is Xandros which is in turn based on Debian.
well, nothing that couldn't have been written on March 1st at any rate. In fact I did write an article about the Elonex One, and the OLPC XO and the EeePC on March 1st, I don't know if it is a better article, I am of course not a professional journalist, but I did at least make an effort to check the facts and actually did have a unit to look at. The ITWire article is just poorly regurgitating some publicly available specifications.
the pre-production model that I borrowed for a week, and was shown at the Education show in Birmingham UK had Xandros on it. Sorry, this is original research, I can't cite anything.
both the eeePC and Elonex One have 800x480 and you are right about the operating system, I think the Linos thing was an early missprint and it has been repeated and repeated. It is a kernel version number (which means very little to the target audience of the marketing material) the operating system is a custom Xandros, just like the eeePC (although Xandros on eeePC was customised for Asus and Xandros on One was customised for Elonex so don't expect them to be identical).
Slashdot Mirror
just as soon as it turns up in the Ubuntu repos.
I did. It isn't hard and mine is going to vote against it. Of course he is in the opposition so it isn't too surprising, but wherever you are in the UK you can write to your MP (by email- its very easy) and a letter writing campaign by valid constituents is going to be noticed. A facebook campaign isn't quite the same thing. Here is my letter and the response and here is where you go to write to your MP
WINE would probably run on ARM, but actually no, WINE doesn't solve the problem, unless you recompile the windows application in question for the ARM processor, then run it under WINE on ARM. QEMU would work, but I don't think the performance would be up to much. Best stick to Linux applications.
turned up at a client and they were all of a fluster. Everything infected, no idea what it was going to do next as it rampaged about the domain. They were terrified because: "we don't know what our computers are doing" which is the normal state when using proprietary software, they must be more used to it than I am. As a consultant the best thing for me to do was leave. I wouldn't attempt to do any work on someone elses infected computer, I don't want to end up owning the problem, and they didn't want to spend a day listening to me talking about how they should switch to a grown up operating system.
so does my Ericsson. but try pressing 112 when it is in that state (don't press the call button though)
Put the keylock on and dial 112, 911 or 999 on any mobile, watch as it punches straight through the keylock and will dial. It will place the call over any mobile network it can reach, roaming or otherwise. Now try it with no credit on a pay as you go SIM. still works. Now take the SIM out. Still works.
He is Stani who wrote SPE, Stani's Python Editor. A really good IDE for Python. sudo apt-get install spe and have a look at it.
to be fair, reading raw email headers is something not many people should ever have to do. Just open a mail and select view-source from the menus. Not hard at all. It does suck a bit that you have to open the mail first. There is also an API for parsing and processing mime entities. Not especially hard to use.
there should be a range of computers allowing each person to select their own ultimate compromise of features and price. Collaboration works better if everyone can join in. I have been working with Elonex in the UK on a couple of computers at the low end of the price spectrum, I am not allowed to use the c word to describe them, but they are as inexpensive as chips and dirt good value. The webbook is a VIA X86 laptop running Ubuntu, fairly traditional architecture. Below that is the One and OneT. The One has an X86 again, but not very quick. It is in an unusual and inovative form factor, basically a digital picture frame with a detachable keyboard. It retails at £99 which is not a lot. The OneT is a clamshell case and it is based on the Xburst chip which is a mipsel architecture (little endian MIPS instruction set). It comes with a simplified GUI and a single user operating system (which is marketing speak for everything running as root). I have it running Debian (text mode only so far). The important point is that with Linux who cares if it is an X86? this is perhaps the ultimate Software Freedom computer, it has no proprietary BIOS, it won't run Flash or pretty much any proprietary closed source stuff because they only get compiled for X86. In fact the processor isn't even running a proprietary instruction set. It runs the bits of MIPS that are no longer covered by copyright.
I have indeed been asked that very question, whilst looking for funding for a Free Software focussed enterprise. My answer was "nothing whatsoever, and we certainly wouldn't want to put any obstacles in the way of anyone else doing it, the more the merrier!" I suspect this was not the answer he was looking for.
no, they bounce apart. The point of the black hole is that the two pool balls get stuck together when they collide. The KE goes into squishing them past all the repulsive forces until they are so squished that they are dense enough (same mass, smaller volume) that the gravitational force overpowers the repulsive forces and the escape velocity of the squished pair exceeds c.
would the black holes have all that Kinetic energy though? I thought they were to be formed by collision of two identical masses travelling at identical speeds in opposite directions. Sounds at rest to me.
the ones which may be occurring in the upper atmosphere are moving quite fast. Quite fast enough to escape the Earth, even if that means flying right through it (they probably won't hit anything on the way through, they are that small.) The LHC ones would be at rest, relative to the Earth, they would not escape, They would fall down to the centre of the Earth and oscillate about inside, perhaps eating the occasional atom that they score a direct hit on, or merging with other small black holes. Of course if the theory is right they would last a fraction of a nanosecond before evaporating. If they theory is wrong and a sustainable small black hole is generated that can eat atoms faster than it can evaporate then we could be in a spot of bother. A very very small spot of bother. All of us.
I hope the Macbook Air next to him is running Free software! This is a major endorsement, well done to all those involved.
thanks, I also needed libdrm-dev and a few build things.
I am using Ubuntu 8.04 fully updated. The run.sh in the xf86-video-via-83.1.0 just gives me a ton of errors. I also tried going in to the X11R7 directory and following the instructions in the README to chmod +x a few files but this barfs on ./configure and complains I don't have packages xorg-server, xvmc adn fontsproto. None of which are in the repos.
Well the same thing as a prototype for a different branding. It is not a MIPS chip. It is an Xburst which is a Chinese clone of the MIPS instruction set. It does not have a floating point unit and there is a recompiled toolchain that does not use the FPU, and this has been used to compile Linux for the MIPSel (little endian) architecture. Flash support is weird. There is no plugin for the browser, but there is a standalone application that can play a downloaded .swf file. The operating system is quite locked down and seems to be some kind of single-user linux. If anyone has any suggestions on how to reflash the thing with something sensible (like a minimal command line Debian/MIPS) then I would be most interested to hear them. Here is some info on the CPU.
system type : JzRISC
processor : 0
cpu model : V4.15
BogoMIPS : 335.05
wait instruction : yes
microsecond timers : yes
tlb_entries : 32
extra interrupt vector : yes
hardware watchpoint : yes
VCED exceptions : not available
VCEI exceptions : not available
how about this for a decent start, take a supercavitating torpedo, filled with something buoyant. Tie a rock to it with a release mechanism and chuck it overboard. Get the hell out of the way and wait for it to hit the ocean floor and release. I have no idea what speed it would emerge at but some supercavitating torpedos might be able to do 800km/h. That is quite a bit of free energy for a flying start to the mission.
the energy required is to lift the 10g out of the earth's gravity well to the height of the orbit, plus the energy required to accelerate 10g to orbital velocity. Both are fairly easy calculations which I will leave as an exercise for the reader. That much kinetic energy is going to be required somehow, a gun gives it all in one go, a rocket carries on accelerating less violently for longer, but has to lift it's own fuel. This project needs a third way. Some kind of vehicle that accelerates (which might mean going at a constant speed upwards i.e. accelerating at 9.8ms^-2) but doesn't take it's own fuel with it, either picking up fuel on the way from the environment, or having fuel beamed up to it from the ground.
A heavy fuel rocket is going to spend almost all of it's energy lifting the fuel. With that strategy you might as well lift something a bit heavier. There are two parts to the problem, getting up, and getting fast. Really fast. The energy requirement for LEO is 32.1 to 38.6 MJ/kg according to wikipedia. lets say 35MJ/kg applied to 10g of payload, that is a total of 350KJ of kinetic energy that needs to be applied to the payload. The most efficient way to do this would be to dump all the energy in one go and fire it from a rail gun in a vacuum. So the easy answer is to strip the Earth of it's atmosphere, then use a rail gun. Plan B would be to use a balloon to do most of the "getting up" part of the problem, then use a rail gun to do the fast bit. I suspect neither of these plans are sufficiently wacky. Perhaps some exotic kite based thing magnetically surfing on the Aurora Borealis would work. I think the key is not to use your own energy, but find it on the way somehow. Solar would appear to be the obvious candidate, quite how you apply this at the edge of the atmosphere is not so simple. Action and reaction, things move forward by flinging stuff out the back. Rockets fling their exhaust, airplanes fling bits of atmosphere. This little payload isn't going to have stuff to fling, or an atmosphere to climb through. It could have lots of energy shone at it from below, the photons would bounce off and impart some thrust. Trouble is that is a lot of energy cost again. I guess a huge solar array could do it for free (within the rules you wouldn't have to pay for the array within the £999 budget) Getting an upward stream of energy to translate to a horizontal orbital velocity is another trick altogether.
It is perhaps the worse cite in the whole history of dubiously sourced facts. I have in fact now confused myself, I could have sworn it was a VIA until I re-read my own article stating it was AMD, now I am not so sure. Next time I get my hands on one I will cat /proc/cpuinfo and let you know what it thinks it has.
on reflection I can cite myself here where I said inaccurately that it was based on an AMD processor (it is a VIA I think) and I said it was based on Debian, which is half true, it is Xandros which is in turn based on Debian.
well, nothing that couldn't have been written on March 1st at any rate. In fact I did write an article about the Elonex One, and the OLPC XO and the EeePC on March 1st, I don't know if it is a better article, I am of course not a professional journalist, but I did at least make an effort to check the facts and actually did have a unit to look at. The ITWire article is just poorly regurgitating some publicly available specifications.
the pre-production model that I borrowed for a week, and was shown at the Education show in Birmingham UK had Xandros on it. Sorry, this is original research, I can't cite anything.
both the eeePC and Elonex One have 800x480 and you are right about the operating system, I think the Linos thing was an early missprint and it has been repeated and repeated. It is a kernel version number (which means very little to the target audience of the marketing material) the operating system is a custom Xandros, just like the eeePC (although Xandros on eeePC was customised for Asus and Xandros on One was customised for Elonex so don't expect them to be identical).