The reason Android is picking up so well within cellphone manufacturers is that it allows for customization without the burden of maintaining a full OS.
Ah, there's the key. Why build in bloat just so you can offer a one-size-fits-all match for all common hardware? Customised solutions from an open source library available on the web. You just keep track of your own scripts for building.
Pardon me, I just had a n00b moment. I should have realised that long ago. That's a certified genuine advantage of open source, right there, and to me possibly the most compelling one I've seen, relative to its importance to the future of technology. Don't bloat, adapt. I like it. It just completely obviates the need for that commercial software build DVD gathering dust in my office.
Not to converge into a bigger beam, no. Although you could have a number of near-parallel beams converge on a single spot, by doing so you add the ranging problem -- distance would need to be accurately determined and the aim of each of the individual lasers would have to be adjusted to get the beams to converge on the same spot. So instead of x-y tracking, you have x-y-z times the number of beams. Tricky.
For my part, I'd prefer the Puppeteer modification to the Tnuctupin digging tool. Be careful not to trigger both (parallel) beams, or there will be a current flow.
Many states already have legalized marijuana for use by doctors (for prescriptions). But the U.S. is arbitrarily over-ruling the states
Wasn't this recently the subject of a White House directive, saying that the federal executive branch had better things to do than to overrule the states on this subject? I think you're looking into yesterday, here.
No, the very best spam is in World of Warcraft, where a large number of trolls are skillfully killed near the auction house so that their fallen corpses spell out the web site of their gold selling operation rendered in 3D. Makes me want to meet them so that I can express my deep admiration for their innovative minds and 1337 development skills, immediately prior to applying a commonly-available heavy kinetic impeller to each of their carpal bones in succession.
Really, what does an OS need to do? It needs to manage the network, talk to devices and launch applications. That's it, isn't it? By specifying "no hard disk" Google is cutting out a major part of the device chat. Displaying a folder hierarchy is essentially a search, format and display application. They're good at that.
A large part of the Windows code is managing a large variety of devices, from displays to USB devices. If Google specifies the display format, then there's another large chunk of code dropped. The UI is an application, pointing devices are - devices.
Add an IP stack for the network and stick a security layer in somewhere, if you still need it.
By limiting configuration choices to those that have a broad appeal a *huge* amount of OS can simply go away. You have less local IO, less device chat, and no local disk latency to worry about.
People know how long their network takes to react, and will accommodate that. In contrast, a very thin OS will be very quick and will compare very favourably to a thick OS in response. And if most of the IO is server-side in the cloud, you won't see a lot of IO delays (source of most hangs) and response should be smoother overall, because servers tend to have the best IO controllers and enough spindles to stripe (not that Google would resort to actual hard drives!) Where's the beef?
I've seen some pretty amazing engineering coming out of our NZ neighbors. They remind me of the Swiss more than anyone else. Amazing motorcycles, Stirling-cycle heat pumps, custom cars, all good stuff and very advanced. It would not surprise me in the least if they succeeded in a private space venture.
Add good engineering to the amazing amount of high quality educational material available online (the full University syllabus material out there) and I can imagine little pockets of excellent engineering and sound science popping up all over the globe.
Mm. Not really. Mono pushes their own libraries - which means you often can't take a mono executable and run it on a windows box without first installing mono libraries. Kind of an ironic twist, really...
Meh. Encapsulate them in a VMWare virtual machine instance like the Deki Wiki appliance. That's a mono app, I believe, running on some distro of Linux or other. I drop it on whatever machine is handy to run it. Dead easy.
But a bit of philosophy here - SI units were designed to measure physical characteristics, and to do so in a way that made computation easy. A litre is a kilogram of water, standard composition, and conversions between items measured are fairly simple as a result.
Bits are mathematical constructs emulated in a physical symbol, a switch state. They are mathematical abstractions, not measurements. And as PP has implied, the concept of bringing them together - "centibytes" - is as silly as asking the number of library of congresses there are in a bicycle. Easy computation requires one Kb to be 1024 bits, not 1000. Hats off to you!
(or perhaps, given your name, you can leave your hat on...)
Also, it's OT, but your sig annoys the crap out of me. I use whom correctly all the time, "intensive purposes" is retarded. Begging the question, though,
A successful sig, I believe. You do know it was a deliberate troll, don't you? Or perhaps just a gentle stir (don't mod him down for that folks, it's humour). People who can't recognise the humour of deliberate mistakes have never read a book to a child (oh, the glee with which they correct you!) and that's a situation for whomever up with which I can certainly put.
I would love to see a heat pump system that had high and low pressure refrigerant lines, individual throttles in each room, and tie-in ports for things like refrigerators. It always strikes me as inefficient that we stick a refrigerator up against a wall in an insulated room and then chill the room itself.
Hmm... good argument for a more integrated heating/cooling system for the house. How about wrapping it up with electricity generation too? The Whispergen folks in New Zealand make a Stirling-cycle microCHP (Combined Heat & Power) generator suitable for the home. You could theoretically switch the flow of the cold and hot sinks with a bit of clever plumbing, and use the energy - the thermal differential, basically - otherwise wasted in generation for heating and cooling places.
Not sure how much additional instrumentation you'd need, but you could quite probably heat and cool your house with nothing more than a gas MicroCHP and a bit of well engineered plumbing & a few digital thermal sensors. You'd need to do your sums though, there's physics involved.
Disclaimer: I'm a Stirling engine fan (not that you couldn't tell).
Real programmers use wave diagrams - far more subtle than butterflies.
I have an original hardcopy Intel 4004 User's Guide I nabbed from the 1970 Wescon exhibition. Reading through that - butterflies. Yes, the quantum weather software butterfly would have been an easier IDE.
I so believe in the premise. I used to write a lot of 3GL code - hundreds of thousands of lines of it, mostly Fortran or C. I also ran a couple of very large teams of software developers. I would say "Write this thing so you can understand it at 3am".
You see, it's not really enough if you understand it at your desk, when you're fully alert. You have to code so you can understand it when you have a headache and the phone calls are coming too close together. For this you need clear narrative comments that mean something, and you shouldn't have to decode the English (yours or other peoples') in the comments at the same time. Distracting!
And over the hundreds of programs that I had to review across the various teams, the the programmers who had tidy code with understandable comments were uniformly the most productive programmers and the ones who had the fewest bugs. And for those who tended to spin their wheels around a bit of code, I would say "Delete that chunk of code, write the test first and write it in English. Then code." Always worked. Bad code reflects muddy thinking, and - like it or not - most programmers' first language is English followed by math. You have to be logical everywhere to get that box of switches to think.
Oh, and obligatory - good comments look like "Increment first array pointer", not "Add one to I".
The funny part is the kooks are the ones who "believe" in general relativity... The history of physics is finding new explanations for weird exceptions.
Weird? It's fairly simple, and doesn't require "belief" at all. Mass causes space to curve, and curvature causes mass to move. The application you use to effect change is geometry, not prayer.
Yeah that does make dealing with china hard, because of the rocket, tracking, etc tech
Not sure there's any IP left to steal, myself. Go to made-in-china.com and look up the "Long March" missile and launch system (I'm sure you'll find the little "add to basket" button as disturbing as I did). You can buy a ballistic missile off the web, apparently - or at least get in touch with people who will discuss it with you.
Buy a few dozen and strap them together with Australian kangaroo hide belts perhaps (sorry, have to put a local content plug in somewhere - it's the closest we'll get to a space programme of our own).
Wouldn't you have to have some thiotimoline and water in your mouse for that to work? Thiotimoline ain't cheap, you know.
It's also an unstable compound before it resublimates. There are people however who have successfully posted warnings of explosions after the fact, but you do have to be quick.
It's a bit like the invention of fire. You can't suppress it, despite its danger - sure, people are burned with it every day (and there are people out there who use it to burn people!) but if you want to cook food or refine metal, you can't throw it out.
There are legitimate users of BitTorrent technologies, and there will continue to be legitimate uses of it. This site/service, whether it's directly useful to you or not, serves as documentation of that fact.
Aha! Due to your egregious breach of password protocols your planetary air shield combination is now mine! And I have changed it to the totally unguessable combination "hunter2"!
Slashdot Mirror
The reason Android is picking up so well within cellphone manufacturers is that it allows for customization without the burden of maintaining a full OS.
Ah, there's the key. Why build in bloat just so you can offer a one-size-fits-all match for all common hardware? Customised solutions from an open source library available on the web. You just keep track of your own scripts for building.
Pardon me, I just had a n00b moment. I should have realised that long ago. That's a certified genuine advantage of open source, right there, and to me possibly the most compelling one I've seen, relative to its importance to the future of technology. Don't bloat, adapt. I like it. It just completely obviates the need for that commercial software build DVD gathering dust in my office.
Nice catch, feralnick.
For my part, I'd prefer the Puppeteer modification to the Tnuctupin digging tool. Be careful not to trigger both (parallel) beams, or there will be a current flow.
And it will still require electricity for the lights, lots of them, and
No it won't. People will revert to windowsills and gardens, if there is no reason to hide cultivation.
Many states already have legalized marijuana for use by doctors (for prescriptions). But the U.S. is arbitrarily over-ruling the states
Wasn't this recently the subject of a White House directive, saying that the federal executive branch had better things to do than to overrule the states on this subject? I think you're looking into yesterday, here.
The Innovative Statistics branch of the Centre for Incomplete Studies says that 24% of those
No, the very best spam is in World of Warcraft, where a large number of trolls are skillfully killed near the auction house so that their fallen corpses spell out the web site of their gold selling operation rendered in 3D. Makes me want to meet them so that I can express my deep admiration for their innovative minds and 1337 development skills, immediately prior to applying a commonly-available heavy kinetic impeller to each of their carpal bones in succession.
Yes, but will it run WoW?
Really, what does an OS need to do? It needs to manage the network, talk to devices and launch applications. That's it, isn't it? By specifying "no hard disk" Google is cutting out a major part of the device chat. Displaying a folder hierarchy is essentially a search, format and display application. They're good at that.
A large part of the Windows code is managing a large variety of devices, from displays to USB devices. If Google specifies the display format, then there's another large chunk of code dropped. The UI is an application, pointing devices are - devices.
Add an IP stack for the network and stick a security layer in somewhere, if you still need it.
By limiting configuration choices to those that have a broad appeal a *huge* amount of OS can simply go away. You have less local IO, less device chat, and no local disk latency to worry about.
People know how long their network takes to react, and will accommodate that. In contrast, a very thin OS will be very quick and will compare very favourably to a thick OS in response. And if most of the IO is server-side in the cloud, you won't see a lot of IO delays (source of most hangs) and response should be smoother overall, because servers tend to have the best IO controllers and enough spindles to stripe (not that Google would resort to actual hard drives!) Where's the beef?
How are the headaches doing, Czarangelus?
I've seen some pretty amazing engineering coming out of our NZ neighbors. They remind me of the Swiss more than anyone else. Amazing motorcycles, Stirling-cycle heat pumps, custom cars, all good stuff and very advanced. It would not surprise me in the least if they succeeded in a private space venture.
Add good engineering to the amazing amount of high quality educational material available online (the full University syllabus material out there) and I can imagine little pockets of excellent engineering and sound science popping up all over the globe.
Give the Internet some credit for this too.
Mm. Not really. Mono pushes their own libraries - which means you often can't take a mono executable and run it on a windows box without first installing mono libraries. Kind of an ironic twist, really...
Meh. Encapsulate them in a VMWare virtual machine instance like the Deki Wiki appliance. That's a mono app, I believe, running on some distro of Linux or other. I drop it on whatever machine is handy to run it. Dead easy.
I'm sorry, Dave...
CS abused nothing.
KB means 1024 bytes, and it always will.
KB is not K.
What a beautifully engineered rant. Correct, too.
But a bit of philosophy here - SI units were designed to measure physical characteristics, and to do so in a way that made computation easy. A litre is a kilogram of water, standard composition, and conversions between items measured are fairly simple as a result.
Bits are mathematical constructs emulated in a physical symbol, a switch state. They are mathematical abstractions, not measurements. And as PP has implied, the concept of bringing them together - "centibytes" - is as silly as asking the number of library of congresses there are in a bicycle. Easy computation requires one Kb to be 1024 bits, not 1000. Hats off to you!
(or perhaps, given your name, you can leave your hat on...)
Also, it's OT, but your sig annoys the crap out of me. I use whom correctly all the time, "intensive purposes" is retarded. Begging the question, though,
A successful sig, I believe. You do know it was a deliberate troll, don't you? Or perhaps just a gentle stir (don't mod him down for that folks, it's humour). People who can't recognise the humour of deliberate mistakes have never read a book to a child (oh, the glee with which they correct you!) and that's a situation for whomever up with which I can certainly put.
I would love to see a heat pump system that had high and low pressure refrigerant lines, individual throttles in each room, and tie-in ports for things like refrigerators. It always strikes me as inefficient that we stick a refrigerator up against a wall in an insulated room and then chill the room itself.
Hmm ... good argument for a more integrated heating/cooling system for the house. How about wrapping it up with electricity generation too? The Whispergen folks in New Zealand make a Stirling-cycle microCHP (Combined Heat & Power) generator suitable for the home. You could theoretically switch the flow of the cold and hot sinks with a bit of clever plumbing, and use the energy - the thermal differential, basically - otherwise wasted in generation for heating and cooling places.
Not sure how much additional instrumentation you'd need, but you could quite probably heat and cool your house with nothing more than a gas MicroCHP and a bit of well engineered plumbing & a few digital thermal sensors. You'd need to do your sums though, there's physics involved.
Disclaimer: I'm a Stirling engine fan (not that you couldn't tell).
I have an original hardcopy Intel 4004 User's Guide I nabbed from the 1970 Wescon exhibition. Reading through that - butterflies. Yes, the quantum weather software butterfly would have been an easier IDE.
I so believe in the premise. I used to write a lot of 3GL code - hundreds of thousands of lines of it, mostly Fortran or C. I also ran a couple of very large teams of software developers. I would say "Write this thing so you can understand it at 3am".
You see, it's not really enough if you understand it at your desk, when you're fully alert. You have to code so you can understand it when you have a headache and the phone calls are coming too close together. For this you need clear narrative comments that mean something, and you shouldn't have to decode the English (yours or other peoples') in the comments at the same time. Distracting!
And over the hundreds of programs that I had to review across the various teams, the the programmers who had tidy code with understandable comments were uniformly the most productive programmers and the ones who had the fewest bugs. And for those who tended to spin their wheels around a bit of code, I would say "Delete that chunk of code, write the test first and write it in English. Then code." Always worked. Bad code reflects muddy thinking, and - like it or not - most programmers' first language is English followed by math. You have to be logical everywhere to get that box of switches to think.
Oh, and obligatory - good comments look like "Increment first array pointer", not "Add one to I".
The funny part is the kooks are the ones who "believe" in general relativity... The history of physics is finding new explanations for weird exceptions.
Weird? It's fairly simple, and doesn't require "belief" at all. Mass causes space to curve, and curvature causes mass to move. The application you use to effect change is geometry, not prayer.
Yeah that does make dealing with china hard, because of the rocket, tracking, etc tech
Not sure there's any IP left to steal, myself. Go to made-in-china.com and look up the "Long March" missile and launch system (I'm sure you'll find the little "add to basket" button as disturbing as I did). You can buy a ballistic missile off the web, apparently - or at least get in touch with people who will discuss it with you.
Buy a few dozen and strap them together with Australian kangaroo hide belts perhaps (sorry, have to put a local content plug in somewhere - it's the closest we'll get to a space programme of our own).
Wouldn't you have to have some thiotimoline and water in your mouse for that to work? Thiotimoline ain't cheap, you know.
It's also an unstable compound before it resublimates. There are people however who have successfully posted warnings of explosions after the fact, but you do have to be quick.
Yes, a local government organisation caved in due to a single threat from a highly feared organisation.
No, those pants do not make you look old.
It's a bit like the invention of fire. You can't suppress it, despite its danger - sure, people are burned with it every day (and there are people out there who use it to burn people!) but if you want to cook food or refine metal, you can't throw it out.
There are legitimate users of BitTorrent technologies, and there will continue to be legitimate uses of it. This site/service, whether it's directly useful to you or not, serves as documentation of that fact.
Aha! Due to your egregious breach of password protocols your planetary air shield combination is now mine! And I have changed it to the totally unguessable combination "hunter2"!
Hah hah hah you have no escape make your time!
Did that show up as asterisks by the way?