Am I the only one who noticed that for about 30 minutes towards the end of the movie, they started inserting their favorite scenes / motifs from Star Wars with only the thinnest of veneers?
First the s/speeder/motorcycle/g chase scene making me wonder when they left Germany for Endor. Then the "stormtroopers" and laser gun fight straight out of the first 10 minutes of A New Hope complete with hydraulic closing doors. Then the escape the deathstar in the millenium falcon sequence. And finally, the showdown on the "view deck" out of RotJ that had me wondering if they were gonna finish it off with light sabers.
The gist of this idea at least in my view is that you can design more powerful, more manageable and more usable software when you can control the entire software stack, including OS and all applications running on it. TiVo is a cannonical example of this. It's based on Linux, updates and manages itself, and the good folks at TiVo can get the benefits of Linux without having to write software that has to support 7 distributions and 15 kernel patches. Of course TiVo is a physical entity, which has its advantages (easy to plug into your cable box, comes with a remote control), but also has its disadvantages (cost of hardware, can't download a TiVo over the internet).
So the idea then is to marry the benefits of hardware appliance with software. I personally think it gets even more interesting when you start to look into the realm of server virtual appliances. Wouldn't it be nice to just go to a website and download a fully configured, self-managing mail server/web server/file server/network security box/proxy server/vpn server etc. etc? No configuration hassles, if done right it can manage itself. Its also a pretty amazingly useful way to bring the benefits of Linux and open source to the masses IMO. If Linux can be installed just like an application, and have a very low maintenance burden, it seems like that might really help continue to accelerate its adoption.
Anyhow, hope this helps explain what a "virtual appliance" is supposed to be all about.
I think the assumption Orwell made that turned out to be wrong was the widespread nuclear war in the 50's that provided the basis for "War is Peace" and that almost everything else in EngSock, Neobolshevism and Death Worship have that as the basis. It's war and the negative consequences of losing one that forces regimes to continue to keep the populace educated and free from doublethink. As it is exactly continual development of technology which is allowably absent in a world that has reached equilibrium. From my reading, science and technology are not the enemy but the savior.
Additionally, the nuclear war of the fifties provided one other crucial property that allowed 1984 to happen. The total destruction from it was the impetus for governments seizing power for the supposed benefit and protection of its citizens. It was only once the governments of the world became homogeneous that 1984 could come into being.
I think Orwell's most valuable point, and one that is similar to Darwin's (and every member of the Enterprise who has fought against the Borg) is that variety is key. If the whole world is at war, or the whole world is at peace, or the whole world functions as one, then the world can cease to change, and Orwell (IMO rightly) presumes the steady state homogeny in humanity to be down right miserable.
So just remember this the next time some beauty pagent contestant vacuously extolls the virtues of world peace.
You couldn't be more incorrect if you tried. It is not that company A buys a product from company B with the notion that if it sucks A will sue B. A buys from B because they know that if B's product stinks, then all the people working for company B will be out on the street. Therefore the people at B have a motivation for making the product not stink that the people at company A understand, and this gives A confidence.
People working on open source have no monetary motivation for continuing to work on it. They *could* give it up at any time with the only loss being that their "baby" goes left unfinished. It also works with respect to positive reinforcement. Company A can't promise to buy a lot of copies to encourse Company B to add feature X. It is a question of businesses and open-source people not speaking the same language.
Even though your example is purposefully citing a rare action, it doesn't take me that long to click the start button, click search, click find, type foo and type the directory name. The time used to learn the concepts of pipes and the syntax of find and the syntax of grep and the syntax of xargs will unlikely ever be made up with the savings of 2 seconds per instance of this situation.
Don't get me wrong, I live by zsh and tab completion and hundreds of vim macros, but I just hate seeing people make specious arguments.
I most certainly agree that games are driving a lot of innovation in all parts of software.
I think the reason is simple though. Since games have such a short lifetime, the designers are always free to try radically new ideas. If it works out, great. If not, oh well, they can try something better the next time.
They also have users who don't mind and actually expect to start from square one, so games don't have as a design goal being as minimally invasive as possible upon the existing instincts of the user.
Of course there is a strong need for consistency,
and gestures don't preclude that by any means.
We need to finally escape from the 30 year old WIMP model which was originally developed at PARC for children under 5 years old.
Evolve man!
Also i wish they would make a book that was like a "stroll through OS design" cover the differences between OS's, what choices they
made, how it effects performance, scaleability,
etc..
The book you want is "Unix Internals" by Uresh
Vahalia. It is fantastic. It walks you through
the evolution of Unix and talks in detail about
the distinguishing features of Solaris 2.x,
4.4 BSD, Digital Unix, SVR 4.2 and Mach among
others.
At Brown the students write their own kernel on top of a simulator after being given some minimal framework (a buffer cache, a loader and lots of header files). Then those that take the optional lab component of the course implement processes and kernel threads (including a simple scheduler), a VFS subsystem (without permissions among other things), Virtual Memory (without paging to backing store), and a simplified System V filesystem. Once it all works they get to run the shell they wrote as the first assignment on their own kernel.
Its a ton of work to do in one semester (and the drop out rate is usually very high) but those that finish come away with a uniquely deep understanding of UNIX flavored OSes for an undergraduate course. (sorry for the blatant plug but I owe my current job to this course).
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Am I the only one who noticed that for about 30 minutes towards the end of the movie, they started inserting their favorite scenes / motifs from Star Wars with only the thinnest of veneers?
First the s/speeder/motorcycle/g chase scene making me wonder when they left Germany for Endor.
Then the "stormtroopers" and laser gun fight straight out of the first 10 minutes of A New Hope complete with hydraulic closing doors.
Then the escape the deathstar in the millenium falcon sequence.
And finally, the showdown on the "view deck" out of RotJ that had me wondering if they were gonna finish it off with light sabers.
Let me take a stab at trying to explain the thinking behind this. It's a pretty damn cool idea if you ask me (disclosure: I do work for VMware)
A virtual appliance is a virtual machine that is configured to act like an appliance.
First, check out http://suif.stanford.edu/collective/ which talks about some of the research around this concept.
The gist of this idea at least in my view is that you can design more powerful, more manageable and more usable software when you can control the entire software stack, including OS and all applications running on it. TiVo is a cannonical example of this. It's based on Linux, updates and manages itself, and the good folks at TiVo can get the benefits of Linux without having to write software that has to support 7 distributions and 15 kernel patches. Of course TiVo is a physical entity, which has its advantages (easy to plug into your cable box, comes with a remote control), but also has its disadvantages (cost of hardware, can't download a TiVo over the internet).
So the idea then is to marry the benefits of hardware appliance with software. I personally think it gets even more interesting when you start to look into the realm of server virtual appliances. Wouldn't it be nice to just go to a website and download a fully configured, self-managing mail server/web server/file server/network security box/proxy server/vpn server etc. etc? No configuration hassles, if done right it can manage itself. Its also a pretty amazingly useful way to bring the benefits of Linux and open source to the masses IMO. If Linux can be installed just like an application, and have a very low maintenance burden, it seems like that might really help continue to accelerate its adoption.
Anyhow, hope this helps explain what a "virtual appliance" is supposed to be all about.
VMware murders puppies too.
Additionally, the nuclear war of the fifties provided one other crucial property that allowed 1984 to happen. The total destruction from it was the impetus for governments seizing power for the supposed benefit and protection of its citizens. It was only once the governments of the world became homogeneous that 1984 could come into being.
I think Orwell's most valuable point, and one that is similar to Darwin's (and every member of the Enterprise who has fought against the Borg) is that variety is key. If the whole world is at war, or the whole world is at peace, or the whole world functions as one, then the world can cease to change, and Orwell (IMO rightly) presumes the steady state homogeny in humanity to be down right miserable.
So just remember this the next time some beauty pagent contestant vacuously extolls the virtues of world peace.
You couldn't be more incorrect if you tried. It is not that company A buys a product from company B with the notion that if it sucks A will sue B. A buys from B because they know that if B's product stinks, then all the people working for company B will be out on the street. Therefore the people at B have a motivation for making the product not stink that the people at company A understand, and this gives A confidence.
People working on open source have no monetary motivation for continuing to work on it. They *could* give it up at any time with the only loss being that their "baby" goes left unfinished. It also works with respect to positive reinforcement. Company A can't promise to buy a lot of copies to encourse Company B to add feature X. It is a question of businesses and open-source people not speaking the same language.
Don't get me wrong, I live by zsh and tab completion and hundreds of vim macros, but I just hate seeing people make specious arguments.
I think the reason is simple though. Since games have such a short lifetime, the designers are always free to try radically new ideas. If it works out, great. If not, oh well, they can try something better the next time.
They also have users who don't mind and actually expect to start from square one, so games don't have as a design goal being as minimally invasive as possible upon the existing instincts of the user.
Of course there is a strong need for consistency, and gestures don't preclude that by any means. We need to finally escape from the 30 year old WIMP model which was originally developed at PARC for children under 5 years old. Evolve man!
The book you want is "Unix Internals" by Uresh Vahalia. It is fantastic. It walks you through the evolution of Unix and talks in detail about the distinguishing features of Solaris 2.x, 4.4 BSD, Digital Unix, SVR 4.2 and Mach among others.
At Brown the students write their own kernel on top of a simulator after being given some minimal framework (a buffer cache, a loader and lots of header files). Then those that take the optional lab component of the course implement processes and kernel threads (including a simple scheduler), a VFS subsystem (without permissions among other things), Virtual Memory (without paging to backing store), and a simplified System V filesystem. Once it all works they get to run the shell they wrote as the first assignment on their own kernel. Its a ton of work to do in one semester (and the drop out rate is usually very high) but those that finish come away with a uniquely deep understanding of UNIX flavored OSes for an undergraduate course. (sorry for the blatant plug but I owe my current job to this course).