Who says we should eat 3 meals a day every day? How about: put more effort into selecting and preparing our meals, eat fewer meals! I find I'm way less hungry if I go longer without eating - as I'm not constantly 3 or 4 hours after the last big meal. The hunger sensation goes away if you get past it (a good analogy is the vibrations of breaking the "sound barrier" in a jet airplane, you throttle past it). In the USA, family and friends are so programmed to do the "3 meals a day" thing that practically nobody questions it.

Discovery of this study changed my life. Now, some days I just eat one big meal, I focus more on enjoying that meal. If you have only one meal in a day: 2 hours to enjoy the meal, read while I'm eating or socialize with friends. I focus more on the quality of food, not quantity. Eating less frequently is a lifestyle change, not a diet!

From: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16529878

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"The effect on health of alternate day calorie restriction: eating less and more than needed on alternate days prolongs life."

Restricting caloric intake to 60-70% of normal adult weight maintenance requirement prolongs lifespan 30-50% and confers near perfect health across a broad range of species. Every other day feeding produces similar effects in rodents, and profound beneficial physiologic changes have been demonstrated in the absence of weight loss in ob/ob mice. Since May 2003 we have experimented with alternate day calorie restriction, one day consuming 20-50% of estimated daily caloric requirement and the next day ad lib eating, and have observed health benefits starting in as little as two weeks, in insulin resistance, asthma, seasonal allergies, infectious diseases of viral, bacterial and fungal origin (viral URI, recurrent bacterial tonsillitis, chronic sinusitis, periodontal disease), autoimmune disorder (rheumatoid arthritis), osteoarthritis, symptoms due to CNS inflammatory lesions (Tourette's, Meniere's) cardiac arrhythmias (PVCs, atrial fibrillation), menopause related hot flashes. We hypothesize that other many conditions would be delayed, prevented or improved, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, brain injury due to thrombotic stroke atherosclerosis, NIDDM, congestive heart failure. Our hypothesis is supported by an article from 1957 in the Spanish medical literature which due to a translation error has been construed by several authors to be the only existing example of calorie restriction with good nutrition. We contend for reasons cited that there was no reduction in calories overall, but that the subjects were eating, on alternate days, either 900 calories or 2300 calories, averaging 1600, and that body weight was maintained. Thus they consumed either 56% or 144% of daily caloric requirement. The subjects were in a residence for old people, and all were in perfect health and over 65. Over three years, there were 6 deaths among 60 study subjects and 13 deaths among 60 ad lib-fed controls, non-significant difference. Study subjects were in hospital 123 days, controls 219, highly significant difference. We believe widespread use of this pattern of eating could impact influenza epidemics and other communicable diseases by improving resistance to infection. In addition to the health effects, this pattern of eating has proven to be a good method of weight control, and we are continuing to study the process in conjunction with the NIH.

Especially in the USA, we eat too damn much (calories). We market these calorie laden meals to ourselves, we eat way too fast (scarf scarf).

I started to question the whole "3 meals a day" that is brainwashed by well meaning friends and family - to discover that it's probably made up social convention that is totally inappropriate for modern lifestyle [especially the typical slashdot geek ;)].

I found the easiest diet is simple: Eat slow, put more effort into meals, and skip meals. This gem really caught my attention: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16529878 "The effect on health of alternate day calorie restriction: eating less and more than needed on alternate days prolongs life."

So now I eat 3 or 4 meals total every 2 days - and put a lot more effort and time into those meals. I'm less hungry, more satisfied.

I agree with you there are some difficult areas. But I think it is in the interest of the Linux community be specific in helping contestants understand those areas and where OpenWrt and Linux stands today.

OpenWrt is already a firmware system. OpenWrt isn't exactly a slouch, it is very modular and on latest Linux 2.6.28.7 kernel currently for this platform. This contest is also on only one specific hardware platform that has a lot more RAM and CPU than what most routers have.

And you could build the web GUI on top of LuCI, X-WRT, Gargoyle codebase.

I don't think this is a huge company... I think they honest want to give back the code to Open Source. I still think we should encourage additional companies to chip in and add to the contest. But probably now that everyone sees the world economy tanking... but that might incentive some unemployed people. $160,000 for 6 months of solid work for two talented people isn't so bad.

I meant "lowest common denominator".

The number of closed routers and outright crippled routers far exceeds the number of open and well supported routers.

This problem continues as long as consumers buy the flavor the week and with no concern as to quality or the product even meeting the claims printed on the box. Routers aren't new, this has been over 10 years of this mess.

Take the famous Cisco/Linksys WRT54G/GS beyond version 4. That router is still for sale more than six years after introduction. Now it is a ghost of it's former self on internal parts. A stream of supposedly self-proclaimed experienced Linux users continue to buy these (version 7, 8, etc) each day and then whine away that the various Linux projects don't support it. 2MB of flash for a $60 router that sold 6 years ago for $60 when it has 8MB of flash... yha, ok. Keep supporting and recommending that model to people. The Least Common Denominator sadly drags down all.

It is an open source license, ANYONE can rebrand it! The logos and text can be changed. The source code must retain previous copyright notices.

anon says: The challange is about to implement a (new) gui for the Ubiquity Router Station, based on AirOS

If you read their forums, this has been explicitly debunked. They say OpenWrt. See:

http://forum.ubnt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6734

I think any wise developer would go with OpenWrt Trunk and update every month or so during development.

I have taken some of what you say and started to compile a list on the Ubiquiti contest forums.

http://ubnt.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8884

Regarding some of what you say as an OpenWrt user: I personally think any new UI should be 2.6 only and only ath5k/ath9k (no madwifi). This is complex enough, supporting these out of date platforms when a new Trendnet router has ath9k and 400Mhz CPU for $25 to $45 is available. Kenrel 2.4 is on the way out, FINALLY, b43 has already been the push of Kamikaze 8.09 release.

Man, people are so jaded here. Stop spreading misinformation. The company is giving free routers to contestants. These guys clearly seem to GET IT. But the attitudes of some in the Linux community make it seem like nobody should even try new ideas and all open source work should only be done traditional ways.

An yha, as soon as you start giving away free routers for entering a contest - guess what happens. People sign up for the free router with no intention of doing any programming. So they rightly have to evaluate how serious a entrant is. But they ARE providing free hardware.

And you can ask someone nicely on OpenWrt to help test and give feedback on your firmware. People who enter the contest are releasing their work to the project at the end, why wouldn't I want to assist them? Not everyone is selfish.

This has had considerable discussion on #OpenWrt IRC. I am not a lawyer or a certified license person. I just been in field and try to get along with this like most educated users.

My take on this:

1) They want you to transfer copyright as an employee or contractor would in USA. This would allow them to add additional licenses or what if they wish (fork the project), as they would be the official copyright holder. There is plenty of stuff in the Linux kernel that is copyright Atheros or IBM. So I don't see much concern here.

2) The open source license clearly gives you the ability to keep working on the code after you give it to them (anyone can). but I guess this would restrict entrant author from offering it commercially and open source (say how MySQL does). AGAIN, no different than I see if you work for a company as an employee and the company has copyright and your job ends.

3) I think the notice they request is not well thought out. But discussion of GPL, Apache licenses seems to me that there is no requirement that anyone keep visible output copyright notices. Only discussion of keeping copyright notices in the source code. So instantly upon release of the code one could have a patch to remove the copyright notice and ubiquity specific graphics icons from the code base and re-release it as a neutral extension to OpenWrt.

3a) I think that they should amend the rules of the contest to have it say "PORTIONS copyright" instead of absolute. It is offensive to the OpenWrt people to make it appear as if shows only one. I think this is just an oversight on Ubiquity part in contest rule. It isn't like they take this directly from contestant and release to their customers on routers - it probably go through a beta and update cycle where such issues are fixed.

I agree with your comment that it isn't trivial. But nor is $160,000 trivial to many people throughout the world. And I encourage other router and Linux vendors to consider joining the contest adding their own money. Why not add another $20,000 and a company do their own evaluation of entries and pick who they think is best?

A great response. I wished you hadn't posted anon so there could be follow-up to your experienced insight. I think it would be very helpful to the OpenWrt community as a whole to really detail what hard tech the project requires that is absent from current Trunk. For example, the bonding you mention.

I personally encourage anyone to build this on OpenWRT trunk and not the AirOS fork. I don't see a single mention of AirOS on the pages, did I miss it?

The contest, at minimum, is free marketing for OpenWRT. I'd like to see companies add to the prize amount with secondary joins to the contest.

Yes, the router has 16MB of flash memory, just like a SU SLINUX Disk (SSD).

RE: "If you really like CLI and have decent knowledge in networking then give Vyatta a try. No GUI at all."

OpenWRT has "no GUI at all". it is an optional piece when you build the firmware. It has all the settings in /etc/config/ tree. There is a command-line program called UCI that allows you to easily edit them. The GUI's get built on top of that typically.

There are at least 3 installable package GUI's available that I know of: X-WRT, LuCI, Gargoyle. But people have used it for years and years without a GUI.

OpenWRT's is really great at being portable to many routers and CPU types. They spent a lot of time investing in the long-term and not worried about the visual fluff.

I think we should encourage other companies to join in the contest. Best idea I have is solicit router companies to do $25,000 donations - and allow them to independently judge and reward their own winner.

That way maybe someone who didn't make the top place could get a chance at another income boost. Would supplement the interest in people fearful of not making 1st place.

Also note that a single person can enter more than ONE entry - so if they come up with different design cocepts - they don't have to choose.

So why don't the guys who make Tomato port their UI over to OpenWRT and enter it in contest?