freedesktop.org has code you can grab from CVS *right now*, and initial reports indicate that the work will be done in the early 2005 timeframe. None of the Longhorn betas have the new DirectX-accelerated GUI yet. That makes freedesktop.org ahead of the game in my book.
Eh? We're actually ahead of the game. Freedesktop.org (the most likely sucessor to XFree86) is working on an OpenGL-accelerated XServer as we speak:) They're ripping out the DRI from the X server and making an independent layer out of it. Its *fascinating* work. If a first release comes out early 2005, then we will beat Longhorn to the market by about a year.
Oh, and OS X isn't already there, contrary to popular belief. It uses OpenGL, but in a very limited way, only for compositing windows together. All 2D is done via the CPU, and its dependence on the PDF model might make it more complex for them to transition Quartz2D to OpenGL.
Its not being to be a 3D desktop. Its going to use 3D hardware on current graphics cards to allow for really rich 2D artwork. Current-gen 3D hardware can do Quartz-style anti-aliased, transparent 2D without breaking a sweat, and that's what developers want to take advantage of.
Who cares about the short term? This is about long term discovery and preservation of knowledge. The knowledge of the Roman Empire was not lost, just hidden away. After it was rediscovered, it was terribly useful to mankind.
Actually, one thing that would nice to do with all this storage is version-controlled file systems. All documents would have their state saved in multiple versions until the drive filled up and the least useful ones needed to be removed. Get rid of this whole "save file" metaphor and just have the system checkpoint the file on each change, and you can easily chew up hundreds of gigs:)
No. It isn't. Several other countries do develop technology, but for instance, take pharmeceuticals - who foots the bill for research and development? The good ol' USA. ------ That's not the point. The US does a great deal of R&D now, but it didn't in the past, and it won't in the future. While we are at the top, it is our responsibility to contribute to the knowledge of humanity.
And besides, what did the space race do to the C.C.C.P? If you answered "Bankrupt" and or "cold" you iz just about right. -------- The space race didn't do that to them, it was a mix of bad economic planning and the arms race.
I agree. Science (should be) is for the good of all, but have you ever heard of patents? ---------- Yes, and I also know that they are a temporary monopoly. Even if the patent lasts for decades, that's really a small amount of time in the grand scheme of things. We're talking about the macro scale here.
How about gouging American customers for research and development. Spending on NASA DOES achieve stuff, no question, but we want the payoff, not some pie-in-the-sky promise about trickle-down science. ------- That's not a great way to do science. If scientists were beancounters, we'd be fucked. Consider quantum mechanics. It was purely intellectual mastrubation for several decades after its invention in the early 20th century. Today, the practical applications of quantum mechanics underly 30% of the US GDP!
Again, I agree. We're still using fire and electricity and that is likely to continue. However, Rome had little more than brute strength, borrowing their logic and math and religion from Greece and the East. ------- They made enormous original contributions to engineering and architecture. Concrete, for example, was a Roman invention. They scale of their architecture was unmatched in the West for more than a thousand years after the fall of the Empire. They were not original in the "pure" sciences, but they were in the applied fields.
I just think we have SO MUCH technology that we should slow down. A hundred and fifty years ago, and all time prior, you and I would most likely be farmers or hunter gatherer. ------- Eh? There were almost no hunter-gatherers in the West (not counting the native Americans) 150 years ago. A 150 years ago, the world was quite modern. Maxwell completed his theory of electromagnatism precisely 149 years ago in 1855!
Not such a bad life except that it was only, on average, 35-50 years long. ------ The average lifespan for a male in 1850 was 60 years old. The average lifespan overall was 47, but that was brought up by high child mortality. The decrease in child mortality was not completely due to technology. Much of it was just teaching people proper practices, and doing proper pre-natal and post-natal care.
I am by no means your average Slashdot jingoist:) I was simply making the comparison in the sense that both countries were/are the most powerful in the world at one time, and things like that inevitably do not last. I do not believe the bullshit "The United States is the most powerful country in the history of the world!" that our politicians are always spewing out.
The first part is correct. The second part is *completely* off base. In between prosperous dynasties in China and China, for example, were long periods of chaotic darkness.
Yes, but the revival of learning, knowledge, etc, in the Renaissance was fueled by preserved Roman knowledge. If that knowledge had been lost, Europe would have been set back hundreds of years. Its much easier to copy an existing Roman dome than to rediscover how domes work!
They survived very well in the long term. Part of the reason the Renaissance happend so quickly was that the west rediscovered all the Roman knowledge that had been squirreled away by monks in the Church. Also, a lot of advances in architecture were greatly accelerated by the fact that Roman structures still stood. The first domes built in hundreds of years in Italy were due to architectures studying the Roman Pantheon and applying that knowledge to their own structures.
After Rome fell, much of its science and technology was preserved. It was not widespread, but mostly carried along by the scholars of the Church. This preserved knowledge was a major factor in the early Renaissance, when society was ready to accept these ideas again. Had Rome not preserved its knowledge and technology, the relatively rapid period of rediscovery during the Renaissance would have been much longer.
I'm tired of us paying for science that gets exported all around the globe. --------- That's complete crap. That's not how science works. Science is for the good of humanity, not one specific, transient country. Long after the US has gone the way of the Roman Republic (and it will, it is the nature of such things), its contribution to science and technology will endure.
If the reference OS is Linux (like in our school's OS design class than yes, they do learn about these things, because they are a part of the OS. They don't learn about the GUI because its not part of the OS, just as in MacOS X.
I'm not saying that GUIs cannot be part of the OS (much of the Windows GUI is in the kernel) I'm saying that this is not the case for the OS in question (Mac OS X).
Its the computer science definition of OS. In OS Design class, you don't learn about making GUIs. GUIs are just apps as far as the kernel is concerned. The masses might not get it, but it doesn't make them any less wrong.
Yep. Linus has been probably the major contributer of code and design, but the simple kernel he wrote all by himself has probably long since been rewritten many times over. He certainly never got Linux as far as SkyOS has come, all by himself.
Yes, it did speed up type checks, but you can easily do the same thing in software, and indeed, existing implementations of Lisp-like languages emulate tag bits in software. And in theory a type of a datum could be "type acessible to object blah" but that is impractical because of the number of tag bits available.
No LispM had more than 8 tag bits. That isn't enough to even completely encode every object type. Only very important types like integers, cons cells, etc, used a tagged representation. Everything else used a generic object representation. The tag bits certainly aren't enough to encode arbitrary information like "accessible to object blah." To get the same level of object-granular protection, you'd have to encode an ACL onto each object, and search it on each memory access!
I don't have an unwavering belief that KDE is technically superior. I accept it for now, however, because nobody seems to be able to provide evidence to the contrary.
Oh, I forgot one thing. While you could easily run native code, you'd have to have some sort of code-signing guaranteeing to the OS that a given binary was compiled with a "safe" compiler. The technology for this already exists, so that wouldn't be a problem.
Most of the "safe" languages out there compile regular native binaries. Lisp, Dylan, Scheme, ML, Ocaml, Haskell, Clean, etc, all compile to native code.
Since these languages don't allow you to do pointer arithmatic, the only runtime checks they need to insert in the generated native code is for array bounds and type checks. Modern optimizers for these languages can eliminate most of these runtime checks.
Type tagging isn't a protection mechanism. Its an optimization for dynamic dispatch (virtual calls in C++/Java-speak). The protection in the Lisp Machine came from two conditions:
1) You couldn't access the byte representation of pointers directly, nor do arithmatic on them. This meant that the only way to access an object was to be handed a pointer to it.
2) Array bounds were checked.
Since the Amiga used C/ASM (IIRC) neither of these conditions held true, which is the reason for the iffy stability.
Note, that you can easily do the LispM-style machine without hardware type tagging. Gwydion's Dylan compiler*, for example, emits guaranteed-safe binaries on regular x86 machines.
*> The CMU Common Lisp compiler ordinarily does the same thing, but unlike Dylan, Common Lisp has an "unsafe" mode that turns of certain checks.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, how?
freedesktop.org has code you can grab from CVS *right now*, and initial reports indicate that the work will be done in the early 2005 timeframe. None of the Longhorn betas have the new DirectX-accelerated GUI yet. That makes freedesktop.org ahead of the game in my book.
Eh? We're actually ahead of the game. Freedesktop.org (the most likely sucessor to XFree86) is working on an OpenGL-accelerated XServer as we speak :) They're ripping out the DRI from the X server and making an independent layer out of it. Its *fascinating* work. If a first release comes out early 2005, then we will beat Longhorn to the market by about a year.
Oh, and OS X isn't already there, contrary to popular belief. It uses OpenGL, but in a very limited way, only for compositing windows together. All 2D is done via the CPU, and its dependence on the PDF model might make it more complex for them to transition Quartz2D to OpenGL.
And?
Its not being to be a 3D desktop. Its going to use 3D hardware on current graphics cards to allow for really rich 2D artwork. Current-gen 3D hardware can do Quartz-style anti-aliased, transparent 2D without breaking a sweat, and that's what developers want to take advantage of.
Who cares about the short term? This is about long term discovery and preservation of knowledge. The knowledge of the Roman Empire was not lost, just hidden away. After it was rediscovered, it was terribly useful to mankind.
Actually, one thing that would nice to do with all this storage is version-controlled file systems. All documents would have their state saved in multiple versions until the drive filled up and the least useful ones needed to be removed. Get rid of this whole "save file" metaphor and just have the system checkpoint the file on each change, and you can easily chew up hundreds of gigs :)
Full-scale 3D worlds entered into the computer via laser scanning of real-world locales. That'd chew up data like anything! Never say never :)
I meant China and Persia. Neither were continuous empires, but rather a series of very different ones.
No. It isn't. Several other countries do develop technology, but for instance, take pharmeceuticals - who foots the bill for research and development? The good ol' USA.
------
That's not the point. The US does a great deal of R&D now, but it didn't in the past, and it won't in the future. While we are at the top, it is our responsibility to contribute to the knowledge of humanity.
And besides, what did the space race do to the C.C.C.P? If you answered "Bankrupt" and or "cold" you iz just about right.
--------
The space race didn't do that to them, it was a mix of bad economic planning and the arms race.
I agree. Science (should be) is for the good of all, but have you ever heard of patents?
----------
Yes, and I also know that they are a temporary monopoly. Even if the patent lasts for decades, that's really a small amount of time in the grand scheme of things. We're talking about the macro scale here.
How about gouging American customers for research and development. Spending on NASA DOES achieve stuff, no question, but we want the payoff, not some pie-in-the-sky promise about trickle-down science.
-------
That's not a great way to do science. If scientists were beancounters, we'd be fucked. Consider quantum mechanics. It was purely intellectual mastrubation for several decades after its invention in the early 20th century. Today, the practical applications of quantum mechanics underly 30% of the US GDP!
Again, I agree. We're still using fire and electricity and that is likely to continue. However, Rome had little more than brute strength, borrowing their logic and math and religion from Greece and the East.
-------
They made enormous original contributions to engineering and architecture. Concrete, for example, was a Roman invention. They scale of their architecture was unmatched in the West for more than a thousand years after the fall of the Empire. They were not original in the "pure" sciences, but they were in the applied fields.
I just think we have SO MUCH technology that we should slow down. A hundred and fifty years ago, and all time prior, you and I would most likely be farmers or hunter gatherer.
-------
Eh? There were almost no hunter-gatherers in the West (not counting the native Americans) 150 years ago. A 150 years ago, the world was quite modern. Maxwell completed his theory of electromagnatism precisely 149 years ago in 1855!
Not such a bad life except that it was only, on average, 35-50 years long.
------
The average lifespan for a male in 1850 was 60 years old. The average lifespan overall was 47, but that was brought up by high child mortality. The decrease in child mortality was not completely due to technology. Much of it was just teaching people proper practices, and doing proper pre-natal and post-natal care.
I am by no means your average Slashdot jingoist :) I was simply making the comparison in the sense that both countries were/are the most powerful in the world at one time, and things like that inevitably do not last. I do not believe the bullshit "The United States is the most powerful country in the history of the world!" that our politicians are always spewing out.
The first part is correct. The second part is *completely* off base. In between prosperous dynasties in China and China, for example, were long periods of chaotic darkness.
Yes, but the revival of learning, knowledge, etc, in the Renaissance was fueled by preserved Roman knowledge. If that knowledge had been lost, Europe would have been set back hundreds of years. Its much easier to copy an existing Roman dome than to rediscover how domes work!
They survived very well in the long term. Part of the reason the Renaissance happend so quickly was that the west rediscovered all the Roman knowledge that had been squirreled away by monks in the Church. Also, a lot of advances in architecture were greatly accelerated by the fact that Roman structures still stood. The first domes built in hundreds of years in Italy were due to architectures studying the Roman Pantheon and applying that knowledge to their own structures.
After Rome fell, much of its science and technology was preserved. It was not widespread, but mostly carried along by the scholars of the Church. This preserved knowledge was a major factor in the early Renaissance, when society was ready to accept these ideas again. Had Rome not preserved its knowledge and technology, the relatively rapid period of rediscovery during the Renaissance would have been much longer.
I'm tired of us paying for science that gets exported all around the globe.
---------
That's complete crap. That's not how science works. Science is for the good of humanity, not one specific, transient country. Long after the US has gone the way of the Roman Republic (and it will, it is the nature of such things), its contribution to science and technology will endure.
If the reference OS is Linux (like in our school's OS design class than yes, they do learn about these things, because they are a part of the OS. They don't learn about the GUI because its not part of the OS, just as in MacOS X.
I'm not saying that GUIs cannot be part of the OS (much of the Windows GUI is in the kernel) I'm saying that this is not the case for the OS in question (Mac OS X).
Its the computer science definition of OS. In OS Design class, you don't learn about making GUIs. GUIs are just apps as far as the kernel is concerned. The masses might not get it, but it doesn't make them any less wrong.
"en masse we are the equivalent of one very large, distributed idiot."
Let me get this straight. So what you are saying, is that Slashdot is a beowulf cluster of idiots?
1) VesaFB supports NVIDIA.
2) XFree86 supports NVIDIA.
3) NVIDIA supports Linux.
4) SkyOS does not fully support NVIDIA cards --- no hardware OpenGL.
Yep. Linus has been probably the major contributer of code and design, but the simple kernel he wrote all by himself has probably long since been rewritten many times over. He certainly never got Linux as far as SkyOS has come, all by himself.
Yes, it did speed up type checks, but you can easily do the same thing in software, and indeed, existing implementations of Lisp-like languages emulate tag bits in software. And in theory a type of a datum could be "type acessible to object blah" but that is impractical because of the number of tag bits available.
No LispM had more than 8 tag bits. That isn't enough to even completely encode every object type. Only very important types like integers, cons cells, etc, used a tagged representation. Everything else used a generic object representation. The tag bits certainly aren't enough to encode arbitrary information like "accessible to object blah." To get the same level of object-granular protection, you'd have to encode an ACL onto each object, and search it on each memory access!
I don't have an unwavering belief that KDE is technically superior. I accept it for now, however, because nobody seems to be able to provide evidence to the contrary.
Oh, I forgot one thing. While you could easily run native code, you'd have to have some sort of code-signing guaranteeing to the OS that a given binary was compiled with a "safe" compiler. The technology for this already exists, so that wouldn't be a problem.
Most of the "safe" languages out there compile regular native binaries. Lisp, Dylan, Scheme, ML, Ocaml, Haskell, Clean, etc, all compile to native code.
Since these languages don't allow you to do pointer arithmatic, the only runtime checks they need to insert in the generated native code is for array bounds and type checks. Modern optimizers for these languages can eliminate most of these runtime checks.
Type tagging isn't a protection mechanism. Its an optimization for dynamic dispatch (virtual calls in C++/Java-speak). The protection in the Lisp Machine came from two conditions:
1) You couldn't access the byte representation of pointers directly, nor do arithmatic on them. This meant that the only way to access an object was to be handed a pointer to it.
2) Array bounds were checked.
Since the Amiga used C/ASM (IIRC) neither of these conditions held true, which is the reason for the iffy stability.
Note, that you can easily do the LispM-style machine without hardware type tagging. Gwydion's Dylan compiler*, for example, emits guaranteed-safe binaries on regular x86 machines.
*> The CMU Common Lisp compiler ordinarily does the same thing, but unlike Dylan, Common Lisp has an "unsafe" mode that turns of certain checks.