There is a form of limit in Windows that affects the NT family of systems - usually referred to as the "desktop heap". Hitting the limit is manifested as either a DLL initilization error for USER32.dll or an out of memory error. Fortunately, the limit it tweakable (after NT 4 Service Pack 2 at least), but the default settings are low enough that the limit is easily hit.
To tweak the limit, take a look in the registry at HLKM/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/SubSystems - there is a key called "Windows" that contains (among other things) "SharedSection=1024,3072". Changing the SharedSection entry to "1024,3072,512" increases the size of the "hidden" desktop heap. If that doesn't work, try increasing the second of the comma delimited values (e.g. 3072 -> 4096), which is the size limit of any particular desktop heap.
I'm not sure if this is the limit the poster of this Ask Slashdot is hitting, but I do know that we have problems with this particular limit at work. We run an interpreted language/database/remote development environment, including customer applications as Windows Services. After stopping and starting the service multiple times, we get a USER32.DLL error for one or more of the executables running under that service - the only resolution is to reboot the machine, even after applying the aforementioned registry tweaks.
Take a look at Aegis. It supports quite a few nice things CVS does not, such as atomic commits, and changes are handled as "change sets" - so a fix that touches multiple files can be applied and backed out in one step.
It has been around for quite a while, and looks fairly mature. I haven't used it yet, but I'm reviewing it now for future use.
Aside from that, this sounds pretty bad... Hopefully with enough protest, and enough signatures on the petition the vote will swing back against software patents.
There is a patch available here called the Linux IP Personality patch. It adds features to netfilter in the 2.4 kernel series which gives you the ability to change the network fingerprint, so you can, for example, fool nmap.
So yes, you can make your box look like OS/2 pretty easily.
Think about the number of levels in Quake 2 or Quake 3, and the number of times they need to be compiled before they're complete, and that's quite a bit of computing time. Especially when the game has deadlines, and levels often have to be rebuild due to changing requirements/features of the game engine. Level designers who are designing levels for an in-progress game will tell you that it's much harder (and levels require many more builds) than when you're working with a finished, stable game engine.
There are, what, 50 maps in Quake 2? If each one takes a couple of hours to build, that's a little over 4 days to build them all a single time. It's possible that the tools they used on that Origin 2000 were more accurate and slower (comparitively) than the Intel/win32 equivalents, so that could require more computing power also. You can see how it would all add up to a lot of computing time... and obviously you don't want to be building levels on the same machine the designer is still trying to work on...
Rather than speculating, I've actually tried to contact ASUS for verification. No response so far (after about 4 hours). We shall see.
You're correct about the Half-Life shots, I apologise.
The fact that it's only screenshots of Quake 3 engine games really proves little, if anything at all. Can you point me to the *exact* console cvars which enable partially transparent walls? Or even wireframe *only* rendering?
It's a possibility, but there are screenshots in one of the Star Trek games, and also in Half-Life... Besides, I'm unaware of any way to get the transparent-walls effect that I've also seen screenshots for.
There are already tools to do these things within games anyway, but not as easily and quickly as these drivers would allow.
I submitted this story about 8 hours ago with the *correct* facts, but it didn't get posted.
Anyway, ASUS are releasing a modification of Detonator 2 drivers (based on 5.32 I think) which will add features allowing you to switch to wireframe mode, partially-transparent-everything mode, and also add extra lighting to a scene.
This has nothing to do with nVidia bar the fact their drivers are being used as the base, and Slashdot are making them look bad by not checking facts before posted a story.
Obviously neither the person who posted the article to Slashdot, or CmdrTaco actually read the URL supplied in the article.
*sigh*
This is a pretty short sighted move by ASUS. Another company, Wicked3D, tried this a while ago and met with a lot of anger in the gaming community. I really hope this happens again, and ASUS decide not to release the drivers. Otherwise the online gaming world will either be based on trusting your opponent (not likely), or everybody cheating as much as possible, and so will begin a horrible downward spiral into out-cheating each other, rather than gaming.
The UWM window manager (part of UDE (Unix Desktop Enviroment)) uses a menu system like that. It certainly takes some getting used to, but it's quite nice once you're used to it.
I've noticed Windows 98 has the beginnings of this. When a window wants your attention, but isn't the currently active one, it'll flash it's associated button on the taskbar.
It's not quite colour based, and it only has two states, but it sounds like a simplified version of what you're talking about.
Quite correct, there are other licenses. But if it was BSD code, they would still have to display the "this product contains code from the Regents" etc, message (sorry, I can't remember it off hand). You see my point? No matter what license (bar public domain, and possibly some others) they would have had to do something, or at least think about the implications of using the code in their product. But it seems they didn't bother to do that. Like they didn't care what the license was (since I can't believe that they thought it was in-house code they were using).
Well, it's good to see they will be fixing the problem (and so they should), but they're only fixing it because they've been caught, it seems.
They claim to have copied the code "without knowing it was GPL". What situations are there where you can just cut and paste some code, and use it without thinking about the permission to use it? Not many. They surely can't have been mistaken into believing it was in-house code, and since they're going to the trouble of developing for Linux, they must have at least heard of licenses and the issues surrounding them.
I wonder if they have some sort of colourful lycra outfit to wear (the rapid justice team, that is). "Quick lawboy, to the law-mobile!" Lawman and lawboy, dispensing rapid justice from Wintel boxes in an effort to save the world from petty crime!
"Unfortunately, the trend is toward user interfaces that are simpler,
not more complex. Most people don't care enough about the
increased possibilities for expression to sacrifice years of their lives
mastering an instrument," says Keislar. "They want to press a button
and hear music come out. As a result, such systems are probably
destined to remain experimental, even if elegant."
I think that particular quote applies to a lot more than just the design of an electronic musical instrument. It seems to be quite true of almost everything nowadays. Most people would be horrified, for example, to have to learn to use a command line over some kind of WIMP GUI. Or imagine a video recorder which was controlled with a keyboard and cron jobs, for example. Sure, geeks would love it, but people in general wouldn't touch the thing with a barge pole (so to speak), and either it would fail, or someone would make a much more simple design.
Nice article about Moog, I didn't know anything about his history really... I've experimented with a friend's minimoog though, playing with the sounds in that is almost like Kraftwerk in a box.;-)
Re:Not So Overwhelming, After All...
on
ATI Radeon 256
·
· Score: 2
If you don't have an Intel processor/mobo, think twice before plonking down hard currency for anything made by ATI. I myself got an ATI All-in
Wonder 128 card this Christmas, and it refuses to play well with my VIA based motherboard/K6-2 processor. It's not like the Super 7 platform is either too new or too old
for ATI to have supported it in the Rage 128 based cards, or that the VIA MVP3-G chipset is so uncommon. ATI, quite frankly, just doesn't care about supporting non-Intel
platforms, because they don't have to. They're the company of choice for Intel-based OEMs. So, they don't care about performance-loving AMD-using geeks like a lot of us
here.
If you're performance loving, I can't understand why you would have ever bought an AMD CPU in the past (I certainly can now with the Athlon, however). The main reason why ATI cards have problems on Super7 is because Super7 is a bad, bad hack. If you actually look around, all of the cards were having problems around that time. The G200 had problems with the Super7 platform, as did the TNT, and just about anything else around at the time using AGP... Some companies were more responsive to the problems, admittedly, but the problem lay far more with the Super7 platform than the graphics card manufacturers.
Funny then how the REALmagic Hollywood+ I got after the ATI's performance bit delivers flawless DVD performance
on the same VIA chipset, with CPU usage averaging under 5%. Yeah, ATI, blame it on the mobo chipset instead of your own laziness when it comes to drivers...
And the REALMagic is a PCI card, right? And your ATI card is AGP? Again, this is more a problem with Super7 than the manufacturer of your graphics card.
This idea of persistant memory is interesting when combining with something like EROS, which is designed to be a persistant system. I don't see how it works well for current systems - the article makes references to not having to wait for the computer to reboot if it crashes... Except with current systems, you'd need to reload a lot of stuff in RAM anyway, because it would've been corrupted by the crash...
I remember a little hack on the Amiga (Fastboot?) which was nearly instant-on. It dumped a copy of your memory to disk, and would just pull that memory image back into memory upon boot... So you could boot the machine in the time it took to pull owever many megs of RAM you had off of hard disk. It certainly had it's share of problems, but it was interesting to play with... Windows 98's suspend to disk mode is pretty similar, although I haven't actually played with that. Still, it certainly sounds like a nice technology for things like MP3 players and palmtop type computers, if nothing else.
Are you serious? PEARL is a real language, and is certainly not new. I wish I knew a little more about it myself, but here's something from FOLDOC:
PEARL
Process and Experiment Automation Real-Time Language. A real-time language for programming process control systems, widely used in Europe. Size and complexity exceeds Ada. One of five pedagogical languages based on Markov algorithms, used in "Nonpareil, a Machine Level Machine Independent Language for the Study of Semantics".
I suppose you thought he meant PERL, which didn't turn up until much later (1985 or so?). Give the guy some credit, people do make spelling mistakes, but it's the facts which are important. Maybe you should check yours before criticising next time.
It's nice to see more support/availability for the OGR project. IMVHO this is one of the most useful distributed projects around at the moment. While proving that you can crack RC5 might be fun, it doesn't have a real pay-off at the end, except for the small prize monies. The same goes for SETI@Home, which is a needle in a haystack search for something which may or may not exist.
Of course, OGR is probably also the least exciting to participate in for most people. At the finish of it you have something which is useful (to some people), but hardly greatly exciting for anyone outside of the field. On the other hand, producing a result confirming extra terrestrial life from the SETI@Home project would be interesting or exciting for almost everybody. This is probably the biggest reason (along with the differences in publicity) why more people support the less-likely-to-return-something-useful projects like SETI@Home over something like OGR or GIMPS.
They mean ReiserFS is the first "stable" journaling FS for Linux. You are quite correct in saying that ext3 was "first", in that it had journaling before ReiserFS (at least, ext3 was publically available with journaling before ReiserFS was, that I'm aware of), but it's a fair way from being considered stable just yet.
Having just looked at ReiserFS's site, it seems either they haven't updated the site yet, or they consider beta == stable, since I could only find the beta release of the code which has journaling.
Well this is probably kind of obvious, but I would guess the free *BSDs would be enjoying a larger userbase and more publicity than they currently are, for a start.
One of the reasons I've heard for Linux's success (at least initially) over the *BSDs is that it was available (and free) earlier, while the *BSD camp was involved with legal problems to do with their source. So it may have been that the same thing as what has happened to Linux would have happened to BSD. One thing to consider is the split of BSD into the three camps (Net, Open, and Free), which may have affected the success somewhat. It's very hard to compare the situations however, since there is only one Linux kernel, but there are lots of distributions - so the kernel is the same for everybody, but the other tools are different depending on the chosen distro. BSD is different, because it has three distinct kernels, and three sets of tools - and that's it.
What this means, is that the Linux community may feel more "as one" than the BSDs, due to the more defined split between each of the BSD distributions (yes, I know they still share a lot of code between them). A key factor in Linux's recent success has been all of the press it's had, would you get the same level of press with BSD in the same position (bearing in mind the 3 three distributions?). I think it's possibly that one of the BSDs might have really taken off over the others, possibly... I don't really know.
One thing that just occured to me, Linux and BSD are probably not much more or less fragmented than each other, in reality, but I most people see Linux as one, and the BSDs as three/divided.
On the other hand, if there were no "free" operating systems, I think one would have found it's way into the world anyway - there was a market for one, as the success of the current free OSes proves. Maybe GNU Hurd would have been picked up by more people and brought to a usable stage more quickly, or maybe someone else would've written something like what happened with Linux (Davix/DaveOS;-).
Of course, this is all speculation, and my information might not even be very accurate.:-)
I was this over on HNN a while back, related to Echelon and a patent the NSA has for "document retrieval" which would, according to the information on their site, ignore the type of stuff people were sending for "Jam Echelon Day".
Basically, it can figure out what a document is about in spite of things such as keywords being planted in the document (ala the Jam Echelon plan), and is not dependant on the language of the document. It works by relating the document to a database of other document fragments, they say.
The NSA's website has some information about it, and this is the patent itself.
If this stuff exists and works, then Jam Echelon was a waste of time on the technical side - but I think the main point was to raise awareness, and that it has done.
When AmigaOS 2.1 was released, it had something called locale. This was basically a system where a small catalog of the text used in any application was stored in a file, and could fairly easily be translated to other languages. The user just selected their language of choice in the locale preferences, and any application that had the appropriate locale catalog available would load it up and be presented in the user's language.
It seemed to work quite well... Well, it had problems, such as large differences in lengths of translated words would cause nasty UI mess-ups. But we're talking 1992-1993 here, so it was a fairly nice thing to have that early. From a programmer's point of view, making your applications 'locale-aware' was very simple, it involved a few minor changes to your code, and then running a tool over your code to extract the locale catalog information. You ended up with a program which was written to use a native language by default, and then would support any language for which the translated locale catalog was available on the system.
I don't think the system had support for non-latin character sets (I could be wrong, I only played with it briefly), so it wasn't the best solution, but it was fairly impressive for it's time...
Apparently the people who wrote this article aren't up with modern times, or something. If you check out some of the 40kB demos for the Amiga you'd see more impressive stuff, and those don't require a 100MHz machine (stated requirements for the Win32 demo on the nervana.com site). As far as using mathematical equations to approximate the real world "better" than polygons, this has been used before. An example would be the procedural textures used in Lightwave 3D, which uses a bunch of algorithms to simulate different real world textures, using only a fraction of the memory of their bitmapped counterparts.
Of course, I could be completely wrong about these demos, but IMHO this is hardly revolutionary, or even the slightest bit impressive. I would expect that if this were truly something more than hype, there would be more substantial information at their website, or at least a demo which is actually impressive.
What would be nice to see is 3D accelerators with support for some procedural textures on the card, and then having those features actually used in the game. You can achieve some very impressive effects with such things, although I suppose most people see it as easier to just add more memory to the card nowadays. I remember reading one card that was due to be released a few months ago was supposed to have such features (Permedia 3?), but I'm not sure.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a form of limit in Windows that affects the NT family of systems - usually referred to as the "desktop heap". Hitting the limit is manifested as either a DLL initilization error for USER32.dll or an out of memory error. Fortunately, the limit it tweakable (after NT 4 Service Pack 2 at least), but the default settings are low enough that the limit is easily hit.
To tweak the limit, take a look in the registry at HLKM/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/SubSystems - there is a key called "Windows" that contains (among other things) "SharedSection=1024,3072". Changing the SharedSection entry to "1024,3072,512" increases the size of the "hidden" desktop heap. If that doesn't work, try increasing the second of the comma delimited values (e.g. 3072 -> 4096), which is the size limit of any particular desktop heap.
I'm not sure if this is the limit the poster of this Ask Slashdot is hitting, but I do know that we have problems with this particular limit at work. We run an interpreted language/database/remote development environment, including customer applications as Windows Services. After stopping and starting the service multiple times, we get a USER32.DLL error for one or more of the executables running under that service - the only resolution is to reboot the machine, even after applying the aforementioned registry tweaks.
Take a look at Bookpool, this book is going for $24.95 there, rather than the $31.95 from Fatbrain.
I am not associated with Bookpool. I like to save money. So do others. Bookpool is cheaper. Their service is also excellent.
Take a look at Aegis. It supports quite a few nice things CVS does not, such as atomic commits, and changes are handled as "change sets" - so a fix that touches multiple files can be applied and backed out in one step.
It has been around for quite a while, and looks fairly mature. I haven't used it yet, but I'm reviewing it now for future use.
http://www.pcug.org.au/~millerp/aegis/aegis.html
I think Hemos meant http://babelfish.altavista.com rather than http://bablefish.altavista.com.
Aside from that, this sounds pretty bad... Hopefully with enough protest, and enough signatures on the petition the vote will swing back against software patents.
There is a patch available here called the Linux IP Personality patch. It adds features to netfilter in the 2.4 kernel series which gives you the ability to change the network fingerprint, so you can, for example, fool nmap.
So yes, you can make your box look like OS/2 pretty easily.
Think about the number of levels in Quake 2 or Quake 3, and the number of times they need to be compiled before they're complete, and that's quite a bit of computing time. Especially when the game has deadlines, and levels often have to be rebuild due to changing requirements/features of the game engine. Level designers who are designing levels for an in-progress game will tell you that it's much harder (and levels require many more builds) than when you're working with a finished, stable game engine.
There are, what, 50 maps in Quake 2? If each one takes a couple of hours to build, that's a little over 4 days to build them all a single time. It's possible that the tools they used on that Origin 2000 were more accurate and slower (comparitively) than the Intel/win32 equivalents, so that could require more computing power also. You can see how it would all add up to a lot of computing time... and obviously you don't want to be building levels on the same machine the designer is still trying to work on...
Rather than speculating, I've actually tried to contact ASUS for verification. No response so far (after about 4 hours). We shall see.
You're correct about the Half-Life shots, I apologise.
The fact that it's only screenshots of Quake 3 engine games really proves little, if anything at all. Can you point me to the *exact* console cvars which enable partially transparent walls? Or even wireframe *only* rendering?
It's a possibility, but there are screenshots in one of the Star Trek games, and also in Half-Life... Besides, I'm unaware of any way to get the transparent-walls effect that I've also seen screenshots for.
There are already tools to do these things within games anyway, but not as easily and quickly as these drivers would allow.
Replying to my own message here, something I forgot:
Email ASUS and complain here (marketing), and here (tech support).
(I had those email addresses in my story submission to Slashdot as well... oh well.)
I submitted this story about 8 hours ago with the *correct* facts, but it didn't get posted.
Anyway, ASUS are releasing a modification of Detonator 2 drivers (based on 5.32 I think) which will add features allowing you to switch to wireframe mode, partially-transparent-everything mode, and also add extra lighting to a scene.
This has nothing to do with nVidia bar the fact their drivers are being used as the base, and Slashdot are making them look bad by not checking facts before posted a story.
Obviously neither the person who posted the article to Slashdot, or CmdrTaco actually read the URL supplied in the article.
*sigh*
This is a pretty short sighted move by ASUS. Another company, Wicked3D, tried this a while ago and met with a lot of anger in the gaming community. I really hope this happens again, and ASUS decide not to release the drivers. Otherwise the online gaming world will either be based on trusting your opponent (not likely), or everybody cheating as much as possible, and so will begin a horrible downward spiral into out-cheating each other, rather than gaming.
The UWM window manager (part of UDE (Unix Desktop Enviroment)) uses a menu system like that. It certainly takes some getting used to, but it's quite nice once you're used to it.
I've noticed Windows 98 has the beginnings of this. When a window wants your attention, but isn't the currently active one, it'll flash it's associated button on the taskbar.
It's not quite colour based, and it only has two states, but it sounds like a simplified version of what you're talking about.
Quite correct, there are other licenses. But if it was BSD code, they would still have to display the "this product contains code from the Regents" etc, message (sorry, I can't remember it off hand). You see my point? No matter what license (bar public domain, and possibly some others) they would have had to do something, or at least think about the implications of using the code in their product. But it seems they didn't bother to do that. Like they didn't care what the license was (since I can't believe that they thought it was in-house code they were using).
Well, it's good to see they will be fixing the problem (and so they should), but they're only fixing it because they've been caught, it seems.
They claim to have copied the code "without knowing it was GPL". What situations are there where you can just cut and paste some code, and use it without thinking about the permission to use it? Not many. They surely can't have been mistaken into believing it was in-house code, and since they're going to the trouble of developing for Linux, they must have at least heard of licenses and the issues surrounding them.
This is pretty poor in my book.
I wonder if they have some sort of colourful lycra outfit to wear (the rapid justice team, that is). "Quick lawboy, to the law-mobile!" Lawman and lawboy, dispensing rapid justice from Wintel boxes in an effort to save the world from petty crime!
"Unfortunately, the trend is toward user interfaces that are simpler, not more complex. Most people don't care enough about the increased possibilities for expression to sacrifice years of their lives mastering an instrument," says Keislar. "They want to press a button and hear music come out. As a result, such systems are probably destined to remain experimental, even if elegant."
I think that particular quote applies to a lot more than just the design of an electronic musical instrument. It seems to be quite true of almost everything nowadays. Most people would be horrified, for example, to have to learn to use a command line over some kind of WIMP GUI. Or imagine a video recorder which was controlled with a keyboard and cron jobs, for example. Sure, geeks would love it, but people in general wouldn't touch the thing with a barge pole (so to speak), and either it would fail, or someone would make a much more simple design.
Nice article about Moog, I didn't know anything about his history really... I've experimented with a friend's minimoog though, playing with the sounds in that is almost like Kraftwerk in a box. ;-)
If you don't have an Intel processor/mobo, think twice before plonking down hard currency for anything made by ATI. I myself got an ATI All-in Wonder 128 card this Christmas, and it refuses to play well with my VIA based motherboard/K6-2 processor. It's not like the Super 7 platform is either too new or too old for ATI to have supported it in the Rage 128 based cards, or that the VIA MVP3-G chipset is so uncommon. ATI, quite frankly, just doesn't care about supporting non-Intel platforms, because they don't have to. They're the company of choice for Intel-based OEMs. So, they don't care about performance-loving AMD-using geeks like a lot of us here.
If you're performance loving, I can't understand why you would have ever bought an AMD CPU in the past (I certainly can now with the Athlon, however). The main reason why ATI cards have problems on Super7 is because Super7 is a bad, bad hack. If you actually look around, all of the cards were having problems around that time. The G200 had problems with the Super7 platform, as did the TNT, and just about anything else around at the time using AGP... Some companies were more responsive to the problems, admittedly, but the problem lay far more with the Super7 platform than the graphics card manufacturers.
Funny then how the REALmagic Hollywood+ I got after the ATI's performance bit delivers flawless DVD performance on the same VIA chipset, with CPU usage averaging under 5%. Yeah, ATI, blame it on the mobo chipset instead of your own laziness when it comes to drivers...
And the REALMagic is a PCI card, right? And your ATI card is AGP? Again, this is more a problem with Super7 than the manufacturer of your graphics card.
This idea of persistant memory is interesting when combining with something like EROS, which is designed to be a persistant system. I don't see how it works well for current systems - the article makes references to not having to wait for the computer to reboot if it crashes... Except with current systems, you'd need to reload a lot of stuff in RAM anyway, because it would've been corrupted by the crash...
I remember a little hack on the Amiga (Fastboot?) which was nearly instant-on. It dumped a copy of your memory to disk, and would just pull that memory image back into memory upon boot... So you could boot the machine in the time it took to pull owever many megs of RAM you had off of hard disk. It certainly had it's share of problems, but it was interesting to play with... Windows 98's suspend to disk mode is pretty similar, although I haven't actually played with that. Still, it certainly sounds like a nice technology for things like MP3 players and palmtop type computers, if nothing else.
Are you serious? PEARL is a real language, and is certainly not new. I wish I knew a little more about it myself, but here's something from FOLDOC:
I suppose you thought he meant PERL, which didn't turn up until much later (1985 or so?). Give the guy some credit, people do make spelling mistakes, but it's the facts which are important. Maybe you should check yours before criticising next time.
It's nice to see more support/availability for the OGR project. IMVHO this is one of the most useful distributed projects around at the moment. While proving that you can crack RC5 might be fun, it doesn't have a real pay-off at the end, except for the small prize monies. The same goes for SETI@Home, which is a needle in a haystack search for something which may or may not exist.
Of course, OGR is probably also the least exciting to participate in for most people. At the finish of it you have something which is useful (to some people), but hardly greatly exciting for anyone outside of the field. On the other hand, producing a result confirming extra terrestrial life from the SETI@Home project would be interesting or exciting for almost everybody. This is probably the biggest reason (along with the differences in publicity) why more people support the less-likely-to-return-something-useful projects like SETI@Home over something like OGR or GIMPS.
They mean ReiserFS is the first "stable" journaling FS for Linux. You are quite correct in saying that ext3 was "first", in that it had journaling before ReiserFS (at least, ext3 was publically available with journaling before ReiserFS was, that I'm aware of), but it's a fair way from being considered stable just yet.
Having just looked at ReiserFS's site, it seems either they haven't updated the site yet, or they consider beta == stable, since I could only find the beta release of the code which has journaling.
Well this is probably kind of obvious, but I would guess the free *BSDs would be enjoying a larger userbase and more publicity than they currently are, for a start.
One of the reasons I've heard for Linux's success (at least initially) over the *BSDs is that it was available (and free) earlier, while the *BSD camp was involved with legal problems to do with their source. So it may have been that the same thing as what has happened to Linux would have happened to BSD. One thing to consider is the split of BSD into the three camps (Net, Open, and Free), which may have affected the success somewhat. It's very hard to compare the situations however, since there is only one Linux kernel, but there are lots of distributions - so the kernel is the same for everybody, but the other tools are different depending on the chosen distro. BSD is different, because it has three distinct kernels, and three sets of tools - and that's it.
What this means, is that the Linux community may feel more "as one" than the BSDs, due to the more defined split between each of the BSD distributions (yes, I know they still share a lot of code between them). A key factor in Linux's recent success has been all of the press it's had, would you get the same level of press with BSD in the same position (bearing in mind the 3 three distributions?). I think it's possibly that one of the BSDs might have really taken off over the others, possibly... I don't really know.
One thing that just occured to me, Linux and BSD are probably not much more or less fragmented than each other, in reality, but I most people see Linux as one, and the BSDs as three/divided.
On the other hand, if there were no "free" operating systems, I think one would have found it's way into the world anyway - there was a market for one, as the success of the current free OSes proves. Maybe GNU Hurd would have been picked up by more people and brought to a usable stage more quickly, or maybe someone else would've written something like what happened with Linux (Davix/DaveOS ;-).
Of course, this is all speculation, and my information might not even be very accurate. :-)
I was this over on HNN a while back, related to Echelon and a patent the NSA has for "document retrieval" which would, according to the information on their site, ignore the type of stuff people were sending for "Jam Echelon Day".
Basically, it can figure out what a document is about in spite of things such as keywords being planted in the document (ala the Jam Echelon plan), and is not dependant on the language of the document. It works by relating the document to a database of other document fragments, they say.
The NSA's website has some information about it, and this is the patent itself.
If this stuff exists and works, then Jam Echelon was a waste of time on the technical side - but I think the main point was to raise awareness, and that it has done.
When AmigaOS 2.1 was released, it had something called locale. This was basically a system where a small catalog of the text used in any application was stored in a file, and could fairly easily be translated to other languages. The user just selected their language of choice in the locale preferences, and any application that had the appropriate locale catalog available would load it up and be presented in the user's language.
It seemed to work quite well... Well, it had problems, such as large differences in lengths of translated words would cause nasty UI mess-ups. But we're talking 1992-1993 here, so it was a fairly nice thing to have that early. From a programmer's point of view, making your applications 'locale-aware' was very simple, it involved a few minor changes to your code, and then running a tool over your code to extract the locale catalog information. You ended up with a program which was written to use a native language by default, and then would support any language for which the translated locale catalog was available on the system.
I don't think the system had support for non-latin character sets (I could be wrong, I only played with it briefly), so it wasn't the best solution, but it was fairly impressive for it's time...
Apparently the people who wrote this article aren't up with modern times, or something. If you check out some of the 40kB demos for the Amiga you'd see more impressive stuff, and those don't require a 100MHz machine (stated requirements for the Win32 demo on the nervana.com site). As far as using mathematical equations to approximate the real world "better" than polygons, this has been used before. An example would be the procedural textures used in Lightwave 3D, which uses a bunch of algorithms to simulate different real world textures, using only a fraction of the memory of their bitmapped counterparts.
Of course, I could be completely wrong about these demos, but IMHO this is hardly revolutionary, or even the slightest bit impressive. I would expect that if this were truly something more than hype, there would be more substantial information at their website, or at least a demo which is actually impressive.
What would be nice to see is 3D accelerators with support for some procedural textures on the card, and then having those features actually used in the game. You can achieve some very impressive effects with such things, although I suppose most people see it as easier to just add more memory to the card nowadays. I remember reading one card that was due to be released a few months ago was supposed to have such features (Permedia 3?), but I'm not sure.