my brother worked for mother theresa's hospice in india, 25 years ago. it wasn't what you'd think. they had a number of people come in from different outside organisations who tried to order people around: this being india they of course didn't listen, because why should they listen to foreigners?

so my brother stayed there and worked with them for six months before advising them to build a brick out-house for effluent, to change the sheets on the beds when somebody died, and to wash the needles in between injecting one patient and the next.

it also didn't help that as mother theresa got older, she began to lose her memory and would wander off, go to sleep, taking the key to the medicine cupboard with her so that nobody could get access to it for an entire day.

ghandi on the other hand is a far better choice for discussion, here. i love the story where he was asked by a mother to tell her son to stop eating sweets: he told her to come back in 2 weeks. when they came back, he said, "stop eating sweets!" and the son went "yes yes mr ghandi!!". the mother, perplexed, asked "why didn't you do that 2 weeks ago??" and he said "because i had to first give up sweets myself".

now *that's* inspiring, and it tells you something that we can learn from this fuss over 3D printing. there's no point asking "what would ghandi do with a 3D printer" because it's the principles that ghandi applied in his life *whenever he met someone* that are the key. it's never about the technology: it's about the people and what they face.

the point is: asking this question is silly. what you need is just to have the 3D printer, and go wander around the world, meeting people. you'll soon find problems that can be solved with it.

there are two ways. my favourite is the first.

1) put passport / credit card on a plate
2) put small amount of water on top of NFC chip
3) put plate into microwave oven
4) set for 3 seconds on HIGH
5) press button and watch pretty sparks
6) open door VERY QUICKLY and put out anything that's smoking or on fire
7) smile and relax, knowing that you are secure from being phished.

the other way is perhaps less risky:

1) obtain a 50,000 volt electrocution device aka "stun gun"....

no i'm not. the extreme case is buying all china parts and sourcing a 32mhz XTAL that's only available in europe. the lead times alone would absolutely kill such a project, let alone getting the export licenses.

TI's SoCs for example - the ones with a DSP - are actually classified as "weapons" for god's sake! they have BXPA "Munitions" classifications slapped on them.

remember that it's usually the top-end ICs that are exclusively made in e.g. Taiwan: there are plenty of semiconductor companies that can do 65nm and above. supply is *not* geographically restricted.

you're right... and yet this should not surprise anyone. insert "country X" for "Chinese" and you'll get the same answer. in fact, i think you'll find that "company X prefers to work with parts that are sourced locally".

with the rhombus tech initiative, we're doing ok. just :) it is extremely hard though. luckily i've been picking parts that are clearly and obviously commonly available, done in volumes so huge that the datasheets leaked in some cases years ago out onto the internet.

but yes: it's much easier to just pay a chinese PCB design house and say "make this please" :)

no, they're not. they're a profit-maximising company, just like any other profit-maximising company. if they did what you're accusing them of doing, they'd go bankrupt.

what we believe they have done is just said, "right: we're going to aim BIG". rather than be scared shitless of the NREs for processor development, they simply decided that they would aim for an extremely large number of processors, and either got a PRC Govt Grant or just got very very good investors. they would then have negotiated an EXTREMELY good rate with one of the fabs, based on the projected volume, and that alone would allow them to sell at the price that they set out to sell at. especially if they placed a cash order for a vast number of chips.

so it's simple economics and sound business sense that has allowed them to sell a 1ghz processor at $7.50 when all *PREVIOUS* competition *INCLUDING COMPETITORS IN CHINA* were selling at around $11 or even $13 for a product that had less features.

the other thing that has allowed them to take the world by storm in this area is the extremely high level of integration in their SoC, as well as working with (i believe they actually own) X-Powers to create an exceptionally low-cost and highly optimised Power Management IC, called the AXP209. the cost of this PMIC is $1.50 in volume.

basically you can get away with $30 worth of parts to do a seriously good little board, which has 1gb of RAM, 4gb of NAND Flash, ethernet, SATA, USB2 and HDMI and more, when everyone else is struggling to hit $35 to $38. that's a big, big difference in this kind of market, and it explains why, when the Allwinner A10 was introduced, that a major recession occurred INSIDE CHINA, in the Electronics District of Guangdong, Shenzen.

i'll say that again, in case you didn't understand. whilst you are accusing China (the country) of "price dumping in the USA", *one very ambitious young company* managed to cause a MAJOR RECESSION IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY.

why is that? it's because the electronics industry in china is critically dependent on and focussed on volume sales. the Allwinner A10 and its associated PMIC and high level of integration left many factories holding out-of-date stock. companies that did NOT move over to the A10 in time were left with stock that they couldn't shift. if they did shift - reneging on contracts in the process, in many cases - they left the SUPPLIERS holding the stock, and i don't know if you're aware of this but China basically operates on a cash-only, cash-up-front basis.

the shift caused by the introduction of the A10 was so vast, and so quick, that it basically wiped out any company that didn't change over in time. including the ODM company that we were talking to at the time, whose clients (factories) all had invested in AMLogic's $13 processor at the time.

so - please do be better informed before making assumptions and accusations such as those which you are making, ok? the country you live in is a very small market compared to china. america is not even particularly relevant, here, because americans expects bigger, better and much much faster than a 1ghz single-core low-power ARM processor. please take more care, ok?

what's interesting is that these people are claiming that the attacks *originate* from china, and that therefore, logically as well, it MUST be the chinese government that instigated these attacks. noooOoo: unless the U.S. has access to the entire world's internet traffic plus all communications globally including mobile phones, telephone lines and every single server and electronic device, there's absolutely NO WAY that they can prove that accusation - period.

why not? because even if an attack "appears" to originate from within china, all that means is that the traffic is coming from an IP address that's inside the china boundaries. and that's *all* it means. it does *NOT* mean that there is not SOMEONE ELSE who is OUTSIDE of china who has compromised that machine and is using it as a DDOS hacking jump-point in order to deliberately mask their true location [and identity].

the hacking could even be done through servers that are compromised and happen to have access to a telephone or a 3G dongle. dial in, initiate attack: you'd never be able to ascertain the identity of the attacker [unless you had access to china's telephone network records].

for all we know, the hacking is actually being instigated by the CIA as a means to have an excuse to justify yet another war or yet another round of political maneuvring.

even if it's random usage of compromised machines rather than intentional misdirection, the percentage of computers compromised by viruses world-wide is quite likely to have a disproportionate number of IP addresses originating from china simply through sheer numbers of people in china who have computers.

there are plenty of foreign governments who would have an interest in the kind of information being claimed to have been sought. why does it *have* to be china that's doing the attacking?

foobsr: there's a book you should read, it's called "journey of souls" by michael newton. i believe you'll find it both insightful and comforting.

the next breakthrough would be to work out a categorical and undeniable way to demonstrate what those thought processes *are* that make a difference, i.e. what *kinds* of thoughts result in slowing down of ageing.

the very very unfortunate thing for those people who like to bash religion, meditation *and* science by sitting on one side of the fence or other and slinging mud [cue down-moderation of this post as an example, because i dared to link science and meditation *shock horror*], will be that it will be found that deep restful states of meditation are the way to gain the kind of control over the hypothalamus that is being described, here.

this link between thoughts and "physical effect" really isn't that hard to imagine. examples are as follows:

* "i'm hungry". if you're a dog, you automatically salivate at the sight of food.
* "i'm angry". you release chemicals into your bloodstream, such as adrenaline.
* "i hate you". your body releases chemicals that are similar to SNAKE VENOM. hatred *literally* poisions you.
* "i love you". all sorts of wonderful endorphins released. and a hell of a lot of hormones.
* fulfilment of vengeance (revenge) releases a chemical that *literally* tastes "sweet". hence the phrase "revenge is sweet".

thought. chemicals. thought. chemicals. thought. chemicals. the chain is *really* clear.

why is it therefore so hard for people to understand that control over thoughts can result in significant life-prolonging benefits?

perhaps it is because it's actually quite hard to keep control over our thoughts. or maybe we wish to deny the link, so that it's possible to continue to feel whatever-we-wish-to-feel without considering that there might be consequences [for ourselves]. that would be a *lot* easier, wouldn't it. i'll be interested to see if the "wisdom of crowds" a la "slashdot moderation" as a whole accepts these kinds of words. very interested indeed.

ok. there's a couple of solutions here. one is to query a number of peers for the same object, obtain its MD5 (or other) checksum and validate them aand the other iiiis...

yes. exactly. git allows you to GPG sign tags. the GPG-signed tags would be the key point around which you would verify that you (ultimately) got the right objects. and it's the GPG-signed tags that would allow you to decide to fork an entire project, or upgrade an entire gnu/linux distro, by simply setting a new target to pull and verify against.

the question which i have yet to resolve is: what the hell do you do about all the intermediate commits, intermediate objects etc. etc.? enough idiots trying to corrupt the system would result in quite a lot of bandwidth wasted before you got to the point where the git tagged branch could be verified by MD5 summing.

what i don't quite understand, though, is why git over http (or any other network protocol) doesn't have the same issue. or, is it the fact that there is only one central control typically for a particular branch (or tag) that makes this moot? so you know that you're only going to ever be pulling one git pack-object from that one server, and having done so you're now up-to-date so can do the checksum, bam, done.

the problem that you've got is the resentment of several years - decades - of abusively-high pricing. people feel that they've been ripped off, so they have no qualms about copying. *UNFORTUNATELY* that mind-set is now entrenched, and an independent artist selling their own creative material is, sadly, going to get hit by that.

whom can the finger be "pointed at" for this situation? well, some would say the record labels for being greedy. but there's a counter-example which illustrates that that's not *entirely* the case. in japan, they love anime. so much so that the fans actually support the directors in every way possible. when a film comes out, the director distributes it first on bittorrent. the fans copy it, enjoy it, buy the t-shirts, buy the merchandise. they distribute it, they translate it, they produce their own dubbed soundtracks, and redistribute them freely.

but here's the kicker: when the official DVDs come out, they PULL THE BITTORRENTs AND GO OUT AND BUY THE DVD.

bear in mind that this is japan, but that's still absolutely stunning. and it puts us westerners lamenting a situation where our poor artists cannot make a living in this day and age to absolute shame. food for thought.

the typical example that i give here is "python htmltmpl". htmltmpl was written to solve a very specific problem: minimalist templating of HTML by allowing dictionaries of key-value pairs to substitute into HTML (value text replaces the key when named) and to do likewise for lists of dictionaries in order to e.g. create tables.

very very simple.

the problem is this: the actual scope of the work required means that the actual programming required was extremely straightforward. i.e. it was done, completed - problem solved. the scope of the work required is clear; the scope of the work required does not change; the scope of the work required does not *NEED* to change.

therein lies the problem, namely that the fact that python-htmltmpl has quotes not had any development quotes means that, as far as sourceforge is concerned, the project is "dead". look at the release dates - 2001 for god's sake!
  http://htmltmpl.sourceforge.net/

the point is: just because a project hasn't had any development done on it, that DOES NOT automatically mean that it doesn't do the job. correlation != causation. python-htmltmpl *clearly* does the job it's intended to do.

i mention this case specifically because i have seen a large number of HTML "templating" languages come and go. the php-inspired one which used syntax. zope with the dreadful and insane embedding of python in templates and templates in python. many many more, all of which caused me to despair when i saw them, so much so that i was inspired to talk at one UKUUG conference at some length about best practices of keeping programming languages declarative i.e. *never* embedding programming languages into HTML (even if it's php).

and once you follow the sanity-restoring rule of keeping a programming language declarative (e.g. in the php case beginning the file with as the last two characters and AT NO POINT EVER NOT FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER FALLING BACK TO OR PERMITTING STATIC HTML TO BE OUTPUT IMPLICITLY)... ... once you follow that rule, then you find that you need a templating system such as php-htmltmpl or any of the others that exist. and, once you've looked closely at what you actually need out of an HTML templating language, then actually, htmltmpl provides a *really* good very simple system which covers pretty much everything you'll need. need to do an expression which is a mixture of variables and HTML? generate it explicitly in php, put it into the array - don't for god's sake try to use a god-awful mix of print, echo, dots and christ knows what else. just.. don't.

so i'm putting this out there because in certain cases, what you find is that the code that you need appears "dead", but that's not actually the case: the failure of sourceforget and github by their "metrics" have relegated perfectly good and *completed* code to obscurity.

you are therefore encouraged to participate in *unfinished* projects, with their constant changes, moving targets and massive contributions which may or may not be correctly managed, because it is those projects that have "99% activity". does that sound like a good thing to you?

the one thing that would help enormously would be to have git be *truly* peer-to-peer distributed. not "yeah shure mate you can always git pull and git push, that's distributed, and you're a peer, right, so... so... git is peer-to-peer and distributed, so what are you talking about you moron??" but "at the network level, git pull and git push have a URL type that is **TRULY** peer-to-peer distributed. to illustrate what i mean, i would like to be able to do the following - with all that it implies:

git clone magnet://abcdefg0123456789/gittorrent.git

if you're familiar with magnet links, you'll know that there is *no* central location: a DHT lookup is used to find the peers.

now, what wasn't clear to the people on the git mailing list when i last looked at this, was that it is possible to use bittorrent to do git pack objects, by creating a file named after the pack object itself. and what wasn't clear to sam (the last person who tried to put git over bittorrent) was that you *MUST NOT* make use of bittorrent's "multiple file in a torrent" feature, because bittorrent divides up its data into equal-sized blocks that *do not* line up with the files that are in them, which is why when you download one file in a torrent you almost always end up with the end of its preceding file and the start of the one after it, as well.

the idea i came up with is that you create *multiple* torrents - one per git object (or git pack object). if you want to pull a tree, you create a torrent containing *one file* which is the list of objects in that tree; gittorrent would then know to map each of those objects onto yet *another* torrent (one per object), repeat until all downloading happily. gittorrent objects are of course named after the hash, so you can pretty much guarantee they'll be unique.

and, adding in a DHT (a la magnet links), you are now no longer critically dependent on something like e.g. github, or in fact any server at all.

to answer your question in a non-technical way, mr anonymous, i think you can see that i feel it would be much more useful to have development tools that use bittorrent-like protocols to share files-as-revision-controlled-data (and, if you've seen what joey hess is doing with bittorrent you'll know that that's a hell of a lot - including storing home directories in git and doing automatic distributed backups)

:) Mini ARM computer, Mini x86 computer (when we get access to ValleyView), Mini MIPS computer (Ingenic jz series), Mini {insert CPU model here} computer, mini FPGA card, mini pass-through card.

the EOMA-68 standard is *not* limited to a particular CPU - it's not even in fact limited to a CPU *at all*. take a look at this for example:
http://elinux.org/Embedded_Open_Modular_Architecture/EOMA-68/Passthrough

that's what we call a "pass-through" card. it has HDMI/DVI **INPUT**. not HDMI output from a processor. it has HDMI *IN*. that input gets converted to RGB/TTL and is "passed through" to the EOMA-68 connector.

what's the purpose of that?

well, imagine that you buy an EOMA-68-compliant LCD Monitor. it comes with a "pass through" card. it costs the same as a standard LCD monitor. it has an HDMI input. except this monitor, you can press a button on the side, pop out the pass-through card, and insert an EOMA-68 Computer Card.

voila - the monitor has instantly been transformed into an all-in-one computer!!!

how absolutely cool is that?

you could turn it into a TV by popping out the Computer Card and putting in a TV card.

you could take that same TV Card and pop it into your 7in tablet "chassis" and you have a portable TV!

are you starting to appreciate just quite how powerful this concept really is?

PADS 9.3. it's absolutely awesome. i'd thoroughly, thoroughly recommend it. it's intuitive, it's obvious, the menus are simple yet powerful, and a heck of a lot of effort and thought has gone into the design and useability, to make sure that the context menus adjust to provide you what you *need*, at the time that you need it.

by contrast, if you've ever seen Allegro PCB design software, it's a nightmare. the menu bar has 25 options across the top!! that's just absolutely insane, and you can tell that the software team basically haven't thought about uesability - at all. you're expected to just... "know" what menu option is needed, you're expected to "know" what "mode" you're in - i can't even BEGIN to get started.

i started using PADS, and i didn't even need a tutorial in order to start doing something. sure, i made mistakes, and there were a couple of frustrating moments when i thought "ok, this isn't obvious, let's look it up" such as "what the hell is ECO mode" and it's a button that stops you from accidentally modifying the PCB from becoming out-of-sync with the schematics. if you click that button, then the software will save any differences that you make [to the netlist] from that point on, so that you can "back-import" them into the schematics.

so i was basically up-and-running in about a month. every time i look at Allegro, i just... i can't even begin to get started. big big difference.

and yeees, i really want to use KiCAD, but it simply cannot cope with these types of tasks *plus* my ignorance of PCB layout :) if i was a trained engineer with 20 years of experience in PCB design i *might* be able to use KiCAD for these tasks, but it would still be very very frustrating even with 20 years experience because KiCAD doesn't have anything like a built-in autorouter, or the Design Rules checks, or differential-pair routing or in fact anything that you'd expect to have in a professional-grade PCB design package.

now you're getting it. the cloud's a fad. this is hardware. it's *your* hardware, and it's *your* data.

but yes: typically a media centre chassis would have terabyte storage, which, obviously, you'd not have on a tablet, but that's ok: that's the way it should be.

the bit that's going to be interesting is how the OS reconfigures to cope with the differences. that's why i'm interested to work with the KDE Team, and also why they're excited about the possibilities here. KDE Plasma Active's underlying core is designed to dynamically completely reconfigure the applications - right down to the size of the menus and what's *on* the menus - depending on the capabilities of the device (screen size and so on).

that's *really* fascinating and a perfect match. whoops, i woke up and found my screen has changed - err should i reboot? no, damnit! should i terminate the app and restart it? no, damnit! should i run a completely different app, one that's designed for the small (or big) screen size? no!!

KDE Plasma Active is about the only OS that even remotely has the capability to reconfigure right now in this way. everything else is like hard-configured for a particular device size. it's gonna be.... interesting, to say the least :)