So does the mighty USA Army, but we don't complain about that!
IMO, Concorde demonstrates the superiority of the European and Japanese practices of 'corporate welfare'. We need to get more of this in the USA, or else these more socialist countries will run rings around us technology-wise.
When the profit motive is the only force in the market, the inevitable result is stagnation and monopoly. The Socialist governments of France and the United Kingdom showed that two Socialist countries could achieve what even the greatest nation on earth could not: Supersonic passenger aircraft.
It is interesting to note that the only other supersonic airliner was the Tupolev TU-144 which came from that other Socialist utopia the USSR.
I am not saying the USA should become socialist, but it should recognize that to achive true greatness and kick-ass status, it needs to develop a supersonic airliner of its own, otherwise people will still look to Britain and France as the most advanced nations.
Come on, you can't tell me you don't feel a tinge of national humiliation every time you see the sleek sexy lines of the Concorde parked at JFK airport ?
Globalization - We didn't vote for it.
on
Globalization
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
Most people I know are against globalization. Even Americans who stand to gain the most. In the last 20 years, we have seen Europe replace its cafes and coffee shops with McDonalds and Starbucks.
Local forms of clothing have been replaced with baseball hats and blue jeans.
And religion has been replaced with shallow consumerism. This all makes sense from the point of view of Global Capital. But let us not forget it was capitalists who ended slavery in order to have a bigger market for their goods.
The real problem of globalization is the American attitude which puts individual freedom above just about every other principle.
In Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Japan, Russia etc our values are different. We put family and religion first. We do not care about your profit motive.
We will eventually win, because we will eventually stop buying into your culture of greed. It may not happen today or tomorrow, but it will happen. And then your IRAs and pension funds will be worth nothing.
The design of a userspace program should not matter on what virtual memory system is in use.
Sure locality of reference matters, but any decent VM design will take this into account.
What I would like to see would be per-process VM algorithms. Like, you give an extra argument to the fork system call, and your new process has its virtual memory managed in a way which is optimal for your application.
Stack based languages exhibit different behaviour to certain other types of languages, and most VM systems seem to be optimised for this general case.
Hey, I made a mistake, Fred Brooks did write the mythical man month. I was not attempting to 'troll' slashdot.
And you should realise that it is possible to create more than one user account on slashdot, and that it is quite easy to brute force the password system. Both of these facts mean that a UID number is no indication of the length of time a given individual has been reading slashdot.
Doesn't match the reality of idiotic management and ludicrous deadlines that seem to be the trademark of the technology industry.
A far more insightful source is Ed Yourdon's books the Mythical Man Month, and Death March.
The sooner everyone, developers, management and consumers realise that to develop good software takes time, and money, the sooner we can all start to enjoy bug-free well written reliable software.
Until then, we are stuck with the 'good enough' model.
The VM policy of the OS should be tweakable in the same way that you can dynamically load and unload modules. I see nothing controversial about this. Some people prefer random page ejection to lease recently used. Others think that demand paging can be improved upon.
I say, include it all in the kernel and make it configurable by the user. After all, most Linux users are pretty tech-savvy, they are unlikely to wreck their machines (the way windoze lusers do every time they tweak their registry).
Since they are cheaper than their competition, and more environmentally friendly.
My concern is whether there is actually a demand for supersonic flight, or whether the current conventional airliners represent the 'good enough' level of technology which means there is no incentive to replace them. The current state of the travel industry makes me think it will be a long time before we see a scramjet based airliner at JFK.
In the meantime, the Europeans seem to be about to revive the Concorde. Its a bit annoying that we don't have anything to beat that. Maybe these superjumbos will be as impressive, but they won't be supersonic
Re:Why does Gates get the credit ?
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
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· Score: 1, Troll
(imagine 95% of the world running AIX!- Ahhhhh!).
Hell or even worse - HP-UX 9...
You have a valid point, but it is sad, isn't it to realise just how many human lives have been wasted by Microsofts bug-ridden software.
Although Microsoft have not actually committed genocide, they must have wasted the equivalent of a few thousand lives if you count all the wasted hours spend looking at BSODs and rebooting...
Did anyone else notice that the article was written by slashdot's very own king of trolls - Jon Erickson ? You don't have to be an Insightful genius to realise what is going on here!
Is it too much to ask the slashdot editors to check things like this before posting ? This troll is not even worthy of inadequacy.org
Why does Gates get the credit ?
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Gates didn't write DOS, he merely licensed it from Gary Kildall (QDOS) so why is Bill Gates the big hero ?
DOS was not even very advanced by the standards of the day. CP/M and MP/M were streets ahead of it. Hell, even xenix would have been a better foundation for Microsofts world domination!
I wonder if the geeks that are so rabidly against Microsoft would be so vociferous if Unix was running on over 95% of the world's PCs ?
It seems to me that it is getting harder and harder to filter actual information from the mess of data and noise and corporate/media spin on the Internet.
Remember that thing with the IBM hard drives ? I still don't know who to believe.
I think this problem is only going to get worse. In the interests of responsible journalism, could someone at slashdot investigate, and actually come to an editorial conclusion ? The truth is out there, I just don't have time to sift through all the spin and hype to get at it.
Who does ?
This is a great idea - but it won't catch on.
on
A Better FTP?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There are a couple of problems. The main one is that most of the servers out there understand the FTP protocol, it has critical mass, and it is 'good enough'.
This means that there is really no incentive to change to it.
The second problem is that for most people, most of the time, their Internet connection is pretty reliable. This is also improving all the time as more and more people move to DSL and cable modems instead of dialling up.
In the dim and distant past, before I became 'respectable' I used to be a hacker wannabe. I used to use my 1200 baud modem to dial into various systems, and lets just say, that had the law been the same then as it is now, I could have been arrested.
But after I became involved in tech support for major financial institutions, I realised that although security there was reasonably good, you could almost always circumvent it via social engineering.
My favorite trick to get into the server room was to put on an old hard-hat and a fluorescent jacket. I would stand outside the door until someone came along, then I would simply ask them to let me in. Which about 70% of the time, they did. At which point, I would point out to them that I could have been anyone, usually got an embarassed apology.
I was using social engineering to raise the security awareness of staff, but it was a real eye-opener to me just how easy it was to control people.
Vinyl sounds better, but the problem is that it deterioirates over time, as you get dust and scratches on it.
The best audio format would be some kind of analog laser disc, which would combine the indestructability of the CD with the analog 'warmth and humanity' of vinyl.
Mind you, looks like the dumb consumer has spoken. I cannot remember the last time I saw a mainstream release (apart from dance music) come out on vinyl. I think vinyl is all but dead.
SACD seems to be the latest pretender to the vinyl throne, but with players costing over $1000 I think they make take time to catch on.
This is the development I have been waiting for. Imagine, you take this thing round to your friends house, and he/she lets you loose on his/her CD collection. In the space of a couple of hours, the damn machine has paid for itself in the savings you could make by ripping CDs instead of buying them.
No doubt the morons at the RIAA will complain that this device violates the DMCA, but in reality it will encourage people to buy CDs, because they will listen to the music in very low quality MP3 format, and later on they will buy the genuine CD, to get the extra sound quality.
I just hope these guys stay under the RIAA's radar.
Microsoft deserve to rot in the eternal flames of hell for this outrageous attempt to coerce people into using their browser.
I am saddened that they cannot allow their products to compete on their merits alone. I mean, IE6 is a good browser, it stands on its merits, why did microsoft think it was insightful to block out other browsers ? It will have a negative effect on Microsoft in the long run, as people start to realise their unethical methods are hurting innocent consumers.
I don't want to be a downer, because I am one of the most zealous Linux advocates you are ever likely to meet. I've persuaded loads of people to give linux a go, I've even temporarily disabled a friends laptop in a bid to convert him (that was not my finest advocacy moment). But the basic cold hard truth is this: docs created as RTF can be imported to pretty much any word processor. Some can read.doc format (partially though, because Microsoft refuse to publish the internal format of their files, believing them to be 'intellectual property' that they can use to 'leverage' their market).
The problem is that you are never dealing with a set of Word docs and templates. There will be excel spreadsheets, and powerpoint presentations. There will be custom macros, and Word-Basic extentions. Documents will be linked and embedded in each other.
In short, most microsoft offices are going to stay that way because of the interdependancies on various proprietory products and protocols.
Your best bet for getting a Linux/StarOffice solution in place is if there is nothing there already. If microsoft has got a company hooked on their corporate crack cocaine, there is very little you can do to wean them off it.
If this kind of project gets off the ground, I think we may yet see a futures and options market develop for that valuable commodity - CPU Cycles.
There would be plenty of room for speculation, and participants in the market would basically be betting on Moore's law, in addition to the other economic factors common to all derivatives markets.
The problems I forsee are to do with the standardization of the contracts. We would need to agree on an architecture, and a delivery method for the CPU cycles. All in all though, this could be a really lucrative business, especially with the demand for GHz from Hollywood movie studios set to explode in the near future due to actors being replaced with CGI animation.
Sometimes I feel like I am living in a Bruce Sterling or William Gibson novel, the pace of technology just seems to get faster and faster.
Its about time that they paid a bit more attention to acessability issues. These software capabilities are not just for a small minority of people. I often find them useful myself, and I am not physically challenged. Having a large high-contrast display setting is actually quite useful to avoid eyestrain on the larger monitors. And the various other acessibility functions can often be useful to able bodied people.
Hopefully this means that finally usability is being taken seriously by the big corporations who are usually too focussed on the bottom line to care about the 1% of the population who need that little extra feature to fully utilize their expensive PC hardware.
A series 5 can be used as a universal infra-red controller. Don't know what the software is called though, or how good it is.
I wonder if you could use the infra-red port on a laptop as a heat-sensitive alarm ? Point it at the door when you go to sleep, and if someone comes in it will play a loud MP3 to alert you. Or is the infra-red receptor on a laptop not heat-sensitive ?
As a mac user, the effort would have been better spent porting some open source apps to the MacOS. Then carbonizing them. Emulation is cool, but for all practical purposes, you are better off going native.
Remember, we owe a duty of commitment to the open source community, and there's no reason for Mac users to be left out!
I have often wanted to have a go at kernel programming. I want to try and write some device drivers, but I am always too scared of this 'black art'. Its good to see someone taking time out to make it a bit more comprehensible for 'the rest of us'.
I'm wondering, do kernel developers use tools like vmware/plex86 to debug their running kernels ? It seems like we've come a long way since debugging with strategically placed printfs
Slashdot Mirror
So does the mighty USA Army, but we don't complain about that!
IMO, Concorde demonstrates the superiority of the European and Japanese practices of 'corporate welfare'. We need to get more of this in the USA, or else these more socialist countries will run rings around us technology-wise.
When the profit motive is the only force in the market, the inevitable result is stagnation and monopoly. The Socialist governments of France and the United Kingdom showed that two Socialist countries could achieve what even the greatest nation on earth could not: Supersonic passenger aircraft.
It is interesting to note that the only other supersonic airliner was the Tupolev TU-144 which came from that other Socialist utopia the USSR.
I am not saying the USA should become socialist, but it should recognize that to achive true greatness and kick-ass status, it needs to develop a supersonic airliner of its own, otherwise people will still look to Britain and France as the most advanced nations.
Come on, you can't tell me you don't feel a tinge of national humiliation every time you see the sleek sexy lines of the Concorde parked at JFK airport ?
Local forms of clothing have been replaced with baseball hats and blue jeans.
And religion has been replaced with shallow consumerism. This all makes sense from the point of view of Global Capital. But let us not forget it was capitalists who ended slavery in order to have a bigger market for their goods.
The real problem of globalization is the American attitude which puts individual freedom above just about every other principle.
In Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, Japan, Russia etc our values are different. We put family and religion first. We do not care about your profit motive.
We will eventually win, because we will eventually stop buying into your culture of greed. It may not happen today or tomorrow, but it will happen. And then your IRAs and pension funds will be worth nothing.
Sure locality of reference matters, but any decent VM design will take this into account.
What I would like to see would be per-process VM algorithms. Like, you give an extra argument to the fork system call, and your new process has its virtual memory managed in a way which is optimal for your application.
Stack based languages exhibit different behaviour to certain other types of languages, and most VM systems seem to be optimised for this general case.
And you should realise that it is possible to create more than one user account on slashdot, and that it is quite easy to brute force the password system. Both of these facts mean that a UID number is no indication of the length of time a given individual has been reading slashdot.
A far more insightful source is Ed Yourdon's books the Mythical Man Month, and Death March.
The sooner everyone, developers, management and consumers realise that to develop good software takes time, and money, the sooner we can all start to enjoy bug-free well written reliable software.
Until then, we are stuck with the 'good enough' model.
I say, include it all in the kernel and make it configurable by the user. After all, most Linux users are pretty tech-savvy, they are unlikely to wreck their machines (the way windoze lusers do every time they tweak their registry).
What do others think ?
My concern is whether there is actually a demand for supersonic flight, or whether the current conventional airliners represent the 'good enough' level of technology which means there is no incentive to replace them. The current state of the travel industry makes me think it will be a long time before we see a scramjet based airliner at JFK.
In the meantime, the Europeans seem to be about to revive the Concorde. Its a bit annoying that we don't have anything to beat that. Maybe these superjumbos will be as impressive, but they won't be supersonic
Hell or even worse - HP-UX 9...
You have a valid point, but it is sad, isn't it to realise just how many human lives have been wasted by Microsofts bug-ridden software.
Although Microsoft have not actually committed genocide, they must have wasted the equivalent of a few thousand lives if you count all the wasted hours spend looking at BSODs and rebooting...
Is it too much to ask the slashdot editors to check things like this before posting ? This troll is not even worthy of inadequacy.org
DOS was not even very advanced by the standards of the day. CP/M and MP/M were streets ahead of it. Hell, even xenix would have been a better foundation for Microsofts world domination!
I wonder if the geeks that are so rabidly against Microsoft would be so vociferous if Unix was running on over 95% of the world's PCs ?
That sounds like spin to me. If not outright lying.
Remember that thing with the IBM hard drives ? I still don't know who to believe.
I think this problem is only going to get worse. In the interests of responsible journalism, could someone at slashdot investigate, and actually come to an editorial conclusion ? The truth is out there, I just don't have time to sift through all the spin and hype to get at it.
Who does ?
This means that there is really no incentive to change to it.
The second problem is that for most people, most of the time, their Internet connection is pretty reliable. This is also improving all the time as more and more people move to DSL and cable modems instead of dialling up.
But after I became involved in tech support for major financial institutions, I realised that although security there was reasonably good, you could almost always circumvent it via social engineering.
My favorite trick to get into the server room was to put on an old hard-hat and a fluorescent jacket. I would stand outside the door until someone came along, then I would simply ask them to let me in. Which about 70% of the time, they did. At which point, I would point out to them that I could have been anyone, usually got an embarassed apology.
I was using social engineering to raise the security awareness of staff, but it was a real eye-opener to me just how easy it was to control people.
The best audio format would be some kind of analog laser disc, which would combine the indestructability of the CD with the analog 'warmth and humanity' of vinyl.
Mind you, looks like the dumb consumer has spoken. I cannot remember the last time I saw a mainstream release (apart from dance music) come out on vinyl. I think vinyl is all but dead.
SACD seems to be the latest pretender to the vinyl throne, but with players costing over $1000 I think they make take time to catch on.
No doubt the morons at the RIAA will complain that this device violates the DMCA, but in reality it will encourage people to buy CDs, because they will listen to the music in very low quality MP3 format, and later on they will buy the genuine CD, to get the extra sound quality.
I just hope these guys stay under the RIAA's radar.
I am saddened that they cannot allow their products to compete on their merits alone. I mean, IE6 is a good browser, it stands on its merits, why did microsoft think it was insightful to block out other browsers ? It will have a negative effect on Microsoft in the long run, as people start to realise their unethical methods are hurting innocent consumers.
You clearly do not understand futures/options markets. The whole point is to speculate on the rate at which moore's law works.
The problem is that you are never dealing with a set of Word docs and templates. There will be excel spreadsheets, and powerpoint presentations. There will be custom macros, and Word-Basic extentions. Documents will be linked and embedded in each other.
In short, most microsoft offices are going to stay that way because of the interdependancies on various proprietory products and protocols.
Your best bet for getting a Linux/StarOffice solution in place is if there is nothing there already. If microsoft has got a company hooked on their corporate crack cocaine, there is very little you can do to wean them off it.
Sad to say, but true.
There would be plenty of room for speculation, and participants in the market would basically be betting on Moore's law, in addition to the other economic factors common to all derivatives markets.
The problems I forsee are to do with the standardization of the contracts. We would need to agree on an architecture, and a delivery method for the CPU cycles. All in all though, this could be a really lucrative business, especially with the demand for GHz from Hollywood movie studios set to explode in the near future due to actors being replaced with CGI animation.
Sometimes I feel like I am living in a Bruce Sterling or William Gibson novel, the pace of technology just seems to get faster and faster.
Hopefully this means that finally usability is being taken seriously by the big corporations who are usually too focussed on the bottom line to care about the 1% of the population who need that little extra feature to fully utilize their expensive PC hardware.
I wonder if you could use the infra-red port on a laptop as a heat-sensitive alarm ? Point it at the door when you go to sleep, and if someone comes in it will play a loud MP3 to alert you. Or is the infra-red receptor on a laptop not heat-sensitive ?
Remember, we owe a duty of commitment to the open source community, and there's no reason for Mac users to be left out!
I'm wondering, do kernel developers use tools like vmware/plex86 to debug their running kernels ? It seems like we've come a long way since debugging with strategically placed printfs
Someone should try this with perl, it could use a good abstraction layer like this.