Return of the Big Boppers

I was re-reading Rudy Rucker’s Ware series recently, starting with the 1982 book, Software. There’s an interesting exchange about the death of Sta-Hi’s father that occurs when Sta-Hi runs into Cobb Anderson for first time time since the Big Boppers gave Cobb a robot body. Like much of the story in the ware series, it’s an early foreshadowing of Rucker’s later non-fiction book on universal automatism, titled “The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. For the uninitiated, universal automatism is the idea that everything in the universe boils down to computation. Rather than describe it, I’ll just quote a little piece of the exchange and let you ponder it.

The robot began to talk then, slowly, and in Cobb’s old voice. “Listen to me, Sta-Hi. Sit down and listen. I’m sorry your father died. But death isn’t real. You have to understand that. Death is meaningless. I wasted the last ten years being scared of death, and now…”

“Now that you think you’re immortal you don’t worry about death,” Sta-Hi said bitterly. “That’s really enlightened of you. But whether you know it or not, Cobb Anderson is dead. I saw him die, and if you think you’re him, you’re just fooling yourself.” He sat down, suddenly very tired.

“If I’m not Cobb Anderson, then who would I be?” The flicker-cladding face smiled at him gently. “I know I’m Cobb. I have the same memories, the same habits, the same feelings that I always did.”

“But what about your . . . your soul,” Sta-Hi said, not liking to use the word. “Each person has a soul, a consciousness, whatever you call it. There’s some special thing that makes a person alive, and there’s no way that can go into a computer program. No way.”

“It doesn’t have to go into the program, Sta-Hi. It is everywhere. It is just existence itself. All consciousness is One. The One is God. God is pure existence unmodified.”

Cobb’s voice was intense, evangelical. “A person is just hardware plus software plus existence. Me existing in flesh is the same as me existing on chips. But that’s not all.

“Potential existence is as good as actual existence. That’s why death is impossible. Your software exists permanently and indestructibly as a certain possibility, a certain mathematical set of relations. Your father is now an abstract, non-physical possibility. But nevertheless he exists!”

The books of the Ware series include Software, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware. The first two were winners of the Philip K. Dick award. These well-known early cyberpunk books have been released in a single volume titled The Ware Tetralogy. You can get the dead tree version from Amazon if you’re like me and still prefer the feel of a real book in your hands. Rucker also offers The Ware Tetralogy as a Creative Commons licensed download in PDF format, suitable for most readers, tablets, phones, or direct download into your brain if you have the necessary USB port on your skull.

First Post^M^M^M^M GPLv3 Relicense

To celebrate today’s release of the GPLv3, I’ve released updates of my two ODP-related programs, dumpcheck and odp2db under the GPLv3 license.

GPLv2 – Where the future begins tomorrow

My one complaint about the new license is the changed wording in the How-To section. The GPLv2 How-To section had a neat Thomas Pynchon / Buckaroo Banzai reference to Yoyodyne in the example copyright disclaimer. The GPLv3 How-To section drops the example disclaimer altogether. They also removed the reference to version 69 of the Gnomovision program in the example interactive mode copyright. Whatever happened to Gnomovision anyway?

Random software and robot news

I’ve been doing a little more C programming lately. On the embedded level, I’m porting some odometery and waypoint navigation code written by David P. Anderson for use on my own robot. This is part of a larger project to put together a GPL’d library of mobile robot code. Don’t expect to see it anytime soon but we are making progress.

I’m also trying to squeeze in time to keep up the work on mod_virgule. I’ve made a lot of progress over the last few months, benefiting both robots.net and Advogato. The ToDo list seems endless but next up is some code refactoring and work on the data schemas used for the XML database and HTML entry forms. This work will hopefully allow me to fix a long standing bug in the HTML forms and make the field layouts a little more flexible.

The Year is off to a Good Start for Free Software

Everywhere I look lately, I’m seeing good news about 3D graphics acceleration support for free software users.

Since I started collecting numbers last year, the highest glxgears results we’d seen for any free software driver was a little over 3,000 FPS. Now we’re begining to see number for the R300 code that has been added to the X.Org radeon driver and we have two reports in the 5,000 – 6,000 FPS range on ATI X800/X850 hardware. These may be the highest glxgears number attained on free software to date (if there are higher ones, hopefully somebody will send us a report). With numbers like that, I think the Ubuntu folks won’t be able to use performance as a reason for switching to proprietary drivers (at least for ATI).

A growing number of reports are showing improvments in the performance of the X.Org Intel graphics driver too.

Meanwhile, the nouveau project, which is busy reverse engineering nVidia’s proprietary hardware, has hit a milestone. They posted a screen shot of their driver successfully running glxgears in late December.

Nouveau also came up in a recent debate on the linux kernel mailing list over proprietary binary drivers. Alan Cox suggested getting nouveau’s DRM module (that’s Direct Rendering Manager, not Digital Restrictions Management) into the kernel ASAP. The DRM module is the kernel side of the X.Org DRI driver. The nouveau folks don’t think the code is quite ready but it’s good to know nVidia 3D acceleration is getting closer.

Not enough good news? The Open Graphics Project took delivery of their first OGD1 development boards and are now in a testing cycle. The development board, which includes two FPGA chips, will have a GPU clock rate of 150MHz. Performance is expected to clock in faster than an ATI Radeon 7000 and a little below the nVidia Ge Force2 GTS. The hardware design is completely open and licensed under the GNU GPL. When the development is completed the design will be moved to custom ASICs, allowing a cheaper (and possibly faster) final board for end users.