When you have 314159 bugs (MS), even a monkey can accidentally reduce bugs just by entering random code.
I think the reality is that people have a higher tolerance for Windows bugs. We're desensitized. Here's one: about 20% of the time, when I hit a custom keyboard shortcut in Windows, the whole process freezes for about a minute. That's a bug. Is it counted on some MS bug tracker ? Probably not. Can I reproduce it consistently ? Yeah, give me any XP, 2000 or 2003 box and 10 seconds. It's not a showstopper for Joe Q. Moron, but it's one hell of a nuisance for Bill T. Coder.
Meanwhile the bugs we hear about from the Apple camp are extensive, and cover a zillion things from minor graphics corruption to obscure SSL glitches that are dependent on cosmic rays and the user's gender. It's all over the place.
Bug disclosure policies also come into play. There is no such thing as a 0-day patch, there are only postponed announcements. It takes time to run a fix through semi-adequate testing and get the PR people to do their 5 minutes of weekly effort.
I CBA to sign up for this crap, but my hunch is this will lead more users to get the warezed version.
There's one thing Photoshop did to me, it warped my brain in such a bizarre way that trying to use any other image editing software gives me Tourettes! I'm not saying Photoshop is any better, but Adobe's anal-retentive UI paradigms force you to unlearn common sense, to make room for the mask-based editing concepts.
I tried the Gimp, and frankly I couldn't wrap my head around it, not because it wasn't good enough, but because it's not Photoshop. I suspect many new users will go through the same painful addiction.
What I don't get is how they're saying BitTorrent (inc) wants to distance itself from software piracy.
BitTorrent is a tool. FTP is a tool. Web/IRC/usenet/email are tools. They're all used for distributing a large portion of illegal content.
You know what else is a tool ? Bram Cohen. By incorporating/selling out, he has positioned himself as a target for this level of corporate bullshit. The reason people aren't suing the creators of FTP and IRC is because they're public domain protocols that predate the idiotic MySpace generation. Whoever "invented" FTP isn't touring the country giving seminars about how awesome they are and why they should be paid gobs of money.
Nice infomercial, but could you please define "wealth" for us all ?
I'm of the opinion that this so-called "pie" is indeed fixed on a global scale. The concept of "wealth" has been distorted over the last few decades to actually be "concentration of wealth".
It is true that proper code sharing will eliminate a lot of junior roles, but these positions were redundant from the start. Conversely, it is very likely to create many new higher-skilled jobs, where developers make use of the improved functionality of this shared code in evolutionary ways.
Let's face it: if we didn't have to reinvent the wheel all the time, we could spend that time building great things UPON the wheels. That is a whole lot more valuable than having 99 different implementations of X.
Funny, I always see Apple as a software first, hardware second kind of business. The hardware is pretty, but the software is what locks people in. If people could (properly) run MacOS on a cheap Dell, there would be little incentive to pay the mega premium for Apple hardware. Likewise, if I could flash a Zune with iTunes, I'd toss that iPod and buy a half-priced Zune instead.
One thing is certain, people don't run out to buy Macs just to wipe the drive and install Windows. They dual-boot, because that MacOS is what they really paid for.
People hem and haw about Apple's hardware being superior, but the thing is: they don't make the hardware. They design the pretty boxes, then they get someone else to manufacture the guts. Intel chips, ATI graphics, and the boards built by X-random chinese company (Foxconn or Tyan perhaps). The only thing stopping TigerDirect and others from selling Apple parts is exclusivity contracts with the manufacturers.
In over 15 years of I.T., I've yet to encounter a pure-Microsoft network of any significant size. Everyone ends up mixing Windows and Linux to some degree, even if it has to be some bastardized proprietary Unix like some unenlightened government departments. SUSE is alright, but it is a small player compared to Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS. Microsoft supporting SUSE is meaningless to the industry.
All this means is a large portion of the market will ignore Hyper-V until this feature bug is resolved. Not many people will "switch" to SUSE for the sole benefit of Microsoft interop. Most will simply use 3rd-party solutions that are both cheaper and better supported.
(checks desktop icon) Okay so this one box runs KDE.
I've tried both KDE and Gnome, and hated them both for different reasons. The only WM I've used that I really can't complain about is Fluxbox, because it does absolutely fuckall and does it well.
The day we come up with a GUI that is consistent, visually satisfying and does not get in the way of the apps, is the day I switch to a Linux desktop. Until then, it will remain a painful gadget that I use out of necessity alone.
Windows is far from perfect, but it mostly works in a predictable manner. Why we can't just clone it and call it a day, well that's a question for our filthy unshaven leaders.
The big problem with NVidia's latest "generation" of graphics hardware is that it's not a big enough leap from the previous batch, and their SLI tech is every bit as clumsy as the original 3Dfx kludge. Rendering alternating frames doesn't seem like it can make much of an improvement, for a rather simple reason: in Quad-SLI, you're essentially giving each card 4 times longer to render its frame, which also means you're quadrupling latency. Each card still needs its own texture and frame buffers, and it has to do all the work each time. It's like running four separate rigs at 15 fps. Well let me tell you a secret: games and game engines typically don't cope too well with that kind of lag.
It's different from say, a non-interactive render from 3D Studio or whatever the kids are doing these days, where four simultaneous frames equates to almost exactly four times the net performance, but the key ingredient here is non-interactive... since each frame is predetermined, you could theoretically have one GPU for every frame of your movie and render the whole shebang within milliseconds - perfect parallelism. This is not the case with interactive games.
The other problem is that SLI tries to blindly throw more power at the problem, without actually considering how people are using SLI. We don't want to run out games at 250fps, for the most part we want higher resolutions and more texture detail.
To get SLI working as expected and actually coax people into dropping $1200 on these overpriced SLI rigs, NVidia needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with split-scene rendering algorithms that work, or some kind of hybrid parallelism to make four GPUs appear and behave as a single ultra-wide GPU (e.g. pooling stream processors and memory). It takes more than just dumb brawn to drive 2560x1600 at acceptable rates.
The thing is, China realizes that it doesn't matter what they do. They could all force their slave citizens to rape and kill their daughters, film it all and upload to Youtube.cn for the depraved enjoyment of government staff, and the Walmarts of the world would still kiss China's ass for cheap products to sell.
China knows this, which is why they ignore what the rest of the world thinks. They know that nothing matters outside of China, unless it's a piece of paper with a lot of numbers on it.
The only logical outcome for earth is total destruction. Normally it would take a while, but the day the US and China start beefing they're going to greatly accelerate the process. There's just no way such mindless greed can go on much longer without severe repercussions.
Yep, honesty never pays. That's the foundation of U.S. politics and economic doctrine.
However there is a non-financial benefit to honesty: satisfaction. Problem is, the legal industry is extremely competitive and does not give benefactors the time of day.
Actually with all the boot camp users, Apple is actually helping to sell more copies of Windows in a roundabout way. I would even suggest that the ratio of licensed vs pirated copies is higher for Apple owners than PCs, but this is pure speculation.
Patent abuse will be irrelevant in a few years when the U.S. economy finally collapses. All the lawsuits are only accelerating this process, siphoning money away from the manufacturers and producers that used to make the country tick.
How about people like Fred Phelps ? He said that 9/11 was god punishing America.
I don't know who Fred Phelps is, but in a roundabout way I would agree that 9/11 was a form of punishment. I can say this only because on that morning, as I watched the TV footage, I was filled with an extremely satisfying sense of "I told you so". I have respect for the individuals who lost their lives, and the countless others who were affected by the immediate repercussions, but on a global scale I saw it as a slap across the face of the most destructive society to walk the earth since the Roman empire. For many it was a sobering wake-up call. Were it not for 9/11, everything would be different today, I think it would actually be worse, because everyone would still be marching forth in ignorance.
I won't defend someone's opinions, but I will defend their right to think them and speak them as long as they defend my right to debate the issue until we reach an agreement. I don't like crazy holy wars either, but I would love to sit down with a strongly religious person and pick their brain to find out where it comes from and what they're trying to achieve. Liars deserve all the worst we can give them, but ignorance is merely two people with half-empty glasses.
I've never taken those numbers seriously, largely because:
1. I consider myself a heavy bittorrent user, seeing as I run dedicated servers EXCLUSIVELY for torrents. Even then, bittorrent makes up less than 25% of my total traffic (yes, I measure it).
2. My friends, who are mostly techy folks or at least internet-savvy, do very little with bittorrent. Little enough that the ISP's 60gb monthly cap is not even a remote concern. Comparatively, they spend all day long on Youtube, Facebook and IRC or Limewire.
3. The only people who can accurately report bittorrent usage, are the very people who benefit from misreporting the stats. ISPs are quick to label bittorrent as illegal downloading in order to demonize the practice, if only to defend their throttling practices and protect their oversold, underperforming networks.
4. How does one identify encrypted bittorrent traffic ? Did they just inflate the numbers by some arbitrary amount to account for stealth traffic ?
I've been on the net for over 15 years, and I haven't seen any significant speed or capacity increases in the last 10 - only price hikes every year or two, for a service that is steadily degrading thanks to traffic shaping/filtering and overcrowding. Bittorrent is one of the prime targets for traffic shaping with most North American ISPs, so I really can't see how it can make up such a huge proportion of the total traffic, not unless there's a bunch of Swedish kids on redundant 100mb lines streaming/dev/urandom to each other 24/7.
Yep I thought the same, though I mostly just "pop(split('/',file))". Lazy, a bit slower than it could be, but filename processing is the least of my concerns when developing an app.
I never said LRU was wrong, it's right for a large majority of scenarios, but it could be greatly improved with hinting. If I know I'm going to be noodling with a certain dataset, I'd like for that data to stay cached above other incidentals. Conversely, I'd like to specify things that should never be cached. The remainder would be handled by the default LRU logic.
I never understood the whole stink with these fuzzy holidays. Isn't Easter supposed to be the day Jesus died or some other TV magic bullshit stunt of his ? I'm pretty sure he didn't perform complex astronomical calculations before deciding to get stabbed by a bunch of half-breeds.
I mean, Christianity is funny enough to begin with, but having a non-fixed historic date is the pinnacle of ridicule. Just pick a date and celebrate already... that's the point! The number isn't the important part. Why can't they just pull a number out of a hat and say Easter's on day N from now on ?
I only care because I celebrate post-Easter, and by "celebrate" I mean "eat lots of discounted milk chocolate". Maybe if they didn't land it on a Sunday each time, I could get a weekday off where there's actual good TV to watch, instead of the boring 60's Disney movies and Pope biographies.
I'm getting sick of registrars acting as the morality police.
Personally, I think this one stupid move has given the anti-Islam film a ton of free publicity. I'll be snatching it off the Pirate Bay the minute it's released by the producer, and you can bet your bible I'll be seeding the everloving crap out of it. I don't care whether something is right or wrong, in all likelihood this movie will be a steaming pile of racist filth like its creator, but the point is: censorship is even worse than racism in my opinion.
I don't think you should be speaking against RTOS without any actual RTOS experience. It just makes everyone else assume you're an ass.
These things typically run on embedded devices, not a friggin' Dell midtower. They do one job and they do it with exacting accuracy, on minified motherboards and fanless CPUs, hooked up to custom-built controllers and monitoring equipment.
RTOS tasks are typically things we used to do in solid state with simple feedback logic, but the RTOS allows it to be done in software at a lower cost, plus allowing easy updates or adjustments without a complete redesign.
A more effective and cheaper solution would be to run PSAs throughout the day and evening, telling parents to "be fucking responsible" and "watch your kid". All the technology in the world cannot compensate for idiot parents.
This sounds like the wrong solution to a very simple problem: caching.
Why do hardcore people use ramdisks ? Because disk caches are stupid. Why not make the cache smarter ?
I'll give an example of what I do with a ramdisk: I copy various video files to it, do my editing, then save the finished work back to a physical disk. These are all things a good disk cache could manage with ease, but it doesn't. Why not ? Because it evicts my precious video files in favor of less important data. What if my encode is going to take a few hours and I'd like to surf or play a quick game ? All those stupid little files will kick out my "old" video files.
If we could ask the caching system to hold a certain file in memory until released, we could use the cache as a transparent ramdisk, and all would be well. Corollary to this is the ability to specify what NOT to cache. If I'm playing a movie, burning an ISO image, or running a backup, don't cache it! - I won't need it after I'm done. I'm certainly not against caching something if there's plenty of free memory, but there should be a priority system that both the application and the user can control. Make it work transparently for most people, and then allow the power mongers to exert manual control where appropriate.
You, sir, are full of shit. Sure, Red Hat tends to be stable when you stick to the base packages. The reason everything is 18 months out of date is because they test the living shit out of their builds, and that's fine. We used to call that Debian, btw.
Now, install something non-standard on Red Hat, and you almost have to unless you're doing something extremely simple, and you'll quickly find yourself at the mercy of disjointed updates, and the beloved hassle of virtual packages. This is true of any package management system, but RPM seems to make it just a little more painful than average, being bound to archaic build routines and an intentional lack of "cheating" abilities.
I use Red Hat, but all my mission-critical apps are built from source and kept far far away from the package manager.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a numbers game.
When you have 314159 bugs (MS), even a monkey can accidentally reduce bugs just by entering random code.
I think the reality is that people have a higher tolerance for Windows bugs. We're desensitized. Here's one: about 20% of the time, when I hit a custom keyboard shortcut in Windows, the whole process freezes for about a minute. That's a bug. Is it counted on some MS bug tracker ? Probably not. Can I reproduce it consistently ? Yeah, give me any XP, 2000 or 2003 box and 10 seconds. It's not a showstopper for Joe Q. Moron, but it's one hell of a nuisance for Bill T. Coder.
Meanwhile the bugs we hear about from the Apple camp are extensive, and cover a zillion things from minor graphics corruption to obscure SSL glitches that are dependent on cosmic rays and the user's gender. It's all over the place.
Bug disclosure policies also come into play. There is no such thing as a 0-day patch, there are only postponed announcements. It takes time to run a fix through semi-adequate testing and get the PR people to do their 5 minutes of weekly effort.
I CBA to sign up for this crap, but my hunch is this will lead more users to get the warezed version.
There's one thing Photoshop did to me, it warped my brain in such a bizarre way that trying to use any other image editing software gives me Tourettes! I'm not saying Photoshop is any better, but Adobe's anal-retentive UI paradigms force you to unlearn common sense, to make room for the mask-based editing concepts.
I tried the Gimp, and frankly I couldn't wrap my head around it, not because it wasn't good enough, but because it's not Photoshop. I suspect many new users will go through the same painful addiction.
What I don't get is how they're saying BitTorrent (inc) wants to distance itself from software piracy.
BitTorrent is a tool. FTP is a tool. Web/IRC/usenet/email are tools. They're all used for distributing a large portion of illegal content.
You know what else is a tool ? Bram Cohen. By incorporating/selling out, he has positioned himself as a target for this level of corporate bullshit. The reason people aren't suing the creators of FTP and IRC is because they're public domain protocols that predate the idiotic MySpace generation. Whoever "invented" FTP isn't touring the country giving seminars about how awesome they are and why they should be paid gobs of money.
Nice infomercial, but could you please define "wealth" for us all ?
I'm of the opinion that this so-called "pie" is indeed fixed on a global scale. The concept of "wealth" has been distorted over the last few decades to actually be "concentration of wealth".
It is true that proper code sharing will eliminate a lot of junior roles, but these positions were redundant from the start. Conversely, it is very likely to create many new higher-skilled jobs, where developers make use of the improved functionality of this shared code in evolutionary ways.
Let's face it: if we didn't have to reinvent the wheel all the time, we could spend that time building great things UPON the wheels. That is a whole lot more valuable than having 99 different implementations of X.
Funny, I always see Apple as a software first, hardware second kind of business. The hardware is pretty, but the software is what locks people in. If people could (properly) run MacOS on a cheap Dell, there would be little incentive to pay the mega premium for Apple hardware. Likewise, if I could flash a Zune with iTunes, I'd toss that iPod and buy a half-priced Zune instead.
One thing is certain, people don't run out to buy Macs just to wipe the drive and install Windows. They dual-boot, because that MacOS is what they really paid for.
People hem and haw about Apple's hardware being superior, but the thing is: they don't make the hardware. They design the pretty boxes, then they get someone else to manufacture the guts. Intel chips, ATI graphics, and the boards built by X-random chinese company (Foxconn or Tyan perhaps). The only thing stopping TigerDirect and others from selling Apple parts is exclusivity contracts with the manufacturers.
1TB ?
:P
/raises, 4.0TB at my desk
What is this, 2002 ?
Everyone with more than 1TB of online storage in their home, raise of hands!
In over 15 years of I.T., I've yet to encounter a pure-Microsoft network of any significant size. Everyone ends up mixing Windows and Linux to some degree, even if it has to be some bastardized proprietary Unix like some unenlightened government departments. SUSE is alright, but it is a small player compared to Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS. Microsoft supporting SUSE is meaningless to the industry.
All this means is a large portion of the market will ignore Hyper-V until this feature bug is resolved. Not many people will "switch" to SUSE for the sole benefit of Microsoft interop. Most will simply use 3rd-party solutions that are both cheaper and better supported.
(checks desktop icon) Okay so this one box runs KDE.
I've tried both KDE and Gnome, and hated them both for different reasons. The only WM I've used that I really can't complain about is Fluxbox, because it does absolutely fuckall and does it well.
The day we come up with a GUI that is consistent, visually satisfying and does not get in the way of the apps, is the day I switch to a Linux desktop. Until then, it will remain a painful gadget that I use out of necessity alone.
Windows is far from perfect, but it mostly works in a predictable manner. Why we can't just clone it and call it a day, well that's a question for our filthy unshaven leaders.
The big problem with NVidia's latest "generation" of graphics hardware is that it's not a big enough leap from the previous batch, and their SLI tech is every bit as clumsy as the original 3Dfx kludge. Rendering alternating frames doesn't seem like it can make much of an improvement, for a rather simple reason: in Quad-SLI, you're essentially giving each card 4 times longer to render its frame, which also means you're quadrupling latency. Each card still needs its own texture and frame buffers, and it has to do all the work each time. It's like running four separate rigs at 15 fps. Well let me tell you a secret: games and game engines typically don't cope too well with that kind of lag.
It's different from say, a non-interactive render from 3D Studio or whatever the kids are doing these days, where four simultaneous frames equates to almost exactly four times the net performance, but the key ingredient here is non-interactive... since each frame is predetermined, you could theoretically have one GPU for every frame of your movie and render the whole shebang within milliseconds - perfect parallelism. This is not the case with interactive games.
The other problem is that SLI tries to blindly throw more power at the problem, without actually considering how people are using SLI. We don't want to run out games at 250fps, for the most part we want higher resolutions and more texture detail.
To get SLI working as expected and actually coax people into dropping $1200 on these overpriced SLI rigs, NVidia needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with split-scene rendering algorithms that work, or some kind of hybrid parallelism to make four GPUs appear and behave as a single ultra-wide GPU (e.g. pooling stream processors and memory). It takes more than just dumb brawn to drive 2560x1600 at acceptable rates.
You criticize like a nazi and you still manage to miss the point.
EPIC FAIL!
GP did it on purpose to gently correct without making a huge stink of it!
The thing is, China realizes that it doesn't matter what they do. They could all force their slave citizens to rape and kill their daughters, film it all and upload to Youtube.cn for the depraved enjoyment of government staff, and the Walmarts of the world would still kiss China's ass for cheap products to sell.
China knows this, which is why they ignore what the rest of the world thinks. They know that nothing matters outside of China, unless it's a piece of paper with a lot of numbers on it.
The only logical outcome for earth is total destruction. Normally it would take a while, but the day the US and China start beefing they're going to greatly accelerate the process. There's just no way such mindless greed can go on much longer without severe repercussions.
Yep, honesty never pays. That's the foundation of U.S. politics and economic doctrine.
However there is a non-financial benefit to honesty: satisfaction. Problem is, the legal industry is extremely competitive and does not give benefactors the time of day.
Actually with all the boot camp users, Apple is actually helping to sell more copies of Windows in a roundabout way. I would even suggest that the ratio of licensed vs pirated copies is higher for Apple owners than PCs, but this is pure speculation.
Patent abuse will be irrelevant in a few years when the U.S. economy finally collapses. All the lawsuits are only accelerating this process, siphoning money away from the manufacturers and producers that used to make the country tick.
How about people like Fred Phelps ? He said that 9/11 was god punishing America.
I don't know who Fred Phelps is, but in a roundabout way I would agree that 9/11 was a form of punishment. I can say this only because on that morning, as I watched the TV footage, I was filled with an extremely satisfying sense of "I told you so". I have respect for the individuals who lost their lives, and the countless others who were affected by the immediate repercussions, but on a global scale I saw it as a slap across the face of the most destructive society to walk the earth since the Roman empire. For many it was a sobering wake-up call. Were it not for 9/11, everything would be different today, I think it would actually be worse, because everyone would still be marching forth in ignorance.
I won't defend someone's opinions, but I will defend their right to think them and speak them as long as they defend my right to debate the issue until we reach an agreement. I don't like crazy holy wars either, but I would love to sit down with a strongly religious person and pick their brain to find out where it comes from and what they're trying to achieve. Liars deserve all the worst we can give them, but ignorance is merely two people with half-empty glasses.
I've never taken those numbers seriously, largely because:
/dev/urandom to each other 24/7.
1. I consider myself a heavy bittorrent user, seeing as I run dedicated servers EXCLUSIVELY for torrents. Even then, bittorrent makes up less than 25% of my total traffic (yes, I measure it).
2. My friends, who are mostly techy folks or at least internet-savvy, do very little with bittorrent. Little enough that the ISP's 60gb monthly cap is not even a remote concern. Comparatively, they spend all day long on Youtube, Facebook and IRC or Limewire.
3. The only people who can accurately report bittorrent usage, are the very people who benefit from misreporting the stats. ISPs are quick to label bittorrent as illegal downloading in order to demonize the practice, if only to defend their throttling practices and protect their oversold, underperforming networks.
4. How does one identify encrypted bittorrent traffic ? Did they just inflate the numbers by some arbitrary amount to account for stealth traffic ?
I've been on the net for over 15 years, and I haven't seen any significant speed or capacity increases in the last 10 - only price hikes every year or two, for a service that is steadily degrading thanks to traffic shaping/filtering and overcrowding. Bittorrent is one of the prime targets for traffic shaping with most North American ISPs, so I really can't see how it can make up such a huge proportion of the total traffic, not unless there's a bunch of Swedish kids on redundant 100mb lines streaming
Yep I thought the same, though I mostly just "pop(split('/',file))". Lazy, a bit slower than it could be, but filename processing is the least of my concerns when developing an app.
I never said LRU was wrong, it's right for a large majority of scenarios, but it could be greatly improved with hinting. If I know I'm going to be noodling with a certain dataset, I'd like for that data to stay cached above other incidentals. Conversely, I'd like to specify things that should never be cached. The remainder would be handled by the default LRU logic.
I never understood the whole stink with these fuzzy holidays. Isn't Easter supposed to be the day Jesus died or some other TV magic bullshit stunt of his ? I'm pretty sure he didn't perform complex astronomical calculations before deciding to get stabbed by a bunch of half-breeds.
I mean, Christianity is funny enough to begin with, but having a non-fixed historic date is the pinnacle of ridicule. Just pick a date and celebrate already... that's the point! The number isn't the important part. Why can't they just pull a number out of a hat and say Easter's on day N from now on ?
I only care because I celebrate post-Easter, and by "celebrate" I mean "eat lots of discounted milk chocolate". Maybe if they didn't land it on a Sunday each time, I could get a weekday off where there's actual good TV to watch, instead of the boring 60's Disney movies and Pope biographies.
I'm getting sick of registrars acting as the morality police.
Personally, I think this one stupid move has given the anti-Islam film a ton of free publicity. I'll be snatching it off the Pirate Bay the minute it's released by the producer, and you can bet your bible I'll be seeding the everloving crap out of it. I don't care whether something is right or wrong, in all likelihood this movie will be a steaming pile of racist filth like its creator, but the point is: censorship is even worse than racism in my opinion.
I don't think you should be speaking against RTOS without any actual RTOS experience. It just makes everyone else assume you're an ass.
These things typically run on embedded devices, not a friggin' Dell midtower. They do one job and they do it with exacting accuracy, on minified motherboards and fanless CPUs, hooked up to custom-built controllers and monitoring equipment.
RTOS tasks are typically things we used to do in solid state with simple feedback logic, but the RTOS allows it to be done in software at a lower cost, plus allowing easy updates or adjustments without a complete redesign.
Cameras ? What about tall kids and midgets ?
A more effective and cheaper solution would be to run PSAs throughout the day and evening, telling parents to "be fucking responsible" and "watch your kid". All the technology in the world cannot compensate for idiot parents.
You seem to believe most Slashdotters are coders. Sadly those days are long gone.
This sounds like the wrong solution to a very simple problem: caching.
Why do hardcore people use ramdisks ? Because disk caches are stupid. Why not make the cache smarter ?
I'll give an example of what I do with a ramdisk: I copy various video files to it, do my editing, then save the finished work back to a physical disk. These are all things a good disk cache could manage with ease, but it doesn't. Why not ? Because it evicts my precious video files in favor of less important data. What if my encode is going to take a few hours and I'd like to surf or play a quick game ? All those stupid little files will kick out my "old" video files.
If we could ask the caching system to hold a certain file in memory until released, we could use the cache as a transparent ramdisk, and all would be well. Corollary to this is the ability to specify what NOT to cache. If I'm playing a movie, burning an ISO image, or running a backup, don't cache it! - I won't need it after I'm done. I'm certainly not against caching something if there's plenty of free memory, but there should be a priority system that both the application and the user can control. Make it work transparently for most people, and then allow the power mongers to exert manual control where appropriate.
Red Hat ?
RPM-based Red Hat ?
You, sir, are full of shit. Sure, Red Hat tends to be stable when you stick to the base packages. The reason everything is 18 months out of date is because they test the living shit out of their builds, and that's fine. We used to call that Debian, btw.
Now, install something non-standard on Red Hat, and you almost have to unless you're doing something extremely simple, and you'll quickly find yourself at the mercy of disjointed updates, and the beloved hassle of virtual packages. This is true of any package management system, but RPM seems to make it just a little more painful than average, being bound to archaic build routines and an intentional lack of "cheating" abilities.
I use Red Hat, but all my mission-critical apps are built from source and kept far far away from the package manager.