Where were you hanging out, the paranoia ward at the local hospital? - And get off my lawn before I call my luddite attack dogs.

Reminds me of an article I read about seagulls, both parent birds spend up to two years teaching their offspring what they can and can't eat at the local tip. Despite their efforts a significant number still die trying to eat plastic bags, batteries, bottle tops, etc.

Of course it is, but it's how you use it that counts.

Jebus do you people not understand the word "save"? In your example you have spent $80K. Aside from that some very effective measures don't even need capital expenditure, for example, the giant multi-national I work for has saved millions by implementing simple things such as getting people to turn their desktop off before going home, teleconferencing in preference to flying, etc. When you have 180K employees these two simple measures alone will add up to millions in savings.

... ynow... one of the reasons i came up with the idea to design mass-volume hardware that would be eco and libre friendly was because, after having developed the experience to deal with both low-level software and high-level software, and having done some circuit design at both school and university, i figured that the rest should not be too hard to learn... or manage.

  you wanna know the absolute toughest part [apart from managing people?] it's the component sourcing. maan, is that tough. if you want a laugh [out of sheer horror, not because it was actually funny] look up the story on how long it took to find a decently-priced mid-mount micro HDMI type D [8 months].

  so anyway, i set out to find people with the prerequisite skills that i *didn't* have, offered them a chance to participate and profit. the list of people who have helped and then fallen by the wayside... i... well.... i want to succeed at this so that i can give them something in return for what they did.

here is the [old] specification of the [revision 1] CPU Card:
http://rhombus-tech.net/allwin...

the current revision 2 which i am looking for factories to produce (RFQs sent out already) we will try with 2gb of RAM. this is just a component change not a layout change so chances of success are high.

here is the [old] specification of the Micro-Engineering Board:
http://rhombus-tech.net/commun...

that was our "minimal test rig" which helped verify the interfaces on the first CPU Cards (and will help verify the next ones as well, with no further financial outlay needed. ever. ok, that would be true if i hadn't taken the opportunity to change the spec before we go properly live with it!! you only get one shot at designing a decade-long standard.... i'd rather get it right)

this will be the basis of the planned crowd-funding campaign: it's more of a micro-desktop PC:
http://rhombus-tech.net/commun...

the micro-desktop chassis is very basic: VGA, 2x USB, Ethernet, Power In (5.5 to 21V DC). all the other interfaces are on the CPU Card (USB-OTG, Micro-HDMI, Micro-SD). however unlike the Micro-Engineering Board, the power is done with a view to the average end-user (as is the VGA connector which means 2 independent screens, straight out the box).

does that help answer the question?

aaaah gotcha! that's the _whole_ reason why i designed the long-term modular standards, so that products *can* be split around the arms race of CPU/SoC on the one hand and battery life / display etc. on the other.

and the factory that we are in touch with (the big one), they _love_ this concept, because the one thing that you might not be aware of is that even the big guys cannot react fast enough nowadays.

imagine what it would mean to them to be able to buy HUGE numbers of CPUs (and related components), drop them into a little module that they KNOW is going to work across every single product that conforms to the long-term standard. in 6 months time there will be a faster SoC, more memory, less power, but that's ok, because *right now* they can get better discounts on the SoC that's available *now*.

on the other side of the interface, imagine what it would mean to them that they could buy the exact same components for a base unit for well... three to five years (or until something better came along or some component went end-of-life)?

it took them a while, but they _loved_ the idea. the problem is: as a PRC State-Sponsored company they are *prohibited* from doing anything other than following the rules... i can't tell you what those rules are: they're confidential, but it meant that we had to find other... creative ways to get the designs made.

yeah. now that prices are dropping, just like the PC price wars, the profits are becoming so small that the manufacturers are getting alarmed (or just dropping out of the market entirely). those people are now looking for something else. they're willing to try something that might get them a profit. what should we tell them?

anyway: thank you for your post, darylb, it provides a very useful starting point for some of the key insights i want to get across to people.

short version: the plan is to carry on, using the lessons learned to
try again, with a crowd-funding campaign that is transparent. please
keep an eye on the mailing list, i will also post here on slashdot
when it begins.

http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipe...

long version:

this has been a hugely ambitious venture, i think henrik's post explains much:
http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipe...

the - extremely ambitious - goal set by me is to solve a huge range of
issues, the heart of which is to create environmentally-conscious
mass-volume appliances that software libre developers are *directly*
involved in at every step of the way.

so, not to be disparaging to any project past or future, but this isn't
"another beagleboard", or "another raspberry pi beater": it's a way to
help the average person *own* their computer appliances and save
money over the long term. software libre developers are invited
to help make that happen.

by "own" we mean "proper copyright compliance, no locked boot
loaders and a thriving software libre environment that they can
walk straight into to help them do what they want with *their*
device... if they want to".

the actual OS installed on the appliance will be one that is
relevant for that appliance, be it ChromeOS, Android, even
Windows or MacOSX. regardless of the pre-installed OS, the
products i am or will be involved in *will* be ones that Software
Libre Developers would be proud to own and would recommend
even to the average person.

by "saving money over the long term" we mean "the device is
split into two around a stable long-term standard
with a thriving second-hand market on each side, with new
CPU Cards coming along as well as new products as well.
buy one CPU Card and one product, it'll be a little bit more
expensive than a monolithic non-upgradeable product,
but buy two and you save 30% because you only need
one CPU Card. break the base unit and instead of the whole
product becoming land-fill you just have to replace the base,
you can transfer not just the applications and data but
the *entire computer*".

it was the environmental modular aspects as well as
the committment to free software *and* the desire to reach
mass-volume levels that attracted aaron to the Rhombus Tech
project.

perhaps unsurprisingly - and i take responsibility for this - the
details of the above did not translate well into the Improv
launch. the reason i can say that is because even henrik,
who has been helping out and a member of the arm netbooks
mailing list for quite some time, *still* has not fully grasped
the full impact of the technical details behind the standards

(hi henrik, how are ya, thank you very very much for helping
with the boot of the first A10 / A20 CPU card, your post on
the mailing list last week was very helpful because it shows
that i still have a long way to go to get the message across
in a short concise way).

the level of logical deduction, the details that need to be taken
into account, the number of processors whose full specifications
must be known in order to make a decent long-term stable
standard.... many people i know reading that sentence will think i
am some sort of self-promoting egotistical dick but i can tell you
right now you *don't* want to be holding in your head the
kinds of mind-numbing details needed to design a long-term
mass-volume computing standard. it's fun... but only in a
masochistic sort of way!

anyway. i did say long, so i have an excuse, but to get to the
point: now that the money is being returned, we can start again
with a new campaign - using a crowdfunding site that shows
numbers, and starts with a lower target (250) that offers more value
for that same amount of money to everyone involved as various
stretch goals (500, 1,000, 2500) are achieved. these will include
casework, FCC Certification, OS images prepared and, most
importantly as far as i am concerned, one of the stretch goals
i feel should be a substantial donation to the KDE Team in
recognition of the help - through some tough lessons if we are
honest - that they have given, as well as the financial outlay
that they've put forward because they believed in what we're
doing.

i'd like to hear people's thoughts and advice, here, because this
really is an exceptionally ambitious project that no commercial
company let alone a software-libre group would ever consider,
precisely because it requires a merging of *both* commercial
aspects *and* software libre principles and ethics. the
environmental angle and long-term financial savings are what
sells it to the end-users though.

The house will not pay your bingo call - you have dismissed the study itself out of hand and "based on zero actual evidence" have picked the answer you want to be true, So the only question now is - are you a self-loathing hippie, or just a garden variety hypocrite?

I believe the GP meant to say water is the "universal solvent", meaning anything will dissolve in it given enough time. As to missing plastic, there is no beach on the planet where you can pick up a handful of sand that does not contain tiny particles of plastic, it's already in the food chain since plastic dust is everywhere. I understand that waste plastic is a huge problem for wildlife but once it has degraded into dust and dispersed it appears to be benign from an environmental POV.

Aside from that, most sausage skins in the western world are made from plastic, it's been that way for decades.

If there are such "important cases" happening as you have claimed, it should be easy to provide an example of one of these "unsung heroes" facing a 50yr sentence, right?

He was bullied into suicide by believable threats of a 50yr prison sentence from authority, just as surely as that 13yr girl was bullied into suicide by a grown woman on facebook a few years ago. The authorities did everything they could to hang that woman even using facebook terms of services against her, and so they should, it is after all their job. But where are the rabid prosecutors that are taking Swartz's tormentors to task? Why have the authorities not pulled out every trick in the book to hang those official bullies with the same fervor and determination they did when pursuing an uneducated, immature soccer mom?

US treasury bonds are still "safer than gold", they are backed by the US government who in turn controls the US military, and power trumps gold any day of the week.

If you enquire a bit deeper I think you will find there is a mathematical distinction between the two, discovered by Lorenz. The distinction is that weather is mathematically chaotic, the long term statistics of weather (ie: climate) is not, "long term" is generally accepted to be at least 30yrs. This mathematical fact means that (all else held equal) a 100yr climate prediction is inherently more certain than a 10 day weather prediction, even if the exact same modeling software is used to make both predictions. This is because you are actually measuring different things, the temperature next Tuesday is weather, a global climate prediction can never make an accurate prediction as to what it will be for pretty much the same reason Tuesday's weather prediction for New York says nothing about today's global average temperature. - The maths won't allow it.

Sort of, but no. Climate is technically the statistics of weather. Weather is mathematically chaotic (ie: turbulent), Climate is remarkably stable on the scales from decades to millennia (ie: not chaotic), the exception being El-Nino which is an example of large scale climatic turbulence, as is Jupiter "Red Spot".