It's eerie how well the Stalker team have captured the look and feel of the area - and it looks like more than a couple of those pictures were used as direct concepts for locations in the Stalker game as well
For those unfamiliar with use of the word "stalker" in Russian, it is a sci-fi term that roughly means "tomb raider or marauder in a post-apocalyptic wasteland". AFAIK, it was first used in the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic, quite possibly the best sci-fi novel I've ever read (I think English translations exist, so you should go and read it. Now.) In the book, stalkers were guys who would sneak past police checkpoints to steal alien artifacts.
The Stalker game is based on the plot of Roadside Picnic, except they changes the setting from a North American alien landing site to the Chernobyl power plant disaster site. Probably makes the game more understandable for those who haven't read the novel. The most interesting thing is that they are going to keep the Strugatsky's concept of the Zone and its anomalies - areas of variable gravity, corrosives that turn flesh into rubber, invisible "meat grinders", burning air, walking corpses, etc. In the book, a stalker's lifespan was directly proportional to his sixth sense for detecting such anomalies. I wonder how well that would work out in the game.
TeX is awesome for laying out mathematical formulas (especially when compared to Word's bletcherous equation editor), and is quite nice for most common tasks. I couldn't agree with you more that managing a 100 page document can get crazy in Word, and is easy in LaTeX. But there's a catch.
For setting up tables, TeX sucks rocks. You have LaTeX tabular, which is only good for really simple things. You have halign, which is quite nice, but not quite powerful enough. You have longtable. But none of them are anywhere as flexible as Word's table tool. Recently, I was converting a paper from Word into TeX. For several tables, to express them adequately in TeX, I had to manually lay out all the hboxes and vboxes. Not fun. In fact, I was annoyed enough that I started writing my own macros for setting up tables. Then I realized that the TeX macro syntax is a hell-spawned evil twin of assembly crossed with Intercal, besides the fact that it's not actually documented.
Anyway, as sleek as TeX looks, be aware that under the surface it's a very hairy twenty-year-old piece of software.
Many (most?) physics and math journals seem to have standardized on (custom versions of) TeX or LaTeX for submitted papers. I know a biophysics researcher, who had never used anything but common Windows programs, complaining because he recently had to put his paper into LaTeX for a journal.
My general impression is that virtually all math and CS researchers typeset their articles and books in some kind of TeX. Physicists are more likely to have been infected by the MSOffice virus...
Scientists at an unknown and undisclosed location are researching into how to create giant bugs that clean up pollution ...while the Pentagon, realizing that dropping metal rods from space is a waste of money, announces plans to produce giant genetically engineered soldiers armed with lasers and tac nukes. In an interview, Rumsfeld mentions that "our God Soldiers will be able to destroy any potentially hostine nation in just a few Days of Fire." Germany and France have already condemned the American plan, claiming that the use of God Soldiers in combat may have disastrous environmental effects.
...here's mine. I have a system with USB 1.1 on the motherboard. Can I upgrade to 2.0 just by buying a PCI card?
#ifdef SARCASM
Theoretically, you could (that's what those cards are for). But practically, I suggest you sue your mobo manufacturer for not selling you the product you wished you had bought from them. Maybe you could even get a class action going... Suing people seems to be all the rage nowadays, doesn't it?
#endif
one of these lawsuits is completely frivolous. Can you guess which one?
You sue the police department because in a case of mistaken identity, they knock down your door and release the dogs, who badly maul you and your sleeping wife.
You sue the hospital because they totally fsck up a routine operation and make your right arm unusable for a year, and then pretend nothing happened.
You sue a game company because you like bought into the hype and wasted $50 on a bad game, just like the last 3 times when you bought games without actually checking a reliable review site.
Same thing here. PIII 866, Nvidia NVS, 2.4.22, save nvidia version.
The minimum requirements are 1 GHz processor, 1.5 recommended. You are going to drop frames all over the place, trust me. I know - I tried it...
>A compassionate society must somehow help its John Baumans.
The US isn't a compassionate society--the voters don't want it to be. If the US were a compassionate society, the choice wouldn't be between people like Bush, Reagan, and Clinton, who are basically outdoing each other on trying to ratchet down social services.
In a non-compassionate society, John Bauman would be cared for by his family - parents, siblings, children, etc (chances are, at least one of them would have a decent job). Instead of paying high taxes for a workable social security, he would pay emotionally by putting up with annoying relatives. And of course, if he were not to have any kind relatives, a non-compassionate society would deposit him in the trashcan.
Face it: American IT workers are no longer competitive. Partially, it is because the third world is catching up in education and infrastructure; partially, it is because too many talentless and overpaid people entered the American IT industry in the 90's. The causes really don't matter, as long as American labor costs too much. Most American IT jobs will go; those that remain will have much lower salaries, and the only American programmers remaining will be those that have a second job, and love programming more than money.
Why do I know this? Because I saw it, 10-15 years ago. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian scientists, engineers, skilled blue-collar workers, etc. found that their skills were suddenly no longer needed. The Russian industry was not competitive with the West, and the government was too poor to pay gov't contracts. So what happened? Some people emigrated to the West, where many of them had to take blue-collar jobs (because racist Westerners didn't care about their job experience or education). Some stayed for the love of their job despite not getting paid, and accepted a massive fall in their quality of life. Many broke down psychologically, started drinking, and are by now basically unemployed and unemployable. The rest went with the flow, and followed the money. They worked three jobs, sold vegetables, fixed cars, imported Western goods, went back to school, opened stores, created a banking system from scratch, etc. Some failed. Some were incredibly successful. The richest Russian businessmen today were knowledge workers in the 1980's.
The ones that were too stubborn or too shocked to adapt are living below the poverty line.
The post you are referring to basically says that the Mars Direct plan is better than leaving part of your vehicle in orbit. Mars Direct calls for the expedition to make enough fuel for the trip home from Martian materials over the course of a year. If that plan works, there is no reason to leave a bunch of fuel tanks in orbit where they can get punctured by a meteorite.
However, there are still good reason for leaving part of the spaceship in orbit. First is radiation shielding: it's very heavy, it's necessary in space, and not necessary on Mars (which has some atmosphere). Presumably it's tough enough to withstand a year of micrometeorite bombardment. Another aspect is if your interplanetary propulsion system is very different from the Mars lift-off system: i.e. liquid methane rocket (as per Mars Direct) for lifting off Mars, and some kind of a plasma or ion engine for going to Earth. It might make sense to leave the engine in orbit because it's useless on the surface, and because exposing it to G-forces of landing and liftoff might damage it.
First, every thing you land on, you use fuel. You use up fuel braking on the way down, and you use up fuel lifting off. So in terms of total energy spent, going to Mars via the Moon is a lose. I.e. it takes X amount of fuel to get the stuff into low Earth orbit; Y to get it from LEO to high orbit or Lagrange points; Z to get it from there to Mars. Assembling it on the Moon requres W more fuel to land on and lift off from the Moon.
Now, the issue is whether it's more economical to assemble everything on Earth (this means lifting it in one big piece - probably not practical), in orbit (means using some kind of a space station), or on the Moon (means building a Moon base). Considering we already have a space station in LEO and that NASA is planning to put some telescopes at the Lagrange points, why not assemble everything there? A moon base is pretty much useless except for anything except making pretty pictures or (very expensively) mining aluminum.
Seriously, though, agriculture is a risky proposition.
I remember a study of human teeth in ancient Asia Minor mentioned in a class I took. Basically, they studied the teeth and skulls (which indicate health and age of death) of the population as it transitioned from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society. For hunter-gatherers, the teeth were nice and healthy, and apparently the people typically lived to 40+. For agriculturalists, 90% of the population had very bad teeth and didn't live past the 20's. But some members of the population, particularly those buried with expensive items in expensive graves, continued to have great teeth and lived to an old age...
Energy required to lift 1 kg out of the gravitational well is (if I am not mistaken) G*M/R, where G is grav. constant, M is mass of planet, and R is planet's radius (in SI units). Plugging in values from the Mars fact sheet for M and R, I get
6.24 * 10^7 J for Earth;
and 1.26 * 10^7 J for Mars (or about 20% of the energy required to leave Earth).
Now, actually, the energy required to leave Mars will be much less than that because you won't be lifting 1) half of the fuel (burnt on the way there); 2) most of the spacecraft (parked in Mars orbit); or 3) most of the experiments and equipment (leave 'em on Mars so the next expedition needs less stuff to carry).
Are you implying that the number of Saturn V rockets required to go from Earth to Mars directly is less than the number needed to go from Earth too Moon base to Mars? Because the Moon has a gravitational field, in case you don't remember.
The way to go is to build a small space station (space dockyard?) at one of the Lagrange points of the Earth-Moon system, and assemble stuff there.
Yes you are. Forget your hand-hacked tools, your hammer and chisel. Let your eyes feast on the sleek automation of Debian and Gentoo. Join us. Join us. Soon all will be assimilated...
Seriously though, Slackware is nice for some things. Like running perfectly on ancient hardware that for the life of me I could not get anything else to boot on.
Dude, I don't understand you. I've used that card - had to go the DOS utility way to get Slackware 8 to recognize it. It's the sort of thing you know you have to do if you are dealing with like 10 year old ISA network cards! The system my card was in was a Pentium 90... If you can afford a CPU that's fast enough to compile KDE (i.e. you are trying Gentoo), couldn't you get some networking equipment that was not manufactured in the neolithic?
Netscape 4.x is quite a bit faster than Mozilla. Don't believe me? Grab an SGI O2 (MIPS 180 MHz). Netscape 4.latest will be responsive, render quickly and quirkily, until it inevitably crashes like 20 minutes later. Mozilla will run like a pig in cement...
Couple of issues with enforced tracking of all property.
1. Braindead laws or regulations. The kind that normal people break all the time. Going over the speed limit when rushing to a hospital or airport. Giving someone a gift without filing taxes. Smuggling technically illegal stuff from abroad. Furthermore, many not-quite-illegal actions that would put you on the List of People to Watch - like buying a bong or a modchip. And you can be sure that if you live in the US, most tracking info will be available (no judge's signature needed) to any company suspecting you are infringing on a random EULA or violating an employment contract.
And if another Sept.11 rolls around (or there is a war) - do you realize what kind of a clampdown the govt could implement?
2. This is more of a philosophical issue, and the one that creeps me out the most. If all your property is registered with the govt, tracked in realtime, information about it continuously logged and analyzed - is it yours, or are you licensing some units of government property? Are you nothing more than Consumer # 7986283.slashdot.org, maintained by the State as long as you provide a net economic and social benefit?
The United States would then rely on Russian, Japanese and European rockets to get to and from the station for the next three years, until the CEV was operational.
How about a soyuz? They are tried, true, and tough as nails.
The Soyuz doesn't have much cargo capacity - it can't supply the ISS occupants with enough water, for one thing. So, you will have to use Soyuz for the crew, and Progress-M for supplies/orbital adjustments. Thing is, it takes around 2 years to assemble a Progress-M vehicle+rocket, and as far as I know, RKK Energiya doesn't have the capacity work on many of them at once. Before the Shuttles were grounded, they were responsible for most of the heavy lifting and the keeping the ISS from falling down. I am not sure to what degree and for how long the Russian industry can replace them.
Anyone taking a CS course program should not be allowed credit for taking classes in C, C++, Cobal, Fortran, Scheme, Lisp, Assembly, Smalltalk, Java, or any other single language.
I don't understand your reason for not giving credit for language classes. That would drive away people under credit pressure (multiple majors, transfers, no AP credits from high school, etc). Those people would be forced to learn the language on their own time (kinda inconvenient in the middle of a group project), probably putting them at disadvantage.
There should also be one required programing language course, it should cover at least 12 languages in 10 weeks, and require some algorythm be implimented in all of them.
Interesting idea. I wish my school had one - would have helped the large fraction of my friends who are scared of Perl...
>the NT series turned out to be fairly insecure, fragile, bloated monstrosities
What was the last member of the NT series you used?
XP. I use it fairly often. You are right, it is a great improvement over old NT's, especially in stability. XP very rarely crashes. However, it's still quiteinsecure. Bloat is a matter of taste; I consider KDE and Gnome to be bloated too, just not as bad as Windows. As for fragility... Maybe it's just my hardware, but I've had the weirdest issues with XP. For example, my sound card dissappearing after suspend/unsuspend, then randomly reappearing several reboots later. I would say that if broken power management handling causes you to lose devices, that's pretty fragile.
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It's eerie how well the Stalker team have captured the look and feel of the area - and it looks like more than a couple of those pictures were used as direct concepts for locations in the Stalker game as well
For those unfamiliar with use of the word "stalker" in Russian, it is a sci-fi term that roughly means "tomb raider or marauder in a post-apocalyptic wasteland". AFAIK, it was first used in the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic, quite possibly the best sci-fi novel I've ever read (I think English translations exist, so you should go and read it. Now.) In the book, stalkers were guys who would sneak past police checkpoints to steal alien artifacts.
The Stalker game is based on the plot of Roadside Picnic, except they changes the setting from a North American alien landing site to the Chernobyl power plant disaster site. Probably makes the game more understandable for those who haven't read the novel. The most interesting thing is that they are going to keep the Strugatsky's concept of the Zone and its anomalies - areas of variable gravity, corrosives that turn flesh into rubber, invisible "meat grinders", burning air, walking corpses, etc. In the book, a stalker's lifespan was directly proportional to his sixth sense for detecting such anomalies. I wonder how well that would work out in the game.
TeX is awesome for laying out mathematical formulas (especially when compared to Word's bletcherous equation editor), and is quite nice for most common tasks. I couldn't agree with you more that managing a 100 page document can get crazy in Word, and is easy in LaTeX. But there's a catch.
For setting up tables, TeX sucks rocks. You have LaTeX tabular, which is only good for really simple things. You have halign, which is quite nice, but not quite powerful enough. You have longtable. But none of them are anywhere as flexible as Word's table tool. Recently, I was converting a paper from Word into TeX. For several tables, to express them adequately in TeX, I had to manually lay out all the hboxes and vboxes. Not fun. In fact, I was annoyed enough that I started writing my own macros for setting up tables. Then I realized that the TeX macro syntax is a hell-spawned evil twin of assembly crossed with Intercal, besides the fact that it's not actually documented.
Anyway, as sleek as TeX looks, be aware that under the surface it's a very hairy twenty-year-old piece of software.
Many (most?) physics and math journals seem to have standardized on (custom versions of) TeX or LaTeX for submitted papers. I know a biophysics researcher, who had never used anything but common Windows programs, complaining because he recently had to put his paper into LaTeX for a journal.
My general impression is that virtually all math and CS researchers typeset their articles and books in some kind of TeX. Physicists are more likely to have been infected by the MSOffice virus...
I've tried it in Word 2000 (tools->options->view->show field codes), it didn't seem to do anything. Does it only work in the most recent versions?
Scientists at an unknown and undisclosed location are researching into how to create giant bugs that clean up pollution
...while the Pentagon, realizing that dropping metal rods from space is a waste of money, announces plans to produce giant genetically engineered soldiers armed with lasers and tac nukes. In an interview, Rumsfeld mentions that "our God Soldiers will be able to destroy any potentially hostine nation in just a few Days of Fire." Germany and France have already condemned the American plan, claiming that the use of God Soldiers in combat may have disastrous environmental effects.
...here's mine. I have a system with USB 1.1 on the motherboard. Can I upgrade to 2.0 just by buying a PCI card?
#ifdef SARCASM
Theoretically, you could (that's what those cards are for). But practically, I suggest you sue your mobo manufacturer for not selling you the product you wished you had bought from them. Maybe you could even get a class action going... Suing people seems to be all the rage nowadays, doesn't it?
#endif
Same thing here. PIII 866, Nvidia NVS, 2.4.22, save nvidia version.
The minimum requirements are 1 GHz processor, 1.5 recommended. You are going to drop frames all over the place, trust me. I know - I tried it...
>A compassionate society must somehow help its John Baumans.
The US isn't a compassionate society--the voters don't want it to be. If the US were a compassionate society, the choice wouldn't be between people like Bush, Reagan, and Clinton, who are basically outdoing each other on trying to ratchet down social services.
In a non-compassionate society, John Bauman would be cared for by his family - parents, siblings, children, etc (chances are, at least one of them would have a decent job). Instead of paying high taxes for a workable social security, he would pay emotionally by putting up with annoying relatives. And of course, if he were not to have any kind relatives, a non-compassionate society would deposit him in the trashcan.
Face it: American IT workers are no longer competitive. Partially, it is because the third world is catching up in education and infrastructure; partially, it is because too many talentless and overpaid people entered the American IT industry in the 90's. The causes really don't matter, as long as American labor costs too much. Most American IT jobs will go; those that remain will have much lower salaries, and the only American programmers remaining will be those that have a second job, and love programming more than money.
Why do I know this? Because I saw it, 10-15 years ago. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian scientists, engineers, skilled blue-collar workers, etc. found that their skills were suddenly no longer needed. The Russian industry was not competitive with the West, and the government was too poor to pay gov't contracts. So what happened? Some people emigrated to the West, where many of them had to take blue-collar jobs (because racist Westerners didn't care about their job experience or education). Some stayed for the love of their job despite not getting paid, and accepted a massive fall in their quality of life. Many broke down psychologically, started drinking, and are by now basically unemployed and unemployable. The rest went with the flow, and followed the money. They worked three jobs, sold vegetables, fixed cars, imported Western goods, went back to school, opened stores, created a banking system from scratch, etc. Some failed. Some were incredibly successful. The richest Russian businessmen today were knowledge workers in the 1980's.
The ones that were too stubborn or too shocked to adapt are living below the poverty line.
Licensing any kind of shit in Russia is not a good business proposition. It's the world's biggest exporter of pirated software AFAIK.
The post you are referring to basically says that the Mars Direct plan is better than leaving part of your vehicle in orbit. Mars Direct calls for the expedition to make enough fuel for the trip home from Martian materials over the course of a year. If that plan works, there is no reason to leave a bunch of fuel tanks in orbit where they can get punctured by a meteorite.
However, there are still good reason for leaving part of the spaceship in orbit. First is radiation shielding: it's very heavy, it's necessary in space, and not necessary on Mars (which has some atmosphere). Presumably it's tough enough to withstand a year of micrometeorite bombardment. Another aspect is if your interplanetary propulsion system is very different from the Mars lift-off system: i.e. liquid methane rocket (as per Mars Direct) for lifting off Mars, and some kind of a plasma or ion engine for going to Earth. It might make sense to leave the engine in orbit because it's useless on the surface, and because exposing it to G-forces of landing and liftoff might damage it.
First, every thing you land on, you use fuel. You use up fuel braking on the way down, and you use up fuel lifting off. So in terms of total energy spent, going to Mars via the Moon is a lose. I.e. it takes X amount of fuel to get the stuff into low Earth orbit; Y to get it from LEO to high orbit or Lagrange points; Z to get it from there to Mars. Assembling it on the Moon requres W more fuel to land on and lift off from the Moon.
Now, the issue is whether it's more economical to assemble everything on Earth (this means lifting it in one big piece - probably not practical), in orbit (means using some kind of a space station), or on the Moon (means building a Moon base). Considering we already have a space station in LEO and that NASA is planning to put some telescopes at the Lagrange points, why not assemble everything there? A moon base is pretty much useless except for anything except making pretty pictures or (very expensively) mining aluminum.
Seriously, though, agriculture is a risky proposition.
I remember a study of human teeth in ancient Asia Minor mentioned in a class I took. Basically, they studied the teeth and skulls (which indicate health and age of death) of the population as it transitioned from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society. For hunter-gatherers, the teeth were nice and healthy, and apparently the people typically lived to 40+. For agriculturalists, 90% of the population had very bad teeth and didn't live past the 20's. But some members of the population, particularly those buried with expensive items in expensive graves, continued to have great teeth and lived to an old age...
Energy required to lift 1 kg out of the gravitational well is (if I am not mistaken) G*M/R, where G is grav. constant, M is mass of planet, and R is planet's radius (in SI units). Plugging in values from the Mars fact sheet for M and R, I get
6.24 * 10^7 J for Earth;
and 1.26 * 10^7 J for Mars (or about 20% of the energy required to leave Earth).
Now, actually, the energy required to leave Mars will be much less than that because you won't be lifting 1) half of the fuel (burnt on the way there); 2) most of the spacecraft (parked in Mars orbit); or 3) most of the experiments and equipment (leave 'em on Mars so the next expedition needs less stuff to carry).
Are you implying that the number of Saturn V rockets required to go from Earth to Mars directly is less than the number needed to go from Earth too Moon base to Mars? Because the Moon has a gravitational field, in case you don't remember.
The way to go is to build a small space station (space dockyard?) at one of the Lagrange points of the Earth-Moon system, and assemble stuff there.
Yes you are. Forget your hand-hacked tools, your hammer and chisel. Let your eyes feast on the sleek automation of Debian and Gentoo. Join us. Join us. Soon all will be assimilated...
Seriously though, Slackware is nice for some things. Like running perfectly on ancient hardware that for the life of me I could not get anything else to boot on.
Dude, I don't understand you. I've used that card - had to go the DOS utility way to get Slackware 8 to recognize it. It's the sort of thing you know you have to do if you are dealing with like 10 year old ISA network cards! The system my card was in was a Pentium 90... If you can afford a CPU that's fast enough to compile KDE (i.e. you are trying Gentoo), couldn't you get some networking equipment that was not manufactured in the neolithic?
Netscape 4.x is quite a bit faster than Mozilla. Don't believe me? Grab an SGI O2 (MIPS 180 MHz). Netscape 4.latest will be responsive, render quickly and quirkily, until it inevitably crashes like 20 minutes later. Mozilla will run like a pig in cement...
Couple of issues with enforced tracking of all property.
1. Braindead laws or regulations. The kind that normal people break all the time. Going over the speed limit when rushing to a hospital or airport. Giving someone a gift without filing taxes. Smuggling technically illegal stuff from abroad. Furthermore, many not-quite-illegal actions that would put you on the List of People to Watch - like buying a bong or a modchip. And you can be sure that if you live in the US, most tracking info will be available (no judge's signature needed) to any company suspecting you are infringing on a random EULA or violating an employment contract.
And if another Sept.11 rolls around (or there is a war) - do you realize what kind of a clampdown the govt could implement?
2. This is more of a philosophical issue, and the one that creeps me out the most. If all your property is registered with the govt, tracked in realtime, information about it continuously logged and analyzed - is it yours, or are you licensing some units of government property? Are you nothing more than Consumer # 7986283.slashdot.org, maintained by the State as long as you provide a net economic and social benefit?
The United States would then rely on Russian, Japanese and European rockets to get to and from the station for the next three years, until the CEV was operational.
These Japanese rockets?
How about a soyuz? They are tried, true, and tough as nails.
The Soyuz doesn't have much cargo capacity - it can't supply the ISS occupants with enough water, for one thing. So, you will have to use Soyuz for the crew, and Progress-M for supplies/orbital adjustments. Thing is, it takes around 2 years to assemble a Progress-M vehicle+rocket, and as far as I know, RKK Energiya doesn't have the capacity work on many of them at once. Before the Shuttles were grounded, they were responsible for most of the heavy lifting and the keeping the ISS from falling down. I am not sure to what degree and for how long the Russian industry can replace them.
Anyone taking a CS course program should not be allowed credit for taking classes in C, C++, Cobal, Fortran, Scheme, Lisp, Assembly, Smalltalk, Java, or any other single language.
I don't understand your reason for not giving credit for language classes. That would drive away people under credit pressure (multiple majors, transfers, no AP credits from high school, etc). Those people would be forced to learn the language on their own time (kinda inconvenient in the middle of a group project), probably putting them at disadvantage.
There should also be one required programing language course, it should cover at least 12 languages in 10 weeks, and require some algorythm be implimented in all of them.
Interesting idea. I wish my school had one - would have helped the large fraction of my friends who are scared of Perl...
>the NT series turned out to be fairly insecure, fragile, bloated monstrosities
What was the last member of the NT series you used?
XP. I use it fairly often. You are right, it is a great improvement over old NT's, especially in stability. XP very rarely crashes. However, it's still quite insecure. Bloat is a matter of taste; I consider KDE and Gnome to be bloated too, just not as bad as Windows. As for fragility... Maybe it's just my hardware, but I've had the weirdest issues with XP. For example, my sound card dissappearing after suspend/unsuspend, then randomly reappearing several reboots later. I would say that if broken power management handling causes you to lose devices, that's pretty fragile.
"I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)"
To summarize the discussion, Tanenbaum was dissing linux because it was non-portable at the time (i.e. designed only for the 386) and monolithic. Torvalds was dissing Minix because it sucked. Torvalds was right...