AFAIK it's a Unix-like environment running on top of the Mach microkernel with a BSD-ish userland. The unix-like varnish over the microkernel is very modern, but I find the BSD userland rather primitive.
I find mine quite watchable in my Acer Aspire One. YMMV with other chips, but since you mentioned Intel GMA 945, I feel comfortable to say it's good enough.
Many government websites in Brazil are hosted on Zope and Plone (I work as a part-time consultant for one of them). There is an open-source turn-key solution for legislative bodies freely available and used by hundreds of them (it's also Zope-based and I did some consulting for them too). Several huge databases run on PostgreSQL clusters - chances are if you filed a tax report in Brazil, a lot of your data now resides on a PostgreSQL server. As of our last election, all electronic voting ballots ran Linux. With about 120 million inhabitants, any federal agency here is easily the size of a medium country or a huge company.
That said, there is still a long way to go and a lot of steering to keep us on the right course.
Would you care to explain how Ubuntu has been a royal headache for you? You know, it you have some specific valid complain, people can fix it.
Of course, if it's not a valid complain, well... You can fix it.
Ubuntu is running sweet here in almost all my desktops and on a handful of servers (the rest run Debian and have run it for what now appear to be ages) and it never, ever, gave me any problem. Motherboards, NICs and RAID controllers died but no single problem was because of the OS. Even the ssh key problem (and that was quite shameful) was a non-event here: a couple keys had to be recreated and that was mostly all it took.
And, BTW, real man use "sudo -i" or, in Red Hat-likes "sudo su -". "su" is so 80s...
Suggestion: Build it as proprietary, sell services to stores and then, after being subsidized by these customers, you can decide to keep it closed or to open it and turn it into a de-facto standard.
Actually, it's more like a 737-sized rebuildable (no one would be crazy enough to grab a just-landed shuttle and launch it back to orbit) capsule that can glide down to an airstrip.
OTOH, it's still cool and looks like a space plane.
Wrong. You pay companies who pay for developers who, in turn, develop open source software.
As for the guys who writes it for love, do nothing. They will continue doing what they love regardless of financial gain. A stable economy will take care of them.
When a GPU is an integral part of the system programmers can rely it will be there for them, it's because they have already converged.
It already happened with x86 with the FPUs that migrated inside the chips themselves. I remember my Am387 numeric co-processor. In fact, I still have that motherboard. The former co-processors are now integral part of the x86 architecture. And while a Weitek was way faster than a 387, current x86 FPUs are definitely not slow.
Perhaps a current GPU would not be able to do it mainly because they assume there is a general purpose CPU connected to the rest of the system.
The newer designs, such as AMD's Fusion, Larrabee and this Nvidia thingie point in the direction of the GPU being integrated as a CPU subsystem. The trend seems clear to me.
And while I doubt anything non-x86 will ever be able to run Office, Firefox runs on a wide variety of architectures. I assume a non-x86 with lots of GPU logic on die would be no problem. I run it on POWER every day.
"CPUs and GPUs are different architectures geared towards different processing models"
Perhaps.
But look at the SSE extensions to the x86 instruction set or the Cell: CPUs are becoming more GPU-like. If you could build a GPU with some CPU-like cores, you could do some serious damage in the future.
We are in for some entertaining developments.
And, since we have enjoyed a couple decades of x86 monotony, it's about time.
The desktop CPU market is being eaten away by the low-power notebook-friendly segment. The writing is on the wall since the Core Duos started appearing in Macs, with a low-power profile and a decent punch much better than any Pentium 4 of the time.
Nvidia is trying to build a CPU/GPU SoC-like thing that's very notebook-friendly and also could power business desktops, that traditionally don't require top-of-the-line performance, and can reap huge savings from power-efficiency.
Intel will fight them with all they have.
After all, companies did not replace CRTs with LCDs to free desktop space.
Since I don't run Aero, The Sims, Spore and only occasionally play with Google Earth, I don't really care for 3D performance.
On the other hand, since I only run Windows under VirtualBox (and don't play games under it - BTW, since when/. became a gamer site?), I do care about compatibility and Intel has given me, for the last couple years, the least headaches when it comes to 3D acceleration under Linux. While I would have to think hard and test a lot before buying a new computer with ATI or Nvidia graphics, I can always go for the Intel low-performance solution knowing it will be enough for me.
As for the money I don't spend on the GPU, I do it with added memory, redundant storage and so on, things that are important for my work and that more than once made up for the lacking 3D acceleration.
Larrabee will be sweet, but I won't carry it in my backpack anytime soon.
Maybe your numbers are correct, but being hit by a dark comet will probably result in 1,000,000,000 times more damage to the planet than a stray satellite would.
A satellite normally hits at no more than orbital speeds and asteroids and comets hit at speeds much higher. Not to mention they have much higher mass.
And yes, we can do something about it. We just haven't figured exactly what.
You know... This is not as absurd as it may sound.
Dark comets are black to visible light, but if we could tune a nuke to produce whatever wavelengths they do reflect (and they do reflect some or they would be radiating a lot of infrared), we could detonate a few in deep space to track the reflections.
Of course, we would need better observation capabilities - we would be observing large patches of sky in search for perhaps very faint reflections for the first pulses and then zero in the regions where the original reflections came for more detailed observations.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not.
AFAIK it's a Unix-like environment running on top of the Mach microkernel with a BSD-ish userland. The unix-like varnish over the microkernel is very modern, but I find the BSD userland rather primitive.
The GUI is good. Most Mac users never leave it.
Interesting. Never heard about them.
I think I should ;-)
I find mine quite watchable in my Acer Aspire One. YMMV with other chips, but since you mentioned Intel GMA 945, I feel comfortable to say it's good enough.
That number was from the top of my mind. Thanks for the correction.
You know... It's an awful lot of people to count ;-)
And thanks for the hugs, brother!
Many government websites in Brazil are hosted on Zope and Plone (I work as a part-time consultant for one of them). There is an open-source turn-key solution for legislative bodies freely available and used by hundreds of them (it's also Zope-based and I did some consulting for them too). Several huge databases run on PostgreSQL clusters - chances are if you filed a tax report in Brazil, a lot of your data now resides on a PostgreSQL server. As of our last election, all electronic voting ballots ran Linux. With about 120 million inhabitants, any federal agency here is easily the size of a medium country or a huge company.
That said, there is still a long way to go and a lot of steering to keep us on the right course.
Would you care to explain how Ubuntu has been a royal headache for you? You know, it you have some specific valid complain, people can fix it.
Of course, if it's not a valid complain, well... You can fix it.
Ubuntu is running sweet here in almost all my desktops and on a handful of servers (the rest run Debian and have run it for what now appear to be ages) and it never, ever, gave me any problem. Motherboards, NICs and RAID controllers died but no single problem was because of the OS. Even the ssh key problem (and that was quite shameful) was a non-event here: a couple keys had to be recreated and that was mostly all it took.
And, BTW, real man use "sudo -i" or, in Red Hat-likes "sudo su -". "su" is so 80s...
Last week I had to install a recent Python in a 10.4 box. I had to _compile_ it 80's style.
Apart from that, OSX worked like charm and Aquamacs is a sweet environment to play with.
But, without a decent package manager, OSX is kind of clumsy to operate. I imagine I will have to apply patches to my 2.6 Python interpreter...
"Last I heard, Visual Studio doesn't work in wine."
It's probably designed that way...
But then, he needs another IDE ;-)
Just curious: apart from playing games designed for Windows, do you know of any significant disadvantage of Linux?
Drivers are not usually a problem with devices that come with the OS pre-installed as the integrator makes sure that everything that ships works too.
So, where are the disadvantages you see?
Suggestion: Build it as proprietary, sell services to stores and then, after being subsidized by these customers, you can decide to keep it closed or to open it and turn it into a de-facto standard.
Krusty Krab
Actually, it's more like a 737-sized rebuildable (no one would be crazy enough to grab a just-landed shuttle and launch it back to orbit) capsule that can glide down to an airstrip.
OTOH, it's still cool and looks like a space plane.
Wrong. You pay companies who pay for developers who, in turn, develop open source software.
As for the guys who writes it for love, do nothing. They will continue doing what they love regardless of financial gain. A stable economy will take care of them.
"All government documents should be in an open, well documented format"
Please don't forget they should also no patent-traps in them.
When a GPU is an integral part of the system programmers can rely it will be there for them, it's because they have already converged.
It already happened with x86 with the FPUs that migrated inside the chips themselves. I remember my Am387 numeric co-processor. In fact, I still have that motherboard. The former co-processors are now integral part of the x86 architecture. And while a Weitek was way faster than a 387, current x86 FPUs are definitely not slow.
Perhaps a current GPU would not be able to do it mainly because they assume there is a general purpose CPU connected to the rest of the system.
The newer designs, such as AMD's Fusion, Larrabee and this Nvidia thingie point in the direction of the GPU being integrated as a CPU subsystem. The trend seems clear to me.
And while I doubt anything non-x86 will ever be able to run Office, Firefox runs on a wide variety of architectures. I assume a non-x86 with lots of GPU logic on die would be no problem. I run it on POWER every day.
"CPUs and GPUs are different architectures geared towards different processing models"
Perhaps.
But look at the SSE extensions to the x86 instruction set or the Cell: CPUs are becoming more GPU-like. If you could build a GPU with some CPU-like cores, you could do some serious damage in the future.
We are in for some entertaining developments.
And, since we have enjoyed a couple decades of x86 monotony, it's about time.
The desktop CPU market is being eaten away by the low-power notebook-friendly segment. The writing is on the wall since the Core Duos started appearing in Macs, with a low-power profile and a decent punch much better than any Pentium 4 of the time.
Nvidia is trying to build a CPU/GPU SoC-like thing that's very notebook-friendly and also could power business desktops, that traditionally don't require top-of-the-line performance, and can reap huge savings from power-efficiency.
Intel will fight them with all they have.
After all, companies did not replace CRTs with LCDs to free desktop space.
Since I don't run Aero, The Sims, Spore and only occasionally play with Google Earth, I don't really care for 3D performance.
On the other hand, since I only run Windows under VirtualBox (and don't play games under it - BTW, since when /. became a gamer site?), I do care about compatibility and Intel has given me, for the last couple years, the least headaches when it comes to 3D acceleration under Linux. While I would have to think hard and test a lot before buying a new computer with ATI or Nvidia graphics, I can always go for the Intel low-performance solution knowing it will be enough for me.
As for the money I don't spend on the GPU, I do it with added memory, redundant storage and so on, things that are important for my work and that more than once made up for the lacking 3D acceleration.
Larrabee will be sweet, but I won't carry it in my backpack anytime soon.
OK. A PS3 gave you 0.99 free PS2's.
Now you can buy a PS3 and a PS2 for the same price you did pay for the PS3 with almost one PS2 built inside.
And you can use both at the same time.
I imagine some of them will even grab a book and read.
"We've figured out lots of things we could do. We just can't (economically) do any of it yet"
In other words, we haven't figured out what to _do_ about it. We have only figured out a lot of things we can further figure out.
Maybe your numbers are correct, but being hit by a dark comet will probably result in 1,000,000,000 times more damage to the planet than a stray satellite would.
A satellite normally hits at no more than orbital speeds and asteroids and comets hit at speeds much higher. Not to mention they have much higher mass.
And yes, we can do something about it. We just haven't figured exactly what.
You know... This is not as absurd as it may sound.
Dark comets are black to visible light, but if we could tune a nuke to produce whatever wavelengths they do reflect (and they do reflect some or they would be radiating a lot of infrared), we could detonate a few in deep space to track the reflections.
Of course, we would need better observation capabilities - we would be observing large patches of sky in search for perhaps very faint reflections for the first pulses and then zero in the regions where the original reflections came for more detailed observations.
Good point.
You heard the wise man, kids. Never, ever use eval unless you know (and you probably don't) what you are doing.