Yes, processor emulation, or in my case, architecture emulation, since it must also simulate VAX storage and networking hardware for compatibility reasons. Switch statements are ok, but for VAX, I've found that you have to get a little dirty and do table lookups for the opcode functions (one table indexed by opcode with the transfer addresses for the jump into op simulation), since there are about 273 instructions to simulate. It's quite simple, really, but I noticed the bottleneck when I changed from the switch statement to the O(1) table lookup implementation. I had expected to lose an average of 100 instructions per loop, which would be a huge speedup. I did lose the 100 average instructions, but only got about a 5% speedup, since the processor was just waiting to pull everything from memory.
Of course, this wouldn't be a problem if it fit into cache, but it takes quite a bit of code to simulate 273 opcodes, the interrupts, and hardware.
Well, first of all, thanks for your work, it is sorely needed. Having said that, though, I don't think TRIPS quite covers what I had in mind. I am more concerned with areas where you have to jump to an unpredictable location every 5 instructions or so, such as processor simulation. My most recent work in this area was on a VAX simulator, where benchmark differences between my workstation (~2700 VAX MIPS [scaled to VAX 11/780]), and the simulated VAX on my workstation (average 5 instructions per simulated instruction, 10.5 VAX MIPS!) are huge due to the difference between code that fits in cache and doesn't break the pipeline, and code that breaks the pipeline before it can be filled, and needs to jump to a new memory location after every 2.5 (average) instructions. Due to latency, something that should simulate at about 10-15% (worst case) of processor speed, only can simulate at about 0.4%. I can't even simulate the performance of a machine built 15 years ago, and that's sad. Marketing departments keep telling us that machines are faster, I'd just like to see them be right someday. Our systems aren't much faster, even though our processors are 2 or 3 orders of magnitude faster.
Of course, no one is going to fix this until they think they should, which will probably never happen, since I'm sure most of the chipmakers are happy with their profit margins now. In other words, if you're going to do something that needs to be done as fast as possible, it better have a predictable path and fit in cache, or you might as well use a cluster of 486s.
That's throughput they're working on, which is great, but not the problem. Latency is the problem, not throughput. Try having large programs with lots of branches and/or syscalls: If the code is large enough, you'll spend more time bringing pages in from memory than actually executing your code, especially since you can forget about pipelining benefits...
Personally, I wish a company would throw out every idea from current memory, put a GB of cache on a chip, and get memory access times down to about 3 picoseconds. But memory doesn't have the marketing appeal that processors do, so we're screwed.
Great... Just what we need, processors that can perform an instruction, then wait 40000 cycles for the next instruction to be read from memory. I wish we could see some memory improvements to go along with these.
Seriously, though, this will help break all the clustering records, provided we can come up with faster interconnects by then.
Re:Thermostats: They are *NOT* your friend
on
Cubicle Etiquette?
·
· Score: 1
Better yet, find some of the black light dye, and a battery-powered blacklight, so that the person won't know that it's on them. Your local Spencer's should have some. Once you've fired that person, I'm sure you can think of other fun things to do with the dye... (like find out who keeps stealing your Mt. Dew from the break room fridge)...
The other thing you have to remember is that the vast majority of the elderly users don't have 21" monitors. Most probably have 14-15" CRTs, because that's what came with their $300 computer that their kids gave them for Christmas/Channukah/Kwanzaa/whatever. Also, most don't know how to change the default font sizes, and large print could really make your site stand out. If they struggle to read your competitors' sites, but find yours easy to read, and intuitive to navigate, they will visit your site more often.
Design on a 15" monitor, with 1024x768 resolution, and make the site easy to read from about 6' away, and you should be just about right. It will make a difference, and as long as the layout is intuitive, it will bring more people to your site. Web design for most sites out there is horrible, and many elderly find it hard to understand (hell, many of college kids have trouble with some).
In other words, increase the print size a little, but don't forget that the #1 thing that will help the older members of the population (and in fact younger people, too) is an intuitive interface and navigation. Also, no matter what you do, some people are going to need help, so make sure that the contact information is easy to find, and be sure to list a customer service phone number. A person that has trouble with a good web page will be more likely to also have trouble emailing a question, so why force them (like too many other sites do)?
Actually, "Smack my ass and call me Sally" is a well known hot sauce line from a local restaurant chain here in Orlando. Check out Tijuana Flats for more information. BTW, one of them "Chet's gone Mad", is the hottest food additive (not a condiment) in the world at 1.5 million scoville units, and "The Slap Heard Around the World" is the hottest sauce.
Yeah, and just think, the latest Microsoft Worm will be able to spread in a few seconds, instead of a few hours. Seriously though, this reminds me of all the talk from the EDO and RDRAM days. "Huge Bandwidth Increases" means almost nothing to most users. I'd personally like to see decreased latencies. Just because you can theoretically transfer 10Tb/sec doesn't mean that you'll get it in the first second (in fact, you won't). In fact, if latencies are anything like now, you'd be lucky to get 100Mb in that first second. It's the same thing as the CPU and memory Mhz wars, it may be nice to see improvement, but real-world speeds won't improve until the weakest link improves, and that currently is not ethernet. For example, a 2.6GHz processor may run at 2.6GHz, but as soon as it has to do a read or write (outside cache), it spends most of those clock cycles waiting for the I/O or memory system. Hell, memory isn't even fast enough to keep up with 10Tb ethernet.
I don't think that it'll really matter, because diamond won't melt. At least, I don't think so. It won't be in general purpose computers anyway I think.
Yeah, but you'd be amazed how well other stuff melts. Or are you holding out for that Powerbook Di or ThinkPad D Series?
SCO has customers? IIRC, SCO made money for the first time in their history the last 2 quarters. Before M$ started pouring in money, SCO never turned a profit.
Technically SCO didn't develop anything that they sell right now. SCO Unix (and project Monterrey) came from old SCO, which became Tarantella. SCO/Caldera just bought it from them. Old SCO had customers, New SCO has lawsuits.
It is viable. After all, how many non-windows machines are infected with Blaster? If you use RPC for something (don't know why anyone would, but...), and don't want Blaster pounding away at your server, you could use the filter to drop all of the packets coming on that port from Windows.
On a related note, lets say you do a lot of communicating between two servers, or between some remote workstations and a server, but don't allow public access. If there's no legitimate reason why a specific OS would connect to your server, why let it? Hell, just by dropping Windows, you get rid of most of the script kiddies. Maybe drop Linux, if you don't use it, to get rid of the rest of them. Probably very few script kiddies run *BSD. Sure, it's security through obscurity, but most kids will probably just overlook your server, which is a good thing. If they don't know it's there, they probably won't attack it.
Use Scantrons, where you bubble in the answer with a black pen or a #2 pencil. Have the people bubble in their votes, and run them through. This makes reading them very easy, especially since the machines are already in use across the country, and verification is as simple as looking at which one is bubbled.
That's a great idea, from all perspectives, but taking it one step further, when it checks for updates, the server should check the serial number against a list of known/suspected pirated numbers. If the serial number is bad, then send dummy updates, ones that force the program to say: "this program is not registered, please call 800-URF-CKED".
If you do it this way, then the real license holder will call to find out why it doesn't work, at which point you can try to find out why their serial number is pirated. Something like this could have prevented the 112-1111111 M$ thing from ever happening, without screwing things up for the end user. Put reasonable limits on how many duplicate licenses you can have, and if you've seen too many, put that number on the list. You won't stop the first few pirated copies, but you'll stop the last 90,000, and you'll find out who leaked the number in the first place. As an extra feature, for corporate keys, you could restrict it to the corporation's IP block.
Damn, maybe I should patent that... Oh well, consider it prior art.
umm, we have GSM here, although it isn't yet the most popular (lots of old TDMA with AT&T and Cingular, and CDMA with Sprint and Verizon). In fact, we've had it for years (T-Mobile, previously Voicestream). For national carriers, T-Mobile, AT&T, or (in some areas) Cingular all have GSM phones and service.
For the original post, I'd say pick the best service, and try an Ericsson T68i. It's a great phone, and you can use it as a bluetooth modem. My only concern would be the speeds of GPRS. If you want speed, get the Sprint PCMCIA card, for $80/month, you can get unlimited access, with speeds usually between 110-230KB/sec. (And yes, I mean kilobytes). We have them at work, and they are on average about the same speed as my cable modem at home. Not bad for internet service anywhere there's cell service.
I said "Assuming you need your entire local network to appear", as in "We have an office over here, and an office across town, and need them connected securely." For individual users at home, set up a server at the office, and have them connect a tunnel to that with a login and password (every recent OS lets you do this). In other words, bite my shiny metal ass.
Assuming you need your entire local network to appear transparently on both ends, just subnet it out, and set the default route to the endpoint boxes, where you can set up a constant, encrypted tunnel between the two. Set them both up with two ethernet cards, one connection to the local network, and another to the internet, and set the machines to forward packets, set up the tunnel, and you probably won't have to touch it for years. There are tons of resources for this sort of thing, but for the google-challenged (which seems to cover a lot of Ask-Slashdot's recently), here you go. You won't need much for hardware, and it will also allow you to do much better monitoring of traffic/security than most solutions would.
Thank you. Unless he wants/. to only allow those who are >= 23, work at McDonalds and living in their parents' basement, you have to accept that people may actually have a real job, and unless you are high enough up, you usually don't get to choose what OS you work with. (and just for the grandparent's reference, this was posted from Windows [work], on a dual boot machine with Gentoo [play]. Guess that must be blasphemy to h[im,er]) If you can make money with something other than Windows, that's great, but for me, I'll keep my paychecks the way they are, thanks.
Yeah, they don't have to, but for some good press, they might do it anyway. For as few systems as they probably have, paying "license fees" for all of them probably wouldn't even be enough to show up on their daily operating costs.
I actually feel sorry for anyone who has to work on such systems, after having seen what kind of hoops those devices have to go through.
Thanks for the sympathy. I did some embedded work for a medical instrument, and you're right, there are a whole ton of hoops to jump through, in many cases there are specific ways you have to solve a problem, perform a procedure, and document your work. It's a pain in the ass. After that, try for FDA approval... That's even worse. Of course, new legislation tightens the noose on the programmer even further, which is one of the reasons why I work on the laboratory side now, not the hospital (OR especially) side.
From the IBM response: 55. States that it is without information sufficient to form a belief
as to the truth of the averments of paragraph 55, except admits that
IBM and The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (a California corporation now
known as Tarantella, Inc., which is not affiliated with SCO), entered
into an agreement to develop a UNIX operating system for a 64-bit
processing platform that was being developed by Intel and that the
project was known as Project Monterey.
Anyone else notice this? Since the majority of SCO's case (aside from the Sequent stuff) centered on things developed for Monterey, isn't it important that it's not the same company? Same name (sort of), sure, but it's not the same corporation. Old SCO != New SCO, therefore New SCO can't sue based on something that may or may not have been done to Old SCO.
Maybe they're suckers, or maybe they just don't exist.
Or, maybe it's Microsoft. Remember, Microsoft has Linux running, and they'd love to let SCO continue with this, and if some extra press is available for about $7,000 (assuming 10 of the $699 licenses), then why wouldn't they. Microsoft won't miss the money, but it makes the anti-Linux story seem more credible. Why else would the name be undisclosed?
Will Windows ever be "finished"? Will the Ford Explorer ever be "finished"? Will your work ever be "finished"? Will human society ever be "finished"?
Umm.... Let's take them one at a time.
1. (Windows) No, since Microsoft couldn't make money off of you if you weren't forced to upgrade. Unless, of course, Microsoft decides they don't like money anymore... (So it's a definite no).
2. (Explorer) We can only hope so. SUV's are bad enough as it is, but that's about the worst... At some point, though, it'll have everything they need to maximize profit, and it'll be finished, then discontinued after it is no longer profitable.
3. (Work) If it's important. You've got to die sometime. Maybe your work isn't finished then, but you will be finished working. But if it's important, someone will finish it.
4. (Society) Yes, or No, depending on your definition. Human society constantly kills itself, so at some point, we'll all be dead, and society's work will be finished. Also, we'll all be finished then, in another sense of the word. But, if you mean finished, as in perfect... Why bother asking. That's just a hell no.
Yeah, of course, to me, the best part of King of the Hill is the constant Mega-Lo- (Wal-)Mart running joke, or Dale's paranoia. Of course, it probably wouldn't be funny on it's own, but for right now, it's damn funny, until you realize that most of it's actually true, then it's just sad.
Personally, I love X, because it lets you do anything you want, by separating the display from the hardware. Want to run a program on a remote computer and display it locally? It's easy in X (hell, ssh -X will usually do it for you), but you have to use Remote Desktop in Win* (if you can use it/can afford the licenses for terminal server), and you have to see the whole desktop.
Having said that, I see your point. X is one of the hardest things to configure, and the configuration tools for it aren't very good. On top of that, GNOME and KDE are both pretty bloated, to the point where it's hard to run them on older hardware. For old hardware, I usually use either Windowmaker, BlackBox, or Enlightenment, but configuring them would be difficult for a newbie (though E's documentation is pretty good). For fast hardware, I use GNOME, mostly because I'm lazy and I don't feel like configuring the others.
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Yes, processor emulation, or in my case, architecture emulation, since it must also simulate VAX storage and networking hardware for compatibility reasons. Switch statements are ok, but for VAX, I've found that you have to get a little dirty and do table lookups for the opcode functions (one table indexed by opcode with the transfer addresses for the jump into op simulation), since there are about 273 instructions to simulate. It's quite simple, really, but I noticed the bottleneck when I changed from the switch statement to the O(1) table lookup implementation. I had expected to lose an average of 100 instructions per loop, which would be a huge speedup. I did lose the 100 average instructions, but only got about a 5% speedup, since the processor was just waiting to pull everything from memory.
Of course, this wouldn't be a problem if it fit into cache, but it takes quite a bit of code to simulate 273 opcodes, the interrupts, and hardware.
Well, first of all, thanks for your work, it is sorely needed. Having said that, though, I don't think TRIPS quite covers what I had in mind. I am more concerned with areas where you have to jump to an unpredictable location every 5 instructions or so, such as processor simulation. My most recent work in this area was on a VAX simulator, where benchmark differences between my workstation (~2700 VAX MIPS [scaled to VAX 11/780]), and the simulated VAX on my workstation (average 5 instructions per simulated instruction, 10.5 VAX MIPS!) are huge due to the difference between code that fits in cache and doesn't break the pipeline, and code that breaks the pipeline before it can be filled, and needs to jump to a new memory location after every 2.5 (average) instructions. Due to latency, something that should simulate at about 10-15% (worst case) of processor speed, only can simulate at about 0.4%. I can't even simulate the performance of a machine built 15 years ago, and that's sad. Marketing departments keep telling us that machines are faster, I'd just like to see them be right someday. Our systems aren't much faster, even though our processors are 2 or 3 orders of magnitude faster.
Of course, no one is going to fix this until they think they should, which will probably never happen, since I'm sure most of the chipmakers are happy with their profit margins now. In other words, if you're going to do something that needs to be done as fast as possible, it better have a predictable path and fit in cache, or you might as well use a cluster of 486s.
That's throughput they're working on, which is great, but not the problem. Latency is the problem, not throughput. Try having large programs with lots of branches and/or syscalls: If the code is large enough, you'll spend more time bringing pages in from memory than actually executing your code, especially since you can forget about pipelining benefits...
Personally, I wish a company would throw out every idea from current memory, put a GB of cache on a chip, and get memory access times down to about 3 picoseconds. But memory doesn't have the marketing appeal that processors do, so we're screwed.
Great... Just what we need, processors that can perform an instruction, then wait 40000 cycles for the next instruction to be read from memory. I wish we could see some memory improvements to go along with these.
Seriously, though, this will help break all the clustering records, provided we can come up with faster interconnects by then.
Better yet, find some of the black light dye, and a battery-powered blacklight, so that the person won't know that it's on them. Your local Spencer's should have some. Once you've fired that person, I'm sure you can think of other fun things to do with the dye... (like find out who keeps stealing your Mt. Dew from the break room fridge)...
The other thing you have to remember is that the vast majority of the elderly users don't have 21" monitors. Most probably have 14-15" CRTs, because that's what came with their $300 computer that their kids gave them for Christmas/Channukah/Kwanzaa/whatever. Also, most don't know how to change the default font sizes, and large print could really make your site stand out. If they struggle to read your competitors' sites, but find yours easy to read, and intuitive to navigate, they will visit your site more often.
Design on a 15" monitor, with 1024x768 resolution, and make the site easy to read from about 6' away, and you should be just about right. It will make a difference, and as long as the layout is intuitive, it will bring more people to your site. Web design for most sites out there is horrible, and many elderly find it hard to understand (hell, many of college kids have trouble with some).
In other words, increase the print size a little, but don't forget that the #1 thing that will help the older members of the population (and in fact younger people, too) is an intuitive interface and navigation. Also, no matter what you do, some people are going to need help, so make sure that the contact information is easy to find, and be sure to list a customer service phone number. A person that has trouble with a good web page will be more likely to also have trouble emailing a question, so why force them (like too many other sites do)?
Actually, "Smack my ass and call me Sally" is a well known hot sauce line from a local restaurant chain here in Orlando. Check out Tijuana Flats for more information. BTW, one of them "Chet's gone Mad", is the hottest food additive (not a condiment) in the world at 1.5 million scoville units, and "The Slap Heard Around the World" is the hottest sauce.
Yeah, and just think, the latest Microsoft Worm will be able to spread in a few seconds, instead of a few hours. Seriously though, this reminds me of all the talk from the EDO and RDRAM days. "Huge Bandwidth Increases" means almost nothing to most users. I'd personally like to see decreased latencies. Just because you can theoretically transfer 10Tb/sec doesn't mean that you'll get it in the first second (in fact, you won't). In fact, if latencies are anything like now, you'd be lucky to get 100Mb in that first second.
It's the same thing as the CPU and memory Mhz wars, it may be nice to see improvement, but real-world speeds won't improve until the weakest link improves, and that currently is not ethernet. For example, a 2.6GHz processor may run at 2.6GHz, but as soon as it has to do a read or write (outside cache), it spends most of those clock cycles waiting for the I/O or memory system. Hell, memory isn't even fast enough to keep up with 10Tb ethernet.
I don't think that it'll really matter, because diamond won't melt. At least, I don't think so. It won't be in general purpose computers anyway I think.
Yeah, but you'd be amazed how well other stuff melts. Or are you holding out for that Powerbook Di or ThinkPad D Series?
SCO has customers? IIRC, SCO made money for the first time in their history the last 2 quarters. Before M$ started pouring in money, SCO never turned a profit.
Technically SCO didn't develop anything that they sell right now. SCO Unix (and project Monterrey) came from old SCO, which became Tarantella. SCO/Caldera just bought it from them. Old SCO had customers, New SCO has lawsuits.
It is viable. After all, how many non-windows machines are infected with Blaster? If you use RPC for something (don't know why anyone would, but...), and don't want Blaster pounding away at your server, you could use the filter to drop all of the packets coming on that port from Windows.
On a related note, lets say you do a lot of communicating between two servers, or between some remote workstations and a server, but don't allow public access. If there's no legitimate reason why a specific OS would connect to your server, why let it? Hell, just by dropping Windows, you get rid of most of the script kiddies. Maybe drop Linux, if you don't use it, to get rid of the rest of them. Probably very few script kiddies run *BSD. Sure, it's security through obscurity, but most kids will probably just overlook your server, which is a good thing. If they don't know it's there, they probably won't attack it.
damn, and I thought the ebay auctions for MMORPG's were rediculous... Now we're buying slashdot accounts?
Use Scantrons, where you bubble in the answer with a black pen or a #2 pencil. Have the people bubble in their votes, and run them through. This makes reading them very easy, especially since the machines are already in use across the country, and verification is as simple as looking at which one is bubbled.
That's a great idea, from all perspectives, but taking it one step further, when it checks for updates, the server should check the serial number against a list of known/suspected pirated numbers. If the serial number is bad, then send dummy updates, ones that force the program to say: "this program is not registered, please call 800-URF-CKED".
If you do it this way, then the real license holder will call to find out why it doesn't work, at which point you can try to find out why their serial number is pirated. Something like this could have prevented the 112-1111111 M$ thing from ever happening, without screwing things up for the end user. Put reasonable limits on how many duplicate licenses you can have, and if you've seen too many, put that number on the list. You won't stop the first few pirated copies, but you'll stop the last 90,000, and you'll find out who leaked the number in the first place. As an extra feature, for corporate keys, you could restrict it to the corporation's IP block.
Damn, maybe I should patent that... Oh well, consider it prior art.
umm, we have GSM here, although it isn't yet the most popular (lots of old TDMA with AT&T and Cingular, and CDMA with Sprint and Verizon). In fact, we've had it for years (T-Mobile, previously Voicestream). For national carriers, T-Mobile, AT&T, or (in some areas) Cingular all have GSM phones and service.
For the original post, I'd say pick the best service, and try an Ericsson T68i. It's a great phone, and you can use it as a bluetooth modem.
My only concern would be the speeds of GPRS. If you want speed, get the Sprint PCMCIA card, for $80/month, you can get unlimited access, with speeds usually between 110-230KB/sec. (And yes, I mean kilobytes). We have them at work, and they are on average about the same speed as my cable modem at home. Not bad for internet service anywhere there's cell service.
I said "Assuming you need your entire local network to appear", as in "We have an office over here, and an office across town, and need them connected securely." For individual users at home, set up a server at the office, and have them connect a tunnel to that with a login and password (every recent OS lets you do this). In other words, bite my shiny metal ass.
Assuming you need your entire local network to appear transparently on both ends, just subnet it out, and set the default route to the endpoint boxes, where you can set up a constant, encrypted tunnel between the two. Set them both up with two ethernet cards, one connection to the local network, and another to the internet, and set the machines to forward packets, set up the tunnel, and you probably won't have to touch it for years. There are tons of resources for this sort of thing, but for the google-challenged (which seems to cover a lot of Ask-Slashdot's recently), here you go.
You won't need much for hardware, and it will also allow you to do much better monitoring of traffic/security than most solutions would.
Thank you. Unless he wants /. to only allow those who are >= 23, work at McDonalds and living in their parents' basement, you have to accept that people may actually have a real job, and unless you are high enough up, you usually don't get to choose what OS you work with. (and just for the grandparent's reference, this was posted from Windows [work], on a dual boot machine with Gentoo [play]. Guess that must be blasphemy to h[im,er]) If you can make money with something other than Windows, that's great, but for me, I'll keep my paychecks the way they are, thanks.
Yeah, they don't have to, but for some good press, they might do it anyway. For as few systems as they probably have, paying "license fees" for all of them probably wouldn't even be enough to show up on their daily operating costs.
I actually feel sorry for anyone who has to work on such systems, after having seen what kind of hoops those devices have to go through.
Thanks for the sympathy. I did some embedded work for a medical instrument, and you're right, there are a whole ton of hoops to jump through, in many cases there are specific ways you have to solve a problem, perform a procedure, and document your work. It's a pain in the ass. After that, try for FDA approval... That's even worse.
Of course, new legislation tightens the noose on the programmer even further, which is one of the reasons why I work on the laboratory side now, not the hospital (OR especially) side.
From the IBM response: 55. States that it is without information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth of the averments of paragraph 55, except admits that IBM and The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (a California corporation now known as Tarantella, Inc., which is not affiliated with SCO), entered into an agreement to develop a UNIX operating system for a 64-bit processing platform that was being developed by Intel and that the project was known as Project Monterey.
Anyone else notice this? Since the majority of SCO's case (aside from the Sequent stuff) centered on things developed for Monterey, isn't it important that it's not the same company? Same name (sort of), sure, but it's not the same corporation. Old SCO != New SCO, therefore New SCO can't sue based on something that may or may not have been done to Old SCO.
Maybe they're suckers, or maybe they just don't exist.
Or, maybe it's Microsoft. Remember, Microsoft has Linux running, and they'd love to let SCO continue with this, and if some extra press is available for about $7,000 (assuming 10 of the $699 licenses), then why wouldn't they. Microsoft won't miss the money, but it makes the anti-Linux story seem more credible. Why else would the name be undisclosed?
Will Windows ever be "finished"? Will the Ford Explorer ever be "finished"? Will your work ever be "finished"? Will human society ever be "finished"?
Umm.... Let's take them one at a time.
1. (Windows) No, since Microsoft couldn't make money off of you if you weren't forced to upgrade. Unless, of course, Microsoft decides they don't like money anymore... (So it's a definite no).
2. (Explorer) We can only hope so. SUV's are bad enough as it is, but that's about the worst... At some point, though, it'll have everything they need to maximize profit, and it'll be finished, then discontinued after it is no longer profitable.
3. (Work) If it's important. You've got to die sometime. Maybe your work isn't finished then, but you will be finished working. But if it's important, someone will finish it.
4. (Society) Yes, or No, depending on your definition. Human society constantly kills itself, so at some point, we'll all be dead, and society's work will be finished. Also, we'll all be finished then, in another sense of the word. But, if you mean finished, as in perfect... Why bother asking. That's just a hell no.
Yeah, of course, to me, the best part of King of the Hill is the constant Mega-Lo- (Wal-)Mart running joke, or Dale's paranoia. Of course, it probably wouldn't be funny on it's own, but for right now, it's damn funny, until you realize that most of it's actually true, then it's just sad.
Personally, I love X, because it lets you do anything you want, by separating the display from the hardware. Want to run a program on a remote computer and display it locally? It's easy in X (hell, ssh -X will usually do it for you), but you have to use Remote Desktop in Win* (if you can use it/can afford the licenses for terminal server), and you have to see the whole desktop.
Having said that, I see your point. X is one of the hardest things to configure, and the configuration tools for it aren't very good. On top of that, GNOME and KDE are both pretty bloated, to the point where it's hard to run them on older hardware. For old hardware, I usually use either Windowmaker, BlackBox, or Enlightenment, but configuring them would be difficult for a newbie (though E's documentation is pretty good). For fast hardware, I use GNOME, mostly because I'm lazy and I don't feel like configuring the others.