I always had a real issue with the whole Pokemon concept, especially in its animated incarnation. I mean, essentially what we have is kids training their "animals" to beat the crap outta each other with various attacks. How is this crap different than training pit bulls to rip each other apart, or roosters to kill each other?
Well, umm, it's maybe different in that, umm, IT'S NOT REAL!!! Much better that the kiddies run around digitally fragging, maiming, blah blah blah than doing it for real, no?
Can you point me to a good summary of the status of Linux on iPAQ? WiFi support, all that? I'm drooling over a Linux PDA, but iPAQ hardware is more available - and I'll be damned if I use WinCE under any circumstances.
I am an embedded linux developer, so am not afraid of hacking, just want a decent base to work from. Have one kernel port up my sleeve, not ready to start another one yet!:-)
Travelling to USA in just over a week will be a good opportunity to pick up a good Linux-capable iPAQ at a fraction of the cost buying it here in Oz.
they may have opened the source, but it is not anywhere near what you OSS developers like.
they will almost certainly NOT accept source from other people; (although they may take suggestions, i'm sure).
It doesn't work like this. To get a project hosted at sourceforge, you have to choose a license from a variety of FOSS models (GPL is one, there are many others).
There is nothing stopping someone taking this code and forking it, if the (presumably Microsoft-based) project admins won't take their patches.
how much extra material would have been required to soften the landing enough for them to be sure?
The point is that every extra gram of spacecraft mass required to "soften the landing" would had to have been launched, inserted into orbit, kickec out of orbit, and kicked back into the earth's atmosphere, along with the milligrams of actual solar wind material.
So, you add, say, 1 kilogram (a very low estimate) of spacecraft mass, to protect the aerogel panels, you've then got to add the extra propellant necessary to shift that mass around...
Mass = money in the spacecraft biz - much easier to do what's been done plenty of times before, and catch it on the way down. The only real difference is that this payload has been inserted back into earth orbit, rather than just coming from there like the spy sats others have talked about.
But anyway, I do this for a living, and my first bit of fun was to port the Linux kernel to run on an FPGA-based processor, the Xilinx Microblaze.
Next step, work I'm doing at the moment, is to map the reconfiguration memory into the Linux device heiracrchy, so I build self-reconfiguring Linux systems. Imagine Arnie in T2 operating on himself, and you're getting the idea.
Doing it this way, I can type something like
cat bitstream.bit >/dev/self
and it causes the fpga-based linux system to partially reconfigure the FPGA itself, swapping in new hardware functionality.
ipodLinux is based on uClinux, which is a version of Linux that runs on processors without an MMU (Memory Management Unit).
The research group where I work is quite involved in embedded linux work. Last year I
ported the Linux kernel to an FPGA-based processor called Microblaze. I'm now doing all sorts of fun stuff involving dynamically self-modifying hardware and other bizarro stuff. All good fun.
uClinux is running in something like 20 million devices, ranging from DVD players to netowrking routers and embedded VPN servers.
Give it a couple of years, and the embedded linux market will make the desktop look puny. The talk on slashdot is all about the Linux desktop, but Linux is already winning the real war, embedded systems.
Every time you send an email, surf the web, bid on ebay, whatever, you should do so with the expectation that the entire world is reading over your shoulder.
The sooner we start encrypting email by default, the better.
Record shops sell CD with all the artwork aswell as the actual media, so would you be entitled to the artwork aswell as the media?
Probably not.
Indeed, since a CD that sells for $AU30 probably only sends at most $2 to the original artist (remember them, the person who generates the work in the first place!?:), a cynic might argue that they will happily give me a discount, of roughly $2. The rest is distribution, marketing, media, reproduction etc. So we pay the record company twice, but not the artist!
you've bought the right to that particular issue of the soundtrack. If you can derive lossy or exact duplicates of it, then you should be allowed to, as the essence of what you have got is the same. You don't have the right to the new stunning 5.1 surround mix, as you haven't actually paid for that. That would be my assumption anyway...
I agree... so how about the reverse, I go out and buy the SACD version. Do I now have the right to walk into a record shop (or to the publisher's HQ) and say "here's my $2, I want a copy of this album on CD"..
Again, probably not. But I definitely should have the right to make a gritty 64kbps mp3 encoding to listen to on my cochlear implanted mp3 player!:)
These are all rhetorical questions, but I think it's interesting to explore the extremities of these issues, that's where the interesting stuff is...
In the real world, this is why we have the courts, to interpret the written law according to contemporary societal values. It's also why it's vital that lobby groups like RIAA not be allowed to extinguish these principles of fair use.
Dammit, that's "Bush bootlicker", not "US bootlicker".
Most of us up here in the US would like to see the architect of the War for Oil out as much as you'd like to see Howard out, if not more.
Fair call - I was just quoting what was painted on the side of the Navy vessel.
Wandering way OT, but it was a real education for me travelling to the US last year at the height of the Iraq invasion, a vast majority of USians I spoke to (admittedly mostly tech/research types) felt the same way...
Your "error" is to assume reasonableness on the part of the record company.
The reasonable approach would be to pay a media-replacement fee, say $2 or so.
The really tricky problem is about the obsolescence of media. Let's say I bought "Dark Side of the Moon" on CD a few years ago. Now it's been re-released as an SACD with a stunning 5.1 surround mix etc etc. Have i bought the rights to "Dark Side of the Moon" as an entity, or just as a particular instance?
I should have added, that the AUSFTA includes requirements that Australia implement DMCA-style anti-circumvention laws. So if it passes in its current form, you can effectively say goodbyte to format-shifting for encrypted media.
An interest comment elsewhere that NZ forbits DVD region coding, and so they bloody should. Talk about doing nothing against piracy, and everything against fair use!
I don't know why you feel you have some god given right to freely distribute something that you don't own...
I'm all for fair use - I bought it, I can transfer media, backup and so on.
But insistence that you should be able to freely distribute material is just ammunition for the RIAA, ARIA and other industry lobbiest bastards' weapons against fair use.
glibc is huge - certainly much to big for embedded systems, which is where the real cutting edge is these days.
Instead, you guys should look at uClibc - a small, fast, and sleek implemention of glibc, that is finding its way into more and more devices every day.
We are talking about an order of magnitude smaller code footprint here people.
If you want the embedded world to jump on to this bandwagon - uClibc is the only way.
This is a great example of why slashdot should really rethink some of its content aprovers.
There is an easy solution - login, go to Preferences -> Homepage, and under "Exclude Stories from the Homepage", put a little tick next to Timothy. You'll never see anything from him again!
BTW judging from recent form I'd have to agree with you
Anybody out there like to comment? Is it a possibility? Could we come back with another rover and get Opportunity working again after it runs out of juice?
The bigger problem is that after X years with no power, thermal effects (ie hot-cold cycling) on the electronics and drive motors etc would have rendered them mostly useless.
However, that doesn't mean there's no point going back to check it out. That's exactly what Apollo 12 did - they executed a planned landing within several hundred meters of an earlier Surveyor probe, cut bits off it (the TV camera) and brought them back to Earth for analysis.
One of the more interesting findings was
bacteria - someone had apparently sneezed near the camera when it was being assembled, and the bacteria was still viable after several years on the surface of the moon....
Slashdot Mirror
Well, umm, it's maybe different in that, umm, IT'S NOT REAL!!! Much better that the kiddies run around digitally fragging, maiming, blah blah blah than doing it for real, no?
This is starting to shit me - I'm all for shameless self-promotion but goddammit make sure you've got a server that will last more than 10 seconds!
Can I also please make the Ob/. joke that the page is clearly being hosted on the pokemon-mini they've hacked?
Can you point me to a good summary of the status of Linux on iPAQ? WiFi support, all that? I'm drooling over a Linux PDA, but iPAQ hardware is more available - and I'll be damned if I use WinCE under any circumstances.
I am an embedded linux developer, so am not afraid of hacking, just want a decent base to work from. Have one kernel port up my sleeve, not ready to start another one yet! :-)
Travelling to USA in just over a week will be a good opportunity to pick up a good Linux-capable iPAQ at a fraction of the cost buying it here in Oz.
Thanks,
Deep truth this person is speaking.
The Z6000, like all Zaurii before it, has a sliding cover thumb keyboard built in...
they will almost certainly NOT accept source from other people; (although they may take suggestions, i'm sure).
It doesn't work like this. To get a project hosted at sourceforge, you have to choose a license from a variety of FOSS models (GPL is one, there are many others).
There is nothing stopping someone taking this code and forking it, if the (presumably Microsoft-based) project admins won't take their patches.
The point is that every extra gram of spacecraft mass required to "soften the landing" would had to have been launched, inserted into orbit, kickec out of orbit, and kicked back into the earth's atmosphere, along with the milligrams of actual solar wind material.
So, you add, say, 1 kilogram (a very low estimate) of spacecraft mass, to protect the aerogel panels, you've then got to add the extra propellant necessary to shift that mass around...
Mass = money in the spacecraft biz - much easier to do what's been done plenty of times before, and catch it on the way down. The only real difference is that this payload has been inserted back into earth orbit, rather than just coming from there like the spy sats others have talked about.
But anyway, I do this for a living, and my first bit of fun was to port the Linux kernel to run on an FPGA-based processor, the Xilinx Microblaze.
Next step, work I'm doing at the moment, is to map the reconfiguration memory into the Linux device heiracrchy, so I build self-reconfiguring Linux systems. Imagine Arnie in T2 operating on himself, and you're getting the idea.
Doing it this way, I can type something like
cat bitstream.bit > /dev/self
and it causes the fpga-based linux system to partially reconfigure the FPGA itself, swapping in new hardware functionality.
fun stuff..
I'm doing a manual update now - slow slow slow...
Microsoft have initiated a DoS attack on their own server!
The hard work is arranging the licensing. You know - negotiation, people skills, all that? sheesh -- yep got karma to burn
ipodLinux is based on uClinux, which is a version of Linux that runs on processors without an MMU (Memory Management Unit).
The research group where I work is quite involved in embedded linux work. Last year I ported the Linux kernel to an FPGA-based processor called Microblaze. I'm now doing all sorts of fun stuff involving dynamically self-modifying hardware and other bizarro stuff. All good fun.
uClinux is running in something like 20 million devices, ranging from DVD players to netowrking routers and embedded VPN servers.
Give it a couple of years, and the embedded linux market will make the desktop look puny. The talk on slashdot is all about the Linux desktop, but Linux is already winning the real war, embedded systems.
encrpyted email
Every time you send an email, surf the web, bid on ebay, whatever, you should do so with the expectation that the entire world is reading over your shoulder.
The sooner we start encrypting email by default, the better.
How's "get fucked" sound?
Yeah yeah contractions blah blah
Probably not.
Indeed, since a CD that sells for $AU30 probably only sends at most $2 to the original artist (remember them, the person who generates the work in the first place!? :), a cynic might argue that they will happily give me a discount, of roughly $2. The rest is distribution, marketing, media, reproduction etc. So we pay the record company twice, but not the artist!
I agree... so how about the reverse, I go out and buy the SACD version. Do I now have the right to walk into a record shop (or to the publisher's HQ) and say "here's my $2, I want a copy of this album on CD"..
Again, probably not. But I definitely should have the right to make a gritty 64kbps mp3 encoding to listen to on my cochlear implanted mp3 player! :)
These are all rhetorical questions, but I think it's interesting to explore the extremities of these issues, that's where the interesting stuff is...
In the real world, this is why we have the courts, to interpret the written law according to contemporary societal values. It's also why it's vital that lobby groups like RIAA not be allowed to extinguish these principles of fair use.
Most of us up here in the US would like to see the architect of the War for Oil out as much as you'd like to see Howard out, if not more.
Fair call - I was just quoting what was painted on the side of the Navy vessel.
Wandering way OT, but it was a real education for me travelling to the US last year at the height of the Iraq invasion, a vast majority of USians I spoke to (admittedly mostly tech/research types) felt the same way...
The reasonable approach would be to pay a media-replacement fee, say $2 or so.
The really tricky problem is about the obsolescence of media. Let's say I bought "Dark Side of the Moon" on CD a few years ago. Now it's been re-released as an SACD with a stunning 5.1 surround mix etc etc. Have i bought the rights to "Dark Side of the Moon" as an entity, or just as a particular instance?
An interest comment elsewhere that NZ forbits DVD region coding, and so they bloody should. Talk about doing nothing against piracy, and everything against fair use!
I'm all for fair use - I bought it, I can transfer media, backup and so on.
But insistence that you should be able to freely distribute material is just ammunition for the RIAA, ARIA and other industry lobbiest bastards' weapons against fair use.
With any luck, we'll be rid of Howard (US bootlicker) in November, so don't forget to speak to opposition MPs as well.
Instead, you guys should look at uClibc - a small, fast, and sleek implemention of glibc, that is finding its way into more and more devices every day.
We are talking about an order of magnitude smaller code footprint here people.
If you want the embedded world to jump on to this bandwagon - uClibc is the only way.
Or better still, build a Timex/Spectrum in an FPGA and clock it as fast as you like...
There is an easy solution - login, go to Preferences -> Homepage, and under "Exclude Stories from the Homepage", put a little tick next to Timothy. You'll never see anything from him again!
BTW judging from recent form I'd have to agree with you
The bigger problem is that after X years with no power, thermal effects (ie hot-cold cycling) on the electronics and drive motors etc would have rendered them mostly useless.
However, that doesn't mean there's no point going back to check it out. That's exactly what Apollo 12 did - they executed a planned landing within several hundred meters of an earlier Surveyor probe, cut bits off it (the TV camera) and brought them back to Earth for analysis.
One of the more interesting findings was bacteria - someone had apparently sneezed near the camera when it was being assembled, and the bacteria was still viable after several years on the surface of the moon....