I agree with what you say, but I don't understand how that invalidates my argument. And I still think that there is this basic flaw in open source --- that doesn't mean os is nonsense, it just means that it doesn't reach a lot of people outside of the community (it still does reach a lot of people, because the community is pretty big).
I am not convinced that it would make sense or be beneficial to simly "layer the UI on top" of existing code, because that would only lead to a frontend as opposed to a GUI. The difference (in my opinion, anyway) is that the frontend strictly follows the logic of the underlying programs, while the GUI offers more value in that it hides some of the complexity and basic mechanisms from the user, and provides a different, more human-friendly view on the system.
I agree, a tool should also be effecient to use for a power user. But the problem with small tools is that they don't work together so easily as soon as you have more complex data than flat files. Think of data bases, or spreadsheets or word processors. Just because you can easily sum up the login time of user johndoe doesn't make it easier to change a number of fields in your bookkeeping spreadsheet.
The other problem is, that this collection of stream-based tools is only easy to use for geeks, not for normal people. It appears logical and simple to you, but believe me, it's a nightmare for the average non-geek user.
Yes, you could do everything in plain ASCII files, and you (and I) might find that very useful and know all the tools to do everything one can imagine with that data. But it's not going to be useful to anybody outside this community.
And as for finding a GUI that is as powerful as stream-based tools: The problem is not writing a front-end for sed and grep, it's hiding this low-level stuff from the user, and instead providing interaction on a higher level. Otherwise the users could use the original tools as well. But they don't (und really shouldn't need to) understand all the basics behind them.
Please read this to the end before you flame me/moderate me to kingdom come.
I think open source is great, but it has this one very basic flaw: Geeks write programs for themselves, and hence, for geeks. And we all know that geeks don't care too much for easy-to-use interfaces, but more for powerful ones (see shells, vi, emacs, etc). So when open source people start writing programs with user interfaces, these will be very similar: powerful, but hard to use for the normal user. And inconsistent with anything the users already know (read: Windows).
Now I am not saying that Gnome (or KDE, for that matter) should copy Windows, but that it would be very beneficial if not only coders worked on such projects, but also people from GUI design (and I am sure that there are people with experience in this area reading/.) and HCI.
Now that open source is growing up (in the sense of: os software being used by non-geeks as well), this is a necessary step. And it brings world domination much closer, too;-)
Is there a "SashXB for Dummies" or something somewhere? Do you really have to use bloody JavaScript for these applications? That would be a nightmare, come on, I want a decent language...
I am not sure if this is really such a great thing. Actually, that name (like many names nowadays) sounds pretty lame. Just look at the old name, that was the name of a business. But what does "Tarantella" mean? Or "Agilent", for that matter? "HP Medical" would have made a lot more sense. Or "Inprise", or... All these names sound like pathetic attempts to pack a lot of meaning into a word, but that only leads to a name that just sucks.
I don't know about the rest of you but i don't have enough bandwidth for the text based internet as it is.(It really suck living at the end of a copper line, Max = 26.4 kbps)
Don't worry, the article is just marketing BS, never mind.
Could someone explain to me how having a longer pipeline speeds things up?
A pipeline makes it possible to have all the parts of the processor occupied all the time. So each part of the pipeline is working on one instruction at cycle n, and at cycle n+1 the same part works on the same part of the next instruction. This way, you have 20 instructions in the pipeline and it is possible for one instruction to complete with every cycle, thus creating the impression that the instruction only takes one cycle (while it really takes 20). This is a bit oversimplified of course, but that's how it works. But you also get higher penalties when jumping to another location the longer the pipeline gets, so 20 stages is really a bad idea unless you have a lot of additional logic to deal with information passing between the pipeline stages.
Even with a smaller feature size won't this create a lot of heat, especially running at 1.4Ghz? IANAExpert but since PIII's run at 90C can we expect this CPU to run ultra hot as well?
I guess so. And also in terms of yield (percentage of good processors that come out of the production line) this is crazy.
You see, MHz counts just aren't enough any more. You also need a completely insane number of transistors (42 million!!! they're nuts!) and about as many meaningless buzzwords. This article *is* marketing BS, and the author doesn't know a thing about processors or any other topic he writes about, that's for sure.
This article is just marketing bullshit, the guy who wrote it obviously has no clue what he is talking about. Take the crap he writes about "peer networking such as Napster" as another example.
The screenshots look really amazing. Just look at the woods... about ten bazillion objects there, plus the water mirroring everything... I really can't imagine how they want to do that in real-time on existing hardware. I mean, this isn't just a few walls and stacked boxes like in quake, they have very complex objects, too (see the skeleton in the first picture).
I guess, for playing this in real-time, you would need... a Beowuld cluster?;-) *ducksandruns*
First of all, Österreich ist spelled with two "r"s...
And then, these ligatures are not redundant, they are just ways of writing German in 7 bit ASCII, or on some foreign typewriters. The umlaut is always preferred (including the ß), only when you can't use it, you use the alternate spelling.
The umlauts (or "accented characters", as you call them) are just part of the German alphabet, like "x" or "n"... not just used for fun;-)
I don't know about the power consumption, but I guess it would make more sense anyway to modify the harddisk, for example, so that if you remove it without a special key, it'll destroy itself at the next power-on (with a special "erase head" that systematically sratches the surface, for example). The laptop must then be protected against use with a BIOS password that really cannot be removed or worked around (and that can't be that difficult, either).
As for the price argument: I think this isn't such a big issue if you are a big corporation or a kind of secret service that has *very* valuable secrets, which would cost you a lot more than a few hundret $$$ if they were stolen.
This is really annoying. But I wonder how hard it would be to reverse-engineer nvidia's windows drivers. I mean, it should be a very thin software layer, so from the names of the entry points, you should get quite a good idea of what the function does. Or am I completely wrong?
You're saying that running an OS straight on top of another is impossible, except when it's possible.;)
No, (s)he's not. vmware runs the system inside a simulated machine, so the os runs directly on the cpu, not "on top of" linux, like an application or like a micro-kernel-based system on top of a micro-kernel. That's different.
i guess it takes a little more than "just a recompile" to get os x running on intel hardware, but even if not, i don't think this is such a good idea. just look at what has happened to be: they stopped building their own boxes and are now reduced to "another os nobody uses".
So what's in this deal for the investors? Do they own a part of the company now, or are they doing it just for the publicity? But then, if there are over a dozen of them, a single company's share of the publicity isn't very big...
The article says "The reason for the investments are simple,... companies see a new market opening up with the arrival of Linux, and they want to ensure themselves a foothold" - but the investing companies are not the only onw that profit. I just don't understand this from the point of view of the investors...
Sliced bread is actually a pretty stupid idea. It gets stale so much faster... and what's the point anyway? Are people to busy to cut their bread themselves?
But on a more serious note: I also kinda expect them to do something really lame, like introducing another Pentium clone or something like that (maybe with some support for PowerPC or Alpha built in). Let's hope I'm wrong... (and you too;-)
IMBW (I might be wrong;-), but doesn't ADSL stand for "ASYMMETRIC digital subscriber line"? So you won't get 1.5mb both ways, even if other ISPs get to the lines eventually (wasn't there a court ruling some time ago saying that the telcos *had* to open the lines to everyone?).
no, that's just for *outgoing* traffic (so people can't use this to host their high-volume servers, as mentioned in the original posting). 5kbps over cable would be ridiculously expensive...
Slashdot Mirror
So I am not the only one who thinks that Deja sucks.
Can anybody point me to a good alternative? Please? I don't understand why there is no other such service, this can't be that hard to build!
I agree with what you say, but I don't understand how that invalidates my argument. And I still think that there is this basic flaw in open source --- that doesn't mean os is nonsense, it just means that it doesn't reach a lot of people outside of the community (it still does reach a lot of people, because the community is pretty big).
I am not convinced that it would make sense or be beneficial to simly "layer the UI on top" of existing code, because that would only lead to a frontend as opposed to a GUI. The difference (in my opinion, anyway) is that the frontend strictly follows the logic of the underlying programs, while the GUI offers more value in that it hides some of the complexity and basic mechanisms from the user, and provides a different, more human-friendly view on the system.
I agree, a tool should also be effecient to use for a power user. But the problem with small tools is that they don't work together so easily as soon as you have more complex data than flat files. Think of data bases, or spreadsheets or word processors. Just because you can easily sum up the login time of user johndoe doesn't make it easier to change a number of fields in your bookkeeping spreadsheet.
The other problem is, that this collection of stream-based tools is only easy to use for geeks, not for normal people. It appears logical and simple to you, but believe me, it's a nightmare for the average non-geek user.
Yes, you could do everything in plain ASCII files, and you (and I) might find that very useful and know all the tools to do everything one can imagine with that data. But it's not going to be useful to anybody outside this community.
And as for finding a GUI that is as powerful as stream-based tools: The problem is not writing a front-end for sed and grep, it's hiding this low-level stuff from the user, and instead providing interaction on a higher level. Otherwise the users could use the original tools as well. But they don't (und really shouldn't need to) understand all the basics behind them.
Maybe this story? It's not very impartial, either ...
But I think all this infighting between UI toolkits doesn't help a lot.
Please read this to the end before you flame me/moderate me to kingdom come.
/.) and HCI.
;-)
I think open source is great, but it has this one very basic flaw: Geeks write programs for themselves, and hence, for geeks. And we all know that geeks don't care too much for easy-to-use interfaces, but more for powerful ones (see shells, vi, emacs, etc). So when open source people start writing programs with user interfaces, these will be very similar: powerful, but hard to use for the normal user. And inconsistent with anything the users already know (read: Windows).
Now I am not saying that Gnome (or KDE, for that matter) should copy Windows, but that it would be very beneficial if not only coders worked on such projects, but also people from GUI design (and I am sure that there are people with experience in this area reading
Now that open source is growing up (in the sense of: os software being used by non-geeks as well), this is a necessary step. And it brings world domination much closer, too
Is there a "SashXB for Dummies" or something somewhere? Do you really have to use bloody JavaScript for these applications? That would be a nightmare, come on, I want a decent language ...
I am not sure if this is really such a great thing. Actually, that name (like many names nowadays) sounds pretty lame. Just look at the old name, that was the name of a business. But what does "Tarantella" mean? Or "Agilent", for that matter? "HP Medical" would have made a lot more sense. Or "Inprise", or ... All these names sound like pathetic attempts to pack a lot of meaning into a word, but that only leads to a name that just sucks.
Sorry if my comment sounded offending, I didn't mean it to. It looked just so obvious to me ...
yeah, peace!
Man, you really deserve your name! ;-)
I don't know about the rest of you but i don't have enough bandwidth for the text based internet as it is.(It really suck living at the end of a copper line, Max = 26.4 kbps)
Don't worry, the article is just marketing BS, never mind.
Could someone explain to me how having a longer pipeline speeds things up?
A pipeline makes it possible to have all the parts of the processor occupied all the time. So each part of the pipeline is working on one instruction at cycle n, and at cycle n+1 the same part works on the same part of the next instruction. This way, you have 20 instructions in the pipeline and it is possible for one instruction to complete with every cycle, thus creating the impression that the instruction only takes one cycle (while it really takes 20). This is a bit oversimplified of course, but that's how it works. But you also get higher penalties when jumping to another location the longer the pipeline gets, so 20 stages is really a bad idea unless you have a lot of additional logic to deal with information passing between the pipeline stages.
Even with a smaller feature size won't this create a lot of heat, especially running at 1.4Ghz? IANAExpert but since PIII's run at 90C can we expect this CPU to run ultra hot as well?
I guess so. And also in terms of yield (percentage of good processors that come out of the production line) this is crazy.
You see, MHz counts just aren't enough any more. You also need a completely insane number of transistors (42 million!!! they're nuts!) and about as many meaningless buzzwords. This article *is* marketing BS, and the author doesn't know a thing about processors or any other topic he writes about, that's for sure.
This article is just marketing bullshit, the guy who wrote it obviously has no clue what he is talking about. Take the crap he writes about "peer networking such as Napster" as another example.
The answer is: European! ;-)
...)
(yes, I am European myself
Ever see a pointer?
The screenshots look really amazing. Just look at the woods ... about ten bazillion objects there, plus the water mirroring everything ... I really can't imagine how they want to do that in real-time on existing hardware. I mean, this isn't just a few walls and stacked boxes like in quake, they have very complex objects, too (see the skeleton in the first picture).
... a Beowuld cluster? ;-) *ducksandruns*
I guess, for playing this in real-time, you would need
First of all, Österreich ist spelled with two "r"s ...
... not just used for fun ;-)
And then, these ligatures are not redundant, they are just ways of writing German in 7 bit ASCII, or on some foreign typewriters. The umlaut is always preferred (including the ß), only when you can't use it, you use the alternate spelling.
The umlauts (or "accented characters", as you call them) are just part of the German alphabet, like "x" or "n"
And yes, ae can stand for ä, of course.
I don't know about the power consumption, but I guess it would make more sense anyway to modify the harddisk, for example, so that if you remove it without a special key, it'll destroy itself at the next power-on (with a special "erase head" that systematically sratches the surface, for example). The laptop must then be protected against use with a BIOS password that really cannot be removed or worked around (and that can't be that difficult, either).
As for the price argument: I think this isn't such a big issue if you are a big corporation or a kind of secret service that has *very* valuable secrets, which would cost you a lot more than a few hundret $$$ if they were stolen.
This is really annoying. But I wonder how hard it would be to reverse-engineer nvidia's windows drivers. I mean, it should be a very thin software layer, so from the names of the entry points, you should get quite a good idea of what the function does. Or am I completely wrong?
You're saying that running an OS straight on top of another is impossible, except when it's possible. ;)
No, (s)he's not. vmware runs the system inside a simulated machine, so the os runs directly on the cpu, not "on top of" linux, like an application or like a micro-kernel-based system on top of a micro-kernel. That's different.
i guess it takes a little more than "just a recompile" to get os x running on intel hardware, but even if not, i don't think this is such a good idea. just look at what has happened to be: they stopped building their own boxes and are now reduced to "another os nobody uses".
There are 1312 stories missing ... you forgot jamie and emmett and ...
So what's in this deal for the investors? Do they own a part of the company now, or are they doing it just for the publicity? But then, if there are over a dozen of them, a single company's share of the publicity isn't very big ...
... companies see a new market opening up with the arrival of Linux, and they want to ensure themselves a foothold" - but the investing companies are not the only onw that profit. I just don't understand this from the point of view of the investors ...
The article says "The reason for the investments are simple,
Sliced bread is actually a pretty stupid idea. It gets stale so much faster ... and what's the point anyway? Are people to busy to cut their bread themselves?
... (and you too ;-)
But on a more serious note: I also kinda expect them to do something really lame, like introducing another Pentium clone or something like that (maybe with some support for PowerPC or Alpha built in). Let's hope I'm wrong
> and to think we could have 1.5mbit BOTH ways
;-), but doesn't ADSL stand for "ASYMMETRIC digital subscriber line"? So you won't get 1.5mb both ways, even if other ISPs get to the lines eventually (wasn't there a court ruling some time ago saying that the telcos *had* to open the lines to everyone?).
IMBW (I might be wrong
no, that's just for *outgoing* traffic (so people can't use this to host their high-volume servers, as mentioned in the original posting). 5kbps over cable would be ridiculously expensive ...