I still don't get it. Microsoft is not that important anymore today as it had been for decades. There are extremely cheap ARM boards (Raspberry, Beagle Bone, etc.) that are almost suitable for Internet and Office applications right now. And I think soon we will have the next generation of Raspberry and Beagle Bones with 1.5 GHz dualcore or quadcore, and we can even built our own cluster of these boards for servers -- for instance, this one with 32 nodes:
I don't understand why Linux users want Win8- or WinRT Pads.
Not only are they pretty expensive but there already are many cheap good Android Pads running a Linux kernel. There are also plain Linux pads on the market, and even Ubuntu plans to sell a Ubuntu pad soon.
I would also recommand EclipseFP. It is an amazingly well working Eclipse Plugin for Haskell with incremental compiling, debugger, Smalltalk like browser, and other nice features.
For this simple reason the Linux Foundation should stop wasting further energy for UEFI. As a Linux user from the very beginning (since 1992) I won't buy any UEFI device for Linux in general even if Linux would be 100% supported. I won't buy an expensive WinRT tablet just to put Linux on it.
When the Linux Foundation was founded I was happy to have a strong organization behind Linux. But today they make me really angry for supporting a system of someone who considered Linux, and the Open Source movement in general, as enemy. UEFI proves that they don't have changed their mind.
LF, please stop your unrealistic UEFI dreams, and please focus on the interests of the Linux community. I believe that most Linux users want functional hardware alternatives which will likely remain free from DRM restrictions. I would appreciate that even at the cost of incompatibility with the internet. In that case we would have to build our own new Internet, free from spam etc.
There are so many good devices like Raspberry and Beagleboard Black. They are powerful enough to be used as a desktop workstation when using a small and efficient Linux distro. Why not even enhance them with an e-ink display to make them a cheap alternative tablet pc that everyone can afford?
By the way, for the price of a single UEFI WinRT tablet we could build a whole server cluster of RPis or BBB.
> "could I express this as s-expressions?" Sure. "Would I want to?" Hell no.
Of course it is possible to implement syntactic sugar in Lisp which supports JSON style expressions. DSLs are common in Lisp, and that actually became a weakness of Lisp (so-called "DSL hell").
The interesting thing about s-expr is that Lisp doesn't need special data conversion tools to handle them. Even control structures are expressed as s-expr, and they can be created and modified dynamically which means that even code can be exchanged at runtime on the fly.
It amazes me how programming languages and APIs look more and more like Lisp. Modern languages copy essential features from Lisp, and JSON as one of the most popular JS libs almost look identical to Lisp s-expressions.
Someday also more people will realize how useful and effective the equivalence of control structures and data really is.
> Obviously you haven't seen the lisp ads from the 80's :)
I studied computer science in the 80's. Maybe that there were some business ads of Lisp (especially Lisp machines). But I had the strong impression that Ada was much more hyped than Lisp. Where is Ada today?
> if it was features, then smalltalk would have won
It depends on how "features" is defined. C won over Lisp and Smalltalk because of the single feature of performance. At the time when C was invented hardware was very expensive.
> Even racket had to get rid of the word "scheme" from their name for marketing reasons.
Racket is a different language. Scheme (R6RS etc.) is a subset of that.
According to your logic Rust will have no chance at all. We will see.
Features are much more relevant than marketing. Look at Ruby, some years ago it was hyped a lot but that enthusiasm has fade away. Look at Lisp, it wasn't hyped for about 50 years but it is still alive today, and many modern language developments still copy features from Lisp.
If the features are good then I don't care about the name. I really like Rust (http://www.rust-lang.org/) although it sounds "rusty".
AFAIK the GreenArray chip provides only 128 bytes per core while Parallela supports 32 KBytes per core.
As a former Forth hacker I was enthusiastic at the first glance of the GA but 128 Bytes per core were really disappointing. What could that amount of RAM be useful for?
One interesting application could be realtime 3D rendering because this is an area with small overhead. I know that the chip does not support floating point but that could be simulated by fixed point integers.
I agree with Shamanmuni that the great advantage of Parallela chip over GPUs is open source (full documentation). It's a practical study tool for real parallel programming tasks that many students can afford.
Lisp is too powerful only for unexperienced developers because the way of programming in Lisp is totally different from all other languages.
Actually many modern languages (Python, Ruby, Java, even C++11) copy more and more features from Lisp since the language designers suddenly realized how useful these features are.
Lisp was never "too powerful" but simply far ahead.
I understand what you mean, and you are basically correct. But nevertheless I see this project as a milestone as it helps to focus on selfmade FPGAs instead of soldering TTL chips to copy some hard wired retro systems.
If we someday will be able to print our own chips then they will surely be FPGAs because debugging and reprinting hardwired chips would be likely too expensive.
> I agree with your entire comment except for the first sentence.
I meant the term "first step" historically. It is really the first step to true open hardware because it is the first project (as far as I know) that solely relies on basic electronics you can solder together on your own pcb.
There are many open hardware projects but all of them are based on complex hardware (FPGA kits etc.). There are several good open cores you can download into your fpga but what if someday your fpga stops working and you can't buy another one because these fpgas are not produced anymore?
I agree with you that selfmade processors will never be able to compete with modern processors. But even a 1 MHz 8 bit cpu can do a lot of things. Remember the huge success of Commodore 64. And if you are able to 3d-print one such a cpu you can also print many, and build a multicore system.
Who says that selfmade processors have to work with silicon and copper? If someone finds a way to produce cheap conductive plastic filaments that would be a huge leap forward for printed circuits. I believe that there are several smart hardware hackers who could achieve a solution we could live well with. 3D printing is just in the beginning. I expect amazing times to come.
I know that there are several open hardware projects (Opencores for instance). But I consider _true_ open hardware as hardware were we always will have _full_ control over _every_ tiny detail of the system.
The TTL level is the right foundation for that. If we could go down to the NMOS level or so for 3D printing, that would be even better. We'll see what the future shows.
I am concerned how fast IT evolves to DRM-locked devices. The PC will become obsolete by tablets so we will lose control over our computers. Currently DRM looks harmless but when you consider the long-term consequences it doesn't look good at all.
First we fought TCPA and Trusted Computing, now we have the first global players (Apple, Microsoft) put DRM into their gadgets to get maximum control and minimum competition. And the customers buy, consume, and play, without considering the consequences.
Our technology today is the foundation for the political systems of tomorrow, and when you consider the global demographic development you know what I mean. Within the next twenty years we will have a completely different global political and economical system, and I don't want to have them total control over us with their super-safe cascaded DRM chips which nobody will be able to break.
Unfortunately we can't stop Apple, Microsoft & Co. from using DRM. That's why I appreciate pioneer projects like this selfmade FPGA very much as they help to jump over the big hurdle from open source to true open hardware. Someday when all commercial chips will be DRM-locked I hope we will be able to 3D-print our own processors and RAM chips.
I am convinced that Open Hardware will become vital for the survival of our freedom of speech and liberty in general.
I think only a hardcore C++ developer would claim that the author's sample is "succinct". Honestly, C++11 is still far behind the easiness of Python (or Scheme), even with Boost.
Funny, a decade ago Ada 95 (the "military" language for high-critical applications) looked like a monstrous over-designed beast when compared to C++. Today Ada 2012 looks elegant and even "small" when compared to C++11. How times have changed :-)