Perhaps this has been Ximian's strategy all along. It'd actually be really funny to have MS suffer from the same strategy it has applied to its previous competitors... Of course this depends on it gaining an appreciable market share...
Not that this is remotely on-topic, but insisting on darwinian evolution as the only modifying force on biological structure is a common fallacy.
If you were to read Kauffman, "The Origins of Order" (Oxford University Press, 1993), you'd get a fairly solid mathematical treatment of how chaos and order combine on the boundary between them to self-modify. This process both limits and creates the evolution that darwin famously found, and the maths provides for the non-linear nature of evolution in the early stages (it's basically a log(n) relation, n=2 in the book but the general case holds. We're so far down the route that the changes are now very small).
Kauffman is a recognised authority in the field as well...
Because it's an enormously difficult task to do (as a robot) what you and I take for granted.
Motion (walking, for example) involves all sorts of attitude shifts to maintain the centre of gravity in the correct place - it's not just putting one foot in front of the other. If you look at how athletes use their bodies to kill momentum and do quick turns, I think you'll agree that the slow-plodding robots are a long way off yet...
Machine vision is still in its' infancy. What you have is unsurpassed. What a 95% blind man has is unsurpassed by machines. Vision implies cognition, (without it, it's just a TV screen!) and this is Hard (capital H). Being able to recover depth, handle occlusion and parallax, make inferences from absolute and relative properties (size, circularity, colour, etc.), and generally 'see' is simply not possible yet in the general case.
Temporal tracking is needed to tie each of those frames together, and make further inferences and aid cognition. The ball moves, after all... kicking it is actually solving a pretty complex tensor of vectors that are constantly changing...
Prediction is necessary to make best use of the current tactical position, with allowances for what might happen next. If your defence has just got the ball, the forward might want to make a run towards the opponents goal... This sort of thing is 'common sense' to people, but really hard to get a computer to come up with. It's easy to hard-code some rules into the machine, but the real goal (pun intended!) is to get the machine to devise its' tactics from instant to instant.
In short, although it's "just a game", it embodies a large cross-section of really hard problems in robotics. Frankly, my money's on the humans!
"combat seems to be the only way that men express themselves or advance their knowledge."
For someone with a PhD, that is a remarkably narrow-minded and sweeping generalisation. Perhaps you should ask a few men whether they consider fighting to be their only method of information discovery.
A hot-headed moment with Kazaa is highly unlikely to end with a freshly-murdered, bleeding corpse on your hands.
A breach of trust on the part of someone using Kazaa is therefore completely insignificant compared to that of a gun-toting "friend" (do they have "non-friends" ?)
I could go on, but there's no point really. If you can't see it from the above, you never will.
I have a dual Tyan m/b with two XP chips in it. It runs hot, but it's been calculating SETI@Home more or less 200% of the time since it was installed, about 3 months ago. No problems, and I think it would have found them by now:-)
Pretty soon it's going to be taken off SETI and put onto the real task, but I thought S@H would be a good reliability burn-in (not to mention adding 6-8 S@H units per day to my total:-)
Buy a petaserver from Sony. You use (say) 10Tb of cache for the tape robots, and store up to a petabyte of data.
It may not be the fastest fileserver in the world, but nonetheless there are inodes which uniquely identify every file. The filesystem we used was SAM-FS, running on 64-bit solaris.
Simon
Re:Compiled for 64 Bit...and Programmed for 64 Bit
on
If I Had a Hammer
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Applications need to be programmed and optimized to make use of the extra registers, extra info paths, extra instructions available on the new platform
This is the job of the compiler... If I recompile source code I expect the compiler to optimise the object code in the best way for the target!
Let's take the example of some of the 1st. generation playstation II code...
No, let's not. The PS2 was so radically different from the PS1 (I've coded both) that it amounted to an architecture change, not just a platform upgrade. The PS1 is a pretty much bog standard CPU+VRAM+DRAM device. The PS2 is a dataflow architecture, with the idea being to set up datastreams, (with the code to execute being part of the stream), and to target those streams with a firing-condition model. This is amazingly versatile (and the device has the bus bandwidth and DMA channels to handle it, the PC doesn't) but it is *very* *very* different from the standard way coding is done. This is why PS2 games are still getting better two years down the line...
Exactly the reason why all these gamedev guys kept screaming it is much harder to code for the PS2 than for other platforms
Actually I don't think it's much harder at all, it's just different. You have 3 independent CPU's, all of which are pretty damn fast considering they're only at 300MHz. The device can do (peak) 3 billion (3,000,000,000) general purpose floating point multipliy/accumulates per second, and you can get pretty close to that figure, unlike most peak throughput estimates. Bandwidth again, and the use of an opportunistic programming methodology rather than a logical-progression methodology.
Having said that, I'm from a parallel computing background, so using only 3 CPU's is child's play:-)
Put it in perspective....why don't 16 bit games re-compiled for 32 bit give a "major" performance boost
Because there's a much more quantifiable change in going from 16-bit to 32-bit. Developers had been hacking around the 16-bit limit using 'near' and 'far' pointers (!!), which meant all the cruft from those 16-bit days was still sticking around and causing problems if you just recompiled.
Now they're (at long last!) in the 32-bit arena, there's no such problems. A char* ptr is still a char* ptr, it now just has a greater domain. No cruft. No problems.
This isn't to say that compilers won't get better over time though - optimisation is an inexact science, and you'd hope to see improvements as compiler-writers see how to improve the optimising stage.
Then you are misunderstanding what I wrote. What you say is true of a single indivisible object, but last time I checked, even amoeba were made of several quarks.
The word "complex" in the phrase "irreducably complex" should serve to signify that this is a collective system, and therefore my analysis applies.
The concept is very simple: A->B can be gained via a roundabout route. Once there, the roundabout route may disappear because of lack of use, or we may not recognise it, or what started out as A and B are now C and D so we're looking for the wrong thing.
This is really rather easy stuff. I'm not the one placing arbitrary limits on evolution here...
I think it's a retrenchment. Up until recently, science had (mostly) ignored creationism as "just another freak religion".
There have been several calls over the last year in the scientific press to attempt to get scientists to take the "propogation of science" throughout the population more seriously, and this includes point out where challengers (such as creationism) fall short of the mark.
I remember also several articles in New Scientist and Scientific American trying to motivate scientists to "spread the word" against creationism. Perhaps it's just a response to that.
Just because something is irreducably complex *now* does not mean it was irreducably complex at the point at which the crucial beneficial change was made which allows the current behaviour.
Evolution can break down a complex interaction of simple non-necessary "actors" into a simpler interaction of necessary "actors", as easily as it can produce the extra "actors" in the first place.
Evolution is the process of harmonisation of an organism to its natural surroundings, with the additional constraint of fitness. "Fitness" can mean dumping things that aren't necessary because you can do the job easier another way now.
An example, your appendix: At one point it was presumably useful (perhaps even necessary). Now it's an atrophying organ with no discernable purpose, or side-effects when removed.
So, in summary, the author makes the assumption of linear progress in time. This is a false premise, and his argument therefore does not hold. To get from A to B, evolution (remember, this is random chance followed by population migration) could might easily go A,G,F,E,D,C,B.
Well pardon me for showing no sympathy, but I alreafy pay £100/month (about $150) for.5Mbit, so I don't really feel too bad about someone getting it for half that price!
It's a risk, but the problem is that other sites will intermingle.html and.php/.asp depending on whether there is any customisation or even just for headers and footers.
In this case, almost all the documents are in fact dumps of pdf files also on the original site. I chose it because I knew it was big:-)
Besides, for a search engine, getting the catalogue can be a useful thing - in the sort of targetted search engine that I'm maintaining, anyway. A lot of the searches are for particular mathematical models (mainly excel spreadsheets at exorbitant cost). These tend to be catalogued just like any other online shop...
Sorry, I wasn't being clear - I forgot to point out that these files are already compressed (using gzip), but only on an individual file basis. The real site is significantly larger than this 7.7Gb, and I should have mentioned that.
Whereas I agree that we're getting close (or maybe have passed) the point where it would make sense to do something better, since I don't have much of a budget, and disk is cheap....
The web size is estimated around 5-10 Terabytes, and text size as percentage of the web is between 12-30% depending on whose paper you read.
I really think people under-estimate the size of the web, and this only becomes apparent when you try to cache large sites. Sure the majority of websites are pretty small, but more often than not now, government and business websites are used for real data-access solutions.
As I mentioned above, I look after a small but targetted search engine (http://www.financewise.com/) which looks at only financially-orientated sites. Take for example the European union site http://europa.eu.int. This is a fairly innocuous site, but if I do:
cd/opt/search/var/sites/26_europa.eu.int
du -sk .
7731586 .
That's a 7.7Gb website, and that's just the text (in fact I only search for.htm,.asp,.php* and.html files). This particular website is growing at the rate of a couple of hundred Mb each month.
I just think that your estimate for the cache size is a long way short of the real figure...
I maintain a tiny search engine (some 5000 sites), with the data cached locally, just like Google. It takes ~250Gb of disk space for that miniscule cache. The one at Google must be of the order of a few hundred Terabytes, not Gigabytes.
On that basis, I echo the original query about how it can be economical to use RAM...
I don't know actually... I work with SGI's a lot, and their engineering has always been top-notch. Go look inside a large 0rigin 2000 and be impressed, but even down to the more-or-less defunct O2's. They're nicely made and give the feel of quality.
Take a look inside one of the Dell rackmount linux servers, and you'll find the same level of quality and attention to detail. The architecture (bandwidth etc.) may not be up to the standards of the big boys, but the engineering is true quality.
*Any* unix system should work for more than 14 days. I know a linux system will. I know a BSD system will, and I know a SunOs system will. I
also know an SGI system will.
The point I'm making is that uptime of less than a year is hardly news. The fact that you have paid an enormous amount of money for something does *not* guarantee it will be proportionatly better in its service than 'el cheapo' replacement, at least not in this environment.
I used to work for the MOD (the equivalent of the US DARPA). We used to have SGI onyx's for our simulations, and life was good. We also had PC's running linux, and life was equally good. There were a few sun's, but because everything else was just as reliable, but got the job done faster, the Suns were marginalised. I could be less subtly about this, but I don't feel like it:-))
SGI are still producing fantastic graphics architectures with next-to-nothing processing power behind them... Sheesh. What are they on ?
I work in the video/film post-production business. We are one of their major clientbases, and these machines will go down well in this niche area. Unfortunately, althoguh SGI get a lot of press for their "movie" image, it's not their money-spinner...
SGI get most of their money from government and research contracts. This machine will not cut the mustard in those areas - it's just too damn slow. Yes the CPU is probably a better performer than its Intel equivalent in MHz, but I just don't believe it'll get anywhere near the SPECfp and SPECint of the Athlon 2000 or Intel 2.2GHz CPUs.
It's a shame. I *really* like SGI machines. I've bought several (I donated one of them to libsdl just so SDL would support SGIs:-) but this machine is - to coin a phrase - too little, too late:-(
Not that bad actually, considering it's my 4th language. I lived in Munich for a short while.
I actually found the self-same URL when checking whether Berliner had one or 2 'L's in it. Isn't Google great ?
The point is though, that I'm not judging history's take on the famous phrase, I'm making use of its' perception to point out just how foolish you can potentially seem when talking complete bollocks.
Simon.
(Sigh) here we go again ...
on
Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
·
· Score: 4, Informative
This is of course completely dependent on whether your window manager "grabs" the X server while doing a 'move window'. Switch that off, and your windows will update asynchronously. There is a minor performance hit on some (mainly older) graphics cards when this option is selected. Personally I can't tell the difference on my G450.
The other thing of note is how...
A great idea, but difficult to do given the direction Xfree has gone in this regard. IMO Xfree needs replacing, people need better choices for windowing systems. Xfree can't cut it for highly demanding stuff, and no number of extentions are going to change that.
(above) appears to sound knowledgeable whilst being completely and utterly wrong. (S)he is simply spreading FUD (why, I don't know - perhaps (s)he likes to appear clever when (s)he isn't).
Don't you just love it when people try to use stuff they don't know about to advance their personal agenda ?
If you want zero-effort working systems, the distributions are the way to go at the moment. If there is anything that can be done to help that unfortunate situation, I am all for it.
I know lots about unix in general and linux in particular. I've written kernel drivers. I've designed embedded CPU's and PCI plugin cards. I am generally regarded as being very technically minded:-)
The flipside: I have also been mystified as to why one of my (admittedly more esoteric) kernels just gives up the ghost at inopportune moments. It's almost always my fault, and I almost always learn more from the mistake, but it's sometimes a non-timely learning experience... I actually *like* learning this sort of thing, I just prefer to choose the time of my enlightenment:-)
In short, why would you want to make it difficult ? Use the time you save to solve other problems instead - ones that someone else hasn't kindly provided a solution for...
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps this has been Ximian's strategy all along. It'd actually be really funny to have MS suffer from the same strategy it has applied to its previous competitors... Of course this depends on it gaining an appreciable market share...
Simon
Not that this is remotely on-topic, but insisting on darwinian evolution as the only modifying force on biological structure is a common fallacy.
If you were to read Kauffman, "The Origins of Order" (Oxford University Press, 1993), you'd get a fairly solid mathematical treatment of how chaos and order combine on the boundary between them to self-modify. This process both limits and creates the evolution that darwin famously found, and the maths provides for the non-linear nature of evolution in the early stages (it's basically a log(n) relation, n=2 in the book but the general case holds. We're so far down the route that the changes are now very small).
Kauffman is a recognised authority in the field as well...
Simon.
Because it's an enormously difficult task to do (as a robot) what you and I take for granted.
Motion (walking, for example) involves all sorts of attitude shifts to maintain the centre of gravity in the correct place - it's not just putting one foot in front of the other. If you look at how athletes use their bodies to kill momentum and do quick turns, I think you'll agree that the slow-plodding robots are a long way off yet...
Machine vision is still in its' infancy. What you have is unsurpassed. What a 95% blind man has is unsurpassed by machines. Vision implies cognition, (without it, it's just a TV screen!) and this is Hard (capital H). Being able to recover depth, handle occlusion and parallax, make inferences from absolute and relative properties (size, circularity, colour, etc.), and generally 'see' is simply not possible yet in the general case.
Temporal tracking is needed to tie each of those frames together, and make further inferences and aid cognition. The ball moves, after all... kicking it is actually solving a pretty complex tensor of vectors that are constantly changing...
Prediction is necessary to make best use of the current tactical position, with allowances for what might happen next. If your defence has just got the ball, the forward might want to make a run towards the opponents goal... This sort of thing is 'common sense' to people, but really hard to get a computer to come up with. It's easy to hard-code some rules into the machine, but the real goal (pun intended!) is to get the machine to devise its' tactics from instant to instant.
In short, although it's "just a game", it embodies a large cross-section of really hard problems in robotics. Frankly, my money's on the humans!
Simon
"combat seems to be the only way that men express themselves or advance their knowledge."
For someone with a PhD, that is a remarkably narrow-minded and sweeping generalisation. Perhaps you should ask a few men whether they consider fighting to be their only method of information discovery.
Simon. PhD. In image processing.
Shrek is a film. This is a video capture card. The two are very different.
Films are a sequence of files (one per frame) on disk, right up until they're cut onto negative. Video is not.
Simon
... is to lie. Apparently I'm a female construction worker, and only 3 years old too - :-)
precocious, huh
The important thing is the age - if you're less than 13 they don't bombard you with any crap at all...
Simon.
Yes, it's pretty simple.
A hot-headed moment with Kazaa is highly unlikely to end with a freshly-murdered, bleeding corpse on your hands.
A breach of trust on the part of someone using Kazaa is therefore completely insignificant compared to that of a gun-toting "friend" (do they have "non-friends" ?)
I could go on, but there's no point really. If you can't see it from the above, you never will.
Simon.
I have a dual Tyan m/b with two XP chips in it. It runs hot, but it's been calculating SETI@Home more or less 200% of the time since it was installed, about 3 months ago. No problems, and I think it would have found them by now :-)
:-)
Pretty soon it's going to be taken off SETI and put onto the real task, but I thought S@H would be a good reliability burn-in (not to mention adding 6-8 S@H units per day to my total
Simon
Buy a petaserver from Sony. You use (say) 10Tb of
cache for the tape robots, and store up to a petabyte of data.
It may not be the fastest fileserver in the world, but nonetheless there are inodes which uniquely identify every file. The filesystem we used was SAM-FS, running on 64-bit solaris.
Simon
This is the job of the compiler... If I recompile source code I expect the compiler to optimise the object code in the best way for the target!
No, let's not. The PS2 was so radically different from the PS1 (I've coded both) that it amounted to an architecture change, not just a platform upgrade. The PS1 is a pretty much bog standard CPU+VRAM+DRAM device. The PS2 is a dataflow architecture, with the idea being to set up datastreams, (with the code to execute being part of the stream), and to target those streams with a firing-condition model. This is amazingly versatile (and the device has the bus bandwidth and DMA channels to handle it, the PC doesn't) but it is *very* *very* different from the standard way coding is done. This is why PS2 games are still getting better two years down the line...
Actually I don't think it's much harder at all, it's just different. You have 3 independent CPU's, all of which are pretty damn fast considering they're only at 300MHz. The device can do (peak) 3 billion (3,000,000,000) general purpose floating point multipliy/accumulates per second, and you can get pretty close to that figure, unlike most peak throughput estimates. Bandwidth again, and the use of an opportunistic programming methodology rather than a logical-progression methodology.
Having said that, I'm from a parallel computing background, so using only 3 CPU's is child's play
Because there's a much more quantifiable change in going from 16-bit to 32-bit. Developers had been hacking around the 16-bit limit using 'near' and 'far' pointers (!!), which meant all the cruft from those 16-bit days was still sticking around and causing problems if you just recompiled.
Now they're (at long last!) in the 32-bit arena, there's no such problems. A char* ptr is still a char* ptr, it now just has a greater domain. No cruft. No problems.
This isn't to say that compilers won't get better over time though - optimisation is an inexact science, and you'd hope to see improvements as compiler-writers see how to improve the optimising stage.
Enough...
Simon
Then you are misunderstanding what I wrote. What you say is true of a single indivisible object, but last time I checked, even amoeba were made of several quarks.
The word "complex" in the phrase "irreducably complex" should serve to signify that this is a collective system, and therefore my analysis applies.
The concept is very simple: A->B can be gained via a roundabout route. Once there, the roundabout route may disappear because of lack of use, or we may not recognise it, or what started out as A and B are now C and D so we're looking for the wrong thing.
This is really rather easy stuff. I'm not the one placing arbitrary limits on evolution here...
I think it's a retrenchment. Up until recently, science had (mostly) ignored creationism as "just another freak religion".
There have been several calls over the last year in the scientific press to attempt to get scientists to take the "propogation of science" throughout the population more seriously, and this includes point out where challengers (such as creationism) fall short of the mark.
I remember also several articles in New Scientist and Scientific American trying to motivate scientists to "spread the word" against creationism. Perhaps it's just a response to that.
Simon
Yep, it's pretty simple.
Just because something is irreducably complex *now* does not mean it was irreducably complex at the point at which the crucial beneficial change was made which allows the current behaviour.
Evolution can break down a complex interaction of simple non-necessary "actors" into a simpler interaction of necessary "actors", as easily as it can produce the extra "actors" in the first place.
Evolution is the process of harmonisation of an organism to its natural surroundings, with the additional constraint of fitness. "Fitness" can mean dumping things that aren't necessary because you can do the job easier another way now.
An example, your appendix: At one point it was presumably useful (perhaps even necessary). Now it's an atrophying organ with no discernable purpose, or side-effects when removed.
So, in summary, the author makes the assumption of linear progress in time. This is a false premise, and his argument therefore does not hold. To get from A to B, evolution (remember, this is random chance followed by population migration) could might easily go A,G,F,E,D,C,B.
Simon.
Well pardon me for showing no sympathy, but I alreafy pay £100/month (about $150) for .5Mbit, so I don't really feel too bad about someone getting it for half that price!
Simon
It's a risk, but the problem is that other sites will intermingle .html and .php/.asp depending on whether there is any customisation or even just for headers and footers.
:-)
In this case, almost all the documents are in fact dumps of pdf files also on the original site. I chose it because I knew it was big
Besides, for a search engine, getting the catalogue can be a useful thing - in the sort of targetted search engine that I'm maintaining, anyway. A lot of the searches are for particular mathematical models (mainly excel spreadsheets at exorbitant cost). These tend to be catalogued just like any other online shop...
ATB,
Simon
Sorry, I wasn't being clear - I forgot to point out that these files are already compressed (using gzip), but only on an individual file basis. The real site is significantly larger than this 7.7Gb, and I should have mentioned that.
....
Whereas I agree that we're getting close (or maybe have passed) the point where it would make sense to do something better, since I don't have much of a budget, and disk is cheap
ATB,
Simon.
I really think people under-estimate the size of the web, and this only becomes apparent when you try to cache large sites. Sure the majority of websites are pretty small, but more often than not now, government and business websites are used for real data-access solutions.
As I mentioned above, I look after a small but targetted search engine (http://www.financewise.com/) which looks at only financially-orientated sites. Take for example the European union site http://europa.eu.int. This is a fairly innocuous site, but if I do:
That's a 7.7Gb website, and that's just the text (in fact I only search for
I just think that your estimate for the cache size is a long way short of the real figure...
Simon
Err. No.
I maintain a tiny search engine (some 5000 sites), with the data cached locally, just like Google. It takes ~250Gb of disk space for that miniscule cache. The one at Google must be of the order of a few hundred Terabytes, not Gigabytes.
On that basis, I echo the original query about how it can be economical to use RAM...
Simon
I don't know actually... I work with SGI's a lot, and their engineering has always been top-notch. Go look inside a large 0rigin 2000 and be impressed, but even down to the more-or-less defunct O2's. They're nicely made and give the feel of quality.
Take a look inside one of the Dell rackmount linux servers, and you'll find the same level of quality and attention to detail. The architecture (bandwidth etc.) may not be up to the standards of the big boys, but the engineering is true quality.
Just a happy customer.
Simon.
*Any* unix system should work for more than 14 days. I know a linux system will. I know a BSD system will, and I know a SunOs system will. I
:-))
also know an SGI system will.
The point I'm making is that uptime of less than a year is hardly news. The fact that you have paid an enormous amount of money for something does *not* guarantee it will be proportionatly better in its service than 'el cheapo' replacement, at least not in this environment.
I used to work for the MOD (the equivalent of the US DARPA). We used to have SGI onyx's for our simulations, and life was good. We also had PC's running linux, and life was equally good. There were a few sun's, but because everything else was just as reliable, but got the job done faster, the Suns were marginalised. I could be less subtly about this, but I don't feel like it
ATB,
Simon.
SGI are still producing fantastic graphics architectures with next-to-nothing processing power behind them... Sheesh. What are they on ?
:-) but this machine is - to coin a phrase - too little, too late :-(
I work in the video/film post-production business. We are one of their major clientbases, and these machines will go down well in this niche area. Unfortunately, althoguh SGI get a lot of press for their "movie" image, it's not their money-spinner...
SGI get most of their money from government and research contracts. This machine will not cut the mustard in those areas - it's just too damn slow. Yes the CPU is probably a better performer than its Intel equivalent in MHz, but I just don't believe it'll get anywhere near the SPECfp and SPECint of the Athlon 2000 or Intel 2.2GHz CPUs.
It's a shame. I *really* like SGI machines. I've bought several (I donated one of them to libsdl just so SDL would support SGIs
Simon.
>
> How's your German?
Not that bad actually, considering it's my 4th language. I lived in Munich for a short while.
I actually found the self-same URL when checking whether Berliner had one or 2 'L's in it. Isn't Google great ?
The point is though, that I'm not judging history's take on the famous phrase, I'm making use of its' perception to point out just how foolish you can potentially seem when talking complete bollocks.
Simon.
This is of course completely dependent on whether your window manager "grabs" the X server while doing a 'move window'. Switch that off, and your windows will update asynchronously. There is a minor performance hit on some (mainly older) graphics cards when this option is selected. Personally I can't tell the difference on my G450.
The other thing of note is how
(above) appears to sound knowledgeable whilst being completely and utterly wrong. (S)he is simply spreading FUD (why, I don't know - perhaps (s)he likes to appear clever when (s)he isn't). Don't you just love it when people try to use stuff they don't know about to advance their personal agenda ?
Almost as much foot-in-mouth as Simon.
Why on earth would you do that ?
Hard disk is (very) cheap compared to my time. I bought a big disk - means I can install and leave alone. *Much* easier.
Simon
If you want zero-effort working systems, the distributions are the way to go at the moment. If there is anything that can be done to help that unfortunate situation, I am all for it.
:-)
... I actually *like* learning this sort of thing, I just prefer to choose the time of my enlightenment :-)
I know lots about unix in general and linux in particular. I've written kernel drivers. I've designed embedded CPU's and PCI plugin cards. I am generally regarded as being very technically minded
The flipside: I have also been mystified as to why one of my (admittedly more esoteric) kernels just gives up the ghost at inopportune moments. It's almost always my fault, and I almost always learn more from the mistake, but it's sometimes a non-timely learning experience
In short, why would you want to make it difficult ? Use the time you save to solve other problems instead - ones that someone else hasn't kindly provided a solution for...
Simon.