'...To enhance the sense of reality, smells including burned charcoal can be pumped into the room.' It almost makes me want to write off college and join the army...
That's lame. I experienced the smell of burned charcoal yesterday; it was the savory aroma of my Thanksgiving turkey cooking on the Weber grill. It gave me a nice warm fuzzy feeling.
If they really want to do combat simulation, they need to pump in the smell of cordite and napalm; the smell of rotting flesh on week-old corpses; the smell of truckfulls of men who haven't changed their clothes in five weeks; the smell of raw sewage and mud at the bottoms of trenches; the smell of mustard gas and burning tires; the smell of fear.
If they had this kind of realism, you'd stay safely in college.
The root problem for all of this seems to be the limits of a hierarchical data organization such as a file system. The debate is if the heirarchy should be organized by application (as the article proposes), file type (all binaries in 'bin'), or some broad attribute of the application ('/usr' vs '/usr/local', 'bin' vs 'sbin').
There probably is no way to solve all of the issues simultaneously in one hierachical scheme. Symlinks could help because they crosslink the tree. Package managers add a more sophisticated database of relations. These relations are much more useful, but unfortunately are accessible only through the package manager program.
All in all, though, it seems that organizing by package makes the most intuitive sense, and the helpers like package managers should be responsible for figuring out how to run the app when you type it on the command line.
It's POSIX compliant in theory, but not as used by the real world
Hardly anyone is working on it
There hasn't been an official release in 4 years (that's 83 years in Internet time)
There is no prospect of a date for any further official releases
OTOH, the HURD is cool because:
It's a microkernel
It has granular security
Except for the last three bad points, the HURD sounds alot like the Windows NT kernel. In fact, the biggest difference could be bad point #4 (since #5 and #6 flow from #4).
Maybe instead of reinventing the wheel, they should just use the NT kernel with the GNU runtime tools and release GNU/NT.
By the time the hurd is stable and featureful enough for everyone to use, we'll all be using 20GHZ machines.
Its true; betting on Moore's law has been proven to be a winning strategy. Ask Bill Gates.
It makes me think of Windows 95. When I first installed it on a 486/33, it seemed huge, bloated and slow. If I run it now on a PIII/800, it seems to be fast, lean, stripped down and almost elegant. I guess context is important.
In fact, I think that the trend for the future is for CPUs to contain their own code generators, like Transmeta (code morphing) and the P4 (trace cache). The legacy X86 instruction set (plus maybe AMD's 64-bit extensions) become nothing but a compact byte code to drive the new designs.
That way, the underlynig hardware architecture can be changed at will with little or no impact on OSes or apps. I think that it was a mistake for Itanium to expose strange hardware features to the software compilers. It's too inflexible.
You have to remember that this is the same public that prefers coal fired power plants to nuclear plants...
Ummm... with recent events leading to talk of outfitting nuclear plants with antiaircraft defense systems, I think the public may have been right on this one.
I have also wondered why more people aren't using the memory bus for peripherals.
Been there, done that. Most PCs prior to the 386 models used the ISA bus for both peripherals and memory. The buses where separated out in modern PCs for a reason: the laws of physics. At today's speeds, a memory bus can't be more than an inch or two in length. If you use your one free memory slot for I/O, you have no more memory expansion capability.
digital photo technology provides an alternative to analog film, which almost always contains gelatin...
However, most electronic equipment such as digital cameras and PCs require tantalum capacitors. Tantalum miners in the African rain forest are overhunting many of the species there and threateninig the ecosystem.
Come to think of it, the truck hauling lentils to your neighborhood market is squishing thousands of poor little insects even as I write this. You just can't win.
There have been quite a few self-contained systems architecture solutions put out over the years (Java and Smalltalk come to mind), and this looks like another one. All of them meet a lot of resistance because they make you use a language that is not the favorite language of the 90% of developers out there who have a different favorite language.
No matter what you think about Microsoft and its practices, the.NET strategy is more likely to attract a wide variety of developers because it allows them to use most any language they want. (.NET has an OS lockin problem, but the 90%/10% ratio is in MS's favor in that case).
REBOL may be extremely cool; I'm going to have to take a look at the language spec. However, I don't think that any single language will ever take over the whole world.
This is a huge understatement. The adjective Mega is a pretty lame way to describe an item that holds 100 Giga bytes.
A real marketing manager would describe this product as a "Terabyte-DVD" *
* CAPACITY DISCLAIMER: Holds up to 1 terabyte assuming all files are compressed 10:1 with a third-party compression utility. Compression utility not included. Your actual compressed capacity may vary. Not all files are compressable.
A week? I had a linux 2.0.35 box on my desk running for 560 days without rebooting or crashing
In my experience, part of this is reliability is just a technicality. Non computer geeks will only use Windows-like environments such as KDE or Gnome. Unfortunately, these complex systems aren't as reliable as the OS itself. On my systems, KDE crashes with a frequency somewhere between that of Win98 and Win2K.
Sure, the Linux kernel keeps right on running, but if I have to press Alt+Ctl+Backspace to restart the X server, it's a hollow victory. The average Joe would just as soon press Alt+Ctl+Delete.
It's not just 8086/XT baggage. The X86 architecture is
a direct descendent of the first microprocessor, the 4004.
I for one think that its cool that we are using a vestige
of the first microprocessor at 5 orders of magnitude faster
speeds. It's a tribute to the human ability to create a good kludge.
I wouldn't want it any other way.
The terminology here is not quite accurate.
It is actually a 640 Fig Newton engine.
NASA studies done in the 1970's determined that Fig Newtons
are one of the densest cookies known to man, and the are inexpensive
and easy to obtain. They serve as an excellent propellant
for this orbital insertion application. It's amazing that only
640 of these cookies are necessary to maneuver this complex spacecraft.
They must be flinging them with some kind of high-velocity
railgun technology.
Re:Extra goodies for subscribers???
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 2
Or here's an idea: forget karma and moderation. Give the people who pay the most the highest scoring posts. How about $1 per point per post. If you really have something to say, it would be worth $5 to get a (Score:5, Platinum Plus) tag on it. With this business model,/. wouldn't need ad revenue at all!
In other words, Datacenter changes the following two lines of code in the kernel header:
#define MAX_CPUS 32
#define MAX_MEM_GB 64
You pay only a few dollars for that mod. The remainder of the huge expense goes to pay for a special team of engineers whose purpose in life is to try to keep your systems up and running.
Quantum effects happen over distances that are significantly smaller than the 'diameter' of an electron
I thought that the distance of a quantum effect depends on the energy of the particles in question. For example, some optical diffraction experiments demonstrate quantum phenomena over visible distances.
Slashdot Mirror
That's lame. I experienced the smell of burned charcoal yesterday; it was the savory aroma of my Thanksgiving turkey cooking on the Weber grill. It gave me a nice warm fuzzy feeling.
If they really want to do combat simulation, they need to pump in the smell of cordite and napalm; the smell of rotting flesh on week-old corpses; the smell of truckfulls of men who haven't changed their clothes in five weeks; the smell of raw sewage and mud at the bottoms of trenches; the smell of mustard gas and burning tires; the smell of fear.
If they had this kind of realism, you'd stay safely in college.
There probably is no way to solve all of the issues simultaneously in one hierachical scheme. Symlinks could help because they crosslink the tree. Package managers add a more sophisticated database of relations. These relations are much more useful, but unfortunately are accessible only through the package manager program.
All in all, though, it seems that organizing by package makes the most intuitive sense, and the helpers like package managers should be responsible for figuring out how to run the app when you type it on the command line.
Scientists: Analyze data
Special Interest Lobbyists: Point out that at least one scientist somewhere thinks that the changes may not be due to human activity
Politicians: Heeding lobbyists, maintain status quo
Net Results: Nothing
The HURD isn't popular yet because
- It's still slow
- It's still buggy
- It's POSIX compliant in theory, but not as used by the real world
- Hardly anyone is working on it
- There hasn't been an official release in 4 years (that's 83 years in Internet time)
- There is no prospect of a date for any further official releases
OTOH, the HURD is cool because:- It's a microkernel
- It has granular security
Except for the last three bad points, the HURD sounds alot like the Windows NT kernel. In fact, the biggest difference could be bad point #4 (since #5 and #6 flow from #4).Maybe instead of reinventing the wheel, they should just use the NT kernel with the GNU runtime tools and release GNU/NT.
Its true; betting on Moore's law has been proven to be a winning strategy. Ask Bill Gates.
It makes me think of Windows 95. When I first installed it on a 486/33, it seemed huge, bloated and slow. If I run it now on a PIII/800, it seems to be fast, lean, stripped down and almost elegant. I guess context is important.
And if you're paranoid: :-)
- Get away from the beach to avoid any tsunami
That way, the underlynig hardware architecture can be changed at will with little or no impact on OSes or apps. I think that it was a mistake for Itanium to expose strange hardware features to the software compilers. It's too inflexible.
Bzzzt. There's no such thing as GHz, only dimensionless numbers and meaningless postfix operators. Now, repeat after me:
Speed: 2400+
You didn't say it, but you did imagine it.
IIRC, cuneiform writing is composed entirely of angle brackets. To write this in XML, every character is going to have to be escaped!
Ummm... with recent events leading to talk of outfitting nuclear plants with antiaircraft defense systems, I think the public may have been right on this one.
Been there, done that. Most PCs prior to the 386 models used the ISA bus for both peripherals and memory. The buses where separated out in modern PCs for a reason: the laws of physics. At today's speeds, a memory bus can't be more than an inch or two in length. If you use your one free memory slot for I/O, you have no more memory expansion capability.
Maybe for its 30th birthday present, someone could buy Unix some vowels.
A 200% cost overrun.
My boss would consider that normal. OTOH, the 500 year schedule slip is a tad much even by software development standards.
Actually, whenever I wear new colored socks, I find that I end up with some dark matter between my toes.
I haven't measured it yet, but it looks like I could account for a few grams of the Universe's missing mass from all of the socks I've broken in.
However, most electronic equipment such as digital cameras and PCs require tantalum capacitors. Tantalum miners in the African rain forest are overhunting many of the species there and threateninig the ecosystem.
Come to think of it, the truck hauling lentils to your neighborhood market is squishing thousands of poor little insects even as I write this. You just can't win.
No matter what you think about Microsoft and its practices, the .NET strategy is more likely to attract a wide variety of developers because it allows them to use most any language they want. (.NET has an OS lockin problem, but the 90%/10% ratio is in MS's favor in that case).
REBOL may be extremely cool; I'm going to have to take a look at the language spec. However, I don't think that any single language will ever take over the whole world.
A real marketing manager would describe this product as a "Terabyte-DVD" *
* CAPACITY DISCLAIMER: Holds up to 1 terabyte assuming all files are compressed 10:1 with a third-party compression utility. Compression utility not included. Your actual compressed capacity may vary. Not all files are compressable.
In my experience, part of this is reliability is just a technicality. Non computer geeks will only use Windows-like environments such as KDE or Gnome. Unfortunately, these complex systems aren't as reliable as the OS itself. On my systems, KDE crashes with a frequency somewhere between that of Win98 and Win2K.
Sure, the Linux kernel keeps right on running, but if I have to press Alt+Ctl+Backspace to restart the X server, it's a hollow victory. The average Joe would just as soon press Alt+Ctl+Delete.
I for one think that its cool that we are using a vestige of the first microprocessor at 5 orders of magnitude faster speeds. It's a tribute to the human ability to create a good kludge. I wouldn't want it any other way.
The terminology here is not quite accurate. It is actually a 640 Fig Newton engine. NASA studies done in the 1970's determined that Fig Newtons are one of the densest cookies known to man, and the are inexpensive and easy to obtain. They serve as an excellent propellant for this orbital insertion application. It's amazing that only 640 of these cookies are necessary to maneuver this complex spacecraft. They must be flinging them with some kind of high-velocity railgun technology.
Or here's an idea: forget karma and moderation. Give the people who pay the most the highest scoring posts. How about $1 per point per post. If you really have something to say, it would be worth $5 to get a (Score:5, Platinum Plus) tag on it. With this business model, /. wouldn't need ad revenue at all!
In other words, Datacenter changes the following two lines of code in the kernel header:
#define MAX_CPUS 32
#define MAX_MEM_GB 64
You pay only a few dollars for that mod. The remainder of the huge expense goes to pay for a special team of engineers whose purpose in life is to try to keep your systems up and running.
Computer hardware doesn't violate copyright laws; people do.
I thought that the distance of a quantum effect depends on the energy of the particles in question. For example, some optical diffraction experiments demonstrate quantum phenomena over visible distances.