Well, Palestinians have a plenty of weaponry. It includes tens of thousands of AK-47, AK-74 and M-16 weapons (many of which were given to Palestinians by Israel to enforce their internal security), machine guns, mortars, high explosives, AT weapons (mainly the ubitiquous RPG-7b AT grenade launcher) and possibly AH missiles and Katyusha salvo fire devices. Is that ample ammunition for you? Also, tanks play a very limited part in the fighting. A situation where both parties conduct military activities is a war so far as I am concerned..
It seems to me like you've been drawing the wrong conclusion. The US was struck by world terrorism, an uncompromising movement which does not really want anything by war. Usama Bin-Ladin is not at all interested in the conflict in Israel; he just wants to destroy the US. Why else did the jets fly into WTC and not into downtown Tel-Aviv?
Your clue about Israeli tanks and snipers killing innocent bystanders seems outrageous to me. One has got to understand that it's really a war that goes on here; and during a war a humanitaran policy of a side can be evaluated only by their intentions. Israel wants none of the innocent bystanders dead. Most of the civilians that were killed had little blame but for being in the place where bombers/shooters perform their actions. But so can be said about the victims of Palestinian suicide bombings! Moreover, had the Palestinian side maintained at least some dignity in the use of arms, the civilian losses would have been much lower.
It might also be an educational lesson to you that the Palestinians were perhaps the only people in the world, except for Afghans and Iraqis that celebrated the bombing of the WTC. On the other hand, having heard about the bombing, Israel's government declared that September the 12th would be a day of national mourning. And for Israel a day of mourning it was - flags were descended, newspapers were hung on the walls of schools and various American institutions received tokens of solidarity. The sense of loss following the attack upon the US was as strong as following the bloodiest of the attacks upon Israel.
Are those the people that you want us to make peace to? We have already entrusted our security to them once and so have you. It seems that both of our countries have been wrong.
Today, the 11th of September, 2001 is a day of calamity, the greatest disaster that has ever struck the United States. And it is only ironic that the great peril, which had given birth to it was left unnoticed and untreated by most until it was too late.
I am deeply shocked by the inhumanity of this action and its perpetrator. Too great an evil has been allowed to happen. It is time now to stand up and to strike back.
For three decades, has mindless terrorism been striking my country Israel; but I can only weep at the immense scale of the tragedy. It is too late now to solve the problem bloodlessly. But it has to be solved now no matter what is the price.
Two words: stack overflow. Of course recursion is an elegant technique, but it's hardly a way to program. Let's look, for example, at Fibonacci numbers example (factorial grows far too quickly). Fib(n) = Fib(n - 2) + Fib(n - 1). That means that using recursion, Fib(n) belongs to O(n ^ 2). To get a Fib(1000), not an unreasonable number, you'll have to wait a few weeks.
Now if you will use plain old-school itteration, the algorithm will belong to O(n) and space requirements will also diminish - rather than the - minimal - 8 bytes for return address and return value for each of the n ^ 2 recursive instances you'll have 4 bytes for each of the n - 1 previous numbers.
Now I'm not saying that recursion is forbidden, or that there aren't places where it can be used safely and elegantly, but doing everything with it is bad. I once had to write an strcmp() in Prolog, and I do not wish that even my worst foe to do it again.
It might be interesting for you to mark that the population we call Palestinian has come to israel in the second half of the 19th century, about the same time as the Jews did. Before that, Palestine was a very sparesly populated land. Of little worth, but for its holy sites.
As an Israeli, I find no use for bigotry regarding religion. Israel beleives in freedom of religion (for example, Muslim Sharia' courthouses are equal in their right to the Jewish Rabinnical courthouses in Israel), and therefore if Arabs beleive Jerusalem is holy for them, they are welcome to come there. As a side note, such courtesy was not given by the Jordanians to the Jews who had wanted to come to the Western Wall in the years 1948-1967.
The Palestinians abuse many of the world's news sources to put through a line of extremist propaganda. Of course, its antisemitic nature is by itself wrong; however the main problem is in the violence they incite. I do not consider them much different from the KKK so far as either style or content is concerned. I don't think there should be room for such media in Israel, the US or any other country which understands the danger in propaganda of violence.
I'm only 16 years old, and my contribution so far has been quite minor (only xml2swf is worth mentioning), but I shall list my reasons for it nevertheless:
First of all, it's about art. Many of the programmers do not treat their work as a job; it is rather a craft, and sometimes - though seldom - an art. And any craftsman has got the urge to create, to somehow demonstrate his skills and knowledge in front of his colleagues and other people. Secondly, it's about training: writing software is the best way to learn a technology, and a good program is a nice addition to anyone's CV or portfolio.
So far I'd described the reason why people write software on their own. The reason they choose to make it open is a matter of culture. Most of us can't expect to make a significant profit from the code written out there. Therefore, it is very easy to make a willingful concession of the slight possibility of a monetary gain in favor of the honor and the feeling of helping someone.
First of all, I'd like to say that I'm not a radio engineer. However it seems to me that with any device intended for communications there are just two options:
The data which is sent over a link is not received at the other end - in which case we don't have communications.
The data which is sent over a channel is received. Imagine now that there's a second connection using the same channel. In this case you won't have a way to distinguish between the two connections on the same channel, and it will not work well.
The conclusion from this is that one cannot have an endless number of channels. And wherever there's a limit, it will be reached, since spectrum is expensive and people will like more channels for less. So I don't think we have a panacea here.
The correct plural for virus is either viri or viruses. Viruses is the English way to form the plural, and viri is the Latin way of doing it. Personally, I prefer the Latin way since it sounds more elegant.
Well, I can't say I'm deeply literate, but I've read much, both in English and in other languages, particularly my native Russian. I've read LoTR in English.
There are books that one cannot compare. For example, "The Art of Indirect Action" by B. Liddel Hart is a masterpiece on military analisys and global strategy, but it is not in the same category as JRRT.
Speaking of the SF/Fantasy area, Both Zelazny's Amber Chronicles, and Asimov's Foundation series are excellent works, but none can compare to LoTR.
You definitely should read LoTR, if you're interested in good reading.
What I personally like in LoTR is the beauty of the author's work, that is the combination of an intricate and deep plot, with masterful writing (Tolkien was a professor and a life-long scholar of the English language).
LoTR is second to none in aesthetics and style, and it is definitely the best book that I've ever read.
I've also had numerous problems with bootloaders which were not good enough/aesthetic enough. In the end I'd stumbled upon XOSL a free bootloader which supports multiple OSes (more than 4), CD/Floppy boot (not flawless), additional boot customization and a very nice GUI. Try it
Well, no, an experienced UNIX programmer should know how to use fork(), domain sockets, or the internals of SQL (her job is around a database), and she knows all of that perfectly.
The problem was not that she didn't know how to handle that, she did (it's not the first time she receives it), but rather that the hype was so big that it confused her.
A few days ago when I was at my mother's work, she asked me how to deal with a copy of the Love Bug which for some reason arrived at her computer. Nothing special, right? Except for this: the mailer is Netscape, the OS is Solaris, the computer is Sun SPARC and my mother is a very experienced UNIX developer/maintenance programmer.
What's the moral of this story? Obviously, the particular problem in this case was the global hype surrounding the Love Bug and its consequences. This hype made my mother abandon the usual UNIX reflex (if it's Microsoft it has nothing to do with me), and treat this problem as real.
It seems to me that the global problem is ignorance. People do not know what viri are; they do not comprehend the concept of a remote exploit; many of us do not have a clear understanding of system security.
I think the proper solution would be to educate people through the mass-media (BTW, it's time for the TV networks to get someone who knows both what a worm is and how to pass on his knowledge to other people). Additionally, security training could be added to all those hi-tech management courses PHBs attend - maybe they'll absorb a few bits (or bytes).
Literacy in various subjects was the driving force of many important reforms and revolutions throughout the human history. It seems to me that some knowledge could improve immensly the computer security culture that we know today.
This is exactly why Open-Source is good
on
IBM Wants Linux
·
· Score: 1
I see the clear advantage of Open Source in the fact that IBM is considering Linux an alternative to AIX.
I don't really think AIX development has been profitable: it is a heavy self-made UNIX, which runs on a limited base. Although much money can be collected from each customer, IBM still loses in the process.
From the other point of view, Linux is already there. There are numerous people except IBM who want to make it better (some of them are IBM's competitors in this market, like SGI). Improving Linux does not cost so much.
In addition, the community receives powerful tools that it can use. The market fragmentation decreases, simplifying the technical support duties. IBM's hardware costs less, and more people buy it.
As a preface, I am not attempting here to flame RMS. I recognize his previous achievements, particularly the writing of the first versions of gcc and emacs, both of which I use and I like. However, for some reason which is not apparent to me, he has left software behind and moved into politics. He has just tried to take over glibc, which is of similar importance to the Linux Kernel.
Beyond its being non-ethical, immoral, irresponsible and Micro$oftish, this demonstrates to us the position that Stallman has decided to take. Unlike most programmers, he does not really like the software - if he did, he would leave it to its developers and maintainers (who have been doing a pretty good job). As I see it (and you may disagree), RMS's desire is to earn influence at the expense of the software.
And as to my opinion of (GNU/)Linux - it should be Linux. It is true that numerous GNU tools are commonly used under Linux; however the real credit belongs to the developers (who have done it for the sake of Free Software, not for the sake of GNU). Any attempt to prefix it with GNU (and thus emphasize the role of GNU) is political, and I don't think there should be room for politics in the truly Free Software.
Since you're not an AC, I'll explain myself fully:
Virus is a foreign word. Even though it is not found in Classical Latin (as a harmful microscopic creature), it is still a Latinized word. Had it been, for example, "vire", I'd have pluralized it as vires.
The spelling "viri" is relatively rational; it reflects a rule well-known even to people who do not speak Latin.
Finally, I am neither an American, nor a native English speaker. Pluralizing foreign words with (e)s is a legitimate American habit; however I find the British tradition of using native plurals more elegant.
Well, I actually did read the page. It said that the plural of both "vir" and "virus" is "viri". Well, there's name for such a thing: homonyms. In every language you have them. What if I told you that, say, in Hebrew, "im" (if) and "i'm" (with) are pronounced in the same way by 95% of the population, and still noone confuses them? Of course your intelligence is too big to acknowledge the existence of such a thing as "context"
Also, again, I reserve the right to use whatever forms of words as I might like. The form "viruses" sounds as stupid as a word can get.
By the way, you can notice my obvious mental retardation from the fact that I'm talking to an anonymous troll without using the +1 bonus.
While you are right regarding the fact that the plural of both vir and virus is viri, I see no contradiction in that. There are numerous such scenarios in languages more heavily inflected than English.
As to the making of words, I desire not to enter a flame war here; however you will fail to convince me that the plural of radius is radiuses or that the plural of anthena is anthenas. The form "viri" is morphologically correct. So long as it stays such, I take the liberty to use it in this way, not just since it implies that I know how to form a Latin plural, but also because I find it more aesthetic.
It is apparent that "Virus" is an exemplary Latin noun, ending with -us and thus undoubtfully belonging to the 2nd declension, masculine, nominative. Now repeat after me:
Since Palm's main interest is in Be's PDA software department, will the rest (or at least some) of Be's software (i.e. BeOS) become open-source so that there would be yet one more free OS?
After all, the OS community responds gratefully to any presents it is given, and BeOS's commercial value is limited, particularly now.
Although many people might treat older CPUs (or machines) with contempt, there are lots of uses for them.
For example, I've got an old Linux 486 under my desk which does firewalling/NAT. Before that, each time I'd rebooted my PC I had to redial. Now I've got it to manage the modem. Hopefully when broadband arrives, it will become my gateway.
For newer computers, one can still run Linux (or Windows 95) on them. I believe that the neither the full bloat of GNOME, KDE, nor of Windows XP is required to do most of the work.
Always keep in mind that Unix was written for a PDP-11, a computer that had a fraction of the processing power of an XT.
Of course, having an X server for PS/2 is nice, but it's not exactly crucial. Price is also an issue, so I hope that the XF86 team would produce something free if the need arises.
One thing that people seldom realise is that there are numerous ways to use even the oddest devices. But considering the PS/2, an elaborate GUI (that could result from putting a desktop environment on top of X) will not be so useful because of the TV display issues.
Naturally, this could change by the time when HDTV comes, but then from the other point of view, we shall have had a PS/3 by that time.
To what extent do the games compiled with SDL for PS2 are slower than the analogous native versions? If a programmer uses a special programming style, does that improve the performance?
Also, does the overhead of SDL grow since there are so many platforms/tricks to be supported (i.e. if a feature of PC hardware leads to a certain architectural solution, the same feature does not necessarily exist or is relevant to the PS2 architecture).
The real problem with the Maginot line is the fact that the French were unable to sustain a dynamic defence. That is, when a German force (I think it was Von Rundstedt's Army Group B) struck through the Lower Countries (today's Benelux), the French were so basically incompetent, that they did not protect their flank directly or at least position their forces so that they could respond properly.
I am not an expert in strategy, but I think that a counter-strike from the east of France-Belgium border to the north-west into Belgium would have cut the German supply routes and effectively shut the offensive. Had the French general staff obeyed the basic rules of operational activity (have a real reserve, mind your flanks, consider your oponent generally superior than you), World War II would have been totally different.
The Maginot line is not only the history of incompetence of military planners, it is also a story of a failure of strategical thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, Palestinians have a plenty of weaponry. It includes tens of thousands of AK-47, AK-74 and M-16 weapons (many of which were given to Palestinians by Israel to enforce their internal security), machine guns, mortars, high explosives, AT weapons (mainly the ubitiquous RPG-7b AT grenade launcher) and possibly AH missiles and Katyusha salvo fire devices. Is that ample ammunition for you? Also, tanks play a very limited part in the fighting. A situation where both parties conduct military activities is a war so far as I am concerned..
It seems to me like you've been drawing the wrong conclusion. The US was struck by world terrorism, an uncompromising movement which does not really want anything by war. Usama Bin-Ladin is not at all interested in the conflict in Israel; he just wants to destroy the US. Why else did the jets fly into WTC and not into downtown Tel-Aviv?
Your clue about Israeli tanks and snipers killing innocent bystanders seems outrageous to me. One has got to understand that it's really a war that goes on here; and during a war a humanitaran policy of a side can be evaluated only by their intentions. Israel wants none of the innocent bystanders dead. Most of the civilians that were killed had little blame but for being in the place where bombers/shooters perform their actions. But so can be said about the victims of Palestinian suicide bombings! Moreover, had the Palestinian side maintained at least some dignity in the use of arms, the civilian losses would have been much lower.
It might also be an educational lesson to you that the Palestinians were perhaps the only people in the world, except for Afghans and Iraqis that celebrated the bombing of the WTC. On the other hand, having heard about the bombing, Israel's government declared that September the 12th would be a day of national mourning. And for Israel a day of mourning it was - flags were descended, newspapers were hung on the walls of schools and various American institutions received tokens of solidarity. The sense of loss following the attack upon the US was as strong as following the bloodiest of the attacks upon Israel.
Are those the people that you want us to make peace to? We have already entrusted our security to them once and so have you. It seems that both of our countries have been wrong.
Today, the 11th of September, 2001 is a day of calamity, the greatest disaster that has ever struck the United States. And it is only ironic that the great peril, which had given birth to it was left unnoticed and untreated by most until it was too late.
I am deeply shocked by the inhumanity of this action and its perpetrator. Too great an evil has been allowed to happen. It is time now to stand up and to strike back.
For three decades, has mindless terrorism been striking my country Israel; but I can only weep at the immense scale of the tragedy. It is too late now to solve the problem bloodlessly. But it has to be solved now no matter what is the price.
Two words: stack overflow. Of course recursion is an elegant technique, but it's hardly a way to program. Let's look, for example, at Fibonacci numbers example (factorial grows far too quickly). Fib(n) = Fib(n - 2) + Fib(n - 1). That means that using recursion, Fib(n) belongs to O(n ^ 2). To get a Fib(1000), not an unreasonable number, you'll have to wait a few weeks.
Now if you will use plain old-school itteration, the algorithm will belong to O(n) and space requirements will also diminish - rather than the - minimal - 8 bytes for return address and return value for each of the n ^ 2 recursive instances you'll have 4 bytes for each of the n - 1 previous numbers.
Now I'm not saying that recursion is forbidden, or that there aren't places where it can be used safely and elegantly, but doing everything with it is bad. I once had to write an strcmp() in Prolog, and I do not wish that even my worst foe to do it again.
It might be interesting for you to mark that the population we call Palestinian has come to israel in the second half of the 19th century, about the same time as the Jews did. Before that, Palestine was a very sparesly populated land. Of little worth, but for its holy sites.
As an Israeli, I find no use for bigotry regarding religion. Israel beleives in freedom of religion (for example, Muslim Sharia' courthouses are equal in their right to the Jewish Rabinnical courthouses in Israel), and therefore if Arabs beleive Jerusalem is holy for them, they are welcome to come there. As a side note, such courtesy was not given by the Jordanians to the Jews who had wanted to come to the Western Wall in the years 1948-1967.
The Palestinians abuse many of the world's news sources to put through a line of extremist propaganda. Of course, its antisemitic nature is by itself wrong; however the main problem is in the violence they incite. I do not consider them much different from the KKK so far as either style or content is concerned. I don't think there should be room for such media in Israel, the US or any other country which understands the danger in propaganda of violence.
I'm only 16 years old, and my contribution so far has been quite minor (only xml2swf is worth mentioning), but I shall list my reasons for it nevertheless:
First of all, it's about art. Many of the programmers do not treat their work as a job; it is rather a craft, and sometimes - though seldom - an art. And any craftsman has got the urge to create, to somehow demonstrate his skills and knowledge in front of his colleagues and other people. Secondly, it's about training: writing software is the best way to learn a technology, and a good program is a nice addition to anyone's CV or portfolio.
So far I'd described the reason why people write software on their own. The reason they choose to make it open is a matter of culture. Most of us can't expect to make a significant profit from the code written out there. Therefore, it is very easy to make a willingful concession of the slight possibility of a monetary gain in favor of the honor and the feeling of helping someone.
Three books went into /dev/null
Seven were lost due to a fire
Nine were left inside a hole
One remains to rule them all
One book that bests them all
One book to grind them,
One book will stay when most are sold,
And in oblivion bind them.
First of all, I'd like to say that I'm not a radio engineer. However it seems to me that with any device intended for communications there are just two options:
The conclusion from this is that one cannot have an endless number of channels. And wherever there's a limit, it will be reached, since spectrum is expensive and people will like more channels for less. So I don't think we have a panacea here.
The correct plural for virus is either viri or viruses. Viruses is the English way to form the plural, and viri is the Latin way of doing it. Personally, I prefer the Latin way since it sounds more elegant.
Well, I can't say I'm deeply literate, but I've read much, both in English and in other languages, particularly my native Russian. I've read LoTR in English.
There are books that one cannot compare. For example, "The Art of Indirect Action" by B. Liddel Hart is a masterpiece on military analisys and global strategy, but it is not in the same category as JRRT.
Speaking of the SF/Fantasy area, Both Zelazny's Amber Chronicles, and Asimov's Foundation series are excellent works, but none can compare to LoTR.
You definitely should read LoTR, if you're interested in good reading.
What I personally like in LoTR is the beauty of the author's work, that is the combination of an intricate and deep plot, with masterful writing (Tolkien was a professor and a life-long scholar of the English language).
LoTR is second to none in aesthetics and style, and it is definitely the best book that I've ever read.
I've also had numerous problems with bootloaders which were not good enough/aesthetic enough. In the end I'd stumbled upon XOSL a free bootloader which supports multiple OSes (more than 4), CD/Floppy boot (not flawless), additional boot customization and a very nice GUI. Try it
Well, no, an experienced UNIX programmer should know how to use fork(), domain sockets, or the internals of SQL (her job is around a database), and she knows all of that perfectly.
The problem was not that she didn't know how to handle that, she did (it's not the first time she receives it), but rather that the hype was so big that it confused her.
A few days ago when I was at my mother's work, she asked me how to deal with a copy of the Love Bug which for some reason arrived at her computer. Nothing special, right? Except for this: the mailer is Netscape, the OS is Solaris, the computer is Sun SPARC and my mother is a very experienced UNIX developer/maintenance programmer.
What's the moral of this story? Obviously, the particular problem in this case was the global hype surrounding the Love Bug and its consequences. This hype made my mother abandon the usual UNIX reflex (if it's Microsoft it has nothing to do with me), and treat this problem as real.
It seems to me that the global problem is ignorance. People do not know what viri are; they do not comprehend the concept of a remote exploit; many of us do not have a clear understanding of system security.
I think the proper solution would be to educate people through the mass-media (BTW, it's time for the TV networks to get someone who knows both what a worm is and how to pass on his knowledge to other people). Additionally, security training could be added to all those hi-tech management courses PHBs attend - maybe they'll absorb a few bits (or bytes).
Literacy in various subjects was the driving force of many important reforms and revolutions throughout the human history. It seems to me that some knowledge could improve immensly the computer security culture that we know today.
I see the clear advantage of Open Source in the fact that IBM is considering Linux an alternative to AIX.
I don't really think AIX development has been profitable: it is a heavy self-made UNIX, which runs on a limited base. Although much money can be collected from each customer, IBM still loses in the process.
From the other point of view, Linux is already there. There are numerous people except IBM who want to make it better (some of them are IBM's competitors in this market, like SGI). Improving Linux does not cost so much.
In addition, the community receives powerful tools that it can use. The market fragmentation decreases, simplifying the technical support duties. IBM's hardware costs less, and more people buy it.
As a preface, I am not attempting here to flame RMS. I recognize his previous achievements, particularly the writing of the first versions of gcc and emacs, both of which I use and I like. However, for some reason which is not apparent to me, he has left software behind and moved into politics. He has just tried to take over glibc, which is of similar importance to the Linux Kernel.
Beyond its being non-ethical, immoral, irresponsible and Micro$oftish, this demonstrates to us the position that Stallman has decided to take. Unlike most programmers, he does not really like the software - if he did, he would leave it to its developers and maintainers (who have been doing a pretty good job). As I see it (and you may disagree), RMS's desire is to earn influence at the expense of the software.
And as to my opinion of (GNU/)Linux - it should be Linux. It is true that numerous GNU tools are commonly used under Linux; however the real credit belongs to the developers (who have done it for the sake of Free Software, not for the sake of GNU). Any attempt to prefix it with GNU (and thus emphasize the role of GNU) is political, and I don't think there should be room for politics in the truly Free Software.
Since you're not an AC, I'll explain myself fully:
Virus is a foreign word. Even though it is not found in Classical Latin (as a harmful microscopic creature), it is still a Latinized word. Had it been, for example, "vire", I'd have pluralized it as vires.
The spelling "viri" is relatively rational; it reflects a rule well-known even to people who do not speak Latin.
Finally, I am neither an American, nor a native English speaker. Pluralizing foreign words with (e)s is a legitimate American habit; however I find the British tradition of using native plurals more elegant.
Well, I actually did read the page. It said that the plural of both "vir" and "virus" is "viri". Well, there's name for such a thing: homonyms. In every language you have them. What if I told you that, say, in Hebrew, "im" (if) and "i'm" (with) are pronounced in the same way by 95% of the population, and still noone confuses them? Of course your intelligence is too big to acknowledge the existence of such a thing as "context"
Also, again, I reserve the right to use whatever forms of words as I might like. The form "viruses" sounds as stupid as a word can get.
By the way, you can notice my obvious mental retardation from the fact that I'm talking to an anonymous troll without using the +1 bonus.
While you are right regarding the fact that the plural of both vir and virus is viri, I see no contradiction in that. There are numerous such scenarios in languages more heavily inflected than English.
As to the making of words, I desire not to enter a flame war here; however you will fail to convince me that the plural of radius is radiuses or that the plural of anthena is anthenas. The form "viri" is morphologically correct. So long as it stays such, I take the liberty to use it in this way, not just since it implies that I know how to form a Latin plural, but also because I find it more aesthetic.
It is apparent that "Virus" is an exemplary Latin noun, ending with -us and thus undoubtfully belonging to the 2nd declension, masculine, nominative. Now repeat after me:
Since Palm's main interest is in Be's PDA software department, will the rest (or at least some) of Be's software (i.e. BeOS) become open-source so that there would be yet one more free OS?
After all, the OS community responds gratefully to any presents it is given, and BeOS's commercial value is limited, particularly now.
Although many people might treat older CPUs (or machines) with contempt, there are lots of uses for them.
For example, I've got an old Linux 486 under my desk which does firewalling/NAT. Before that, each time I'd rebooted my PC I had to redial. Now I've got it to manage the modem. Hopefully when broadband arrives, it will become my gateway.
For newer computers, one can still run Linux (or Windows 95) on them. I believe that the neither the full bloat of GNOME, KDE, nor of Windows XP is required to do most of the work.
Always keep in mind that Unix was written for a PDP-11, a computer that had a fraction of the processing power of an XT.
Of course, having an X server for PS/2 is nice, but it's not exactly crucial. Price is also an issue, so I hope that the XF86 team would produce something free if the need arises.
One thing that people seldom realise is that there are numerous ways to use even the oddest devices. But considering the PS/2, an elaborate GUI (that could result from putting a desktop environment on top of X) will not be so useful because of the TV display issues.
Naturally, this could change by the time when HDTV comes, but then from the other point of view, we shall have had a PS/3 by that time.
To what extent do the games compiled with SDL for PS2 are slower than the analogous native versions? If a programmer uses a special programming style, does that improve the performance?
Also, does the overhead of SDL grow since there are so many platforms/tricks to be supported (i.e. if a feature of PC hardware leads to a certain architectural solution, the same feature does not necessarily exist or is relevant to the PS2 architecture).
The real problem with the Maginot line is the fact that the French were unable to sustain a dynamic defence. That is, when a German force (I think it was Von Rundstedt's Army Group B) struck through the Lower Countries (today's Benelux), the French were so basically incompetent, that they did not protect their flank directly or at least position their forces so that they could respond properly.
I am not an expert in strategy, but I think that a counter-strike from the east of France-Belgium border to the north-west into Belgium would have cut the German supply routes and effectively shut the offensive. Had the French general staff obeyed the basic rules of operational activity (have a real reserve, mind your flanks, consider your oponent generally superior than you), World War II would have been totally different.
The Maginot line is not only the history of incompetence of military planners, it is also a story of a failure of strategical thinking.