It would be a lot easier to re-create the technology we have now than it was to get here in the first place. We know what a transistor does, we know how to lay them out on a chip. And almost every person who graduates with a CmpE degree can design a MIPS processor in a few thousand gates. I can't say I can speak for disk, but we know how to make disks, so it wouldn't be that hard... We know how to do almost everything in a modern computer, we'd only have to rebuild the infrastructure. This might be a tad difficult if, say, we loose our fabs and stuff, but for the most part I think we could get up and running with new components in, say, 5 years. Underlying appliances 1 year, rudimentary fabs in another year, they start plopping out circa-1990 chips in an additional year, and we use those to leap up to, say, 1997 or so by the end of 5 years.
It will help that we won't be constrained by x86. Though in modern processors it's really not that big of a deal (yay, hardware translation).
Adventure Shell... old hat?
on
MUD Shell
·
· Score: 5
Isn't this just like the Adventure Shell, which
has been around for a long time? Seems pretty
MSInnovative to me.
A lot of people are saying the port will be rough...
What about using winelib? Isn't this exactly
what winelib is supposed to help with? Easy porting
of code from windows to *nix machines? Especially
with open code...
Power to the Free Software folk! Using Winelib I
bet they could get a port in a few weeks...
Re:Find out where the industry is really going
on
Plastic Valley?
·
· Score: 2
200 watts at eight-tenths of a volt is 250 Amperes of current. That sounds hideously impractical.
Yeah. Over half the pins will be power pins, and you have problems with metal migration, and ground bounce, and all sorts of bad problems. But that's where they say things are headed -- though that's a way-off thing so they might revise it.
And, yes, there is little difference between noise and signal now, even less at half today's signal strength!
One thing you might want to look at is the modified MPEG-2 codec that the guy who wrote Broadcast2000 (the non-linear movie editor for Linux) has... http://heroinewarrior.com/mpeg2movie.php3
The guy claims quality/bandwith similar to DivX, but the codec is GPL, and is SMP-ready.
I don't have any personal experience with it, but if I were designing a Tivo-like system that's what I'd look at first -- especially if I was trying to do real-time high-compression video stuff and was willing to get some hefty CPU power it will pay off...
Find out where the industry is really going
on
Plastic Valley?
·
· Score: 4
To find out where the semiconductor industry is really going in the next 15 years, there is the Semiconductor Industry Association's International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (which is publicly available at http://public.itrs.net, though it seems to be down this morning.
Do a google search for ``SIA roadmap''.
Anyway, the roadmap goes out for about 15 years, and has some startling predictions (chips will run at.6-.8 volts, but will need about 200W of power) and it covers everything from processors to memory to everything else. Like, ALL the parameters. It's very comprehensive.
So, why should you look at it to see what's going to happen in the next 15 years? Because the ITRS is extremely important for the industry. All the chip manufacturers, all the test equipment manufacturers, all the materials manufacturers... they all look at the ITRS to see what they need to work on. The Silicon industry is made up of hundreds of companies, and in order to get them all to meet up at the same place to continue making faster stuff, they need to all be working towards the same goal... and so they all follow the ITRS, for the most part.
That's not to say that you won't see some new technologies pop in, but the ITRS is typically dead-on for most stuff.
You see, when you say ``Linux,'' what do you really mean? You really don't think of your kernel. Really, you don't. You think of all those great tools that help you to get your work done... tools like make and vim and gcc and grip and the gimp and apt and everything else that make you more productive. Things like the window manager that does what you want, and configurability of how your text editor works, and being able to easily remap your keys and such.
If, suddenly, you can get something from Apple that has a BSD underneath, with all the great tools you have grown to love, is it really MacOS that you're loving? No, it's still the things that you love on your computer that you call ``Linux.''
Might MacOS decrease the number of people who run the Linux kernel? Perhaps. Mostly, though, I think it will increase the base of people who have access to all the great tools that we love. In that perspective, what we call ``Linux'' will just have more people added to the ranks.
And, I think, this is what is going to happen to all the computer vendors, especially the UNIX vendors: They will either become like Linux, or they will die. Either you will have all the great tools available to you on your UNIX variant, along with easy (apt-style, perhaps) upgrading and such, or you will see that flavor of UNIX die off. So you might still have a Solaris or IRIX kernel, and maybe even C library, but your installation will become more and more Linux-like. And so, sort of, Linux will achieve Total World Domination. Maybe not the kernel... but the powerful environment, for sure.
If there is someone to support it, I think that Linux
with either KDE or Gnome is at least as easy as learning
your way around windows... I have experience to support
this claim working at a company with 5000 people on SUN
boxes using mainly MWM's root-menu to pick their
applications. The interface isn't such a problem.
The problem is applications... if they want to use MSWord then they should probably use Windows.
The problem, however, of course is that it is immoral to support a company that uses unethical business practices. So MS and Apple would be out. Apple would probably be out anyway due to the higher cost and marginal and questionable benefit in the easy-to-learn category.
Of course, if they just want to have a web browser, then any linux variant is probably fine.
I used to work for a group that administered
about 5,000 *nix workstations, a mix of Irix, SunOS, Solaris,
AIX, and more. There were 6 people in our group.
One of them did printers. One of them did classified
systems. One of them did backup. That left three
people to administrate 5,000 *nix machines. It worked
just fine. We didn't handle things like ``I don't
remember my password'' but if there was a problem
with a *system* it was our job to fix. It wasn't too bad at all. You just write lots of scripts.
Very few of the people with *nix machines were big unix geeks. Basically, you put the applications they need on the root menu and show them how to use it. That's about all they need to know.
I think this is a hoax. It just doesn't seem as... I dunno, professional as last year's document. BG just seems a bit too cocky. Although the document raises some legitimate concerns, many of the arguments are straw-men or flamebait. Like the whole mozilla thing -- mozilla isn't exactly a useless product. Yes, it has bugs and is behind IE, but mozilla is to IE as IIS is to Apache, or thereabouts. I dunno... this document is rather hard to swallow.
You would have to have the proxy know which user was using the proxy, and take that along with where they were going and record it in a database. Then you would have to be able to go back and get some stuff out of the database.
This is a lot more overhead than just a caching proxy. And, yes, there are significant ISPs today that don't use caching proxies.
So, yes, I've also come to the conclusion that
I won't be voting for either Bush or Gore. I find
them both pretty much evil. I refuse to vote for an evil candidate.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think about the
eipsode of the Simpsons where the aliens take over
the bodies of Clinton and Bob Dole? Whenever I hear
people say ``well, (Gore|Bush) isn't quite as bad''
I always think of Homer saying ``Don't blame me,
I voted for Krodos!''
So, I can sort of understand Bush's plan. Seriously, blocking software may be bad, it may have lots of problems, but if the majority of the people want computers bought with public funds to not show porn, that's a decision that's OK by me... though there are lots of problems with blocking software that need to be overcome first.
Gore's plan seems to be really horrible... it puts a huge responsibility on ISPs. They have to intercept web requests and insert their own parent-blocking-thing. Most ISPs don't have this infrastructure. They also don't have the infrastructure to keep track of what pages you've visited. And that's a lot of stuff for them to keep track of, not to mention that there are other barriers (encryption).
Bush's idea to put blocks on public computers may be a bad idea, but at worst you won't be able to get to some sites you need to get to at your library. With Gore's plan, suddenly ISPs have a huge responsibility to keep track of everyone's usage, and when they do that they open themselves for (A) lots of lawsuits and (B) now the gov't can subpeona your browsing history from your ISP that they have to keep. There goes all your privacy.
Not only that, we've seen recently that many ISPs back down from big corporate pressure... since your ISP now has a list of everywhere you've visited some corporation can sue your ISP ``unless you tell us everyone who has downloaded an mp3'' or something.
Magic number collisions happen only when people are stupid and don't check the magic database before plunking down their own format -- virtually nobody has this problem.
To associate a program with a filename (why would you want to do this? It's backwards), you can do it at the filemanager level. And I believe that you're wrong in believing that you want to open up files with the same program that made them... I want to make images with the gimp, but I want to view them with xv or xloadimage or ee.
What happens on a Mac when your little four-letter-codes have a collision? What happens if two programs have the same app code?
AFAIK, on the mainstream unix filemanagers you can configure what program opens what kind of file, but there is a default for each file that is supported.
The magic database is ubercool. Learn it. Love it. Use it. MacOS- and Windows-style file-type resolution sucks. As you said, extention-based types suck. But keeping creator info / 4-letter file codes (the mac way) sucks, too.
I'm pretty sure that you could fairly easily write
some VFS code to get CVS working with the Gnome Midnight Commander VFS stuff (the vfs libraries that Gnome uses), with all the code out there that
does things with CVS.
After you have a CVS GMC VFS library (Go-Go-Gadget-TLAs!) you can use the excellent podfuk to instantly allow you to
use the CVS archive as a filesystem!
There are a handfull of people here at Georgia Tech
who do wearable computers... they basically have
a computer based on a StrongARM running the Linux
kernel with the emacs operating system. They have
wireless networking, speech recognition, and
a thingie that brings up information based on context --
so when the guy is talking about a subject it will
bring up information on what he is talking about.
It's pretty schweeet. The main prof hasn't used a desktop computer in years, and I see one of the grad students looking out the window and keying in stuff on his chording keyboard thing... talk about desktop backgrounds!:-)
What? Sunsite changed its name? But everyone talks
about putting their stuff on sunsite... and people
tell me that I can use sunsite as a mirror for their
distibution of choice... and I always *type*
ftp sunsite.unc.edu...
Registers to aid cross-network IPv6 shared memory? Let's see some white papers from MOT here. Does the G4 implement IPv6 in the processor? Yeah, right.
So, I could possibly see how MOT has some registers that are sort of doing the Intel thing... You know, the Intel Net Pipeline. The one that makes the Internet faster. Just like the Motorola DSM registers?
And it will take a LONG time before I'm convinced that your Apple iFruit can replace my Ultra Enterprise Server. I don't care if it's running BSD underneath, Apple has a LONG way to go before I'm convinced I should use an Apple product anywhere in an environment that is anywhere near mission-critical or secure.
Companies have to earn their respect. Apple has not yet made a server OS. It will take a long time of them having a good server OS for me to be convinced that I should use it.
Slashdot Mirror
It will help that we won't be constrained by x86. Though in modern processors it's really not that big of a deal (yay, hardware translation).
Isn't this just like the Adventure Shell, which has been around for a long time? Seems pretty MSInnovative to me.
What about using winelib? Isn't this exactly what winelib is supposed to help with? Easy porting of code from windows to *nix machines? Especially with open code...
Power to the Free Software folk! Using Winelib I bet they could get a port in a few weeks...
Yeah. Over half the pins will be power pins, and you have problems with metal migration, and ground bounce, and all sorts of bad problems. But that's where they say things are headed -- though that's a way-off thing so they might revise it.
And, yes, there is little difference between noise and signal now, even less at half today's signal strength!
The guy claims quality/bandwith similar to DivX, but the codec is GPL, and is SMP-ready.
I don't have any personal experience with it, but if I were designing a Tivo-like system that's what I'd look at first -- especially if I was trying to do real-time high-compression video stuff and was willing to get some hefty CPU power it will pay off...
Anyway, the roadmap goes out for about 15 years, and has some startling predictions (chips will run at .6-.8 volts, but will need about 200W of power) and it covers everything from processors to memory to everything else. Like, ALL the parameters. It's very comprehensive.
So, why should you look at it to see what's going to happen in the next 15 years? Because the ITRS is extremely important for the industry. All the chip manufacturers, all the test equipment manufacturers, all the materials manufacturers... they all look at the ITRS to see what they need to work on. The Silicon industry is made up of hundreds of companies, and in order to get them all to meet up at the same place to continue making faster stuff, they need to all be working towards the same goal... and so they all follow the ITRS, for the most part.
That's not to say that you won't see some new technologies pop in, but the ITRS is typically dead-on for most stuff.
You see, when you say ``Linux,'' what do you really mean? You really don't think of your kernel. Really, you don't. You think of all those great tools that help you to get your work done... tools like make and vim and gcc and grip and the gimp and apt and everything else that make you more productive. Things like the window manager that does what you want, and configurability of how your text editor works, and being able to easily remap your keys and such.
If, suddenly, you can get something from Apple that has a BSD underneath, with all the great tools you have grown to love, is it really MacOS that you're loving? No, it's still the things that you love on your computer that you call ``Linux.''
Might MacOS decrease the number of people who run the Linux kernel? Perhaps. Mostly, though, I think it will increase the base of people who have access to all the great tools that we love. In that perspective, what we call ``Linux'' will just have more people added to the ranks.
And, I think, this is what is going to happen to all the computer vendors, especially the UNIX vendors: They will either become like Linux, or they will die. Either you will have all the great tools available to you on your UNIX variant, along with easy (apt-style, perhaps) upgrading and such, or you will see that flavor of UNIX die off. So you might still have a Solaris or IRIX kernel, and maybe even C library, but your installation will become more and more Linux-like. And so, sort of, Linux will achieve Total World Domination. Maybe not the kernel... but the powerful environment, for sure.
If there is someone to support it, I think that Linux with either KDE or Gnome is at least as easy as learning your way around windows... I have experience to support this claim working at a company with 5000 people on SUN boxes using mainly MWM's root-menu to pick their applications. The interface isn't such a problem.
The problem is applications... if they want to use MSWord then they should probably use Windows.
The problem, however, of course is that it is immoral to support a company that uses unethical business practices. So MS and Apple would be out. Apple would probably be out anyway due to the higher cost and marginal and questionable benefit in the easy-to-learn category.
Of course, if they just want to have a web browser, then any linux variant is probably fine.
Very few of the people with *nix machines were big unix geeks. Basically, you put the applications they need on the root menu and show them how to use it. That's about all they need to know.
Unless you have POWER! Don't you remember Back to the Future part 2?
Get a new version of modutils... see /Documentation/Changes
You do realize that the Green Party and the Libertarian party are pretty much the exact opposite, right?
I think this is a hoax. It just doesn't seem as ... I dunno, professional as last year's document. BG just seems a bit too cocky. Although the document raises some legitimate concerns, many of the arguments are straw-men or flamebait. Like the whole mozilla thing -- mozilla isn't exactly a useless product. Yes, it has bugs and is behind IE, but mozilla is to IE as IIS is to Apache, or thereabouts. I dunno... this document is rather hard to swallow.
Harry Browne is the Anti-Nader! (or is it Nader that is the Anti-Browne?)
This is a lot more overhead than just a caching proxy. And, yes, there are significant ISPs today that don't use caching proxies.
Most states have laws that the EC people must vote for the president that the population voted for.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think about the eipsode of the Simpsons where the aliens take over the bodies of Clinton and Bob Dole? Whenever I hear people say ``well, (Gore|Bush) isn't quite as bad'' I always think of Homer saying ``Don't blame me, I voted for Krodos!''
Gore's plan seems to be really horrible... it puts a huge responsibility on ISPs. They have to intercept web requests and insert their own parent-blocking-thing. Most ISPs don't have this infrastructure. They also don't have the infrastructure to keep track of what pages you've visited. And that's a lot of stuff for them to keep track of, not to mention that there are other barriers (encryption).
Bush's idea to put blocks on public computers may be a bad idea, but at worst you won't be able to get to some sites you need to get to at your library. With Gore's plan, suddenly ISPs have a huge responsibility to keep track of everyone's usage, and when they do that they open themselves for (A) lots of lawsuits and (B) now the gov't can subpeona your browsing history from your ISP that they have to keep. There goes all your privacy.
Not only that, we've seen recently that many ISPs back down from big corporate pressure... since your ISP now has a list of everywhere you've visited some corporation can sue your ISP ``unless you tell us everyone who has downloaded an mp3'' or something.
To associate a program with a filename (why would you want to do this? It's backwards), you can do it at the filemanager level. And I believe that you're wrong in believing that you want to open up files with the same program that made them... I want to make images with the gimp, but I want to view them with xv or xloadimage or ee.
What happens on a Mac when your little four-letter-codes have a collision? What happens if two programs have the same app code?
AFAIK, on the mainstream unix filemanagers you can configure what program opens what kind of file, but there is a default for each file that is supported.
The magic database is ubercool. Learn it. Love it. Use it. MacOS- and Windows-style file-type resolution sucks. As you said, extention-based types suck. But keeping creator info / 4-letter file codes (the mac way) sucks, too.
After you have a CVS GMC VFS library (Go-Go-Gadget-TLAs!) you can use the excellent podfuk to instantly allow you to use the CVS archive as a filesystem!
So, yes, I'd say it is his operating system!
It's pretty schweeet. The main prof hasn't used a desktop computer in years, and I see one of the grad students looking out the window and keying in stuff on his chording keyboard thing... talk about desktop backgrounds! :-)
Guinness happens to be a lot of peoples' favourite beer...
What? Sunsite changed its name? But everyone talks about putting their stuff on sunsite... and people tell me that I can use sunsite as a mirror for their distibution of choice... and I always *type* ftp sunsite.unc.edu...
So, I could possibly see how MOT has some registers that are sort of doing the Intel thing... You know, the Intel Net Pipeline. The one that makes the Internet faster. Just like the Motorola DSM registers?
And it will take a LONG time before I'm convinced that your Apple iFruit can replace my Ultra Enterprise Server. I don't care if it's running BSD underneath, Apple has a LONG way to go before I'm convinced I should use an Apple product anywhere in an environment that is anywhere near mission-critical or secure.
Companies have to earn their respect. Apple has not yet made a server OS. It will take a long time of them having a good server OS for me to be convinced that I should use it.