(Now I'm imagining iNTEL implementing new multiple IO bus controller silicon so that their multiple CPUs can get at system resources more easily.)
There is actually good reason for designing IO de devices so that the CPU that controls them communicates on a bus that is not shared with a lot of other stuff.
Not to say that multiple IO busses is a bad idea. (I exit stage left to go reread the specs on Sun's processors.)
From what I was just reading now, maybe the RNA world which some theorists have speculated (theorized) predated the DNA biological world we presently live in was the place where something like viruses could reproduce themselves.
But I'm probably misunderstanding everything I read today.
My personal opinion?
I remember playing with a 6802 prototyping board with a flaky power-on reset circuit. (I used cheap switches from Radio Shack.) It had a monitor ROM, of course, then later it had BASIC in ROM. If power came up too fast, the ROM would not be ready to put the reset vector on the bus, and the CPU would jump somewhere else. Sometimes, if the reset button worked, I could look at RAM, and I would find bits and pieces of the ROM sitting out there. Until the thing stabilized, sometimes it was not particular interesting, but sometimes it would dump almost intelligible strings, or even clots of error messages or the symbol tables into video RAM.
I had read, at the time, about how computers with disk drives had to have good power-on reset circuits, or had to be booted up with no media in the drives, and media loaded after the operator stabilized the CPU. Otherwise, the disk drives would tend to get told to write random data on the disks, which, of course, kind of ruins the whole purpose of having disks.
I had also read that (some of?) the first computer viruses were inspired by some of the junk that was left in memory by such episodes of uncontrolled execution.
So I have tended to wonder whether it might not be the case that viruses are not some independent remnants of proto-life, but are rather the results of genetic accidents.
I'm not sure we could tell the difference from looking at the archeological record.
But it's interesting that one of the biologists the friendly article quotes made a comment that almost equated viruses with God.
With a machine like this, a qualified teacher can write his/her own textbooks.
With a machine like this and a qualified teacher with a certain form of ambition, the kids can write their own textbooks.
Learning? How much did I learn from those expensive (tax-payed) textbooks I had in elementary? How often did I crack them? Why did I prefer the family Encyclopedia set?
How much more would I have learned had I had a machine like this to take notes on?
This is the company that brings you your drive-buy infections. By the dozens. Not theoretical, but in the wild.
Because they have this compulsion about putting tech into the general market before it's ready, and they have this aversion toward cleaning up their own messes.
There is only so much of this kind of market pollution the industry can take.
And you want us to bet on a Microsoft-grown technology? Half-stolen^H^H^H^H^H^Hborrowed without asking, just like pretty much everything they produce?
(I remember a story about a dangerous man named Midas.)
Even, contrary to what some say, technical alternatives capable of being implemented in large institutions.
There are still no alternatives in the _common_ _perception_ of the market place. There are no alternatives on TV.
Well, the Mac is on TV, but it is most definitely _not_ an alternative. Jobs would have to let it be legally installable on whitebox hardware first. We're not just talking about letting Dell and HP make and sell Mac OS pre-installed boxes. Your local integrator has to be able to install it, without too many hurdles, and at a cost that leaves him some profit.
So, the technical alternative on TV is neither a marketplace alternative nor a market alternative. And Jobs _can't_ push the Mac OS into full confrontation in the marketplace like that until he has something to fight MSOffice with. (OpenOffice is close, but still not quite there.)
No (valid) Linux distro is on TV. It has no presence in the perceived market. So, while it is a technical alternative and a market alternative, it is not a _marketplace_ alternative.
So, one step which could be taken is for RedHat and IBM to start pumping ads into the prime-time TV stream.
Or, Microsoft could (be ordered to) get out of the stream.
(And we may need to put similar restrictions on iNTEL, if they fail to convert their Classmate project into a machine that meets the OLPC specs and offer OLPC as an alternative on it. The "iNTEL Inside" labels are they same kind of thing.)
Of course, we don't want to suggest that RedHat and IBM start trying to bribe and threaten people, even if they could afford to get in a bribing war with Microsoft.
One relief I could think of that might not be unreasonable for a court to order when a company continues to behave like Microsoft. Strip them of all their patents and bar them from obtaining more patents until their market presence drops below 50%. (Trade one monopoly for another.)
It's infel's Classmate that is trying to be the cheap "everyman's computer".
Or, I could correct your little composition:
The thing is, Otellini's $300 laptop suffers from the same flaw as Ford's Model T ultimately did.
A used computer will probably give you more capability than a cheap new one. I think for the price of the XO, you could buy a notebook that's better than this "everyman's computer", and while you were at it, you could probably buy a used generator. And neither the kids nor their teachers would be able to use them anyway.
All those who are worried about support can go to the olpc wiki and look at the pilot projects in progress. The only reason there would be logistics problems is if infel and Micro$oft deliberately interfered.
Microsoft is making noise about porting MSWindows to the XO.
We'll only see that if the XO beats their current hand of dirty tricks. But that one is not one you can lay at the feet of OLPC. It's Steve Ballmer's move, and if he doesn't move, well, he's the one denying XO purchasers the choice.
That MSWxp/MSie would bog down on the hardware is not due to anyone's suppression of choice, it's due to hardware design goals that favor lightweight software, goals that are driven by the target environment. The Classmate is going to bite deep mud in the markets they are being sold into (which will ultimately be yet another excuse to divert them away from the children).
Linux on XO?
Hello? I see a light on upstairs, anyone home?
What's left? Ahh. NetBSD.
Give us a little time. You know where some of those one-for-two are going.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, how about some intelligent USB controllers to convert from USB nodes to ethernet?
If I had the spare time, I'd try to build some, maybe with ARM or MCORE or something similarly cheap and low power.
How many busses between the CPU and IO devices?
How many busses between the CPU and peripherals?
(Now I'm imagining iNTEL implementing new multiple IO bus controller silicon so that their multiple CPUs can get at system resources more easily.)
There is actually good reason for designing IO de devices so that the CPU that controls them communicates on a bus that is not shared with a lot of other stuff.
Not to say that multiple IO busses is a bad idea. (I exit stage left to go reread the specs on Sun's processors.)
Wow.
...
That's kind of like the difference between the typical floppy interfaces way back when and SCSI.
And (was it Xebec?) they extended the floppy interface concepts to provide cheap HD interfaces (IDE).
Which would compare to
(And I've always been in favor of making even keyboards be intelligent enough to be independent nodes on the network.)
I think you missed something there.
Or maybe they'll target Target and end up frying Frys.
(I seem to have this reflex for delivering straight lines.)
Makes one think strange things.
From what I was just reading now, maybe the RNA world which some theorists have speculated (theorized) predated the DNA biological world we presently live in was the place where something like viruses could reproduce themselves.
But I'm probably misunderstanding everything I read today.
My personal opinion?
I remember playing with a 6802 prototyping board with a flaky power-on reset circuit. (I used cheap switches from Radio Shack.) It had a monitor ROM, of course, then later it had BASIC in ROM. If power came up too fast, the ROM would not be ready to put the reset vector on the bus, and the CPU would jump somewhere else. Sometimes, if the reset button worked, I could look at RAM, and I would find bits and pieces of the ROM sitting out there. Until the thing stabilized, sometimes it was not particular interesting, but sometimes it would dump almost intelligible strings, or even clots of error messages or the symbol tables into video RAM.
I had read, at the time, about how computers with disk drives had to have good power-on reset circuits, or had to be booted up with no media in the drives, and media loaded after the operator stabilized the CPU. Otherwise, the disk drives would tend to get told to write random data on the disks, which, of course, kind of ruins the whole purpose of having disks.
I had also read that (some of?) the first computer viruses were inspired by some of the junk that was left in memory by such episodes of uncontrolled execution.
So I have tended to wonder whether it might not be the case that viruses are not some independent remnants of proto-life, but are rather the results of genetic accidents.
I'm not sure we could tell the difference from looking at the archeological record.
But it's interesting that one of the biologists the friendly article quotes made a comment that almost equated viruses with God.
Anybody besides me that can't find the second page?
I had to manually change the page parameter on the url to page=4 to get the last page.
Hmmm. page=2.5 seems to get a page between the first and last. I wonder if there are more.
and not everyone thinks the other guys' fetishes are all that interesting.
HTH/HAND
With a machine like this, a qualified teacher can write his/her own textbooks.
With a machine like this and a qualified teacher with a certain form of ambition, the kids can write their own textbooks.
Learning? How much did I learn from those expensive (tax-payed) textbooks I had in elementary? How often did I crack them? Why did I prefer the family Encyclopedia set?
How much more would I have learned had I had a machine like this to take notes on?
I just did. Found Bill O'Reilly's web page and the wikipedia article, etc.
I think the joke has something to do with spin doctoring, but I wouldn't swear to it.
One of the UWB camps based its "modulation" on what is probably the only secure wireless encryption technique in existence. Yes, iNTEL killed it.
My memory is that it is already cracked. No links at the moment.
Why has no one bothered cracking the non-bluetooth wireless?
Wired keyboards put out RFI. My guess is that the perception that no one has bothered is probably a misperception.
(Real) UWB is probably the only way to be reasonably secure without wires (and shielding).
also produce RFI
That's one reason for me to be running the other way.
Data lockin, here we come. Not.
Ubuntu, would be my guess. Or Mandrake or whatever.
Fedora's not bad either, but it really isn't for the masses.
Next OS I buy (new, anyway) will probably be RedHat's Enterprise. But that's me, and you are not I.
You want some of that Midas gold, huh?
You seriously recommend betting on Microsoft?
This is the company that brings you your drive-buy infections. By the dozens. Not theoretical, but in the wild.
Because they have this compulsion about putting tech into the general market before it's ready, and they have this aversion toward cleaning up their own messes.
There is only so much of this kind of market pollution the industry can take.
And you want us to bet on a Microsoft-grown technology? Half-stolen^H^H^H^H^H^Hborrowed without asking, just like pretty much everything they produce?
(I remember a story about a dangerous man named Midas.)
Yes, there are technical alternatives.
Even, contrary to what some say, technical alternatives capable of being implemented in large institutions.
There are still no alternatives in the _common_ _perception_ of the market place. There are no alternatives on TV.
Well, the Mac is on TV, but it is most definitely _not_ an alternative. Jobs would have to let it be legally installable on whitebox hardware first. We're not just talking about letting Dell and HP make and sell Mac OS pre-installed boxes. Your local integrator has to be able to install it, without too many hurdles, and at a cost that leaves him some profit.
So, the technical alternative on TV is neither a marketplace alternative nor a market alternative. And Jobs _can't_ push the Mac OS into full confrontation in the marketplace like that until he has something to fight MSOffice with. (OpenOffice is close, but still not quite there.)
No (valid) Linux distro is on TV. It has no presence in the perceived market. So, while it is a technical alternative and a market alternative, it is not a _marketplace_ alternative.
So, one step which could be taken is for RedHat and IBM to start pumping ads into the prime-time TV stream.
Or, Microsoft could (be ordered to) get out of the stream.
(And we may need to put similar restrictions on iNTEL, if they fail to convert their Classmate project into a machine that meets the OLPC specs and offer OLPC as an alternative on it. The "iNTEL Inside" labels are they same kind of thing.)
Of course, we don't want to suggest that RedHat and IBM start trying to bribe and threaten people, even if they could afford to get in a bribing war with Microsoft.
One relief I could think of that might not be unreasonable for a court to order when a company continues to behave like Microsoft. Strip them of all their patents and bar them from obtaining more patents until their market presence drops below 50%. (Trade one monopoly for another.)
Probability and statistics. Everybody with mod points had already moved on to a new thread.
of the next floor down.
You know, looking at the world upside down.
It's infel's Classmate that is trying to be the cheap "everyman's computer".
Or, I could correct your little composition:
All those who are worried about support can go to the olpc wiki and look at the pilot projects in progress. The only reason there would be logistics problems is if infel and Micro$oft deliberately interfered.
It's where the next big thing always come from,
although by the time it hits the market the lunatics have moved on and never get to cash in.
Microsoft is making noise about porting MSWindows to the XO.
We'll only see that if the XO beats their current hand of dirty tricks. But that one is not one you can lay at the feet of OLPC. It's Steve Ballmer's move, and if he doesn't move, well, he's the one denying XO purchasers the choice.
That MSWxp/MSie would bog down on the hardware is not due to anyone's suppression of choice, it's due to hardware design goals that favor lightweight software, goals that are driven by the target environment. The Classmate is going to bite deep mud in the markets they are being sold into (which will ultimately be yet another excuse to divert them away from the children).
Linux on XO?
Hello? I see a light on upstairs, anyone home?
What's left? Ahh. NetBSD.
Give us a little time. You know where some of those one-for-two are going.
IHBT
is going to built on on top of openBSD.
And it's still not going to be secure.
And Theo will introduce a license provision that large corporations must not admit to using his software.