Sat, 13 Dec 2003
Excuses, excuses
The reason I haven't blogged lately is that I'm in Leeds.
Where my family live. Where I'm busy upgrading my sister,
brother-in-law, and father to run OS/X on various shades of
surplus-to-requirement powerbook and iBooks, installing
Airport access points, configuring broadband lines, and
otherwise catching up on a year's worth of system
administration work for my blood relatives. In return for this
they're feeding me, watering me, and telling me to get my hair
cut.
As this posting demonstrates, I've finally managed to get my
sister's NTL broadband connection talking to an Airport and
thence to my own iBook, in the wind-swept garrett on the top
floor. This is a Good Thing. Less good is the fact that I
talked myself into buying a copy of Poser for
Feorag and began playing with it, instead of working on the
current story. But piling real work on top of mere system
administration is, well, just not on.
Meanwhile, by way of BoingBoing, here's news of a
fascinating development: the first demo of an
open
source CPU core that can be implemented using FPGAs --
cheap off-the-shelf reconfigurable chips that can be
programmed to emulate other circuits. It's a long way to go
until we see the Free Hardware Foundation's GNU Nanoassembler
1.0, but this is clearly a significant step on the way because
it means goddamn royalty and copyright encumbrance free
microprocessors that run goddamn royalty and copyright
encumbrance free software (sorry for shouting there). All
too many linux geeks think that it's enough for the software
not to involve paying the Microsoft tax -- without realising
that Intel, AMD, and the like are ultimately just as
restrictive. FPGA based CPU cores running open RISC
architectures are the first step towards really free
(as in speech, not as in beer) computers and, by extension,
towards the development of an architecture of the commons.
Which is critically important because computing these days is
infrastructure, and by building it on foundations owned by
rapacious multinationals we're leaving our future working
environment in hock to them.
(Do I hear a chorus of "give the workers the means of
production and they'll feed themselves for life" in the house?)
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posted at: 23:27 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
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