Re:Speaking of retards.
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
Who won't be able to lug it around everywhere
Read the article, idiot. This is largely a nonissue. (What is an issue is that you have to stand up to use the current model, but if the technology can't be adapted to a chair or flatbed-form unit, I'll be stunned.)
$3000 worth of aspirational toy
Haven't priced electric wheelchairs or sit-down transports recently, have you? Let me assure you that the Segway is (or, rather, will be) quite competitive, not to mention smaller, lighter and more agile.
And too rich to consider a bike, or rollerblades?
You know, when I've already stated that I think it's overpriced for a lot of its possible applications, trying to make a zing out of this only makes you look even dumber than you started out looking. Which, when you think about it, is pretty impressive.
This is a trinket.
No. This is a first-generation product. With all the practical and financial drawbacks that are normally implied by that. Why this is producing such a negative reaction on the very home turf of the "release early, release often" crowd is, frankly, beyond me.
Speaking of retards.
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Who the fuck can't ride a scooter or drive a car? Is there some huge group of uncoordinated retards who cant operate a scooter or a car but can ride an IT? Is that the market for this piece of shit? It's some sort of scooter for the severely challenged?
I don't know what's more depressing: that you actually thought you were being insightful by posting this, or that our ever-vigilent moderators voted you up for it.
At the risk of responding to your knee-jerk, brainless dribblings with an actual answer instead of the back-handed slap upside the face that they so richly deserve, allow me to call your attention to:
the elderly
the handicapped
people too young for a driver's license
people who live in communities with noise-abatement laws
...and that's just off the top of my head, and not even speculating on possible uses in industrial applications. The question isn't whether people can drive a car or a scooter, although there are plenty who cannot for reasons having nothing to do with being "retards". The question is whether there are applications for which the Segway might be more appropriate than a car or a scooter.
The problem with the Segway isn't that it lacks a market. The problem is that it's at least $2300 too expensive for most of them, and probably about twice as heavy as it should be.
How is IT as safe as a car? You're totally unprotected on an IT, just like on a scooter or a bike.
With a top speed of under 10mph, comparing a Segway's safety to a car is, well, about as stupid as the rest of your post. I suspect that its safety is about comparable to a bicycle, but the Segway has the advantage of not putting the rider in a hunched-over position -- jumping clear of an accident will be much easier.
In passing, let me just say that I am astounded and overwhelmed by your level of compassion and understanding for your fellow human beings. Here's hoping that you contract a degenerative neural disease, so you can taste some of the same.
"dynamic stability"
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 3, Funny
Can't you see that a vehicle which uses Dynamic Stability to be driven as an extension of your own body movements is a great innovation?
What, you mean like... a bicycle? Or roller skates?
Hell, I drive my car via an extension of my own body movements. I call this miraculous technology "the steering wheel."
I know that this was one of the more-anticipated interviews done recently here, and I know that you were in a hurry to get it out, but this half-assed transcription is lifeless and boring -- I gave up after two questions.
Please sit down and take the time to actually transcribe Bruce's answers in full from tape. (You did tape this, right?) If you really can't be bothered to do that, just convert them to some appropriate audio file format and put them up somewhere where they can be downloaded.
...is crap crap crap crap crap. The Blade 100 is one of Sun's IDE-based machines. Because Sun expects that such boxes are going to be used either as low-end workstations (the Blade 100) or disk-avoiding compute farm servers (the Netra X1), the disk subsystem of them is painfully below par: Sun routinely ships under-speced IDE disks (remember the 4800 RPM drive? Sun does, and they've got a whole warehouseful to refresh your memory with!) and compounds the problem with Solaris 8's ATA/IDE drivers, which are the worst in the known universe -- watch your entire system drag to a half as the OS attempt to write out a.5MB file! Whee!
I don't know what Ace's traffic numbers are normally like, but using a Blade 100 for anything other than a small, personal website is flat-out folly. At a minimum, they should have been using a Netra T1/AC200 ($3k, nicely configured, and a 1U rackmount machine to boot), and I would probably have thought seriously about scrounging a used E250 or E220R off of Ebay.
It's not. Our anonymous friend was trapped in a time displacement effect, casting him back to 1991, when the only TCP stack available for System 7 was Apple's original MacTCP extension, which was in fact notably crappy.
MkLinux was actually developed by Apple (in conjunction with some European academic group, don't remember who), back in the Amelio era. Itself, it was never very popular, but the code release allowed people to start building monolithic linux kernels on PPC Macs, and the assorted Mac Linux distros followed on shortly after.
Right now, the only reason to use MkLinux is if you want to run linux on one of the original powermacs: the 6100, 7100 and 8100. MkLinux is the only linux which supports booting on NuBus (non-PCI) based Macs, and is maintained for that reason only.
The reason for this disclaimer was not that he didn't know that cable tv exists outside the USA, but because he does know that outside the US, having cable doesn't necessarily increase your chances of getting the SciFi Channel.
I have done 20 or so solaris installs, and I can tell you my least favorite part is bootstraping the machine to the point that my config scripts can take over...
There is no such thing as Solaris 2.8, and 2.7 only exists in some places. I assume you meant 7 and 8
You're just going to have to imagine me dressed up as Moon Unit Zappa circa 1985 as I intone from on high here:
Whatever.
Sun's breaking of a perfectly functional numbering convention for the sake of their marketeers is, well, their own lookout. Every other reader knew exactly what I was talking about, and only you were dumb and/or desperate enough to think that you could score some sort of lame debating point by pointing it out.
bash was only introduce into Solaris as of Solaris 8
Hm, I'm pretty sure I recall it showing up in one of the MU packs for 7, but I could be wrong on that count -- I was mercifully spared the experience of 7 for the most part.
/bin is actually a symlink to/usr/bin, so technically it doesn't put it under/bin
From Moon Zappa straight to William Shatner: GET. A. LIFE.
Mac boot firmware not custom at all.
on
Firewire and Linux?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Just a small note: ever since the 7500/8500/9500 model PowerMacs, all of Apple's computers have used the IEEE 1275 "Open Firmware" firmware architecture. Sun also uses this, branded as OpenBoot, and I believe IBM uses it in their POWER4 servers as well. It's not custom in the least.
It's always been a complete mystery to me why PC vendors didn't implement OpenBoot, since it's inexpensive,open, and provides many of the functions that you currently need to buy expensive hardware dongles to get on PCs.
(Preemptive note to moderators: realweasel.com really is a hardware site.)
Hmm, correct me if I'm wrong (please do), but isn't Myth the single best-selling PC game to date?
Myth II was Bungie's best-selling PC game to date. If memory serves, they moved around 80,000 units of it. Of all PC games to date, it's not even in the top 50. (#1 is that damned Deer Hunter game, with some horrible number of millions of copies out there.)
Remember, Bungie was jumping into the Linux games market, with titles like Myth 2
Bungie was hardly "jumping into" the Linux market. They licensed Myth II to Loki well over a year after the PC and Mac versions shipped.
Even before the MS buyout, Bungie never said a word about a Linux port of Halo, probably because Loki never sold more than a handful of even their most popular titles.
Wake up, people. M$ is making money off this. Don't be tempted. Stay strong. Buy a Gamecube 3 days later. The less money they have, the sooner there will be parity in the marketplace.
Actually, Microsoft loses money on every XBox console that anyone buys. The exact figure is unknown, but it's estimated at $200 per unit.
More than one wag has suggested that MS-haters might want to buy lots of XBoxes this christmas, just to put a big ol' dent in Bill's bottom line.
Of course, what they do make money on is the software, which is why they're trying to force those awful multi-game bundle deals on everybody. But if you can find an unbundled xbox and a single copy of Halo, you can have a pile of gaming goodness and still pick Bill's pocket while you're at it.
HALO was planned to be an amazingly, impressive, multiplayer game set inside a virtual online war.
You know, I've followed this game's development pretty rabidly since the first rumors of "Project Blam" started surfacing in 1998. I think you're remembering selectively: Halo was never pitched as a persistant multiplayer-only game. It was always going to have a primary single-player component.
I suspect you're confused because all of the initial demos were of the multiplayer side. At the time, Bungie took pains to explain that this was a result of their internal development schedule, which slotted the engine and multiplayer sections for completion long before the single-player campaign was even demoable, much less finished. (The reasons for this kind of schedule should be pretty self-evident: artists, writers and voice-actors work on different time scales than engineers.)
The big change that did occur around the time of the MS buyout was a shift from third-person to first-person perspective, but I don't see any reason to not take their word that that was a gameplay and control issue brought out by playtesting.
Suck it up, Bungie. MS stole your soul and your ability to innovate.
Christ, grow up, will you?
First of all, in all likelihood, Microsoft saved Bungie from bankruptcy. If you cast your mind back to 1998, Bungie was on the tail end of a very ambitious expansion program that had produced mixed results at best. Myth and Myth II had gotten uniformly excellent reviews, but were far from best-sellers. They were having amply-documented (by themselves, at length, on their website) problems getting their boxes onto store shelves. They had sunk an unknown but presumably significant amount of money into opening up a California office to produce a game (Oni) that at the time of the MS buyout was over a year behind schedule and still slipping, and they had just started development on an insanely ambitious title (Halo) that was, at best, not going to ship for another two years. Add it all up, and you get a company in desperate need of funding, not to mention some marketing muscle.
Second, pissing and moaning about how a finished game diverges, a little or a lot, from whatever rabid speculation some of the designers indulged in while it was still in pre-alpha form only shows how little you understand about the development process. Here's the nutshell version: Shit happens. You start out with a design doc that says the game will have perfect realtime raytraced voxels and will also make you coffee and fetch your slippers. A year later all of your hair is missing because BigHardwareCo's graphics APIs are an undocumented mess, the playtesters insist that they want tea, not coffee, and half of the company's monitors explode during a cutscene in level 10 for no reason that you can determine. You have a finite amount of money to spend, a finite amount of time you can take before the online game sites lose interest in your screenshots, and a finite amount of prozac you can dispense to your engineers. All of those airy promises you made a year ago are now completely irrelevant. You fix the problems that are fixable, remove the parts that can't be done, polish what does work until it shines, and save the fifty great ideas you had to abandon for the sequel. Assuming there is s sequel. Assuming, of course, you ship at all.
Companies do not run on good intentions alone, and designers don't make games for their own amusement: they make them so that other people can see them. (And so they can get paid.) Given a choice between slowly slipping under the waves and suddenly getting a very, very large wad of cash from a company that was also going to market my product like nobody's business, I know what I, and any other adult, would choose in a heartbeat.
Actually, intial development work for Halo was all done on a PC, using MS Visual Studio. The engine was designed to be portable, and in-house work on a Mac port was in process at the time of the Microsoft buyout, but Jason Jones was on record at the time as saying that all primary development work for Halo was being done on PCs.
As far as I know, the only pre-xbox demo of Halo that wasn't performed on a PC was the 1999 Macworld one.
And how many people remember Bungie promising over and over that Halo would not become a console game?
Zero. Because they never said that.
Or, later, that it would be released for the XBox and (PC or Mac) simultaneously?
Zero, because they never said that either. (They've consistantly promised that it would eventually ship for all platforms, but the word "simultaneously" was never, ever used.)
And frankly, even if they had promised to deliver it directly to your doorstep in a shiny box with a nice pink ribbon on it... so what? For all of the amateur theatrics that have grown up around it, making games is a business. Building a game as large as Halo requires an investment of millions of dollars, not to mention uncountable man-hours. In the end, the decision about what to release, and when, gets made on the basis of what will maximize the return on that investment, and for no other reason. Ever. Some developer mentioned in an interview three years ago that they'd ship a BeOS version? Irrelevant. Show me the money.
In Solaris, there are the psr* family of commands for processor administration. psradmin -f 0 will turn off processor 0. As long as this isn't physical powering down of processors, and simply instructions to the scheduler to disregard p0, you could, on the above vm, do something like:
Leaving procs 0-3 for Prod, 4-5 for Test, and 6-7 for Dev.
I don't think that this could work with the vserver patches as they are currently implemented. There is still only one kernel and (important bit here) one scheduler running: so all of your assorted vservers will run on the total number of procs aloted to the scheduler.
You might be able to hack up some sort of "vpsradm" command that instructed the scheduler to never assign processes from a certain vserver to a certain processor, but I suspect that such a thing is a lot easier to theorize about than to actually implement. (Actual kernel hackers are encouraged to add their two cents here.)
now you could get 8 processors of RS/6000 goodness, run production on 4 processors, Test on 2 processors, and Dev on 2 processors.
What you're suggesting is pretty much the opposite of how this package works. As the author himself states, you cannot dedicate hardware resources to a vserver. Only one kernel is ever running, and you use all of your cpus or none. Process- and user-space isolation is provided, but if a process in one vserver tickles a kernel bug that crashes the system, the whole ball of wax will come down with that vserver. (Likewise, it's very likely that a kernel-level root exploit will allow you to break out of the vserver and attack the whole system.)
Essentially, vserver is to the process space what chroot is to the filesystem layer.
This is not inherantly better or worse than the "system partitioning" approach; it's just a different approach, and will have different uses.
For example, consider a user wanting to close a window. The user has two choices. She can type Ctrl-W and close it, or take her hands off of the keyboard (which she was using) and go for the little 'x' in the corner to close the window.
Aha, now we're descending from the general case to a specific case. And in this specific case, you're quite right: the "window-close" widget in just about every WIMP interface out there takes forever and a day (relatively speaking) to get a lock on. The metaphor has stuck with us primarily because nobody's thought of a better method yet.
That was just to close a window. Selecting menu items (once you've successfully moused to the menu) is even longer.
That depends on one huge-arse variable: where the menus are.
In the Windows world (and that of its imitators, Gnome and KDE), the menus are placed in the top of the floating window. A terrible mistake, and it makes them dog-slow to use for all of the reasons that you mention and a few more as well -- since the location of the menu onscreen isn't predictable, you can't even use muscle memory to make up for the other defects in the design.
Put the menus in a predictable location (e.g. the top of the screen, with frequently-used menus closer to the corners) and the situation changes dramatically. Deeply nested hierarchical menus reduce the effect a bit, but that's the visual equivilant of adding more modifier keys: hopefully you keep the must-used actions closest to the top of the "tree".
What a weird assertion to make. Why on earth would you believe such a thing? Unless you're moving your mouse via telekinesis, your fine motor control is very much involved in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Who won't be able to lug it around everywhere
Read the article, idiot. This is largely a nonissue. (What is an issue is that you have to stand up to use the current model, but if the technology can't be adapted to a chair or flatbed-form unit, I'll be stunned.)
$3000 worth of aspirational toy
Haven't priced electric wheelchairs or sit-down transports recently, have you? Let me assure you that the Segway is (or, rather, will be) quite competitive, not to mention smaller, lighter and more agile.
And too rich to consider a bike, or rollerblades?
You know, when I've already stated that I think it's overpriced for a lot of its possible applications, trying to make a zing out of this only makes you look even dumber than you started out looking. Which, when you think about it, is pretty impressive.
This is a trinket.
No. This is a first-generation product. With all the practical and financial drawbacks that are normally implied by that. Why this is producing such a negative reaction on the very home turf of the "release early, release often" crowd is, frankly, beyond me.
I don't know what's more depressing: that you actually thought you were being insightful by posting this, or that our ever-vigilent moderators voted you up for it.
At the risk of responding to your knee-jerk, brainless dribblings with an actual answer instead of the back-handed slap upside the face that they so richly deserve, allow me to call your attention to:
- the elderly
- the handicapped
- people too young for a driver's license
- people who live in communities with noise-abatement laws
...and that's just off the top of my head, and not even speculating on possible uses in industrial applications. The question isn't whether people can drive a car or a scooter, although there are plenty who cannot for reasons having nothing to do with being "retards". The question is whether there are applications for which the Segway might be more appropriate than a car or a scooter.The problem with the Segway isn't that it lacks a market. The problem is that it's at least $2300 too expensive for most of them, and probably about twice as heavy as it should be.
How is IT as safe as a car? You're totally unprotected on an IT, just like on a scooter or a bike.
With a top speed of under 10mph, comparing a Segway's safety to a car is, well, about as stupid as the rest of your post. I suspect that its safety is about comparable to a bicycle, but the Segway has the advantage of not putting the rider in a hunched-over position -- jumping clear of an accident will be much easier.
In passing, let me just say that I am astounded and overwhelmed by your level of compassion and understanding for your fellow human beings. Here's hoping that you contract a degenerative neural disease, so you can taste some of the same.
Can't you see that a vehicle which uses Dynamic Stability to be driven as an extension of your own body movements is a great innovation?
What, you mean like... a bicycle? Or roller skates?
Hell, I drive my car via an extension of my own body movements. I call this miraculous technology "the steering wheel."
I know that this was one of the more-anticipated interviews done recently here, and I know that you were in a hurry to get it out, but this half-assed transcription is lifeless and boring -- I gave up after two questions.
Please sit down and take the time to actually transcribe Bruce's answers in full from tape. (You did tape this, right?) If you really can't be bothered to do that, just convert them to some appropriate audio file format and put them up somewhere where they can be downloaded.
...is crap crap crap crap crap. The Blade 100 is one of Sun's IDE-based machines. Because Sun expects that such boxes are going to be used either as low-end workstations (the Blade 100) or disk-avoiding compute farm servers (the Netra X1), the disk subsystem of them is painfully below par: Sun routinely ships under-speced IDE disks (remember the 4800 RPM drive? Sun does, and they've got a whole warehouseful to refresh your memory with!) and compounds the problem with Solaris 8's ATA/IDE drivers, which are the worst in the known universe -- watch your entire system drag to a half as the OS attempt to write out a .5MB file! Whee!
I don't know what Ace's traffic numbers are normally like, but using a Blade 100 for anything other than a small, personal website is flat-out folly. At a minimum, they should have been using a Netra T1/AC200 ($3k, nicely configured, and a 1U rackmount machine to boot), and I would probably have thought seriously about scrounging a used E250 or E220R off of Ebay.
It's not. Our anonymous friend was trapped in a time displacement effect, casting him back to 1991, when the only TCP stack available for System 7 was Apple's original MacTCP extension, which was in fact notably crappy.
MkLinux was actually developed by Apple (in conjunction with some European academic group, don't remember who), back in the Amelio era. Itself, it was never very popular, but the code release allowed people to start building monolithic linux kernels on PPC Macs, and the assorted Mac Linux distros followed on shortly after.
Right now, the only reason to use MkLinux is if you want to run linux on one of the original powermacs: the 6100, 7100 and 8100. MkLinux is the only linux which supports booting on NuBus (non-PCI) based Macs, and is maintained for that reason only.
The reason for this disclaimer was not that he didn't know that cable tv exists outside the USA, but because he does know that outside the US, having cable doesn't necessarily increase your chances of getting the SciFi Channel.
I have done 20 or so solaris installs, and I can tell you my least favorite part is bootstraping the machine to the point that my config scripts can take over...
Er, not heard of Jumpstart, have you?
There is no such thing as Solaris 2.8, and 2.7 only exists in some places. I assume you meant 7 and 8
/bin is actually a symlink to /usr/bin, so technically it doesn't put it under /bin
You're just going to have to imagine me dressed up as Moon Unit Zappa circa 1985 as I intone from on high here:
Whatever.
Sun's breaking of a perfectly functional numbering convention for the sake of their marketeers is, well, their own lookout. Every other reader knew exactly what I was talking about, and only you were dumb and/or desperate enough to think that you could score some sort of lame debating point by pointing it out.
bash was only introduce into Solaris as of Solaris 8
Hm, I'm pretty sure I recall it showing up in one of the MU packs for 7, but I could be wrong on that count -- I was mercifully spared the experience of 7 for the most part.
From Moon Zappa straight to William Shatner: GET. A. LIFE.
No other OS puts bash under /bin.
Except for Solaris 2.7 and 2.8. Ahem.
If you can read you would notice:
"UPS Ground does not insure international shipments"
Yes, the story summary says that.
Unfortunately, it is wrong .
Just a small note: ever since the 7500/8500/9500 model PowerMacs, all of Apple's computers have used the IEEE 1275 "Open Firmware" firmware architecture. Sun also uses this, branded as OpenBoot, and I believe IBM uses it in their POWER4 servers as well. It's not custom in the least.
It's always been a complete mystery to me why PC vendors didn't implement OpenBoot, since it's inexpensive,open, and provides many of the functions that you currently need to buy expensive hardware dongles to get on PCs.
(Preemptive note to moderators: realweasel.com really is a hardware site.)
Yeah, that $0.50 per port license fee is really gonna break the bank. May I suggest looking under your couch cushions for spare change?
Hmm, correct me if I'm wrong (please do), but isn't Myth the single best-selling PC game to date?
Myth II was Bungie's best-selling PC game to date. If memory serves, they moved around 80,000 units of it. Of all PC games to date, it's not even in the top 50. (#1 is that damned Deer Hunter game, with some horrible number of millions of copies out there.)
Remember, Bungie was jumping into the Linux games market, with titles like Myth 2
Bungie was hardly "jumping into" the Linux market. They licensed Myth II to Loki well over a year after the PC and Mac versions shipped.
Even before the MS buyout, Bungie never said a word about a Linux port of Halo, probably because Loki never sold more than a handful of even their most popular titles.
Wake up, people. M$ is making money off this. Don't be tempted. Stay strong. Buy a Gamecube 3 days later. The less money they have, the sooner there will be parity in the marketplace.
Actually, Microsoft loses money on every XBox console that anyone buys. The exact figure is unknown, but it's estimated at $200 per unit.
More than one wag has suggested that MS-haters might want to buy lots of XBoxes this christmas, just to put a big ol' dent in Bill's bottom line.
Of course, what they do make money on is the software, which is why they're trying to force those awful multi-game bundle deals on everybody. But if you can find an unbundled xbox and a single copy of Halo, you can have a pile of gaming goodness and still pick Bill's pocket while you're at it.
You know, I've followed this game's development pretty rabidly since the first rumors of "Project Blam" started surfacing in 1998. I think you're remembering selectively: Halo was never pitched as a persistant multiplayer-only game. It was always going to have a primary single-player component.
I suspect you're confused because all of the initial demos were of the multiplayer side. At the time, Bungie took pains to explain that this was a result of their internal development schedule, which slotted the engine and multiplayer sections for completion long before the single-player campaign was even demoable, much less finished. (The reasons for this kind of schedule should be pretty self-evident: artists, writers and voice-actors work on different time scales than engineers.)
The big change that did occur around the time of the MS buyout was a shift from third-person to first-person perspective, but I don't see any reason to not take their word that that was a gameplay and control issue brought out by playtesting.
Christ, grow up, will you?
First of all, in all likelihood, Microsoft saved Bungie from bankruptcy. If you cast your mind back to 1998, Bungie was on the tail end of a very ambitious expansion program that had produced mixed results at best. Myth and Myth II had gotten uniformly excellent reviews, but were far from best-sellers. They were having amply-documented (by themselves, at length, on their website) problems getting their boxes onto store shelves. They had sunk an unknown but presumably significant amount of money into opening up a California office to produce a game (Oni) that at the time of the MS buyout was over a year behind schedule and still slipping, and they had just started development on an insanely ambitious title (Halo) that was, at best, not going to ship for another two years. Add it all up, and you get a company in desperate need of funding, not to mention some marketing muscle.
Second, pissing and moaning about how a finished game diverges, a little or a lot, from whatever rabid speculation some of the designers indulged in while it was still in pre-alpha form only shows how little you understand about the development process. Here's the nutshell version: Shit happens. You start out with a design doc that says the game will have perfect realtime raytraced voxels and will also make you coffee and fetch your slippers. A year later all of your hair is missing because BigHardwareCo's graphics APIs are an undocumented mess, the playtesters insist that they want tea, not coffee, and half of the company's monitors explode during a cutscene in level 10 for no reason that you can determine. You have a finite amount of money to spend, a finite amount of time you can take before the online game sites lose interest in your screenshots, and a finite amount of prozac you can dispense to your engineers. All of those airy promises you made a year ago are now completely irrelevant. You fix the problems that are fixable, remove the parts that can't be done, polish what does work until it shines, and save the fifty great ideas you had to abandon for the sequel. Assuming there is s sequel. Assuming, of course, you ship at all.
Companies do not run on good intentions alone, and designers don't make games for their own amusement: they make them so that other people can see them. (And so they can get paid.) Given a choice between slowly slipping under the waves and suddenly getting a very, very large wad of cash from a company that was also going to market my product like nobody's business, I know what I, and any other adult, would choose in a heartbeat.
Actually, intial development work for Halo was all done on a PC, using MS Visual Studio. The engine was designed to be portable, and in-house work on a Mac port was in process at the time of the Microsoft buyout, but Jason Jones was on record at the time as saying that all primary development work for Halo was being done on PCs.
As far as I know, the only pre-xbox demo of Halo that wasn't performed on a PC was the 1999 Macworld one.
And how many people remember Bungie promising over and over that Halo would not become a console game?
Zero. Because they never said that.
Or, later, that it would be released for the XBox and (PC or Mac) simultaneously?
Zero, because they never said that either. (They've consistantly promised that it would eventually ship for all platforms, but the word "simultaneously" was never, ever used.)
And frankly, even if they had promised to deliver it directly to your doorstep in a shiny box with a nice pink ribbon on it... so what? For all of the amateur theatrics that have grown up around it, making games is a business. Building a game as large as Halo requires an investment of millions of dollars, not to mention uncountable man-hours. In the end, the decision about what to release, and when, gets made on the basis of what will maximize the return on that investment, and for no other reason. Ever. Some developer mentioned in an interview three years ago that they'd ship a BeOS version? Irrelevant. Show me the money.
You can implement all the features of GNOME in a fraction of the code.
Fascinating assertion, captain. I look forward to seeing the release of your far-more-svelte competing project. Let us know when it's out, eh?
I don't think that this could work with the vserver patches as they are currently implemented. There is still only one kernel and (important bit here) one scheduler running: so all of your assorted vservers will run on the total number of procs aloted to the scheduler.
You might be able to hack up some sort of "vpsradm" command that instructed the scheduler to never assign processes from a certain vserver to a certain processor, but I suspect that such a thing is a lot easier to theorize about than to actually implement. (Actual kernel hackers are encouraged to add their two cents here.)
now you could get 8 processors of RS/6000 goodness, run production on 4 processors, Test on 2 processors, and Dev on 2 processors.
What you're suggesting is pretty much the opposite of how this package works. As the author himself states, you cannot dedicate hardware resources to a vserver. Only one kernel is ever running, and you use all of your cpus or none. Process- and user-space isolation is provided, but if a process in one vserver tickles a kernel bug that crashes the system, the whole ball of wax will come down with that vserver. (Likewise, it's very likely that a kernel-level root exploit will allow you to break out of the vserver and attack the whole system.)
Essentially, vserver is to the process space what chroot is to the filesystem layer.
This is not inherantly better or worse than the "system partitioning" approach; it's just a different approach, and will have different uses.
For example, consider a user wanting to close a window. The user has two choices. She can type Ctrl-W and close it, or take her hands off of the keyboard (which she was using) and go for the little 'x' in the corner to close the window.
Aha, now we're descending from the general case to a specific case. And in this specific case, you're quite right: the "window-close" widget in just about every WIMP interface out there takes forever and a day (relatively speaking) to get a lock on. The metaphor has stuck with us primarily because nobody's thought of a better method yet.
That was just to close a window. Selecting menu items (once you've successfully moused to the menu) is even longer.
That depends on one huge-arse variable: where the menus are.
In the Windows world (and that of its imitators, Gnome and KDE), the menus are placed in the top of the floating window. A terrible mistake, and it makes them dog-slow to use for all of the reasons that you mention and a few more as well -- since the location of the menu onscreen isn't predictable, you can't even use muscle memory to make up for the other defects in the design.
Put the menus in a predictable location (e.g. the top of the screen, with frequently-used menus closer to the corners) and the situation changes dramatically. Deeply nested hierarchical menus reduce the effect a bit, but that's the visual equivilant of adding more modifier keys: hopefully you keep the must-used actions closest to the top of the "tree".
2. Muscle memory doesn't work with the mouse
What a weird assertion to make. Why on earth would you believe such a thing? Unless you're moving your mouse via telekinesis, your fine motor control is very much involved in the process.