bitcracker

That's your reason to buy a WinRT pad and put Linux on it?

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:

http://t3n.de/news/raspberry-pi-cluster-467237/

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.

So, what's the gain?

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.

http://eclipsefp.github.io/features.html

Tell your son to put the lamp _behind_ the screen. It will bless his eyes.

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.

Yes, this is the usual way in Common Lisp.

> "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.

JSON: { "posts": { "id": "1", "title": "Rails is Omakase", "rels": { "author": 9, "comments": [ 5, 12, 17, 20 ] } } }

LISP: (posts (id 1) (title "Rails is Omakase") (rels (author 9) (comments (5 12 17 20))))

> 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.

This is the first step to true open hardware.

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.

In other words: C++11 boosts Python :-)

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 :-)

We'll see whether Wayland is able to hold what it promises.

> wayland _should_eventually_ be able to completely fill the role that X11 currently fills.

Which X11 features are still missing? Does Wayland support X11's seemless remote multiuser sessions already?

I've googled around and found this fresh message from April 2012:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/04/06/0538250/update-on-wa...

"... X11 support on Wayland. It's basically ready to go, but window management is implemented only as a hack right now."

That doesn't sound good. It seems that Wayland will have a hard time to replace X11 in the next decade. Currently I see no reason why I should switch.

Another solution is xmodmap in Unix or some similar tool in Windows to change the keyboard layout. With that solution you don't have to miss the default national keyboard layout.

Adding a keyboard to a tablet makes it a computer with the power of a PC we had ten years ago.

There is nothing more productive than a good desktop workstation with big multiple screens. I recently purchased a new one for a good price, and I am happy with it.

> but it transparently stores and compares UTF-8 strings

Thanks for this good news! The last time I tried Lua it didn't work. UTF-8 is ok, full Unicode is not necessary.

I also like Lua. The speed of the virtual machine is awesome. But sadly Lua is still missing Unicode support. This is a big issue that needs to be solved.

Even an experienced programmer can still be a bad programmer.

I realized that myself when I learned Ada. You cannot imagine how humbling an Ada compiler can be :-) This is possibly the reason why Ada is not popular at all. It exposes how bad you really are. Java, C#, and even C++ are much more tolerant and can easily give you the illusion of being a good programmer

I am experienced in really many programming styles and languages. Ada and Lisp and their programming paradigms advanced my programming skills the most. Ada, because of its merciless requirement of discipline, and Lisp because it teached me to focus on data instead of code.

IMHO: That's why good programmers love Lisp.

Lisp is all about data structures. Data can be expressed so easily no matter how complex it is. Lisp coding is merely writing minimum code to handle data structures. Even code is data. So it's no problem to extend Lisp with new commands. That's precisely coding around data.

In Java or C# however you have a lot of libraries to handle data but you don't have such freedom of data expression. You have to write a lot of code to express and handle complex data.

> The ergo gains of vim are so rediculously awesome

For instance?

> if I had to write my own Mars-landing controller, I would use C. No doubt there.

C is a good choice for code generation, as a replacement for Assembler. But I would never dare write mars landing code in C directly.

I guess the curiosity team used several languages destined for a 100% verified C compiler for a well defined subset of C.

I think it's exactly the opposite. If the story is really true then the psychological effects are enormous. It tells them:

"Look we have everything under control. We can even afford to let you know that. Look, we can make your top secret workstations play music just for fun. Don't mess with us, otherwise we can make even your bombs explode in your own bunkers."

I think if the Iranians are really so stupid to make war with Israel or U.S. (which means WW3) this would lead to their own self destruction.