Capitalism in its traditional forms claims to deal with social and environmental issues through consumers "placing value" on these things.
The problem is that even intelligent and concerned consumers cannot really understand the full implications of the products they buy...
IMNSHO, this makes the "free market" a foolish and destructive goal, since constrained markets can be adjusted to take into account social and environmental factors more practically.
Also note that once you start advocating eco-taxation, you're not really advocating a free market any more...
However, it's still a very good sign. Perhaps Sony "gets it"?
While I would like to live in a world where this might happen, I don't think it can. Sony as a whole has a lot to fear from the "open" way of doing things.
Sure, they *might* be able to do okay with a genuinely "open" gaming platform (although they'd still need to be able to collect a slice of every game sold).
But Sony as a whole has its fingers in so many pies (film, music, etc...) that the "open" world will be one in which they loose. Ultimately, Sony will be backing encrypted-content hardware to protect theit content business arms.
My feeling about this is that they're nervous about M$ targeting their market (wouldn't you be?), and are taking steps to defend themselves.
the previous posts cover all the in-depth technical books on OS design which I've come across in my travels.
However, the original question asked about something else as well... user interfaces.
In *nix land, OS design and UI design are completely different planets. As far as I could gather from reading "Showstopper", this is not quite so true in Windows land.
There are probably a lot more starting points for UI design than kernel architecture; the topic is somewhat more accessible. Of course, having said that I can't recommend anything brilliant, but perhaps someone else can.
A good step to take, but unfortunately, it won't win the war. Now if all the geeks in the world who didn't like the way things are going got organised, then that would be a different story.
This sounds like a valid criticism, but I don't think it is...
If you somehow wiped most of the cars off the planet, lots of people would need to take public transport instead. Hence, the buses would be full, and would run on many more routes much more often.
You almost certainly wouldn't be using buses anyway. Even trains are much more efficient than buses, but if cars weren't around, and the resources that get put into automotive R&D were diverted, you would most likely have other, even better, alternatives.
By now, you would probably have "route planning" systems. You tell your computer which pair of obscure places you need to get from/to, and it tells you how to get there quicky. The system could even re-route transport according to people's needs (in advance). In some circumstances, it might choose to use a car-sized vehicle if that was appropriate.
The essential difference is that the system would work better by being community oriented (kind of like free software, vs. a thousand proprieatry re-implementations of bits of UNIX:)...
The car is certainly a very significant invention. But given that General Motors used shady buisiness techniques to wipe out a significant slice of the world's public transport, this one has got to sit under something of a cloud (pardon the pun:).
More seriously though, it is debateable whether the world is really better off with cars. There are benefits (independence of travel, convenience for moving "stuff"), but the costs (accidents, pollution, time waiting in traffic jams) are pretty high. Perhaps a world with just a few cars would work better....
Checkers has been solved, chess is interesting
on
Solving Chess?
·
· Score: 1
In conclusion, while chess and checkers have not been solved, it is my opinion that computers are already better then any human being. (can be argued against for Kasparov vs Deep Blue but we will leave that aside) The point of my discussion? Forget about pumping more man hours into chess and reach for the pinnacle of AI research, Go!!!
Actually, IIRC, checkers has been solved completely. Even though it at first seems that the search space will be mind boggling (like chess), the fact that all the pieces in checkers are the same makes it tractable.
As for chess, there are numerous posts above which indicate how vast the number of possible chess games are, and it is very unlikely that they will all be explored.
What might be imaginable, though, is for computers to identify patterns which allow this space to be pruned enough to make it traversable.
This/. story makes a mistake in calling for Beowulfs or distributed.net projects - these only work if your problem is not exponentially vast in the way chess is. Instead, it would be more interesting to have a really clever computer program (running on a more modest system, perhaps) which was smart enough to identify the right patterns in the system...
The K6-III is basically a K6-II with more cache. They were getting miserable yields from the K6-III production lines, and had to rebadge most of them as K6-IIs.
Interesting the way you say this. When I hear people railing about how children need to be protected from porn (eg our wonderful Australian internet censorship legislation), I get *really* angry. My instinctive reaction is "How can these people get worked up about something as hard to pin down as sexuality, while advertisers are allowed free reign to mangle the minds of vulnerable children?".
The real problem is that censorship is politically saleable, whereas protecting kids from advertising would anger a lot of wealthy corporations. Politicians don't do that these days.
Back onto laptops - at my university, there was a bit of a push to bring in laptops in a big way a couple of years ago. The reality was that it was inequitable and foolish - but certain senior staff were pushing it as part of their political games. Rather than providing labs or dialin facilities, they wasted a lot of resources on laptop docking points which went unused.
Anyone here work for a keyboard manufacturing company?
Just a thought.....
Perhaps you could slip some code into these "internet keyboards" that just occasionally sends users to Slashdot or some other "subversive" website instead?
I'll assume for a second that you're not just a troll and actually hold something like the above opinion.
But try as I might, I cannot understand how you find RMS and Hitler similar. The only match I find is unwillingness to compromise. And that only goes for RMS pesonally, not those of us who support him.
You're not just a troll, you're a muddle headed troll.
there'd be all sorts of interesting questions I'd be dying to ask him. Would it conduct research? What approach to intellectual property would it take?
Electronic teaching is one of the biggest cans of worms you could ever imagine (I sat on a couple of university IT committees....)
This is a much needed development. The Gimp Users Manual, while at least being substantial documentation, was rather insoluble when I looked at it. I was trying to learn script-fu, and the examples it gave didn't work (!).
Hopefully now I'll be able to tell my workmates to go and read about the GIMP....
Okay okay... Mea culpa, I do have some genuinely socialist beliefs, so I think to some extent people do have to serve society. The reason for this is not that I feel they should, but instead that evolution suggests that that would be a very good idea. If people do not band together and create a society in which many of the rules are laid down by the community, then something else happens. Instead of having a government or community dictating the way things run, you get the strongest competitors (be they Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Barnes & Noble or your local fascist boss) running the show. And you certainly don't need a "monopoly" for this to be the case. Just go and read some Dickens;)
At the same time, I'm not a socialist in other senses because I don't believe that human beings are capable of enacting the "from each according to their means, to each according to their needs" socialist ideal. Humans have way too much evolutionary baggage to form a sensible communal society along those lines.
At the moment, the world economy is dominated by massive "competitive" organisations with negligible "co-operative" accountablility. Instead, IMO, we need a society which balances co-operative and competitive structures- one in which competitive incentives are designed to foster co-operation (kind of like open source software really:).
I even have the beginnings of a "crackpot" model as to how one might do this, which I've been meaning to write up for a while. The economic model I based it on seriously spun out a commerce student friend of mine when I described it to him, so perhaps it will even cause some trouble:)
I tutor OS here at the University of Melbourne. We also have a primarily theoretical course at 3rd year, and then a 4th year course which goes into great and messy depth on the implementation of 4.4BSD, but stops short of visiting any actual code. The 3rd year course does however include some projects on implementing abstracted cache and disk scheduling algorithms. The 4th year course could perhaps be Linux-ised by using one of the LDP kernel books.
I agree that I can't see the point of cutting real-world code instead of doing this kind of course. *But* - once you've actually done that, you might want to move into playing with the real linux kernel. Don't start your own project unless you come up with a brilliant idea (like implementing an rsync based network filesystem:). Instead, go and find an interesting project (like USB, ReiserFS, or CODA) and work on that...
>> Static web serving is not [a] problem (once you debug the code).
>Nothing is a problem once you debug the code.
Oh, right. So all programming tasks are of equal difficulty then?:)
Perhaps we *should* be using a microkernel, but until we are, anything that goes into the kernel should be very robust. There's no reason why a static http server can't be robust, and there's every reason why a dynamic one (or an entire graphics subsystem, as per NT) is going to cause huge headaches.
I'm normally a very cynical person, but if there's one thing that tempers my dim view of hummanity, it's the open source movement.
True, everyone has their own project barrows to push (see my signature below:). Howerver, I would like to make a more general suggestion.
Why don't you finnance bug-fixing? Equivalently, you could pay people to smooth out those little inelegancies which make free software harder to use, but which most hackers will grumble about rather than fixing.
This could be done using some kind of "bounty" to the first person to fix something up, or by some kind of specific "contractual" agreement with specific coders.
But what we really have here is a gapping hole in the theory that competition is necessarily a Good Thing. Sure, it can prevent some (and certainly not all) kinds of stagnation. But patents like these really point out that sometimes, what people should be doing is co-operating, rather than competing.
While I think that most non-religious people aren't very "evengelical" about their views, I've met agnostics and athiests who were extremely disparaging of anyone with religious beliefs - these are the "abortion clinic bombers" of the non-religious world, the fanatics who give their views a bad name because they use it as an excuse to persecute, belittle and denigrate others.
While I agree with you that some atheists can be denigrating in their dismissals of religion, I think there is a point that needs to be raised on the issue.
It is something of a duty, perhaps in the tradition of Carl Sagan, of people who understand science to explain (and promote) it to those who don't. When you're dealing with individuals who have very closed world views, often due to a fundamentalist religious or New Age upbringing and an absence quality scientific education, there can be a fair amount of intellectual trauma involved.
What those of us arguing for science need to remember is to remain polite, endeavour to understand what is going through the minds of those we're talking to, and, perhaps, to know when our time is being wasted.
The site seems to be down rather quickly for the/. effect. Or is Stanford like some other Universities I've encountered, and very edgy about providing too much of its high-quality material to the unpaying masses of cyberspace?;)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that even intelligent and concerned consumers cannot really understand the full implications of the products they buy...
IMNSHO, this makes the "free market" a foolish and destructive goal, since constrained markets can be adjusted to take into account social and environmental factors more practically.
Also note that once you start advocating eco-taxation, you're not really advocating a free market any more...
While I would like to live in a world where this might happen, I don't think it can. Sony as a whole has a lot to fear from the "open" way of doing things.
Sure, they *might* be able to do okay with a genuinely "open" gaming platform (although they'd still need to be able to collect a slice of every game sold).
But Sony as a whole has its fingers in so many pies (film, music, etc...) that the "open" world will be one in which they loose. Ultimately, Sony will be backing encrypted-content hardware to protect theit content business arms.
My feeling about this is that they're nervous about M$ targeting their market (wouldn't you be?), and are taking steps to defend themselves.
hmmm....
the previous posts cover all the in-depth technical books on OS design which I've come across in my travels.
However, the original question asked about something else as well... user interfaces.
In *nix land, OS design and UI design are completely different planets. As far as I could gather from reading "Showstopper", this is not quite so true in Windows land.
There are probably a lot more starting points for UI design than kernel architecture; the topic is somewhat more accessible. Of course, having said that I can't recommend anything brilliant, but perhaps someone else can.
Of course, it isn't likely to happend...
- If you somehow wiped most of the cars off the planet, lots of people would need to take public transport instead. Hence, the buses would be full, and would run on many more routes much more often.
- You almost certainly wouldn't be using buses anyway. Even trains are much more efficient than buses, but if cars weren't around, and the resources that get put into automotive R&D were diverted, you would most likely have other, even better, alternatives.
By now, you would probably have "route planning" systems. You tell your computer which pair of obscure places you need to get from/to, and it tells you how to get there quicky. The system could even re-route transport according to people's needs (in advance). In some circumstances, it might choose to use a car-sized vehicle if that was appropriate.The essential difference is that the system would work better by being community oriented (kind of like free software, vs. a thousand proprieatry re-implementations of bits of UNIX :)...
The same sort of thing also happened here in Australia, as this and this page imply, although I can't find any detailed documents...
More seriously though, it is debateable whether the world is really better off with cars. There are benefits (independence of travel, convenience for moving "stuff"), but the costs (accidents, pollution, time waiting in traffic jams) are pretty high. Perhaps a world with just a few cars would work better....
Actually, IIRC, checkers has been solved completely. Even though it at first seems that the search space will be mind boggling (like chess), the fact that all the pieces in checkers are the same makes it tractable.
As for chess, there are numerous posts above which indicate how vast the number of possible chess games are, and it is very unlikely that they will all be explored.
What might be imaginable, though, is for computers to identify patterns which allow this space to be pruned enough to make it traversable.
This /. story makes a mistake in calling for Beowulfs or distributed.net projects - these only work if your problem is not exponentially vast in the way chess is. Instead, it would be more interesting to have a really clever computer program (running on a more modest system, perhaps) which was smart enough to identify the right patterns in the system...
Actually, this isn't quite what happened.
The K6-III is basically a K6-II with more cache. They were getting miserable yields from the K6-III production lines, and had to rebadge most of them as K6-IIs.
This is ridculous. Whenever Rob wants the latest version of package X rolled into a .deb, he just has to drop a hint somewhere...
What about the rest of us?
Interesting the way you say this. When I hear people railing about how children need to be protected from porn (eg our wonderful Australian internet censorship legislation), I get *really* angry. My instinctive reaction is "How can these people get worked up about something as hard to pin down as sexuality, while advertisers are allowed free reign to mangle the minds of vulnerable children?".
The real problem is that censorship is politically saleable, whereas protecting kids from advertising would anger a lot of wealthy corporations. Politicians don't do that these days.
Back onto laptops - at my university, there was a bit of a push to bring in laptops in a big way a couple of years ago. The reality was that it was inequitable and foolish - but certain senior staff were pushing it as part of their political games. Rather than providing labs or dialin facilities, they wasted a lot of resources on laptop docking points which went unused.
Anyone here work for a keyboard manufacturing company?
Just a thought.....
Perhaps you could slip some code into these "internet keyboards" that just occasionally sends users to Slashdot or some other "subversive" website instead?
:)
Shmsh!
Brain explodes.
I'll assume for a second that you're not just a troll and actually hold something like the above opinion.
But try as I might, I cannot understand how you find RMS and Hitler similar. The only match I find is unwillingness to compromise. And that only goes for RMS pesonally, not those of us who support him.
You're not just a troll, you're a muddle headed troll.
I wonder if we could get him to do one....
there'd be all sorts of interesting questions I'd be dying to ask him. Would it conduct research? What approach to intellectual property would it take?
Electronic teaching is one of the biggest cans of worms you could ever imagine (I sat on a couple of university IT committees....)
This is a much needed development. The Gimp Users Manual, while at least being substantial documentation, was rather insoluble when I looked at it. I was trying to learn script-fu, and the examples it gave didn't work (!).
Hopefully now I'll be able to tell my workmates to go and read about the GIMP....
Mea culpa, I do have some genuinely socialist beliefs, so I think to some extent people do have to serve society. The reason for this is not that I feel they should, but instead that evolution suggests that that would be a very good idea. If people do not band together and create a society in which many of the rules are laid down by the community, then something else happens. Instead of having a government or community dictating the way things run, you get the strongest competitors (be they Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Barnes & Noble or your local fascist boss) running the show. And you certainly don't need a "monopoly" for this to be the case. Just go and read some Dickens
At the same time, I'm not a socialist in other senses because I don't believe that human beings are capable of enacting the "from each according to their means, to each according to their needs" socialist ideal. Humans have way too much evolutionary baggage to form a sensible communal society along those lines.
At the moment, the world economy is dominated by massive "competitive" organisations with negligible "co-operative" accountablility. Instead, IMO, we need a society which balances co-operative and competitive structures- one in which competitive incentives are designed to foster co-operation (kind of like open source software really :).
I even have the beginnings of a "crackpot" model as to how one might do this, which I've been meaning to write up for a while. The economic model I based it on seriously spun out a commerce student friend of mine when I described it to him, so perhaps it will even cause some trouble :)
Anyway, that's enough babble for one posting...
I agree that I can't see the point of cutting real-world code instead of doing this kind of course. *But* - once you've actually done that, you might want to move into playing with the real linux kernel. Don't start your own project unless you come up with a brilliant idea (like implementing an rsync based network filesystem :). Instead, go and find an interesting project (like USB, ReiserFS, or CODA) and work on that...
I happen to have my own little documentation project that could use funding too... it's called guru (the GNU User Re-education Utility).
Maybe Foogle was right in claiming that everyone had their own vested interests.... ;)
>> Static web serving is not [a] problem (once you debug the code).
:)
>Nothing is a problem once you debug the code.
Oh, right. So all programming tasks are of equal difficulty then?
Perhaps we *should* be using a microkernel, but until we are, anything that goes into the kernel should be very robust. There's no reason why a static http server can't be robust, and there's every reason why a dynamic one (or an entire graphics subsystem, as per NT) is going to cause huge headaches.
True, everyone has their own project barrows to push (see my signature below :). Howerver, I would like to make a more general suggestion.
Why don't you finnance bug-fixing? Equivalently, you could pay people to smooth out those little inelegancies which make free software harder to use, but which most hackers will grumble about rather than fixing.
This could be done using some kind of "bounty" to the first person to fix something up, or by some kind of specific "contractual" agreement with specific coders.
But what we really have here is a gapping hole in the theory that competition is necessarily a Good Thing. Sure, it can prevent some (and certainly not all) kinds of stagnation. But patents like these really point out that sometimes, what people should be doing is co-operating, rather than competing.
Hence, making khttpd a non static web server would be a very foolish thing to do, and would mangle system stability.
Static web serving is not problem (once you debug the code).
Actually, MS-DOS was derived from QDOS, which Bill Gates bought whilst he was in college.
QDOS stood for Quick and Dirty Operating System.
Aren't human beings silly animals sometimes ;)
While I agree with you that some atheists can be denigrating in their dismissals of religion, I think there is a point that needs to be raised on the issue.
It is something of a duty, perhaps in the tradition of Carl Sagan, of people who understand science to explain (and promote) it to those who don't. When you're dealing with individuals who have very closed world views, often due to a fundamentalist religious or New Age upbringing and an absence quality scientific education, there can be a fair amount of intellectual trauma involved.
What those of us arguing for science need to remember is to remain polite, endeavour to understand what is going through the minds of those we're talking to, and, perhaps, to know when our time is being wasted.
The site seems to be down rather quickly for the /. effect. Or is Stanford like some other Universities I've encountered, and very edgy about providing too much of its high-quality material to the unpaying masses of cyberspace? ;)