To be even fairer, Red Hat do employ a large proportion of the kernel and userspace developers for the software they make support income from - they even have a record of open sourcing code that they get from company acquisitions. But they are very much benefiting from the fact that it's easier to build an OS by co-operating with other companies and individuals than to go toe-to-toe with MS (and Apple, not that they're direct RH competitors in any significant way) on your own.
Parent is not a troll! He has a fair point. It is true that the software RHEL is made up of is free (like freedom and beer) and you can use all of that for free, in CentOS. So you are paying "just" for the support in that sense. But try getting hold of a copy of RHEL without paying someone - it's not like (AFAIK!) you can download it and optionally buy support later.
That said, I had heard (uhm, possibly from a RH employee...) that RH were reasonably sensible about support issues. The particular example I'd brought up, probably on a Xen project mailing list, was that if they only support 4 VMs then they might not support you if you'd been running more than 4 RHEL VMs on your server. But I was told, at the time, that actually the worst they'd do would be to ask you to have only 4 VMs running whilst they help you fix it - fairly reasonable really. So in that sense your contract with them really is just constraints on the support, not on how you use the stuff.
A fair point - not really funny mod material;-) The Nouveau drivers being merged are an important step in the right direction. The current situation, particularly for Free Software-only distros like Fedora is that when you install the system and boot for the first time you end up using the open source "nv" driver, which was provided by NVidia to provide basic 2D support but apparently is not very good. The Nouveau driver has support for KMS (kernel modesetting), which is needed for flicker-free graphical boot and nicer fast user switching, Xrandr which is the new way of doing dynamic monitor configuration and possibly even has better 2D acceleration than nv (I'm not sure on that point). In addition, the Nouveau people are working towards reverse engineered 3D support - they already have some basic stuff running on that score, I think.
So the Nouveau drivers provide a functionality boost for "haven't installed the NVidia binary drivers yet" situations and, for people who want or need to run free software systems, they give you better functionality than the existing open source nv driver. Various distros (Fedora first, I think, with Ubuntu following) are including Nouveau as their default driver for NVidia cards, so it makes sense to have it in the upstream kernel where it's subject to the scrutiny of many eyes, can benefit from infrastructure improvements in the kernel, etc. In the meantime, the Nouveau developers can carry on working towards full 3D support based on the stuff that's already in the kernel.
It's not so much a question of the 3D portion being ignored, more of the fact that it's more advanced than the existing OSS 2D drivers, so already an improvement, with 3D support coming in the future.
Nobody I know, including myself, saw it first time round but perhaps we just are from the moron segment of the human race;-)
The point of the video is to be viral (which it did reasonably well at) so as to spread a useful message. One of the better uses of advertising money I've seen out of public sector, as long as it reached enough people.
Reminded me of this observational skills test (by Transport For London to remind drivers to look out for the many cyclists on city streets): http://www.dothetest.co.uk/basketball.html
Good questions. The 360 Arcade is pretty cheap nowadays though, I think, so perhaps that should make it competitive price-wise with the Wii for casual games. I'd probably invest in a few casual games for the 360 given I have one already, so maybe there'll be some uptake that way too.
But agreed the Wii has significant "man on the street" mindshare - plenty of non-gamers think of it as "the fun console for normal people" and it would be fairly tricky for Microsoft to unseat them. But if they stump up the marketing dollars perhaps it can be done - some of the things proposed for Natal look really good for a family / party gaming context.
Well, I guess the optimisation of 360 games has improved over time so the graphics quality won't necessarily drop (much) relative to the baseline of the early current-generation titles. Really though, I think the tech looks useful even if the games are less graphically good. I've played on the Wii before and for serious games (Resident Evil 4) their motion technology really did make things more exciting and scary even though that platform had very little CPU power available. For casual games, the Wii is also in the lead. If Natal gave me fun casual games without having to buy a Wii, plus maybe some serious games that trade graphical detail for a different kind of immersive experience that would make me happy. It just wouldn't be as good as having the full power of the Xbox *plus* motion sensing.
I logged in and voted and I didn't bother to check whether the site was owned by Google; but then I don't really use my Google account for anything, so it's not a highly-valued token for me.
I appreciate the warning over language, though it didn't look worse than other sites/. links to from my brief look. But there are (albeit thumbnailed) images of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which are probably more important to warn people about.
Also, the article has evidence that censorship has not ceased so YMMV with this story.
The project has added shared vision (across a population) and various drug pills that alter the behaviour of the neurons to an existing project to see what happens. The website describes this in a way which doesn't make it sound as controversial as the summary does - it's just cool. The critters are powered by neural nets and seemingly have retinas wired up for vision - this project has added a shared retina across the whole population and allows it to be updated by the individuals. And it changes over time too, AIUI, like some kind of replay. The drug pills act on the neural nets by changing the behaviour of certain neurons, which is basically what drugs do in a real brain. Why do this? Who cares if it's useful, it's a cool hack and this is news for nerds! You can view the image of the shared retina so you can see what the critters have produced - I think that the telepathy aspect is more interesting (though not so headline-grabbing) than the drugs.
I'm not really sure where the "may actually produce hallucinations in the user" came from, I didn't see a mention on the homepage of the project. It makes it sound like you, the user at the computer, might hallucinate whilst watching it - it looks like just a low-res grid of coloured pixels to me, so I wouldn't be worried about seeing any flying monkeys afterwards!
Not a serious company but thought I'd note that OpenStreetmap (http://openstreetmap.org) uses PostgreSQL to store data for their Mapnik rendering engine and PostGIS to query it. They're rendering user-contributed map data for the entire world, so that's a fairly serious operation.
Heh, that's certainly true too! I've been thinking a lot recently about whether predatory / monopolistic behaviour is *ever* a good idea. It seems to me it's only ever a good plan in the relatively short term. In the end, trying to squash the market under your weight rather than swim in it is always going to result in disloyal customers, faster moving competitors and loss of market position.
I'm not sure there's a way of avoiding the eventual progression of successful company -> bureaucratic monster -> innovation-averse nuisance. But I do think that it's a slide worth fighting, it just needs management to have a *really* good sense of the big picture and can make a case for doing the right thing, as opposed to chasing immediate profits or serving short term investors in the company.
IMO this is one place where strong management can make a big difference by taking an explicit position on "Times are tough, we need to collect what revenue we can" vs "We need to preserve a relationship with our customers *and* help them stay in business *and* get ready to capitalise on that good relationship when the economy picks up and we want to sell more stuff". Targets should not be allowed to distract from the bigger picture, which is *serving your customers*. Sure you might have contract terms that give you "the right" to hit your customers with surprise charges in order to help keep your own business afloat but you're not really serving them, you're using them. By the same token, when I go to my local shop they have "the right" to be rude to me - I'm paying for goods, not manners. But then I'd switch purchasing to the other local shop. Everything has a cost.
But what do I know, I'm not a manager! Times are tough, people have to get by somehow.
Why believe only the parts of the maths that sound dangerous if the same scientific work also says that it's *not* dangerous? That's just like taking a sentence of somebody's speech and quoting it out of context. If the argument is "but the maths might be wrong" then you might as well disbelieve it all, which a) means that you've eliminated the suggestion of danger in the first place b) means that if you want to argue *anything* you need to come up with some new maths to prove them wrong (and revolutionise the discipline of Physics, get a guaranteed Nobel Prize and be remembered as the saviour of mankind for thousands of years)
I'd have said that was one of the main things you kept with Open Source. The Open Source software I've originated has had fairly modest user bases but I've remained the lead developer. The main way I think I'd lose artistic ownership is if somebody took over and developed / maintained the software better than me - in which case they'd deserve it.
Quite upsetting to see open source associated with piracy, etc but I can see how for somebody a) not necessarily as tech-literate as us and b) working closely with people in an intellectual property industry which is suddenly seeing an influx of strange new concepts, it might seem like they're part and parcel of the internet (and in some sense they are, they're just rather different things anyhow!).
Dunno who he is but I didn't think the essay was overly vague or rambling. Certainly I found it more interesting than most of the articles I see on Slashdot these days...
I guess this is no more crazy than the marketing commercial ventures put out. And there's some truth to the idea that the web always wins. But doing everything using the web when it could be done as well or better using a public API + native apps implementing it strikes me as a bit backwards, like "It's javascript / AJAX based!" is becoming the new technology bubble. AJAX is a very powerful hammer which makes a lot of other problems look like nails. It's just worth remembering some of those problems might only *look like* nails!
I have no objection to there being an AJAX interface to pretty much anything, I just don't want it to be the only choice. But I'm a bit bewildered when people talk as if local apps -> web apps is an inevitable good -> better transition. In this case they *really are* different tools with different uses and some (increasingly substantial) overlap.
Also, does anyone see the irony here, given that when the first iPhone launched Apple claimed it didn't need native apps because you could just javascript, etc? OK, so Firefox / Fennec has a faster JavaScript engine but still...
I generally prefer sci-fi to use mysticism and magic when they want to get some unexplained magic, so I quite liked the psychics / gods. I prefer the approach (I'd say there's a fair helping of it in BSG and even Star Wars) to, say, Star Trek's tendency to just make up crazy bits of science. Star Trek's science focus *was* quite cool and in a sense made it all somewhat believable. But if they need a magic solution, I find it less jarring for it to be actual magic than for people to repeatedly do stuff that's supposed to be outside the reach of human science until the current crisis.
Just my PoV, of course - introducing mysticism stuff probably breaks any claim to be "hard sci-fi" and can be used as a horrible cheat (c.f. the way what you can achieve with The Force in Star Wars varies so much and the fact that "size matters not" - but it sometimes does!).
Surely GDP per capita doesn't tell you in itself what a typical person's income is, let alone what their standard of living is? It'll give you the mean but the median is probably more interesting, or the mean of working-class people's income, perhaps.
Isn't dom0 itself a hypervisor kernel? If so I highly doubt Linux will integrate a kernel within itself.
Dom0 isn't actually a hypervisor, no. Xen itself is the true hypervisor on the system and it controls access to the CPU, system memory and various other very low level concerns. Any OS that runs on a Xen system must be a virtual machine of some kind.
Dom0 is a special virtual machine that happens to be allowed to do privileged stuff like accessing the real hardware on the system and managing other domains. Basically you get a dom0-capable kernel by starting from a paravirtualised domU kernel and adding various stuff to support these privileged operations.
The various dom0 kernel patches to mainline extend the existing domU support in various ways so that these features are supported. You still need to boot on top of Xen but the advantage to getting this in mainline (and using paravirt_ops) would be that you can build a single kernel imagine that runs paravirt as dom0 or domU or boots natively or whatever.
There has been some objection to adding dom0 support, on the grounds that KVM is now the "Linux way". However, it would be useful to people and would be some way short of adding a second full hypervisor - Xen itself would continue to be a separate codebase. It'd be more a case of adding another (strange) kind of specialised "machine" that Linux is capable of booting on.
NetBSD has included support for booting as both dom0 and domU for some time now (the original NetBSD Xen support was written by a guy who later became a Xen developer, it's since been taken over by someone else I think). OpenSolaris has dom0 and domU support also, for Sun's own hypervisor product. FreeBSD 8 has added Xen domU support but sadly dom0 support is still not available.
Perhaps 'Using "Money Power" Against Suspected / Accused Pirates' or just plain "Against Defendants" would be more representative?
Re:Does XEN have a future?
on
The Book of Xen
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Disclaimer: I've been a Xen developer in the past and I'm currently obliged to work on Xen-related stuff for my degree. However, please take the following as my personal opinions!
Wrt keeping pace with kernel driver development: it's worth noting that most of Xen's hardware support comes from running device drivers within a privileged Linux VM (dom0). So most things supported under Linux should work under Xen, plus new drivers should also work as they're added (assuming you're running an up-to-date Linux, which as others have noted you may not be given Xen's officially supported dom0 has mostly been based on 2.6.18, though I hear rumours that proper support for running kernel.org kernels as dom0 might be coming or already available somewhere). That said, stuff like power management / CPU frequency scaling / hibernate / etc tends to need co-operation from Xen, so that can lead to some duplication and extra complexity for Xen to support (I don't know that it does support hibernate support, for instance).
I think that the kernel developers have given Xen support in mainline a fairly rough ride (though as the patches were somewhat large and unusual, that's partly understandable). The Xen developers could probably have handled the merge faster by engaging more and better with the kernel community earlier on.
Regarding distro support - RedHat made Xen a major feature, with good Xen support in RHEL5 (and later support for RHEL4 running as a PV Xen guest) and Fedora. However, relatively early on they started isolating their command-line tools and GUI from the specifics of Xen through an abstraction library called libvirt, a command shell called virsh and a gui called virt-manager. They are now going with KVM as their primary virtualisation feature for the future, with the same UI provided. Obviously they'll have to keep supporting Xen in RHEL due to long term support guarantees. Fedora hasn't supported running as dom0 for a couple of releases as they've decided to stop porting the Xen patches and wait for kernel.org support (they did provide some development and impetus to the mainlining effort, to help this goal along). RedHat has bought the company which wrote KVM and also acquired their SPICE virtual desktop protocol and additions to KVM / Qemu to support this. SPICE is currently most useful for Windows guests from what I've read but it can do some pretty impressive stuff.
SuSE are still quite keen on Xen AFAIK and Xen is certainly still an OSS project which continues to be developed and enhanced. That said, XenSource (which is now owned by Citrix) isn't really in the business of providing virtualisation for Linux distros (although the open source Xen can do that), so much as in selling "appliance-style" virtualisation software a la VMware ESX. They want to be attractive as a commercial virtualisation platform for whatever is expected to be popular in data centres and they're not so worried about being a de-facto standard in Open Source circles.
Re:Does XEN have a future?
on
The Book of Xen
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Disclaimer: I've been a Xen developer in the past and I'm currently obliged to work on Xen-related stuff for my degree.
Minor clarification: Xen support for running as a domU is upstream and there are plans to get dom0 support upstream as well. If getting dom0 support upstream doesn't happen, at least (hopefully) they might be able to base their dom0 kernel on a patchset on top of the kernel.org domU support rather than the horrible forked business they used for a long time:-S
It is KDE4. The "Zoom out thing" shrinks your desktop into the corner of the screen and you can add more desktop-looking things if you want and switch between them. The - reasonable, IMO - goal is to enable you to have several desktop setups (with panel configurations, shortcuts, and other plasmoids) configured and switch between them depending on what you're doing. This is an orthogonal thing to Virtual Desktops although in 4.4 I think you can choose a 1:1 relationship between virtual desktops and activities, which might make them a bit less scary for mere mortals. Not sure I'd ever really use it but I can kinda see why people might!
I think early releases of KDE 4 were quite Vista-ish in being a fundamental architectural improvement that worked drastically less well in some user-visible cases;-) But I think it's evolving into a Windows 7-alike "better technology with the bugs fixed" kind of thing. Like Vista itself probably would have done if there wasn't a marketing reason to make a new launch with an "untainted" brand, I guess. I've found KDE 4 OK to work with since 4.1 and I really like where they're going with it in a whole lot of different ways. I'm quite excited to play with some of the APIs they've added at some point, they all look really fun and powerful.
I find KDE 4 pretty good overall but the "zoom out" is annoying. It's always had the feeling of a "placeholder" or prototype feature to me. I don't mind that so much but I don't think it's a good idea to have scary-looking features that aren't "end user safe" enabled by default. What they're trying to do with activities is good but the GUI they've provided for it seems like they just haven't polished it yet, so a) it looks scary and b) I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with it.
I expect it'll be useful to some people now and more people once it's polished; in the meantime it would be nice for it not to appear to non power users (or at the least, for some "Are you sure you want to use activities?" window or maybe just a more obvious "Get me outta here!" button).
Using the desktop is mostly fairly pleasant and user friendly if I stay away from that though. And the UI is a lot less cluttered than KDE3 days whilst still giving me plenty of power. My favourite user experience for KDE 4 is probably Mandriva's FWIW - I don't think various distros have always configured it as well as they could be default.
Slashdot Mirror
To be even fairer, Red Hat do employ a large proportion of the kernel and userspace developers for the software they make support income from - they even have a record of open sourcing code that they get from company acquisitions. But they are very much benefiting from the fact that it's easier to build an OS by co-operating with other companies and individuals than to go toe-to-toe with MS (and Apple, not that they're direct RH competitors in any significant way) on your own.
Parent is not a troll! He has a fair point. It is true that the software RHEL is made up of is free (like freedom and beer) and you can use all of that for free, in CentOS. So you are paying "just" for the support in that sense. But try getting hold of a copy of RHEL without paying someone - it's not like (AFAIK!) you can download it and optionally buy support later.
That said, I had heard (uhm, possibly from a RH employee...) that RH were reasonably sensible about support issues. The particular example I'd brought up, probably on a Xen project mailing list, was that if they only support 4 VMs then they might not support you if you'd been running more than 4 RHEL VMs on your server. But I was told, at the time, that actually the worst they'd do would be to ask you to have only 4 VMs running whilst they help you fix it - fairly reasonable really. So in that sense your contract with them really is just constraints on the support, not on how you use the stuff.
A fair point - not really funny mod material ;-) The Nouveau drivers being merged are an important step in the right direction. The current situation, particularly for Free Software-only distros like Fedora is that when you install the system and boot for the first time you end up using the open source "nv" driver, which was provided by NVidia to provide basic 2D support but apparently is not very good. The Nouveau driver has support for KMS (kernel modesetting), which is needed for flicker-free graphical boot and nicer fast user switching, Xrandr which is the new way of doing dynamic monitor configuration and possibly even has better 2D acceleration than nv (I'm not sure on that point). In addition, the Nouveau people are working towards reverse engineered 3D support - they already have some basic stuff running on that score, I think.
So the Nouveau drivers provide a functionality boost for "haven't installed the NVidia binary drivers yet" situations and, for people who want or need to run free software systems, they give you better functionality than the existing open source nv driver. Various distros (Fedora first, I think, with Ubuntu following) are including Nouveau as their default driver for NVidia cards, so it makes sense to have it in the upstream kernel where it's subject to the scrutiny of many eyes, can benefit from infrastructure improvements in the kernel, etc. In the meantime, the Nouveau developers can carry on working towards full 3D support based on the stuff that's already in the kernel.
It's not so much a question of the 3D portion being ignored, more of the fact that it's more advanced than the existing OSS 2D drivers, so already an improvement, with 3D support coming in the future.
Nobody I know, including myself, saw it first time round but perhaps we just are from the moron segment of the human race ;-)
The point of the video is to be viral (which it did reasonably well at) so as to spread a useful message. One of the better uses of advertising money I've seen out of public sector, as long as it reached enough people.
Reminded me of this observational skills test (by Transport For London to remind drivers to look out for the many cyclists on city streets): http://www.dothetest.co.uk/basketball.html
Good questions. The 360 Arcade is pretty cheap nowadays though, I think, so perhaps that should make it competitive price-wise with the Wii for casual games. I'd probably invest in a few casual games for the 360 given I have one already, so maybe there'll be some uptake that way too.
But agreed the Wii has significant "man on the street" mindshare - plenty of non-gamers think of it as "the fun console for normal people" and it would be fairly tricky for Microsoft to unseat them. But if they stump up the marketing dollars perhaps it can be done - some of the things proposed for Natal look really good for a family / party gaming context.
Well, I guess the optimisation of 360 games has improved over time so the graphics quality won't necessarily drop (much) relative to the baseline of the early current-generation titles. Really though, I think the tech looks useful even if the games are less graphically good. I've played on the Wii before and for serious games (Resident Evil 4) their motion technology really did make things more exciting and scary even though that platform had very little CPU power available. For casual games, the Wii is also in the lead. If Natal gave me fun casual games without having to buy a Wii, plus maybe some serious games that trade graphical detail for a different kind of immersive experience that would make me happy. It just wouldn't be as good as having the full power of the Xbox *plus* motion sensing.
I logged in and voted and I didn't bother to check whether the site was owned by Google; but then I don't really use my Google account for anything, so it's not a highly-valued token for me.
I appreciate the warning over language, though it didn't look worse than other sites /. links to from my brief look. But there are (albeit thumbnailed) images of the Tiananmen Square massacre, which are probably more important to warn people about.
Also, the article has evidence that censorship has not ceased so YMMV with this story.
The project has added shared vision (across a population) and various drug pills that alter the behaviour of the neurons to an existing project to see what happens. The website describes this in a way which doesn't make it sound as controversial as the summary does - it's just cool. The critters are powered by neural nets and seemingly have retinas wired up for vision - this project has added a shared retina across the whole population and allows it to be updated by the individuals. And it changes over time too, AIUI, like some kind of replay. The drug pills act on the neural nets by changing the behaviour of certain neurons, which is basically what drugs do in a real brain. Why do this? Who cares if it's useful, it's a cool hack and this is news for nerds! You can view the image of the shared retina so you can see what the critters have produced - I think that the telepathy aspect is more interesting (though not so headline-grabbing) than the drugs.
I'm not really sure where the "may actually produce hallucinations in the user" came from, I didn't see a mention on the homepage of the project. It makes it sound like you, the user at the computer, might hallucinate whilst watching it - it looks like just a low-res grid of coloured pixels to me, so I wouldn't be worried about seeing any flying monkeys afterwards!
Not a serious company but thought I'd note that OpenStreetmap (http://openstreetmap.org) uses PostgreSQL to store data for their Mapnik rendering engine and PostGIS to query it. They're rendering user-contributed map data for the entire world, so that's a fairly serious operation.
Heh, that's certainly true too! I've been thinking a lot recently about whether predatory / monopolistic behaviour is *ever* a good idea. It seems to me it's only ever a good plan in the relatively short term. In the end, trying to squash the market under your weight rather than swim in it is always going to result in disloyal customers, faster moving competitors and loss of market position.
I'm not sure there's a way of avoiding the eventual progression of successful company -> bureaucratic monster -> innovation-averse nuisance. But I do think that it's a slide worth fighting, it just needs management to have a *really* good sense of the big picture and can make a case for doing the right thing, as opposed to chasing immediate profits or serving short term investors in the company.
IMO this is one place where strong management can make a big difference by taking an explicit position on "Times are tough, we need to collect what revenue we can" vs "We need to preserve a relationship with our customers *and* help them stay in business *and* get ready to capitalise on that good relationship when the economy picks up and we want to sell more stuff". Targets should not be allowed to distract from the bigger picture, which is *serving your customers*. Sure you might have contract terms that give you "the right" to hit your customers with surprise charges in order to help keep your own business afloat but you're not really serving them, you're using them. By the same token, when I go to my local shop they have "the right" to be rude to me - I'm paying for goods, not manners. But then I'd switch purchasing to the other local shop. Everything has a cost.
But what do I know, I'm not a manager! Times are tough, people have to get by somehow.
Why believe only the parts of the maths that sound dangerous if the same scientific work also says that it's *not* dangerous? That's just like taking a sentence of somebody's speech and quoting it out of context. If the argument is "but the maths might be wrong" then you might as well disbelieve it all, which a) means that you've eliminated the suggestion of danger in the first place b) means that if you want to argue *anything* you need to come up with some new maths to prove them wrong (and revolutionise the discipline of Physics, get a guaranteed Nobel Prize and be remembered as the saviour of mankind for thousands of years)
I'd have said that was one of the main things you kept with Open Source. The Open Source software I've originated has had fairly modest user bases but I've remained the lead developer. The main way I think I'd lose artistic ownership is if somebody took over and developed / maintained the software better than me - in which case they'd deserve it.
Quite upsetting to see open source associated with piracy, etc but I can see how for somebody a) not necessarily as tech-literate as us and b) working closely with people in an intellectual property industry which is suddenly seeing an influx of strange new concepts, it might seem like they're part and parcel of the internet (and in some sense they are, they're just rather different things anyhow!).
Dunno who he is but I didn't think the essay was overly vague or rambling. Certainly I found it more interesting than most of the articles I see on Slashdot these days...
I guess this is no more crazy than the marketing commercial ventures put out. And there's some truth to the idea that the web always wins. But doing everything using the web when it could be done as well or better using a public API + native apps implementing it strikes me as a bit backwards, like "It's javascript / AJAX based!" is becoming the new technology bubble. AJAX is a very powerful hammer which makes a lot of other problems look like nails. It's just worth remembering some of those problems might only *look like* nails!
I have no objection to there being an AJAX interface to pretty much anything, I just don't want it to be the only choice. But I'm a bit bewildered when people talk as if local apps -> web apps is an inevitable good -> better transition. In this case they *really are* different tools with different uses and some (increasingly substantial) overlap.
Also, does anyone see the irony here, given that when the first iPhone launched Apple claimed it didn't need native apps because you could just javascript, etc? OK, so Firefox / Fennec has a faster JavaScript engine but still...
I generally prefer sci-fi to use mysticism and magic when they want to get some unexplained magic, so I quite liked the psychics / gods. I prefer the approach (I'd say there's a fair helping of it in BSG and even Star Wars) to, say, Star Trek's tendency to just make up crazy bits of science. Star Trek's science focus *was* quite cool and in a sense made it all somewhat believable. But if they need a magic solution, I find it less jarring for it to be actual magic than for people to repeatedly do stuff that's supposed to be outside the reach of human science until the current crisis.
Just my PoV, of course - introducing mysticism stuff probably breaks any claim to be "hard sci-fi" and can be used as a horrible cheat (c.f. the way what you can achieve with The Force in Star Wars varies so much and the fact that "size matters not" - but it sometimes does!).
Surely GDP per capita doesn't tell you in itself what a typical person's income is, let alone what their standard of living is? It'll give you the mean but the median is probably more interesting, or the mean of working-class people's income, perhaps.
Isn't dom0 itself a hypervisor kernel? If so I highly doubt Linux will integrate a kernel within itself.
Dom0 isn't actually a hypervisor, no. Xen itself is the true hypervisor on the system and it controls access to the CPU, system memory and various other very low level concerns. Any OS that runs on a Xen system must be a virtual machine of some kind.
Dom0 is a special virtual machine that happens to be allowed to do privileged stuff like accessing the real hardware on the system and managing other domains. Basically you get a dom0-capable kernel by starting from a paravirtualised domU kernel and adding various stuff to support these privileged operations.
The various dom0 kernel patches to mainline extend the existing domU support in various ways so that these features are supported. You still need to boot on top of Xen but the advantage to getting this in mainline (and using paravirt_ops) would be that you can build a single kernel imagine that runs paravirt as dom0 or domU or boots natively or whatever.
There has been some objection to adding dom0 support, on the grounds that KVM is now the "Linux way". However, it would be useful to people and would be some way short of adding a second full hypervisor - Xen itself would continue to be a separate codebase. It'd be more a case of adding another (strange) kind of specialised "machine" that Linux is capable of booting on.
NetBSD has included support for booting as both dom0 and domU for some time now (the original NetBSD Xen support was written by a guy who later became a Xen developer, it's since been taken over by someone else I think). OpenSolaris has dom0 and domU support also, for Sun's own hypervisor product. FreeBSD 8 has added Xen domU support but sadly dom0 support is still not available.
Perhaps 'Using "Money Power" Against Suspected / Accused Pirates' or just plain "Against Defendants" would be more representative?
Disclaimer: I've been a Xen developer in the past and I'm currently obliged to work on Xen-related stuff for my degree. However, please take the following as my personal opinions!
Wrt keeping pace with kernel driver development: it's worth noting that most of Xen's hardware support comes from running device drivers within a privileged Linux VM (dom0). So most things supported under Linux should work under Xen, plus new drivers should also work as they're added (assuming you're running an up-to-date Linux, which as others have noted you may not be given Xen's officially supported dom0 has mostly been based on 2.6.18, though I hear rumours that proper support for running kernel.org kernels as dom0 might be coming or already available somewhere). That said, stuff like power management / CPU frequency scaling / hibernate / etc tends to need co-operation from Xen, so that can lead to some duplication and extra complexity for Xen to support (I don't know that it does support hibernate support, for instance).
I think that the kernel developers have given Xen support in mainline a fairly rough ride (though as the patches were somewhat large and unusual, that's partly understandable). The Xen developers could probably have handled the merge faster by engaging more and better with the kernel community earlier on.
Regarding distro support - RedHat made Xen a major feature, with good Xen support in RHEL5 (and later support for RHEL4 running as a PV Xen guest) and Fedora. However, relatively early on they started isolating their command-line tools and GUI from the specifics of Xen through an abstraction library called libvirt, a command shell called virsh and a gui called virt-manager. They are now going with KVM as their primary virtualisation feature for the future, with the same UI provided. Obviously they'll have to keep supporting Xen in RHEL due to long term support guarantees. Fedora hasn't supported running as dom0 for a couple of releases as they've decided to stop porting the Xen patches and wait for kernel.org support (they did provide some development and impetus to the mainlining effort, to help this goal along). RedHat has bought the company which wrote KVM and also acquired their SPICE virtual desktop protocol and additions to KVM / Qemu to support this. SPICE is currently most useful for Windows guests from what I've read but it can do some pretty impressive stuff.
SuSE are still quite keen on Xen AFAIK and Xen is certainly still an OSS project which continues to be developed and enhanced. That said, XenSource (which is now owned by Citrix) isn't really in the business of providing virtualisation for Linux distros (although the open source Xen can do that), so much as in selling "appliance-style" virtualisation software a la VMware ESX. They want to be attractive as a commercial virtualisation platform for whatever is expected to be popular in data centres and they're not so worried about being a de-facto standard in Open Source circles.
Disclaimer: I've been a Xen developer in the past and I'm currently obliged to work on Xen-related stuff for my degree.
Minor clarification: Xen support for running as a domU is upstream and there are plans to get dom0 support upstream as well. If getting dom0 support upstream doesn't happen, at least (hopefully) they might be able to base their dom0 kernel on a patchset on top of the kernel.org domU support rather than the horrible forked business they used for a long time :-S
It is KDE4. The "Zoom out thing" shrinks your desktop into the corner of the screen and you can add more desktop-looking things if you want and switch between them. The - reasonable, IMO - goal is to enable you to have several desktop setups (with panel configurations, shortcuts, and other plasmoids) configured and switch between them depending on what you're doing. This is an orthogonal thing to Virtual Desktops although in 4.4 I think you can choose a 1:1 relationship between virtual desktops and activities, which might make them a bit less scary for mere mortals. Not sure I'd ever really use it but I can kinda see why people might!
I think early releases of KDE 4 were quite Vista-ish in being a fundamental architectural improvement that worked drastically less well in some user-visible cases ;-) But I think it's evolving into a Windows 7-alike "better technology with the bugs fixed" kind of thing. Like Vista itself probably would have done if there wasn't a marketing reason to make a new launch with an "untainted" brand, I guess. I've found KDE 4 OK to work with since 4.1 and I really like where they're going with it in a whole lot of different ways. I'm quite excited to play with some of the APIs they've added at some point, they all look really fun and powerful.
I find KDE 4 pretty good overall but the "zoom out" is annoying. It's always had the feeling of a "placeholder" or prototype feature to me. I don't mind that so much but I don't think it's a good idea to have scary-looking features that aren't "end user safe" enabled by default. What they're trying to do with activities is good but the GUI they've provided for it seems like they just haven't polished it yet, so a) it looks scary and b) I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with it.
I expect it'll be useful to some people now and more people once it's polished; in the meantime it would be nice for it not to appear to non power users (or at the least, for some "Are you sure you want to use activities?" window or maybe just a more obvious "Get me outta here!" button).
Using the desktop is mostly fairly pleasant and user friendly if I stay away from that though. And the UI is a lot less cluttered than KDE3 days whilst still giving me plenty of power. My favourite user experience for KDE 4 is probably Mandriva's FWIW - I don't think various distros have always configured it as well as they could be default.