Yeah. Tanenbaum, I believe, is quoted along the lines of "if you ever handed that in to me I'd flunk you".
The irony is that there is in fact a "modernized" microkernel Linux -- Apple used it as a starting point for Rhapsody, which became MacOS X -- but virtually nobody but a few NuBus-bound PowerMac and HP PA-RISC users cares about it.
You didn't really read the piece, did you? They tried it with two processors, one an off-the-shelf Northwood (which did require water cooling) and one a hand-picked chip supplied by an unspecified mobo vendor.
Actually, I believe the Northwood P4 w/DDR is the overall leader just at the moment. And I believe Tom's Hardware just managed to get it cranked up to 3.1GHz...
As for using Rambus and the i850 -- nobody really wants it. Notice: as long as the P4 was tied to Rambus, it was a flop. These days a P4 is not particularly expensive (largely because practically every P4 consumer system on the market is SDRAM-based).
Hypochondria is one word for it... The thing is that a lot of these people don't want to hear that what they have is really a mental imbalance. I've heard of people with imagined skin parasites too -- they will go to the dermatologist, present no obvious symptoms, and simply do not wish to be told that what they really need is a mild antipsychotic.
It's a bizarre situation. I feel safe in saying that these people's conditions are probably delusional; what has to be brought into account is that whether or not it's all in their heads, their suffering is certainly real. The problem is that they take any attempt to bridge the disconnect as a personal insult...
Actually, I don't know that would be so hard to emulate now -- the thing with the IBM system was that the cable was proprietary. All you'd have to do to create a decent non-proprietary version would be as follows:
-Separate monitor and desktop box
-bootable Firewire connection
-USB for keyboard
-combined USB/Firewire cable with a connector that's actually a combination of the two connectors so you can replace the cable easily
I thought of mentioning WTX despite its obsolescence but didn't, for two reasons:
-It's incredibly strange -- seems to be a warped hybrid of ATX and the Apple G3/G4 enclosure, but it seems to lack any real point for existing (thus its quick and merciful death), and
-It's not really meant for small-format systems anyway.
On top of those, it's a weird and baroque sort of design that would seem to be far too expensive to implement to be worthwhile.
WTX is a strange beast; if PCI was hot-pluggable I could see a point for it, but it's not necessary and never was. That's why it's dead.
See, I have a problem with all this because the question has nothing to say about the scarcity of pre-existing small-format standards, of which we have at least three:
-MicroATX -- spotted in your typical 3-slot minitower case. Not too common lately, as the big guys seem to be pretty much standardized on 4-slot ATX midtowers (I don't see a whole lot of either full or minitower cases in my local Best Buy these days).
-FlexATX -- see the SV24 Spacewalker.
-NLX -- Many but not all of your average small-format desktops.
-ATX/Riser -- common in rack servers but AFAIK nowhere else.
As for double-sided motherboards, I could see this presenting a bit of a handling problem...
The fact is that we've already got everything we need in terms of expandable-type form factors -- the only way to go smaller would be to build the entire system around laptop parts (like, for example, the iOpener or the CappucinoPC). At that point you're just building throwaways.
It might be a good price for OEMs as well. I could see someone doing a handy business kitting out SV24s for home users, as a matter of fact; the same goes for some of FIC's small-profile systems.
I don't think these are quite what the market needs, though. The best thing would be something like the old Gateway living room PC, maybe an NLX-format case in black or grey with a front panel display and lots of blue lights. The home entertainment thingy HP is selling is close, but I'd like to have a generic system case that does the same job, fits into the same sort of situation, etc.
Actually, with Dell the case is standard; it's the power supply that's @!#$? proprietary...
I think the only real problem with the SV24 is that there's only one motherboard out there that will fit in it. I think it's a great design (perhaps a bit aesthetically challenged), but I'd like to see more FlexATX boards on the market before I give it any serious consideration.
Perhaps... perhaps the thing to do is to slap a mobile Athlon on a daughter card. That will help the heat dissipation problem a bit. For graphics, wait until nVidia comes out with a second-generation nForce (one that actually has decent performance and uses the GF3 core that the Xbox Northbridge uses) and go with that...
I do like the system. It's not real pretty to me, but it's elegant in its own way.
Mailbox full I wonder why
I'm getting all this spam
It fills up my mailer window
With teen sluts and Sircam
And even if I delete it'll all be back
Hit my head against a wall
And it reminds me
That my life is not so bad, not so bad at all
Dell wouldn't. They just killed their only Itanium project recently due to nonexistent demand.
Intel can spin it any way they wish (the current party line is and has been that the first iteration of Itanic (Merced) was sort of a public beta and the real fun was supposed to start with McKinley) but the fact is that a) there has been very little buzz (far more people would rather see commodity Mac motherboards, with or without MacOS, for example) and b) so much time has passed since Merced was announced that I doubt anyone really cares anymore.
Besides, a *32-bit* P4/Northwood or Athlon XP can stomp an Itanium anyway...
Actually, the 85/86 language was called TI BASIC, but as far as I can tell it doesn't resemble BASIC in any useful sense. It's really its own language.
/Brian
Re:There's a good chance it's fake...
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2, Offtopic
Realistically... Cursive is a pain in the ass anyway. I don't know about most people, but I always found it harder to read and a waste of time to learn. Teaching a tenth-grader calligraphy in art class is IMHO a far more productive way of educating someone than teaching the same kid cursive in fourth grade.
Not to mention that the export restrictions are moot anyway. Yeah, another beowulf comment; I can feel the (-1, Redundant) already...
But the problem here is the same one as we had with the aftermath of September 11, on a much less tragic scale. Instead of admitting that there was nothing we could have reasonably done to stop it, we've taken all kinds of after-the-horse-is-out-of-the-barn measures (i.e. banning knives on airplanes?!), cracked down on basic civil liberties, and tried to point fingers to blame someone, anyone, for something that was entirely the doing of one man and his personal terror cult.
Things like this are accountability issues. While the average man on the street may not care, there's still a lot of cold-war mentality out there (Red-baiting is still a viable attack strategy in some quarters; it's not a joke to everybody) and those people pull some pretty powerful strings. Long story short, the people who demand ineffective restrictions like this are very much the same people who want National Missile Defense (just as unworkable -- you really think you can catch sand in a sieve?) -- long on rhetoric, short on logic.
When I first went to college in the early 90s I was a Mac zealot on a then-Mac-dominated campus (no longer, sadly). I had a number of friends who were serious DOS junkies and considered things like "customizeable memory managers" (not that you would want to, but HAD to) a good thing.
Pick up Microsoft's Server+ certification guide sometimes.
I work in the computer department of a large downtown Boston bookstore (the best in the area, though ironically not belonging to the biggest chain -- if you're from around here you know where) and I actively steer customers away from Microsoft-authored books because they're not to be trusted for their information. I felt particularly vindicated the other day when flipping through their Server+ guide and found a sort-of-irrelevant passage on selecting network operating systems.
Linux was mentioned but no other Unix; Novell and (of course) Win2k were also mentioned. The hilarious part was the comparison of features; Linux got a thumbs down for security (okay, Linux isn't great but...) and Win2k, natch, a thumbs up (... it's better than this!). Love it, love it, love it: FUD even in the context of a guide platform-independent certification exam.
Linux was created as a toy for Linus and a few million of his best friends to play with. The fact that it has grown up to be an industrial-strength mid-size server solution (I'd still go clustered FreeBSD or Big Blue for the *really* big guns, but Linux can do an awful lot in the sub-enterprise level) is nice. The fact that it's demonstrably more stable and for the most part more secure than Windows of any stripe is nice.
But the fact is that Linux is what it is because people like us (M$-haters) latched onto it. Me, I used to be a hard-core Mac guy (still am, I just have divided loyalties now:-) ), and I know what damage Microsoft can do. But Linus is only one of us insofar as he's out to make Linux the best it can be, with no regard for pressure from outside.
I sat through an entire semester of a programming language class in college that was taught on such a high level that not only did nobody understand, not a single person in the class even had a clue what questions to ask.
I can find plenty to interest me in programming languages; that's why I designed one myself. But it damn well does matter how a teacher teaches; the student isn't even going to bother trying to find something interesting in the subject if there's no hint of something interesting being there. IMHO you'd find a lot more kids being interested in Math if they knew the implications of what awaited them when they hit calculus class, but we drown them in seemingly unrelated items without giving them a clue of how they connect, with the result being that a lot of kids are lucky to even see trigonometry before they get done with high school, never mind calculus.
As for entertainment... something tells me you never had a chemistry teacher who blew things up in class. You get a kid's attention by putting a piece of sodium in water, he or she is going to be a lot more interested when you explain the deal with reactive metals than if you simply lay out a few notes in class.
As for your grandmother... what a bitch, if she reacted to life in general with roughly the same attitude. No wonder you grew up to have an attitude like that.
You're rather missing the point. Linux is a 386 operating system, and should (with the proper trimming of utilities) still be able to run on a 386. Believe it or not, some of us can't even afford $500 for a shitbox Celeron and are stuck with what we've got (in my case a $200 P2 as well as the P100 I mentioned in my interview question). That market is probably a lot larger than you think it is.
Look at it this way: yes, I can use a 1.x kernel, but forget about things like up-to-date security, USB support (a lot of old Pentium MMX boxen have the ports), etc. Who can someone in that situation turn to but Linux?
Er... padds have existed since Apple shipped the Newton. I have one in my pocket; it's called a Palm IIIx.
The only difference between what you're talking about and my PalmPilot is that your idea would be more expensive, but otherwise essentially identical. Though admittedly an epaper screen would be easier to read...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. Tanenbaum, I believe, is quoted along the lines of "if you ever handed that in to me I'd flunk you".
The irony is that there is in fact a "modernized" microkernel Linux -- Apple used it as a starting point for Rhapsody, which became MacOS X -- but virtually nobody but a few NuBus-bound PowerMac and HP PA-RISC users cares about it.
/Brian
You didn't really read the piece, did you? They tried it with two processors, one an off-the-shelf Northwood (which did require water cooling) and one a hand-picked chip supplied by an unspecified mobo vendor.
/Brian
This article more or less supports my point, actually. Not very strongly, but it leans heavily in that direction.
/Brian
Actually, I believe the Northwood P4 w/DDR is the overall leader just at the moment. And I believe Tom's Hardware just managed to get it cranked up to 3.1GHz...
As for using Rambus and the i850 -- nobody really wants it. Notice: as long as the P4 was tied to Rambus, it was a flop. These days a P4 is not particularly expensive (largely because practically every P4 consumer system on the market is SDRAM-based).
/Brian
Hypochondria is one word for it... The thing is that a lot of these people don't want to hear that what they have is really a mental imbalance. I've heard of people with imagined skin parasites too -- they will go to the dermatologist, present no obvious symptoms, and simply do not wish to be told that what they really need is a mild antipsychotic.
It's a bizarre situation. I feel safe in saying that these people's conditions are probably delusional; what has to be brought into account is that whether or not it's all in their heads, their suffering is certainly real. The problem is that they take any attempt to bridge the disconnect as a personal insult...
/Brian
I believe it's called Activism, actually. You'd rather have us just bend over...
Never mind.
/Brian
Actually, I don't know that would be so hard to emulate now -- the thing with the IBM system was that the cable was proprietary. All you'd have to do to create a decent non-proprietary version would be as follows:
-Separate monitor and desktop box
-bootable Firewire connection
-USB for keyboard
-combined USB/Firewire cable with a connector that's actually a combination of the two connectors so you can replace the cable easily
I'm surprised no one's done that...
/Brian
I thought of mentioning WTX despite its obsolescence but didn't, for two reasons:
-It's incredibly strange -- seems to be a warped hybrid of ATX and the Apple G3/G4 enclosure, but it seems to lack any real point for existing (thus its quick and merciful death), and
-It's not really meant for small-format systems anyway.
On top of those, it's a weird and baroque sort of design that would seem to be far too expensive to implement to be worthwhile.
WTX is a strange beast; if PCI was hot-pluggable I could see a point for it, but it's not necessary and never was. That's why it's dead.
/Brian
See, I have a problem with all this because the question has nothing to say about the scarcity of pre-existing small-format standards, of which we have at least three:
-MicroATX -- spotted in your typical 3-slot minitower case. Not too common lately, as the big guys seem to be pretty much standardized on 4-slot ATX midtowers (I don't see a whole lot of either full or minitower cases in my local Best Buy these days).
-FlexATX -- see the SV24 Spacewalker.
-NLX -- Many but not all of your average small-format desktops.
-ATX/Riser -- common in rack servers but AFAIK nowhere else.
As for double-sided motherboards, I could see this presenting a bit of a handling problem...
The fact is that we've already got everything we need in terms of expandable-type form factors -- the only way to go smaller would be to build the entire system around laptop parts (like, for example, the iOpener or the CappucinoPC). At that point you're just building throwaways.
/Brian
It might be a good price for OEMs as well. I could see someone doing a handy business kitting out SV24s for home users, as a matter of fact; the same goes for some of FIC's small-profile systems.
I don't think these are quite what the market needs, though. The best thing would be something like the old Gateway living room PC, maybe an NLX-format case in black or grey with a front panel display and lots of blue lights. The home entertainment thingy HP is selling is close, but I'd like to have a generic system case that does the same job, fits into the same sort of situation, etc.
The Spacewalker and friends come close, but...
/Brian
Actually, with Dell the case is standard; it's the power supply that's @!#$? proprietary...
I think the only real problem with the SV24 is that there's only one motherboard out there that will fit in it. I think it's a great design (perhaps a bit aesthetically challenged), but I'd like to see more FlexATX boards on the market before I give it any serious consideration.
Perhaps... perhaps the thing to do is to slap a mobile Athlon on a daughter card. That will help the heat dissipation problem a bit. For graphics, wait until nVidia comes out with a second-generation nForce (one that actually has decent performance and uses the GF3 core that the Xbox Northbridge uses) and go with that...
I do like the system. It's not real pretty to me, but it's elegant in its own way.
/Brian
Mailbox full I wonder why
I'm getting all this spam
It fills up my mailer window
With teen sluts and Sircam
And even if I delete it'll all be back
Hit my head against a wall
And it reminds me
That my life is not so bad, not so bad at all
/Brian
Dell wouldn't. They just killed their only Itanium project recently due to nonexistent demand.
Intel can spin it any way they wish (the current party line is and has been that the first iteration of Itanic (Merced) was sort of a public beta and the real fun was supposed to start with McKinley) but the fact is that a) there has been very little buzz (far more people would rather see commodity Mac motherboards, with or without MacOS, for example) and b) so much time has passed since Merced was announced that I doubt anyone really cares anymore.
Besides, a *32-bit* P4/Northwood or Athlon XP can stomp an Itanium anyway...
/Brian
Actually, I wonder if you can do that -- the low-level driver routines are available on some models, hacked on others...
/brian
Yeah. I've often found the layout restrictions to be ludicrous at the very least -- what if my calculator of choice is a PalmPilot?
It's incredibly arbitrary, that's for certain...
/Brian
Actually, the 85/86 language was called TI BASIC, but as far as I can tell it doesn't resemble BASIC in any useful sense. It's really its own language.
/Brian
Realistically... Cursive is a pain in the ass anyway. I don't know about most people, but I always found it harder to read and a waste of time to learn. Teaching a tenth-grader calligraphy in art class is IMHO a far more productive way of educating someone than teaching the same kid cursive in fourth grade.
/Brian
Not to mention that the export restrictions are moot anyway. Yeah, another beowulf comment; I can feel the (-1, Redundant) already...
But the problem here is the same one as we had with the aftermath of September 11, on a much less tragic scale. Instead of admitting that there was nothing we could have reasonably done to stop it, we've taken all kinds of after-the-horse-is-out-of-the-barn measures (i.e. banning knives on airplanes?!), cracked down on basic civil liberties, and tried to point fingers to blame someone, anyone, for something that was entirely the doing of one man and his personal terror cult.
Things like this are accountability issues. While the average man on the street may not care, there's still a lot of cold-war mentality out there (Red-baiting is still a viable attack strategy in some quarters; it's not a joke to everybody) and those people pull some pretty powerful strings. Long story short, the people who demand ineffective restrictions like this are very much the same people who want National Missile Defense (just as unworkable -- you really think you can catch sand in a sieve?) -- long on rhetoric, short on logic.
/Brian
When I first went to college in the early 90s I was a Mac zealot on a then-Mac-dominated campus (no longer, sadly). I had a number of friends who were serious DOS junkies and considered things like "customizeable memory managers" (not that you would want to, but HAD to) a good thing.
This just brings back such memories...
/Brian
Pick up Microsoft's Server+ certification guide sometimes.
I work in the computer department of a large downtown Boston bookstore (the best in the area, though ironically not belonging to the biggest chain -- if you're from around here you know where) and I actively steer customers away from Microsoft-authored books because they're not to be trusted for their information. I felt particularly vindicated the other day when flipping through their Server+ guide and found a sort-of-irrelevant passage on selecting network operating systems.
Linux was mentioned but no other Unix; Novell and (of course) Win2k were also mentioned. The hilarious part was the comparison of features; Linux got a thumbs down for security (okay, Linux isn't great but...) and Win2k, natch, a thumbs up (... it's better than this!). Love it, love it, love it: FUD even in the context of a guide platform-independent certification exam.
/Brian
Pretty simple, really:
:-) ), and I know what damage Microsoft can do. But Linus is only one of us insofar as he's out to make Linux the best it can be, with no regard for pressure from outside.
Linux was created as a toy for Linus and a few million of his best friends to play with. The fact that it has grown up to be an industrial-strength mid-size server solution (I'd still go clustered FreeBSD or Big Blue for the *really* big guns, but Linux can do an awful lot in the sub-enterprise level) is nice. The fact that it's demonstrably more stable and for the most part more secure than Windows of any stripe is nice.
But the fact is that Linux is what it is because people like us (M$-haters) latched onto it. Me, I used to be a hard-core Mac guy (still am, I just have divided loyalties now
/Brian
I can find plenty to interest me in programming languages; that's why I designed one myself. But it damn well does matter how a teacher teaches; the student isn't even going to bother trying to find something interesting in the subject if there's no hint of something interesting being there. IMHO you'd find a lot more kids being interested in Math if they knew the implications of what awaited them when they hit calculus class, but we drown them in seemingly unrelated items without giving them a clue of how they connect, with the result being that a lot of kids are lucky to even see trigonometry before they get done with high school, never mind calculus.
As for entertainment... something tells me you never had a chemistry teacher who blew things up in class. You get a kid's attention by putting a piece of sodium in water, he or she is going to be a lot more interested when you explain the deal with reactive metals than if you simply lay out a few notes in class.
As for your grandmother... what a bitch, if she reacted to life in general with roughly the same attitude. No wonder you grew up to have an attitude like that.
You're rather missing the point. Linux is a 386 operating system, and should (with the proper trimming of utilities) still be able to run on a 386. Believe it or not, some of us can't even afford $500 for a shitbox Celeron and are stuck with what we've got (in my case a $200 P2 as well as the P100 I mentioned in my interview question). That market is probably a lot larger than you think it is.
Look at it this way: yes, I can use a 1.x kernel, but forget about things like up-to-date security, USB support (a lot of old Pentium MMX boxen have the ports), etc. Who can someone in that situation turn to but Linux?
/Brian
Er... padds have existed since Apple shipped the Newton. I have one in my pocket; it's called a Palm IIIx.
The only difference between what you're talking about and my PalmPilot is that your idea would be more expensive, but otherwise essentially identical. Though admittedly an epaper screen would be easier to read...
/Brian
Mod parent up as (+2, absofreakinlutely hilarious)...
Seriously, though. I do like the whole idea of "holodeck wallpaper", though I would tend to wonder how long it would take to become affordable.
Though I wouldn't buy an epaper book; too iffy.
/Brian