First, a bit of historical background. Some years ago, Linksys released the WRT54G home wireless router. It turned out that the router came with an embedded version of Linux, and therefore under terms of the GPL, users of the router were entitled to see the source code. After a bit of prodding, Linksys made the […]
Very interesting post about Ampulex compressa, a species of tropical African wasp. Like many other solitary wasps, A. compressa lays its eggs on another insect, which is then used as food by the wasp’s larvae. However, our wasp has picked Periplaneta americana, an African cockroach (not American, despite the misleading name), as the host for […]
Stanisław Lem, one of the world’s greatest science fiction writers, died on Monday March 27. And I had just started reading the Cyberiad last week…
(Which, by the way, at least in my translation, is an utterly brilliant work. The Dragons of Probability in particular will leave anyone who has ever taken a quantum mechanics course […]
The X.org i810 driver for Intel “Extreme” graphics cards is probably the premier example of a fully open-source 2D/3D graphics driver. (Despite the name “i810“, the driver actually supports all 800 and 900 series Intel graphics). My laptop comes with Intel 915GM integrated graphics, so I have been using the i810 driver for over 6 […]