Ok, what follows is slanted opinion. Treat it as such.
From my point of view as someone who converted from classic Amiga hardware + AmigaOS (with a bit of Linux/m68k every now and then) to ia32-Linux, I know it's hard to see why the Amiga-fan herd would want to use QNX as a desktop system. "It's a REAL-TIME OPERATING SYSTEM, for crap's sake! You're not SUPPOSED to run it on the DESKTOP!" I hear. Well, things aren't that simple.
As you probably know, the amiga herd was, in the 1990s, engaged in a bitter and one-sided war against the pc/windows crowd. Since the amiga hardware stopped being able to keep up with the speed that the PC was developing, the amiga fans had to use different arguments for why "the amiga REALLY is MUCH better than ANYTHING that Micro$oft keeps pushing you" than hardware superiority (which was true until about 1993, 1994...). Most of the arguments were based on these ideas:
AmigaOS has a small memory footprint and no bloat to speak of. You can fit a working AmigaOS system on a single 880KiB floppy.
Being able to fit a working environment on a floppy was important in the early days (1986-1990) because hard drives cost quite a lot of money and the most that people could afford was generally a 512KiB memory expansion and/or a second floppy drive. So-called "turbo" cards and the ability to take standard SIMM memory modules came later. As you can probably tell, the one-floppy feature is largely irrelevant today as there's enough memory to boot off one disk, then mount a filesystem on another or in the system memory.
Additionally, the cost of having a small memory footprint was that the system core was extremely simple. There was no memory protection, and the virtual memory extension programs that came later were doomed to fail because of the inconsistent manner that AmigaOS programs allocated memory (i.e. the "should we use MEMF_PUBLIC for this memory that we're going to pass between processes?").
(QNX paraller -- the web-station-on-a-HD-floppy demo)
The AmigaOS is a real-time operating system; we don't need no steenking 32MiB audio buffers for audio that doesn't crackle! Also, the OS task-switches much better than windows ever can.
All true, except that with the low context-switch time (that you get when you don't have to mess around with memory management; every process is king, remember?) you get major stability problems since every process can take the system down, in the middle of a disk transaction no less.
(QNX paraller -- two magic buzzwords: "real time")
Because the QNX kernel shares many of the properties that they used for arguments in their war-on-the-PC, they now have a collective hard-on for a closed-source real-time kernel not designed for desktop use. Another reason why the amiga fans are now slinging more vitriol is that the sensible ones moved to Linux on either ia32 or PPC a couple of years ago, when it became clear to most that despite the many iterations of "Amiga bought, new owner plans resurrection! Film at 11!", nothing was going to happen, ever (the best that some could do was release a "support the amiga!" CD single containing some of the worst electro-pop I've ever heard; this was in 1998).
I present as evidence the incredible shitflingery perpetrated in comp.sys.amiga.{advocacy,misc} regarding Linux around when the current owner had announced[0] that the next Amiga incarnation would be linux-based; some even claimed that the SCSI support in the 2.2.x kernel was horribly broken based on a message they'd seen regarding a SCSI bug in a 0.x kernel!
I used Amiga computers from the year 1988 to 1997. I wrote quite a bit of code, including a primitive texturemapped 3d-engine and a port of Id software's DOOM (based on the source release a few years ago, not the GPL one). The only thing about the Amiga that's alive now is the demo scene, and that's being killed off by the mainstreamization of the demoscene by assembly.com (there's a demoscene around the old CBM 64 though, so don't lose hope yet.)
And that's all I've got to say.
[0] Well, they didn't actually announce anything. It's said that during a presentation flick that they did, the words "Linux" and "Transmeta" were displayed; I'm assuming they got a whiff of "open-source linux-licking betrayal" from there.
Clarification: the P6's decoders don't work the same way, that much is true. But the first decoder of the decode group can decode instructions of up to 4 micro-ops in parallel with the two 1-uop decoders (if the instruction would generate more than 4 uops, the decoding stops being an one-cycle thing). So, if I'm any good at reading an AC's mind, I'd say that the two "minor" decoders are hard-wired to output uops for just these instructions because the one-uop instructions can be translated trivially.
Since the decoder group can put 4+1+1 == 6 uops into the reorder buffer per cycle (provided that the instructions are a properly aligned 4-1-1 uop group), you'd hardly get "a third of your possible micro-op issue rate" from just the one decoder.
Disclaimer: I'm writing this at 4:30 AM local time (18h personal uptime), so I can't be said to know anything about anything. Yes, I know a bit too much about the P6 core, yog-sothoth help me.
I don't think that the problem was that he didn't understand what a game console is, but that he wanted to correct what he considers an improper use of the word. That's how I would do it, if I wanted to be polite.
This stuff is important. Much more important than getting money for the software you write. (if that's a problem, get a day job for a company that's doing things using computers that are of minimal interest to the free software people; that's what I do.) It's about freedom. Not money. Get it? Once you break out of that foolish american frame of compulsive moneymaking, you'll see what he's really talking about.
As someone put in their.sig, "Lighten up. People will like you more."
Look, don't pretend that you all didn't know this was going to happen as soon as The Big Money moved into raping the internet in addition to other natural and semi-natural (i.e. man-made) resources. Since they have most of the people who make decisions relevant to this in their pocket, so you USAnians are going to be SOL (yes, that's no matter which asshole you vote for your precious little presidency) until you get rid of the fucking bastards.
That's my opinion anyway, and I'll be willing to say that I was wrong if in 10 years the situation substantially changes for the better.
But I'm having a hard time imagining even a medium crowd (like downtown Helsinki during the lunch breaks, which really isn't very much compared to other cities) where every single person is wearing gargoyle gear. I mean, I carry a cell phone on my belt most of the time but I wouldn't want an entire computer on me at all times. Even charging the cellphone roughly once a week is a hassle (as in, I have to remember that the phone is there) so you probably can imagine how much trouble it would be to recharge a battery on a wearable computer that's supposed to be active most of the time; if you turn it off at times why not use a laptop (like normal people do) instead of a wearable 'puter?
I mean, what are you going to do? Hang your clothes in a special recharger-and-coathanger contraption every evening?
From the one guy's translation, I think the ID number is more like an identifier for the microcode translator inside the CPU, a kind of a version number that isn't unique across 2 identical TM-equipped Vaios. ICBW, of course.
So what if we do things to ourselves that make us cease to be human? That would only be a bad thing if "human" were the best
we could be. I have this doubt that human beings are the optimum form of life, and if we are, then that's pretty sad.
What, you don't think that humanity has evolved over the last 4000 years? I must disagree; we've come a long way from hunting and collecting.
I'll bet that at the time when stone axes were brand new, people thought that "whoa, this thing, this stone age technology, is going to push us into godhood!". Same for bronze age, iron age, industrial age and the age that comes after the current one. There's only one thing that's certain about evolution; it won't happen in your lifetime (or mine, or the next generation's).
Now, could somebody please explain why the fuck do we need yet ANOTHER damn mp3 player, binary-only no less? We have, like FreeAMP, XMMS, gmpeg and some others, and that's only counting the ones that use gtk+; I'm sure there are a few for KDE too.
Everything that you could speed up with this sort of a contraption you can do with the linux buffers, only the linux buffers are better because they're implicit. QED.
(apologies for the lack of verbosity, but I'm not in the mood to go a'whoring after karma today.)
Gnutella's protocol is broken by design.. As is any protocol designed around senselessly flooding the network of connected nodes with packets; that doesn't work in the long run.
Encryption. This also allows for features such as "plausible deniability" (i.e. the operators of permanent nodes can't tell what the files in their cache contain, because they're all encrypted with the cleartext key and looked up with a SHA160 hash of the same cleartext key; since you can't get the cleartext key from the hash you can't decrypt the file.) A big plus if you're an ISP.
Caching. No more slashdot effect.
In my brutally honest opinion, gnutella sucks icebergs through a nano-tube.
... since all it takes is 36 hours with SoftICE, a case of mountain dew and a competent software cracker to figure out where the decryption part is in the software player that will inevitably be released and how to replicate its behaviour in C.
Or, if they only release hardware to do the playing, some malaysian hard-core people will eventually crack the die open and scan the silicon. Or the format will just die out. Whatever.
I think we all can agree that There Ain't No Such Thing As Copy Protection.
Brr. There was, once upon a time, a FINBASIC hack for the C64 that would alter the tokenization thingy in the RAM copy of the C64 ROM so that the commands would look vaguely like finnish. That was even less pleasant than C64 basic by itself.
Maybe I'm just an eeeeevil commie bastard, but doesn't it seem rather odd to anybody that people are saying things like "napster is dead" even though any platform worth using has an unofficial napster client that'll connect you to an opennap server once you get an address & stuff from napigator.com (IIRC)?
ChatScan violates some commonly recognised guidelines for what is proper behavior for an IRC client by repeatedly joining/parting channels and doing other stuff that generates much more server-to-server traffic than an ordinary IRC client would. The IRC networks aren't designed to support these... crawler bot / DoS hybrids.
If you ask me, the company that sells/provides ChatScan should think a fucking bit more before making this sort of programs. The IRC is not content-searchable, get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, what follows is slanted opinion. Treat it as such.
From my point of view as someone who converted from classic Amiga hardware + AmigaOS (with a bit of Linux/m68k every now and then) to ia32-Linux, I know it's hard to see why the Amiga-fan herd would want to use QNX as a desktop system. "It's a REAL-TIME OPERATING SYSTEM, for crap's sake! You're not SUPPOSED to run it on the DESKTOP!" I hear. Well, things aren't that simple.
As you probably know, the amiga herd was, in the 1990s, engaged in a bitter and one-sided war against the pc/windows crowd. Since the amiga hardware stopped being able to keep up with the speed that the PC was developing, the amiga fans had to use different arguments for why "the amiga REALLY is MUCH better than ANYTHING that Micro$oft keeps pushing you" than hardware superiority (which was true until about 1993, 1994...). Most of the arguments were based on these ideas:
Being able to fit a working environment on a floppy was important in the early days (1986-1990) because hard drives cost quite a lot of money and the most that people could afford was generally a 512KiB memory expansion and/or a second floppy drive. So-called "turbo" cards and the ability to take standard SIMM memory modules came later. As you can probably tell, the one-floppy feature is largely irrelevant today as there's enough memory to boot off one disk, then mount a filesystem on another or in the system memory.
Additionally, the cost of having a small memory footprint was that the system core was extremely simple. There was no memory protection, and the virtual memory extension programs that came later were doomed to fail because of the inconsistent manner that AmigaOS programs allocated memory (i.e. the "should we use MEMF_PUBLIC for this memory that we're going to pass between processes?").
(QNX paraller -- the web-station-on-a-HD-floppy demo)
All true, except that with the low context-switch time (that you get when you don't have to mess around with memory management; every process is king, remember?) you get major stability problems since every process can take the system down, in the middle of a disk transaction no less.
(QNX paraller -- two magic buzzwords: "real time")
Because the QNX kernel shares many of the properties that they used for arguments in their war-on-the-PC, they now have a collective hard-on for a closed-source real-time kernel not designed for desktop use. Another reason why the amiga fans are now slinging more vitriol is that the sensible ones moved to Linux on either ia32 or PPC a couple of years ago, when it became clear to most that despite the many iterations of "Amiga bought, new owner plans resurrection! Film at 11!", nothing was going to happen, ever (the best that some could do was release a "support the amiga!" CD single containing some of the worst electro-pop I've ever heard; this was in 1998).
I present as evidence the incredible shitflingery perpetrated in comp.sys.amiga.{advocacy,misc} regarding Linux around when the current owner had announced[0] that the next Amiga incarnation would be linux-based; some even claimed that the SCSI support in the 2.2.x kernel was horribly broken based on a message they'd seen regarding a SCSI bug in a 0.x kernel!
I used Amiga computers from the year 1988 to 1997. I wrote quite a bit of code, including a primitive texturemapped 3d-engine and a port of Id software's DOOM (based on the source release a few years ago, not the GPL one). The only thing about the Amiga that's alive now is the demo scene, and that's being killed off by the mainstreamization of the demoscene by assembly.com (there's a demoscene around the old CBM 64 though, so don't lose hope yet.)
And that's all I've got to say.
[0] Well, they didn't actually announce anything. It's said that during a presentation flick that they did, the words "Linux" and "Transmeta" were displayed; I'm assuming they got a whiff of "open-source linux-licking betrayal" from there.
You're assuming that they need to prove that the key exists.
Clarification: the P6's decoders don't work the same way, that much is true. But the first decoder of the decode group can decode instructions of up to 4 micro-ops in parallel with the two 1-uop decoders (if the instruction would generate more than 4 uops, the decoding stops being an one-cycle thing). So, if I'm any good at reading an AC's mind, I'd say that the two "minor" decoders are hard-wired to output uops for just these instructions because the one-uop instructions can be translated trivially.
Since the decoder group can put 4+1+1 == 6 uops into the reorder buffer per cycle (provided that the instructions are a properly aligned 4-1-1 uop group), you'd hardly get "a third of your possible micro-op issue rate" from just the one decoder.
Disclaimer: I'm writing this at 4:30 AM local time (18h personal uptime), so I can't be said to know anything about anything. Yes, I know a bit too much about the P6 core, yog-sothoth help me.
I don't think that the problem was that he didn't understand what a game console is, but that he wanted to correct what he considers an improper use of the word. That's how I would do it, if I wanted to be polite.
This stuff is important. Much more important than getting money for the software you write. (if that's a problem, get a day job for a company that's doing things using computers that are of minimal interest to the free software people; that's what I do.) It's about freedom. Not money. Get it? Once you break out of that foolish american frame of compulsive moneymaking, you'll see what he's really talking about.
As someone put in their .sig, "Lighten up. People will like you more."
Look, don't pretend that you all didn't know this was going to happen as soon as The Big Money moved into raping the internet in addition to other natural and semi-natural (i.e. man-made) resources. Since they have most of the people who make decisions relevant to this in their pocket, so you USAnians are going to be SOL (yes, that's no matter which asshole you vote for your precious little presidency) until you get rid of the fucking bastards.
That's my opinion anyway, and I'll be willing to say that I was wrong if in 10 years the situation substantially changes for the better.
But I'm having a hard time imagining even a medium crowd (like downtown Helsinki during the lunch breaks, which really isn't very much compared to other cities) where every single person is wearing gargoyle gear. I mean, I carry a cell phone on my belt most of the time but I wouldn't want an entire computer on me at all times. Even charging the cellphone roughly once a week is a hassle (as in, I have to remember that the phone is there) so you probably can imagine how much trouble it would be to recharge a battery on a wearable computer that's supposed to be active most of the time; if you turn it off at times why not use a laptop (like normal people do) instead of a wearable 'puter?
I mean, what are you going to do? Hang your clothes in a special recharger-and-coathanger contraption every evening?
From the one guy's translation, I think the ID number is more like an identifier for the microcode translator inside the CPU, a kind of a version number that isn't unique across 2 identical TM-equipped Vaios. ICBW, of course.
Look at the amount of recycling it's doing; that's gotta be good for the nature, right?
"0 Troll"? Come on, you little shitwanks, -1 me! Go on, I dare you!
What, you don't think that humanity has evolved over the last 4000 years? I must disagree; we've come a long way from hunting and collecting.
I'll bet that at the time when stone axes were brand new, people thought that "whoa, this thing, this stone age technology, is going to push us into godhood!". Same for bronze age, iron age, industrial age and the age that comes after the current one. There's only one thing that's certain about evolution; it won't happen in your lifetime (or mine, or the next generation's).
Now, could somebody please explain why the fuck do we need yet ANOTHER damn mp3 player, binary-only no less? We have, like FreeAMP, XMMS, gmpeg and some others, and that's only counting the ones that use gtk+; I'm sure there are a few for KDE too.
Furrfu!
As I've said before (in this comment comparing freenet and gnutella), gnutella's protocol sucks. Senseless flooding across nodes, etc.
Everything that you could speed up with this sort of a contraption you can do with the linux buffers, only the linux buffers are better because they're implicit. QED.
(apologies for the lack of verbosity, but I'm not in the mood to go a'whoring after karma today.)
Ok, the basic differences are like this:
In my brutally honest opinion, gnutella sucks icebergs through a nano-tube.
... since all it takes is 36 hours with SoftICE, a case of mountain dew and a competent software cracker to figure out where the decryption part is in the software player that will inevitably be released and how to replicate its behaviour in C.
Or, if they only release hardware to do the playing, some malaysian hard-core people will eventually crack the die open and scan the silicon. Or the format will just die out. Whatever.
I think we all can agree that There Ain't No Such Thing As Copy Protection.
Yeah, as if THAT's going to happen. Perhaps after that, they'll come up with an algorithm to solve the traveling salesman problem in O(1).
Umm. You know what? The loss-leader "business model" deserves to be destroyed. Utterly and completely. Nothing bad about that happening.
Umm, I think you mean COBOL in the second paragraph.
C++ in finnish? What a horrible idea.
luokka PeliOhjaimenAkselinTarkkailija
{
julkinen:
tyhjä aseta_herkkyys(
liuku aste);
liuku hae_herkkyys(tyhjä);
suojattu:
liuku herkkyys;
};
Brr. There was, once upon a time, a FINBASIC hack for the C64 that would alter the tokenization thingy in the RAM copy of the C64 ROM so that the commands would look vaguely like finnish. That was even less pleasant than C64 basic by itself.
Umm. Since when did accessing an unsafe pointer crash the system?
Oh, you mean on windows. [slaps hand to forehead]
Maybe I'm just an eeeeevil commie bastard, but doesn't it seem rather odd to anybody that people are saying things like "napster is dead" even though any platform worth using has an unofficial napster client that'll connect you to an opennap server once you get an address & stuff from napigator.com (IIRC)?
(emphasis mine)
Bit of a coincidence, isn't it?
Who cares? We have opennap, and every platform worth using has a client for the napster protocol that supports unofficial servers. So why bother?
ChatScan violates some commonly recognised guidelines for what is proper behavior for an IRC client by repeatedly joining/parting channels and doing other stuff that generates much more server-to-server traffic than an ordinary IRC client would. The IRC networks aren't designed to support these... crawler bot / DoS hybrids.
If you ask me, the company that sells/provides ChatScan should think a fucking bit more before making this sort of programs. The IRC is not content-searchable, get over it.