Can you back that up with reference? Do you mean extrajudicial execution, as in put these people up against a wall and shot them without trial? Or do you refer to civilian casualties during time of war?
RE: Gauntanamo and other US run detention camps. I completely agree. I disagree with this policy vehemently and will vote against any elected official who supports the policy.
As for the organ harvesting, the reports I read is far worse than just using organs from those executed. They are killing in order to harvest organs.
The Chinese government is an interesting mix of technocracy, considering that it is run primarily by officials with engineering degrees. Slashdot members should give due consideration to this fact. A degree in engineering does not necessarily confer ethical policy-making. Perhaps it is best that the technocrats won out over the Maoist ideologues though.
Fair point. I wrote a reply to a similar comment asking that I refer to current Chinese human rights abuses in comparison to the US. I did so. The upshot is that Chinese executions, use of prison labor camps, and organ harvesting of prisoners for resale doesn't compare with 'political correctness' debates here in the US.
Realize that the issue is not should one condemn China for its censorship policies or focus on its more severe human rights problems, but upthread the issue was: is China and the US similar in their use of censorship and human rights abuse? I answer that the US and China are not. China is far worse.
Further, I would like to see some specific instances of government censorship used for a comparison. I have seen none in this thread.
Would you please be specific about which innocent civilians the US is killing and where? Do you refer to Iraq and Afghanistan? Or do you refer to abortion rights in the US? I'm confused.
As for the current situation in China, it is less severe than under Mao's regime for the majority of citizens. However, China does still execute more people per year than the entire world combined. China still utilizes reeducation through labor, essentially prison labor camps. Slavery. And there have been many recent reports of organ harvesting of prisoners for sale on the international market.
I'm sorry, but I still don't think the human rights situation between the US and China comes close in comparison.
Oh, of course not. But the issue is whether the same configuration constraints could be imposed with either alternative. On 'nix, yup. As for Windows... eh, not my problem. I do wonder if it is truly impossible to constrain a Windows deployment without the use of thin clients though. Seems unlikely to me.
On the management side of things, bad decisions lead to bad -- and often costly -- results, regardless of platform.
There are multiple english spellings for many of these names. For example Mao is often spelled as Mao Zedong as well as Mao Tse-Tung. Deng Xio Peng is another common spelling along with Deng Xioping. Liu Shaoqi is also commonly spelled Liu Shao-Ch'i.
Welcome to the wonderful world of indeterminate phonetic representations in translation.
I can't speak for Windows thin client solutions, as I haven't seen one since Citrix made an NT 3.51 X-Terminal based solution back in '96 or so. It worked. Sort-of. But my impression of X-Terminals is that when display hardware was expensive, it made sense. Today, a megapixel capable display and computer is *really* cheap. With disk and even 2D acceleration. Solve your problem with a central file server, that's what I say.
The rest of Windows brokenness is your problem to fix.
Here is a great example of Artificial Life that generates truly unexpected behavior during runs. Perhaps this type of Alife simulation could be an inspiration for a new generation of game AI. Do not program a location and series of behavior patterns, instead make a population of AIs based on a variety of physical forms. Each form will have a limited set of possible movements within a the simulated world. It will need inputs in order to determine friend and foe, perhaps something similar to limited vision and hearing. It will need survival as a baseline goal. They will also need "food" of some sort. Perhaps the player or other, different, AIs can represent a food source. Give it some form of sex in order to reproduce its learned behavior through some genetic mechanism.
I suspect a hardware physics chip would help tremendously. But what I've seen of FramSticks was pretty damn cool. I have no idea how well it could be incorporated into AI gaming though. So this is just one of those: *shrug* hey, what about this? type of posts from someone ignorant and totally out of the field.
lol! The sad thing is that I didn't want or expect this comment to get notice, whereas this and this really do deserve it. Moderation is so freak'n broken here I often don't know whether to throw my hands up and sigh, or simply go back to K5 where the men are trolls and the S/N still high (if you consider trolling signal).
Feh./. is really losing its appeal for me. Perhaps I'm just five years behind the times.
The Politically Correct movement is about speech against speech. Those who hold certain political views against what they consider social ills, such as: Racism, Sexism, Political and/or Wealth Inequality, blah blah blah. A litany of left of center views. Welcome to life in a Democratic Republic where free speech is -- supposedly -- valued.
Contrast this with China under Mao. Where, at the zenith of Mao's power, people were expected to believe that he could utter no incorrect statement. That he would live for ten thousand years. That he was sacred, essentially a religious prophet (who preached against religion -- he was a Communist after all). Anyone who spoke even slightly against Mao, by suggesting that he was just a person, a human who could make mistakes like anyone else, they risked being grabbed by party officials and dragged to the center of town. There they would be charged with "Capitalist Thought" and forced to "Self-Criticize" in front of their townsfolk. They would have to recite a litany of their crimes against Mao and the Party. And if they were lucky they would simply be stripped of their job, their children would be removed from school, and their supply of "Rice Coupons" (food) cut to nothing. Then their local citizenship would papers would be destroyed and they would be sent to live with peasants in a twenty-seven thousand person commune. Where they would likely starve.
If, on the other hand, they did not properly repent, they would have a heavy stone sign with the words "Capitalist Criminal" engraved upon it, hung from their necks with piano wire. They would be forced to sit on their knees in the center of town and wait while for days while the sign, so heavy that the piano wire would cut through their necks to the vertebrae, slowly killed them. If they were lucky they might repent and beg forgiveness. Whereupon an executioner would put a rifle bullet in the back of their head. And then charge the family a fee for the bullet and service. No shit.
I'm sorry, but campus political correctness in the US doesn't even come close to the suffering the Chinese have had to endure.
It's easy enough to convert protected HDMI to monitors with DVI/HDCP. The only other addition to an HDMI cable is audio, which many monitors don't even support.
Changing material after the fact destroys any context for comments written to rebut the claims published on slashdot. May I suggest a retraction next time? It's the honest thing to do.
This is a pretty bad analogy. The students did not engage in struggle in order to stifle dissent among their peers. The vast majority were slavish devotees of Mao to begin with. Instead, it was a cynical means for Mao to shift the power balance within the government from the then current leaders Deng Xio Peng and Liu Shaoqi, who had taken the reigns of power from Mao after his failed Great Leap Forward five year plan. The Great Leap Forward led to massive crop failures while farmers spent their energy making worthless pig iron in small homebrew forges instead of farming. Deng Xio Peng and Liu Shaoqui rightly realized the policy blunders of Mao and pushed him out in order to get food production back on track.
But Mao wanted his power back. So, he encouraged students to form a "Red Guard" paramilitary group to rid China of the Four Olds (old customs; old culture; old habits; old ideas). To do this they were given free reign to interrogate those old members of society who were in power -- for those who were in power were, by definition, corrupt because they were not equally sharing their gains. The students then took these old leaders and "struggled" against them through violent means, until the person either admitted his crimes or died while refusing.
Ratting on other students to stifle dissent was not the intent of the Cultural Revolution, though other students who had been children of former landlords, or whose parents had been caught up in the anti-rightist movement during the Great Leap Forward were fair game for "struggle" sessions as well. Mao's principle goal was to unseat Deng Xio Peng and Liu Shaoqui, which he did when students successfully stormed the presidential compound and took both into custody in 1968. Liu Shaoqui died shortly thereafter in prison, while Deng Xio Peng weathered the storm and eventually retook the reigns of power some time after Mao's death. As the Cultural Revolution neared its zenith, street fighting broke out among various factions of Red Guards, who each fought to proclaim their greater loyalty to Mao. In this manner outright civil war broke out between student groups broke out, with automatic weapons and artillery fire destroying entire city blocks and killing numerous civilians, until Mao released the army to re-take control of city streets by force. And then the Cultural Revolution was over, and a bunch of Red Guard students were executed for treason. And, of course, Mao was the Great Leader controlling the reigns of power once again.
It is in this context that one can view the 1989 Tiananmen Square repression, as Deng Xio Peng was leader at the time. If you remember, that was a student led revolt against the political leadership ostensibly in support of democratic reforms. However, Deng Xio Peng was most certainly frightened by the breakdown in law and order of the Cultural Revolution and likely thought he was acting to stop a repeat of the Cultural Revolution. Not that the violent repression at Tiananmen Square was an appropriate response, it's just that most people here in the west viewed it as a violent repression of democratic values, when it is more likely that Deng Xio Peng thought he was preventing yet another student led civil war that he had seen during the late 1960s.
Take us forward another sixteen to seventeen years (nearly another generation) and one can see that the context of cultural and political repression common in China today is far less bloody than prior generations. It is still repressive. It still relies on "self-criticism" in order to enforce the social norms of imposed groupthink. But the current leadership is, perhaps, a bit less violent in its repression of dissent.
Unless you're Falun Gong. Who make an excellent source of fresh organs for transplantation to the buying public. But, hey, that's just a matter of collecting hard currency by killing and selling the body parts of religious kooks. It's not political like Internet Censorship. *cough!*
Yeah, fine. I'm not itching for a fight here. There was an interesting counterpoint post that described certain features for reducing context switching between the send/recieve pass in the QNX scheduler that appeared interesting. Show me the money and I'll change my mind. But so far I just haven't seen these microkernel systems perform well under high load.
For those who already own an HDTV, and who plan to purchase HD movies, it would be cheaper than buying the 360 with HD-DVD. It would be much cheaper than buying a 360 and a Blu-Ray player.
Feh. So what.
I've got two HDTVs and I'm not excited by this price point, the featureset, or the games. I can wait for a pricedrop. Also, I'd rather see who wins the HD disc player market, and I'd like to see both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD get spanked in the market. Perhaps a good spanking will teach these manufacturers to cut back on the overly restrictive DRM.
As others have pointed out in this thread, the gain from a userland device driver process is not always so clearcut. There are many nasty circumstances wherein it is just as impossible to safely shutdown a userland device driver running under a microkernel as it would be in a monolithic kernel. IOW: for the stability gain in some circumstances you sacrifice the overhead involved with message passing. One person pointed out that QNX has a particularly elegant message passing system, which improves performance. I haven't seen it so I can't rebutt.
As to whether fine grained privileges help this situation, there are always circumstances where an administrator needs full access to system level privileges. These could be limited to single-user on boot for the most severe repairs, but then you're sacrificing uptime. On a production server, that could be a nightmare scenerio. OTOH: if there is only a single user who has full administrator privileges, then a remote exploit is still possible. Even with fine grained levels of administrators privileges, this fact doesn't solve the problem. If you have a door with a lock, there must always be a key to unlock that door. If you have a building with several doors and locks, there is always at least one master key.
Who gets that master key can't prevent the fact that the master key exists and in the hands of a criminal damage is the result.
Years ago I fiddled a bunch with Tanenbaum's Minix. I've played with Hurd, as well as Darwin on a Mac. I've not been impressed with any of them from a performance perspective. Compare that to Irix or Solaris on large multicpu systems (which I do have experience with) and I would say that the monolithic -- with loadable modules -- design appears to scale better. And yet the microkernel folks would make the arguement that message passing ought to scale better in a large SMP environment.
It doesn't appear to be the case. Though I admit, I've only used microkernel based system that were toys in comparison to the professional stuff.
OK, just to be clear: one serious kernel bug is enough to take down the OS. Clearly, a userland process segfaulting will not take the OS down. The rest I've responded to down the thread by others who had posted first.
You're still dependent on sane message passing for the system to function. Further, no one has yet to argue that message passing doesn't badly impact system performance. That's because it does.
Essenentilly, the argument here is that micokernel design somehow increases security and is more stable. Further, the argument is that as monolithic kernels grow larger, system stability and security must therefore decline in proportion to size. Yet, in the real world this is not what I see. Instead, I see that micorkernel systems are terribly slow and not significantly more stable than monolithic systems. Further, I see no security benefit one way or the other. If a shell elevates its prigilege to root, it still has total control over the system - whether running on a microkernel based system or not.
I think the article overstates the stability benefits and makes a false argument on security.
OK. So lets get to the meat of the argument, which is that message passing micokernels are slow by design and still prone to failure if a critical userland device driver process dies. Further, please show me how security is improved. If a userland process (say a shell) elevates privileges to root, how is this any different from a monolithic kernel based system?
we are talking about a metaphor here. Are you suggesting that a modern multicompartement ship is a good metaphor to use in designing operating system kernels, whereas the Titanic would have been bad?
didn't save the Titanic. Every microkernel system I've seen has been terribly slow due to message passing overhead. While it may make marginal sense from a security standpoint to isolate drivers into userland processes, the upshot is that if a critical driver goes *poof!* the system still goes down.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you back that up with reference? Do you mean extrajudicial execution, as in put these people up against a wall and shot them without trial? Or do you refer to civilian casualties during time of war?
RE: Gauntanamo and other US run detention camps. I completely agree. I disagree with this policy vehemently and will vote against any elected official who supports the policy.
As for the organ harvesting, the reports I read is far worse than just using organs from those executed. They are killing in order to harvest organs.
The Chinese government is an interesting mix of technocracy, considering that it is run primarily by officials with engineering degrees. Slashdot members should give due consideration to this fact. A degree in engineering does not necessarily confer ethical policy-making. Perhaps it is best that the technocrats won out over the Maoist ideologues though.
Fair point. I wrote a reply to a similar comment asking that I refer to current Chinese human rights abuses in comparison to the US. I did so. The upshot is that Chinese executions, use of prison labor camps, and organ harvesting of prisoners for resale doesn't compare with 'political correctness' debates here in the US.
Realize that the issue is not should one condemn China for its censorship policies or focus on its more severe human rights problems, but upthread the issue was: is China and the US similar in their use of censorship and human rights abuse? I answer that the US and China are not. China is far worse.
Further, I would like to see some specific instances of government censorship used for a comparison. I have seen none in this thread.
Would you please be specific about which innocent civilians the US is killing and where? Do you refer to Iraq and Afghanistan? Or do you refer to abortion rights in the US? I'm confused.
As for the current situation in China, it is less severe than under Mao's regime for the majority of citizens. However, China does still execute more people per year than the entire world combined. China still utilizes reeducation through labor, essentially prison labor camps. Slavery. And there have been many recent reports of organ harvesting of prisoners for sale on the international market.
I'm sorry, but I still don't think the human rights situation between the US and China comes close in comparison.
Oh, of course not. But the issue is whether the same configuration constraints could be imposed with either alternative. On 'nix, yup. As for Windows... eh, not my problem. I do wonder if it is truly impossible to constrain a Windows deployment without the use of thin clients though. Seems unlikely to me.
On the management side of things, bad decisions lead to bad -- and often costly -- results, regardless of platform.
There are multiple english spellings for many of these names. For example Mao is often spelled as Mao Zedong as well as Mao Tse-Tung. Deng Xio Peng is another common spelling along with Deng Xioping. Liu Shaoqi is also commonly spelled Liu Shao-Ch'i.
Welcome to the wonderful world of indeterminate phonetic representations in translation.
allow me to offer my condolences. How early 90's.
I can't speak for Windows thin client solutions, as I haven't seen one since Citrix made an NT 3.51 X-Terminal based solution back in '96 or so. It worked. Sort-of. But my impression of X-Terminals is that when display hardware was expensive, it made sense. Today, a megapixel capable display and computer is *really* cheap. With disk and even 2D acceleration. Solve your problem with a central file server, that's what I say.
The rest of Windows brokenness is your problem to fix.
FramSticks
Here is a great example of Artificial Life that generates truly unexpected behavior during runs. Perhaps this type of Alife simulation could be an inspiration for a new generation of game AI. Do not program a location and series of behavior patterns, instead make a population of AIs based on a variety of physical forms. Each form will have a limited set of possible movements within a the simulated world. It will need inputs in order to determine friend and foe, perhaps something similar to limited vision and hearing. It will need survival as a baseline goal. They will also need "food" of some sort. Perhaps the player or other, different, AIs can represent a food source. Give it some form of sex in order to reproduce its learned behavior through some genetic mechanism.
I suspect a hardware physics chip would help tremendously. But what I've seen of FramSticks was pretty damn cool. I have no idea how well it could be incorporated into AI gaming though. So this is just one of those: *shrug* hey, what about this? type of posts from someone ignorant and totally out of the field.
lol! The sad thing is that I didn't want or expect this comment to get notice, whereas this and this really do deserve it. Moderation is so freak'n broken here I often don't know whether to throw my hands up and sigh, or simply go back to K5 where the men are trolls and the S/N still high (if you consider trolling signal).
/. is really losing its appeal for me. Perhaps I'm just five years behind the times.
Feh.
Do you really believe that tripe?
The Politically Correct movement is about speech against speech. Those who hold certain political views against what they consider social ills, such as: Racism, Sexism, Political and/or Wealth Inequality, blah blah blah. A litany of left of center views. Welcome to life in a Democratic Republic where free speech is -- supposedly -- valued.
Contrast this with China under Mao. Where, at the zenith of Mao's power, people were expected to believe that he could utter no incorrect statement. That he would live for ten thousand years. That he was sacred, essentially a religious prophet (who preached against religion -- he was a Communist after all). Anyone who spoke even slightly against Mao, by suggesting that he was just a person, a human who could make mistakes like anyone else, they risked being grabbed by party officials and dragged to the center of town. There they would be charged with "Capitalist Thought" and forced to "Self-Criticize" in front of their townsfolk. They would have to recite a litany of their crimes against Mao and the Party. And if they were lucky they would simply be stripped of their job, their children would be removed from school, and their supply of "Rice Coupons" (food) cut to nothing. Then their local citizenship would papers would be destroyed and they would be sent to live with peasants in a twenty-seven thousand person commune. Where they would likely starve.
If, on the other hand, they did not properly repent, they would have a heavy stone sign with the words "Capitalist Criminal" engraved upon it, hung from their necks with piano wire. They would be forced to sit on their knees in the center of town and wait while for days while the sign, so heavy that the piano wire would cut through their necks to the vertebrae, slowly killed them. If they were lucky they might repent and beg forgiveness. Whereupon an executioner would put a rifle bullet in the back of their head. And then charge the family a fee for the bullet and service. No shit.
I'm sorry, but campus political correctness in the US doesn't even come close to the suffering the Chinese have had to endure.
It's easy enough to convert protected HDMI to monitors with DVI/HDCP. The only other addition to an HDMI cable is audio, which many monitors don't even support.
Changing material after the fact destroys any context for comments written to rebut the claims published on slashdot. May I suggest a retraction next time? It's the honest thing to do.
This is a pretty bad analogy. The students did not engage in struggle in order to stifle dissent among their peers. The vast majority were slavish devotees of Mao to begin with. Instead, it was a cynical means for Mao to shift the power balance within the government from the then current leaders Deng Xio Peng and Liu Shaoqi, who had taken the reigns of power from Mao after his failed Great Leap Forward five year plan. The Great Leap Forward led to massive crop failures while farmers spent their energy making worthless pig iron in small homebrew forges instead of farming. Deng Xio Peng and Liu Shaoqui rightly realized the policy blunders of Mao and pushed him out in order to get food production back on track.
But Mao wanted his power back. So, he encouraged students to form a "Red Guard" paramilitary group to rid China of the Four Olds (old customs; old culture; old habits; old ideas). To do this they were given free reign to interrogate those old members of society who were in power -- for those who were in power were, by definition, corrupt because they were not equally sharing their gains. The students then took these old leaders and "struggled" against them through violent means, until the person either admitted his crimes or died while refusing.
Ratting on other students to stifle dissent was not the intent of the Cultural Revolution, though other students who had been children of former landlords, or whose parents had been caught up in the anti-rightist movement during the Great Leap Forward were fair game for "struggle" sessions as well. Mao's principle goal was to unseat Deng Xio Peng and Liu Shaoqui, which he did when students successfully stormed the presidential compound and took both into custody in 1968. Liu Shaoqui died shortly thereafter in prison, while Deng Xio Peng weathered the storm and eventually retook the reigns of power some time after Mao's death. As the Cultural Revolution neared its zenith, street fighting broke out among various factions of Red Guards, who each fought to proclaim their greater loyalty to Mao. In this manner outright civil war broke out between student groups broke out, with automatic weapons and artillery fire destroying entire city blocks and killing numerous civilians, until Mao released the army to re-take control of city streets by force. And then the Cultural Revolution was over, and a bunch of Red Guard students were executed for treason. And, of course, Mao was the Great Leader controlling the reigns of power once again.
It is in this context that one can view the 1989 Tiananmen Square repression, as Deng Xio Peng was leader at the time. If you remember, that was a student led revolt against the political leadership ostensibly in support of democratic reforms. However, Deng Xio Peng was most certainly frightened by the breakdown in law and order of the Cultural Revolution and likely thought he was acting to stop a repeat of the Cultural Revolution. Not that the violent repression at Tiananmen Square was an appropriate response, it's just that most people here in the west viewed it as a violent repression of democratic values, when it is more likely that Deng Xio Peng thought he was preventing yet another student led civil war that he had seen during the late 1960s.
Take us forward another sixteen to seventeen years (nearly another generation) and one can see that the context of cultural and political repression common in China today is far less bloody than prior generations. It is still repressive. It still relies on "self-criticism" in order to enforce the social norms of imposed groupthink. But the current leadership is, perhaps, a bit less violent in its repression of dissent.
Unless you're Falun Gong. Who make an excellent source of fresh organs for transplantation to the buying public. But, hey, that's just a matter of collecting hard currency by killing and selling the body parts of religious kooks. It's not political like Internet Censorship. *cough!*
"agree to disagree?"
Yeah, fine. I'm not itching for a fight here. There was an interesting counterpoint post that described certain features for reducing context switching between the send/recieve pass in the QNX scheduler that appeared interesting. Show me the money and I'll change my mind. But so far I just haven't seen these microkernel systems perform well under high load.
wasn't it supposed to support two digital video outputs? Apparently not.
For those who already own an HDTV, and who plan to purchase HD movies, it would be cheaper than buying the 360 with HD-DVD. It would be much cheaper than buying a 360 and a Blu-Ray player.
Feh. So what.
I've got two HDTVs and I'm not excited by this price point, the featureset, or the games. I can wait for a pricedrop. Also, I'd rather see who wins the HD disc player market, and I'd like to see both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD get spanked in the market. Perhaps a good spanking will teach these manufacturers to cut back on the overly restrictive DRM.
As others have pointed out in this thread, the gain from a userland device driver process is not always so clearcut. There are many nasty circumstances wherein it is just as impossible to safely shutdown a userland device driver running under a microkernel as it would be in a monolithic kernel. IOW: for the stability gain in some circumstances you sacrifice the overhead involved with message passing. One person pointed out that QNX has a particularly elegant message passing system, which improves performance. I haven't seen it so I can't rebutt.
As to whether fine grained privileges help this situation, there are always circumstances where an administrator needs full access to system level privileges. These could be limited to single-user on boot for the most severe repairs, but then you're sacrificing uptime. On a production server, that could be a nightmare scenerio. OTOH: if there is only a single user who has full administrator privileges, then a remote exploit is still possible. Even with fine grained levels of administrators privileges, this fact doesn't solve the problem. If you have a door with a lock, there must always be a key to unlock that door. If you have a building with several doors and locks, there is always at least one master key.
Who gets that master key can't prevent the fact that the master key exists and in the hands of a criminal damage is the result.
Good question.
Years ago I fiddled a bunch with Tanenbaum's Minix. I've played with Hurd, as well as Darwin on a Mac. I've not been impressed with any of them from a performance perspective. Compare that to Irix or Solaris on large multicpu systems (which I do have experience with) and I would say that the monolithic -- with loadable modules -- design appears to scale better. And yet the microkernel folks would make the arguement that message passing ought to scale better in a large SMP environment.
It doesn't appear to be the case. Though I admit, I've only used microkernel based system that were toys in comparison to the professional stuff.
I don't have any experience with QNX, so I can't debate the performance of that OS.
OK, just to be clear: one serious kernel bug is enough to take down the OS. Clearly, a userland process segfaulting will not take the OS down. The rest I've responded to down the thread by others who had posted first.
Feel free, kick away.
You're still dependent on sane message passing for the system to function. Further, no one has yet to argue that message passing doesn't badly impact system performance. That's because it does.
Essenentilly, the argument here is that micokernel design somehow increases security and is more stable. Further, the argument is that as monolithic kernels grow larger, system stability and security must therefore decline in proportion to size. Yet, in the real world this is not what I see. Instead, I see that micorkernel systems are terribly slow and not significantly more stable than monolithic systems. Further, I see no security benefit one way or the other. If a shell elevates its prigilege to root, it still has total control over the system - whether running on a microkernel based system or not.
I think the article overstates the stability benefits and makes a false argument on security.
. ..
OK. So lets get to the meat of the argument, which is that message passing micokernels are slow by design and still prone to failure if a critical userland device driver process dies. Further, please show me how security is improved. If a userland process (say a shell) elevates privileges to root, how is this any different from a monolithic kernel based system?
we are talking about a metaphor here. Are you suggesting that a modern multicompartement ship is a good metaphor to use in designing operating system kernels, whereas the Titanic would have been bad?
didn't save the Titanic. Every microkernel system I've seen has been terribly slow due to message passing overhead. While it may make marginal sense from a security standpoint to isolate drivers into userland processes, the upshot is that if a critical driver goes *poof!* the system still goes down.
Solution: better code management and testing.