How did people get around this issue before Read/Write access to NTFS? Did they have a FAT32 partition or something that both of the OS installations shared?
Yep! That's actually the recommended approach I found several times. Not great, but it works. I've got a FAT32 shared partition on my dual-boot laptop right now, in fact.
Re:Plextor's 708A works just fine at 8X
on
DVD-Rs go 8x
·
· Score: 1
The reliability of any modern Ferrari has improved many times over.
I'd believe it, though I admit I have limited first-hand experience with them, so I'm really relying on what I hear.
Given my recent dealings with the Plextor 8x, however, I thought it was an apt metaphor for Jarnis to have chosen!:)
Re:Plextor's 708A works just fine at 8X
on
DVD-Rs go 8x
·
· Score: 1
It's a Plextor after all, which roughly translates to being the Ferrari of the optical drives...
What -- fast but ureliable?
Seriously, my friend just picked up one of these drives. He can burn discs just fine, but the drive gives I/O errors when reading the discs he just burned. Yes, in Linux and Windows. Yes, the discs read fine in other DVD drives, including set-top players. Yes, he's tried every version of the firmware available.
So, fine, he probably just happened to get a defective one, and an exchange for a new one will probably fix it. And one data point does not a statistic make. But it's the only data point I have.
Agreed. The real killer is the first one you mention, however -- latency. For a single user on a single system, the CPU overhead is minimal, and the en/decryption happens fast enough as to not compromise bandwidth.
But the latency of SSH when tunneling X connections is atrocious. Even skipping the tunneling but using VPN to connect instead doesn't result in as poor performance.
I remember an earlier version of Mesa was using some XGetColormap (not the exact function, but you get my point) call once for each color in the color map. Not tunneling through SSH: 2 seconds. Tunneling through SSH: 2 minutes. X has too much back-and-forth communication to work well in a system with much latency.
LBX and so on help, but not enough. I'd like to see real progress made on a protocol which cuts down on the dependence on low-latency networks.
Some PS2 games support 480p. Some XBox games support 720p. I believe some GameCube games support 480p. And not all games that support an HD display mode also support an explicit 16x9 mode. In fact, I've found little correlation between options for widescreen and options for progressive scan; many games support widescreen but *not* progressive scan. I'm betting that the newer the game is, the more likely it is to have HDTV support, however.
As another poster mentioned, check out hdgames.net. I don't know how comprehensive their list is, but it hasn't lied to me yet. Looking at their database for the PS2, they've got about 60 games listed that support 16x9, about 20 that support 480p, and about half of those that support 480p also support 16x9.
I just went from a standard def 32" tube to a 50" widescreen HDTV a couple months ago. The downside to this is you can see all the flaws in analog programming, simply because the display is so clear and so BIG. True HDTV programming is amazing, however. Videogames, however, have no signal noise to worry about, so all you get is a crystal clear picture. The downside here is that aliasing is much more obvious at the normal console resolution, simply because the pixels are so well defined. This is where progressive scan really helps, and for games that support it, it does look great.
16x9 support actually isn't as big a deal as you'd think. The reason is not that you'd rather play them in 4x3, but that HDTVs typically have nonlinear scaling modes that fit a 4x3 image to a 16x9 screen with little perceptible distortion. (In essence, they scale the picture more at the edges where less of the action is happening. It's only noticeable with some camera movements, or when watching the crawls on news stations.)
I should point out that in my experience, video games don't have the same aspect ratio problems as live TV, simply because they are not realistic enough. I'll play any videogame using one of these 4x3 to 16x9 scaling modes and feel perfectly comfortable with it. And then I get any game in full widescreen glory.
Also, I should point out that any time I put my PS2 in progressive scan mode, the picture does fill up the 16x9 screen on its own, whether or not there is an option to enable widescreen. I'm betting most games that support 480p, when they don't have an explicit option, will usually rescale things for widescreen automatically. Because of what I said above, however, it's sometimes hard to tell.
And yes, it rocks. No, I haven't noticed any framerate issues in 480p.
Now, I justified the cost of an HDTV without needing my video game addiction. I just used my normal DVD viewing addiction. And my TiVo addiction, but that was really about the size more than the hi-def. Could I justify it just for video games? Probably, yes, but the increased size is not an insignificant part of that.
But how much faster and snappier will the response be with the transparency done at lower level?
I don't know the answer, but I can make an educated guess. A lot. And I mean a whole crapload faster.
If the server does not support alpha, then the only way wm to blend things is to ask X politely for the background, do the compositing in software, and send it back to X to draw. In fact, in many cases the only "background" you can ask X for is the desktop background, which means that semi-transparent windows are an illusion that only works when windows do not overlap.
If the server does support alpha, then the app simply says "draw me" in it's usual way, with some transparency information, and X does it, overlapping windows and all. The blending can even happen in hardware.
Skipping all this sending of pixels and blending in hardware instead of software can easily speed things up by on order of magnitude or two.
And the best part? The year is in the URL, the dateline, pasted on every single image, and implicit in the references to Deep Impact and Armageddon in the first paragraph.
But why would anyone want to play it in the arcade?
Think Skeeball, or those stupid "knock the quarters off the shelves" games -- a simple game where if you do well you are rewarded with tickets. So you're right; it's not a game that would work as well if the whole point was to play the game because there are (no offense to Tux) better games in arcades. Games that reward you with tickets don't have to be extremely complex, and Tux Racer is arguably better than something like skeeball for that reason.
I'll second that. Mine's worked without any issues for several "red-hat-versions". (Switched to Mandrake recently, but it's an effective measure nonetheless.) Supposedly much better than the linksys / dlink / netgear variety, and not much more expensive.
on the other hand... "100 hour MTBI is desirable" Ack! It is hoped that it won't crash more than once every three days?
I'm sure they're talking about a single node failure, not the whole machine. Most people aren't running jobs on more than a few hundred processors, so a compute node failing will take out only one of a few dozen running jobs. And it's more like having your program crash, anyway; resubmit your job and it will simply run on a different set of nodes.
My question is: what is this operating system they've got running on the compute nodes? It's called "LWK (Catamount)". Their previous Red machines were runnning Cougar/TFLOPS, which was a home-grown OS, on the compute nodes, and it didn't support some basic (IMO) features like sockets. It makes it really hard to get data out of those compute nodes except by writing to disk. I wonder if this LWK is the same thing.....
I don't have the queuewarn set to something like 30 mins because I have a feeling my users would complain to me if they got warning messages every 30 mins.
Agreed, but I would really like get the first warning after a very short interval. I don't run my own SMTP daemon -- is it possible to send a first warning after 30 minutes and not every thirty minutes?
Problem number one: For the most part, email is perfectly reliable. If it isn't delivered half an hour, 99% of the time it's because I screwed up the address. I'd like to know after 5 minutes, but I'd take half an hour. And I don't want the computer trying for four freaking days to send an email that I messed up.
Problem number two: Let's say there was a legitimate problem with the network. A router was taken down for maintenance, for instance. These days, people grumble if it's down for more than 10 minutes, and few outages last more than a couple hours. For the re-try interval, 12 hours is probably sufficient, but 24 will cover an overnight outage and its subsequent fix with time to spare. Heck -- How many outages last for more than a day? In the rare event that it does, it may last a week, or maybe a permanent change occurred to keep the mail from ever being deliverable.
So, I have no advice to you other than please, please make everyone you know configure their system as such.
(Flames -- err, I mean opposing viewpoints -- welcome.)
Really!? So I take it it was an OEM router rebranded as a CompUSA, kind of like what they do with Maxtor hard drives? If so, any idea who the original manufacturer was?
There are also special addresses that are reserved for 'unconnected' networks - that is networks that use IP but are not connected to the Internet, These addresses are:-
* One A Class Network
10.0.0.0
* 16 B Class Networks
172.16.0.0 - 172.31.0.0
* 256 C Class Networks 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.0
The one most often used by home networking products is 192.168.1.x in my experience, not the full/16. They are designed to hold 254 addresses, no more. Why are these designed for only a small number of IP addresses? Well, the home routers often have 4 ports, with maybe wireless. Are you really going to have a few hundred clients? Anyway, it's probably best to stick with the 192.168.1.x for a small network if you're planning on connecting to one of these. If, not, do whatever floats your boat!
It plays EXACTLY the same as SoulCalibur, which again isn't a bad thing, because SoulCalibur is the best fighting game ever, IMHO.
Ah, see, here's the kicker. I've played Soul Edge (Soul Blade) and I thought it was one of the best fighting games ever. But I haven't been to an arcade in years, and I don't have a dreamcast, so I've never even seen Soul Calibur (the first one). I wouldn't know the difference if the game they've released for the PS2 was Soul Calibur!
2: The lower resolution is often called "EDTV", for "enhanced definition". The EDTV/HDTV resolution price difference is around $3k vs $6k.
3: It is not just a "very few extra pixels" as you call it. The resolution difference is more like 1366x768 vs 852x480. That's about 1.7x in each dimension, and 3x total pixel count by area. On a computer, I'm sure you'd agree that's a phenomenal difference.
the majority of the hecklers I've seen here on Slashdot have never contributed a line of open-source code in their lives
While I understand your point, I find this statement a little amusing. It's like saying "the majority of people heckling Manson have never killed a single person in their lives."
Quick question: what are your upload rates before the 35 minute period? What do they drop to? (Or am I misunderstanding, and they cut off any uploads after 35 minutes? If so, that's much worse.)
Just for another point of reference, I have an AT&T cable modem (though they just switched to comcast).
I get something like 2-3 Mbps download, and the upload is capped to 256 kbps, all the time. I think it takes about 1 second for the upload cap to kick in, assuming the delay is not just my perception and inaccurate progress dialogs.
My terms of service explicitly had that upload rate in it, and it was part of the service I knew I was buying. What do your terms of service say?
Out of curiosity, does the slashdot crowd of of any major breakthroughs made in the field of general intelligence recently?
Not specifically, as far as I know.
It's hard to specify exactly what "general intelligence" means, though. I think one could fairly make the claim that it is the integration of concepts like natural language processing, planning, vision interpretation, and maybe consciousness.
If so, then I think the answer is that some breakthroughs are occurring in the smaller fields, but it's almost a straightforward research methodology these days. For example, in the planning domain, GraphPlan (too lazy to find the source, but less than a decade ago) clearly dominated the previous best attempts such as total and partial-order planners.
Computer vision has also made advances, and in my less-than-well-informed opinion is that it is proceeding at a rate similar to computer graphics (as the two are rather related): by itself it is a large field, and every year you'll see some cool new algorithms and improvements to previous ones that increase the speed or accuracy beyond what was previously possible.
NLP I'm not familiar enough with to comment, and consciousness still has to stick with the psychologists and neuropsychologists for progress in research, so it's slower going. (Not an insult to the biological sciences, by the way; it's simply slower to test people than computers.)
And I'm not sure of research out there to integrate the whole thing, and thus what "major breakthroughs" are occuring for general intelligence; I'd almost put the video game industry at the forefront of whole-creature-simulation. But the short answer is progress is being made at a more steady pace in the fields which need to be integrated to create an artificial intelligence.
From Russel and Norvig Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach:
From the beginning, AI researchers were not shy in making predictions of their coming successes. The Following statement by Herbert Simon in 1957 is often quoted:
It is not my aim to surprise or shock you -- but the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that can think, that learn, and that create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until -- in a visible future -- the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which human mind has been applied.
Although one might argue that terms such as "visible future" can be interpreted in various ways, some of Simon's predictions were more concrete. In 1958, he predicted that within 10 years a computer would be chess champion, and an important new mathematical theorem would be proved by machine. Claims such as these turned out to be wildly optimistic.
I remember claims apart from Simon's (can't find the source, sorry) dating back fifty years ago that computers would have human-level intelligence by 2000. The field of AI has been notoriously difficult to predict. Who knows? -- maybe this time someone will be right. But don't bet on it.
Well, I sure hope so, but I still think the cost will be more than I want to spend for a while. So I'm glad I waited until now to get my DVD burner (since the price is finally pretty good), and I'm glad I don't have to wait for the next technology to go a big step up from CD-Rs.
Here's the problem: blue laser will be expensive when it first comes out. How many years have we waited for DVD burners to get to the $200 range? They started way up around $1000, and only last year or thereabouts dropped to the sub $300 range.
You're absolutely correct that DVDs are barely usable for backup, but the drives and media are finally reasonably priced. So I could wait one year and buy a $1000 blue laser recorder with media that won't play in a single set-top DVD player sold today (ignoring bakward compatibility with current DVD+/-R), and in the meantime I'm stuck with 30 CD's to back up my 20 gigs of important data.
Or, I can buy my $175 DVD burner, get it all on 5 discs without having to split the data nearly as much, have the ability to back up my DVD movies at good quality, and let it tide me over until the blue lasers (or whatever) come down in price a few years from now.
I just bought a DVD-RW a few weeks ago, and I love it. Just thought I'd present my justification as an opposing viewpoint.
One has to remember, language features aren't added to the standard because someone feels sudden fountain of creativity, but rather to solve existing design problems.
True. I admit I know very little about D, but I get the impression that simplification itself is the feature. For example, they have no multiple inheritance, which is absolutely removing functionality. (Yes, I do use MI, despite so many notable resources saying not to.) But it allows simplifying assumptions in many places, from vtbl's and RTTI through the compiler itself. So I do not see the point of D as a true "successor" of C++, but maybe more as a language with 90% of the functionality and 50% of the complexity of C++, nearly identical syntactically, but with extra features incorporated from the Java and C# camps.
Slashdot Mirror
How did people get around this issue before Read/Write access to NTFS? Did they have a FAT32 partition or something that both of the OS installations shared?
Yep! That's actually the recommended approach I found several times. Not great, but it works. I've got a FAT32 shared partition on my dual-boot laptop right now, in fact.
The reliability of any modern Ferrari has improved many times over.
:)
I'd believe it, though I admit I have limited first-hand experience with them, so I'm really relying on what I hear.
Given my recent dealings with the Plextor 8x, however, I thought it was an apt metaphor for Jarnis to have chosen!
It's a Plextor after all, which roughly translates to being the Ferrari of the optical drives...
What -- fast but ureliable?
Seriously, my friend just picked up one of these drives. He can burn discs just fine, but the drive gives I/O errors when reading the discs he just burned. Yes, in Linux and Windows. Yes, the discs read fine in other DVD drives, including set-top players. Yes, he's tried every version of the firmware available.
So, fine, he probably just happened to get a defective one, and an exchange for a new one will probably fix it. And one data point does not a statistic make. But it's the only data point I have.
Agreed. The real killer is the first one you mention, however -- latency. For a single user on a single system, the CPU overhead is minimal, and the en/decryption happens fast enough as to not compromise bandwidth.
But the latency of SSH when tunneling X connections is atrocious. Even skipping the tunneling but using VPN to connect instead doesn't result in as poor performance.
I remember an earlier version of Mesa was using some XGetColormap (not the exact function, but you get my point) call once for each color in the color map. Not tunneling through SSH: 2 seconds. Tunneling through SSH: 2 minutes. X has too much back-and-forth communication to work well in a system with much latency.
LBX and so on help, but not enough. I'd like to see real progress made on a protocol which cuts down on the dependence on low-latency networks.
Sounds like we're talking about consoles here.
Some PS2 games support 480p. Some XBox games support 720p. I believe some GameCube games support 480p. And not all games that support an HD display mode also support an explicit 16x9 mode. In fact, I've found little correlation between options for widescreen and options for progressive scan; many games support widescreen but *not* progressive scan. I'm betting that the newer the game is, the more likely it is to have HDTV support, however.
As another poster mentioned, check out hdgames.net. I don't know how comprehensive their list is, but it hasn't lied to me yet. Looking at their database for the PS2, they've got about 60 games listed that support 16x9, about 20 that support 480p, and about half of those that support 480p also support 16x9.
I just went from a standard def 32" tube to a 50" widescreen HDTV a couple months ago. The downside to this is you can see all the flaws in analog programming, simply because the display is so clear and so BIG. True HDTV programming is amazing, however. Videogames, however, have no signal noise to worry about, so all you get is a crystal clear picture. The downside here is that aliasing is much more obvious at the normal console resolution, simply because the pixels are so well defined. This is where progressive scan really helps, and for games that support it, it does look great.
16x9 support actually isn't as big a deal as you'd think. The reason is not that you'd rather play them in 4x3, but that HDTVs typically have nonlinear scaling modes that fit a 4x3 image to a 16x9 screen with little perceptible distortion. (In essence, they scale the picture more at the edges where less of the action is happening. It's only noticeable with some camera movements, or when watching the crawls on news stations.)
I should point out that in my experience, video games don't have the same aspect ratio problems as live TV, simply because they are not realistic enough. I'll play any videogame using one of these 4x3 to 16x9 scaling modes and feel perfectly comfortable with it. And then I get any game in full widescreen glory.
Also, I should point out that any time I put my PS2 in progressive scan mode, the picture does fill up the 16x9 screen on its own, whether or not there is an option to enable widescreen. I'm betting most games that support 480p, when they don't have an explicit option, will usually rescale things for widescreen automatically. Because of what I said above, however, it's sometimes hard to tell.
And yes, it rocks. No, I haven't noticed any framerate issues in 480p.
Now, I justified the cost of an HDTV without needing my video game addiction. I just used my normal DVD viewing addiction. And my TiVo addiction, but that was really about the size more than the hi-def. Could I justify it just for video games? Probably, yes, but the increased size is not an insignificant part of that.
But how much faster and snappier will the response be with the transparency done at lower level?
I don't know the answer, but I can make an educated guess. A lot. And I mean a whole crapload faster.
If the server does not support alpha, then the only way wm to blend things is to ask X politely for the background, do the compositing in software, and send it back to X to draw. In fact, in many cases the only "background" you can ask X for is the desktop background, which means that semi-transparent windows are an illusion that only works when windows do not overlap.
If the server does support alpha, then the app simply says "draw me" in it's usual way, with some transparency information, and X does it, overlapping windows and all. The blending can even happen in hardware.
Skipping all this sending of pixels and blending in hardware instead of software can easily speed things up by on order of magnitude or two.
And the best part? The year is in the URL, the dateline, pasted on every single image, and implicit in the references to Deep Impact and Armageddon in the first paragraph.
But why would anyone want to play it in the arcade?
Think Skeeball, or those stupid "knock the quarters off the shelves" games -- a simple game where if you do well you are rewarded with tickets. So you're right; it's not a game that would work as well if the whole point was to play the game because there are (no offense to Tux) better games in arcades. Games that reward you with tickets don't have to be extremely complex, and Tux Racer is arguably better than something like skeeball for that reason.
I'll second that. Mine's worked without any issues for several "red-hat-versions". (Switched to Mandrake recently, but it's an effective measure nonetheless.) Supposedly much better than the linksys / dlink / netgear variety, and not much more expensive.
http://www.orinocowireless.com/
I'm sure I can make a phone call and get more, but I'm too damn busy..... I'll just wait until the next story. ('cuz you know there's gonna be one)
It won't really matter until it comes time to port my code to the thing anyway. I just have a feeling sockets are going to be the deal breaker.
on the other hand... "100 hour MTBI is desirable"
Ack! It is hoped that it won't crash more than
once every three days?
I'm sure they're talking about a single node failure, not the whole machine. Most people aren't running jobs on more than a few hundred processors, so a compute node failing will take out only one of a few dozen running jobs. And it's more like having your program crash, anyway; resubmit your job and it will simply run on a different set of nodes.
My question is: what is this operating system they've got running on the compute nodes? It's called "LWK (Catamount)". Their previous Red machines were runnning Cougar/TFLOPS, which was a home-grown OS, on the compute nodes, and it didn't support some basic (IMO) features like sockets. It makes it really hard to get data out of those compute nodes except by writing to disk. I wonder if this LWK is the same thing.....
I don't have the queuewarn set to something like 30 mins because I have a feeling my users would complain to me if they got warning messages every 30 mins.
Agreed, but I would really like get the first warning after a very short interval. I don't run my own SMTP daemon -- is it possible to send a first warning after 30 minutes and not every thirty minutes?
For God's sake, yes!
Problem number one: For the most part, email is perfectly reliable. If it isn't delivered half an hour, 99% of the time it's because I screwed up the address. I'd like to know after 5 minutes, but I'd take half an hour. And I don't want the computer trying for four freaking days to send an email that I messed up.
Problem number two: Let's say there was a legitimate problem with the network. A router was taken down for maintenance, for instance. These days, people grumble if it's down for more than 10 minutes, and few outages last more than a couple hours. For the re-try interval, 12 hours is probably sufficient, but 24 will cover an overnight outage and its subsequent fix with time to spare. Heck -- How many outages last for more than a day? In the rare event that it does, it may last a week, or maybe a permanent change occurred to keep the mail from ever being deliverable.
So, I have no advice to you other than please, please make everyone you know configure their system as such.
(Flames -- err, I mean opposing viewpoints -- welcome.)
Really!? So I take it it was an OEM router rebranded as a CompUSA, kind of like what they do with Maxtor hard drives? If so, any idea who the original manufacturer was?
For what it's worth, I actually thought it was hilarious. :)
The one most often used by home networking products is 192.168.1.x in my experience, not the full
1: Yes, they can display HDTV "signals".
2: The lower resolution is often called "EDTV", for "enhanced definition". The EDTV/HDTV resolution price difference is around $3k vs $6k.
3: It is not just a "very few extra pixels" as you call it. The resolution difference is more like 1366x768 vs 852x480. That's about 1.7x in each dimension, and 3x total pixel count by area. On a computer, I'm sure you'd agree that's a phenomenal difference.
the majority of the hecklers I've seen here on Slashdot have never contributed a line of open-source code in their lives
While I understand your point, I find this statement a little amusing. It's like saying "the majority of people heckling Manson have never killed a single person in their lives."
Quick question: what are your upload rates before the 35 minute period? What do they drop to? (Or am I misunderstanding, and they cut off any uploads after 35 minutes? If so, that's much worse.)
Just for another point of reference, I have an AT&T cable modem (though they just switched to comcast).
I get something like 2-3 Mbps download, and the upload is capped to 256 kbps, all the time. I think it takes about 1 second for the upload cap to kick in, assuming the delay is not just my perception and inaccurate progress dialogs.
My terms of service explicitly had that upload rate in it, and it was part of the service I knew I was buying. What do your terms of service say?
It's hard to specify exactly what "general intelligence" means, though. I think one could fairly make the claim that it is the integration of concepts like natural language processing, planning, vision interpretation, and maybe consciousness.
If so, then I think the answer is that some breakthroughs are occurring in the smaller fields, but it's almost a straightforward research methodology these days. For example, in the planning domain, GraphPlan (too lazy to find the source, but less than a decade ago) clearly dominated the previous best attempts such as total and partial-order planners.
Computer vision has also made advances, and in my less-than-well-informed opinion is that it is proceeding at a rate similar to computer graphics (as the two are rather related): by itself it is a large field, and every year you'll see some cool new algorithms and improvements to previous ones that increase the speed or accuracy beyond what was previously possible.
NLP I'm not familiar enough with to comment, and consciousness still has to stick with the psychologists and neuropsychologists for progress in research, so it's slower going. (Not an insult to the biological sciences, by the way; it's simply slower to test people than computers.)
And I'm not sure of research out there to integrate the whole thing, and thus what "major breakthroughs" are occuring for general intelligence; I'd almost put the video game industry at the forefront of whole-creature-simulation. But the short answer is progress is being made at a more steady pace in the fields which need to be integrated to create an artificial intelligence.
Blue might come sooner than you think.
Well, I sure hope so, but I still think the cost will be more than I want to spend for a while. So I'm glad I waited until now to get my DVD burner (since the price is finally pretty good), and I'm glad I don't have to wait for the next technology to go a big step up from CD-Rs.
Here's the problem: blue laser will be expensive when it first comes out. How many years have we waited for DVD burners to get to the $200 range? They started way up around $1000, and only last year or thereabouts dropped to the sub $300 range.
You're absolutely correct that DVDs are barely usable for backup, but the drives and media are finally reasonably priced. So I could wait one year and buy a $1000 blue laser recorder with media that won't play in a single set-top DVD player sold today (ignoring bakward compatibility with current DVD+/-R), and in the meantime I'm stuck with 30 CD's to back up my 20 gigs of important data.
Or, I can buy my $175 DVD burner, get it all on 5 discs without having to split the data nearly as much, have the ability to back up my DVD movies at good quality, and let it tide me over until the blue lasers (or whatever) come down in price a few years from now.
I just bought a DVD-RW a few weeks ago, and I love it. Just thought I'd present my justification as an opposing viewpoint.
One has to remember, language features aren't added to the standard because someone feels sudden fountain of creativity, but rather to solve existing design problems.
True. I admit I know very little about D, but I get the impression that simplification itself is the feature. For example, they have no multiple inheritance, which is absolutely removing functionality. (Yes, I do use MI, despite so many notable resources saying not to.) But it allows simplifying assumptions in many places, from vtbl's and RTTI through the compiler itself. So I do not see the point of D as a true "successor" of C++, but maybe more as a language with 90% of the functionality and 50% of the complexity of C++, nearly identical syntactically, but with extra features incorporated from the Java and C# camps.
All IMHO, of course.... I've never used D.