Not every application is primarily concerned with speed. It kills me how many Linux people can't understand why anyone would want to sacrifice speed for any reason.
Microkernels may be slightly slower by nature than monolithic kernels like Linux, but the difference is rapidly becoming a nonissue with increasing processor speeds and better kernel designs.
In the meantime, microkernels are allowing for a host of new and useful features that monolithics just can't do: user-mounted file systems, increased security at the kernel level, dramatically increased ease and speed of development of kernel-level components, the ability to load entire separate operating systems interfacing with the same or separate hardware with no external software... to name a few.
Eventually speed will no longer be considered a primary goal, in fact, it is slowly but surely becoming trivial. Microkernels will win out if monolithic/Linux advocates can only use the speed argument to try to show the superiority of their kernel.
I was thinking about purchasing a Sun Fire 4800, but found that I could get just as much mileage out of ten Linux servers that I built on AMD Athlon XP processors.
Depends on what you need. In the case of my place of employ a bunch of $500 peecees couldn't do what our SunFire 4800 is doing. But I'm glad the peecees worked out for you.
And the Operating System? Linux, of course. Do it right.
I find it somewhat odd that whoever did this study didn't take into account the buffer on the end of a strand of DNA. As I understand from a paper I read some time ago, this is the main factor which caps life expectancy, and has been a known fact for years.
How did a study like the one this article describes overlook such information, which I found in a few minutes on Google (pretending I had no prior knowledge)? Seems like there was a lack of research into the biology of this issue, and that they concentrated primarily on statistics. Unfortunately that doesn't necessarily work; like someone else said in another post, this is similar to ignoring terminal velocity when collecting data about falling objects.
The point was basically that almost no one would obey speed limits, blood alcohol limits, traffic signals, etc. without the fear of being ticketed. Cops are the reason 99% of people obey the law. Most people only care about public safety until it gets in the way of their own satisfaction.
I'll wager that traffic cops have done a hell of a lot more good than bad, because just by being out there and making it known that they enforce the laws they make the roads a lot safer.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to live in any country where any drunk fuckwit could speed through a red light and total my car with impunity because there were no traffic cops to stop him.
Believing that there is no God is as foolish as believing that there is a God. Rather, it makes more sense just to not think about it until there's some kind of basis for the belief, one way or another. If I were to tell you I believe there are chocolate donuts buried on Mars, would you say that the reality is that there are no donuts? No. You'd say that you don't think there are any donuts there, but the possibility exists so why debate it until we actually find some donuts or dig up every inch of Martian soil and find nothing. Right?
The fact that many people think God "looks like us" or "created the universe in 7 days" or whatever is irrational nonsense IMO, but there is no real reason to discount a God entirely. Simply put, I'm going to sit on the fence about the issue and try not to think about it, because it'll only start mattering to me when there's some substantial evidence one way or another.
That's unfair in this case. It seems very likely that there is life elsewhere in the universe, and probably intelligent life at that (alien abductions I seriously doubt, but this poster said nothing about abductions). And ESP is a very broad classification, which is scientifically plausible in some forms... large electromagnets mess with brainwaves, and by some definitions that would be considered ESP.
No. Galileo did not stand on the Sun and observe the Earth's motion. He did, however, stand on the Earth and observe the other planets. Regardless, had he been able to observe the Earth from the Sun, the observations would still be ordinary.
Galileo didn't observe the other planets to confirm a heliocentric universe, nor did he come up with the idea. He merely supported a claim by Copernicus which was later confirmed by Kepler. Kepler observed that the planets could orbit the sun given three simple laws which he formulated. However, Kepler at first wanted so strongly to believe in a geocentric universe, the idea that had been rammed down his throat by the Catholic Church since birth, that he actually came up with an immensely more complex mathematical model to explain the motion of the planets in such a way that they would all orbit the earth. So you see, because the idea of a heliocentric universe was extraordinary at the time, so were the observations. Even a man of science like Kepler looked at the observations and thought to himself, this can't be right.
Stephen Hawking talks about this in A Brief History of Time. Carl Sagan talks about this in Cosmos. Lots of other people talked about this before them. For crying out loud, this very notion has been a staple part of Hindu mythology for hundreds of years.
Amen. If you can't appreciate the value of such a discovery in pure science, then there's no need to complain about it. I'm sure there's plenty of people like me out there who find discoveries like these, no matter how trivial they may seem, to be one more step towards answering the most fundamental questions about our universe. Far from irrelevant.
To the person who started this thread, and others who would ask the same question, I think we should try to think of it from the point of view of those responsible for the discoveries before we comment on their validity or usefulness. I mean, someone worked on this for a long time, in addition to spending years learning the fundamentals of their particular field. They don't need people who are for the most part ignorant of the details and implications to tell them whether their discoveries are useful or not.
MacOSX doesn't use the same microkernel-and-servers setup as the Hurd. So while it is theoretically possible to run multiple (even different) Hurd instances over the same Mach microkernel, hardware access issues would most definitely arise with MacOSX unless modifications were made to regulate them.
One is guilty for the "crime" for simple posession of an object or substance.
This is not a law of morality. It would more accurately be described as a law of prevention. If a person posesses a firearm without a license, they are comitting no explicitly harmful crime yet this situation must be corrected. Regulation of potentially harmful objects or substances is necessary to prevent likely harmful crimes, and laws are necessary to enforce such regulations (it must be considered a crime not to comply with the regulations, or no one would do so). The only variable is the word likely, and it is in no way based on morals. It is based on individual and group statistics (i.e. has said person committed violent crimes before, or is this sort of crime common, or what is this object/substance normally used for).
Some cases do not meet the statistical requirements, or even projected statistics and logical assumptions, to prove that regulation is necessary and so politicians fall back on morality and religion as an explanation (since morals and religion are usually popular enough for a majority to nod their heads). The laws are based on the fact that law-makers believe that posession of an object, substance or knowledge could be harmful to society and therefore should be regulated.
The actual regulatory requirements can be debated, and I definitely disagree with many of those instituted currently, but the fact that some form of regulation is necessary for almost anything potentially harmful cannot be disputed.
You will agree that cars have a high potential to cause injury or death in the hands of an unlicensed driver, yet by your arguments driving should not be regulated until they have actually caused harm by driving the vehicle improperly. It is often necessary to project (by statistics or common sense) the likelihood of causing harm in different ways, and to regulate based on this. You have to apply the same standards to 'gray' areas like abortion and cloning as well. Despite all the wonderful benefits of embryo cloning, you must consider the potential harm as well. Although I disagree with most large governments' "if one person complains, shut it down for everyone and they won't know what they missed" attitude (like the skate park down the street that was shut down because one kid got hurt), the knowledge still needs some regulation to prevent harm. I don't care whether they call it morals or common sense.
Doubtless someone is reading this and thinking "but abortion doesn't hurt anyone but the foetus, and a foetus isn't a person," or some similar albeit less clear-cut case of moral definition. Well, that's the breaks folks. Vote for people who have the same definition of a 'person' as you do. There's nothing that can be done about that. Or for a definition of 'harm' or what constitutes a harmful act, or whether someone 'meant' to do it makes a difference, or how much statistical proof is necessary to regulate. All of these are human rights standards, there's no other way to define them, so we go with the majority. Period.
I still think mouse designers have yet to top the Logitech M-CQ38, triangular tilted 3-button PS/2 ball mouse that works fine for me. A scroll wheel gets in the way, I don't want it, and those elongated-ovoid-shaped mice that seem to dominate the market these days feel like they were designed for E.T.
I realize they're pretty hard to come by, but does anyone have any really 'good' or 'typical' ones? I've never seen ball lightning, and I'm not sure I've seen any good pics of it (having nothing to judge against).
I don't mean to nitpick, but I must point out that time is in no way fixed in direction or absolute (indeed, nothing is), and we perceive everything in our universe as a linear function of time from any given reference point. Therefore we can only see the end result of a distortion or reversal of time from our perspective, which implies that if time were "reversed" in a particular volume of space we would not see anything at all. Light emitted by the stars in the galaxy would by their own frame of reference be moving outward through this reversed space-time, but could not possibly coexist with light travelling subject to our frame of reference (as it would appear to be moving back to the source) and would therefore cease to exist or be trapped on the boundary and we would certainly never see it. To say nothing of many other inconsistencies, I think this is the simplest to understand.
Yes, Microsoft owns Bungie. No, Micorosoft does not normally release their source code. Yes, Myth II's server runs on Linux.
Am I missing something? I ask because I fail to see the dilemma, or surprise, or whatever it is that has people hot and bothered in this situation.
First off, Microsoft does not immediately impose a Win32 regime on companies it acquires. They do not operate on their image, or on a basis of "we hate Open Source and Linux." They operate for profit, and killing software that's already been implemented simply to show off that they don't need Linux or Open Source is not profitable. MS acquired Hotmail a long time ago IIRC, and they're still dependent on FreeBSD servers for some of it. Bungie wrote their server for Linux (whether before or after they were acquired by MS) and there is no point in forcing them to develop it for Windows instead. Also, the fact that Bungie has given away the code to that server does not imply that Microsoft is "embracing" Open Source, it simply means that someone decided keeping the official servers up was too expensive, but that it would be shitty to just cut people off, and that releasing the source code could only make profits go up (see the bargain bin thing in another post). I'm sure Microsoft has no problem with anything that does not cut into profit and could potentially increase it.
The argument that could be made is that image does indeed affect people's esteem of and confidence in MS, but in this case we're not dealing with MS directly but a subsidiary company. Bungie releasing source code does not hurt MS's ego. If MS released the code to FrontPage or WinXP, that would be different... but they haven't.
What they need to do is clear a path through the peat moss in Loch Ness and find those damned elusive Plesiosaurs who breed there. Or at least skeletons of them.
The idea here isn't to boot Solaris out... it's to introduce compatibility with Linux because when Sun equipment is too expensive, we go to PeeCee and Linux, and Sun still wants to be an option when that's already happened.
Solaris for Sparc will not be replaced by Linux any time soon (hopefully never) because it's whole purpose is to provide a stable and extensible environment compatible with Sun hardware. Linux has good points, but out-of-box, it's a far cry from a robust server environment. Solaris has things like JumpStart that make administering it MUCH more efficient than Linux. The only advantages of Linux in this arena are being cheap/free to implement, and running on cheap hardware*.
*Notice that the biggest complaint with Solaris/x86 was compatibility problems with low-end hardware...
they won't be leveling, they won't be farming items, what will they be doing?
My idea (well, I'm sure it's not *just* mine) is instead of levelling, have something very similar to Karma harvesting on Slashdot... partly from quests, partly from experience, etc... because in the real world, a 30 year old is not five times as strong as a 20 year old. Experience should count, but not be the whole point. Item and gold collection over time would also inherently make you stronger, but again, not *that* much stronger.
This way everyone is not so far behind when they start, but the real heroic people are quite a bit stronger (but must keep being heroic to stay strong). Assholes would, in contrast, become weaker, but as on/. have the ability to redeem themselves with a determined effort.
Slashdot Mirror
Microkernels may be slightly slower by nature than monolithic kernels like Linux, but the difference is rapidly becoming a nonissue with increasing processor speeds and better kernel designs.
In the meantime, microkernels are allowing for a host of new and useful features that monolithics just can't do: user-mounted file systems, increased security at the kernel level, dramatically increased ease and speed of development of kernel-level components, the ability to load entire separate operating systems interfacing with the same or separate hardware with no external software... to name a few.
Eventually speed will no longer be considered a primary goal, in fact, it is slowly but surely becoming trivial. Microkernels will win out if monolithic/Linux advocates can only use the speed argument to try to show the superiority of their kernel.
Your analogy is not really applicable. I think most people will agree that a microkernel is superior in design to a monolithic kernel.
I was thinking about purchasing a Sun Fire 4800, but found that I could get just as much mileage out of ten Linux servers that I built on AMD Athlon XP processors.
Depends on what you need. In the case of my place of employ a bunch of $500 peecees couldn't do what our SunFire 4800 is doing. But I'm glad the peecees worked out for you.
And the Operating System? Linux, of course. Do it right.
Linux is ugly. Try FreeBSD for a week.
I find it somewhat odd that whoever did this study didn't take into account the buffer on the end of a strand of DNA. As I understand from a paper I read some time ago, this is the main factor which caps life expectancy, and has been a known fact for years.
How did a study like the one this article describes overlook such information, which I found in a few minutes on Google (pretending I had no prior knowledge)? Seems like there was a lack of research into the biology of this issue, and that they concentrated primarily on statistics. Unfortunately that doesn't necessarily work; like someone else said in another post, this is similar to ignoring terminal velocity when collecting data about falling objects.
The point was basically that almost no one would obey speed limits, blood alcohol limits, traffic signals, etc. without the fear of being ticketed. Cops are the reason 99% of people obey the law. Most people only care about public safety until it gets in the way of their own satisfaction.
I'll wager that traffic cops have done a hell of a lot more good than bad, because just by being out there and making it known that they enforce the laws they make the roads a lot safer.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to live in any country where any drunk fuckwit could speed through a red light and total my car with impunity because there were no traffic cops to stop him.
GIRLFRIEND: What kind of idiots do you hang around with?
Believing that there is no God is as foolish as believing that there is a God. Rather, it makes more sense just to not think about it until there's some kind of basis for the belief, one way or another. If I were to tell you I believe there are chocolate donuts buried on Mars, would you say that the reality is that there are no donuts? No. You'd say that you don't think there are any donuts there, but the possibility exists so why debate it until we actually find some donuts or dig up every inch of Martian soil and find nothing. Right?
The fact that many people think God "looks like us" or "created the universe in 7 days" or whatever is irrational nonsense IMO, but there is no real reason to discount a God entirely. Simply put, I'm going to sit on the fence about the issue and try not to think about it, because it'll only start mattering to me when there's some substantial evidence one way or another.
Turbolasers shoot green. =)
That's unfair in this case. It seems very likely that there is life elsewhere in the universe, and probably intelligent life at that (alien abductions I seriously doubt, but this poster said nothing about abductions). And ESP is a very broad classification, which is scientifically plausible in some forms... large electromagnets mess with brainwaves, and by some definitions that would be considered ESP.
No. Galileo did not stand on the Sun and observe the Earth's motion. He did, however, stand on the Earth and observe the other planets. Regardless, had he been able to observe the Earth from the Sun, the observations would still be ordinary.
Galileo didn't observe the other planets to confirm a heliocentric universe, nor did he come up with the idea. He merely supported a claim by Copernicus which was later confirmed by Kepler. Kepler observed that the planets could orbit the sun given three simple laws which he formulated. However, Kepler at first wanted so strongly to believe in a geocentric universe, the idea that had been rammed down his throat by the Catholic Church since birth, that he actually came up with an immensely more complex mathematical model to explain the motion of the planets in such a way that they would all orbit the earth. So you see, because the idea of a heliocentric universe was extraordinary at the time, so were the observations. Even a man of science like Kepler looked at the observations and thought to himself, this can't be right.
You'd think someone with a PhD could find a job at a laboratory that actually EXISTS.
Well, I'd better start packing for my trip to Las Vegas, New Mexico.
Stephen Hawking talks about this in A Brief History of Time. Carl Sagan talks about this in Cosmos. Lots of other people talked about this before them. For crying out loud, this very notion has been a staple part of Hindu mythology for hundreds of years.
Is this by any chance related to the recent /. story about Mr. Steven Olson patenting swinging sideways?
Amen. If you can't appreciate the value of such a discovery in pure science, then there's no need to complain about it. I'm sure there's plenty of people like me out there who find discoveries like these, no matter how trivial they may seem, to be one more step towards answering the most fundamental questions about our universe. Far from irrelevant.
To the person who started this thread, and others who would ask the same question, I think we should try to think of it from the point of view of those responsible for the discoveries before we comment on their validity or usefulness. I mean, someone worked on this for a long time, in addition to spending years learning the fundamentals of their particular field. They don't need people who are for the most part ignorant of the details and implications to tell them whether their discoveries are useful or not.
MacOSX doesn't use the same microkernel-and-servers setup as the Hurd. So while it is theoretically possible to run multiple (even different) Hurd instances over the same Mach microkernel, hardware access issues would most definitely arise with MacOSX unless modifications were made to regulate them.
Only as long as it's not using Windows.
One is guilty for the "crime" for simple posession of an object or substance.
This is not a law of morality. It would more accurately be described as a law of prevention. If a person posesses a firearm without a license, they are comitting no explicitly harmful crime yet this situation must be corrected. Regulation of potentially harmful objects or substances is necessary to prevent likely harmful crimes, and laws are necessary to enforce such regulations (it must be considered a crime not to comply with the regulations, or no one would do so). The only variable is the word likely, and it is in no way based on morals. It is based on individual and group statistics (i.e. has said person committed violent crimes before, or is this sort of crime common, or what is this object/substance normally used for).
Some cases do not meet the statistical requirements, or even projected statistics and logical assumptions, to prove that regulation is necessary and so politicians fall back on morality and religion as an explanation (since morals and religion are usually popular enough for a majority to nod their heads). The laws are based on the fact that law-makers believe that posession of an object, substance or knowledge could be harmful to society and therefore should be regulated.
The actual regulatory requirements can be debated, and I definitely disagree with many of those instituted currently, but the fact that some form of regulation is necessary for almost anything potentially harmful cannot be disputed.
You will agree that cars have a high potential to cause injury or death in the hands of an unlicensed driver, yet by your arguments driving should not be regulated until they have actually caused harm by driving the vehicle improperly. It is often necessary to project (by statistics or common sense) the likelihood of causing harm in different ways, and to regulate based on this. You have to apply the same standards to 'gray' areas like abortion and cloning as well. Despite all the wonderful benefits of embryo cloning, you must consider the potential harm as well. Although I disagree with most large governments' "if one person complains, shut it down for everyone and they won't know what they missed" attitude (like the skate park down the street that was shut down because one kid got hurt), the knowledge still needs some regulation to prevent harm. I don't care whether they call it morals or common sense.
Doubtless someone is reading this and thinking "but abortion doesn't hurt anyone but the foetus, and a foetus isn't a person," or some similar albeit less clear-cut case of moral definition. Well, that's the breaks folks. Vote for people who have the same definition of a 'person' as you do. There's nothing that can be done about that. Or for a definition of 'harm' or what constitutes a harmful act, or whether someone 'meant' to do it makes a difference, or how much statistical proof is necessary to regulate. All of these are human rights standards, there's no other way to define them, so we go with the majority. Period.
I still think mouse designers have yet to top the Logitech M-CQ38, triangular tilted 3-button PS/2 ball mouse that works fine for me. A scroll wheel gets in the way, I don't want it, and those elongated-ovoid-shaped mice that seem to dominate the market these days feel like they were designed for E.T.
I realize they're pretty hard to come by, but does anyone have any really 'good' or 'typical' ones? I've never seen ball lightning, and I'm not sure I've seen any good pics of it (having nothing to judge against).
BL #1 BL #2 BL #3 BL #4
I don't mean to nitpick, but I must point out that time is in no way fixed in direction or absolute (indeed, nothing is), and we perceive everything in our universe as a linear function of time from any given reference point. Therefore we can only see the end result of a distortion or reversal of time from our perspective, which implies that if time were "reversed" in a particular volume of space we would not see anything at all. Light emitted by the stars in the galaxy would by their own frame of reference be moving outward through this reversed space-time, but could not possibly coexist with light travelling subject to our frame of reference (as it would appear to be moving back to the source) and would therefore cease to exist or be trapped on the boundary and we would certainly never see it. To say nothing of many other inconsistencies, I think this is the simplest to understand.
Interesting... the only PC older than me is the one that IBM released in August 1981. =)
Yes, Microsoft owns Bungie. No, Micorosoft does not normally release their source code. Yes, Myth II's server runs on Linux.
Am I missing something? I ask because I fail to see the dilemma, or surprise, or whatever it is that has people hot and bothered in this situation.
First off, Microsoft does not immediately impose a Win32 regime on companies it acquires. They do not operate on their image, or on a basis of "we hate Open Source and Linux." They operate for profit, and killing software that's already been implemented simply to show off that they don't need Linux or Open Source is not profitable. MS acquired Hotmail a long time ago IIRC, and they're still dependent on FreeBSD servers for some of it. Bungie wrote their server for Linux (whether before or after they were acquired by MS) and there is no point in forcing them to develop it for Windows instead. Also, the fact that Bungie has given away the code to that server does not imply that Microsoft is "embracing" Open Source, it simply means that someone decided keeping the official servers up was too expensive, but that it would be shitty to just cut people off, and that releasing the source code could only make profits go up (see the bargain bin thing in another post). I'm sure Microsoft has no problem with anything that does not cut into profit and could potentially increase it.
The argument that could be made is that image does indeed affect people's esteem of and confidence in MS, but in this case we're not dealing with MS directly but a subsidiary company. Bungie releasing source code does not hurt MS's ego. If MS released the code to FrontPage or WinXP, that would be different... but they haven't.
What they need to do is clear a path through the peat moss in Loch Ness and find those damned elusive Plesiosaurs who breed there. Or at least skeletons of them.
There's my wishful thinking for the day...
The idea here isn't to boot Solaris out... it's to introduce compatibility with Linux because when Sun equipment is too expensive, we go to PeeCee and Linux, and Sun still wants to be an option when that's already happened.
Solaris for Sparc will not be replaced by Linux any time soon (hopefully never) because it's whole purpose is to provide a stable and extensible environment compatible with Sun hardware. Linux has good points, but out-of-box, it's a far cry from a robust server environment. Solaris has things like JumpStart that make administering it MUCH more efficient than Linux. The only advantages of Linux in this arena are being cheap/free to implement, and running on cheap hardware*.
*Notice that the biggest complaint with Solaris/x86 was compatibility problems with low-end hardware...
they won't be leveling, they won't be farming items, what will they be doing?
My idea (well, I'm sure it's not *just* mine) is instead of levelling, have something very similar to Karma harvesting on Slashdot... partly from quests, partly from experience, etc... because in the real world, a 30 year old is not five times as strong as a 20 year old. Experience should count, but not be the whole point. Item and gold collection over time would also inherently make you stronger, but again, not *that* much stronger.
This way everyone is not so far behind when they start, but the real heroic people are quite a bit stronger (but must keep being heroic to stay strong). Assholes would, in contrast, become weaker, but as on /. have the ability to redeem themselves with a determined effort.