Dude... I rarely watch any television. In fact, the only times I find myself in front of that box is when I'm watching a movie on video cassette, and even that is rare.
The reason I don't watch television is simple: It's annoying. So many advertisements and so many idiotic, mindless shows have made it unbearable for me. I'm amazed that so many Americans subject themselves to this activity; what a waste of perfectly good time. You could be working on your car, or hanging out with some hot chick.
The Internet, on the other hand, is not a medium for wasting time, as with the television: It's simply not an entertainment medium. It is a medium for communication, education and, more recently, commerce. That there are ways to waste hours on IM is another story altogether.
This is a marvelous idea! Now that I've thought of it, I believe that every college should do something unique each year as part of its acceptance process. In other words, technical colleges might have you break an encryption, or fix some obscure bug nobody can find in a huge piece of software, or something difficult and obscure that most people wouldn't be able to accomplish. If you can do that, it adds major points to your acceptance process and gives you a huge advantage. Of course, other important stuff (like what grade you got in kindergarden) would still apply.
In my not-so humble opinion as a leading expert on this subject, AOL should not purchase Red Hat. The reason for this is simple: AOL is not and should not be in the operating system business.
A company should have its focus on a specific thing, and then put all its energy into being the best at that thing. As AOL is clearly in the business of providing Internet service to its subscribers, it should concentrate on that endeavor.
This does not, however, mean that AOL cannot make some sort of agreement with Red Hat to bundle a native Linux version of the America Online client software. In fact, I believe that AOL and Red Hat should make a "strategic alliance" in order to compete with the Evil Empire, otherwise known as Microsoft.
In fact, Red Hat should make such strategic alliances with every company out there that competes with Microsoft on any level. For example, the Quicken people, just as an example off the top of my head. Having so-called "brand name" commercial software available for the Linux platform would certainly give millions of Windows users out there a plausible alternative.
I believe that colleges should assign a CS project to their students, and after the projects are turned in, they should kick all those students out of school, permanently, on the grounds of doing the assignment, which automatically constitutes cheating. Students that don't do the assignment will immediately be kicked out of school for not doing the assignment, which also constitutes cheating. This will make life much easier for college professors because they won't have to prepare more than one lesson. I believe this is also more efficient financially.
I remember once seeing a program on television about modern pinball machines. I was surprised that they actually used a 486 in the pinball machine, with a special "video" card to display stuff on the LED grid display.
Why in the world is a whole 486 needed? I don't see why they couldn't implement the thing using a few cheap 8 bit processors. Oh well.
I know a really smart guy who happens to be extremely good at the game of Chess. One night, he had a really big party at his house. An hour or so prior to this, he filled a large plastic tub with ice and placed in it many cans and bottles of various brands of beer. The folks who came over actually brought a whole bunch of beer, so we ended up with enough beer for about four parties.
During the party, my friend, the smart guy, drank more beer than anybody else. After everyone left (except me), he discovered that his plastic tub was still full of beer--virtually all of it was still there. We chit-chatted and had some beer for a while. I had a few, and he drank them like crazy. Then, we started playing Chess, and he continued to drink.
About an hour into the game (we were really taking our time with this game), he got up and stumbled into his bathroom. While he was in there, I heard all kinds of banging, like he was kicking something in there. There were quite a few loud bangs, then quiet for a few moments, and then, all of a sudden, there was a hugeBANG! and I actually felt the house shaking, as if an earthquake was beginning. (I surmise that he fell on the floor.) At this point, I was laughing like crazy, but trying to keep it down. Next thing I know, his bathroom door opened, but instead of coming back to the kitchen to continue our game, he went into his bedroom. I waited for a few minutes, but he didn't come back, so I eventually turned off all his lights and let myself out.
I figure he had nearly 40 pints of beer that night! I am not exagerating! This man is very big, very strong, and he drinks a LOT, so it doesn't really surprise me that over a period of 6 hours or so, beginning when his guests came over around 8, and ending at 2 in the morning, when he went to the bathroom, that he had so much beer.
The next morning, he didn't even remember that we had been playing Chess. Furthermore, he had a monster hangover. When I asked him why he drank so much, his answer was, "Because it was there!"
So my conclusion from this whole story is that some Chess players who put so much of their brain into the game have some kind of psychological problem. In his case, it's alcoholism. In someone else's case, something else happens.
By the way, if you're a Chess expert, don't take this personally. I'm sure that you can be good at Chess and not be a psycho. But for some people, it has some kind of subconcious effect that I can't really explain. Oh well.
I believe that no government in the world should censor information available on the Internet. The Internet should be a way to exchange information freely, even if that information is illegal to obtain through other means. In fact, the governments of the world should encourage people to obtain illegal information over the Internet, and should pass laws making such illegal information legal if obtained through the Internet. Also, if the information is really illegal, like more illegal than most other illegal information, the government should give both the sender and receiver a hefty reward of, say, one year's worth of wages, tax free.
In other words, ban Internet censorship!
By the way, I was being somewhat sarcastic above. Oh well.
I don't like this at all... Currently, this sounds like a bucket of hype without the technical possibility of making a system like this actually work.
So, every parcel of space will have a website, eh? And where, pray tell, will these gajillions of websites be stored? Or, more likely, will each parcel of "space"--meaning its coordinates--be mapped to DNS? If so, this sounds just like the stupid idea a year or two ago of mapping peoples' phone numbers to DNS. (It's exactly the opposite of what you want to do. If you want to find a particular person's website, why not make use of the new.name TLD and use the person's full name?) Combine that with the current abuse of the DNS system, and the ongoing violations of its original design, and you have a big mess. (The ongoing violations are as follows: Every company or d00d out there gets the same domain name registered under.com,.net,.org,.this,.that, and whatever other.'s there are out there. The correct way to do this is by subdividing everything by two-letter country codes, as was originally intended, so that the address space won't get all jumbled up like it is now, thanks to the current mess.)
In other words, this sounds like just one more way to send SPAM. Oh well.
X11 isn't going to be replaced. But there is something that could happen. There could be an XFree86-Lite. An X with the same API as all the other X's, but designed and optimized for a non-networked standalone desktop. Strip out all the stuff that home PCs would never use. But make it compatible with the existing X. Hell, you could write it all as a kernel mod for all I care. But at least you would get your tiny weakling X for your desktop and I would still have my big and powerful X for my workstation and we could still use the same X applications.
That has got to be the smartest thing I've heard anyone on/. say all day! Honestly, why shouldn't there be an XFree-Lite for non-networked use? As it is, XFree86 runs very efficiently, even on my slower boxes, so a Lite version for single box use would haul ass. Hopefully, something like this will get implemented in the near future.
Besides a Lite version of X itself, I think the widely used toolkits need to begin using X's facilities correctly, or more correctly than they currently do. With these changes, home PC users will have some good alternatives to Windows and Macintosh.
Finally, I'm voting to keep X. It's a good system, developed when computers didn't have nearly as much power as they do today, and it's still just as good as it was back then. I believe that implementing a new, from-scratch system (with backward compatibility) would be stupid, because the overhead of backward compatibility would probably defeat the purpose of a new implementation anyway. Implementing something without backward compat would be the dumbest choice on the planet, because it would be a useless system.
This is what should happen. AOL should enter into some kind of agreement with Apple, SGI, Palm, Sun, a bunch of audio and video companies, and whatever remaining large ISPs there happen to still exist.
These companies would put together an army of programmers who would pick out the best bits of Mac OS X, Solaris, IRIX, BeOS (which Palm just acquired), Linux, the BSDs, and all the free embedded OSs out there. They would put together a bulletproof operating system that supports every standard out there and runs on just about any kind of hardware. This would be optimized for lightning fast performance and would have dazzling graphics and sound. Bundle with that a browser that supports all the standards, an office suite more complete than Microsoft's ever was, audio, video and graphics software capable of professional results, and a ton of games.
After doing this, AOL and the rest of the ISPs would remove their icons from Windows and heavily market the new software and crush Microsoft! Microsoft will go out of business within 6 months and everyone in the world will live happily ever after.
It'll never happen. Oh well.
Re:Something really cool!
on
Million Man LAN
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, just a quick follow-up to my earlier post...
For the longest time, I thought it would be cool to build a "render-farm" about the size of a refrigerator. I'd build this huge box about 6 feet cube. On two opposite sides, I'd put large double doors (with locking capability) to access the hardware inside.
Inside this large box, I'd put 4 racks, one in front of each door, so that you'd only have to open one door to access one rack.
I'd build 6 boxes for each rack, each containing, I estimate, 10 small single-board computers, each with individual power supplies and large hard drives. This would make 60 computers per rack, for a total of 240 computers inside the 6 foot cube. Actually, it wouldn't exactly be like that, because I'd get a few rackmount SGIs and put them in there as well.
The entire cube would be temperature insulated and cooled by two separate techniques simultaneously. First, it would contain an elaborate liquid cooling system. Antifreeze would be cooled down to very cold temperatures and run through a series of pipes through the cube. Each rack would receive 6 pipes, one for each box on the rack. Each box would have a pipe running through it, going in between all the blades of a heat sink on each CPU, as well as any component of the power supply that I feel needs super cooling. There would be no fans on the power supplies, so they wouldn't take up so much room. After travelling through one box, the antifreeze would make another pass through the main cooler before continuing on to another box on the same rack, and then on the next rack, etc.
The "main cooler" would actually be a series of radiators sitting inside a small freezer, with a large fan blowing the freezing air through them, by the way.
In addition to the liquid cooling system, there would be an air conditioner large enough for a good sized room installed on top of the cube, inside a cool looking enclosure. All extra space beside and behind the racks would be for air conditioning ducts. Cold air would blow on all the electronic components, keeping them nice and cool. Like I said before, the entire 6 foot cube would be temperature insulated. The doors would seal the unit shut when closed, for the most part. This would keep most of the dust outside, and allow the air conditioning to remain a "closed" system.
In the same room as this monstrocity, I'd build a large table in the shape of a U, or more like an O, but with an opening, so that a person (me) can sit inside the center. There would be 3 or 4 (or maybe 5) sets of monitors, keyboard and mouse on this desk. These would be dedicated X Window Systems, booting over NFS from one of the computers inside the cube.
Now here's what I'd do with this mess. I'd be able to run stable and current versions of all the BSDs, quite a few Linux distros, one or two or about 10 built-from-scratch distros of the above, several OS/2 installations, just for fun, and a bunch of computers running various virtualization software, such as VMWare or Bochs (or whatever they renamed their project to)... the SGI boxes would obviously run IRIX. Collectively, this big "computer" would allow a whole mess of software to run. Some of the computers would be dedicated to compiling kernels and programs. Others would run databases, where I'd store just about everything I could dream of. Collectively, the entire system would act as a huge data storage unit, making just about everything accessible to just about all the computers through NFS, SMB, FTP, or whatever protocols I decide to use. All of this would be accessible from the dedicated X boxes on the circular desk.
Once I have built one of these, I'll improve on the design and build more, until my entire house will be full of computers from floor to ceiling, leaving barely enough room to crawl around in access passages, and these computers would do just about every kind of processing there is... I might even have a network of 25 computers acting just as an elaborate firewall! Of course, before I can even start this project, I have to win the next huge lottery jackpot.
Oh well... Nobody said you can't dream about crap like this.:-)
I believe Adobe is run by a bunch of scum! They used to be a really cool company, but nowadays, they're just getting people arrested and withdrawing from the Asian market because they're racist! Why are they racist, you ask?! Well, simply because they're saying that Asians are thieves, that Asians pirate more software than, say, Whites or Latinos or Indians or something. That's why! I think the community should get together and bring back the "BoycottAdobe" website!
On the other hand, perhaps it would be benificial to all parties involved if some representatives from these "Asian" countries got together with Adobe management and knocked some sense into them through their thick skulls, because making, say, 50% profit because of piracy is better than making no profit at all because you're not even SELLING in the region, you IDIOTS!!!!
Something really cool!
on
Million Man LAN
·
· Score: 2, Offtopic
You can get small single board Pentiums with the memory, networking, video and sound hardware all built in. There are many models of these. Some are designed for embedded use, others as industrial computers, and yet others for other purposes. Some can fit in the palm of your hand, and others are a little bigger.
The really cool thing begins by buying a whole mess of these. Even different kinds. Modify a large tower case to contain them, and hack a high end KVM switch into the case, so that a single monitor, keyboard and mouse would be used. In other words, the thing would look like a factory made computer. Little does anybody know, there are, say, 40 computers inside.
Some of these computers would have hard drives, and would contain all the data used by all the others.
One of the computers would have two network interfaces, and would serve as a firewall and NAT "box" for the rest of the box, making it possible to hook up to an external network.
One of the computers would be an X server. Its job would be to display the software running on all the other computers.
All the others would boot various operating systems. You could run all the BSDs, several Linux distros, maybe one with your own Linux From Scratch setup, perhaps one of them would even run OS/2. Several might run VMWare or another virtualization system, so they could run more operating systems while other jobs are going on in the background. You would essentially end up with a "computer" that is actually a whole bunch of computers, running many operating systems and tons of software packages simultaneously.
NOW HERE'S THE COOL PART!
You take that to your next LAN party! Show everyone how you're running all kinds of applications in 20 different operating systems all at the same time, and the system stays very responsive!
I'll be downloading these binaries as soon as I get home from work. Hopefully, they'll run under FreeBSD. Otherwise, I'll have to go into my garage to dig up one of my working Linux boxes.:) Oh well.
It would be great if anyone could build a custom kernel.
Imagine this... Let's say it's 5 years down the road, and the hot new computer is the 72 ghz Apple Pentium G7 with 64 gigs of on-chip ram. Hard drives have been totally eliminated because new, memory based permanent storage technology has been invented and proven over the past 2 years. An entire meg can be recorded in under 1 microsecond. The only remaining mechanical component of a computer is the standard Glass-RW drive (the 2 terabyte recordable successor to DVD), so the whole computer is now a small single board, and most of the electronic hardware is inside the main processor, an inch square in size. In fact, the plugs on this board take more room and cost more than the computation hardware.
Now imagine that a build world takes 4 minutes to complete. Here's how installation of FreeBSD 9.8-RELEASE takes place. (Yeah, I know this was a Linux thread.) You pop the Glassdisk in the drive, choose a few options, and all your software is configured, optimized, checked for security vulnerabilities, compiled and installed within 2 or 3 minutes.
In order for that to happen in 5 years, Granny needs the ability to custom configure her own kernel right now.
I think it's a myth that government contractors are doing so great. I happen to personally know the managers of several companies.
One is a genuine government contractor, which designs, produces and repairs all sorts of weird computer systems for government and military. About 5 or 6 years ago, business was booming for them, and they moved from a 20,000 square foot building to one twice as large, hired many employees, purchased all sorts of equipment... you name it. So much money was rolling in, they didn't know what to do with it. Now, they can barely pay the bills, and they might have to shut down.
The other two are aerospace design and manufacturing companies. One has been slowly shutting down for the past 3 years, and the other is just starting to get back on track.
If these folks aren't government contractors, I don't know who is.
I distinctly remember having the "too fast" problem with games. My all-time favorite game was Demon Stalkers. It had 16 colors! I think it was written for the 25 mhz 386s (or something like that) at the time. I remember trying to play it on my dad's computer, which must have been a 33 mhz, and it was too fast to be playable. Luckily, that computer had a "turbo" button you could push to reduce the speed or something. (How the heck did that work?!)
Anyway, due to hard coded timing, it won't even run on my P-III, P-IIs, Celerons... even my slowest Pentium is way too fast for this game. One of these days, I'll find some old 386 for sale on eBay or somewhere, and that baby is mine, dude!
The best way to get your hands dirty with any programming project is to get the code, study it for a while, and try to change and improve things. The kernel contains a little bit (or a lot) of everything. Try to fix bugs, improve performance or lower memory usage, if you're skilled at that kind of stuff.
The most important thing to remember is: Don't be intimidated by the kernel. Think of it as a really big program, because that's what it is. The only difference is that it doesn't get loaded by the operating system... it is the operating system!
Congratulations to the GNOME folks for making 2.0 a reality.
Now if only the number of shared libraries could be reduced... GNOME is currently a huge monster of a system, and I'm sure its size (and performance) could be improved for the next release.
I wonder what effect these observations will have on superstring theory, which is supposed to combine the physics of the micro-microscopic world (quantum physics) with the physics of the gigantic universe (general relativity), two branches of study that couldn't previously be combined due to huge inconsistancies in the math.
Superstring theory was supposed to have some profound effect on the theory of gravity, last I remember, but then, I haven't read up on it in a year or so, and there have probably been big developments since.
And with Gates' tax bracket, that's like a needle in a haystack. He must be paying 50% of this country's taxes. Well, not 50%, but whatever it is, it's a pretty hefty tax bill. I don't envy him one bit. (Of course, he probably doesn't mind too much, otherwise he would have retired years ago.)
Slashdot Mirror
Dude... I rarely watch any television. In fact, the only times I find myself in front of that box is when I'm watching a movie on video cassette, and even that is rare.
The reason I don't watch television is simple: It's annoying. So many advertisements and so many idiotic, mindless shows have made it unbearable for me. I'm amazed that so many Americans subject themselves to this activity; what a waste of perfectly good time. You could be working on your car, or hanging out with some hot chick.
The Internet, on the other hand, is not a medium for wasting time, as with the television: It's simply not an entertainment medium. It is a medium for communication, education and, more recently, commerce. That there are ways to waste hours on IM is another story altogether.
xxxxx O xxxxx H xxxxx xxxxx W xxxxx E xxxxx L xxxxx L xxxxx
Of course.
Rice B. Suck
0123-4567-8901-2345, Exp 13-99
SSN: 123-45-6789
Bwahaaaaahaaaaaahaaahaaaahaahahahahahahahahahaha ha hahahah!
The moral: Those who make the rules must **N**E**V**E**R** follow them.
......oooooooooooooooh well
This is a marvelous idea! Now that I've thought of it, I believe that every college should do something unique each year as part of its acceptance process. In other words, technical colleges might have you break an encryption, or fix some obscure bug nobody can find in a huge piece of software, or something difficult and obscure that most people wouldn't be able to accomplish. If you can do that, it adds major points to your acceptance process and gives you a huge advantage. Of course, other important stuff (like what grade you got in kindergarden) would still apply.
-_-_-O-_-_-H-_-_- -_-_-W-_-_-E-_-_-L-_-_-L-_-_- !
In my not-so humble opinion as a leading expert on this subject, AOL should not purchase Red Hat. The reason for this is simple: AOL is not and should not be in the operating system business.
A company should have its focus on a specific thing, and then put all its energy into being the best at that thing. As AOL is clearly in the business of providing Internet service to its subscribers, it should concentrate on that endeavor.
This does not, however, mean that AOL cannot make some sort of agreement with Red Hat to bundle a native Linux version of the America Online client software. In fact, I believe that AOL and Red Hat should make a "strategic alliance" in order to compete with the Evil Empire, otherwise known as Micro s oft.
In fact, Red Hat should make such strategic alliances with every company out there that competes with Micro s oft on any level. For example, the Quicken people, just as an example off the top of my head. Having so-called "brand name" commercial software available for the Linux platform would certainly give millions of Windows users out there a plausible alternative.
xx O xx H xx xx W xx E xx L xx L xx
I believe that colleges should assign a CS project to their students, and after the projects are turned in, they should kick all those students out of school, permanently, on the grounds of doing the assignment, which automatically constitutes cheating. Students that don't do the assignment will immediately be kicked out of school for not doing the assignment, which also constitutes cheating. This will make life much easier for college professors because they won't have to prepare more than one lesson. I believe this is also more efficient financially.
** O ** ** H ** ** ** W ** ** E ** ** L ** ** L **
Oh well.
I remember once seeing a program on television about modern pinball machines. I was surprised that they actually used a 486 in the pinball machine, with a special "video" card to display stuff on the LED grid display.
Why in the world is a whole 486 needed? I don't see why they couldn't implement the thing using a few cheap 8 bit processors. Oh well.
I know a really smart guy who happens to be extremely good at the game of Chess. One night, he had a really big party at his house. An hour or so prior to this, he filled a large plastic tub with ice and placed in it many cans and bottles of various brands of beer. The folks who came over actually brought a whole bunch of beer, so we ended up with enough beer for about four parties.
During the party, my friend, the smart guy, drank more beer than anybody else. After everyone left (except me), he discovered that his plastic tub was still full of beer--virtually all of it was still there. We chit-chatted and had some beer for a while. I had a few, and he drank them like crazy. Then, we started playing Chess, and he continued to drink.
About an hour into the game (we were really taking our time with this game), he got up and stumbled into his bathroom. While he was in there, I heard all kinds of banging, like he was kicking something in there. There were quite a few loud bangs, then quiet for a few moments, and then, all of a sudden, there was a huge BANG! and I actually felt the house shaking, as if an earthquake was beginning. (I surmise that he fell on the floor.) At this point, I was laughing like crazy, but trying to keep it down. Next thing I know, his bathroom door opened, but instead of coming back to the kitchen to continue our game, he went into his bedroom. I waited for a few minutes, but he didn't come back, so I eventually turned off all his lights and let myself out.
I figure he had nearly 40 pints of beer that night! I am not exagerating! This man is very big, very strong, and he drinks a LOT, so it doesn't really surprise me that over a period of 6 hours or so, beginning when his guests came over around 8, and ending at 2 in the morning, when he went to the bathroom, that he had so much beer.
The next morning, he didn't even remember that we had been playing Chess. Furthermore, he had a monster hangover. When I asked him why he drank so much, his answer was, "Because it was there!"
So my conclusion from this whole story is that some Chess players who put so much of their brain into the game have some kind of psychological problem. In his case, it's alcoholism. In someone else's case, something else happens.
By the way, if you're a Chess expert, don't take this personally. I'm sure that you can be good at Chess and not be a psycho. But for some people, it has some kind of subconcious effect that I can't really explain. Oh well.
I believe that no government in the world should censor information available on the Internet. The Internet should be a way to exchange information freely, even if that information is illegal to obtain through other means. In fact, the governments of the world should encourage people to obtain illegal information over the Internet, and should pass laws making such illegal information legal if obtained through the Internet. Also, if the information is really illegal, like more illegal than most other illegal information, the government should give both the sender and receiver a hefty reward of, say, one year's worth of wages, tax free.
In other words, ban Internet censorship!
By the way, I was being somewhat sarcastic above. Oh well.
It's too bad so many good shows are being and have been cancelled over the past several years.
I don't like this at all... Currently, this sounds like a bucket of hype without the technical possibility of making a system like this actually work.
So, every parcel of space will have a website, eh? And where, pray tell, will these gajillions of websites be stored? Or, more likely, will each parcel of "space"--meaning its coordinates--be mapped to DNS? If so, this sounds just like the stupid idea a year or two ago of mapping peoples' phone numbers to DNS. (It's exactly the opposite of what you want to do. If you want to find a particular person's website, why not make use of the new .name TLD and use the person's full name?) Combine that with the current abuse of the DNS system, and the ongoing violations of its original design, and you have a big mess. (The ongoing violations are as follows: Every company or d00d out there gets the same domain name registered under .com, .net, .org, .this, .that, and whatever other .'s there are out there. The correct way to do this is by subdividing everything by two-letter country codes, as was originally intended, so that the address space won't get all jumbled up like it is now, thanks to the current mess.)
In other words, this sounds like just one more way to send SPAM. Oh well.
X11 isn't going to be replaced. But there is something that could happen. There could be an XFree86-Lite. An X with the same API as all the other X's, but designed and optimized for a non-networked standalone desktop. Strip out all the stuff that home PCs would never use. But make it compatible with the existing X. Hell, you could write it all as a kernel mod for all I care. But at least you would get your tiny weakling X for your desktop and I would still have my big and powerful X for my workstation and we could still use the same X applications.
That has got to be the smartest thing I've heard anyone on /. say all day! Honestly, why shouldn't there be an XFree-Lite for non-networked use? As it is, XFree86 runs very efficiently, even on my slower boxes, so a Lite version for single box use would haul ass. Hopefully, something like this will get implemented in the near future.
Besides a Lite version of X itself, I think the widely used toolkits need to begin using X's facilities correctly, or more correctly than they currently do. With these changes, home PC users will have some good alternatives to Windows and Macintosh.
Finally, I'm voting to keep X. It's a good system, developed when computers didn't have nearly as much power as they do today, and it's still just as good as it was back then. I believe that implementing a new, from-scratch system (with backward compatibility) would be stupid, because the overhead of backward compatibility would probably defeat the purpose of a new implementation anyway. Implementing something without backward compat would be the dumbest choice on the planet, because it would be a useless system.
Just my $0.02.
Richard Stallman will go on a shooting rampage when he hears about this:
It's not GNU/Linux anymore! It's AOL /Linux!
This is what should happen. AOL should enter into some kind of agreement with Apple, SGI, Palm, Sun, a bunch of audio and video companies, and whatever remaining large ISPs there happen to still exist.
These companies would put together an army of programmers who would pick out the best bits of Mac OS X, Solaris, IRIX, BeOS (which Palm just acquired), Linux, the BSDs, and all the free embedded OSs out there. They would put together a bulletproof operating system that supports every standard out there and runs on just about any kind of hardware. This would be optimized for lightning fast performance and would have dazzling graphics and sound. Bundle with that a browser that supports all the standards, an office suite more complete than Microsoft's ever was, audio, video and graphics software capable of professional results, and a ton of games.
After doing this, AOL and the rest of the ISPs would remove their icons from Windows and heavily market the new software and crush Microsoft! Microsoft will go out of business within 6 months and everyone in the world will live happily ever after.
It'll never happen. Oh well.
Actually, just a quick follow-up to my earlier post...
For the longest time, I thought it would be cool to build a "render-farm" about the size of a refrigerator. I'd build this huge box about 6 feet cube. On two opposite sides, I'd put large double doors (with locking capability) to access the hardware inside.
Inside this large box, I'd put 4 racks, one in front of each door, so that you'd only have to open one door to access one rack.
I'd build 6 boxes for each rack, each containing, I estimate, 10 small single-board computers, each with individual power supplies and large hard drives. This would make 60 computers per rack, for a total of 240 computers inside the 6 foot cube. Actually, it wouldn't exactly be like that, because I'd get a few rackmount SGIs and put them in there as well.
The entire cube would be temperature insulated and cooled by two separate techniques simultaneously. First, it would contain an elaborate liquid cooling system. Antifreeze would be cooled down to very cold temperatures and run through a series of pipes through the cube. Each rack would receive 6 pipes, one for each box on the rack. Each box would have a pipe running through it, going in between all the blades of a heat sink on each CPU, as well as any component of the power supply that I feel needs super cooling. There would be no fans on the power supplies, so they wouldn't take up so much room. After travelling through one box, the antifreeze would make another pass through the main cooler before continuing on to another box on the same rack, and then on the next rack, etc.
The "main cooler" would actually be a series of radiators sitting inside a small freezer, with a large fan blowing the freezing air through them, by the way.
In addition to the liquid cooling system, there would be an air conditioner large enough for a good sized room installed on top of the cube, inside a cool looking enclosure. All extra space beside and behind the racks would be for air conditioning ducts. Cold air would blow on all the electronic components, keeping them nice and cool. Like I said before, the entire 6 foot cube would be temperature insulated. The doors would seal the unit shut when closed, for the most part. This would keep most of the dust outside, and allow the air conditioning to remain a "closed" system.
In the same room as this monstrocity, I'd build a large table in the shape of a U, or more like an O, but with an opening, so that a person (me) can sit inside the center. There would be 3 or 4 (or maybe 5) sets of monitors, keyboard and mouse on this desk. These would be dedicated X Window Systems, booting over NFS from one of the computers inside the cube.
Now here's what I'd do with this mess. I'd be able to run stable and current versions of all the BSDs, quite a few Linux distros, one or two or about 10 built-from-scratch distros of the above, several OS/2 installations, just for fun, and a bunch of computers running various virtualization software, such as VMWare or Bochs (or whatever they renamed their project to)... the SGI boxes would obviously run IRIX. Collectively, this big "computer" would allow a whole mess of software to run. Some of the computers would be dedicated to compiling kernels and programs. Others would run databases, where I'd store just about everything I could dream of. Collectively, the entire system would act as a huge data storage unit, making just about everything accessible to just about all the computers through NFS, SMB, FTP, or whatever protocols I decide to use. All of this would be accessible from the dedicated X boxes on the circular desk.
Once I have built one of these, I'll improve on the design and build more, until my entire house will be full of computers from floor to ceiling, leaving barely enough room to crawl around in access passages, and these computers would do just about every kind of processing there is... I might even have a network of 25 computers acting just as an elaborate firewall! Of course, before I can even start this project, I have to win the next huge lottery jackpot.
Oh well... Nobody said you can't dream about crap like this. :-)
I believe Adobe is run by a bunch of scum! They used to be a really cool company, but nowadays, they're just getting people arrested and withdrawing from the Asian market because they're racist! Why are they racist, you ask?! Well, simply because they're saying that Asians are thieves, that Asians pirate more software than, say, Whites or Latinos or Indians or something. That's why! I think the community should get together and bring back the "BoycottAdobe" website!
On the other hand, perhaps it would be benificial to all parties involved if some representatives from these "Asian" countries got together with Adobe management and knocked some sense into them through their thick skulls, because making, say, 50% profit because of piracy is better than making no profit at all because you're not even SELLING in the region, you IDIOTS!!!!
You can get small single board Pentiums with the memory, networking, video and sound hardware all built in. There are many models of these. Some are designed for embedded use, others as industrial computers, and yet others for other purposes. Some can fit in the palm of your hand, and others are a little bigger.
The really cool thing begins by buying a whole mess of these. Even different kinds. Modify a large tower case to contain them, and hack a high end KVM switch into the case, so that a single monitor, keyboard and mouse would be used. In other words, the thing would look like a factory made computer. Little does anybody know, there are, say, 40 computers inside.
Some of these computers would have hard drives, and would contain all the data used by all the others.
One of the computers would have two network interfaces, and would serve as a firewall and NAT "box" for the rest of the box, making it possible to hook up to an external network.
One of the computers would be an X server. Its job would be to display the software running on all the other computers.
All the others would boot various operating systems. You could run all the BSDs, several Linux distros, maybe one with your own Linux From Scratch setup, perhaps one of them would even run OS/2. Several might run VMWare or another virtualization system, so they could run more operating systems while other jobs are going on in the background. You would essentially end up with a "computer" that is actually a whole bunch of computers, running many operating systems and tons of software packages simultaneously.
NOW HERE'S THE COOL PART!
You take that to your next LAN party! Show everyone how you're running all kinds of applications in 20 different operating systems all at the same time, and the system stays very responsive!
Oh well.
I'll be downloading these binaries as soon as I get home from work. Hopefully, they'll run under FreeBSD. Otherwise, I'll have to go into my garage to dig up one of my working Linux boxes. :) Oh well.
It would be great if anyone could build a custom kernel.
Imagine this... Let's say it's 5 years down the road, and the hot new computer is the 72 ghz Apple Pentium G7 with 64 gigs of on-chip ram. Hard drives have been totally eliminated because new, memory based permanent storage technology has been invented and proven over the past 2 years. An entire meg can be recorded in under 1 microsecond. The only remaining mechanical component of a computer is the standard Glass-RW drive (the 2 terabyte recordable successor to DVD), so the whole computer is now a small single board, and most of the electronic hardware is inside the main processor, an inch square in size. In fact, the plugs on this board take more room and cost more than the computation hardware.
Now imagine that a build world takes 4 minutes to complete. Here's how installation of FreeBSD 9.8-RELEASE takes place. (Yeah, I know this was a Linux thread.) You pop the Glassdisk in the drive, choose a few options, and all your software is configured, optimized, checked for security vulnerabilities, compiled and installed within 2 or 3 minutes.
In order for that to happen in 5 years, Granny needs the ability to custom configure her own kernel right now.
I think it's a myth that government contractors are doing so great. I happen to personally know the managers of several companies.
One is a genuine government contractor, which designs, produces and repairs all sorts of weird computer systems for government and military. About 5 or 6 years ago, business was booming for them, and they moved from a 20,000 square foot building to one twice as large, hired many employees, purchased all sorts of equipment... you name it. So much money was rolling in, they didn't know what to do with it. Now, they can barely pay the bills, and they might have to shut down.
The other two are aerospace design and manufacturing companies. One has been slowly shutting down for the past 3 years, and the other is just starting to get back on track.
If these folks aren't government contractors, I don't know who is.
I distinctly remember having the "too fast" problem with games. My all-time favorite game was Demon Stalkers. It had 16 colors! I think it was written for the 25 mhz 386s (or something like that) at the time. I remember trying to play it on my dad's computer, which must have been a 33 mhz, and it was too fast to be playable. Luckily, that computer had a "turbo" button you could push to reduce the speed or something. (How the heck did that work?!)
Anyway, due to hard coded timing, it won't even run on my P-III, P-IIs, Celerons... even my slowest Pentium is way too fast for this game. One of these days, I'll find some old 386 for sale on eBay or somewhere, and that baby is mine, dude!
The best way to get your hands dirty with any programming project is to get the code, study it for a while, and try to change and improve things. The kernel contains a little bit (or a lot) of everything. Try to fix bugs, improve performance or lower memory usage, if you're skilled at that kind of stuff.
The most important thing to remember is: Don't be intimidated by the kernel. Think of it as a really big program, because that's what it is. The only difference is that it doesn't get loaded by the operating system... it is the operating system!
Congratulations to the GNOME folks for making 2.0 a reality.
Now if only the number of shared libraries could be reduced... GNOME is currently a huge monster of a system, and I'm sure its size (and performance) could be improved for the next release.
I wonder what effect these observations will have on superstring theory, which is supposed to combine the physics of the micro-microscopic world (quantum physics) with the physics of the gigantic universe (general relativity), two branches of study that couldn't previously be combined due to huge inconsistancies in the math.
Superstring theory was supposed to have some profound effect on the theory of gravity, last I remember, but then, I haven't read up on it in a year or so, and there have probably been big developments since.
And with Gates' tax bracket, that's like a needle in a haystack. He must be paying 50% of this country's taxes. Well, not 50%, but whatever it is, it's a pretty hefty tax bill. I don't envy him one bit. (Of course, he probably doesn't mind too much, otherwise he would have retired years ago.)
Negra Modelo. Because Guiness sucks.
Now THAT's a flaimbait if I've ever seen one! :)