they'd NEVER survive the death of Windows OS IMO. The reason being it has been the control of the OS and its APIs which have allowed them to push all their other software onto users. Today, they are a 3 headed snake with the Windows OS, Windows Office, and Windows Server software providing close to equal revenues and profits. BUT, you take away the Windows OS and the other two fall fast and hard.
They have, and will continue to do, anything to protect the Windows OS. With the profits of these business in the 80% range, no expense is too great. Trust me, they'll NEVER survive without the Windows OS, never. IMO
hmmm, after the last attack, they collected fingernail clippers from passengers on airplanes and people who entered government buildings, national monuments...
A cyber attack you say? They'll probably start collecting USB thumbdrives from people entering those same structures and probably add Starbucks and cyber-cafes to the list.;-) Then, 5 years later they'll figure out it isn't a good idea to be running Microsoft Windows on all their computers. Just a guess.
Runnng multiple OS 'personalities' on one computer at the same time? That was called the WorkplaceOS and was targeted at the PowerPC platform IBM, Apple, and others were working on in the early 1990's. Apple pulled the rug out from under it when the first version of the hardware was released( PREP ) but Apple decided it wasn't good enough. They all worked on a new design for another 2 years and came out with CHRP. For a short time, Apple supported this and even license the Mac OS to 3rd party CHRP hardware vendors but when Jobs came back, that was all terminated.
it would have been nice....a base OS with your HOST personality of choice and then you purchase client OS's which handle running application written for that platform but only load up in a window of your HOST personality. Kinda like how OS/2 runs Windows apps with the Windows system digging into the OS/2 system for hardware support.
for crying out loud, how off-topic do you people want to get? The topic is about desktop computers and the mention of Apple not being a monopoly was related to that, the desktop. Please look at the context of the thread.
Apples monopoly in handheld media players has nothing to do with running Windows in a VM or who Apple ties its desktop/server OS to its hardware.
right you are and I need to be more aware of how I use the term, monopoly. There is nothing wrong with being a monopoly and it's the goal of many businesses. It's just that the "business game" changes when you are a monopoly. Well, unless you are Microsoft...
Nicely put and it sounds like this whole thing is a non-issue. That is unless just the threat of Microsoft pulling you into court scares you.
As you stated it, it sounds like they would never want this to go to court since it's likely the whole EULA threat would be washed away. But, who would be willing to pay for a 5+ year court battle with Microsoft regardless of the truthiness of it all?
haven't been around very long I see. It's called the "tying arrangement" and if you were REALLY interested, it's just a google search away. But I'll help you a bit.
Microsoft is a convicted monopoly and as such they are NOT allowed to the same 'competitive' practices as others. The "convicted" part is stated because they've already shown to have used their monopoly position illegally under the rules of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Apple is not even close to being a monopoly so they can do as they please under normal competitive rules.
Why is this soooo difficult for people to understand....
4. USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the
licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.
What is a "licensed device"? Is Microsoft saying that they are once again, locking their OS to the hardware?
Now, what would the "licensed device" be with a standalone copy of Vista Home Basic if the original intent is to run it in a VM? There is no licensed device unless the VM image is the licensed device?
The way I read what the EULA is attempting to say, they don't allow you to run the version of Microsoft Windows Vista, which you purchased with the computer, inside a virtual machine on that computer or any other computer. ie you can't have the same licensed software installed in two or more places.
Maybe China was just trying to offset the global warming scale by putting up an umbrella of junk to block the sun?;-)
You KNOW this is going to get brought up by someone in the "global warming doesn't exist" club.
Seriously, when I heard about China blowing up that satelite, the first thing that came into my mind was all the debre floating around up there. Getting vehicles to the space station, or other, is already like throwing a ball through a swarm of killer bees and hope to not hit one.
If that is their public face on it then not only are they failing but it goes against their marketing plans.
The cross-platform stuff out there from OTHER companies exist with different motives. Those businesses need to see that the product works across as many platforms( and versions of Windows ) as possible. So long as it makes sense to do so and in the case for Java, if the JDK or JRE are there, tons of stuff come along for the ride. They want their stuff working on older systems and spend the time and effort making sure it does.
Microsoft, they talk about it but have not delivered for 15 years and won't. Not because they can't but because it's against their business plan, against their profit making business of selling new copies of MS Windows. They want incompatabilities to force upgrades. This treadmill is called the Microsoft Economy. I would doubt you'll see MS.Net support going very far back and as it moves forward, I'd expect to see additions breaking backward support. After all, they are fighting their own saturated market more then Linux and Mac.
(big with Slashdotters, but not even a blip on the radar screen with 99% of Microsoft's customer base)
you know, this makes me think that this "cross platform" stuff should not be pushed as 'cross OS' but instead, it should be talked about in relation to working across Microsofts various OS's and their versions. Here are two scenarios in this regard:
1:
developer1-"Look, why don't we start these new projects on JBOSS and Java? It's all cross-platform and we can not only run it on our Windows Server 2003 machines, if we could also run it on a Linux server."
developer2-"Who cares about Linux, we're a Microsoft shop so it doesn't matter if the project runs on Linux."
2:
developer1-"Look, why don't we start these new project on JBOSS and JAVA? It's all cross-platform and we can not only run it on our Windows Server 2003 machines, it'll also run it on that Windows Server 2000 machine we have running just a few database translations a week. And, it'll run on and can be developed on the Windows XP machines we all have."
developer2-"You mean the app software will run on those without having to upgrade them? That's cool and if it works, we won't have to deal with changing everything again when we have to bring in the Vista Server machines."
There's one tiny little problem here. The fox is incharge of the hen house. Do people STILL think that Microsoft is going to let there be a nice clean efficient and seamless migration from Microsoft OOXML to ODF? They might say they will and they might show some demo of that but as history is my witness, they'll be tweaking those ODF docs in places the sun don't shine. And the result will be less than an easy to use converter.
Just ask yourself, what profit motives does Microsoft have in making this work? What profit motives do they have by making people THINK it's going to work? If Microsoft was so willing to enable this, why isn't it a builtin feature to MS Word?
Nope, it's a timebomb waiting to blow up in many many a businesspersons face. A few government officials faces too I suspect. After all, it's the "One Microsoft Way".;-) IMO.
Well, I wasn't bringing up the Global Warming issue with my statement, just that Cheney/Bush are tied to the oil industry so tightly that they are making policy based on keeping oil profits high. IMO, 6 years ago, oil usage worldwide was known and it was known that China and India, etc were going to want much much more. And the Cheney/Bush hydrogen/hybrid cockup has more to do with how we need to reduce our consumption to reduce our need for oil related 'efforts' outiside the country. The side-effect of more efficient vehicles being less poluting is great too.
And BTW, if anybody thinks that the amount of crud we put into the air is NOT effecting climate, they must be kidding themselves. Burn one candle in your home and it's no big deal, burn a thousand and see what happens to the air quality and temp. We put alot more shit in the air than ever before and it's not getting washed out in the rain. Visually, the sunsets in the last 15 years over the Pacific Ocean have become consistently quite abit more colorful. And I don't know if it's true, but supposedly measureable air polution from over the Pacific is reaching the West Coast of the US. Like I said, I'd not verified the source but remember reading that testing was ongoing.
I also think our scientists have come a very long way from the days when someone thought up global cooling and it took off. But hey, look at how the public took ahold of hydrogen cars. Then never once questioned how come it was OK to talk about and show million dollar hydrogen prototypes while the auto industry also claimed that hybrid tech adds too much to the cost of the car(~$3000-$5000). Nobody questions these things. Heck, and if you do you're called UnAmerican or UnPatriotic. IMO
come on, show me proof that Cheney/Bush did not terminate that US hybrid vehicle project. Did not create a hydrogen vehicle smoke screen which in 6 years has only produced multi-million dollar prototypes with nothing but dreams of some break-throughs that'll bring the production costs even CLOSE to todays costs. Tell me that the US auto industry was NOT publicly saying they were going to product hybrid gas-electric vehicles in late 1999 and early 2000 and by mid 2000, drop all recognition of gas-electric hybrid vehicles and spend billions on hydrogen prototypes.
Oh, and tell me that Bush did not mock hybrids and Al Gore during his run up to the 2000 election.
Naw, Cheney/Bush had nothing to do with all that. It was the terrorists! No wait, it was Saddam! Ya, that's the ticket...Saddam made them doit. Get real.
I'd like to see if this digs up anything along the lines of Microsoft marketing kickbacks and how it tied Windows to the OEM like thumb and index fingers on a child playing with superglue( or white on rice, stink on shit, etc ).
I've heard that over 20% of Dells profits come directly from marketing Windows. you know, 'we recommend Microsoft Windows XP' on ever page on it's website, the 12 MS windows stickers on keyboards, mice, monitor, case with ever new Dell PC. Oh, and don't forget the 'there are too many Linux distributions so we'll just wait on that' from Dell.
Then, must maybe people will understand why HP, Dell, etc don't ship Linux. After all, those 'marketing dollars' were not part of the DOJ vs MSFT settlement and pulling any of that back because of interest in Linux would not be breaking the settlement rules. What this means is that it would take a whole new case, a long drawn out case as opposed to the instant sanctions possible from settlement infractions.
Still, it's too bad Dell had to resort to accepting this instead of promoting competition in the CPU market. I guess it was easier for them to stick with one vendor as long as they kept kicking back $$$ at ever rumor of Dell going with AMD. This might not look good for Dell.
This is what I've been saying since the mess in 2000. You get electronic collection and a paper trail which not only can be quickly scanned/counted by a dumb-scanner( not much room for hacking ) but you also get something the voter or inspector can visually verify.
Like I said, I've been saying this since 2000 and all I see is the current mess with first touchscreens with no paper, then they have paper but it can't be scanned and must be read manually for a recount and in all cases, there's never been a verification of the touchscreens across the country. Only in a few places where it became obvous something was 'wrong'.
So GO Florida! At this rate, you might get a reliable/verifiable voting system in another 5-10 years. Way to go.:-/
You mean the same Cheney/Bush who, when he took office in 2000, created his own automotive energy project, moved the existing hybrid vehicle project( 7 years old ) into this new project, axed the old project, created and funded a hydrogen/hype vehicle project, then axed the hybrid vehicle project? The list goes on and on about the deals Cheney and Bush made which stalled or killed off efficiency projects and labs while making sure their buddies in the oil industry would grow their profits. Remember during the 2004 election campaign when Bush made a visit to a renewable energy lab in Colorado? It was found out a week earlier that he'd cut their funding and they were going to layoff over 40 employees right before Bush arrived. They got special funding in a matter of days before Bush arrived but the funding was only going to last about 1 year....
So this is not surprising. What gets my goat is that all the Republicans were just acting like lemmings and allowing Cheney/Bush to do whatever the wanted. Only now that he's a lame duck and the public FINALLY figured out Iraq is a screw-up, are some Republicans making statements against their( Cheney/Bush ) policies.
What a wonderful spineless group bunch of lemmings they are. IMO.
As I said earlier, these kids are not building a Preditor UAV and I think the garbage collection is helpful in it takes that aspect of programming out of their hands. When they move on to high levels of learning they can get to know the 'finer' details of what it's like to develope and keep track of your memory.
As far as 'regular vanilla Linux' goes, again, it's there, it's up to the task and in the case of DSL, there are a bunch of easy addon parts. Sure LRP could work but they would take the whole course just getting the pieces put together. I know, I used LRP years ago when no consumer routers existed. Still got the floppies and old 386/40 it ran on. Anyways, I think the idea here is getting a simple and quick system up where these kids can learn some programming and get the excitement of making software make things move and an good level of abstraction can be implemented to make sure the kids deal with only the parts they can handle in the time given.
And though something like DSL isn't tiny, there's alot of stuff to add 'flavor' to the project. Like wireless capabilities, IR, a camera, etc and it'll still run on a gutted PC mobo with 128MB of RAM and a 1GB CF card. I think it's still the 2.4 kernel so it's got that going for it.;-) Cost of the mobo is not going to be an issue and neither would performance at the level of learning required.
I also think there is something to being able to run your robotics learning software on any PC while developing it, test it on that same PC connected to the robotics platform to watch motors turn, sensors sense, and then copy the bytecode or jar file over to a CF card and plug that in and watch it go on its own. AND, the consistency of the developement language is the same for what's being done on the robot and on the desktop.
It's not the ultimate platform for robotics but I believe there are enough pieces, cheap pieces, good pieces to get the class up and running. And learning. Heck, they could make their robotics platform from an old UPS, some steppers from old floppy drived, scanners, printers, etc and a board from Trinamics with an RS232 port. Trinamics has a 3 port board they might get a discount on. The Trinamics interace language is pretty easy to make a Java wrapper for too.
So it might not be ideal, but I still believe that a DSL-Linux/Java module/CF-IDE robotics platform on an old PC mobo, along with Eclipse or NetBeans on the desktop, would make a good, cheap, learning platform for robotics. And I just might have to eat my own dog food and build this myself. Almost everyone has the parts. Two old printers with clogged print heads collecting dust, an old UPS with atleast alittle battery life, an old AMD socket mobo in the backroom. The tricky part is the wheel drive controller but I have one of those Trinamic boards from anothe project so it'll work for me. Others would probably get something from sparkfun.com. Now, it's just a matter of an axle, wheels, drive belts, and some screws for the robot platform. The platform/dev/build env would be DSL and a USB-drive if the mobo will boot from it, otherwise an CF-IDE interface and an old CF card. Eclipse on the desktop rounds out most of the needed stuff. Well, and some time... ah, one more thing would make this alittle better. Instead of a big desktop powersupply to plug into the UPS/robot, how about a 12V mobo powersupply like those sold by mini-box.com for those mini-EPIA boards? Something with a lower price would be better though.
Bummer that you're having so much of a problem patching in RT support. As you mentioned, others seemed to have been able to do it but I will agree, there is a 'nack' to getting all the ducks in a row when patching. I guess this is why a number of embedded Linux device makers use supported RT Linux kernels. So their developers can develop app code and not spend too much time on the environment/OS-subsystem.
That leads me to the comment on language. Because there are alot of pieces to a robotics puzzle, it seems to me that there is an advantage to having a widely used language, such as Java, which has a wealth of tools available and scales from the desktop PC down to a small embedded system-on-a-DIMM module. The instructor might be biting off more than he can chew but atleast, with something like Java, he could build the class objects in advance and for "programming" lessons, have the class adding only those objects and using only the methods he's provided. You know, to show them how to put pieces together. My guess is that 30% of the class time would be spent on teaching how the program/code is developed on a PC and loaded into the robot. 30% on how those programs are put together from a skeleton, 20% on hands-on modifications to the skeleton, and 20% on a project to try and get the robot to move through a simple course in a given period.
BTW, I will be looking at the MSP430 now that I've found an SPI library. It looks like a nice uCPU and TI does a nice job at letting you eval quickly and cheaply to get up on the uCPU.
I wouldn't exect the specified class to be targeting the next Darpa Grand Challenge any time soon. From what I understand of the requirements, they don't need any high end realtime control, just something easy to learn and hopefully something easy to more which has a couple of motors, wheels, and a bump sensor or two.
Given that, I'd go for something leveraging Java since it can be developed on most platforms, runs on most platforms, can be tought with good design techniques, there's free software available, a couple of good simulators available for free and written in Java. And, if you really want to go small, there's Gumstix, Snap, and a few other small singleboard/DIMM-sized boards which run Java.
All the parts are there for what they need. And when they've graduated, they can go to DOS if that's what they really want/need.
I was thinking along the lines of a standard PC mobo also. Old ones with RS232 ports are cheap and the older memory is cheap too. Now, add an CF->IDE interface board and there's no need for a harddrive. I would go with something like DSL( Damn Small Linux ) and include the Java package. Note that this is all pre-course prep work for the instructor so that the kids have a platform to work with.
There's also an open source Java based robotics simulator that'll let the kids control virtual robots on desktop computers first and then, move the code to the CF card and then plug it into the 'robot'. Ofcourse, some kind of wheeled platform is needed and I would look into seeing if Roomba would give a discount on some of their Create kits.
It's not plug-n-play but with a little work, a pretty cool teaching platform could be built and darn cheap too.
I wasn't interested in a "my numbers are bigger than your" discussion and obviously, there are more TOTAL Fedora user than the number of Fedora 6 users.
And yes, it's a big deal having data and the technique for getting those numbers. Shuttleworth didn't state where the numbers came from but also wasn't asked. My guess is those numbers came from their date servers since I've seen default Ubuntu installations setting/etc/default/ntpdate to point to ubuntu.com servers.
Anyway, it is great these numbers are getting out there and even better when they can be validated.
Now, the problem will be dealing with the bitch-slapping hardware vendors are going to get from Microsoft for even saying the "L" word.
Slashdot Mirror
they'd NEVER survive the death of Windows OS IMO. The reason being it has been the control of the OS and its APIs which have allowed them to push all their other software onto users. Today, they are a 3 headed snake with the Windows OS, Windows Office, and Windows Server software providing close to equal revenues and profits. BUT, you take away the Windows OS and the other two fall fast and hard.
They have, and will continue to do, anything to protect the Windows OS. With the profits of these business in the 80% range, no expense is too great. Trust me, they'll NEVER survive without the Windows OS, never. IMO
LoB
hmmm, after the last attack, they collected fingernail clippers from passengers on airplanes and people who entered government buildings, national monuments...
;-) Then, 5 years later they'll figure out it isn't a good idea to be running Microsoft Windows on all their computers. Just a guess.
A cyber attack you say? They'll probably start collecting USB thumbdrives from people entering those same structures and probably add Starbucks and cyber-cafes to the list.
LoB
Runnng multiple OS 'personalities' on one computer at the same time? That was called the WorkplaceOS and was targeted at the PowerPC platform IBM, Apple, and others were working on in the early 1990's. Apple pulled the rug out from under it when the first version of the hardware was released( PREP ) but Apple decided it wasn't good enough. They all worked on a new design for another 2 years and came out with CHRP. For a short time, Apple supported this and even license the Mac OS to 3rd party CHRP hardware vendors but when Jobs came back, that was all terminated.
it would have been nice....a base OS with your HOST personality of choice and then you purchase client OS's which handle running application written for that platform but only load up in a window of your HOST personality. Kinda like how OS/2 runs Windows apps with the Windows system digging into the OS/2 system for hardware support.
LoB
for crying out loud, how off-topic do you people want to get? The topic is about desktop computers and the mention of Apple not being a monopoly was related to that, the desktop. Please look at the context of the thread.
Apples monopoly in handheld media players has nothing to do with running Windows in a VM or who Apple ties its desktop/server OS to its hardware.
Wow, there's some serious ADD going on here.
LoB
and how does that relate to Microsoft Visa running in a VM( on a PC) and the MS Vista EULA?
right you are and I need to be more aware of how I use the term, monopoly. There is nothing wrong with being a monopoly and it's the goal of many businesses. It's just that the "business game" changes when you are a monopoly. Well, unless you are Microsoft...
LoB
Nicely put and it sounds like this whole thing is a non-issue. That is unless just the threat of Microsoft pulling you into court scares you.
As you stated it, it sounds like they would never want this to go to court since it's likely the whole EULA threat would be washed away. But, who would be willing to pay for a 5+ year court battle with Microsoft regardless of the truthiness of it all?
LoB
haven't been around very long I see. It's called the "tying arrangement" and if you were REALLY interested, it's just a google search away. But I'll help you a bit.
t
http://www.answers.com/topic/sherman-antitrust-ac
NOTE: look for the part called "tying arrangement".
LoB LOL
Microsoft is a convicted monopoly and as such they are NOT allowed to the same 'competitive' practices as others. The "convicted" part is stated because they've already shown to have used their monopoly position illegally under the rules of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Apple is not even close to being a monopoly so they can do as they please under normal competitive rules.
Why is this soooo difficult for people to understand....
LoB
What is a "licensed device"? Is Microsoft saying that they are once again, locking their OS to the hardware?
Now, what would the "licensed device" be with a standalone copy of Vista Home Basic if the original intent is to run it in a VM? There is no licensed device unless the VM image is the licensed device?
The way I read what the EULA is attempting to say, they don't allow you to run the version of Microsoft Windows Vista, which you purchased with the computer, inside a virtual machine on that computer or any other computer. ie you can't have the same licensed software installed in two or more places.
LoB
Maybe China was just trying to offset the global warming scale by putting up an umbrella of junk to block the sun? ;-)
You KNOW this is going to get brought up by someone in the "global warming doesn't exist" club.
Seriously, when I heard about China blowing up that satelite, the first thing that came into my mind was all the debre floating around up there. Getting vehicles to the space station, or other, is already like throwing a ball through a swarm of killer bees and hope to not hit one.
LoB
If that is their public face on it then not only are they failing but it goes against their marketing plans.
.Net support going very far back and as it moves forward, I'd expect to see additions breaking backward support. After all, they are fighting their own saturated market more then Linux and Mac.
The cross-platform stuff out there from OTHER companies exist with different motives. Those businesses need to see that the product works across as many platforms( and versions of Windows ) as possible. So long as it makes sense to do so and in the case for Java, if the JDK or JRE are there, tons of stuff come along for the ride. They want their stuff working on older systems and spend the time and effort making sure it does.
Microsoft, they talk about it but have not delivered for 15 years and won't. Not because they can't but because it's against their business plan, against their profit making business of selling new copies of MS Windows. They want incompatabilities to force upgrades. This treadmill is called the Microsoft Economy. I would doubt you'll see MS
IMO
LoB
you know, this makes me think that this "cross platform" stuff should not be pushed as 'cross OS' but instead, it should be talked about in relation to working across Microsofts various OS's and their versions.
Here are two scenarios in this regard:
1:
developer1-"Look, why don't we start these new projects on JBOSS and Java? It's all cross-platform and we can not only run it on our Windows Server 2003 machines, if we could also run it on a Linux server."
developer2-"Who cares about Linux, we're a Microsoft shop so it doesn't matter if the project runs on Linux."
2:
developer1-"Look, why don't we start these new project on JBOSS and JAVA? It's all cross-platform and we can not only run it on our Windows Server 2003 machines, it'll also run it on that Windows Server 2000 machine we have running just a few database translations a week. And, it'll run on and can be developed on the Windows XP machines we all have." developer2-"You mean the app software will run on those without having to upgrade them? That's cool and if it works, we won't have to deal with changing everything again when we have to bring in the Vista Server machines."
You get the idea.
LoB
There's one tiny little problem here. The fox is incharge of the hen house. Do people STILL think that Microsoft is going to let there be a nice clean efficient and seamless migration from Microsoft OOXML to ODF? They might say they will and they might show some demo of that but as history is my witness, they'll be tweaking those ODF docs in places the sun don't shine. And the result will be less than an easy to use converter.
;-) IMO.
Just ask yourself, what profit motives does Microsoft have in making this work? What profit motives do they have by making people THINK it's going to work? If Microsoft was so willing to enable this, why isn't it a builtin feature to MS Word?
Nope, it's a timebomb waiting to blow up in many many a businesspersons face. A few government officials faces too I suspect. After all, it's the "One Microsoft Way".
LoB
Well, I wasn't bringing up the Global Warming issue with my statement, just that Cheney/Bush are tied to the oil industry so tightly that they are making policy based on keeping oil profits high. IMO, 6 years ago, oil usage worldwide was known and it was known that China and India, etc were going to want much much more. And the Cheney/Bush hydrogen/hybrid cockup has more to do with how we need to reduce our consumption to reduce our need for oil related 'efforts' outiside the country. The side-effect of more efficient vehicles being less poluting is great too.
And BTW, if anybody thinks that the amount of crud we put into the air is NOT effecting climate, they must be kidding themselves. Burn one candle in your home and it's no big deal, burn a thousand and see what happens to the air quality and temp. We put alot more shit in the air than ever before and it's not getting washed out in the rain. Visually, the sunsets in the last 15 years over the Pacific Ocean have become consistently quite abit more colorful. And I don't know if it's true, but supposedly measureable air polution from over the Pacific is reaching the West Coast of the US. Like I said, I'd not verified the source but remember reading that testing was ongoing.
I also think our scientists have come a very long way from the days when someone thought up global cooling and it took off. But hey, look at how the public took ahold of hydrogen cars. Then never once questioned how come it was OK to talk about and show million dollar hydrogen prototypes while the auto industry also claimed that hybrid tech adds too much to the cost of the car(~$3000-$5000). Nobody questions these things. Heck, and if you do you're called UnAmerican or UnPatriotic. IMO
LoB
Tell me about it... And get a load of the AC comment above. Wow, a true blue Cheney/Bush believer or what.
LoB
come on, show me proof that Cheney/Bush did not terminate that US hybrid vehicle project. Did not create a hydrogen vehicle smoke screen which in 6 years has only produced multi-million dollar prototypes with nothing but dreams of some break-throughs that'll bring the production costs even CLOSE to todays costs. Tell me that the US auto industry was NOT publicly saying they were going to product hybrid gas-electric vehicles in late 1999 and early 2000 and by mid 2000, drop all recognition of gas-electric hybrid vehicles and spend billions on hydrogen prototypes.
Oh, and tell me that Bush did not mock hybrids and Al Gore during his run up to the 2000 election.
Naw, Cheney/Bush had nothing to do with all that. It was the terrorists! No wait, it was Saddam! Ya, that's the ticket...Saddam made them doit. Get real.
LoB
I'd like to see if this digs up anything along the lines of Microsoft marketing kickbacks and how it tied Windows to the OEM like thumb and index fingers on a child playing with superglue( or white on rice, stink on shit, etc ).
I've heard that over 20% of Dells profits come directly from marketing Windows. you know, 'we recommend Microsoft Windows XP' on ever page on it's website, the 12 MS windows stickers on keyboards, mice, monitor, case with ever new Dell PC. Oh, and don't forget the 'there are too many Linux distributions so we'll just wait on that' from Dell.
Then, must maybe people will understand why HP, Dell, etc don't ship Linux. After all, those 'marketing dollars' were not part of the DOJ vs MSFT settlement and pulling any of that back because of interest in Linux would not be breaking the settlement rules. What this means is that it would take a whole new case, a long drawn out case as opposed to the instant sanctions possible from settlement infractions.
Still, it's too bad Dell had to resort to accepting this instead of promoting competition in the CPU market. I guess it was easier for them to stick with one vendor as long as they kept kicking back $$$ at ever rumor of Dell going with AMD. This might not look good for Dell.
LoB
This is what I've been saying since the mess in 2000. You get electronic collection and a paper trail which not only can be quickly scanned/counted by a dumb-scanner( not much room for hacking ) but you also get something the voter or inspector can visually verify.
:-/
Like I said, I've been saying this since 2000 and all I see is the current mess with first touchscreens with no paper, then they have paper but it can't be scanned and must be read manually for a recount and in all cases, there's never been a verification of the touchscreens across the country. Only in a few places where it became obvous something was 'wrong'.
So GO Florida! At this rate, you might get a reliable/verifiable voting system in another 5-10 years. Way to go.
LoB
You mean the same Cheney/Bush who, when he took office in 2000, created his own automotive energy project, moved the existing hybrid vehicle project( 7 years old ) into this new project, axed the old project, created and funded a hydrogen/hype vehicle project, then axed the hybrid vehicle project? The list goes on and on about the deals Cheney and Bush made which stalled or killed off efficiency projects and labs while making sure their buddies in the oil industry would grow their profits. Remember during the 2004 election campaign when Bush made a visit to a renewable energy lab in Colorado? It was found out a week earlier that he'd cut their funding and they were going to layoff over 40 employees right before Bush arrived. They got special funding in a matter of days before Bush arrived but the funding was only going to last about 1 year....
So this is not surprising. What gets my goat is that all the Republicans were just acting like lemmings and allowing Cheney/Bush to do whatever the wanted. Only now that he's a lame duck and the public FINALLY figured out Iraq is a screw-up, are some Republicans making statements against their( Cheney/Bush ) policies.
What a wonderful spineless group bunch of lemmings they are. IMO.
LoB
As I said earlier, these kids are not building a Preditor UAV and I think the garbage collection is helpful in it takes that aspect of programming out of their hands. When they move on to high levels of learning they can get to know the 'finer' details of what it's like to develope and keep track of your memory.
;-) Cost of the mobo is not going to be an issue and neither would performance at the level of learning required.
As far as 'regular vanilla Linux' goes, again, it's there, it's up to the task and in the case of DSL, there are a bunch of easy addon parts. Sure LRP could work but they would take the whole course just getting the pieces put together. I know, I used LRP years ago when no consumer routers existed. Still got the floppies and old 386/40 it ran on. Anyways, I think the idea here is getting a simple and quick system up where these kids can learn some programming and get the excitement of making software make things move and an good level of abstraction can be implemented to make sure the kids deal with only the parts they can handle in the time given.
And though something like DSL isn't tiny, there's alot of stuff to add 'flavor' to the project. Like wireless capabilities, IR, a camera, etc and it'll still run on a gutted PC mobo with 128MB of RAM and a 1GB CF card. I think it's still the 2.4 kernel so it's got that going for it.
I also think there is something to being able to run your robotics learning software on any PC while developing it, test it on that same PC connected to the robotics platform to watch motors turn, sensors sense, and then copy the bytecode or jar file over to a CF card and plug that in and watch it go on its own. AND, the consistency of the developement language is the same for what's being done on the robot and on the desktop.
It's not the ultimate platform for robotics but I believe there are enough pieces, cheap pieces, good pieces to get the class up and running. And learning. Heck, they could make their robotics platform from an old UPS, some steppers from old floppy drived, scanners, printers, etc and a board from Trinamics with an RS232 port. Trinamics has a 3 port board they might get a discount on. The Trinamics interace language is pretty easy to make a Java wrapper for too.
So it might not be ideal, but I still believe that a DSL-Linux/Java module/CF-IDE robotics platform on an old PC mobo, along with Eclipse or NetBeans on the desktop, would make a good, cheap, learning platform for robotics. And I just might have to eat my own dog food and build this myself. Almost everyone has the parts. Two old printers with clogged print heads collecting dust, an old UPS with atleast alittle battery life, an old AMD socket mobo in the backroom. The tricky part is the wheel drive controller but I have one of those Trinamic boards from anothe project so it'll work for me. Others would probably get something from sparkfun.com. Now, it's just a matter of an axle, wheels, drive belts, and some screws for the robot platform. The platform/dev/build env would be DSL and a USB-drive if the mobo will boot from it, otherwise an CF-IDE interface and an old CF card. Eclipse on the desktop rounds out most of the needed stuff. Well, and some time... ah, one more thing would make this alittle better. Instead of a big desktop powersupply to plug into the UPS/robot, how about a 12V mobo powersupply like those sold by mini-box.com for those mini-EPIA boards? Something with a lower price would be better though.
LoB
Bummer that you're having so much of a problem patching in RT support. As you mentioned, others seemed to have been able to do it but I will agree, there is a 'nack' to getting all the ducks in a row when patching. I guess this is why a number of embedded Linux device makers use supported RT Linux kernels. So their developers can develop app code and not spend too much time on the environment/OS-subsystem.
That leads me to the comment on language. Because there are alot of pieces to a robotics puzzle, it seems to me that there is an advantage to having a widely used language, such as Java, which has a wealth of tools available and scales from the desktop PC down to a small embedded system-on-a-DIMM module. The instructor might be biting off more than he can chew but atleast, with something like Java, he could build the class objects in advance and for "programming" lessons, have the class adding only those objects and using only the methods he's provided. You know, to show them how to put pieces together. My guess is that 30% of the class time would be spent on teaching how the program/code is developed on a PC and loaded into the robot. 30% on how those programs are put together from a skeleton, 20% on hands-on modifications to the skeleton, and 20% on a project to try and get the robot to move through a simple course in a given period.
BTW, I will be looking at the MSP430 now that I've found an SPI library. It looks like a nice uCPU and TI does a nice job at letting you eval quickly and cheaply to get up on the uCPU.
LoB
I wouldn't exect the specified class to be targeting the next Darpa Grand Challenge any time soon. From what I understand of the requirements, they don't need any high end realtime control, just something easy to learn and hopefully something easy to more which has a couple of motors, wheels, and a bump sensor or two.
Given that, I'd go for something leveraging Java since it can be developed on most platforms, runs on most platforms, can be tought with good design techniques, there's free software available, a couple of good simulators available for free and written in Java. And, if you really want to go small, there's Gumstix, Snap, and a few other small singleboard/DIMM-sized boards which run Java.
All the parts are there for what they need. And when they've graduated, they can go to DOS if that's what they really want/need.
LoB
I was thinking along the lines of a standard PC mobo also. Old ones with RS232 ports are cheap and the older memory is cheap too. Now, add an CF->IDE interface board and there's no need for a harddrive. I would go with something like DSL( Damn Small Linux ) and include the Java package. Note that this is all pre-course prep work for the instructor so that the kids have a platform to work with.
There's also an open source Java based robotics simulator that'll let the kids control virtual robots on desktop computers first and then, move the code to the CF card and then plug it into the 'robot'. Ofcourse, some kind of wheeled platform is needed and I would look into seeing if Roomba would give a discount on some of their Create kits.
It's not plug-n-play but with a little work, a pretty cool teaching platform could be built and darn cheap too.
LoB
I wasn't interested in a "my numbers are bigger than your" discussion and obviously, there are more TOTAL Fedora user than the number of Fedora 6 users.
/etc/default/ntpdate to point to ubuntu.com servers.
And yes, it's a big deal having data and the technique for getting those numbers. Shuttleworth didn't state where the numbers came from but also wasn't asked. My guess is those numbers came from their date servers since I've seen default Ubuntu installations setting
Anyway, it is great these numbers are getting out there and even better when they can be validated.
Now, the problem will be dealing with the bitch-slapping hardware vendors are going to get from Microsoft for even saying the "L" word.
LoB