The OS course I took last quarter mostly had us writing programs to simulate OS operations. We worked with the pthread library to get a better understanding of processes and thread, wrote scheduling simulators to build on that, and did a few things under NT like developing a cmd-like shell.
This quarter we basically just progressively built a filesystem driver for FAT12, but it didn't really relate to the lecture material and took far too much time for most students.
I suggest you stay away from actual kernel hacking, at least until later in the course. Simulations are less dangerous to the system, especially when the students are coding in an area they have little to no experience with. As per my second point, make sure the assignments are relevant and not too long.
... but I'm a big fan of Microsoft Internet Explorer. It offers far better support for HTML4 and CSS than any other browser available, it's less quirky than netscape, faster than mozilla (though most browsers are), and free unlike opera.
I've heard that there is a linux port in the works, but haven't able to find much information on it. Anybody know anything?
My university just blocks all traffic to Napster's servers. This can easily be gotten around with anonymous web browsing services and an off-campus proxy.
To call this censorship is laughable. From what I saw of Napster, no legitimate use actually existed and it served to do nothing more than suck up bandwidth. Universities pay large amounts of money to provide the fast connections they do, and if something like Napster is sucking up large percentages of that bandwidth for far-from-academic purposes, they have every right to block it.
The question is when they'll block imesh (http://www.imesh.com).
Matrix rip-offs appeal to the general populous
on
X-Files FPS Episode
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It's all well and good for us techies to bemoan the sheer stupidity of last night's episode. I particularly hated the scene where the lone gunmen connected a hard drive cable and called it "rerouting the circuitry to bypass the infected system" or something like that. The general public doesn't understand technology, though, and that's the audience TV is aiming towards. Until the general populous knows enough about technology to say "Hey that's stupid," we'll still be having conversations like this:
friend> What's that? Is that a printer? other friend> No, that's a transmogrifier. (it was actually my printer) friend> What's a transmogrifier?
I built a dual celeron 500 with it last summer and it's a damn nice machine. I've been wary about running BSD on it, however, because I've always heard that BSD's SMP support was poor. Anybody know how it stands today?
I certainly hope the show's producers don't overlook the character of Little Wooden Boy. Without help from this dynamic sidekick, the Tick would not have been able to defeat the Swiss as easily as he did. Damn Swiss bastards....
Colorado College is not exactly the finest academic institution in my home town (or the world). If you can't meet their standards for SAT or ACT scores, you probably should be working at McDonald's, regardless of skin color.
Not since the advent of the 3d card. The original Quake was written almost entirely in C, with the exception of a few painting and sound mixing routines.
I haven't been able to write high-level code that compiles into a reasonably-sized executable since I stopped using Turbo Pascal. Today's compilers shove in so many safety hooks and unused functionality with their executables that I hate using them. I've recently taken an interest in windows programming in assmebly and I find it more enjoyable to see masm dump out a 4k executable where vc6 dumps out an file ten times that size. I would guess that most of the instability issues in operating systems and applications today can be traced back to code bloat both on the programmer's side and the compiler's side. Maybe.
If you've got an indie band, just burn some songs to a CD and mail it to greenwitch.com. They run multiple audio streams for all different genres of music that you can listen to with most mp3 players. You can't really sell or distribute music through them, but you at least get some exposure.
I think the only thing anybody could really get out of that article wsa the point that freebsd networking is superior to linux and nt. I've been running 3.2 for almost two months now for serving web and developing purposes and I'm very happy with it. It even supports my old GUS, so I also use it as a jukebox.
The *bsd oses will grow in popularity soon enough and we'll have more stuff here. Linux is becoming so commercialized that I've heard it referred to as the "Windows of Unices" by some.
Work in quantum computing and quantum cryptography has shown that every cryptographic standard today can be broken in a no time at all, so how would wireless networks be able to take advantage of this? Since quantum computing only works because of entanglement, can wireless communications use this technology to provide any true security? Scientific study has shown that entangled particles can stay as such when separated by distances up to 10 kilometers, which is certainly far enough if your device is computing with another in your home or perhaps a receiver box connected to the internet at the end of your block. Anybody care to comment?
This kind of "dynamic" music has been in games for quite a while. I remember listening to the score change while playing the original X-Wing. This music is not as dynamic as what is proposed here, however. Unreal basically has a built-in s3m player with hooks in each levels soundtrack to switch moods when an enemy comes near or something like that. This is about as simple dynamic music as you can get.
It looks like simple voxels to me -- a rendering trick that's been around for almost a decade. For those of you who are amazed at what can be done with 74k, take a look at this little program from 1994.
And I consider it to be one of the worst pieces of software in the history of computing, so I just had to write them. Here's the email I sent:
Netomat Development Team:
I tried out your "non-linear" browser this morning and was not at all disappointed with what I got. That's not to say I liked it or found it useful, I was expecting it to be fundamentally useless and your browser performed beautifully in that respect. The following email message contains criticism which you may or may not enjoy.
I agree that the web is in need of a new browsing method, but this is not it. Your browser falls down on a couple points, in my mind:
1) You can't actually get specific information on any given topic
example: I typed in "news" and got 10 "turkish daily news online" pieces of news floating around. I fail to see how this is providing me with the information I want. I tried refining my search to "today's news" and got a number of floating pieces of text that had "today's news" in them. I ask you: how am I actually supposed to get the news in a browsing environment such as this?
2) The images don't seem relevant for some searches.
example: I searched for "netomat sucks" and was presented with some images of some musicians and dancers (nobody famous), none of which looked relevant to any of the text floating around. And if they were, how would I know?
example 2: I searched for "britney spears" and got poorly-drawn images of the characters from that classic cartoon, Ducktales. As far as I can tell there's no connection here.
3) The animation is slow. Don't even try to argue that Java is fundamentally slow, I've seen a lot of impressive graphics work done in Java and you've got a lot of work to do.
4) There's no method by which to save content. There's tons of software, music, video, and information out there that cannot be accessed by your browser. Perhaps the text and images thing
5) You destroy the work of every web designer ever. Web pages exist to be viewed, not torn apart and trivialized by the client's browser. The web designed sits around and codes large amounts of html and puts together all sorts of snazzy graphics, scripts, applets and whatnot and expects them to be viewed in the way he intended. Your browser pulls out the description meta tag, the first image on the page and floats them around randomly. What happened to the other 99% of the content on the page? With your browser, we'll never know.
6) Your web page is ugly (I'm not saying mine isn't). For the love of god, add some color.
As far as I can tell, there was only one redeeming feature of your browser: I typed in porn, got some nice pictures without any passwords and wasn't flooded with popup windows.
You've got a good idea, but I think you went about it all wrong. The floating text and images thing isn't very fun to watch, nor does it present information well to the user. This is akin to having the text and images in a magazine float around when I'm trying to read it -- it's annoying and a pain to follow.
I can only suggest that you add some real functionality and allow the user to actually see some amount of content pertaining to a topic.
I'd be curious to see how they manage windwos 3d accelerated applications. It's not an impossibility, but I can imagine that having the accelerator render both the window manager and an application at the same time will steal clock cycles from both and cause an ovreall system slowdown.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than destroying the satellites, why don't they just auction them off on ebay?
The OS course I took last quarter mostly had us writing programs to simulate OS operations. We worked with the pthread library to get a better understanding of processes and thread, wrote scheduling simulators to build on that, and did a few things under NT like developing a cmd-like shell.
This quarter we basically just progressively built a filesystem driver for FAT12, but it didn't really relate to the lecture material and took far too much time for most students.
I suggest you stay away from actual kernel hacking, at least until later in the course. Simulations are less dangerous to the system, especially when the students are coding in an area they have little to no experience with. As per my second point, make sure the assignments are relevant and not too long.
... but I'm a big fan of Microsoft Internet Explorer. It offers far better support for HTML4 and CSS than any other browser available, it's less quirky than netscape, faster than mozilla (though most browsers are), and free unlike opera.
I've heard that there is a linux port in the works, but haven't able to find much information on it. Anybody know anything?
My university just blocks all traffic to Napster's servers. This can easily be gotten around with anonymous web browsing services and an off-campus proxy.
To call this censorship is laughable. From what I saw of Napster, no legitimate use actually existed and it served to do nothing more than suck up bandwidth. Universities pay large amounts of money to provide the fast connections they do, and if something like Napster is sucking up large percentages of that bandwidth for far-from-academic purposes, they have every right to block it.
The question is when they'll block imesh (http://www.imesh.com).
It's all well and good for us techies to bemoan the sheer stupidity of last night's episode. I particularly hated the scene where the lone gunmen connected a hard drive cable and called it "rerouting the circuitry to bypass the infected system" or something like that. The general public doesn't understand technology, though, and that's the audience TV is aiming towards. Until the general populous knows enough about technology to say "Hey that's stupid," we'll still be having conversations like this:
friend> What's that? Is that a printer?
other friend> No, that's a transmogrifier. (it was actually my printer)
friend> What's a transmogrifier?
I built a dual celeron 500 with it last summer and it's a damn nice machine. I've been wary about running BSD on it, however, because I've always heard that BSD's SMP support was poor. Anybody know how it stands today?
That people are so up in arms about spam that they endorse government regulation.
These same people are often the ones crying to keep the net free from government censorship, taxes, etc.
I certainly hope the show's producers don't overlook the character of Little Wooden Boy. Without help from this dynamic sidekick, the Tick would not have been able to defeat the Swiss as easily as he did. Damn Swiss bastards....
Colorado College is not exactly the finest academic institution in my home town (or the world). If you can't meet their standards for SAT or ACT scores, you probably should be working at McDonald's, regardless of skin color.
Good compilers nowaday can beat human ASM programmers.
No.
Not since the advent of the 3d card. The original Quake was written almost entirely in C, with the exception of a few painting and sound mixing routines.
I haven't been able to write high-level code that compiles into a reasonably-sized executable since I stopped using Turbo Pascal. Today's compilers shove in so many safety hooks and unused functionality with their executables that I hate using them. I've recently taken an interest in windows programming in assmebly and I find it more enjoyable to see masm dump out a 4k executable where vc6 dumps out an file ten times that size. I would guess that most of the instability issues in operating systems and applications today can be traced back to code bloat both on the programmer's side and the compiler's side. Maybe.
If you've got an indie band, just burn some songs to a CD and mail it to greenwitch.com. They run multiple audio streams for all different genres of music that you can listen to with most mp3 players. You can't really sell or distribute music through them, but you at least get some exposure.
BEST MULTIPLAYER COMPUTER GAME OF ALL TIME
those were the good old days...
Do you ever regret any of the decisions you've made concerning the packetstorm incident, working with Carolyn Meinel, and the like?
I think the only thing anybody could really get out of that article wsa the point that freebsd networking is superior to linux and nt. I've been running 3.2 for almost two months now for serving web and developing purposes and I'm very happy with it. It even supports my old GUS, so I also use it as a jukebox.
The *bsd oses will grow in popularity soon enough and we'll have more stuff here. Linux is becoming so commercialized that I've heard it referred to as the "Windows of Unices" by some.
Work in quantum computing and quantum cryptography has shown that every cryptographic standard today can be broken in a no time at all, so how would wireless networks be able to take advantage of this? Since quantum computing only works because of entanglement, can wireless communications use this technology to provide any true security? Scientific study has shown that entangled particles can stay as such when separated by distances up to 10 kilometers, which is certainly far enough if your device is computing with another in your home or perhaps a receiver box connected to the internet at the end of your block. Anybody care to comment?
This kind of "dynamic" music has been in games for quite a while. I remember listening to the score change while playing the original X-Wing. This music is not as dynamic as what is proposed here, however. Unreal basically has a built-in s3m player with hooks in each levels soundtrack to switch moods when an enemy comes near or something like that. This is about as simple dynamic music as you can get.
Will there be cd audio tracks on the q3 arena cd and, if so, who's doing them?
It looks like simple voxels to me -- a rendering trick that's been around for almost a decade. For those of you who are amazed at what can be done with 74k, take a look at this little program from 1994.
don't waste your time there for grad work
And I consider it to be one of the worst pieces of software in the history of computing, so I just had to write them. Here's the email I sent:
Netomat Development Team:
I tried out your "non-linear" browser this morning and was not at all disappointed with what I got. That's not to say I liked it or found it useful, I was expecting it to be fundamentally useless and your browser performed beautifully in that respect. The following email message contains criticism which you may or may not enjoy.
I agree that the web is in need of a new browsing method, but this is not it. Your browser falls down on a couple points, in my mind:
1) You can't actually get specific information on any given topic
example: I typed in "news" and got 10 "turkish daily news online" pieces of news floating around. I fail to see how this is providing me with the information I want. I tried refining my search to "today's news" and got a number of floating pieces of text that had "today's news" in them. I ask you: how am I actually supposed to get the news in a browsing environment such as this?
2) The images don't seem relevant for some searches.
example: I searched for "netomat sucks" and was presented with some images of some musicians and dancers (nobody famous), none of which looked relevant to any of the text floating around. And if they were, how would I know?
example 2: I searched for "britney spears" and got poorly-drawn images of the characters from that classic cartoon, Ducktales. As far as I can tell there's no connection here.
3) The animation is slow. Don't even try to argue that Java is fundamentally slow, I've seen a lot of impressive graphics work done in Java and you've got a lot of work to do.
4) There's no method by which to save content. There's tons of software, music, video, and information out there that cannot be accessed by your browser. Perhaps the text and images thing
5) You destroy the work of every web designer ever. Web pages exist to be viewed, not torn apart and trivialized by the client's browser. The web designed sits around and codes large amounts of html and puts together all sorts of snazzy graphics, scripts, applets and whatnot and expects them to be viewed in the way he intended. Your browser pulls out the description meta tag, the first image on the page and floats them around randomly. What happened to the other 99% of the content on the page? With your browser, we'll never know.
6) Your web page is ugly (I'm not saying mine isn't). For the love of god, add some color.
As far as I can tell, there was only one redeeming feature of your browser: I typed in porn, got some nice pictures without any passwords and wasn't flooded with popup windows.
You've got a good idea, but I think you went about it all wrong. The floating text and images thing isn't very fun to watch, nor does it present information well to the user. This is akin to having the text and images in a magazine float around when I'm trying to read it -- it's annoying and a pain to follow.
I can only suggest that you add some real functionality and allow the user to actually see some amount of content pertaining to a topic.
Hope you find this helpful.
I'd be curious to see how they manage windwos 3d accelerated applications. It's not an impossibility, but I can imagine that having the accelerator render both the window manager and an application at the same time will steal clock cycles from both and cause an ovreall system slowdown.