pingswept

I wouldn't fight it, but I wouldn't sign it either. I won't develop for a platform with that level of restriction.

Gerbers? Where?

By "open hardware," do you mean open source hardware, or something else?

From the responses, it looks like "open hardware" means something like "can install any OS on it" in the network switch world.

The Beaglebone Black is the most open board, so far as I can tell.

Here are the PCB sources for the latest revision: http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:BeagleBoneBlack#Hardware_Files

The datasheet for the AM3558 processor is here, no NDA required: http://www.ti.com/product/AM3358/technicaldocuments

The bootloader is U-boot, which is open source, based here: http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot

The GPU in the AM3558 is a PowerVR SGX530, which is not open source in any sense-- I believe that the Linux driver uses a binary blob (but I'm not 100% sure of that).

For comparison, the Raspberry Pi has open schematics (http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Raspbe...) but not open PCB layout source files. There's a partial datasheet for the processor here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/BCM283..., but you can't buy the processor from Broadcom unless you're willing to buy 100,000 or so.

Referring to this part, I suspect: "population will have to drop to pre-industrialisation levels"

True, but the GPL wasn't widely used until Linux took off in the mid-90's, roughly 20 years ago. So I was off by a few years, you're right.

(But I'd say the idea of free/libre software certainly predates even the GNU manifesto.)

There is a push for open source hardware, but it is a substantially smaller movement. The Open Source Hardware just formed a year or two ago: http://www.oshwa.org/ The movement is growing, but it appears to be around 15 years behind software, and maybe not growing as quickly as OSS did.

I would prefer to see Project Ara evolve into Novena. Google can keep their "NOT FOR SALE OR EXCHANGE" developer's agreement.

This appears to be similar to the open source hardware Novena laptop (https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop), but closed source hardware.

From the Purism crowdfunding campaign: "The Librem 15 is the first high-end laptop where you are in control and have complete visibility into the kernel, the operating system, and all software."

It seems like the Novena came first and is substantially more free/open. A laptop running all open source software is still good, but it's not as pure as claimed.

Or maybe s/dark sheep/dark horse/g ?

In any case, I think the g is superfluous, as "dark sheep" only appears once.

The article was written by Geoff Wozniak, not Steve Wozniak. Different guy.

If it makes you feel better, each hour you spend exercising extends your life by around 3.5 hours (net 2.5 after the hour you spent) on average. These are just rough numbers, backed up by the Framingham heart study and an analysis of the Framingham data by Jonker, et al.: http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/29/1/38.full.pdf They say 2.5 hours per week over a 75 year lifetime makes you live 3.5 years longer, and 2.5 hours per week over 75 years is around 1 year.

(Of course, you might get hit by a bus tomorrow, but that's true whether you exercise or not. I guess you should avoid exercising near traffic.)

I used to work at one: http://www.mindtribe.com

There is a lot to dislike about him. A man who becomes the preeminent patent troll after already having a enough money to do anything he wants-- worst kind of person, if you ask me.

It appears that you're being downvoted, but I've found Wendell Berry to be one of the most insightful writers about the weaknesses of technological advances, despite the fact that he doesn't use a computer. Reading his essays would be worth the time of a lot of young programmers, if only to learn why old people scowl at their newfangled gizmos.

"But what could someone who never uses a computer know about computers!?!" They could know what is lost when you use a computer, and, in general, you can't get that perspective from the Hacker News crowd (or nearly anyone under 30 or so). I don't agree with everything he writes (especially not the religious stuff), but he's very wise, I think.

If intrigued, one might try "The Unsettling of America" (1977), "What Are People For?" (1990) or "Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community" (1993).

(I''m not the OP.)

I have a degree in English, and another one in mechanical engineering.

The 9 English classes that I took were uniformly less difficult and less rigorous than the 25 or so engineering classes I took. When I studied English, I already had a reasonably well-developed understanding of logic, but it was not used in my English classes. I would estimate that I could have earned a B average in English with 5-10x less time spent than in engineering. Standardized tests suggest that I have more aptitude for engineering (or at least math), so English should have been harder for me if the curricula were of the same difficulty.

I agree that Google's efforts, as you have described, have been exemplary.

Have they not also gone along with the NSA in what appear to be violations of the 4th amendment?

I'm mostly ignorant of this stuff, but reading the quote below from the Guardian makes them look complicit. I think it's fine to be complicit when you're powerless, but Google is not powerless. What bad thing would have happened to Larry Page if he had said "Uh, we're not handing over the data." Would he actually have been arrested?

(Just to be clear, you've probably thought about this for 400 hours more than I have, so if I'm totally wrong, sorry.)

From the Guardian [1]:

"The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data.

Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the internet.

Asked during a Wednesday hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the Fisa Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.”"

[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/19/us-tech-giants-...

My parents are both pilots. The numbers are just my estimates from having flown with them a bunch. Maybe my numbers are a little high, but I think I'd stand by them.

There's always a bunch of dealing with cranking open the hanger door with the winch, dragging the plane out, checking that there is no water in the fuel (both tanks), transferring the stuff you're bringing with you from the car to the plane, getting into the seatbelt, plugging in the headsets and checking that they're all working, talking to the tower, taxiing out to the runway, waiting for a plane or two to take off, and then actually taking off.

Anyway, have fun flying.

True, but it takes around 45 minutes to prepare a plane for flight and about 20 minutes to put it away. Also, you have to drive to and from the airport. Planes are incredible, but you have to fly pretty far before they're a timesaver.

A group of programmers who make a popular version of Linux have decided to make their version of Linux start with a new program when the computer boots. Instead of using a program from the 80's called "System V init scripts", they have decided to switch to a new program called "systemd." Both programs have the major responsibility of starting the rest of the programs that make up Linux.

I found this explanation of systemd interesting (though more suitable for a wannabe hacker than a 5-year-old (though I suppose the two sets may not be disjoint)): http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

That function just retrieves the rating for one course, based on the course ID that the user has retrieved by searching for some courses. It is certainly requesting data from Yale's server, but I wouldn't call it scraping. To qualify as scraping (at least as I've done it), you'd have to iterate over all possible IDs and store the records in a database.

For example, consider this basketball scraper: https://github.com/andrewgiessel/basketballcrawler This builds a list of all the current NBA players and then pulls stats on all of them, saving them in a giant JSON file, IIRC. That's scraping.

What Sean Haufler is doing is not massively iterated, and it's linked in time and quantity to human-generated queries. Seems different to me.

I see where you're going with that, but I don't think delivery of software over a so-called "network" will ever be feasible. Even with a 1200 baud modem, transferring a multi-kilobyte .exe would take hours, and that's assuming the BBS doesn't drop the connection partway through!

It seems more realistic to transmit the pictures using CD-ROM technology: it's like Netflix, but for CD-ROMs. Amazon would mail you their catalog CD-ROM, and you look at a slideshow of all the products they sell. Then, when you decide what you want, simply fax your order to Amazon, and they tell you which "shop" to drive to in order to pickup your merchandise.

That's a pretty good idea, but don't you think it would take too long for the shipments to get there?

They should come up with a way of tracking what pictures people look at and then shipping the stuff in the pictures to the warehouses near those people. I bet you could do the picture tracking thing with an ActiveX control. That wouldn't work in Navigator, of course.

Ah, similar to Amazon's "shopping cart," the shop could provide a physical cart (imagine a cross between a baby stroller and a faraday cage) to help customers carry inventory to the exit of the store.

Thanks for that. Very interesting read.

You have a decent point here.

But I am OP. That's what I meant when I wrote corruption-- the idea that a nonprofit will be more user-focused since they can't be acquisition-focused, since they're not an acquisition target.

To paraphrase John O'Nolan in his original Kickstarter video for Ghost, Ghost is designed for users, not to please investors or potential acquirers. You can hear the original here: https://ghost.org/features/ starting around 2:05 in the video.

> Yet, exactly like Wordpress, i consider this a huge commercial machine

Ghost itself is produced by a nonprofit organization. Though I suppose the surrounding ecosystem may eventually be just as commercial as that of Wordpress, the main Ghost developers have the explicit goal of not getting corrupted by money.

I think it's the "you get annoyed" step that people would prefer to avoid by default, rather than having it imposed on them by default.