OK, so it's not on the Cell architecture, but rather an FPGA-based softCPU, but certainly the problem of integrating asymmetric coprocessing engines into the Linux architecture has been thought about before.
I work at one of Australia's largest Universities, and recently contacted one of our service departments regarding a web application that gave a "Bad browser" message when accessed with Mozilla. I emailed asking if they had considered supporting a standards-compliant browsser like Mozilla.
Here is the response:
"Thank you for your email and information. You are the first to request this and quite frankly I had not considered it. I had always followed corporate policy - with central IT not supporting these I figured why should I? "
This is what we are up against.
Needless to say I have just forwarded a link to the main article!
People scamming the rebate schemes is a valid response to what is, in essence, a totally anti-consumer practice. I'm amazed that it's even legal to offer these false discounts, and artificially inflated prices.
Even better, get something like a Lowe Alpine bag (I have a Contour Mountain) that has an inner sleeve for those CamelBack water bladders - any sensible-sized laptop fits perfectly in there.
When I travel with my laptop I buy a bubble-wrap envelope from the post office , put the laptop in there and put the whole thing in the water bladder sleeve - takes 10 seconds to pull it out through airport security checks, and provides enough padding to keep it happy and healthy.
Maybe! Linux runs on the MicroBlaze softCPU on Xilinx FPGAs, as a derivitave of uCLinux. Care to port it to this new hot hardware?
Hey - that's me!:)
In answer to the child of parent (sibling?) the purpose of putting a softcore processor and Linux on an FPGA is to leverage all the things that Linux does so well, and also give access to the things that FPGAs do well.
Ever tried to implement a TCP/IP stack and web server in pure logic? It's been done, but it's pain all the way. With Linux, it's there already, for free.
Our research focusses on efficient ways of integrating the custom hardware capabilities within the operating system context.
And, in case you were wondering, we are imagining a Beowulf cluster of these...
Am I unreasonable to see a lot of this as an overdue correction in the IT labour market?
For a while here in Australia at least it seemed that someone with a 6 week vocational computing course could earn $50K+ doing front-line support.
That wasn't a realistic or sustainable situation, and is certainly not reflected in any other industry I can think of.
The problem is that in working with any reasonable tech company, you are going to be exposed to ideas that will co-mingle with any existing or new "private" ideas of your own.
It's the nature of human creativity, and it's almost impossible (and meaningless) to disentangle the two.
Clearly, blanket assignment of all "IP" (I hate that term) to the employer is not fair, but nor is it reasonable to argue that his private stuff is completely seperate.
A reasonable reward scheme for new ideas generated by employees would be the best idea - isn't that what IBM (and recently Microsoft) does? Basically you assign the patent to the company, but you are listed as the inventor and get a license income stream plus "invention bonus"...
So Im not the only one with the urge to have multiple Quad-Core processors that reconfigure dynamicaly from OS based controls... Hurra for Linux...
Absolutely. Oh the fun you can have when you can modify the hardware as easily as you can the OS...
Just thinking of using Windows to do this give me chest pains.
Indeed. Also since this is publically funded research, I feel there is an ethical responsibility to ensure that the outcomes benefit the community in general (a la open source), rather than a specific corporate entity.
Re:Boy -- talk about your pointless questions...
on
Can GNU Ever Be Unix?
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· Score: 1
I think it is almost certain that some distro of Linux could easily pass OG's test suite. It is also almost a certainty that FSF/GNU would never opt for it on religious grounds.
One question I had after reading the article, say IBM pays for certification of some particular IBM-distro. Now, is it IBM who is certified, or is it the distro? If I simply redistribute the exact sources that IBM do (free to under the GPL), am I now a supplier of a certified Linux solution?
When certification can cost up to half a mega-buck (see article), I think this is a question that a potential certificee (is there such a word?) might want answered.
I think it shouldn't be that mutch of an issues to program some part of the FPGA with the logic to reprogram the rest?
We do it already. The latest Xilinx FPGAs have an internal reconfiguration port, so the FPGA logic can reprogram itself.
We published a paper earlier this year about running Linux on an FPGA processor, with this reconfiguration port mapped into/dev. Basically we can partially reconfigure the FPGA under OS control while the rest of the FPGA (incl. the CPU with linux) keeps going. See my.sig..
"There is no predicted lifespan for VentrAssist because there are no wearing parts,"
says co-inventor of the device and company founder John Woodard. "It could be a hundred years, we don't know."
Sorry, but if you can't even offer an intelligent analysis of the lifespan issue, then you don't know enough about your device.
I was on a flight between Australia and the US recently. The first movie was
Calendar Girls, a story about a bunch of 50+ English women who do a nude calendar as a fund raiser - in it there were a couple of very brief titty-shots that had been pixellated out.
After this, on comes some new boxing movie, completely uncut, with the classic slow motion head-jarring blood-spitting sequences that they seem to thrive on.
Jokes aside, can someone explain to me how a bit of saggy tit is more offensive than gratuitous full-screen slow motion violence?
And if people dont want ads, they buy pay-tv services. I wouldn't pay a few dollars a week to record/filter ads from free to air tv. I mainly just turn it off.
I'm not so sure about that - pay tv services here suffer the same extortion racket that they seem to in the US - bundling.
Until I can order Pay TV a la carte there's no way I'd cough up AUD50+ / month to get collection of crap plus one or two channels of interest.
But in lieu of that, $2 or 3 per week for ad blocking, plus PVR services? Yes please.
Yes, but wasn't really my point. I want a game that is less demanding of my attention - I want to engage with it on my terms.
If I'm playing a game, and someone walks into the room to talk to me, I don't have to scrabble for the pause button, or whatever, I just drop the joystick, release the mouse, hands off the keyboard, whatever, turn and talk to them.
Incidentally the same ideas are cropping up in devices that detect when a driver falls asleep. During normal driving, you make many tiny corrections on the wheel every second - someone who drifts off to sleep, or is overly distracted, stops making those movements, and it can be detected.
Of course then the problem is how to do a graceful automated shutdown of a vehicle travelling at 100km/h, but you gotta start somewhere!
I couldn't wait to get home and play Kings Quest or Space Quest or (if I get past the age check) Leisure Suit Larry
My big lesson in game suck-factor was after getting about 3/4 way through Police Quest (yes, the original) and finding out that because I hadn't collected my wallet from the locker in the first sequence in the game (about 2 weeks playing time ago), I couldn't get any further in the game.
I couldn't just return to the station and collect the wallet, oh no, it was all over, and had been ever since I'd made that first mistake. I don't think I played it again after that.
This may exist already, not sure, but what I'd like is an auto-pause - so I can just get up and walk away from a game, and it will figure out that since I'm not moving the controls any more, I'm probably not playing any more either.
You could use a sort of time dilation effect - game time starts to slow as the time since last control movement increases.
Maybe not so good for multiplayer, or at least require some tweaking.
Here's another benefit - anyone who's been a kid (or dealt with kids) and trying to distract their attention away from a game, the excuse is always "I can't pause now" or "hang on, just a minute". If you have a game that you can literally drop and walk away from, it changes the way you interact with it.
It was fun to spike my stats (scroll down to hourly stats) with a comment originated mini-slashdotting:)
It's interesting, the hit rate exhibits a lovely exponential decay...not like the crunching, grinding burning shriek that will come when I get front page coverage for my project - admins beware!! muhahahahahaha!!
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so it's not on the Cell architecture, but rather an FPGA-based softCPU, but certainly the problem of integrating asymmetric coprocessing engines into the Linux architecture has been thought about before.
Cool stuff nonetheless.
Here is the response:
"Thank you for your email and information. You are the first to request this and quite frankly I had not considered it. I had always followed corporate policy - with central IT not supporting these I figured why should I? "
This is what we are up against.
Needless to say I have just forwarded a link to the main article!
Go you good thing, go!
Oh, and First Post! ppbbbbbbtttthhhhhhhh!
There's a lot more to an OS than the damn window manager!
People scamming the rebate schemes is a valid response to what is, in essence, a totally anti-consumer practice. I'm amazed that it's even legal to offer these false discounts, and artificially inflated prices.
When I travel with my laptop I buy a bubble-wrap envelope from the post office , put the laptop in there and put the whole thing in the water bladder sleeve - takes 10 seconds to pull it out through airport security checks, and provides enough padding to keep it happy and healthy.
Hey - that's me! :)
In answer to the child of parent (sibling?) the purpose of putting a softcore processor and Linux on an FPGA is to leverage all the things that Linux does so well, and also give access to the things that FPGAs do well.
Ever tried to implement a TCP/IP stack and web server in pure logic? It's been done, but it's pain all the way. With Linux, it's there already, for free.
Our research focusses on efficient ways of integrating the custom hardware capabilities within the operating system context.
And, in case you were wondering, we are imagining a Beowulf cluster of these...
Am I unreasonable to see a lot of this as an overdue correction in the IT labour market? For a while here in Australia at least it seemed that someone with a 6 week vocational computing course could earn $50K+ doing front-line support. That wasn't a realistic or sustainable situation, and is certainly not reflected in any other industry I can think of.
It's the nature of human creativity, and it's almost impossible (and meaningless) to disentangle the two.
Clearly, blanket assignment of all "IP" (I hate that term) to the employer is not fair, but nor is it reasonable to argue that his private stuff is completely seperate.
A reasonable reward scheme for new ideas generated by employees would be the best idea - isn't that what IBM (and recently Microsoft) does? Basically you assign the patent to the company, but you are listed as the inventor and get a license income stream plus "invention bonus"...
Absolutely. Oh the fun you can have when you can modify the hardware as easily as you can the OS...
Just thinking of using Windows to do this give me chest pains.
Indeed. Also since this is publically funded research, I feel there is an ethical responsibility to ensure that the outcomes benefit the community in general (a la open source), rather than a specific corporate entity.
One question I had after reading the article, say IBM pays for certification of some particular IBM-distro. Now, is it IBM who is certified, or is it the distro? If I simply redistribute the exact sources that IBM do (free to under the GPL), am I now a supplier of a certified Linux solution?
When certification can cost up to half a mega-buck (see article), I think this is a question that a potential certificee (is there such a word?) might want answered.
We do it already. The latest Xilinx FPGAs have an internal reconfiguration port, so the FPGA logic can reprogram itself.
We published a paper earlier this year about running Linux on an FPGA processor, with this reconfiguration port mapped into /dev. Basically we can partially reconfigure the FPGA under OS control while the rest of the FPGA (incl. the CPU with linux) keeps going. See my .sig..
"There is no predicted lifespan for VentrAssist because there are no wearing parts," says co-inventor of the device and company founder John Woodard. "It could be a hundred years, we don't know."
Sorry, but if you can't even offer an intelligent analysis of the lifespan issue, then you don't know enough about your device.
Makes it sound amateurish.
Sure does. All they gotta do is strap you down, inject it into your brain, then wait a couple of years for your brain to degenerate..
What a weapon!
Oh no, now wait for the War on Prions FUD to begin.
Or more germanely, it may be advisable not to inject your next Big Mac straight into your brain...
What a load of crap! A Nokia 3315 is less than AUD100 (USD60) to buy with no plan, contract, nothing, just the phone.
Sure, there's no colour screen, no camera, no poly-frickin-phonic ringtones, just a phone that you make calls with.
sigh...
After this, on comes some new boxing movie, completely uncut, with the classic slow motion head-jarring blood-spitting sequences that they seem to thrive on.
Jokes aside, can someone explain to me how a bit of saggy tit is more offensive than gratuitous full-screen slow motion violence?
I'm not so sure about that - pay tv services here suffer the same extortion racket that they seem to in the US - bundling.
Until I can order Pay TV a la carte there's no way I'd cough up AUD50+ / month to get collection of crap plus one or two channels of interest.
But in lieu of that, $2 or 3 per week for ad blocking, plus PVR services? Yes please.
Yes, but wasn't really my point. I want a game that is less demanding of my attention - I want to engage with it on my terms.
If I'm playing a game, and someone walks into the room to talk to me, I don't have to scrabble for the pause button, or whatever, I just drop the joystick, release the mouse, hands off the keyboard, whatever, turn and talk to them.
Incidentally the same ideas are cropping up in devices that detect when a driver falls asleep. During normal driving, you make many tiny corrections on the wheel every second - someone who drifts off to sleep, or is overly distracted, stops making those movements, and it can be detected.
Of course then the problem is how to do a graceful automated shutdown of a vehicle travelling at 100km/h, but you gotta start somewhere!
My big lesson in game suck-factor was after getting about 3/4 way through Police Quest (yes, the original) and finding out that because I hadn't collected my wallet from the locker in the first sequence in the game (about 2 weeks playing time ago), I couldn't get any further in the game.
I couldn't just return to the station and collect the wallet, oh no, it was all over, and had been ever since I'd made that first mistake. I don't think I played it again after that.
You could use a sort of time dilation effect - game time starts to slow as the time since last control movement increases.
Maybe not so good for multiplayer, or at least require some tweaking.
Here's another benefit - anyone who's been a kid (or dealt with kids) and trying to distract their attention away from a game, the excuse is always "I can't pause now" or "hang on, just a minute". If you have a game that you can literally drop and walk away from, it changes the way you interact with it.
U.S. authorities accused him of violating U.N. sanctions imposed against Yugoslavia by playing the match.
Yeah 'cos we all know about the US's unwavering respect for the UN...
But only when it suits...
It was fun to spike my stats (scroll down to hourly stats) with a comment originated mini-slashdotting :)
It's interesting, the hit rate exhibits a lovely exponential decay...not like the crunching, grinding burning shriek that will come when I get front page coverage for my project - admins beware!! muhahahahahaha!!