That probably means that modern OSes are pretty much "done", the interesting fields are apps, not the kernel.
For the end-user, probably. But there's a huge amount of work and research left to be done with OS kernels. How about a standard driver API/ABI for OSS kernels? How about the ability to use the BSD TCP/IP stack with Linux (something I'd love to see, for reasons I won't get into here)?
How about a microkernel or an exokernel with decent performance? The HURD is essentially dead, but there's still an opportunity for a brilliant someone to come along and make a good microkernel OS, with all the security, stabillity, and maintainability that comes along with such an architecture.
Point is, there are many many opportunities for a creative kernel hacker to do new, useful things.
Heh yeah, Buffalo. If you've never had pizza from the Long Island/NYC area, there's no comparison.
Are there even any pizza places in Buffalo that don't sell tacos and chicken fingers?:) If you've got any recommendations, I'll see if I can check em out.
I'd love to know where these are. I've got China town sitting a few blocks away, and yet the restaurants there can barely take my order over the phone, much less Internet.:-/
Try living near a decent-sized college campus. The only trouble is that, living in upstate New York, no one knows how to make decent pizza.
You seem to be the exception, then. And yeah, it's just OpenOffice on any platform. Search the Gentoo forums some time. Few people will report startup times of under 10 seconds. Honestly, it's not a big deal. It's the kind of program you start once and use for a few hours.
Thank you for stating the blatantly obvious. I'll make things a little simpler: you don't have to run through every possible permutation to start noticing patterns. After you've got a halfway decent bot that's learned from playing against itself, you can pit it against some humans to gather more useful data.
My point was that there are many ways for building good strategies that don't require borrowing from books.
"The hard part is: What if I've got two 10s? What am I going to do?" As he scans poker books for strategy tips
Well, clearly he's not much of an engineer either. Let your program simulate all possible situations, and figure out the best choices like that. You can determine the best strategies based on statistics, not conventional wisdom.
Well, that's overdoing it a little. I have a P4 2.4GHz with 512MB RAM that I bought two years ago. It was mid-to-high range then. It's still more than enough for most work, but it's very low-end for gamers.
My times:
MS Word 2003 - 5 seconds
OO Writer 1.9.100 - 17 seconds
It's all about hardware support. It would be an absolute nightmare for Apple to try to support every bit of x86 hardware out there. They're much better off just restricting it to their own computers, keeping their reliability.
I've been so frustrated with the lack of something that meets my needs (do I really need to run a whole fucking MySQL server just to store my own info?) that I've started working on my own PIM app, except with Python and a bit of Javascript. It's getting a little overly ambitious though, since I'd like to have both an HTML and a wxPython interface.
I love Korganizer and Kontact, but I'm still looking for a decent Windows program that supports the vCalendar format. I dual boot by necessity, so it's frustrating. I've looked at a few online calendar apps, including Yahoo's stuff, but it's not great. I can't wait for Sunbird.
Because if some stupid app was taking 100% CPU power, on the old machine that meant it was using 50% of my CPUs, and I had a whole nother CPU available for killing errant apps with.
To be fair, decent OSes (Linux, the BSDs, etc) can handle this situation on a single processor without freezing. It's just a matter of doing scheduling and preemption properly.
Yes, the prequels, especially Ep. 3, do a decent job of filling in the backstory, but I think the real lessons of the series come from 4, 5, and 6: fighting oppression, facing your enemy, and redemption.
Yes. If there's one thing that Episode 3 did right (for me, at least), it was showing why the Empire was a force that had to be resisted.
Are you sure you're talking about XvT and not TIE Fighter? The plot in XvT was pretty thin; it was mostly just a multiplayer game. TIE Fighter, on the other hand, was easily the best of the entire series (from X-Wing to X-Wing: Alliance).
I *guarantee* there are more jedi out there post-Sith than Yoda and Obi-Wan. First, it's somewhat foreshadowed by Obi-Wan changing the "Distress signal" to alert other jedis to stay away.
Likely, but irrelevant. Unless we're really not being told something, Vader and Palpatine hunt down the rest of those Jedi too, eventually bringing it down to 2/2. At the end of RotJ, Luke is all that's left.
Slightly offtopic, but isn't it funny how most of the decent lines in the new trilogy are stolen from the original trilogy? Episode 3 was really shameless in this regard.
KDE wipes the floor with Windows, and looks better too now that they've switched to Plastik as the default theme. It's not harder to use (well, except for sorting desktop icons...), and it's much more powerful.
The reason the file/folder method worked so well is because it's a good abstraction from the real world model.
Well no, not really. Back in the good old days, "folders" were called directories. Microsoft just stuck pretty icons on them and called them folders. Directories work because they're simple, for both users and programmers. Regardless of real-world metaphors, it's easy to understand a simple hierarchy.
I stopped caring about what Peter Molyneux was doing after Black & White. It wasn't absolute garbage, but it was extremely overhyped and underdeveloped. Very disappointing, because it was one of the few games I had actually purchased in a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
For the end-user, probably. But there's a huge amount of work and research left to be done with OS kernels. How about a standard driver API/ABI for OSS kernels? How about the ability to use the BSD TCP/IP stack with Linux (something I'd love to see, for reasons I won't get into here)?
How about a microkernel or an exokernel with decent performance? The HURD is essentially dead, but there's still an opportunity for a brilliant someone to come along and make a good microkernel OS, with all the security, stabillity, and maintainability that comes along with such an architecture.
Point is, there are many many opportunities for a creative kernel hacker to do new, useful things.
I don't know about the other BSDs, but FreeBSD is still stuck with OSS (Open Sound System), whereas Linux has the vastly superior ALSA system.
Are there even any pizza places in Buffalo that don't sell tacos and chicken fingers? :) If you've got any recommendations, I'll see if I can check em out.
Try living near a decent-sized college campus. The only trouble is that, living in upstate New York, no one knows how to make decent pizza.
You seem to be the exception, then. And yeah, it's just OpenOffice on any platform. Search the Gentoo forums some time. Few people will report startup times of under 10 seconds. Honestly, it's not a big deal. It's the kind of program you start once and use for a few hours.
My point was that there are many ways for building good strategies that don't require borrowing from books.
Well, clearly he's not much of an engineer either. Let your program simulate all possible situations, and figure out the best choices like that. You can determine the best strategies based on statistics, not conventional wisdom.
Well, that's overdoing it a little. I have a P4 2.4GHz with 512MB RAM that I bought two years ago. It was mid-to-high range then. It's still more than enough for most work, but it's very low-end for gamers.
My times:
MS Word 2003 - 5 seconds OO Writer 1.9.100 - 17 seconds
It's all about hardware support. It would be an absolute nightmare for Apple to try to support every bit of x86 hardware out there. They're much better off just restricting it to their own computers, keeping their reliability.
Eh? It's UCLA. California taxpayers.
P.S. I loved the dead spider comparison :-)
For Windows? After a bit of Googling, I found a couple in-progress ports, but not even a beta version for download.
I've been so frustrated with the lack of something that meets my needs (do I really need to run a whole fucking MySQL server just to store my own info?) that I've started working on my own PIM app, except with Python and a bit of Javascript. It's getting a little overly ambitious though, since I'd like to have both an HTML and a wxPython interface.
I love Korganizer and Kontact, but I'm still looking for a decent Windows program that supports the vCalendar format. I dual boot by necessity, so it's frustrating. I've looked at a few online calendar apps, including Yahoo's stuff, but it's not great. I can't wait for Sunbird.
To be fair, decent OSes (Linux, the BSDs, etc) can handle this situation on a single processor without freezing. It's just a matter of doing scheduling and preemption properly.
Use Fortran, or another language/extension that automatically parallelizes on appropriate code.
Yes. If there's one thing that Episode 3 did right (for me, at least), it was showing why the Empire was a force that had to be resisted.
Are you sure you're talking about XvT and not TIE Fighter? The plot in XvT was pretty thin; it was mostly just a multiplayer game. TIE Fighter, on the other hand, was easily the best of the entire series (from X-Wing to X-Wing: Alliance).
Likely, but irrelevant. Unless we're really not being told something, Vader and Palpatine hunt down the rest of those Jedi too, eventually bringing it down to 2/2. At the end of RotJ, Luke is all that's left.
Slightly offtopic, but isn't it funny how most of the decent lines in the new trilogy are stolen from the original trilogy? Episode 3 was really shameless in this regard.
KDE wipes the floor with Windows, and looks better too now that they've switched to Plastik as the default theme. It's not harder to use (well, except for sorting desktop icons...), and it's much more powerful.
Well no, not really. Back in the good old days, "folders" were called directories. Microsoft just stuck pretty icons on them and called them folders. Directories work because they're simple, for both users and programmers. Regardless of real-world metaphors, it's easy to understand a simple hierarchy.
You mean Zombie Tesla, right?
Yeah, it doesn't sound very exciting, especially when Will Wright seems to be doing everything you'd ever want in a Black & White type of game.
I stopped caring about what Peter Molyneux was doing after Black & White. It wasn't absolute garbage, but it was extremely overhyped and underdeveloped. Very disappointing, because it was one of the few games I had actually purchased in a long time.