Just because your video card/hard drive/printer/whatever has a CPU and/or RAM inside it doesn't mean that the Operating System is running on it.
Yes but the entire disk IO subsystem depends on the interface to the hard drive.
Inter-process communication does not a Distributed Operating System make!
I said inter- processor communication, not inter-process. You're right - even the simplest RTOS can accomodate multiple processes running on a single CPU. And there is nothing "distributed" about Inter-process communication in this sense. But we're talking about a different animal when the OS sends a job to the CPU on the HD, and another one to the video card, etc. As soon as multiple CPUs are involved that's when the word "distributed" pops into my head. And those CPUs don't have to be thousands of miles apart connected via a TCP/IP stack. They can be physically side-by-side, connected by a bloody RS232 interface for all I care. It's still distributed.
Distributed OS? Get a grip. Every OS in the world is already "distributed". The problem here is that people typically think that a PC has only 1 processor, when this is not the case. A PC is actually a collection of smaller computers: - most hard drives have their own CPU and RAM, which qualifies them as small embedded computers. - most video cards have extremely powerful CPUs and gobs of RAM. I'm not even going to get into printer hardware. Whether the OS is interfacing to all these processors via hardware bus architectures or over TCP/IP is pretty irrelevant. There is still a lot of inter-processor communication going on within a single PC. To me, that qualifies every OS in the world as a "distributed OS".
I think you are color blind too. I checked out www.zeldman.com and that site SUCKS. It also has horribly gaudy backgrnd colors like bright green and orange.....
So the whole of floating ice on the north pole (tens of feet thick at most, I believe) and the ice shelves (much thicker in places) can melt with out changing the water level.
Try tens of miles thick. Ice can easily reach 20 feet thick on large northern lakes. I did a quick search on polar ice thickness but all I came up with was this one: http://www.thedude.com/ice_cap.htm
Just get SCSI. Gets rid of your IDE bottleneck, performance can be as good as you'll ever find and it is widely available. Not as flexible as 1394 (no hot plug and all that), but a good solution for drives.
This is not true - there are plenty of hot-swappable SCSI devices on the market, and they've been around for a long time. I believe most of these devices use an SCA-80 pin connector, which is power and data in one. Typically used in RAID cabinets where data is striped across multiple hard drives. If one of them fails you can rip it out of the chassis, throw it over your shoulder, and slap a new one in without powering down. You can then run a recovery program to rebuild the data on the drive based on parity information.
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Distributed OS? Get a grip. Every OS in the world is already "distributed". The problem here is that people typically think that a PC has only 1 processor, when this is not the case. A PC is actually a collection of smaller computers: - most hard drives have their own CPU and RAM, which qualifies them as small embedded computers. - most video cards have extremely powerful CPUs and gobs of RAM. I'm not even going to get into printer hardware. Whether the OS is interfacing to all these processors via hardware bus architectures or over TCP/IP is pretty irrelevant. There is still a lot of inter-processor communication going on within a single PC. To me, that qualifies every OS in the world as a "distributed OS".
I think you are color blind too. I checked out www.zeldman.com and that site SUCKS. It also has horribly gaudy backgrnd colors like bright green and orange.....