The type of thing I posted about is so far from being considered a social responsibility issue that it was moderated down as being "offtopic." Good grief.
The answer to this question should be obvious from the get go. What do 90% of people need computers for? To do word processing, web surfing, email. A few people need a bit more, maybe a spreadsheet or database. Note that I'm ignoring speciality fields here, like graphic arts, movie production, and numerical analysis. But look at the things that have been forced into general production for all of these people:
CPUs so fast and hot that they need massive heat sinks and their own fans.
CPUs with built-in multimedia instructions that nobody uses. At the expense of higher power consumption
CPUs with vector math instructions that don't have any benefit except for 3D graphics. At the expense of higher power consumption.
3D graphics cards with 4 or 8MB as a standard with every machine, cards that often need their own heat sinks and fans.
AGP, which is even of questionable benefit for 3D games.
And, quite honestly, most of these things aren't even in general use under Linux, with the exception of faster CPUs. By now, we should have computers the size of calculators that use 1 watt of power and boot-up instantly and are solid as a rock. But the pointless push for the bleeding edge keeps everyone from getting what they want. Is "fast, but mediocre" really a good alternative to "not quite as fast, but wonderful"?
This isn't an important movement, this is the online equivalent to magazines like Sassy, Seventeen, and Glamour. Grrl and Chick sites--and I mean sites using those actual terms in the name, not a random slam--have stories about dating and boys and proms and music and clothes and makeup and teen angst and pretty much what you'd expect. This isn't bad; it's just a pop culture thing for a certain age. And it's certainly not a movement of any kind.
The interesting thing about women on the web is that they fall largely outside of the geek crowd. There isn't a preoccupation with abstract issues, like which operating system a browser runs under or the open/closed nature of various plugins. It's possible that the traditional, stereotypical geek on the web is shortly going to start looking very inbred.
The ability to alter the UI to one's personal liking and maximum efficiency is a benefit that computers brings to us.
Putting an X-Files or Simpsons theme on a browser or MP3 player has nothing to do with efficiency. If anything, one could argue that skins slow an application down and make it harder to see UI widgets, but there's no efficiency argument for the flipside.
The general theory is that some people don't want to use their computers for anything except reconfiguring and customizing software. Occasionally those people run out of things to do and do something productive. But do we really want this kind of person being productive? Who knows what drivel they'll produce. Skins are an ingenious way of preventing such idle hands. What we need are more skinnable applications and more skins. Perhaps someone should write a robot to pull images of the web and generate thousands of skins. This will keep skin-happy people busy even longer, downloading, installing, and deleting, and generally out of society.
In the beginning, Lara was a decent action hero. Yeah, she was exaggerated physically, but other than that she was believable. Tough but sexy, with the sexy more of an afterthought. Since then, the developers have gotten a bit too horny and full of themselves. Lara is now featured in magazines wearing swimpy swimsuits, or topless and covering herself with a towel, etc. Good grief. Teenage boys rule the game business.
Wrong. You can take college classes in "Artificial Intelligence," and there are textbooks on the subject. But the subject has been eroded by ridiculous SF treatments.
At one time, especially back when the term was coined, "AI" was equated with making machines "think" in the same general capacity as humans. AI has changed since then, and is now more of a broad classification of symbolic computing, searching, theorem proving, and knowledge representation. If you pick up any good, recent AI textbook, you won't find any information at all about making machines think in a true way. That's not the goal.
AI is more a way of branding problems that aren't completely deterministic in the way that traditional algorithms are. A classic example is the STUDENT program for decoding and solving high-school algebra level word problems. An amazing piece of work back in the 1960s--how many people could write something like that today?--but hardly AI in the sense of Kurzweil. Today we're at the same level, in general, but we're working on different problems. Making computers think like people is not one of those problems.
Re:Crystal Space, compare and contrast.
on
Jet3d Game Engine
·
· Score: 2
Jet3D/Genesis3D is up there there with LithTech and the Unreal Engine. The difference is that no one has written a high profile game with Jet3D, so it seems more like a kiddie project. Okay, no one's written a high profile game with LithTech either. Well, Shogo...nah, I stand by my original comment.
I suspect, too, that people are taking a close look at Jet3D and thinking "Man, the source to this is messy" or "Look at how they did [this] and [that]; that's soooo lame." If those same people could peek into Unreal or LithTech or any of the hundreds of other engines used in commercial products, then they'd say the same thing. Hype and features sell games and engines, not the guts. And in this case we get to see the guts.
Let's suppose that all of a sudden Microsoft and all copies of Windows 95/98/2000/NT vanished. The result would be a complete mess. Likely, it would cause a run on Macintoshes, but I can't see it causing a run on Linux. The oft cited mantra of the Linux world is that the user should be able to make choices. The choice of which Window manager to run. The choice of which text editor to use. The choice of which distribution to get. These choices only matter to people who fixate on Linux as an operating system. Realistically, people think like this:
I'm a writer. I want to use a comfortable word processor.
My son is four. I want to get him some educational software that will help him learn to read.
I want to be able to browse the web and send email with pictures to my friends.
Obsession with particulars of hardware and software isn't part of this at all. These people aren't stupid; they have their lives and want a tool to help them get things done. Right now, Linux isn't a tool as much as it is a kit that you can spend weekends and evenings with until you've eventually built a ship in a bottle that you are happy with. Windows and Word and Outlook and Excel have gotten to the point where they *are* just tools. When I put on my geek hat, I dislike Bill Gates greatly. When I put on my other hats, I'm glad that I can fire up Word and be done with it.
That's mumbo jumbo. Anyone with a CS degree who remotely thinks that computers can learn in any real sense of the word should be in a different field. Heck, right now I can type "naked women" into Google and get back tons of information. And a computer must have "learned" that info, because it was able to present it to me, right? I don't think so.
I want to agree with these people, but let's be realistic. CPU speeds get faster, software gets more complex, but is software getting more reliable or more sophisticated in general? Not nearly at the same rate as Moore's law. In fact, I'd argue that in general we're pushing the limits of software reliability and complexity right now, and we're rewinding as a result.
For example, we've gone through the original UNIX phase (1970s), through competitors like VMS, through assorted desktop operating systems (CPM, MS-DOS/PC-DOS, MacOS, Windows, AmigaOS) before we've finally come around to UNIX again (i.e. Linux). Linux isn't anything earth shattering or revolutionary or cutting edge; it's just stable, simple, and proven.
Or look at compilers. For the longest time people were hell-bent on optimization and how compilers should be able to generate code better than any human could. But now the commonly accepted view is that it isn't worth going over the top in terms of wacky optimizations. It's better to be conservative rather than risk breaking code for an extra 2-15% increase in speed.
Overall, I don't think we are able to write the software that will do any of the things that Kurzweil and friends rave about. Speed is one thing, but in any basic computer science course students are given examples of calculations that would take some seemingly infinite amount of time. Assuming a 1000x speedup in hardware, the time is reduced to something still unreasonable, like 400,000 years. There's more to it than this. Saying that speed results in intelligence is just plain naive.
After about Ultima VI, Lord British was more a manager than anything else. After that point, the games expanded technologically but went backward in many other ways. Ultima VII was so bad in certain respects that LB made apologies for it. And Ultima IX is a disaster across the board. I almost want to say that the Ultima games were never meant to be visualized in real-time as has been done with the last three games. In 3D with a directly controlled character, Ultima seems more like a poor clone of Mario 64 than a role playing game. It is time to let the Ultima series die a peaceful death.
Well said. Games have completely failed in their abilities to tell interactive stories. The best they've done is to present a narrative that the player moves through by pressing the buttons the designer decided he should push. This may be a valid form of entertainment, but it has fallen short of what games were once presented as being capable of.
A topic that has rows of shelves at Barnes & Noble, gets coverage on CNN and in the NY Times and Wall Street Journal is not, by any stretch of the imagination, counter-cultural.
There really isn't going to be any novel in WIMP. It's been pretty much explored to death.
That's very short sighted IMO. Nobody's even been trying to design something from a usability standpoint; everyone's just copying Apple and Microsoft. And Apple's gotten all senile with UI abominations like the new Quicktime player; they're not to be looked to for inspiration.
I need to start my own Linux GUI company, apparently:)
Amen. These folks are just like the kid who copies an essay and isn't smart enough to realize when he's copying something relevant or not. Microsoft interfaces are a conglomeration of features, some good and some horrible, with pretty graphics on top. Heck, Windows Notepad doesn't even support the Ctrl+S shortcut for Save. Ask for help and you get presented with weird choices about what size database you'd like to build. Uninstallers are frequently added to the start menu right next to applications, as if you need constant access to them. The Start menu itself is a mess because navigating nested pull-right menus is awkward, so why is it the cornerstone of the whole GUI? Why do apps have toolbars filled with icons that don't represent anything remotely obvious? Is it better to have to hover the cursor over weird pictures--to get tooltips--than to navigate textual menus? And so on and so on. Bring on some UI designers with some sense.
Thing is, though, that the GNOME and KDE people are frequently copying *bad* things from Microsoft. Something may be completely trashed at the User Interface Hall of Shame--and rightfully so--and then it shows up in a Linux desktop environment.
The open source side of this is interesting, but I wouldn't expect to leverage much success from the Linux coding community, because:
1. The number of coders who have demonstrated any usability sense at all are very rare; rare enough that they should be snapped up by wise companies. 2. The Linux game coding community is *horrible*. Yes, I mean that. This is 2000; we have amazing multi-hundred-megahertz machines. We have graphics cards that speed things up even more. And what are we seeing: clones of Asteroids and Tetris and Tron light-cycle games. Ugh. Yeah, we get some ports and some people try to conjure up some inkling of creativity, but it just doesn't look good.
This is a really weird article. Getting a job that's Linux-based isn't necessarily a good thing, or at least it has very little to do with your personal satisfaction. Linux is, after all, just an operating system. What's more important is the type of work you're doing, the people you're working with, how well a company is managed, and so on. If you want a Linux job solely because you think Microsoft is evil, then you need to pull back and look at your personal crusades in perspective. If you enjoy programming, then you'll get the same problem solving and code writing pleasures regardless of whether you're working on a mainframe, a proprietary embedded system (much more common than either Windows or Linux in the job market), a handheld device, or some form of desktop PC. Ranting about how Linux is superior to Windows really does give the same impression as arguing whether Captain Picard could take down Captain Kirk. It looks really weird to most people, because most people, even the techies, don't fixate on which operating system their computer is running.
Re:Ugh. I'd rather not hire you.
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 2
If you have all this trouble yourself with using the web, and you let it get to you like that, then you're probably not worth hiring for a high tech job.
You mean you've never accessed a site and had it be dog slow? You've never been unable to connect to a favorite site? What if the college network drags to a crawl because some new game demo just came out?
Setting up a special web site containing notes and such, yeah that's clever, but it's hardly the point. You would be much smarter to just photocopy the notes and bring them to class. Or put them on your laptop and search for the information in a local file. In a high pressure situation, you go for the most reliable solution.
It's stunning how many people want to approach this as a programming problem; i.e. a fast way of checking lots of numbers. We're talking about a *proof*. Guessing and checking is missing the point.
Ugh. I'd rather go for it without the web.
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 2
Searching the web can be *infuriating*, especially if the local network is bogged down or a site you need to access is having trouble. I love the web, but I have to admit that finding information on it can soak up a surprising amount of time. If I had an exam like this, I'd think the ability to online searches was a red herring; if you took advantage of it, you'd never get anywhere, just as if you were allowed to take a 50 minute math exam with in a room filled with math texts,
For Windows, first there was MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes). Horrible, horrible, hacks, but the MFC DLLs ship with every Windows machine. Then Visual BASIC and Delphi came along and have generally been battling it out, with VB getting more attention.
Now Borland has a good chance of getting their libraries to ship with many Linux distributions. The result is that you can write pretty flashy UI-oriented applications and distribute them as teeny-tiny executables. Yeah, I know all about Tk and GTK and such, but Borland's stuff is much nicer. All of a sudden, Linux is going to have very nice GUI apps. Borland tech is very good; they may not be crazy hippies, but they're infinitely better than Microsoft.
Additionally, Object Pascal is a bang-up development language, even without the RAD tools. You have much less muss and fuss than C++, and the compile times for even large projects on any halfway decent machine are effectively zero. It makes gcc seem like a total 1970s dog. I'm hoping Borland will give away the command line OP tools like they have with their C compiler. I'd switch to OP for all low-level development in a second. (Strangley, many of the features of Pascal that C programmers hated back in the C/Pascal wars of 15 years ago are now in C++, most notably VAR parameters (C++ references) and function prototypes.)
No offense, but Linux is out of its league in embedded systems. Sure, you could use it, but embedded systems programmers are very particular about things--as they should be, considering that they're often working on systems that lives depend upon. You would never want a system with unpredicatable context switching times or free-for-all memory usage (i.e. dependent on malloc) in a critical system. I like Linux, but would never want it to be used on aircraft or controlling an anti-lock braking system. Never. There's a huge difference between reliability on the desktop and reliability in situations like these. "Best tool for the job" is infinitely more important than advocacy.
Slashdot Mirror
The type of thing I posted about is so far from being considered a social responsibility issue that it was moderated down as being "offtopic." Good grief.
CPUs so fast and hot that they need massive heat sinks and their own fans.
CPUs with built-in multimedia instructions that nobody uses. At the expense of higher power consumption
CPUs with vector math instructions that don't have any benefit except for 3D graphics. At the expense of higher power consumption.
3D graphics cards with 4 or 8MB as a standard with every machine, cards that often need their own heat sinks and fans.
AGP, which is even of questionable benefit for 3D games.
And, quite honestly, most of these things aren't even in general use under Linux, with the exception of faster CPUs. By now, we should have computers the size of calculators that use 1 watt of power and boot-up instantly and are solid as a rock. But the pointless push for the bleeding edge keeps everyone from getting what they want. Is "fast, but mediocre" really a good alternative to "not quite as fast, but wonderful"?
This isn't an important movement, this is the online equivalent to magazines like Sassy, Seventeen, and Glamour. Grrl and Chick sites--and I mean sites using those actual terms in the name, not a random slam--have stories about dating and boys and proms and music and clothes and makeup and teen angst and pretty much what you'd expect. This isn't bad; it's just a pop culture thing for a certain age. And it's certainly not a movement of any kind.
The interesting thing about women on the web is that they fall largely outside of the geek crowd. There isn't a preoccupation with abstract issues, like which operating system a browser runs under or the open/closed nature of various plugins. It's possible that the traditional, stereotypical geek on the web is shortly going to start looking very inbred.
The ability to alter the UI to one's personal liking and maximum efficiency is a benefit that computers brings to us.
Putting an X-Files or Simpsons theme on a browser or MP3 player has nothing to do with efficiency. If anything, one could argue that skins slow an application down and make it harder to see UI widgets, but there's no efficiency argument for the flipside.
The general theory is that some people don't want to use their computers for anything except reconfiguring and customizing software. Occasionally those people run out of things to do and do something productive. But do we really want this kind of person being productive? Who knows what drivel they'll produce. Skins are an ingenious way of preventing such idle hands. What we need are more skinnable applications and more skins. Perhaps someone should write a robot to pull images of the web and generate thousands of skins. This will keep skin-happy people busy even longer, downloading, installing, and deleting, and generally out of society.
In the beginning, Lara was a decent action hero. Yeah, she was exaggerated physically, but other than that she was believable. Tough but sexy, with the sexy more of an afterthought. Since then, the developers have gotten a bit too horny and full of themselves. Lara is now featured in magazines wearing swimpy swimsuits, or topless and covering herself with a towel, etc. Good grief. Teenage boys rule the game business.
Wrong. You can take college classes in "Artificial Intelligence," and there are textbooks on the subject. But the subject has been eroded by ridiculous SF treatments.
At one time, especially back when the term was coined, "AI" was equated with making machines "think" in the same general capacity as humans. AI has changed since then, and is now more of a broad classification of symbolic computing, searching, theorem proving, and knowledge representation. If you pick up any good, recent AI textbook, you won't find any information at all about making machines think in a true way. That's not the goal.
AI is more a way of branding problems that aren't completely deterministic in the way that traditional algorithms are. A classic example is the STUDENT program for decoding and solving high-school algebra level word problems. An amazing piece of work back in the 1960s--how many people could write something like that today?--but hardly AI in the sense of Kurzweil. Today we're at the same level, in general, but we're working on different problems. Making computers think like people is not one of those problems.
Jet3D/Genesis3D is up there there with LithTech and the Unreal Engine. The difference is that no one has written a high profile game with Jet3D, so it seems more like a kiddie project. Okay, no one's written a high profile game with LithTech either. Well, Shogo...nah, I stand by my original comment.
I suspect, too, that people are taking a close look at Jet3D and thinking "Man, the source to this is messy" or "Look at how they did [this] and [that]; that's soooo lame." If those same people could peek into Unreal or LithTech or any of the hundreds of other engines used in commercial products, then they'd say the same thing. Hype and features sell games and engines, not the guts. And in this case we get to see the guts.
I'm a writer. I want to use a comfortable word processor.
My son is four. I want to get him some educational software that will help him learn to read.
I want to be able to browse the web and send email with pictures to my friends.
Obsession with particulars of hardware and software isn't part of this at all. These people aren't stupid; they have their lives and want a tool to help them get things done. Right now, Linux isn't a tool as much as it is a kit that you can spend weekends and evenings with until you've eventually built a ship in a bottle that you are happy with. Windows and Word and Outlook and Excel have gotten to the point where they *are* just tools. When I put on my geek hat, I dislike Bill Gates greatly. When I put on my other hats, I'm glad that I can fire up Word and be done with it.
That's mumbo jumbo. Anyone with a CS degree who remotely thinks that computers can learn in any real sense of the word should be in a different field. Heck, right now I can type "naked women" into Google and get back tons of information. And a computer must have "learned" that info, because it was able to present it to me, right? I don't think so.
I want to agree with these people, but let's be realistic. CPU speeds get faster, software gets more complex, but is software getting more reliable or more sophisticated in general? Not nearly at the same rate as Moore's law. In fact, I'd argue that in general we're pushing the limits of software reliability and complexity right now, and we're rewinding as a result.
For example, we've gone through the original UNIX phase (1970s), through competitors like VMS, through assorted desktop operating systems (CPM, MS-DOS/PC-DOS, MacOS, Windows, AmigaOS) before we've finally come around to UNIX again (i.e. Linux). Linux isn't anything earth shattering or revolutionary or cutting edge; it's just stable, simple, and proven.
Or look at compilers. For the longest time people were hell-bent on optimization and how compilers should be able to generate code better than any human could. But now the commonly accepted view is that it isn't worth going over the top in terms of wacky optimizations. It's better to be conservative rather than risk breaking code for an extra 2-15% increase in speed.
Overall, I don't think we are able to write the software that will do any of the things that Kurzweil and friends rave about. Speed is one thing, but in any basic computer science course students are given examples of calculations that would take some seemingly infinite amount of time. Assuming a 1000x speedup in hardware, the time is reduced to something still unreasonable, like 400,000 years. There's more to it than this. Saying that speed results in intelligence is just plain naive.
After about Ultima VI, Lord British was more a manager than anything else. After that point, the games expanded technologically but went backward in many other ways. Ultima VII was so bad in certain respects that LB made apologies for it. And Ultima IX is a disaster across the board. I almost want to say that the Ultima games were never meant to be visualized in real-time as has been done with the last three games. In 3D with a directly controlled character, Ultima seems more like a poor clone of Mario 64 than a role playing game. It is time to let the Ultima series die a peaceful death.
Well said. Games have completely failed in their abilities to tell interactive stories. The best they've done is to present a narrative that the player moves through by pressing the buttons the designer decided he should push. This may be a valid form of entertainment, but it has fallen short of what games were once presented as being capable of.
A topic that has rows of shelves at Barnes & Noble, gets coverage on CNN and in the NY Times and Wall Street Journal is not, by any stretch of the imagination, counter-cultural.
There really isn't going to be any novel in WIMP. It's been pretty much explored to death.
:)
That's very short sighted IMO. Nobody's even been trying to design something from a usability standpoint; everyone's just copying Apple and Microsoft. And Apple's gotten all senile with UI abominations like the new Quicktime player; they're not to be looked to for inspiration.
I need to start my own Linux GUI company, apparently
Amen. These folks are just like the kid who copies an essay and isn't smart enough to realize when he's copying something relevant or not. Microsoft interfaces are a conglomeration of features, some good and some horrible, with pretty graphics on top. Heck, Windows Notepad doesn't even support the Ctrl+S shortcut for Save. Ask for help and you get presented with weird choices about what size database you'd like to build. Uninstallers are frequently added to the start menu right next to applications, as if you need constant access to them. The Start menu itself is a mess because navigating nested pull-right menus is awkward, so why is it the cornerstone of the whole GUI? Why do apps have toolbars filled with icons that don't represent anything remotely obvious? Is it better to have to hover the cursor over weird pictures--to get tooltips--than to navigate textual menus? And so on and so on. Bring on some UI designers with some sense.
Thing is, though, that the GNOME and KDE people are frequently copying *bad* things from Microsoft. Something may be completely trashed at the User Interface Hall of Shame--and rightfully so--and then it shows up in a Linux desktop environment.
The open source side of this is interesting, but I wouldn't expect to leverage much success from the Linux coding community, because:
1. The number of coders who have demonstrated any usability sense at all are very rare; rare enough that they should be snapped up by wise companies.
2. The Linux game coding community is *horrible*. Yes, I mean that. This is 2000; we have amazing multi-hundred-megahertz machines. We have graphics cards that speed things up even more. And what are we seeing: clones of Asteroids and Tetris and Tron light-cycle games. Ugh. Yeah, we get some ports and some people try to conjure up some inkling of creativity, but it just doesn't look good.
This is a really weird article. Getting a job that's Linux-based isn't necessarily a good thing, or at least it has very little to do with your personal satisfaction. Linux is, after all, just an operating system. What's more important is the type of work you're doing, the people you're working with, how well a company is managed, and so on. If you want a Linux job solely because you think Microsoft is evil, then you need to pull back and look at your personal crusades in perspective. If you enjoy programming, then you'll get the same problem solving and code writing pleasures regardless of whether you're working on a mainframe, a proprietary embedded system (much more common than either Windows or Linux in the job market), a handheld device, or some form of desktop PC. Ranting about how Linux is superior to Windows really does give the same impression as arguing whether Captain Picard could take down Captain Kirk. It looks really weird to most people, because most people, even the techies, don't fixate on which operating system their computer is running.
If you have all this trouble yourself with using the web, and you let it get to you like that, then you're probably not worth hiring for a high tech job.
You mean you've never accessed a site and had it be dog slow? You've never been unable to connect to a favorite site? What if the college network drags to a crawl because some new game demo just came out?
Setting up a special web site containing notes and such, yeah that's clever, but it's hardly the point. You would be much smarter to just photocopy the notes and bring them to class. Or put them on your laptop and search for the information in a local file. In a high pressure situation, you go for the most reliable solution.
It's stunning how many people want to approach this as a programming problem; i.e. a fast way of checking lots of numbers. We're talking about a *proof*. Guessing and checking is missing the point.
Searching the web can be *infuriating*, especially if the local network is bogged down or a site you need to access is having trouble. I love the web, but I have to admit that finding information on it can soak up a surprising amount of time. If I had an exam like this, I'd think the ability to online searches was a red herring; if you took advantage of it, you'd never get anywhere, just as if you were allowed to take a 50 minute math exam with in a room filled with math texts,
For Windows, first there was MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes). Horrible, horrible, hacks, but the MFC DLLs ship with every Windows machine. Then Visual BASIC and Delphi came along and have generally been battling it out, with VB getting more attention.
Now Borland has a good chance of getting their libraries to ship with many Linux distributions. The result is that you can write pretty flashy UI-oriented applications and distribute them as teeny-tiny executables. Yeah, I know all about Tk and GTK and such, but Borland's stuff is much nicer. All of a sudden, Linux is going to have very nice GUI apps. Borland tech is very good; they may not be crazy hippies, but they're infinitely better than Microsoft.
Additionally, Object Pascal is a bang-up development language, even without the RAD tools. You have much less muss and fuss than C++, and the compile times for even large projects on any halfway decent machine are effectively zero. It makes gcc seem like a total 1970s dog. I'm hoping Borland will give away the command line OP tools like they have with their C compiler. I'd switch to OP for all low-level development in a second. (Strangley, many of the features of Pascal that C programmers hated back in the C/Pascal wars of 15 years ago are now in C++, most notably VAR parameters (C++ references) and function prototypes.)
No offense, but Linux is out of its league in embedded systems. Sure, you could use it, but embedded systems programmers are very particular about things--as they should be, considering that they're often working on systems that lives depend upon. You would never want a system with unpredicatable context switching times or free-for-all memory usage (i.e. dependent on malloc) in a critical system. I like Linux, but would never want it to be used on aircraft or controlling an anti-lock braking system. Never. There's a huge difference between reliability on the desktop and reliability in situations like these. "Best tool for the job" is infinitely more important than advocacy.