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Submission + - The World's Smallest Comic is etched on a hair (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Gizmodo reports :

Zoom in on this particular hair, though, and you'll find something even stranger: a teeny, tiny comic strip called "Juanita Knits the Planet." Ten micron-tall Juanita and her friends were etched onto the hair using a focused ion beam. The microscopic comic strip was created for the Exceptional Hardware Software Meeting, a gathering for open source and DIY enthusiasts in Germany.

The video is also available on youtube.
Hardware

Submission + - 17-yo builds fusion reactor, keynotes Berlin's EHSM

Submitted by lekernel
lekernel writes: Will Jack is a 17 year old high school student from the US who enjoys nothing more than building nuclear fusion reactors in his basement. He will be the keynote speaker later this month at Berlin's Exceptionally Hard and Soft Meeting, a conference on the frontiers of open source and DIY. Other topics covered by the conference are the CERN open hardware initiative, microchip reverse-engineering, DIY vacuum tubes, and more.

Submission + - EHSM: Exceptionally Hard & Soft Meeting in Berlin (dangerousprototypes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Are you sad that the 29C3 will take place in Hamburg but you want to visit Berlin ? As seen on dangerousprototypes.com, "(...) the premiere of the uniquely named Exceptionally Hard and Soft Meeting (EHSM) (...) will be held in Berlin, Germany on December 28-30, 2012. “EHSM is turning out to be something like the OSH Summit this side of the pond. (...)” " The schedule looks like a pile of refined geek pr0n: Garage electronic parts manufacture, CPU design, nuclear physics...
Open Source

Submission + - Hardcore DIY And Open Source Conference Announced

Submitted by lekernel
lekernel writes: LED blinkers, microcontroller breakout boards and mediocre 3D printers no longer excite you? Then, the Exceptionally Hard and Soft Meeting may be something for you. The conference aims at featuring the most hardcore DIY, hacker and open source projects, such as electron microscopes, rocket science and software-defined radios and radars. It will be held at the end of December in Berlin, Germany.
Open Source

Submission + - Hardcore DIY And Open Source Conference Announced

Submitted by lekernel
lekernel writes: LED blinkers, microcontroller breakout boards and mediocre 3D printers no longer excite you? Then, the Exceptionally Hard and Soft Meeting may be something for you. The conference aims at featuring the most hardcore DIY and open source projects, such as electron microscopes, rocket science and software-defined radios and radars. It will be held at the end of December in Berlin, and they have an open call for participation.
Businesses

Submission + - Golden Age of Silicon Valley is Over with Facebook IPO

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Steve Blank, a professor at Berkeley and Stanford and serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, says that the the Facebook IPO is the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley as we know it. "Silicon Valley historically would invest in science, and technology, and, you know, actual silicon," says Blank. "If you were a good venture capitalist you could make $100 million." But there's a new pattern emerging created by two big ideas that will lead to the demise of Silicon Valley as we know it. The first is putting computer devices, mobile and tablet especially, in the hands of billions of people and the second is that we are moving all the social needs that we used to do face-to-face onto the computer and this trend has just begun. "If you think Facebook is the end, ask MySpace. Art, entertainment, everything you can imagine in life is moving to computers. Companies like Facebook for the first time can get total markets approaching the entire population." That's great for Facebook but it means Silicon Valley is screwed as a place for investing in advanced science. "If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas social media will go big in two years, what do you think I'm going to pick?" concludes Blank. "The headline for me here is that Facebook's success has the unintended consequence of leading to the demise of Silicon Valley as a place where investors take big risks on advanced science and tech that helps the world. The golden age of Silicon valley is over and we're dancing on its grave.""

Comment Re:This already exists (Score 1) 54

by lekernel (#37788474) Attached to: Open Source CPUs Coming To a Club Near You?
This is where the Milkymist project is different - you can implement the SoC on a small, affordable FPGA and still get good performance, in part thanks to dedicated accelerators. By the way, there is also FPGA platforms for OpenSPARC so your estimate is too high, but they're still quite expensive and OpenSPARC runs pretty slowly on them.

Comment Re:Too long ? (Score 1) 54

by lekernel (#37788418) Attached to: Open Source CPUs Coming To a Club Near You?
The LM32 _is_ a good example of open source CPU; and there's more to open source than GNU. Also, it is simply more technically appropriate here than LEON, OpenRISC and OpenSPARC. There was some confusion about the LM32 license (sparkled among other things by confidentiality notices left in the source files) but Lattice cleaned up most of the mess a few months ago. The Lattice license says: " The Provider grants to You a personal, non-exclusive right to use object code created from the Software or a Derivative Work to physically implement the design in devices such as a programmable logic devices or application specific integrated circuits." So - yes, we can implement it in non-Lattice FPGAs. There is no MMU; some people talked about building one but it did not happen. We are open to switching to OpenRISC should it become as small and fast as LM32.
Hardware

Submission + - Open Source CPUs Coming to a Club Near You? (milkymist.org) 1

Submitted by lekernel
lekernel writes: The Milkymist project have started shipping their so-called "video synthesizer", a device used by concert and other event organizers to create live visual effects. Most interestingly, the device is based on their fully open source system-on-chip design, including both a CPU and graphics accelerators — the latter being a significant part of what Open Graphics is still struggling with.

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