The part of the article where Probert discusses the operating system becoming something like a hypervisor reminds me of the Cache Kernel from a Stanford University paper back in 1994. http://www-dsg.stanford.edu/papers/cachekernel/main.html
The way I understand it, the cache kernel in kernel mode doesn't really have built-in policy for traditional OS tasks like scheduing or resource management. It just serves as a cache for loading and unloading for things like addresses spaces and threads and making them active. The policy for working with these things comes from separate application kernels in user mode and kernel objects that are loaded by the cache kernel.
There's also a 1997 MIT paper on exokernels (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/exo-sosp97/exo-sosp97.html). The idea is separating the responsibility of management from the responsibility of protection. The exokernel knows how to protect resources and the application knows how to make them sing. In the paper, they build a webserver on this architecture and it performs very well.
Both of these papers have research operating systems that demonstate specialized "native" applications running alongside unmodified UNIX applications running on UNIX emulators. That would suggest rebuilding an operating system in one of these styles wouldn't entail throwing out all the existing software or immediately forcing a new programming model on developers who aren't ready.
Microsoft used to talk about "personalities" in NT. It had subsystems for OS/2 1.x, WIn16, and Win32 that would allow apps from OS/2 (character mode), Windows 3.1 and Windows NT running as peers on top of the NT kernel. Perhaps someday the subsystems come back, some as OS personalities running traditional apps, and some as whole applications with resource management policy in their own right. Notepad might just run on the Win32 subsystem, but Photoshop might be interested in managing its own memory as well as disk space.
The mid-90s were fun for OS research, weren't they?:)
I asked my daughter if she wanted her picture in Times Square. She said she's been there and done that. 21 months, thanks for asking.
Seriously, Time Magazine is posting submitted pictures on a billboard until they announce the Person of the Year. If they use your picture, they send you an email with a link to the photo of the billboard with your picture on it. It took a day for her picture to make it up.
That's an old saying I heard a while ago and I think it's very true. Working a dull job you don't like is easy to tolerate in the short term, but the dullness eats away at your soul...eventually, you'll become resentful and feel that the best years of your life have slipped away...
It's obvious what you want to do...you're just unsure if you have nerve to take the risk. Take it. Just leave your company on good terms and don't burn your bridges. If you do have to come back to IT, either you'll go back to them for a job, or your next potential employer will go to them to find out why you left. What they say about you will depend on how you left.
I'm actually looking for one myself. A few weeks ago, I met some young (2nd graders to middle school) students in a mall who were demonstrating their math skills from an abacus class. The thing is, they weren't using abaci in their demo. They were able to do the basic math operations (up to division by three digit numbers) in their heads instantly using abacus principles.
These days, I have a new baby to worry about (Jaime, a girl, Mar 4, 5 lbs 13 oz) so I haven't had a chance to play with one yet. After meeting those kids, though, I do want to take a look and see if it could help me.
I think the saving function will be marked with a floppy disk for the forseeable future and it doesn't matter anyway. Folders in a GUI don't have that much in common with real-life folders anymore either. The floppy disk/file save idiom is almost like an established cultural understanding in computers now, so there won't be any change until the function fundamentally changes.
Saving is really just committing to all of your changes since the last checkpoint/save point. If the idea of "Save" changes at all it might focus along those lines with an icon for the function related more to committment than to physical storage devices.
Spire's a good company and I've bought from them three times. They don't make the model I use anymore, but I can attest to their quality. Very solid construction all around and very comfortable to use.
As soon as I read the article, that popped into my head...also the score and sounds from Defender of the Crown on the C64 bring back fond memories...they put that SID to good use...
I was a bit reckless with my use of the term "IA32".
I was only talking about the instruction set and the processor itself, because the post I was replying to seemed to assume emulating an x86 processor was enough to run x86 applications. Of course more than just the processor is necessary to support an app. Virtual PC does emulate the rest of the hardware required, and Virtual PC+Windows is a good solution for x86 apps on PPC.
To run existing applications on the 970, an IBM emulator would have to have a bit more to it than just emulation for the IA32 instruction set. Applications depend on an operating system and an actual API (as opposed to a "documented" API). If we want to run Windows applications to run on PPC, IA32 emulation is only a small part of it and most of the rest is already under development by other projects such as WINE.
It would help PPC for IBM to produce a software emulator for IA32, but it would also need to put some resources into helping Open Source projects fill in the gaps with the rest of the platform. I think Intel's IA32-on-IA64 emulation has a bit of an advantage here because the IA64 chips are supported by Windows, which hides the rest of the hardware platform from the applications.
This actually reminds me of when Apple's emulation strategy back when they migrated from the old 680x0 series to PowerPC. It was well orchestrated and was actually something of a triumph for them. I hope that bodes well for Intel's attempt.
For Intel to have a long term future without the embarassment of junking the whole architecture, they need Itanium x to run IA32 credibly. Advances in x86 performance keep coming at such increasing development costs that I think they would have to be able to migrate the market to IA64 within 5-10 years from now.
I would like for both the IA64 and the Hammer architectures to flourish, but Intel's taken an extremely bold step with EPIC, and I don't want to see them get punished in the market for that alone. I like the spirit of aiming higher.
I just want to congratulate the happy couple and wish them all the best. As it happens, I'm getting married in August and I know you both must be looking forward to a wonderful future.:)
That's all design really is. You think it's about the Software Lifecycle, and writing specs until you're blue in the face? You're talking about paradigms of labour and documentation. But make no mistake - the act of design is the act of making decisions. Sometimes hard ones, sometimes easier ones. Some more important than others.
And I submit to you that design is inherent to evolution.
Evolution, in my view, is a process comprised of two cycling stages, as others have pointed out. Mutation is a random process, as random events cause (perhaps a number of) individuals in a species to develop a new trait. Selection is a process of deciding which "mutants" are able to reproduce and propagate.
In biology, is there decision-making in mutation? Depends on what kind of mutation. If a gamma ray snips a DNA molecule, there's no decision made there - it just happens. But decisions can affect mutation. DNA researchers and biologists create mutants in labs everyday. And as a society, we've accepted a technologically advanced quality of life that we know affects our environment and in turn affects us. What goes around comes around.
Decision making takes a more active role in selection and propagation. In anthropology, we measure evolutionary success generally by the number of viable offspring produced by the variation. That means that a successful variation of a species in a world of scarce resources (such as food and useful time) manages and allocates its resources in such a way that it is able to have more children than other variations of the species and thus have more influence on the future direction of the species. Successful management requires successful decision-making. Just try to manage without making a decision and you'll see. It doesn't matter if radioactive spiders turn whole packs of dogs into super-intelligent beings able to telepathically move fire-hydrants and build solid-gold toilets to drink out of - if those dogs decide to spend their time doing that and never have any puppies, they're an evolutionary dead-end. This is actually an issue that's been discussed in Anthro...people we see as being more more successful in our society are having fewer kids than less successful people...anyhow, we see that decision-making (and thus, design) is not mutually exclusive to evolution and in fact plays a large role in it.
In software, mutation could be described as a change to either the source code of a software "component" or the configuration of a collection of software components. Any such modification is a mutation of software, whether intentional or not. Most changes in software, for good or ill, are intentional. Some are caused by gamma rays hitting storage devices and flipping bits, but more are done on purpose as an act that serves some purpose (bug-killing, optimization, etc.) So there is a decision there to serve the purpose via change. There's also a decision to either let a modification stand (because it serves the purpose, or because reversing the change is not worth it), or to revert to the pre-modification state. The decision is there even if it's only to ignore the issue. Decision making and, by extension, design is present in the selection of software changes. You cannot separate design from software evolution, because you cannot separate the evaluation and decision making process from the software development process. Doing such a thing about amount to putting a million monkeys on a million consoles banging away and hoping Linux 3.0 magically results. Statistically it could happen, but animal control would have a cow.
Linus originally decided to go with Rik's VM code for 2.4, then later switched to Andrea's code. Neither move was decided by a coin toss. Evolution? Yes. Design? Yes. It's both, and why can't it be both?
I'll finish by quoting from "Modern C++ Design" by Andrei Alexandrescu (page 4):
For any given architectural problem, there are many competing ways of solving it. However they may scale differently and have distinct sets of advantages and disadvantages...
Designing software systems is hard because it constantly asks you to choose. And in program design, just as in life, choice is hard.
Good, seasoned developers know what choices will lead to a good design. For a beginner, each design choice opens a door to the unknown. The experienced designer is like a good chess player: She can see moves ahead. This takes time to learn.
I didn't like it either. But though I had higher hopes, I'm not really surprised either. This is a familiar experience to anyone who's ever fallen in love with something from abroad only to see the American remake pale so badly in comparison.
The problem is that American producers are in love with their set pieces...the hosts, the sets, the gimmicks, the gadgets...all the superficial things that you notice in the first minute you see something. These are the things that make something "cool", but not what makes them great.
The true star of the Iron Chef concept is not the chairman, it's not the ingredient, or the kitchen or even the chefs... it's the mastery of skill and the struggle to parlay every ounce of that skill into accomplishing something that seems impossible.
When I watch the Japanese version, I love hearing about the ingredients and the techniques and the kitchen stadium is cool, but what really holds the space in my heart is watching these great masters of their craft with a dozen things going at once and somehow pulling a gourmet banquet menu together as the hour ticks away... like Iron Chef Sakai redefining minute rice.
I mean, that's why we love it, right? If the chefs just did something that seems perfectly feasible like create a single course for judging, we wouldn't care as much. If they made less than gourmet meals, we wouldn't care as much. It's the skill and the struggle, in the context of passion for food, that made the fans.
For Iron Chef USA, however, it was more about the host and the kitchen and the commentators and the motorcycle..even for people who've never seen the original Iron Chef, these things get old really fast.
Another thing too... as an Asian, I think we (generalizing over Asians) like to hold esteemed people up on pedestals as "ideals" to look up and aspire to. To give us an example of greatness to aim for. On the other hand, Americans tend to prefer bringing esteemed people down off of the pedestal to be "one of us". That kind of accounts for some of the difference in tone between the two versions of Iron Chef. In Japan, the Iron Chefs are like stoic masters of their craft, models of professionalism. In the USA, I think Americans prefer their Iron Chefs more juiced up and doing antics like some cool guy or something. It's a matter of taste, of course, but possibly another reason the soup didn't taste like we thought it should.
I don't know much about this, but the has been done research of how no gravity affect old people. How about living on "Mars retirement home" for a couple of months a year. Floating around, don't having to stand on those weary bones. I suppose there would be a back side to this, too, but I can't really think of any (except for the bones weakening from lack of "use"), since I don't have any first hand information (yet).
What happens when these old folks come back? Their bones, which weren't so strong to begin with, would be far too weak from the loss of calcium. Astronauts in the primes of their lives who have spent months in space need a good deal of training and reconditioning before they return to normal, so imagine whatit would be like for an elderly person. Forget about weekend visits and the like, too...
If you blast Grandpa into orbit, he ain't coming back.:)
I've known of QNX for a number of years from reading about it in Byte and I was so impressed that I called to see if I could order it. They didn't sell it as a single distribution, but rather as a collection of modules and the cost for the pieces I wanted including the development tools and the GUI reached well into the thousands. Whispers of memory tell me it was close to 10 thousand but I could be wrong about that...but not by much...
This is an amazing offer...finally, those of us who've only been able to read about QNX/Neutrino or hear the stories told by hard realtime users will get the chance to play with it for ourselves (beyond simply booting it up and surfing the web). QNX is a different sort of operating system designed for a different sort of needs at a completely different sort of pricing than what most of us are generally used to around here, so we should make the most of this opportunity to learn from it.
Besides GNU/Linux and GNU/HURD, is it possible that someday Debian might attempt an OS that completely breaks with the UNIX tradition? Although I understand HURD implements UNIX in a different way, how about an OS that reflects and entirely new way of thinking in its API's and its visible structure?
To me, one of Carmack's greatest traits is his maturity. I've been reading his plan updates for years, along with all the interviews and writings I can find, and I've never felt like he was being a punk, or using his immense talent as a proof of his opinions (e.g. "I'm the best game programmer there is, so I must be right"). He's a person who is willing to stand up in front of a crowd with a different view (I admire that he was willing to say on/. that NT serves his needs better than Linux...others might have tried to "please the crowd"). He can see value in things even when they're not useful for him, and he takes the time to decide properly how valuable something really is for him. I could honestly sit for hours talking about all things I respect about him, and how much he has impressed me with his focus and honesty, etc. but my fingers are tired and I'm starting to sound like I want to have his kid..:)
From reading the.plans of other game developers on PlanetQuake and *some* of the comments on places like Slashdot, I wish other technical people could look up to Carmack for more than just his programming skills...respect for that is certainly well-deserved, but there is so much more than that that people could learn from him.
He isn't just a great programmer, he's grown into one heck of a complete person. Congratulations to him...I hope he enjoys continued success.
Well, promoting Linux eases their dependence on Microsoft for software to run on the processors...but why is Intel investing in more than one distribution?
I guess Intel is trying to create another Windows without creating another Microsoft.:)
Is that the new logo for Debian? It makes me think of Starbucks. Everything they sell there is covered with swirls like that.
Really, though...what connection does that logo have to debian? Is there supposed to be a story behind it? To me, it doesn't suggest anything about what it's meant to represent.
As swirls go, it's a nice one though...and if it isn't Debian's logo at all, then I'll have my crow with plenty of salt, thank you.:)
In the previous comment I submitted, I was making the point that interface designers who are looking at 3D should look into new directions or possibilities that the new technology could enable. IBM's ideas or examples may not be the best ones, but they're interesting because they're different and the writings bring up some good points.
Does anyone remember a "bork-ifier" proxy?
on
Stop: Quickies Time
·
· Score: 1
When I first got on the Internet, I had the address of a proxy that would translate everything into Swedish Chef..does anyone know one that still exists?
Try The Dialectizer. It does Redneck, Jive, Cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Moron, and Pig Latin. Better than Jar Jar, but then again, anything is.:)
Slashdot Mirror
... if we could all just agree to disagree and buy what we want to use.
There's no Heaven out there hosted by Bill, Steve, or Linus waiting for us when we die. All this religion is a waste of passion.
The part of the article where Probert discusses the operating system becoming something like a hypervisor reminds me of the Cache Kernel from a Stanford University paper back in 1994. http://www-dsg.stanford.edu/papers/cachekernel/main.html
The way I understand it, the cache kernel in kernel mode doesn't really have built-in policy for traditional OS tasks like scheduing or resource management. It just serves as a cache for loading and unloading for things like addresses spaces and threads and making them active. The policy for working with these things comes from separate application kernels in user mode and kernel objects that are loaded by the cache kernel.
There's also a 1997 MIT paper on exokernels (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/exo-sosp97/exo-sosp97.html). The idea is separating the responsibility of management from the responsibility of protection. The exokernel knows how to protect resources and the application knows how to make them sing. In the paper, they build a webserver on this architecture and it performs very well.
Both of these papers have research operating systems that demonstate specialized "native" applications running alongside unmodified UNIX applications running on UNIX emulators. That would suggest rebuilding an operating system in one of these styles wouldn't entail throwing out all the existing software or immediately forcing a new programming model on developers who aren't ready.
Microsoft used to talk about "personalities" in NT. It had subsystems for OS/2 1.x, WIn16, and Win32 that would allow apps from OS/2 (character mode), Windows 3.1 and Windows NT running as peers on top of the NT kernel. Perhaps someday the subsystems come back, some as OS personalities running traditional apps, and some as whole applications with resource management policy in their own right. Notepad might just run on the Win32 subsystem, but Photoshop might be interested in managing its own memory as well as disk space.
The mid-90s were fun for OS research, weren't they? :)
How can you guys deflect protons when you're being so negative?
I asked my daughter if she wanted her picture in Times Square. She said she's been there and done that. 21 months, thanks for asking.
Seriously, Time Magazine is posting submitted pictures on a billboard until they announce the Person of the Year. If they use your picture, they send you an email with a link to the photo of the billboard with your picture on it. It took a day for her picture to make it up.
...and you'll never work a day in your life...
That's an old saying I heard a while ago and I think it's very true. Working a dull job you don't like is easy to tolerate in the short term, but the dullness eats away at your soul...eventually, you'll become resentful and feel that the best years of your life have slipped away...
It's obvious what you want to do...you're just unsure if you have nerve to take the risk. Take it. Just leave your company on good terms and don't burn your bridges. If you do have to come back to IT, either you'll go back to them for a job, or your next potential employer will go to them to find out why you left. What they say about you will depend on how you left.
Good luck, I envy you.
I'm actually looking for one myself. A few weeks ago, I met some young (2nd graders to middle school) students in a mall who were demonstrating their math skills from an abacus class. The thing is, they weren't using abaci in their demo. They were able to do the basic math operations (up to division by three digit numbers) in their heads instantly using abacus principles.
These days, I have a new baby to worry about (Jaime, a girl, Mar 4, 5 lbs 13 oz) so I haven't had a chance to play with one yet. After meeting those kids, though, I do want to take a look and see if it could help me.
I think the saving function will be marked with a floppy disk for the forseeable future and it doesn't matter anyway. Folders in a GUI don't have that much in common with real-life folders anymore either. The floppy disk/file save idiom is almost like an established cultural understanding in computers now, so there won't be any change until the function fundamentally changes.
Saving is really just committing to all of your changes since the last checkpoint/save point. If the idea of "Save" changes at all it might focus along those lines with an icon for the function related more to committment than to physical storage devices.
Spire's a good company and I've bought from them three times. They don't make the model I use anymore, but I can attest to their quality. Very solid construction all around and very comfortable to use.
Stay a while.... STAY FOREVER!!!!!!!
As soon as I read the article, that popped into my head...also the score and sounds from Defender of the Crown on the C64 bring back fond memories...they put that SID to good use...
I was a bit reckless with my use of the term "IA32".
I was only talking about the instruction set and the processor itself, because the post I was replying to seemed to assume emulating an x86 processor was enough to run x86 applications. Of course more than just the processor is necessary to support an app. Virtual PC does emulate the rest of the hardware required, and Virtual PC+Windows is a good solution for x86 apps on PPC.
To run existing applications on the 970, an IBM emulator would have to have a bit more to it than just emulation for the IA32 instruction set. Applications depend on an operating system and an actual API (as opposed to a "documented" API). If we want to run Windows applications to run on PPC, IA32 emulation is only a small part of it and most of the rest is already under development by other projects such as WINE.
It would help PPC for IBM to produce a software emulator for IA32, but it would also need to put some resources into helping Open Source projects fill in the gaps with the rest of the platform. I think Intel's IA32-on-IA64 emulation has a bit of an advantage here because the IA64 chips are supported by Windows, which hides the rest of the hardware platform from the applications.
This actually reminds me of when Apple's emulation strategy back when they migrated from the old 680x0 series to PowerPC. It was well orchestrated and was actually something of a triumph for them. I hope that bodes well for Intel's attempt.
For Intel to have a long term future without the embarassment of junking the whole architecture, they need Itanium x to run IA32 credibly. Advances in x86 performance keep coming at such increasing development costs that I think they would have to be able to migrate the market to IA64 within 5-10 years from now.
I would like for both the IA64 and the Hammer architectures to flourish, but Intel's taken an extremely bold step with EPIC, and I don't want to see them get punished in the market for that alone. I like the spirit of aiming higher.
If you're using your own diamonds and you don't know the dealer all that well, be careful that your stones don't get switched for lower quality ones.
I just want to congratulate the happy couple and wish them all the best. As it happens, I'm getting married in August and I know you both must be looking forward to a wonderful future. :)
Hooray!!
--
John
And I submit to you that design is inherent to evolution.
Evolution, in my view, is a process comprised of two cycling stages, as others have pointed out. Mutation is a random process, as random events cause (perhaps a number of) individuals in a species to develop a new trait. Selection is a process of deciding which "mutants" are able to reproduce and propagate.
In biology, is there decision-making in mutation? Depends on what kind of mutation. If a gamma ray snips a DNA molecule, there's no decision made there - it just happens. But decisions can affect mutation. DNA researchers and biologists create mutants in labs everyday. And as a society, we've accepted a technologically advanced quality of life that we know affects our environment and in turn affects us. What goes around comes around.
Decision making takes a more active role in selection and propagation. In anthropology, we measure evolutionary success generally by the number of viable offspring produced by the variation. That means that a successful variation of a species in a world of scarce resources (such as food and useful time) manages and allocates its resources in such a way that it is able to have more children than other variations of the species and thus have more influence on the future direction of the species. Successful management requires successful decision-making. Just try to manage without making a decision and you'll see. It doesn't matter if radioactive spiders turn whole packs of dogs into super-intelligent beings able to telepathically move fire-hydrants and build solid-gold toilets to drink out of - if those dogs decide to spend their time doing that and never have any puppies, they're an evolutionary dead-end. This is actually an issue that's been discussed in Anthro...people we see as being more more successful in our society are having fewer kids than less successful people...anyhow, we see that decision-making (and thus, design) is not mutually exclusive to evolution and in fact plays a large role in it.
In software, mutation could be described as a change to either the source code of a software "component" or the configuration of a collection of software components. Any such modification is a mutation of software, whether intentional or not. Most changes in software, for good or ill, are intentional. Some are caused by gamma rays hitting storage devices and flipping bits, but more are done on purpose as an act that serves some purpose (bug-killing, optimization, etc.) So there is a decision there to serve the purpose via change. There's also a decision to either let a modification stand (because it serves the purpose, or because reversing the change is not worth it), or to revert to the pre-modification state. The decision is there even if it's only to ignore the issue. Decision making and, by extension, design is present in the selection of software changes. You cannot separate design from software evolution, because you cannot separate the evaluation and decision making process from the software development process. Doing such a thing about amount to putting a million monkeys on a million consoles banging away and hoping Linux 3.0 magically results. Statistically it could happen, but animal control would have a cow.
Linus originally decided to go with Rik's VM code for 2.4, then later switched to Andrea's code. Neither move was decided by a coin toss. Evolution? Yes. Design? Yes. It's both, and why can't it be both?
I'll finish by quoting from "Modern C++ Design" by Andrei Alexandrescu (page 4):
I didn't like it either. But though I had higher hopes, I'm not really surprised either. This is a familiar experience to anyone who's ever fallen in love with something from abroad only to see the American remake pale so badly in comparison.
The problem is that American producers are in love with their set pieces...the hosts, the sets, the gimmicks, the gadgets...all the superficial things that you notice in the first minute you see something. These are the things that make something "cool", but not what makes them great.
The true star of the Iron Chef concept is not the chairman, it's not the ingredient, or the kitchen or even the chefs... it's the mastery of skill and the struggle to parlay every ounce of that skill into accomplishing something that seems impossible.
When I watch the Japanese version, I love hearing about the ingredients and the techniques and the kitchen stadium is cool, but what really holds the space in my heart is watching these great masters of their craft with a dozen things going at once and somehow pulling a gourmet banquet menu together as the hour ticks away... like Iron Chef Sakai redefining minute rice.
I mean, that's why we love it, right? If the chefs just did something that seems perfectly feasible like create a single course for judging, we wouldn't care as much. If they made less than gourmet meals, we wouldn't care as much. It's the skill and the struggle, in the context of passion for food, that made the fans.
For Iron Chef USA, however, it was more about the host and the kitchen and the commentators and the motorcycle..even for people who've never seen the original Iron Chef, these things get old really fast.
Another thing too... as an Asian, I think we (generalizing over Asians) like to hold esteemed people up on pedestals as "ideals" to look up and aspire to. To give us an example of greatness to aim for. On the other hand, Americans tend to prefer bringing esteemed people down off of the pedestal to be "one of us". That kind of accounts for some of the difference in tone between the two versions of Iron Chef. In Japan, the Iron Chefs are like stoic masters of their craft, models of professionalism. In the USA, I think Americans prefer their Iron Chefs more juiced up and doing antics like some cool guy or something. It's a matter of taste, of course, but possibly another reason the soup didn't taste like we thought it should.
What happens when these old folks come back? Their bones, which weren't so strong to begin with, would be far too weak from the loss of calcium. Astronauts in the primes of their lives who have spent months in space need a good deal of training and reconditioning before they return to normal, so imagine whatit would be like for an elderly person. Forget about weekend visits and the like, too...
:)
If you blast Grandpa into orbit, he ain't coming back.
I've known of QNX for a number of years from reading about it in Byte and I was so impressed that I called to see if I could order it. They didn't sell it as a single distribution, but rather as a collection of modules and the cost for the pieces I wanted including the development tools and the GUI reached well into the thousands. Whispers of memory tell me it was close to 10 thousand but I could be wrong about that...but not by much...
This is an amazing offer...finally, those of us who've only been able to read about QNX/Neutrino or hear the stories told by hard realtime users will get the chance to play with it for ourselves (beyond simply booting it up and surfing the web). QNX is a different sort of operating system designed for a different sort of needs at a completely different sort of pricing than what most of us are generally used to around here, so we should make the most of this opportunity to learn from it.
Besides GNU/Linux and GNU/HURD, is it possible that someday Debian might attempt an OS that completely breaks with the UNIX tradition? Although I understand HURD implements UNIX in a different way, how about an OS that reflects and entirely new way of thinking in its API's and its visible structure?
To me, one of Carmack's greatest traits is his maturity. I've been reading his plan updates for years, along with all the interviews and writings I can find, and I've never felt like he was being a punk, or using his immense talent as a proof of his opinions (e.g. "I'm the best game programmer there is, so I must be right"). He's a person who is willing to stand up in front of a crowd with a different view (I admire that he was willing to say on /. that NT serves his needs better than Linux...others might have tried to "please the crowd"). He can see value in things even when they're not useful for him, and he takes the time to decide properly how valuable something really is for him. I could honestly sit for hours talking about all things I respect about him, and how much he has impressed me with his focus and honesty, etc. but my fingers are tired and I'm starting to sound like I want to have his kid.. :)
.plans of other game developers on PlanetQuake and *some* of the comments on places like Slashdot, I wish other technical people could look up to Carmack for more than just his programming skills...respect for that is certainly well-deserved, but there is so much more than that that people could learn from him.
From reading the
He isn't just a great programmer, he's grown into one heck of a complete person. Congratulations to him...I hope he enjoys continued success.
Well, promoting Linux eases their dependence on Microsoft for software to run on the processors...but why is Intel investing in more than one distribution?
:)
I guess Intel is trying to create another Windows without creating another Microsoft.
Is that the new logo for Debian? It makes me think of Starbucks. Everything they sell there is covered with swirls like that.
:)
Really, though...what connection does that logo have to debian? Is there supposed to be a story behind it? To me, it doesn't suggest anything about what it's meant to represent.
As swirls go, it's a nice one though...and if it isn't Debian's logo at all, then I'll have my crow with plenty of salt, thank you.
I'm hoping for "the Determinant" or "the Cross Product" myself. Or, how about Matrix 2: Gaussian-Jordan Elimination?
:) I'm just kidding, don't shoot me!
In the previous comment I submitted, I was making the point that interface designers who are looking at 3D should look into new directions or possibilities that the new technology could enable. IBM's ideas or examples may not be the best ones, but they're interesting because they're different and the writings bring up some good points.
When I first got on the Internet, I had the address of a proxy that would translate everything into Swedish Chef ..does anyone know one that still exists?
:)
Try The Dialectizer. It does Redneck, Jive, Cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Moron, and Pig Latin. Better than Jar Jar, but then again, anything is.