What MB are you talking about? I am going to be building a (hopefully) quiet, low-power Linux home router soon and that MB sounds very interesting, as long as it has at least 3 PCI slots so that I can get 3 NICs on it...
One facet of these emulators that is of particular interest to developers, but not mentioned in the article, is the completeness of the emulation. Back when I was working on an OS, I found that there were some instructions that were incompletely/improperly emulated by bochs and plex86. This made it difficult to write some kinds of code.
I am not sure how VMWare compares with regards to this. When I tried it it seemed to be alot more complete than bochs/plex86, but unfortunately it was missing the "console only" mode that plex86/bochs has.
Also I corresponded with VMWare who was unwilling to guarantee that their cheaper "Linux guest only" version would be able to run a simple handcrafted OS. I decided that their much more expensive general version was not worth the price, and stuck with plex86/bochs, working around the improperly emulated, or non-emulated, instructions.
I think it would be interesting to see a comparison of these emulators from a completeness standpoint, not just a performance standpoint. For an OS developer, the former is probably more important than the latter.
In any case, an emulator is a godsend when you are writing OS code, because otherwise you have to reboot your machine and wait for it to POST each time you change you code rather than just simply firing off a much quicker and easier run of the emulator. Also, the emulators often print out useful messages when there is an unusual processor condition or a processor exception, which can be very helpful in tracking down the cause of lockups. Plex86 was particularly good in this regard at the time that I was using it.
Wow. I am simply amazed that people can actually sling insults at each other over IDE vs. SCSI. It boggles the mind.
I can only talk about my experience, whch is unfortunately outdated. At my previous place of employment, I was basically the IT department, and I helped to build our at-the-time honkin fast file server. We decided to go with the fastest SCSI at the time (can't remember what it was, a step behind Ultra160 I think). We bought 18 GB 7200 RPM scsi drives (this was when IDE was at 5400 RPM max). It worked really, really well. We were able to do multiple read/write tests (tar'ing from one drive to the other, etc) simultaneously and the CPU load stayed very low (under 10%). We did the same tests using the remaining IDE drives in the system, and the CPU load went up significantly to 30% or so. This was with a Pentium III 500 system, using Linux.
So at the time I was very impressed and happy with our choice. There is something about knowing that disk I/O is being handled by a capable and powerful controller, that was comforting. When we replaced the machine we went with a SCSI Raid array and were even more impressed with the speed and low CPU usage.
But that was about three years ago, and I'm sure things have changed. I am about to build my own system and I have been seriously considering using a SCSI drive. But I would like to know if SCSI still holds the advantages that it used to (or at least, that I thought that it used to). I wish someone would do comprehensive testing and benchmarking on this, I think it would clear up alot of the FUD floating around in this debate.
There, I made my point, and I didn't insult anyone in doing it!
I never played Baldur's Gate, which this Neverwinter Nights seems to be related to (being written by the same company and of the same game genre), but I did play Icewind Dale, which got rave reviews as a great RPG.
Only, I thought Icewind Dale sucked. Badly. So badly that I never got beyond the first mountain pass. Here is why I thought that Icewind Dale sucked:
1. The graphics were not that great. The characters you get to select from look like they were all scanned from an airbrush that was copied out of the back of some dungeons and dragons magazine. The characters, monsters, architecture, etc, drawn in isometric view were very good either.
2. When generating a character, you get to choose from lots of neat races, like elf, half-elf, human, dwarf, etc... but then when you go to actually assign skill points, and strength points, intelligence, etc, you can just move any number of points from any column to any other. So you can create a dwarf that has the exact same characteristics as an elf. What is the point of having character races if you can just arbitrarily change stats any way you like? It really takes the fun out of designing a character. There is no challenge, and in fact the race becomes nothing more than a name.
3. The gameplay sucked. Lots of clicking around, trying to select the correct group of people and make them do the correct thing. They're always doing something stupid - running back and forth trying to stand on the spot that you clicked on rather than fighting back against the orc that is pummeling them, or getting all clogged up at an entranceway, or stopping altogether because someone else who was trying to go the same way they were was in the way for a moment. It was just frustrating and annoying trying to control all of my party members and trying to make them do something reasonable all of the time.
4. Fighting monsters is way too hard and gives way, way too few experience points. I played forever waiting for any member of my party to get enough experience to gain a level. I needed like 2,000 experience points to get to level 2, and was getting like 10 for each monster I killed. And finding creatures to fight, and then finishing them off, took forever. So after hours and hours none of my characters had even advanced a level. How lame.
5. Stupid quests. All of the tasks that I was asked to complete by the townspeople in the first town were just uninteresting and dumb. They were all of the form "go get this thing and take it to that person." Lame. And then the amount of experience I would get for doing that was low anyway. Although, at one point I was walking around in a basement and I opened a door to find a boy who was afraid to go back to town or something. I didn't have to do anything at all, I just randomly happened to open that door, and the kid went back to town and I got like 500 experience points for each character. WTF?!?? Opening a door at random gives me the same experience as killing 50 orcs? It's no fun to try to build up your characters when fighting hard against monsters gives you almost no experience, but randomly happening upon lost children gives you tons.
6. Bugs. The game would slow to a crawl and then crash every so often.
Eventually I gave up and realized that the game was a total waste of my time. It had to be one of the worst games I had ever played. And yet I read all over the place about how it was such a great game.
Needless to say, I am extremely skeptical of the entire RPG genre, especially anything from BioWare.
If it weren't for Fallout 1 & 2, which were two of the best games I have ever played, I would probably write off the RPG genre altogether.
Re:When will TiVo get ReplayTV network features?
on
TiVo Series 2 Review
·
· Score: 2
Adding a DVD burner would add hundreds of dollars to the cost of the box for a feature that not that many people really want.
CDs don't have enough capacity to be seriously considered for archiving/storing shows.
That's why.
I have one also - Ti is strong but not hard
on
The Sexiest Metal
·
· Score: 2
I have been wearing a Titanium wedding ring since 6/1999. I bought it at www.titaniumrings.com, a place in Montreal that I would highly recommend.
The ring is a Titanium alloy - Ti6Al4V... it is very strong, and I think pretty attractive.
The problem is, whereas Titanium is a strong metal, it is not a very hard metal... meaning that it scratches more or less as easily as any other metal. So after a while your ring ends up as scuffed as any other ring.
If I had to do it all over again I would have had a hardened tool steel ring custom made with a Titanium Nitrate coating. I think that the result would be basically indestructible and nearly scratchproof (with 99% the hardness of diamond). Actually some of the other nitrate coatings are cool too because they have a blue or greenish tint. I probably would have gone with one of those.
You can turn off the autorecord suggestions feature. So you don't have to use it if you don't want to.
On the other hand, I can't understand why anyone could possibly complain about this feature. It uses disk space that is not being used otherwise. So it costs you absolutely nothing to have these programs recorded for you. Even if the TiVo never once managed to select a program that you were remotely interested in, it would still cost you nothing. But if just once, TiVo caught a show that piqued your interest, then the autorecord of suggestions feature will have been worth it.
Because only unused disk space is used for the suggestions feature, it works alot like the Linux buffer cache, where memory that is not being used will keep files buffered in memory. I've also heard people complain about this Linux feature; they think it's wasting memory, and just can't seem to understand that that memory would not have been used anyway. So it either sits there doing absolutely nothing, and is a complete waste, or does something that has a chance, maybe just a slight chance, but a chance nonetheless, of being useful.
TiVo's suggestions feature is not really like MSWord's autocorrect, because it doesn't interfere with your use of the box otherwise. I guess it does interfere a little bit - it makes the Now Showing list longer, which will make it slightly slower to navigate. But really, the effect is so minor, you'd really be splitting hairs to complain about that.
And yeah, I guess you could write your own suggestions program, but it would not be easy. More power to you if you can do it, but it would take alot of work.
BTW, I work for TiVo so please bear that in mind when you read my defense of TiVo features.
OK, so I'm just a layman, but there's one simple statement in your posting which I don't quite understand. You say:
"Mass (for some reason) creates curvature in spacetime..."
So my question is, why is there this other thing creating curvature, called "mass"? Why don't we just say that mass is just another name for the curvature itself?
My thoughts along these lines (once again, as a layman) are this: When I think of mass, I think of something I can push up against and find that it is hard. But all that really means is that there is a force pushing me back (not gravity, presumably the repulsive forces of same-charge particles). I can't really touch anything - I can get very close to its "center of mass" but the closer I get, the harder it pushes me away. So it's all just forces, centered around a singlar point in space; there is no "mass". There's nothing to touch, and nothing to be touched.
So my question is, why is mass considered to be something separate from the curvature of spacetime, which creates that curvature, and not just the curvature itself?
Summer after freshman year of college... 1991... I was playing SF2 late one night in an arcade and some local rowdies came in. I kicked their asses one by one, using Chun Li, and eventually one of them got mad enough to sucker-punch me. I lost some blood and had to get 6 stitches above my eye.
I didn't stop playing (well, I stopped playing that night, but I didn't stop playing altogether). I loved that game, man. It was a serious addiction.
If you pay per page view, then it is impossible to pay for more views than you use, unless you stop reading Slashdot and don't use up some of the views you paid for. But the same thing would happen if you stopped reading Slashdot before your yearly subscription were up.
It's simplest to think about this with some concrete examples:
Let's imagine that Slashdot charged $20/year instead of $5 per 1000 views.
For any individual user who pays the $20 yearly subscription, one of three things could happen:
1) You view the site less than 4000 times, say 200 times. In this case, you would have only paid $10 under the pay-per-view scheme. You are cheated.
2) You view the site exactly 4000 times. You paid for exactly what you viewed. Congratulations!
3) You view the site more than 4000 times, say 8000 times. In this case, you would have paid $40 under the pay-per-view scheme. You paid less than Slashdot thought that the views were worth. Slashdot was cheated.
So in the pay-per-time-period scheme, except in the highly unlikely second case, someone ends up cheated, either you, or Slashdot.
Wouldn't you rather just pay for exactly what you use, and feel confident that you are not being cheated and that Slashdot isn't being cheated either?
BTW, you don't have to think about how many times you have viewed Slashdot in the current payment scheme. You pay once, then forget about it. If you don't like to keep track of such things, then don't - some day, ads will start reappearing and you will realize that you need to pay some more. The exact same thing happens if you ignore your time-period-based subscription - eventually it runs out and you have to pay again.
You don't have to pay per view of Slashdot, anyway - if you have some kind of cache, then you can just view the already-downloaded Slashdot story from the cache should you want to look at it again. You end up only paying Slashdot for the views that you made which required their servers to service your request. So in the end, you only pay Slashdot when they're actually working, anyway.
So aside from being uncomfortable with having to embrace a new payment paradigm, I simply cannot see what you base your complaints on.
As an aside, I bought 10000 views today, and I'm happy as could be. I've been enjoying Slashdot for years now (check out my UID, which would be lower had I bothered to sign up for one when I first saw that accounts were available), and this is the first time I've given something back (not sure my previous comments count:)... and it feels really good.
Guess my friend's friend is rich(er) now
on
PayPal Goes Public
·
· Score: 2
A friend of a friend registered the domain name "x.com" five or so years back, before domain names were thought to have much value, and during the week or so window when single-letter names became available and before they were all registered. I think he registered it because he was working on some project related to X11, or perhaps he just thought the domain name was cool.
Anyway, a few years later, he was approached by a company that wanted the name (this was during the height of the domain name foolishness/craziness a few years ago). I remember hearing that he sold for some money and a percentage of the company.
I remember thinking that he was dumb because he ought to have asked for more cash and less equity.
Guess I was wrong in the end because his couple hundred thousand shares of what is now PayPal (originally x.com) are probably worth several million.
In the same situation I probably would have asked for much more cash up front and much less equity, which would have been completely wrong. To the extent that anyone can riches buying and selling domain names, this guy "earned" it by making a smart choice when selling.
Other posts have indicated that Cliff Hanger is not available yet.
When I was 10 I was addicted to that game. It rocked. I still have a little journal entry I made in a short-lived journal I started at that time, which has the first 30 or so moves in it...
I could never beat the Ninjas though. I suppose that now I'll find the whole thing is a piece of cake, like all video games that I thought were so difficult when I was young and have since revisited to beat my old high score of 15 years ago on the very first try...
"I want a cold, calculated, well planned, painful, mass devastation of the terrorists, their homes, their families, their harboring country and any nation caught funding their operation. Rinse. Repeat."
I am not distorting facts. You can clearly see that the original poster wants mass devastation. He wants families to die (families include children, remember?). He said he wants the harboring country and any nation funding their operation to be treated likewise. And then he throws in "rise, repeat", which would suggest that he wouldn't be satisfied with even that level of bloodshed.
But, I think it was all pretty clear already and you're just being ignorant, or stupid, or both.
You lost me. Why do you claim that he's sitting on his hands? Because he doesn't want to kill innocent people out of a misguided and childish impulse for revenge?
Does your claim that he's sitting on his hands mean that you, in contrast, are actually doing something about the problem? What? Sharpening up your hunting knife in hopes that you can stab a child to death and get your revenge? I just don't get it.
I am wholly behind any action to solve the terrorist problem. But I believe that any solution needs to recognize that innocent casualties should be avoided at all costs. I think that we should go in, and with as little loss of life as possible, simply eliminate the government of any totalitarian state, or any state obviously incapable of governing their people in a sane way. I was thinking today about America and wars. I can't think of a country that we have had a real war with, and won, that didn't come out of it well, perhaps better than before the war. Consider Japan, South Korea, Germany... all of them had governments set up by the western powers after they lost the war and they are all doing very well today. Small countries should be lining up to be beaten by the US in a war - it would probably be the best thing for them. We need to go in, and do whatever it takes to establish proper democracies in these places.
We should not just try to exact revenge by tallying the largest body count possible. Civilian casualties should be avoided, although some casualties are impossible to avoid in military action.
And most of all, we should remember that Arab-Americans in the United States should not be singled out for abuse - that's the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. These people left their homeland and came to America because they hate the evils that extremists in their home countries are doing as much as we do. Use your head, and save your anger for those who really deserve it.
But most importantly, let's take this opportunity when the whole world seems to be on the same page to make some real, positive changes to other countries of the world, by toppling oppressive governments that have gone on for far too long, and setting up democracies in their place.
And the reason that I think that Java's mechanism is only a small step in the right direction is that it's simple a convention. There's very little behind it. I don't have to name my classes with a package, nor to I have to pick a package name that is reasonable. Package names actually take up a considerable amount of space in a Java file - I wrote a commercial obfuscator package and it turned out that something like 5 - 10% of a Java class file's size is just package names embedded in every reference to other classes - and it seems silly to drag all of these strings around when a more concise, robust system could be used instead...
Something I've always wondered about Garbage Collection is, doesn't it basically add alot of VM paging overhead to a process?
Meaning that, since the garbage collector has to periodically walk all of the heap of a process, it would seem to me that it would thus periodically force any pages that are paged to disk to be brought back in by the VM even if they didn't need to be otherwise.
I used to do alot of Java programming, and I got the uncanny feeling that every time my program grew very large (which was very often - Java programs use *soooo* much memory, don't know if it's just a general tendency of GC or if it's Java's implementation) the system would thrash quite a bit more than if I wasn't running any Java programs... and I came to believe that it might have something to do with the garbage collector forcing the OS to load every page of the process into memory as the GC swept through, so everything that modern OS's do in terms of trying to streamline VM kind of gets thrown out the window when garbage collectors are forcing every page of their process to be loaded in periodically.
Just wondering why no one has ever made the point (to my knowledge, anyway) that garbage collectors may be very bad for virtual memory performance. It seems quite likely to me, anyway.
Otherwise, I like just about every idea in the D language, especially his Name Space notion - although I didn't read too much detail of his spec, at least he's thinking about it. I hate the fact that modern languages are based on string identifiers during linking; there's no formal mechanism whatsoever of avoiding clashes in the namespace (Java's class package name idea is a small step in the right direction), and it really seems stupid to me that shared libraries should be carrying around all this string baggage, and doing all these string compares during linking...
Have you ever tried doing a bit of offline research on "what it's actually like in China"?
Meaning, have you ever actually been here? Have you ever actually travelled in China and met people in person and talked about life here?
Somehow I doubt it.
What I don't understand is why, whenever there is any mention of China at all, there are people who have to come out of the woodwork spouting off about China when they don't have the smallest bit of first hand experience. We were talking about 'net filtering, not taiwain, tibetan genocide, or any other unrelated topic. And filtering 'net access, albeit lame, is a far cry from any of these topics your online research has clearly made you such an expert on.
Hm, my experience has been different. The Chinese internet cafes often have very good access, but dialup is often very poor. At first I was using the state-owned internet service - you just dial 263 from any phone, and you get a PPP connection with username 263 and password 263, and your usage is charged per minute to your phone bill. But this is amazingly expensive - it was costing me about $100/month and that's a small fortune in China! It is possible to buy internet dialup cards, which give you a username and password which expire after 3 months. That's what I'm using now, and the service is godawful bad at times, but it is much less expensive.
Most of the Chinese that I have met who use the internet (almost entirely under 30 years old, almost nobody over that age seems to use the 'net here) don't use it from home due to the expense and poor quality. They go to internet cafes.
That is a complete and utter fabrication. I have been living in China for seven months now, using China's public internet service the whole time, and have never experienced the above.
Yes, China does filter out sites, but that is the extent of it. I have never received any "access denied" error when visiting Slashdot, and I visit it every day, from Beijing no less, where the Communist Party's dictums are most readily observed.
True, China's connection to the outside world is slow and unreliable at times, but that's not selective by site - it's just poor network infrastructure.
Please don't spread FUD about China... there is alot of it here already, and you're not helping clear things up for anyone. Americans who know little about China will jump at the chance to believe anything negative about this country, and you are just giving them more ammunition.
My own personal opinion is that China's filtering policy is lame and misguided, but hey, this is their country, they can do what they want with it.
I can't post my.profile since I don't have one (I use.bashrc, etc), but it's not that interesting anyway... the only interesting thing about it is that it's split up into a.bashrc (and.bash_login, etc) and.bashrc.local (and.bash_login.local, etc). The.local files are for local system settings, the rest are "generic" settings that should work under any *nix.
The non-.local files are managed by CVS; my CVS repository is out there on the 'net on my private server, so from any 'net-connected *nix system with CVS, I can just CVS checkout my init files. Also whenever I change something on one system I can check it in and then update it on the other systems when I get to them.
I even had the idea once of making this a sort of public service - setting up some simple scripts and programs as glue for managing the CVS side of things, and then putting a public CVS server up on the 'net just to allow people to check in their init files. Then someone could easily use this service to keep all of their init files up-to-date and consistent on every system they use.
Actually, I am slowly working on some new OS ideas and one of my ideas is exactly this - a public (secure) repository for user configuration info so that whenever a user of the OS goes anywhere, their preferences can easily follow them.
If anyone else wants to take this idea and run with it, be my guest.
The architecture you choose is entirely up to you, of course, but here are some suggestions to keep in mind which may help to make your OS more useful and interesting:
1. Throw everything that you know about current OS's out the window. There is no point in building a new OS unless you can come up with some new ideas to make something truly unique. So don't base your ideas on what currently exists - you can use current technologies as guidance, but don't let them limit the way you think about the solutions to problems. Studying current technologies actually is useful because they have all come about to satisfy needs, and in studying them you can learn alot about the kinds of needs that users have, but the approaches to meeting these needs should not be encumbered by current technology.
As an example, consider the file system. I myself have been trying to think about better ways to structure permanent storage than the current system. So far I have had no luck - it's a hard problem - but maybe you will come up with an idea which revolutionizes computers. Right now filesystems are throwbacks to the 1970's - hierarchical storage systems based upon string names. "Files" are organized in "directories", all of which have names, thus creating a hierarchically-named set of raw data files. But is there a better way? Is there a way to store data on a permanent medium such that storage and retrieval is much more natural? Perhaps by storing context information based upon the situation in which the data was created, so that retrieving that data at a later time is simply a matter of reproducing the context? Maybe this will make finding information much easier for the user. All I know is, poking around filesystems by opening folder after folder, drilling down to where you think the file might be, and then returning to the top level again for another look, because you can't find your data, seems like an awful waste of time, and one which the computer ought to be able to provide more assistance in than is currently done in modern OS's.
2. Remember that an OS is nothing more than the program which allows the computer to run other programs, and provides the overall organization of the system such that programs (and users) needn't concern themselves with mundane tasks such as locating file data in the sectors of hard disks, or composing TCP/IP packets, etc. Don't overdesign your OS to do things that programs or users should do, but at the same time, don't underdesign it, so that programs and users have to come up with their own mechanisms for managing system resources. In the former case, you will stifle further development of your system by hardcoding in things which are better left to programs to handle in different ways which may suit different users better; in the latter case, different users and programs will fill in the gaps of your OS in different ways, resulting in fragmentation and incomatibility.
3. Release your code under the GNU Public License. Don't make your own license, don't worry about licensing schemes which try to ensure that you can extract maximum revenue from your code should your OS become popular in the future. If you are very lucky, your code may gain a following. Releasing your code under a closed license or one which does not offer the full freedoms of the GPL will hinder your ability to gain support from developers in the free software community, and developer support is probably the most important factor in the success of such a project. And if your OS is popular, you will be paid back in myriads of ways, not all of them monetary.
4. Keep in mind that you will probably want to offer the ability to run other open-source code on your OS in the future. You shouldn't cripple your system for the sake of compatibility for Linux/FreeBSD/etc. programs, but keep in mind that at some time in the future (maybe earlier rather than later), you will want to run such programs, so from the beginning keep the concept of a "POSIX compatibility layer" or somesuch in your mind, and design so that future implementation of such a thing is possible.
5. Don't listen to people who will try to discourage you. Many people will say, "You're wasting your time - we already have so many OS's, we should focus our energy on expanding Linux rather than coming up with a new OS." Remember that your time and efforts are your own and no one else's, and only you have the right to decide what you should and shouldn't do with your time. If something interests and intruiges you, then do it. Don't worry about repeating someone else's work. If nothing else, the best way to learn is to do, and if your project fails, then at least you will have learned alot, and who knows, you may then be able to contribute to something like Linux much more effectively because of your experience, should you choose to do so. There is more than enough room in the world of software for new OS's, and new ideas, so go for it, and don't let naysayers discourage you.
6. You might consider setting up a web site or mailing list for discussion of your ideas before you implement them; other people can provide valuable insight into your problems and maybe enhance your ideas so that when you do implement them, they are that much better.
Best of luck, and keep us posted on your progress!
"In any case, most people in China don't seem to know or care about opinions outside of China. The government has indoctrinated them to believe that all the evils in this world originate from western society, and that China is working hard to do the best for its people. Example: the Chinese tour guides thought that westerners all knew about Tianamen Square because it was the largest square in Beijing."
OK, this I am going to have to disagree with. I have been in Beijing for about three and a half months now and I have seen no evidence of Chinese people not caring about opinions outside of their own country. They are no different from Westerners in this sense; they are in fact curious about what people outside of China think.
I taught an English class this past month and my students were all very interested in what I, as an American, thought about all of the things that have been in the news recently. They have asked me many questions which would indicate to me that they are just as interested in what foreigners think as people in the United States are. Wait, make that more so, because in general I find that it is Americans who care less about what people outside of America think than the Chinese do.
People in China are no different from people anywhere. I have had students in my class tell me that they distrust the Chinese government and still others tell me that they think that the communist system is flawed. Of course, some agree with the government's policies. It's no different from the U.S. - everyone has their own opinion, some agree with the government and some don't, but in any case they seem pretty capable of making their own judgements about politics.
Chinese people do have something of an inferiority complex, though, in my opinion. Being constantly bombarded with images of the west, which in itself gives a daily reminder to the Chinese about how far behind they are in many respects, really makes people feel a little bit inferior. The result is that people seem to be a little overly proud of Chinese history and culture. Some pride in your country is good but it seems to be a little extreme sometimes. I have no real problem with this, however - there are many worse qualities to have than an overzealous love of one's country.
If you really want to know what Chinese think, you should step out of the guided tours and talk to and live amongst the Chinese. I have seen many tour groups being shuttled along from sight to sight and then to the Hard Rock Cafe and then back to their posh western hotels, and I can't imagine how they could think that they've gotten a real taste of China.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to respond to my own post, but ... I found it:
8 7c lr.html
... sweet!
http://203.161.230.38/product_img/socket_370/m7
Looks like it's right around $75 US on Pricewatch
What MB are you talking about? I am going to be building a (hopefully) quiet, low-power Linux home router soon and that MB sounds very interesting, as long as it has at least 3 PCI slots so that I can get 3 NICs on it ...
Thanks!
One facet of these emulators that is of particular interest to developers, but not mentioned in the article, is the completeness of the emulation. Back when I was working on an OS, I found that there were some instructions that were incompletely/improperly emulated by bochs and plex86. This made it difficult to write some kinds of code.
I am not sure how VMWare compares with regards to this. When I tried it it seemed to be alot more complete than bochs/plex86, but unfortunately it was missing the "console only" mode that plex86/bochs has.
Also I corresponded with VMWare who was unwilling to guarantee that their cheaper "Linux guest only" version would be able to run a simple handcrafted OS. I decided that their much more expensive general version was not worth the price, and stuck with plex86/bochs, working around the improperly emulated, or non-emulated, instructions.
I think it would be interesting to see a comparison of these emulators from a completeness standpoint, not just a performance standpoint. For an OS developer, the former is probably more important than the latter.
In any case, an emulator is a godsend when you are writing OS code, because otherwise you have to reboot your machine and wait for it to POST each time you change you code rather than just simply firing off a much quicker and easier run of the emulator. Also, the emulators often print out useful messages when there is an unusual processor condition or a processor exception, which can be very helpful in tracking down the cause of lockups. Plex86 was particularly good in this regard at the time that I was using it.
Wow. I am simply amazed that people can actually sling insults at each other over IDE vs. SCSI. It boggles the mind.
I can only talk about my experience, whch is unfortunately outdated. At my previous place of employment, I was basically the IT department, and I helped to build our at-the-time honkin fast file server. We decided to go with the fastest SCSI at the time (can't remember what it was, a step behind Ultra160 I think). We bought 18 GB 7200 RPM scsi drives (this was when IDE was at 5400 RPM max). It worked really, really well. We were able to do multiple read/write tests (tar'ing from one drive to the other, etc) simultaneously and the CPU load stayed very low (under 10%). We did the same tests using the remaining IDE drives in the system, and the CPU load went up significantly to 30% or so. This was with a Pentium III 500 system, using Linux.
So at the time I was very impressed and happy with our choice. There is something about knowing that disk I/O is being handled by a capable and powerful controller, that was comforting. When we replaced the machine we went with a SCSI Raid array and were even more impressed with the speed and low CPU usage.
But that was about three years ago, and I'm sure things have changed. I am about to build my own system and I have been seriously considering using a SCSI drive. But I would like to know if SCSI still holds the advantages that it used to (or at least, that I thought that it used to). I wish someone would do comprehensive testing and benchmarking on this, I think it would clear up alot of the FUD floating around in this debate.
There, I made my point, and I didn't insult anyone in doing it!
I never played Baldur's Gate, which this Neverwinter Nights seems to be related to (being written by the same company and of the same game genre), but I did play Icewind Dale, which got rave reviews as a great RPG.
... but then when you go to actually assign skill points, and strength points, intelligence, etc, you can just move any number of points from any column to any other. So you can create a dwarf that has the exact same characteristics as an elf. What is the point of having character races if you can just arbitrarily change stats any way you like? It really takes the fun out of designing a character. There is no challenge, and in fact the race becomes nothing more than a name.
Only, I thought Icewind Dale sucked. Badly. So badly that I never got beyond the first mountain pass. Here is why I thought that Icewind Dale sucked:
1. The graphics were not that great. The characters you get to select from look like they were all scanned from an airbrush that was copied out of the back of some dungeons and dragons magazine. The characters, monsters, architecture, etc, drawn in isometric view were very good either.
2. When generating a character, you get to choose from lots of neat races, like elf, half-elf, human, dwarf, etc
3. The gameplay sucked. Lots of clicking around, trying to select the correct group of people and make them do the correct thing. They're always doing something stupid - running back and forth trying to stand on the spot that you clicked on rather than fighting back against the orc that is pummeling them, or getting all clogged up at an entranceway, or stopping altogether because someone else who was trying to go the same way they were was in the way for a moment. It was just frustrating and annoying trying to control all of my party members and trying to make them do something reasonable all of the time.
4. Fighting monsters is way too hard and gives way, way too few experience points. I played forever waiting for any member of my party to get enough experience to gain a level. I needed like 2,000 experience points to get to level 2, and was getting like 10 for each monster I killed. And finding creatures to fight, and then finishing them off, took forever. So after hours and hours none of my characters had even advanced a level. How lame.
5. Stupid quests. All of the tasks that I was asked to complete by the townspeople in the first town were just uninteresting and dumb. They were all of the form "go get this thing and take it to that person." Lame. And then the amount of experience I would get for doing that was low anyway. Although, at one point I was walking around in a basement and I opened a door to find a boy who was afraid to go back to town or something. I didn't have to do anything at all, I just randomly happened to open that door, and the kid went back to town and I got like 500 experience points for each character. WTF?!?? Opening a door at random gives me the same experience as killing 50 orcs? It's no fun to try to build up your characters when fighting hard against monsters gives you almost no experience, but randomly happening upon lost children gives you tons.
6. Bugs. The game would slow to a crawl and then crash every so often.
Eventually I gave up and realized that the game was a total waste of my time. It had to be one of the worst games I had ever played. And yet I read all over the place about how it was such a great game.
Needless to say, I am extremely skeptical of the entire RPG genre, especially anything from BioWare.
If it weren't for Fallout 1 & 2, which were two of the best games I have ever played, I would probably write off the RPG genre altogether.
Adding a DVD burner would add hundreds of dollars to the cost of the box for a feature that not that many people really want.
CDs don't have enough capacity to be seriously considered for archiving/storing shows.
That's why.
I have been wearing a Titanium wedding ring since 6/1999. I bought it at www.titaniumrings.com, a place in Montreal that I would highly recommend.
... it is very strong, and I think pretty attractive.
... meaning that it scratches more or less as easily as any other metal. So after a while your ring ends up as scuffed as any other ring.
The ring is a Titanium alloy - Ti6Al4V
The problem is, whereas Titanium is a strong metal, it is not a very hard metal
If I had to do it all over again I would have had a hardened tool steel ring custom made with a Titanium Nitrate coating. I think that the result would be basically indestructible and nearly scratchproof (with 99% the hardness of diamond). Actually some of the other nitrate coatings are cool too because they have a blue or greenish tint. I probably would have gone with one of those.
You can turn off the autorecord suggestions feature. So you don't have to use it if you don't want to.
On the other hand, I can't understand why anyone could possibly complain about this feature. It uses disk space that is not being used otherwise. So it costs you absolutely nothing to have these programs recorded for you. Even if the TiVo never once managed to select a program that you were remotely interested in, it would still cost you nothing. But if just once, TiVo caught a show that piqued your interest, then the autorecord of suggestions feature will have been worth it.
Because only unused disk space is used for the suggestions feature, it works alot like the Linux buffer cache, where memory that is not being used will keep files buffered in memory. I've also heard people complain about this Linux feature; they think it's wasting memory, and just can't seem to understand that that memory would not have been used anyway. So it either sits there doing absolutely nothing, and is a complete waste, or does something that has a chance, maybe just a slight chance, but a chance nonetheless, of being useful.
TiVo's suggestions feature is not really like MSWord's autocorrect, because it doesn't interfere with your use of the box otherwise. I guess it does interfere a little bit - it makes the Now Showing list longer, which will make it slightly slower to navigate. But really, the effect is so minor, you'd really be splitting hairs to complain about that.
And yeah, I guess you could write your own suggestions program, but it would not be easy. More power to you if you can do it, but it would take alot of work.
BTW, I work for TiVo so please bear that in mind when you read my defense of TiVo features.
OK, so I'm just a layman, but there's one simple statement in your posting which I don't quite understand. You say:
..."
"Mass (for some reason) creates curvature in spacetime
So my question is, why is there this other thing creating curvature, called "mass"? Why don't we just say that mass is just another name for the curvature itself?
My thoughts along these lines (once again, as a layman) are this: When I think of mass, I think of something I can push up against and find that it is hard. But all that really means is that there is a force pushing me back (not gravity, presumably the repulsive forces of same-charge particles). I can't really touch anything - I can get very close to its "center of mass" but the closer I get, the harder it pushes me away. So it's all just forces, centered around a singlar point in space; there is no "mass". There's nothing to touch, and nothing to be touched.
So my question is, why is mass considered to be something separate from the curvature of spacetime, which creates that curvature, and not just the curvature itself?
Summer after freshman year of college ... 1991 ... I was playing SF2 late one night in an arcade and some local rowdies came in. I kicked their asses one by one, using Chun Li, and eventually one of them got mad enough to sucker-punch me. I lost some blood and had to get 6 stitches above my eye.
I didn't stop playing (well, I stopped playing that night, but I didn't stop playing altogether). I loved that game, man. It was a serious addiction.
That makes no sense.
:) ... and it feels really good.
If you pay per page view, then it is impossible to pay for more views than you use, unless you stop reading Slashdot and don't use up some of the views you paid for. But the same thing would happen if you stopped reading Slashdot before your yearly subscription were up.
It's simplest to think about this with some concrete examples:
Let's imagine that Slashdot charged $20/year instead of $5 per 1000 views.
For any individual user who pays the $20 yearly subscription, one of three things could happen:
1) You view the site less than 4000 times, say 200 times. In this case, you would have only paid $10 under the pay-per-view scheme. You are cheated.
2) You view the site exactly 4000 times. You paid for exactly what you viewed. Congratulations!
3) You view the site more than 4000 times, say 8000 times. In this case, you would have paid $40 under the pay-per-view scheme. You paid less than Slashdot thought that the views were worth. Slashdot was cheated.
So in the pay-per-time-period scheme, except in the highly unlikely second case, someone ends up cheated, either you, or Slashdot.
Wouldn't you rather just pay for exactly what you use, and feel confident that you are not being cheated and that Slashdot isn't being cheated either?
BTW, you don't have to think about how many times you have viewed Slashdot in the current payment scheme. You pay once, then forget about it. If you don't like to keep track of such things, then don't - some day, ads will start reappearing and you will realize that you need to pay some more. The exact same thing happens if you ignore your time-period-based subscription - eventually it runs out and you have to pay again.
You don't have to pay per view of Slashdot, anyway - if you have some kind of cache, then you can just view the already-downloaded Slashdot story from the cache should you want to look at it again. You end up only paying Slashdot for the views that you made which required their servers to service your request. So in the end, you only pay Slashdot when they're actually working, anyway.
So aside from being uncomfortable with having to embrace a new payment paradigm, I simply cannot see what you base your complaints on.
As an aside, I bought 10000 views today, and I'm happy as could be. I've been enjoying Slashdot for years now (check out my UID, which would be lower had I bothered to sign up for one when I first saw that accounts were available), and this is the first time I've given something back (not sure my previous comments count
A friend of a friend registered the domain name "x.com" five or so years back, before domain names were thought to have much value, and during the week or so window when single-letter names became available and before they were all registered. I think he registered it because he was working on some project related to X11, or perhaps he just thought the domain name was cool.
Anyway, a few years later, he was approached by a company that wanted the name (this was during the height of the domain name foolishness/craziness a few years ago). I remember hearing that he sold for some money and a percentage of the company.
I remember thinking that he was dumb because he ought to have asked for more cash and less equity.
Guess I was wrong in the end because his couple hundred thousand shares of what is now PayPal (originally x.com) are probably worth several million.
In the same situation I probably would have asked for much more cash up front and much less equity, which would have been completely wrong. To the extent that anyone can riches buying and selling domain names, this guy "earned" it by making a smart choice when selling.
Heh - that was funny. Actually it says
"Study Chinese Today!"
Other posts have indicated that Cliff Hanger is not available yet.
...
...
When I was 10 I was addicted to that game. It rocked. I still have a little journal entry I made in a short-lived journal I started at that time, which has the first 30 or so moves in it
I could never beat the Ninjas though. I suppose that now I'll find the whole thing is a piece of cake, like all video games that I thought were so difficult when I was young and have since revisited to beat my old high score of 15 years ago on the very first try
"I want a cold, calculated, well planned, painful, mass devastation of the terrorists, their homes, their families, their harboring country and any nation caught funding their operation. Rinse. Repeat."
I am not distorting facts. You can clearly see that the original poster wants mass devastation. He wants families to die (families include children, remember?). He said he wants the harboring country and any nation funding their operation to be treated likewise. And then he throws in "rise, repeat", which would suggest that he wouldn't be satisfied with even that level of bloodshed.
But, I think it was all pretty clear already and you're just being ignorant, or stupid, or both.
You lost me. Why do you claim that he's sitting on his hands? Because he doesn't want to kill innocent people out of a misguided and childish impulse for revenge?
... all of them had governments set up by the western powers after they lost the war and they are all doing very well today. Small countries should be lining up to be beaten by the US in a war - it would probably be the best thing for them. We need to go in, and do whatever it takes to establish proper democracies in these places.
Does your claim that he's sitting on his hands mean that you, in contrast, are actually doing something about the problem? What? Sharpening up your hunting knife in hopes that you can stab a child to death and get your revenge? I just don't get it.
I am wholly behind any action to solve the terrorist problem. But I believe that any solution needs to recognize that innocent casualties should be avoided at all costs. I think that we should go in, and with as little loss of life as possible, simply eliminate the government of any totalitarian state, or any state obviously incapable of governing their people in a sane way. I was thinking today about America and wars. I can't think of a country that we have had a real war with, and won, that didn't come out of it well, perhaps better than before the war. Consider Japan, South Korea, Germany
We should not just try to exact revenge by tallying the largest body count possible. Civilian casualties should be avoided, although some casualties are impossible to avoid in military action.
And most of all, we should remember that Arab-Americans in the United States should not be singled out for abuse - that's the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. These people left their homeland and came to America because they hate the evils that extremists in their home countries are doing as much as we do. Use your head, and save your anger for those who really deserve it.
But most importantly, let's take this opportunity when the whole world seems to be on the same page to make some real, positive changes to other countries of the world, by toppling oppressive governments that have gone on for far too long, and setting up democracies in their place.
And the reason that I think that Java's mechanism is only a small step in the right direction is that it's simple a convention. There's very little behind it. I don't have to name my classes with a package, nor to I have to pick a package name that is reasonable. Package names actually take up a considerable amount of space in a Java file - I wrote a commercial obfuscator package and it turned out that something like 5 - 10% of a Java class file's size is just package names embedded in every reference to other classes - and it seems silly to drag all of these strings around when a more concise, robust system could be used instead ...
Meaning that, since the garbage collector has to periodically walk all of the heap of a process, it would seem to me that it would thus periodically force any pages that are paged to disk to be brought back in by the VM even if they didn't need to be otherwise.
I used to do alot of Java programming, and I got the uncanny feeling that every time my program grew very large (which was very often - Java programs use *soooo* much memory, don't know if it's just a general tendency of GC or if it's Java's implementation) the system would thrash quite a bit more than if I wasn't running any Java programs ... and I came to believe that it might have something to do with the garbage collector forcing the OS to load every page of the process into memory as the GC swept through, so everything that modern OS's do in terms of trying to streamline VM kind of gets thrown out the window when garbage collectors are forcing every page of their process to be loaded in periodically.
Just wondering why no one has ever made the point (to my knowledge, anyway) that garbage collectors may be very bad for virtual memory performance. It seems quite likely to me, anyway.
Otherwise, I like just about every idea in the D language, especially his Name Space notion - although I didn't read too much detail of his spec, at least he's thinking about it. I hate the fact that modern languages are based on string identifiers during linking; there's no formal mechanism whatsoever of avoiding clashes in the namespace (Java's class package name idea is a small step in the right direction), and it really seems stupid to me that shared libraries should be carrying around all this string baggage, and doing all these string compares during linking ...
Anyway, that's how I see it.
Meaning, have you ever actually been here? Have you ever actually travelled in China and met people in person and talked about life here?
Somehow I doubt it.
What I don't understand is why, whenever there is any mention of China at all, there are people who have to come out of the woodwork spouting off about China when they don't have the smallest bit of first hand experience. We were talking about 'net filtering, not taiwain, tibetan genocide, or any other unrelated topic. And filtering 'net access, albeit lame, is a far cry from any of these topics your online research has clearly made you such an expert on.
Hm, my experience has been different. The Chinese internet cafes often have very good access, but dialup is often very poor. At first I was using the state-owned internet service - you just dial 263 from any phone, and you get a PPP connection with username 263 and password 263, and your usage is charged per minute to your phone bill. But this is amazingly expensive - it was costing me about $100/month and that's a small fortune in China! It is possible to buy internet dialup cards, which give you a username and password which expire after 3 months. That's what I'm using now, and the service is godawful bad at times, but it is much less expensive. Most of the Chinese that I have met who use the internet (almost entirely under 30 years old, almost nobody over that age seems to use the 'net here) don't use it from home due to the expense and poor quality. They go to internet cafes.
That is a complete and utter fabrication. I have been living in China for seven months now, using China's public internet service the whole time, and have never experienced the above.
... there is alot of it here already, and you're not helping clear things up for anyone. Americans who know little about China will jump at the chance to believe anything negative about this country, and you are just giving them more ammunition.
Yes, China does filter out sites, but that is the extent of it. I have never received any "access denied" error when visiting Slashdot, and I visit it every day, from Beijing no less, where the Communist Party's dictums are most readily observed.
True, China's connection to the outside world is slow and unreliable at times, but that's not selective by site - it's just poor network infrastructure.
Please don't spread FUD about China
My own personal opinion is that China's filtering policy is lame and misguided, but hey, this is their country, they can do what they want with it.
I can't post my .profile since I don't have one (I use .bashrc, etc), but it's not that interesting anyway ... the only interesting thing about it is that it's split up into a .bashrc (and .bash_login, etc) and .bashrc.local (and .bash_login.local, etc). The .local files are for local system settings, the rest are "generic" settings that should work under any *nix.
The non-.local files are managed by CVS; my CVS repository is out there on the 'net on my private server, so from any 'net-connected *nix system with CVS, I can just CVS checkout my init files. Also whenever I change something on one system I can check it in and then update it on the other systems when I get to them.
I even had the idea once of making this a sort of public service - setting up some simple scripts and programs as glue for managing the CVS side of things, and then putting a public CVS server up on the 'net just to allow people to check in their init files. Then someone could easily use this service to keep all of their init files up-to-date and consistent on every system they use.
Actually, I am slowly working on some new OS ideas and one of my ideas is exactly this - a public (secure) repository for user configuration info so that whenever a user of the OS goes anywhere, their preferences can easily follow them.
If anyone else wants to take this idea and run with it, be my guest.
The architecture you choose is entirely up to you, of course, but here are some suggestions to keep in mind which may help to make your OS more useful and interesting:
1. Throw everything that you know about current OS's out the window. There is no point in building a new OS unless you can come up with some new ideas to make something truly unique. So don't base your ideas on what currently exists - you can use current technologies as guidance, but don't let them limit the way you think about the solutions to problems. Studying current technologies actually is useful because they have all come about to satisfy needs, and in studying them you can learn alot about the kinds of needs that users have, but the approaches to meeting these needs should not be encumbered by current technology.
As an example, consider the file system. I myself have been trying to think about better ways to structure permanent storage than the current system. So far I have had no luck - it's a hard problem - but maybe you will come up with an idea which revolutionizes computers. Right now filesystems are throwbacks to the 1970's - hierarchical storage systems based upon string names. "Files" are organized in "directories", all of which have names, thus creating a hierarchically-named set of raw data files. But is there a better way? Is there a way to store data on a permanent medium such that storage and retrieval is much more natural? Perhaps by storing context information based upon the situation in which the data was created, so that retrieving that data at a later time is simply a matter of reproducing the context? Maybe this will make finding information much easier for the user. All I know is, poking around filesystems by opening folder after folder, drilling down to where you think the file might be, and then returning to the top level again for another look, because you can't find your data, seems like an awful waste of time, and one which the computer ought to be able to provide more assistance in than is currently done in modern OS's.
2. Remember that an OS is nothing more than the program which allows the computer to run other programs, and provides the overall organization of the system such that programs (and users) needn't concern themselves with mundane tasks such as locating file data in the sectors of hard disks, or composing TCP/IP packets, etc. Don't overdesign your OS to do things that programs or users should do, but at the same time, don't underdesign it, so that programs and users have to come up with their own mechanisms for managing system resources. In the former case, you will stifle further development of your system by hardcoding in things which are better left to programs to handle in different ways which may suit different users better; in the latter case, different users and programs will fill in the gaps of your OS in different ways, resulting in fragmentation and incomatibility.
3. Release your code under the GNU Public License. Don't make your own license, don't worry about licensing schemes which try to ensure that you can extract maximum revenue from your code should your OS become popular in the future. If you are very lucky, your code may gain a following. Releasing your code under a closed license or one which does not offer the full freedoms of the GPL will hinder your ability to gain support from developers in the free software community, and developer support is probably the most important factor in the success of such a project. And if your OS is popular, you will be paid back in myriads of ways, not all of them monetary.
4. Keep in mind that you will probably want to offer the ability to run other open-source code on your OS in the future. You shouldn't cripple your system for the sake of compatibility for Linux/FreeBSD/etc. programs, but keep in mind that at some time in the future (maybe earlier rather than later), you will want to run such programs, so from the beginning keep the concept of a "POSIX compatibility layer" or somesuch in your mind, and design so that future implementation of such a thing is possible.
5. Don't listen to people who will try to discourage you. Many people will say, "You're wasting your time - we already have so many OS's, we should focus our energy on expanding Linux rather than coming up with a new OS." Remember that your time and efforts are your own and no one else's, and only you have the right to decide what you should and shouldn't do with your time. If something interests and intruiges you, then do it. Don't worry about repeating someone else's work. If nothing else, the best way to learn is to do, and if your project fails, then at least you will have learned alot, and who knows, you may then be able to contribute to something like Linux much more effectively because of your experience, should you choose to do so. There is more than enough room in the world of software for new OS's, and new ideas, so go for it, and don't let naysayers discourage you.
6. You might consider setting up a web site or mailing list for discussion of your ideas before you implement them; other people can provide valuable insight into your problems and maybe enhance your ideas so that when you do implement them, they are that much better.
Best of luck, and keep us posted on your progress!
Poster writes:
"In any case, most people in China don't seem to know or care about opinions outside of China. The government has indoctrinated them to believe that all the evils in this world originate from western society, and that China is working hard to do the best for its people. Example: the Chinese tour guides thought that westerners all knew about Tianamen Square because it was the largest square in Beijing."
OK, this I am going to have to disagree with. I have been in Beijing for about three and a half months now and I have seen no evidence of Chinese people not caring about opinions outside of their own country. They are no different from Westerners in this sense; they are in fact curious about what people outside of China think.
I taught an English class this past month and my students were all very interested in what I, as an American, thought about all of the things that have been in the news recently. They have asked me many questions which would indicate to me that they are just as interested in what foreigners think as people in the United States are. Wait, make that more so, because in general I find that it is Americans who care less about what people outside of America think than the Chinese do.
People in China are no different from people anywhere. I have had students in my class tell me that they distrust the Chinese government and still others tell me that they think that the communist system is flawed. Of course, some agree with the government's policies. It's no different from the U.S. - everyone has their own opinion, some agree with the government and some don't, but in any case they seem pretty capable of making their own judgements about politics.
Chinese people do have something of an inferiority complex, though, in my opinion. Being constantly bombarded with images of the west, which in itself gives a daily reminder to the Chinese about how far behind they are in many respects, really makes people feel a little bit inferior. The result is that people seem to be a little overly proud of Chinese history and culture. Some pride in your country is good but it seems to be a little extreme sometimes. I have no real problem with this, however - there are many worse qualities to have than an overzealous love of one's country.
If you really want to know what Chinese think, you should step out of the guided tours and talk to and live amongst the Chinese. I have seen many tour groups being shuttled along from sight to sight and then to the Hard Rock Cafe and then back to their posh western hotels, and I can't imagine how they could think that they've gotten a real taste of China.
I think you misunderstood the post to which you are replying.
...
The "velvet gloved fist of friendship" would refer to someone who is acting aggressively but covering it up with a thin veil of friendship.
The key words here are "fist" and "velvet-covered". I think that you and the person to whom you are responding are really saying the same thing