Geek? Want a Notebook Like RMS? Lemote Yeeloong Could Be The Answer

6 Responses to Geek? Want a Notebook Like RMS? Lemote Yeeloong Could Be The Answer

1. oiaohm says:

   August 31, 2014 at 7:51 pm

   http://opencores.org/
   This is what annoys me about you kurkosdr. You go spewing off garbage without facts. FSF and GNU and RMS do support opencores to produce fully open hardware.

   FSF does back the idea of hardware designs being free and open. Making silicon chips at this stage requires some extremely expensive gear. It comes down to being practical.

   A well documented black box can still be audited that it is doing exactly what it documentation says. Like the original 8086 from intel has a complete book listing every single instruction the cpu should respond to and how it should respond. You might not have the silicon design but you could audit exactly what it did. Loongson 2F is also like this where everything a Longson processor should do is in the documentation. If it does anything else it a defective chip. Current day intel and AMD chips have a black box around exactly how the Microcode in them works so you cannot write anything to audit the Microcode sections of their cpus.

   Proprietary designs with fully open spec can be audited from a security point of view.

   Yes fully open design would be good but lets be realistic it is too expensive for people to open design chips. Worse is a silicon chip designed for X factory will not in fact be able to made in different factory due to the differences in tolerances between the two factories. Yes silicon chips are not like circuit boards were you can send the same design to many different vendors and get the same quality result.

   Next best is Proprietary designs at silicon with fully open spec with real world interfacing. Why next best at least this can be audited.

   The problem is majority these days don’t come with all the details required to audit.
2. Robert Pogson says:

   August 30, 2014 at 5:18 am

   kurkosdr wrote, “such a major flaw can only be corrected only if the FSF admits hardware designs, video, audio, pictures and text “should be free” as much as software should be free.”

   This forgets history. FSF began in part because RMS was frustrated by a printer he could not control because the manufacturer would not release the code. That applies to all hardware: CPUs, NICs, USB interfaces…
3. Robert Pogson says:

   August 30, 2014 at 5:12 am

   kurkosdr wrote, “at which point a firmware becomes an OS? Which makes it silly to avoid proprietary OSes as well!”

   What is silly is to have programmable devices everywhere which your enemies can use to spy on and to control YOU! We, who don’t voluntarily commit to slavery, fear and a police-state choose FLOSS whenever we can. The FLOSS movement is growing in strength and soon will be able successfully to demand open systems for greater privacy and security. There already are manufacturers who offer open systems. If they grow and the others wither the world will become a better place.
4. kurkosdr says:

   August 29, 2014 at 5:29 pm

   …and that poses the question, at which point a firmware becomes an OS? Which makes it silly to avoid proprietary OSes as well!
5. kurkosdr says:

   August 29, 2014 at 5:28 pm

   In other words, it’s silly to avoid proprietary BIOSes or bootloaders, but at the same time use chips that are based on proprietary designs, like Stallman is doing.
6. kurkosdr says:

   August 29, 2014 at 5:23 pm

   We had an interesting (promise, go ahead and read it) discussion on why saying “I don’t want this computer, it has a proprietary BIOS/EFI/bootloader” is silly even if you are an FSF advocate:
   http://tmrepository.com/fudtracker/so-is-it-a-circuit-or-a-piece-of-software/

   Generally, there is one BIG problem with the FSF movement: At which point the software becomes non-trivial, and hence “must be free”?

   FOR EXAMPLE:
   Suppose I make a cartoon about an airplane flying (in Mpeg1). Suppose I take the cartoon and make a game of a moving airplane that uses the DVD navigation features of a DVD player, much like a game called “Tomb Raider: The Action Adventure” or “Scene It!”. In plain english, if the player presses the wrong button at the DVD player d-pad, he arrives at the wrong scene and sees “game over”. Now suppose I rewrite the game to use the BD-J functionality of Bluray players, because I want the airplane to be move freely around, with increasing levels of interactivity. Then suppose I port the game to Java (easy with BD-J) and release it as jar. Then suppose I compile the Java source into an exe.

   At which point do your basic rights to software freedom kick-in, and I must release the source?

   Generally, at which point interactive video stops being interactive video and becomes a videogame, javascript code becomes a browser app, and hardware micro-code becomes firmware?

   Every attempt to draw a line in the sand will be arbitary!

   This is a deep and fundamental flaw in the FSF rhetoric, and every time it pops up, (firmware, javascript, interactive video), it’s papered-over using arbitary handwaving like “trivial code”. In reality, such a major flaw can only be corrected only if the FSF admits hardware designs, video, audio, pictures and text “should be free” as much as software should be free.