Scarily, the Amiga OS has been open-source cloned and ported to x86, in the form of AROS.
Unlike other projects that have drawn some inspiration from AmigaOS, AROS pretty much just tries to be a straight clone (with a necessary overhaul to the device drivers layer).
The project is quite far along, and has a few interesting features:
(a) Amiga OS had no true memory protection. Neither does AROS. There's a system of semaphore locking on some sections that is to true memory protection as cooperative multitasking is to pre-emptive.
(b) When the system goes down (see (a)), it reboots in a fraction of a second - a soft "reboot" does not jump back to the BIOS, but re-enters the AROS kernel init after zeroing some choice areas of memory.
(c) due to the absence of memory protection between user-space tasks, context switches, such as they are, are extremely lightweight. Not much of distinction between threads and processes. Amiga applications have always tended to be very muyltithreaded. The OS is true pre-emptive multitasking.
(c) It uses message-passing-by-reference for IPC. Rather than copying data from one process to another, they pass references to the data around. Very quick.
(d) it has support for amiga-style logical volumes, assigns, and pluggable filesystem drivers, which are pretty cool - cd'ing into compressed archives, ftp sites, and so on, as well as the OS having a clear notion of the distinction between a particular floppy/cd/partition and the drive it is in... (woirked example: why the hell don't linux distros configure cdroms to automount and show up as both/mnt/cdrom and/mnt/cdlabel/ or something - the amiga got this right, allowing you to say "CD0:path/to/file" for "the file on thedisk that I've got in the CD drive" and "LABELNAME:path/to/file" for "the file on the particular volume that is named "LABELNAME", wherever it may be!)
I think close are worth money. But I don't think I should have to wear them just because of some outmoded christian "morality" still ingrained in mainstream society.
Clothes are good for protecting you from the environment - one of the main reasons for their existence. However, in large parts of the world, and anywhere the environment is under human control (e.g. indoors), clothes are unnecessary for that purpose. We shouldn't have to pay for redundant, useless clothes in those situations, just because some religious wackos are ashamed of their bodies and afraid to look at other peoples'!
Currently, I can be arrested for walking naked down a street in summer (I'm in Ireland - you wouldn't want to do that in winter.). This is stupid. Think of how much better off parents would be if they didn't have to dress their children for the 6-8 months of the year it's reasonably comfortable to go without clothes.
I suggest you get a better dictionary, your neo-feudalist corporate overlords have been brainwashing you. It's funny actually - when a european says "socialism" it has quite different connotations to an American saying it:
I looked up Socialism in American and British dictionaries. It's funny how the slants on the two entries, are so different:
American (dictionary.com):
Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.
Manages to make it sound all "evil commie", while still retaining the european understanding of meaning in the first phrase - Anyone care to guess why didn't they leave it at "Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively" ? Hmm...
British (Chambers 20th century):
The theory, principle, or scheme of social organisation which places means of production and distribution in the hands of the community.
No hint of planned economy, dictatorship, or even big government. Hardly conflicting with Libertarianism - in fact, phrased that way, it sounds like they're a good match, given that a community is just a semi-organised bunch of citizens!
Just goes to show, eh? The gulf of understanding between America and Europe grows ever wider...
This is the real world. Cheap, soundbite arguments win the minds of the ignorant masses. If you're swaying the minds of teenagers, then appearing to be on their level is a good thing.
It is of course different from calling Gates a doodoohead if I use the term "Micro$oft". It's still recognisably "Microsoft", but (a) the dollar sign emphasises that they're all about money. (b) in most parts of the world, also suggests corruption, since (b.1) it's associated with the USA, and (b.2) has connotations of "the serpent on the branch"
Microsoft uses dirty mind tricks straight out of Psychology 101 - be aware of them!
I'd have to disagree - there are few things more concise than "Micro$oft". Here in Europe, at least, such word-play is widely accepted, and is common among satirical mags such as private eye and the phoenix - which the powers that be take quite seriously. Worldwide, the $ sign tends to symbolise corruption.
And don't forget,/. is a forum for the converted. To maintain social cohesion, derogatory terms for the enemy are important - as any Minister for Propaganda knows. Thus, I mistrust anyone who criticises the use of such derogatory terms, since he's trying to undermine the common group outlook on life.
An important part of deprogramming someone is getting him to change his language usage away from the group's jargon - conversely, group jargon is important for programming them (witness $cientology's wierd, clipped psychobabble slang).
In this case, such language is serving a useful purpose - unifying people against microsoft.
Oh, and I would just like to point out the fact that the following phrases are not, and never were, funny
Yes, they are. I, for one, find them quite amusing. More seriously, calling the enemy by the name he uses for himself merely legitimizes him. Thus, using those names for Micro$oft are a positive thing if you happen to be opposed to them. I tend to use $cientologist too.
Asking people to stop using them is a hallmark of an astroturfer, since that's one of the first things MS's crack team of P.R. psychologists would recommend.
Rubbish. Mickeyshaft use propaganda tactics all the time. Using the name someone chooses for themselves legitimises them. Choosing a name for them doesn't. Micro$oft have a team of crack psychologists in P.R. who understand these things. So keep using the variant spellings, and fight their brainwashing!
Unless you use client-side java (in which case it's not really a web interface anymore), and until xforms is widely supported, web based interfaces basically suck for anything complicated.
Client-side Java interfaces are quite nice these days - provided you're using an up-to-date 1.3 JVM, and not MS's now-sucky 1.1 VM that they keep around just to make java look bad. When Java 1.4 with integrated webstart etc. is released, client side java will be even more attractive for vertical apps.
A camera on every street corner isn't so bad - provided everyone, not just the government/police, can use the camera network, and provided there's more public-access camera in the police and government buildings....
David Brin has outlined a model for such a society in his book "The Transparent Society", chapter one of which is available online here
What's the bets Microsoft are contracted for the new network's systems, swallowing millions of taxpayer dollars, and probably running the whole thing on MSTCP or NetBEUI... - and, in the normal microsoft fashion leaving the entire thing wide open to their friends the scientologists...
Re:Check out the Preemptible Kernel patches...
on
Kernel 2.4.11 Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
One thing to note, and I find myself saying this again and again, is that one of the simplest performance tweaks you can do is to negative-renice the X server. It's even mentioned somewhere in the X manual, and makes a hell of a difference.
This means that the GUI then pre-empts background tasks, like on Windoze, and other systems intended for desktop use. Of course you don't want to do that on a server machine, but only Microsoft are stupid enough to do it by default even on their "server" OSes.
I'd like to see "workstation" installs do it automatically, but there's a few small notes:
(a) if you renice it too low, it also ends up pre-empting audio tasks too much, and audio could conceivably skip when you move windows about. Shouldn't happen on today's reasonably fast computers. Easily fixed by careful tuning, perhaps including renicing important audio tasks too if your computer's really slow.
(b) If you're using the xfs font server, it needs tuning too - if it's starved of cpu time, then you might actually make text-heavy parts of the gui slower, not faster. I really wish distros would stop using xfs, since truetype support is now built into the X server, and server-side font support is being phased out thanks to XRender and Xft anyway.
Re:Shower Curtain Prior Art
on
IgNobel Awards
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· Score: 1
I know you're joking - but just in case anyone seriously tries that after reading it:
It's a lot easier just to stick weights to the bottom of your shower curtain. Here (Ireland) the more expensive shower curtains have folded over hems at the bottom with small weights sewn in. Problem solved - weights are heavy enough to pull curtain flat. You just need to have a firmly attached curtain rail, since the curtain is obviously significantly heavier with weights in.
The Gameboy Advance is perfectly matched in power to the 2D gaming heyday machines (back when the PeeCee _really_ sucked) like the Amiga, Archie, ST, SNES, MegaDrive - games companies have a massive back catalogue of 16 and early 32-bit games suitable for porting to GB Advance, such as the entire SNES library, the entire Amiga library, etc, etc.
Now you know why games companies were still suing people distributing the "old" roms and disk images - they want to sell them all to a whole new generation of punters, but on handhelds.
I actually like seeing amiga and snes classics on a teeny tiny handheld, with the gfx, sound and gameplay intact...
EROS is a very promising O.S. - orthogonally persistent, cool security.
An "interesting" OS is AROS - it's AmigaOS, but open-source on x86, complete with Amiga-style:
pre-emptive multitasking.
total lack of memory protection, except for "cooperative" m.p. via semaphore locking.
blazingly fast IPC by by-reference message passing
on-the-fly shared library function patching
user-space device drivers (though, without any memory protection, user space is a pretty abstract concept:-).
integrated GUI + unix-like shell.
Also has a fun "soft-pseudo-reboot in a fraction of a second" feature, based on just freeing all memory except the kernel + vectoring to the kernel entry point - whcih means, you may crash due to lack of memory protection, but you'll be back up,very,very quickly:-).
Just wondering, are the fonts antialiased because OpenOffice switched to XFree's/ Xft/Xrender infrastructure as the underlying engine, or did they roll their own AA solution?
(and if we've got 'em, American's must have had them for ages!)
Actually, america currently lags behind europe in mobile technology - partly because the americans had a bout of NIH syndrome the first time round (remember the GSM-works-everywhere-but-the-US fiasco), and partly because they have a rather lower population density.
European firms could have jumped straight to 3G, but all firms concerned got together and decided that it would be more profitable to force consumers through an extra upgrade cycle, so switched their attention to 2.5G, which is the Windows ME of the phone world.
Did your university have a lot of ties to the U.S. military? If so, then there you go - Ada is mandated for many contracts, so they were just prepping graduates for the army.
Recently, I've found myself havng to look for a new job - browsing the listings, I've lost track of the huge number of adverts looking for people with things like "10 years Java experience" and other gems.:-)
Throughout this all, there were FAR more people saying stuff like "OMG" than people who were swearing.
Maybe. I was on another continent at the time -
but, as far as my memory recalls, the original soundtrack reveals the people near the camcorder were swearing... and then in later playbacks some audio technician somewhere presunably mixed in a different soundtrack, possibly recorded nearby, not necessarily staged, of "cleaner" stuff.
I really don't like that sort of crap.
Unfortunately, I cannot prove this definitively - though my brother says he also noticed, neither of us made recordings.
I think more "ordinary" people should get into running their own nameservers - you want "http://spawnosatans.pants/" to point to the same place as "http://www.microsoft.com/" ? Well you can have it! pop it in your/etc/hosts file as an alias, or even run your own proxying DNS server...
You don't need an addon to windows or linux for this - it's built into the OS, even in Windows - windows has a perfectly normal hosts.txt file, since it's network stack is from BSD.
I'm just kinda surprised this doesn't happen more often - you could have people swapping personal lists of "cool" aliases - "but hyperlinks would stop working if the world didn't all use the same DNS root servers?" - well, maybe, but so what? The fragmentation impact would be much reduced since most web-pages have very domain-specific forests of links, so a short statement of "we use such-and-such's TLDs" on a site would usually be enough to sort things out, since most links would be to other pages within the same "family".
All this could be made very pointy-clicky for the drooling idiots of the world - in fact, it would keep them entertained for hours, making their computer think www.popularfootballteam.com or whatever was called wank.droolers.suck.suck.suck...
I think the reason "fuck" and "shit" fall into that category, as opposed to "puppy" and "cornbread" is pretty obvious...;)
No, not to me. I genuinely have difficulty understanding what makes them "bad" or "shameful". Calling the words "harsh", yes, I can understand that - but again that's only because they're associated with negative reinforcement in my mind.
I'd find someone shouting "Die, you!" much more upsetting than someone shouting "Fuck you!" - yet someone saying the former on t.v. is unlikely to be censored, while the latter routinely is (and, in my experience, a fuck is something to be enjoyed...)
When I'm surprised, or my emotion glands have kicked in, I tend to go for exclamations like "aaaarghhh!!!!" anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
Scarily, the Amiga OS has been open-source cloned and ported to x86, in the form of AROS.
/mnt/cdrom and /mnt/cdlabel/ or something - the amiga got this right, allowing you to say "CD0:path/to/file" for "the file on thedisk that I've got in the CD drive" and "LABELNAME:path/to/file" for "the file on the particular volume that is named "LABELNAME", wherever it may be!)
Unlike other projects that have drawn some inspiration from AmigaOS, AROS pretty much just tries to be a straight clone (with a necessary overhaul to the device drivers layer).
The project is quite far along, and has a few interesting features:
(a) Amiga OS had no true memory protection. Neither does AROS. There's a system of semaphore locking on some sections that is to true memory protection as cooperative multitasking is to pre-emptive.
(b) When the system goes down (see (a)), it reboots in a fraction of a second - a soft "reboot" does not jump back to the BIOS, but re-enters the AROS kernel init after zeroing some choice areas of memory.
(c) due to the absence of memory protection between user-space tasks, context switches, such as they are, are extremely lightweight. Not much of distinction between threads and processes. Amiga applications have always tended to be very muyltithreaded. The OS is true pre-emptive multitasking.
(c) It uses message-passing-by-reference for IPC. Rather than copying data from one process to another, they pass references to the data around. Very quick.
(d) it has support for amiga-style logical volumes, assigns, and pluggable filesystem drivers, which are pretty cool - cd'ing into compressed archives, ftp sites, and so on, as well as the OS having a clear notion of the distinction between a particular floppy/cd/partition and the drive it is in... (woirked example: why the hell don't linux distros configure cdroms to automount and show up as both
About the only thing missing is prohibition.
Sure, there's no alcohol prohibition - but there's plenty of prohibition of drugs that are arguably less harmful than alcohol.
I think close are worth money. But I don't think I should have to wear them just because of some outmoded christian "morality" still ingrained in mainstream society.
Clothes are good for protecting you from the environment - one of the main reasons for their existence. However, in large parts of the world, and anywhere the environment is under human control (e.g. indoors), clothes are unnecessary for that purpose. We shouldn't have to pay for redundant, useless clothes in those situations, just because some religious wackos are ashamed of their bodies and afraid to look at other peoples'!
Currently, I can be arrested for walking naked down a street in summer (I'm in Ireland - you wouldn't want to do that in winter.). This is stupid. Think of how much better off parents would be if they didn't have to dress their children for the 6-8 months of the year it's reasonably comfortable to go without clothes.
I suggest you get a better dictionary, your neo-feudalist corporate overlords have been brainwashing you. It's funny actually - when a european says "socialism" it has quite different connotations to an American saying it:
I looked up Socialism in American and British dictionaries. It's funny how the slants on the two entries, are so different:
American (dictionary.com):
Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.
Manages to make it sound all "evil commie", while still retaining the european understanding of meaning in the first phrase - Anyone care to guess why didn't they leave it at "Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively" ? Hmm...
British (Chambers 20th century):
The theory, principle, or scheme of social organisation which places means of production and distribution in the hands of the community.
No hint of planned economy, dictatorship, or even big government. Hardly conflicting with Libertarianism - in fact, phrased that way, it sounds like they're a good match, given that a community is just a semi-organised bunch of citizens!
Just goes to show, eh? The gulf of understanding between America and Europe grows ever wider...
I just mean available for work. .com collapse and all that.
If anyone's hiring, I'm free. :-) Masters in mechanical engineering, with a heavy emphasis on CFD...
(Far too much like hard work if I wasn't being paid for it though...)
This is the real world. Cheap, soundbite arguments win the minds of the ignorant masses. If you're swaying the minds of teenagers, then appearing to be on their level is a good thing.
It is of course different from calling Gates a doodoohead if I use the term "Micro$oft". It's still recognisably "Microsoft", but (a) the dollar sign emphasises that they're all about money. (b) in most parts of the world, also suggests corruption, since (b.1) it's associated with the USA, and (b.2) has connotations of "the serpent on the branch"
Microsoft uses dirty mind tricks straight out of Psychology 101 - be aware of them!
I'd have to disagree - there are few things more concise than "Micro$oft". Here in Europe, at least, such word-play is widely accepted, and is common among satirical mags such as private eye and the phoenix - which the powers that be take quite seriously. Worldwide, the $ sign tends to symbolise corruption.
/. is a forum for the converted. To maintain social cohesion, derogatory terms for the enemy are important - as any Minister for Propaganda knows. Thus, I mistrust anyone who criticises the use of such derogatory terms, since he's trying to undermine the common group outlook on life.
And don't forget,
An important part of deprogramming someone is getting him to change his language usage away from the group's jargon - conversely, group jargon is important for programming them (witness $cientology's wierd, clipped psychobabble slang).
In this case, such language is serving a useful purpose - unifying people against microsoft.
Oh, and I would just like to point out the fact that the following phrases are not, and never were, funny
Yes, they are. I, for one, find them quite amusing. More seriously, calling the enemy by the name he uses for himself merely legitimizes him. Thus, using those names for Micro$oft are a positive thing if you happen to be opposed to them. I tend to use $cientologist too.
Asking people to stop using them is a hallmark of an astroturfer, since that's one of the first things MS's crack team of P.R. psychologists would recommend.
Rubbish. Mickeyshaft use propaganda tactics all the time. Using the name someone chooses for themselves legitimises them. Choosing a name for them doesn't. Micro$oft have a team of crack psychologists in P.R. who understand these things. So keep using the variant spellings, and fight their brainwashing!
Unless you use client-side java (in which case it's not really a web interface anymore), and until xforms is widely supported, web based interfaces basically suck for anything complicated.
Client-side Java interfaces are quite nice these days - provided you're using an up-to-date 1.3 JVM, and not MS's now-sucky 1.1 VM that they keep around just to make java look bad. When Java 1.4 with integrated webstart etc. is released, client side java will be even more attractive for vertical apps.
A camera on every street corner isn't so bad - provided everyone, not just the government/police, can use the camera network, and provided there's more public-access camera in the police and government buildings....
David Brin has outlined a model for such a society in his book "The Transparent Society", chapter one of which is available online here
What's the bets Microsoft are contracted for the new network's systems, swallowing millions of taxpayer dollars, and probably running the whole thing on MSTCP or NetBEUI... - and, in the normal microsoft fashion leaving the entire thing wide open to their friends the scientologists...
One thing to note, and I find myself saying this again and again, is that one of the simplest performance tweaks you can do is to negative-renice the X server. It's even mentioned somewhere in the X manual, and makes a hell of a difference.
This means that the GUI then pre-empts background tasks, like on Windoze, and other systems intended for desktop use. Of course you don't want to do that on a server machine, but only Microsoft are stupid enough to do it by default even on their "server" OSes.
I'd like to see "workstation" installs do it automatically, but there's a few small notes:
(a) if you renice it too low, it also ends up pre-empting audio tasks too much, and audio could conceivably skip when you move windows about. Shouldn't happen on today's reasonably fast computers. Easily fixed by careful tuning, perhaps including renicing important audio tasks too if your computer's really slow.
(b) If you're using the xfs font server, it needs tuning too - if it's starved of cpu time, then you might actually make text-heavy parts of the gui slower, not faster. I really wish distros would stop using xfs, since truetype support is now built into the X server, and server-side font support is being phased out thanks to XRender and Xft anyway.
I know you're joking - but just in case anyone seriously tries that after reading it:
It's a lot easier just to stick weights to the bottom of your shower curtain. Here (Ireland) the more expensive shower curtains have folded over hems at the bottom with small weights sewn in. Problem solved - weights are heavy enough to pull curtain flat. You just need to have a firmly attached curtain rail, since the curtain is obviously significantly heavier with weights in.
No. Gameboy Advance uses an ARM chip.
The Gameboy Advance is perfectly matched in power to the 2D gaming heyday machines (back when the PeeCee _really_ sucked) like the Amiga, Archie, ST, SNES, MegaDrive - games companies have a massive back catalogue of 16 and early 32-bit games suitable for porting to GB Advance, such as the entire SNES library, the entire Amiga library, etc, etc.
Now you know why games companies were still suing people distributing the "old" roms and disk images - they want to sell them all to a whole new generation of punters, but on handhelds.
I actually like seeing amiga and snes classics on a teeny tiny handheld, with the gfx, sound and gameplay intact...
EROS is a very promising O.S. - orthogonally persistent, cool security.
:-).
:-).
An "interesting" OS is AROS - it's AmigaOS, but open-source on x86, complete with Amiga-style:
pre-emptive multitasking.
total lack of memory protection, except for "cooperative" m.p. via semaphore locking.
blazingly fast IPC by by-reference message passing
on-the-fly shared library function patching
user-space device drivers (though, without any memory protection, user space is a pretty abstract concept
integrated GUI + unix-like shell.
Also has a fun "soft-pseudo-reboot in a fraction of a second" feature, based on just freeing all memory except the kernel + vectoring to the kernel entry point - whcih means, you may crash due to lack of memory protection, but you'll be back up,very,very quickly
I know a few CAD pros who would consider it.
Just wondering, are the fonts antialiased because OpenOffice switched to XFree's/ Xft/Xrender infrastructure as the underlying engine, or did they roll their own AA solution?
(and if we've got 'em, American's must have had them for ages!)
Actually, america currently lags behind europe in mobile technology - partly because the americans had a bout of NIH syndrome the first time round (remember the GSM-works-everywhere-but-the-US fiasco), and partly because they have a rather lower population density.
European firms could have jumped straight to 3G, but all firms concerned got together and decided that it would be more profitable to force consumers through an extra upgrade cycle, so switched their attention to 2.5G, which is the Windows ME of the phone world.
Did your university have a lot of ties to the U.S. military? If so, then there you go - Ada is mandated for many contracts, so they were just prepping graduates for the army.
Recently, I've found myself havng to look for a new job - browsing the listings, I've lost track of the huge number of adverts looking for people with things like "10 years Java experience" and other gems. :-)
Throughout this all, there were FAR more people saying stuff like "OMG" than people who were swearing.
Maybe. I was on another continent at the time -
but, as far as my memory recalls, the original soundtrack reveals the people near the camcorder were swearing... and then in later playbacks some audio technician somewhere presunably mixed in a different soundtrack, possibly recorded nearby, not necessarily staged, of "cleaner" stuff.
I really don't like that sort of crap.
Unfortunately, I cannot prove this definitively - though my brother says he also noticed, neither of us made recordings.
I think more "ordinary" people should get into running their own nameservers - you want "http://spawnosatans.pants/" to point to the same place as "http://www.microsoft.com/" ? Well you can have it! pop it in your /etc/hosts file as an alias, or even run your own proxying DNS server...
You don't need an addon to windows or linux for this - it's built into the OS, even in Windows - windows has a perfectly normal hosts.txt file, since it's network stack is from BSD.
I'm just kinda surprised this doesn't happen more often - you could have people swapping personal lists of "cool" aliases - "but hyperlinks would stop working if the world didn't all use the same DNS root servers?" - well, maybe, but so what? The fragmentation impact would be much reduced since most web-pages have very domain-specific forests of links, so a short statement of "we use such-and-such's TLDs" on a site would usually be enough to sort things out, since most links would be to other pages within the same "family".
All this could be made very pointy-clicky for the drooling idiots of the world - in fact, it would keep them entertained for hours, making their computer think www.popularfootballteam.com or whatever was called wank.droolers.suck.suck.suck...
I think the reason "fuck" and "shit" fall into that category, as opposed to "puppy" and "cornbread" is pretty obvious... ;)
No, not to me. I genuinely have difficulty understanding what makes them "bad" or "shameful". Calling the words "harsh", yes, I can understand that - but again that's only because they're associated with negative reinforcement in my mind.
I'd find someone shouting "Die, you!" much more upsetting than someone shouting "Fuck you!" - yet someone saying the former on t.v. is unlikely to be censored, while the latter routinely is (and, in my experience, a fuck is something to be enjoyed...)
When I'm surprised, or my emotion glands have kicked in, I tend to go for exclamations like "aaaarghhh!!!!" anyway...