Yeah, it was called MkLinux, which much like The Hurd, runs over a MACH Microkernel.
I believe it wouldn't be too difficult for you to run Darwin on your 7200, which also uses the Mach u-kernel. Can't guarantee that it runs on pre 604 PPCs, but I am fairly certain it has that capability. Now as for performance... well, the 7200(/90, 120?) were never that speedy to begin with. And as for getting enough RAM in that box to run OS X... I guess you better stick with Mac OS 7.6.1 or go LinuxPPC. Or best of all, go Debian GNU/Linux!
I actually do sympathise with you, but I bought my Power Computing PowerCenter 604/132 to run the Ex-Apple next generation OS. At least I got to run it... and with SheepShaver's Virtualized Mac OS, It was prractically as if I had Mac OS X 5 years ahead of schedule. Sigh... I wonder if Blue OS will run on PPC Linux.
A few years ago one of my friends spend most of a month doing little else but hack the Hurd onto his 7200 (or maybe it was a 7500... kinda fuzzy). Unfortunately, it was all in vain... he never actually got it to the point where you he could show the end result being useful at anything, and the Hurd Project looked as if it had completely died at that point, so others dragged him away from the thing.
Now The Hurd finally looks like is will release in a manner of months (120 months more should do it!), but this super-cross-platform Mach Microkernel hasn't bought any portability fot the Hurd... it is X86 only. Man, I should have just stuck with the BeOS. At least it was a Microkernel that was actually released, even if it ended up defecting to Intel. And hey, if the microkernel OS includes enough GNU utilities, can I just pretend that it is GNU? Hey, they gave out some system code as GPL!
I wonder how difficult it would be to get OpenBeOS back over the x86/PPC barrier? Well, that is, after it get released. Are there any pools on which will release first, GNU/HURD x86 or OpenBeOS/x86? I'd like to see them odds.
Being disbarred means that he can't practice law... Clinton was not impeached. Illegal wiretapping of politically powerful people is is better recipe for impeachment than illicit sexual contact with politically subservient assistants. Perhaps a home movie of Bush snorting Coke off of Tipper Whor^d^d^d^dGore's genitals leaking onto Gnutella would have some interesting political repurcussions. "Parental Advisory Warning - Insufficient censoring of Tipper may induce nausea."
As we have already seen, a few nukes will hardly destroy the world, though it may make life near ground zero distinctly unleasant for some time... especially without a nearby ocean to absorb most of the fallout. Global life expectancy may drop a few years for most populations. But censorship would still be rampant (Thanks Mrs Gore!) and easing the discomfort of radiation poisoning with Cannabis and narcotics would still be illegal. (Clinton, Bush, respectively should decriminalize or accept reprimand.)
Yes, Fallout help to solve that annoying biodiverity problem
Most mutations have no end result, of those few that actually affect the organism, they usually have negative effects. The only time that mutations tend to be helpful are in response to drastic environmental change. So the only mutation that would become widespread would be that which increases radiation tolerance. The vast majority of organisms, along with their null and negatively mutagenic varieties, would die out.
The very few remaining survivors wouldn't have nearly as much of that annoying biodiversity to deal with. Because variety is the spice to the ulcer of life. Human tissue is so much more pleasing when it is oxidized and blisering. And I look forward to seeing how the scrotum evolves in response to natural selection.
Shades of Groundhog Day? Yeah, it was almost cartoonish. "Stay right here, don't move."
*squeeaky girly scream---crunch*
Ahhh, that was a fond memory. Somehow I don't think they inteded this scene to be funny, but it was fucking hillarious. My audience wasn't so expressive, but I laughed loud enough for at least my row.
But I really don't see that the movie was bad... it just felt a bit too short. Then again, maybe that's just compared to the last movie I saw, which was about 3 hours.... Damn halflings!
Once I was hanging with jungle-girl in her nifty, very breathable, breast contouring woven top (were the nipples being friendly?), watching her climb labbers and such, I don't imaging that I would care about science or machinery either. Saving ethic pop-star TnA? Yah, then sign me up as action hero! I don't imagine that I would have found the name Mumba all that appealing, but since I saw the movie.... MMMMMMMumba
Even without the nifty chix in dispararate styles (mmm, cappuchino biker), I agree with you about Mr Irons, and Mr Jones. (I'm almost dissapointed there wasn't a 7-up yours reference, but then I suppose I can be a bit cheesy at times.) Althohugh to be fair, there wasn't really that much screen time for anybody but the main character. the movie felt like it progressed way too quickly, and I would have appreciated if it were strecthed out just a bit more, to give a chance to soak in each of the scenes a bit more. Even before thigs get all time travelly, there could have been more character development so that I could actually get attached. I felt distant from the main character through the whole movie, and maybe that could have been remedied with more early development. They could have showed a scene with him actually teaching, which would have been a great opportunity for all kinds of foreshadowing, and a reference point to compare to the end of the movie. But most importantly, Mumba, Samantha Mumba. I think I need to go buy a soulful pop-R&B album right about now.
I still agree with you that the darts were a marker. The goo was a sticky mess, rubbing it off completely wasn't an option. I wonder why the boy was able to escape, but it seems possible that the dart's target was only pursued by the shooter, and Mr Irons had interfered with the morlock that chased the boy.
Beowolf clusters are considered horizontal scaling, while NUMA clusters are considered vertical scaling. From my experience (SGI CC-NUMA) a NUMA cluster looks like a single computer system, with a single shared memory. (SGI systems are even Cache-Coherent, so that there is minimal performance loss if your data is in the RAM of the most distant CPU.. a significant issue with 256 nodes). This means that you don't have to deal with MPI or other systems to deal with disparate memory of seperate machines, so you can mostly code as if it were a single supercomputer. In fact, that is how SGI actually makes their supercomputers.
NUMA clusters tend to have scalability problems related to the cache coherence issue, so for a vertically scalable CC-NUMA box, you have to pay SGI the big bux. I haven't looked at IBMs NUMA technology, but if they own sequent, then they probably have similar capability.
As for the work to set one up, SGI's 3000 line is fairly trivial, the hardware is designed to handle it, and I think you only need NUMA link cables to scale beyond what fits inside a deskside case, if not a full height case. Now if you have a wall of these systems, you will need the NUMAlink (nee CrayLink) lovin'. As for an Intel based system, I suspect it wouldn't be nearly as easy... unless your vendor provides the setup for you. On your own, you would need to futz with cabling the systems together, just like in a beowolf. Except that your performance depends on finding a reasonably priced, high bandwidth, low-latency interconnect. Gigabit Ethernet wont scale very far, so going past 16 CPUs would be very unpleasant. If you expend the effort, you will end up with a cluster of machines that behave very much like a "supercomputer" though. Good luck!
A Beowolf cluster of these? That's so 2 years ago... I'd love to see a NUMA-linked cluster of these! And I wonder how long it would take that cluster running GNOME under XFree86 to have Mozilla render this page nested at -1!
Seriously, I wonder how long it takes to boot. Every NUMA machine I've ever used took more than its fair share of time to boot... much more than a standard Unix server. It would be pretty funny if compiling the kernel turned out to be trivial compared to booting!
Who would have guessed that technology would progress? Most people alive this century. There wa at least one guy at the beginning of this century who thought that no more technical advances were possible, and the patent office would have to be closed. He was the exception. Even "Moore's (so called) Law" postulates that the transistors on a CPU would double in number every 18 months, which mostly explains your progression along the Intel product line. That is insightful?
You don't get the point at all. This is about NUMA technology escaping the proprietary systems of the past and becoming feasible outside of Government funded Nuclear Detonation Simulations and corporate data-mining. This is about Free Software enabling this once proprietary technology due to the generous donations by SGI and IBM, who want Linux to bring its buzz to fruition on their hardware and services.
Now who would have guessed that somebody could use this as an opportunity to talk about email, the web, and not just "jihads and holocausts, but also rebirths and renaissances", not to mention neo-luddites. This is the poorest mismoderation I've seen for a while, and I wish that AC who claimed to have mod points had actually had the balls to use them. This obvious display of crap-flooding doesent even end with a proper sentence. And despite the fact we differ on many points, on this point we agree. He writes: God, this is disgusting. What a fucking rediculous troll. If anybody w/mod points actually possesses an ounce of intelligence, maybe I wouldn't have to puke right now.
By computer graphics technology, do you mean a render-farm? That would be much better suited to a standard beowolf cluster, because the interprocess communication is minimal. That is an example of an "embarrasingly parallel" compumpting problem. As for live graphics, an Onyx workstation doesn't benefit from CPU power so much as its Reality Engine/Infinite Reality graphics pipeline. When you need better graphics performance, you can utilize multiple graphics pipelines. Some of the Onyx 3000s can use (I think) as many as 16 different IR3s for improved graphics output, like in RealityCenters.
The point of this article isn't that kernel compilation is fast because it is usually CPU bound, and 16 CPUs alleviate that problem. If fact kernel compiliation isn't strictly CPU bound... there are other performance limits too, especially disk performance. The significance of this article is that multithreaded kernel compiles benefit from the increased interprocess communication potential in NUMA architectures... performance would be much worse trying to spread that across a beowolf cluster.
While rendering (not displaying) graphics or running basic number crunching does not benefit much from a NUMA setup as compared to a beowolf style setup, some complex equation do benefit... computing the first million digits of Pi would use interprocess communication, as would large scale data minig application. It's been a few years since I've been there, I saw a huge cluster of Origin 2000s CC-NUMAed together with one Onyx 2, which handled displaying the results of the data mining. (An Onyx2 is basically an Origin 2000 with a graphics pipeline. An Onyx 3000 without any graphics bricks is an Origin 3000.)
But the reserve for this machine is $3850. The article says 16 way, which would be four of these four-way SMP systems. That also doesn't take into account the need for a high-bandwidth, low latency interconnect (like SGI's NumaLink.) If you aren't expecting more than 16-way SMP, then you can probably get away with switched Gigabit Ethernet, as long as it is kept distinct from the nornal network connectivity. If the Gigabit upgrade is still dual portm then you are set. If not, you'll neet another NIC - though you will only really need one for the whole cluster.
Maybe instead of two grand, the poster meant twenty-grand. Either way, $20 grand is better than $100K!
I wanted to know what the hell a BOF is! Am I the only one who was amazed that a "BOF session" could happen with a bunch of BSD geeks? That sounds like how I would spend the night when I had a girlfriend. Now there's unnanounced "boffing" at BSDCon?
So while I'm pretty sure that BOF has nothing to do with procreation, I'm still unclear as to what it means. It is mentioned twice in the first paragraph, but not defined anywhere. I briefly reference Dictionary.com and the first definition I see is "Boring Old Fart."
There really needs to be a conscienscious effort to improve technical articles, by defining every term that uses CAPS. Even if the word is a common acronym, (or maybe not an acronym at all e.g. BASIC, UNIX, FAX) because as illustrated by the parent post, there are no universally recognized acronyms. The abbreviation can be a good thing for lengthy articles, but not if there is a loss of information.
I had to spend much time googling around oreillynet.com to find out what a "BOF session" is, because Dictionary.com didn't recognize the phrase. Just plain BOF actually had the correct answer listed first, but because I was briefly referencing, and not carefully reading, I skipped the proper definition because it was a hyperlink.
Just to save the trouble for anyone else who isn't familiar with the term, a "BOF session" is a meeting to discuss a certain topic. BOF in this case is "Birds of a Feather" who flock together, whether preplanned or ad-hoc, and the prase dates back at least to USENIX conferences in the early 1980s.
Aye. The Candy coating on OS X probably reflects useage of Quartz related technologies. Well, thanks for pointing that out. I suppose that the printing interface is completely handled at the DisplayPDF level, so that Darwin hackers cant really contribute here either.
Honestly, I was trolling to see if anyone had tried Office X on Mac OS classic, because I couldn't google for it. Too much spam from Office X reviews noting that the Classic environment could run previous versions of Office, so that there wasn't much reason to upgrade if you already used Office 2000.
Thanks for setting me straight. I still wonder if using a print server would alleviate the problem.
I'd love to see actual engineering documents and code for 'Vger' Voyager 6, so that I could build a living machine. This would allow me the option of sex0ring it... I mean, "interfacing" with it, or else removing the infestation of carbon lifeforms from the surface of the 3rd planet. You earthlings had better hope I'm in good mood, or hard up, lest yee shall all perish before me.
Sure, that is lots of power to wield. That's probably why NASA denys the existence of any probes beyond Voyager 2. Don't believe it!
I just hope that the Slashdot community will have the guts to go after AOL for this in the same way they would Microsoft. As it is I suspect the response will be a bit like the response in Congress to administration stonewalling or the like. Outrage at the actions if it is the other party, appologism if it is their own party, or even outrage that people would even complain.
Right, Slashdot has always been pro-AOL. Apologism should be expected, as without AOL, most of Slashdot's readers wouldn't be part of The Information Superhighway! (That means Inter-net for you newbies.) Hell, I have a shell script,./Slashdot.sh which automatically dials AOL, logs me in, and then launches Slashdot automatically. For me, Slashdot just isn't the same unless I hear "You've got mail!" whle the page loads.
Oh, btw, I am writing this in MS word for Linux. It has a "submit to Slashdot" menu button, which I find really convienient. I sure hope Microsoft isn't violating my privacy and reading what I posted!
If his apps run natively in OS X, then they are using the Carbon API. Unless he suddenly stopped using all of mis Macintosh Applications and switched to NeXT applications which were ported to Cocoa. Carbon is a clarified Mac OS API, which runs equally well between Mac OS X and Mac OS classic (as long as you have CarbonLib installed. Almost all Mac OS 8.5 and above have this, it's a free download for 8.1).
Have you tried your Ofice X on Mac OS 9? The solution is to just run Mac OS 9, because you don't yet have support for your wide fromat Epson, and your word requires it. Just like anything else, you can't fully migrate to Mac OS X until all of your hardware is supported. In the mean time, Maybe Mac OS 9 isn't as purty to show off, but you use what lets you get your work done. If you really need the stability of OS X right now, then you can reboot to print if it is easier than sending your file off to another machine.
Just out of curiosity, does your Wide format printer have a print server? I would think that that might alleviate your problem as well.
I honestly don't know much about Japanese. But I suspect (just a hunch) that as long as you kept your verbs consistent, you could mix and match nouns and still come out rather understandable. Sort of like in "Jabberwocky". Hmm, let me change that... I can also see the inverse being true as well. I suppose it would matter the context of the situation, and the subject matter.
Did you say that you are learning German, French and Japanese simultaneously? Which would you say has been hardest, or least difficult to learn? I always understood French to be just a metter of learning the vocabulary once the grammer was understood. On the other hand, I believe Mark Twain had some criticism regarding German "having more exceptions than rules".
One other thing, are you familiar with the Sapir-Whorf Theorem? It has been called by other names as well, but it basically specifies IIRC that expressive capability of a language can influence the range of the native speaker's thought. Have you found that you had ideas that you couldn't properly express before, that you now have the proper liguistic tools to vocalize? Or that with new language skills you have gained new insights and points of view that you didn't previously concieve? I guess I wonder how fluent you are with your languages... do you find you internally translate to/from English, or do you directly "think" in various languages?
Just as I side note, I would be really tempted to get you drunk just to hear what comes out of you.:D that sounds like fun! I'd wanna have a tape recorder handy, of course....
A CD-ROM would not let you put anything on the system. You need a hard drive for that. Bootable CD-ROMs are based off of Floppy images (el-torito standard for x86), so there is no reason you couldn't just burn the floppy image to a CD with your custom setup of tcpdump, ngrep et al.
There are some that would say you shouldn't be running these applications from your filewall anyway, but from another machine on your network. The only reason utilities would need to be on your firewall is to measure the kinds of traffic outside of your network, and that would still be better to run from an external workstation. Such complexity might lead to your firewall failing.
I don't speak for the pro-floppy legions, but while your previous post was insightful, it did not deserve a score of 5. I don't use a floppy based distro, but this debate has acutally pushed me towards the benefits of such a solution. In any event, the issue is not as cut-and-dry as you or Theo seem to think, and your being overmoderated encourages me to play the devil's advocate.
Unless you are a long time computer hobbyist with generations of surplus hardware laying around, a hard drive is not trivial to acquire. On the otherhand, anyone who gets junkmail more than likely has thrown away many floppies. A harddrive is only cheap compared to what harddrives used to cost. For the price of one inexpensive hard drive, you can get hundreds of floppy disks. Hard drives are not impervious to failure, and for the cost, redundant copies of your packet filter conf. file have a better chance of survival on $50 worth of floppys than one $50 hard drive.
If top security is your concern, then you don't keep log files on a rewriteable medium like a hard drive. A better answer is a read-only boot device, with logs sent to a printer. You can reboot if anything goes wrong, and still have access to the logs while offline. You can stay online while making and testing updates on another floppy, and even keep multiple floppies with multiple configs.
For a single function device, it is tough to argue that a harddrive makes a RAID (Redundant Assortment of Inexpensive Diskettes;) passe. Performance is not an issue because single function devices should run from RAM - running from a harddrive would be undesireable. It is even argueable that read-only floppies can be better than CD-ROMs because they are easier to update. CD-R defeats the whole inexpensive aspect, unless you already have the hardware and buy blank media in bulk. Even then, floppies are still cheaper. While you may now get AOL CDs in the mail, these aren't as useful as AOL floppies! If AOL ever starts mailing preformatted harddrives, then I will gleefully retract my arguments.
-castlan
Don't back down!
on
To The Pain
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The fact that these guys went through so much trouble to bring the element of physical pain to the typically less than tactile sport of gaming indicates that they are masochists. They were dissatisfied by the lack of pain in their gaming, so they fixed that shortcoming. Besides their basic engineering skills at accomplishing this feat, they also indicate their intelligence and cynical wit with the clever title of Painstation. This photograph provides evidence that they have the ability to perseverse through adversity.
Now if you combine these qualities, you get a formidable force. If Sony threatens them over over the use of the term "Painstation", I say that they shouldn't back down, and I would be puzzled if they did! Not many people would confuse an archiaic self contained bar-sized electronic table-tennis-torture device with the Sony Playstation line of Home gaming consoles, even with the "force-feedback" option. I say that these clever masochists should stand by their production in the face of the belligerent Sony, and who better to do it! If not for the cause of marketing technological advancement despite questionable Intellectual Property practice, then at least for the sake of art! More than just a proof-of-concept of a phyciological Human Computer Interaction theory, this is an artistic statement regarding the current reality of the gaming and home entertainment industries. All great art comes from suffering artists, and this is no exception!
Of course, I do have a few reservations. The word should not be an issue, but if this is going to be produced for mass marketing, then I might take exception to the use of the Playstation font or visual appearance. I think that bringing this into the world of commerce should impose some IP rules. The fact that most of this is preexisting technology should definitely be considerdd to th benefit of the Painstation.
The most important concern is how sanitary this is. I'd hate to pick up Hepatitis at the local video arcade...
I suppose that your avoidance is a good thing, considering that one should learn rules, then understand those rules, before breaking them. IMO, this is the background that is commonly forgotten in the phrase "all rules are meant to be broken."
Perhaps it is good excercise for your brain, to keep variant languages distinct. This may increase mental capacity and flexibility, and may aid cognition in further pursuits.
As the parent described, code mixing can provide for greater expressiveness, as long as all codes are common among participants. Personally, I can't envision a circumstance where grammatical code mixing can be beneficial, unless obfuscation is the intended result. It would be a strectch, but perhaps there are circumstances where grammar mixing might overcome communicative deficiencies, perhaps because of the communications medium. This might become evident when considereing: a croweded environment full of interference; an echoing chamber, an electronic voice reproduction; and various forms of written communication. Again, this is highly speculative.
More feasible is vocabulary code mixing. Many languages have words for concepts that cannot be sufficiently expressed with native words, so foreign vocabulary is regularly adopted by natural languages. While vocabulary mixing may be subconsious in populations living along language-borders, there may also be instances of conscious efforts towards language unification. Esperanto is the most blatant example of this I am aware of, but it may also take place in communities with recent immigration.
In an academic environment, code mixing should definitely be avaioded unless a deliberate part of social research. Once you feel comforatble with the languages, and use then in non-academic situations, then it may be worth re-evaluating code mixing. As you are formally educated, it would be your responsibility to consider the intended audience's prior experience and understnding.
While I agree with the content of your post, I disagree with the emphasis. As successful as the commoditization of computing has been, no-name commodity-composed machines should not be considered the default for the purchase of a new system. Most of thse arguments equally apply to SGI workstations, or even many name brand x86 architecure system vendors.
Apple is just another of many recognizable high quality systems vendors. You emphasize that "Apple hardware" should not be peered with plebian PC hardware. I'd like to remind everybody that before the iMac revolution, Apple was open, and there were a handfull of Mac clones available that offered value and selection. Apple killed the openness of their platform that was very promising. While this was good for Apple Computer, this was bad for consumers who are subject to vendor-dependance. If something ever happens to Apple Inc., then Macintosh consumers are screwed. Now Apple may include 3rd party graphics hardware, modernized bus interfaces, etc. But I still smell the corpse of Power Computing, and fear the despotism fostered by Apple.
BTW, you definitely deserve your moderations for this post, but I strongly feel that you should change your.sig file.
Aye, I guess I was a bit out of it when I read your post. My point was basically that addressed by your first point. After they jumped into the Apple pond with both feet, they already lost their focus and the game.
If they ket the BeBox as a fallback during everything else, I think they would have had a real chance. Especially when they started hyping the Media OS stuff... leveraging the geek port et al., they could have had a fairly powerful low host media production platform, with no monopolists to artificially restrict their functionality.
Really, they just needed their safety net, so they could have lasted longer. I think most computing success stories start out w/ the tech first, and find their niche/killer app later, if they survive long enough. Then, they have to have some way to keep that niche out of the hands of the bigger fish. Apple didn't know it was going to be a publishing platform until after they introduced the laser printer. Be could have used that geek port almost as their BeOS hypothetical killer app dongle. No competetors could run whatever hardware used the geek port without prohibitive effort. That could have bought them enough time to solidify their niche.
But that is all speculation. I relent, and with sober reexamination of your post, I agree with you.
Well, you will have at least 6 months between changes. It was supposed to be a little sarcastic, but really I was sparing you. I could have brought up how Freenet can just as easily harbor unsavory trojans and wicked macro files, just like Word. I also could have talked about how the binary Word.docs can contain all kinds of personal info, which can be awful if you make the.doc file publically available, as then your private info will leak out into society at large. Similarly, you can inadvertently copy a sensitive file into Freenet, and once that happens you can never remove it again. Hell, you can even accidentally copy a Word file which contains private info into Freenet, and by the time you realize that your private info was in the.doc, it is too late to remove it. I also could have pointed out that if you thought that Outlook was a dangerous medium for spreading all kinds of filthy viruses, then you have much more to look forward to, because when Freenet is in the full swing of things, there will be no mail servers on which to host virus-scanners, and no way to filter out all of the infectious garbage! Of course, I am a very thoughtful person, and being sensitive to your needs I didn't bring any of this stuff up. It's a good thing I know when to keep my mouth shut, huh! 8D
Don't you feel better now? I would say "See, I told you so!" if I were one of those kinds of people, but I'm not, and it's a good thing too. See, I can be comforting when I try. Not at all sociopathic-like. 8P
Now how about a hug? %D
No, wait, come back! I was being friendly, I was! Hey!:-(
You missed the point, absurdidty..
on
More on MPEG4
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· Score: 1
The parent post was arguing the absurdity of temporal taxation. I fully agree that it is unreasonable to be taxed for merely existing, despite any arbitrary position you might find yourself in. In the US we have the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happieness. I don't owe the government anything to be alive, to be unrestricted, or to experience passive forms of entertainment if that is what I like to do.
The gas tax is a significantly different issue. It is not ephemeral, arbitrary or temporal. Gasoline is a measurable substance that you can expend. Expenditure of this resource is not without consequence. Perhaps you don't feel these consequences justify taxation, but that has nothing to do with the valid point made by Kymermosst. Even if you abstract the Gas Tax to its equivalent "per mile" taxation, that is still a reasonable meter to pay for wear and tear on roadways.
The gas per hour might be a differnt story, if there was any reasonable "gas per hour" usage, which is absurd. To indulge in absurdidty, consider the previously mentioned "inalienable rights". If I were to board a foreign state-owned and operated spacecraft, then perhaps I might not be guaranteed the same rights, being as I am now an alien. (Hey, I said absurd, didn't I?) Now not only is my right to exist questionable, my very expression of life is an expenditure of the foreign state. Perhaps then it could be reasonable to be "passively" taxed on a temporal basis, as I really am using "a certain amount of gas per hour" (In this case, a mixture of gasses.) Of course it is still not the best situation to be in. If you had the option, micropayments per breath would probably be less desireable than just a flat rate paid up front. This is arguably the most feasible way to implement such an arangement, as it has already been demonstrated with, if memory serves, Dennis and a constituent of the former Soviet Union.
Back to Earth for a moment, perhaps instead of bitching over taxation of Petrolium products, perhaps it should be encouraged, with an incentive to transition to more sustainable, less harmful forms of energy. Yes, even in California. We should not be relying on the Middle East for such a critical need, especially when global politics is considered.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it was called MkLinux, which much like The Hurd, runs over a MACH Microkernel.
I believe it wouldn't be too difficult for you to run Darwin on your 7200, which also uses the Mach u-kernel. Can't guarantee that it runs on pre 604 PPCs, but I am fairly certain it has that capability. Now as for performance... well, the 7200(/90, 120?) were never that speedy to begin with. And as for getting enough RAM in that box to run OS X... I guess you better stick with Mac OS 7.6.1 or go LinuxPPC. Or best of all, go Debian GNU/Linux!
I actually do sympathise with you, but I bought my Power Computing PowerCenter 604/132 to run the Ex-Apple next generation OS. At least I got to run it... and with SheepShaver's Virtualized Mac OS, It was prractically as if I had Mac OS X 5 years ahead of schedule. Sigh... I wonder if Blue OS will run on PPC Linux.
A few years ago one of my friends spend most of a month doing little else but hack the Hurd onto his 7200 (or maybe it was a 7500... kinda fuzzy). Unfortunately, it was all in vain... he never actually got it to the point where you he could show the end result being useful at anything, and the Hurd Project looked as if it had completely died at that point, so others dragged him away from the thing.
Now The Hurd finally looks like is will release in a manner of months (120 months more should do it!), but this super-cross-platform Mach Microkernel hasn't bought any portability fot the Hurd... it is X86 only. Man, I should have just stuck with the BeOS. At least it was a Microkernel that was actually released, even if it ended up defecting to Intel. And hey, if the microkernel OS includes enough GNU utilities, can I just pretend that it is GNU? Hey, they gave out some system code as GPL!
I wonder how difficult it would be to get OpenBeOS back over the x86/PPC barrier? Well, that is, after it get released. Are there any pools on which will release first, GNU/HURD x86 or OpenBeOS/x86? I'd like to see them odds.
Being disbarred means that he can't practice law... Clinton was not impeached. Illegal wiretapping of politically powerful people is is better recipe for impeachment than illicit sexual contact with politically subservient assistants. Perhaps a home movie of Bush snorting Coke off of Tipper Whor^d^d^d^dGore's genitals leaking onto Gnutella would have some interesting political repurcussions. "Parental Advisory Warning - Insufficient censoring of Tipper may induce nausea."
As we have already seen, a few nukes will hardly destroy the world, though it may make life near ground zero distinctly unleasant for some time... especially without a nearby ocean to absorb most of the fallout. Global life expectancy may drop a few years for most populations. But censorship would still be rampant (Thanks Mrs Gore!) and easing the discomfort of radiation poisoning with Cannabis and narcotics would still be illegal. (Clinton, Bush, respectively should decriminalize or accept reprimand.)
Yes, Fallout help to solve that annoying biodiverity problem
Most mutations have no end result, of those few that actually affect the organism, they usually have negative effects. The only time that mutations tend to be helpful are in response to drastic environmental change. So the only mutation that would become widespread would be that which increases radiation tolerance. The vast majority of organisms, along with their null and negatively mutagenic varieties, would die out.
The very few remaining survivors wouldn't have nearly as much of that annoying biodiversity to deal with. Because variety is the spice to the ulcer of life. Human tissue is so much more pleasing when it is oxidized and blisering. And I look forward to seeing how the scrotum evolves in response to natural selection.
Shades of Groundhog Day? Yeah, it was almost cartoonish. "Stay right here, don't move."
*squeeaky girly scream---crunch*
Ahhh, that was a fond memory. Somehow I don't think they inteded this scene to be funny, but it was fucking hillarious. My audience wasn't so expressive, but I laughed loud enough for at least my row.
But I really don't see that the movie was bad... it just felt a bit too short. Then again, maybe that's just compared to the last movie I saw, which was about 3 hours.... Damn halflings!
Once I was hanging with jungle-girl in her nifty, very breathable, breast contouring woven top (were the nipples being friendly?), watching her climb labbers and such, I don't imaging that I would care about science or machinery either. Saving ethic pop-star TnA? Yah, then sign me up as action hero! I don't imagine that I would have found the name Mumba all that appealing, but since I saw the movie.... MMMMMMMumba
Even without the nifty chix in dispararate styles (mmm, cappuchino biker), I agree with you about Mr Irons, and Mr Jones. (I'm almost dissapointed there wasn't a 7-up yours reference, but then I suppose I can be a bit cheesy at times.) Althohugh to be fair, there wasn't really that much screen time for anybody but the main character. the movie felt like it progressed way too quickly, and I would have appreciated if it were strecthed out just a bit more, to give a chance to soak in each of the scenes a bit more. Even before thigs get all time travelly, there could have been more character development so that I could actually get attached. I felt distant from the main character through the whole movie, and maybe that could have been remedied with more early development. They could have showed a scene with him actually teaching, which would have been a great opportunity for all kinds of foreshadowing, and a reference point to compare to the end of the movie. But most importantly, Mumba, Samantha Mumba. I think I need to go buy a soulful pop-R&B album right about now.
I still agree with you that the darts were a marker. The goo was a sticky mess, rubbing it off completely wasn't an option. I wonder why the boy was able to escape, but it seems possible that the dart's target was only pursued by the shooter, and Mr Irons had interfered with the morlock that chased the boy.
Beowolf clusters are considered horizontal scaling, while NUMA clusters are considered vertical scaling. From my experience (SGI CC-NUMA) a NUMA cluster looks like a single computer system, with a single shared memory. (SGI systems are even Cache-Coherent, so that there is minimal performance loss if your data is in the RAM of the most distant CPU.. a significant issue with 256 nodes). This means that you don't have to deal with MPI or other systems to deal with disparate memory of seperate machines, so you can mostly code as if it were a single supercomputer. In fact, that is how SGI actually makes their supercomputers.
NUMA clusters tend to have scalability problems related to the cache coherence issue, so for a vertically scalable CC-NUMA box, you have to pay SGI the big bux. I haven't looked at IBMs NUMA technology, but if they own sequent, then they probably have similar capability.
As for the work to set one up, SGI's 3000 line is fairly trivial, the hardware is designed to handle it, and I think you only need NUMA link cables to scale beyond what fits inside a deskside case, if not a full height case. Now if you have a wall of these systems, you will need the NUMAlink (nee CrayLink) lovin'. As for an Intel based system, I suspect it wouldn't be nearly as easy... unless your vendor provides the setup for you. On your own, you would need to futz with cabling the systems together, just like in a beowolf. Except that your performance depends on finding a reasonably priced, high bandwidth, low-latency interconnect. Gigabit Ethernet wont scale very far, so going past 16 CPUs would be very unpleasant. If you expend the effort, you will end up with a cluster of machines that behave very much like a "supercomputer" though. Good luck!
A Beowolf cluster of these? That's so 2 years ago... I'd love to see a NUMA-linked cluster of these! And I wonder how long it would take that cluster running GNOME under XFree86 to have Mozilla render this page nested at -1!
Seriously, I wonder how long it takes to boot. Every NUMA machine I've ever used took more than its fair share of time to boot... much more than a standard Unix server. It would be pretty funny if compiling the kernel turned out to be trivial compared to booting!
Who would have guessed that technology would progress? Most people alive this century. There wa at least one guy at the beginning of this century who thought that no more technical advances were possible, and the patent office would have to be closed. He was the exception. Even "Moore's (so called) Law" postulates that the transistors on a CPU would double in number every 18 months, which mostly explains your progression along the Intel product line. That is insightful?
You don't get the point at all. This is about NUMA technology escaping the proprietary systems of the past and becoming feasible outside of Government funded Nuclear Detonation Simulations and corporate data-mining. This is about Free Software enabling this once proprietary technology due to the generous donations by SGI and IBM, who want Linux to bring its buzz to fruition on their hardware and services.
Now who would have guessed that somebody could use this as an opportunity to talk about email, the web, and not just "jihads and holocausts, but also rebirths and renaissances", not to mention neo-luddites. This is the poorest mismoderation I've seen for a while, and I wish that AC who claimed to have mod points had actually had the balls to use them. This obvious display of crap-flooding doesent even end with a proper sentence.
And despite the fact we differ on many points, on this point we agree. He writes:
God, this is disgusting. What a fucking rediculous troll. If anybody w/mod points actually possesses an ounce of intelligence, maybe I wouldn't have to puke right now.
-castlan
By computer graphics technology, do you mean a render-farm? That would be much better suited to a standard beowolf cluster, because the interprocess communication is minimal. That is an example of an "embarrasingly parallel" compumpting problem. As for live graphics, an Onyx workstation doesn't benefit from CPU power so much as its Reality Engine/Infinite Reality graphics pipeline. When you need better graphics performance, you can utilize multiple graphics pipelines. Some of the Onyx 3000s can use (I think) as many as 16 different IR3s for improved graphics output, like in RealityCenters.
The point of this article isn't that kernel compilation is fast because it is usually CPU bound, and 16 CPUs alleviate that problem. If fact kernel compiliation isn't strictly CPU bound... there are other performance limits too, especially disk performance. The significance of this article is that multithreaded kernel compiles benefit from the increased interprocess communication potential in NUMA architectures... performance would be much worse trying to spread that across a beowolf cluster.
While rendering (not displaying) graphics or running basic number crunching does not benefit much from a NUMA setup as compared to a beowolf style setup, some complex equation do benefit... computing the first million digits of Pi would use interprocess communication, as would large scale data minig application. It's been a few years since I've been there, I saw a huge cluster of Origin 2000s CC-NUMAed together with one Onyx 2, which handled displaying the results of the data mining. (An Onyx2 is basically an Origin 2000 with a graphics pipeline. An Onyx 3000 without any graphics bricks is an Origin 3000.)
But the reserve for this machine is $3850. The article says 16 way, which would be four of these four-way SMP systems. That also doesn't take into account the need for a high-bandwidth, low latency interconnect (like SGI's NumaLink.) If you aren't expecting more than 16-way SMP, then you can probably get away with switched Gigabit Ethernet, as long as it is kept distinct from the nornal network connectivity. If the Gigabit upgrade is still dual portm then you are set. If not, you'll neet another NIC - though you will only really need one for the whole cluster.
Maybe instead of two grand, the poster meant twenty-grand. Either way, $20 grand is better than $100K!
I wanted to know what the hell a BOF is! Am I the only one who was amazed that a "BOF session" could happen with a bunch of BSD geeks? That sounds like how I would spend the night when I had a girlfriend. Now there's unnanounced "boffing" at BSDCon?
So while I'm pretty sure that BOF has nothing to do with procreation, I'm still unclear as to what it means. It is mentioned twice in the first paragraph, but not defined anywhere. I briefly reference Dictionary.com and the first definition I see is "Boring Old Fart."
There really needs to be a conscienscious effort to improve technical articles, by defining every term that uses CAPS. Even if the word is a common acronym, (or maybe not an acronym at all e.g. BASIC, UNIX, FAX) because as illustrated by the parent post, there are no universally recognized acronyms. The abbreviation can be a good thing for lengthy articles, but not if there is a loss of information.
I had to spend much time googling around oreillynet.com to find out what a "BOF session" is, because Dictionary.com didn't recognize the phrase. Just plain BOF actually had the correct answer listed first, but because I was briefly referencing, and not carefully reading, I skipped the proper definition because it was a hyperlink.
Just to save the trouble for anyone else who isn't familiar with the term, a "BOF session" is a meeting to discuss a certain topic. BOF in this case is "Birds of a Feather" who flock together, whether preplanned or ad-hoc, and the prase dates back at least to USENIX conferences in the early 1980s.
Aye. The Candy coating on OS X probably reflects useage of Quartz related technologies. Well, thanks for pointing that out. I suppose that the printing interface is completely handled at the DisplayPDF level, so that Darwin hackers cant really contribute here either.
Honestly, I was trolling to see if anyone had tried Office X on Mac OS classic, because I couldn't google for it. Too much spam from Office X reviews noting that the Classic environment could run previous versions of Office, so that there wasn't much reason to upgrade if you already used Office 2000.
Thanks for setting me straight. I still wonder if using a print server would alleviate the problem.
I'd love to see actual engineering documents and code for 'Vger' Voyager 6, so that I could build a living machine. This would allow me the option of sex0ring it... I mean, "interfacing" with it, or else removing the infestation of carbon lifeforms from the surface of the 3rd planet. You earthlings had better hope I'm in good mood, or hard up, lest yee shall all perish before me.
Sure, that is lots of power to wield. That's probably why NASA denys the existence of any probes beyond Voyager 2. Don't believe it!
I just hope that the Slashdot community will have the guts to go after AOL for this in the same way they would Microsoft. As it is I suspect the response will be a bit like the response in Congress to administration stonewalling or the like. Outrage at the actions if it is the other party, appologism if it is their own party, or even outrage that people would even complain.
./Slashdot.sh which automatically dials AOL, logs me in, and then launches Slashdot automatically. For me, Slashdot just isn't the same unless I hear "You've got mail!" whle the page loads.
Right, Slashdot has always been pro-AOL. Apologism should be expected, as without AOL, most of Slashdot's readers wouldn't be part of The Information Superhighway! (That means Inter-net for you newbies.) Hell, I have a shell script,
Oh, btw, I am writing this in MS word for Linux. It has a "submit to Slashdot" menu button, which I find really convienient. I sure hope Microsoft isn't violating my privacy and reading what I posted!
If his apps run natively in OS X, then they are using the Carbon API. Unless he suddenly stopped using all of mis Macintosh Applications and switched to NeXT applications which were ported to Cocoa. Carbon is a clarified Mac OS API, which runs equally well between Mac OS X and Mac OS classic (as long as you have CarbonLib installed. Almost all Mac OS 8.5 and above have this, it's a free download for 8.1).
Have you tried your Ofice X on Mac OS 9? The solution is to just run Mac OS 9, because you don't yet have support for your wide fromat Epson, and your word requires it. Just like anything else, you can't fully migrate to Mac OS X until all of your hardware is supported. In the mean time, Maybe Mac OS 9 isn't as purty to show off, but you use what lets you get your work done. If you really need the stability of OS X right now, then you can reboot to print if it is easier than sending your file off to another machine.
Just out of curiosity, does your Wide format printer have a print server? I would think that that might alleviate your problem as well.
I honestly don't know much about Japanese. But I suspect (just a hunch) that as long as you kept your verbs consistent, you could mix and match nouns and still come out rather understandable. Sort of like in "Jabberwocky". Hmm, let me change that... I can also see the inverse being true as well. I suppose it would matter the context of the situation, and the subject matter.
:D that sounds like fun! I'd wanna have a tape recorder handy, of course....
Did you say that you are learning German, French and Japanese simultaneously? Which would you say has been hardest, or least difficult to learn? I always understood French to be just a metter of learning the vocabulary once the grammer was understood. On the other hand, I believe Mark Twain had some criticism regarding German "having more exceptions than rules".
One other thing, are you familiar with the Sapir-Whorf Theorem? It has been called by other names as well, but it basically specifies IIRC that expressive capability of a language can influence the range of the native speaker's thought. Have you found that you had ideas that you couldn't properly express before, that you now have the proper liguistic tools to vocalize? Or that with new language skills you have gained new insights and points of view that you didn't previously concieve? I guess I wonder how fluent you are with your languages... do you find you internally translate to/from English, or do you directly "think" in various languages?
Just as I side note, I would be really tempted to get you drunk just to hear what comes out of you.
-castlan
A CD-ROM would not let you put anything on the system. You need a hard drive for that. Bootable CD-ROMs are based off of Floppy images (el-torito standard for x86), so there is no reason you couldn't just burn the floppy image to a CD with your custom setup of tcpdump, ngrep et al.
There are some that would say you shouldn't be running these applications from your filewall anyway, but from another machine on your network. The only reason utilities would need to be on your firewall is to measure the kinds of traffic outside of your network, and that would still be better to run from an external workstation. Such complexity might lead to your firewall failing.
I don't speak for the pro-floppy legions, but while your previous post was insightful, it did not deserve a score of 5. I don't use a floppy based distro, but this debate has acutally pushed me towards the benefits of such a solution. In any event, the issue is not as cut-and-dry as you or Theo seem to think, and your being overmoderated encourages me to play the devil's advocate.
;) passe. Performance is not an issue because single function devices should run from RAM - running from a harddrive would be undesireable. It is even argueable that read-only floppies can be better than CD-ROMs because they are easier to update. CD-R defeats the whole inexpensive aspect, unless you already have the hardware and buy blank media in bulk. Even then, floppies are still cheaper. While you may now get AOL CDs in the mail, these aren't as useful as AOL floppies! If AOL ever starts mailing preformatted harddrives, then I will gleefully retract my arguments.
Unless you are a long time computer hobbyist with generations of surplus hardware laying around, a hard drive is not trivial to acquire. On the otherhand, anyone who gets junkmail more than likely has thrown away many floppies. A harddrive is only cheap compared to what harddrives used to cost. For the price of one inexpensive hard drive, you can get hundreds of floppy disks. Hard drives are not impervious to failure, and for the cost, redundant copies of your packet filter conf. file have a better chance of survival on $50 worth of floppys than one $50 hard drive.
If top security is your concern, then you don't keep log files on a rewriteable medium like a hard drive. A better answer is a read-only boot device, with logs sent to a printer. You can reboot if anything goes wrong, and still have access to the logs while offline. You can stay online while making and testing updates on another floppy, and even keep multiple floppies with multiple configs.
For a single function device, it is tough to argue that a harddrive makes a RAID (Redundant Assortment of Inexpensive Diskettes
-castlan
The fact that these guys went through so much trouble to bring the element of physical pain to the typically less than tactile sport of gaming indicates that they are masochists. They were dissatisfied by the lack of pain in their gaming, so they fixed that shortcoming. Besides their basic engineering skills at accomplishing this feat, they also indicate their intelligence and cynical wit with the clever title of Painstation. This photograph provides evidence that they have the ability to perseverse through adversity.
Now if you combine these qualities, you get a formidable force. If Sony threatens them over over the use of the term "Painstation", I say that they shouldn't back down, and I would be puzzled if they did! Not many people would confuse an archiaic self contained bar-sized electronic table-tennis-torture device with the Sony Playstation line of Home gaming consoles, even with the "force-feedback" option. I say that these clever masochists should stand by their production in the face of the belligerent Sony, and who better to do it! If not for the cause of marketing technological advancement despite questionable Intellectual Property practice, then at least for the sake of art! More than just a proof-of-concept of a phyciological Human Computer Interaction theory, this is an artistic statement regarding the current reality of the gaming and home entertainment industries. All great art comes from suffering artists, and this is no exception!
Of course, I do have a few reservations. The word should not be an issue, but if this is going to be produced for mass marketing, then I might take exception to the use of the Playstation font or visual appearance. I think that bringing this into the world of commerce should impose some IP rules. The fact that most of this is preexisting technology should definitely be considerdd to th benefit of the Painstation.
The most important concern is how sanitary this is. I'd hate to pick up Hepatitis at the local video arcade...
-castlan
I suppose that your avoidance is a good thing, considering that one should learn rules, then understand those rules, before breaking them. IMO, this is the background that is commonly forgotten in the phrase "all rules are meant to be broken."
Perhaps it is good excercise for your brain, to keep variant languages distinct. This may increase mental capacity and flexibility, and may aid cognition in further pursuits.
As the parent described, code mixing can provide for greater expressiveness, as long as all codes are common among participants. Personally, I can't envision a circumstance where grammatical code mixing can be beneficial, unless obfuscation is the intended result. It would be a strectch, but perhaps there are circumstances where grammar mixing might overcome communicative deficiencies, perhaps because of the communications medium. This might become evident when considereing: a croweded environment full of interference; an echoing chamber, an electronic voice reproduction; and various forms of written communication. Again, this is highly speculative.
More feasible is vocabulary code mixing. Many languages have words for concepts that cannot be sufficiently expressed with native words, so foreign vocabulary is regularly adopted by natural languages. While vocabulary mixing may be subconsious in populations living along language-borders, there may also be instances of conscious efforts towards language unification. Esperanto is the most blatant example of this I am aware of, but it may also take place in communities with recent immigration.
In an academic environment, code mixing should definitely be avaioded unless a deliberate part of social research. Once you feel comforatble with the languages, and use then in non-academic situations, then it may be worth re-evaluating code mixing. As you are formally educated, it would be your responsibility to consider the intended audience's prior experience and understnding.
-castlan
While I agree with the content of your post, I disagree with the emphasis. As successful as the commoditization of computing has been, no-name commodity-composed machines should not be considered the default for the purchase of a new system. Most of thse arguments equally apply to SGI workstations, or even many name brand x86 architecure system vendors.
.sig file.
Apple is just another of many recognizable high quality systems vendors. You emphasize that "Apple hardware" should not be peered with plebian PC hardware. I'd like to remind everybody that before the iMac revolution, Apple was open, and there were a handfull of Mac clones available that offered value and selection. Apple killed the openness of their platform that was very promising. While this was good for Apple Computer, this was bad for consumers who are subject to vendor-dependance. If something ever happens to Apple Inc., then Macintosh consumers are screwed. Now Apple may include 3rd party graphics hardware, modernized bus interfaces, etc. But I still smell the corpse of Power Computing, and fear the despotism fostered by Apple.
BTW, you definitely deserve your moderations for this post, but I strongly feel that you should change your
-castlan
Aye, I guess I was a bit out of it when I read your post. My point was basically that addressed by your first point. After they jumped into the Apple pond with both feet, they already lost their focus and the game.
If they ket the BeBox as a fallback during everything else, I think they would have had a real chance. Especially when they started hyping the Media OS stuff... leveraging the geek port et al., they could have had a fairly powerful low host media production platform, with no monopolists to artificially restrict their functionality.
Really, they just needed their safety net, so they could have lasted longer. I think most computing success stories start out w/ the tech first, and find their niche/killer app later, if they survive long enough. Then, they have to have some way to keep that niche out of the hands of the bigger fish. Apple didn't know it was going to be a publishing platform until after they introduced the laser printer. Be could have used that geek port almost as their BeOS hypothetical killer app dongle. No competetors could run whatever hardware used the geek port without prohibitive effort. That could have bought them enough time to solidify their niche.
But that is all speculation. I relent, and with sober reexamination of your post, I agree with you.
Well, you will have at least 6 months between changes. .docs can contain all kinds of personal info, which can be awful if you make the .doc file publically available, as then your private info will leak out into society at large. Similarly, you can inadvertently copy a sensitive file into Freenet, and once that happens you can never remove it again. Hell, you can even accidentally copy a Word file which contains private info into Freenet, and by the time you realize that your private info was in the .doc, it is too late to remove it. I also could have pointed out that if you thought that Outlook was a dangerous medium for spreading all kinds of filthy viruses, then you have much more to look forward to, because when Freenet is in the full swing of things, there will be no mail servers on which to host virus-scanners, and no way to filter out all of the infectious garbage! Of course, I am a very thoughtful person, and being sensitive to your needs I didn't bring any of this stuff up. It's a good thing I know when to keep my mouth shut, huh! 8D
:-(
It was supposed to be a little sarcastic, but really I was sparing you.
I could have brought up how Freenet can just as easily harbor unsavory trojans and wicked macro files, just like Word.
I also could have talked about how the binary Word
Don't you feel better now? I would say "See, I told you so!" if I were one of those kinds of people, but I'm not, and it's a good thing too. See, I can be comforting when I try. Not at all sociopathic-like. 8P
Now how about a hug? %D
No, wait, come back! I was being friendly, I was! Hey!
The parent post was arguing the absurdity of temporal taxation. I fully agree that it is unreasonable to be taxed for merely existing, despite any arbitrary position you might find yourself in. In the US we have the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happieness. I don't owe the government anything to be alive, to be unrestricted, or to experience passive forms of entertainment if that is what I like to do.
The gas tax is a significantly different issue. It is not ephemeral, arbitrary or temporal. Gasoline is a measurable substance that you can expend. Expenditure of this resource is not without consequence. Perhaps you don't feel these consequences justify taxation, but that has nothing to do with the valid point made by Kymermosst. Even if you abstract the Gas Tax to its equivalent "per mile" taxation, that is still a reasonable meter to pay for wear and tear on roadways.
The gas per hour might be a differnt story, if there was any reasonable "gas per hour" usage, which is absurd. To indulge in absurdidty, consider the previously mentioned "inalienable rights". If I were to board a foreign state-owned and operated spacecraft, then perhaps I might not be guaranteed the same rights, being as I am now an alien. (Hey, I said absurd, didn't I?) Now not only is my right to exist questionable, my very expression of life is an expenditure of the foreign state. Perhaps then it could be reasonable to be "passively" taxed on a temporal basis, as I really am using "a certain amount of gas per hour" (In this case, a mixture of gasses.) Of course it is still not the best situation to be in. If you had the option, micropayments per breath would probably be less desireable than just a flat rate paid up front. This is arguably the most feasible way to implement such an arangement, as it has already been demonstrated with, if memory serves, Dennis and a constituent of the former Soviet Union.
Back to Earth for a moment, perhaps instead of bitching over taxation of Petrolium products, perhaps it should be encouraged, with an incentive to transition to more sustainable, less harmful forms of energy. Yes, even in California. We should not be relying on the Middle East for such a critical need, especially when global politics is considered.
-castlan