Being forced to buy a product - that's really the worst problem you could run into under "libertarian" capitalism - but you don't, because a company can't do that. Want to grow your own food, that's not a problem because, as we all know, everyone has enough land under capitalism to be self-sufficient. If you don't have the skills, or, maybe, the resources to build your own television, you surely have enough stacks of paper lying around... (You don't have to work to get your stacks of paper, they magically lie around in your backyard, and if you do, surely not in a company that can exploit the hell out of you because there are no laws. No, a company would never, ever do that.)
The libertarian party does a very good job in selling their program with a lot of "liberty" rhetoric, so slashdot-type people who are very concerned with personal liberty issues and disappointed by the US pseudo-democracy are going to trust them. I fail to see anything else in their program than the replacement of relative state domination by total corporate domination, however.
It's great that someone from the left who is also very much in favor of personal liberties counters these "libertarian" rants.
It seems to me that they also do a good job in confusing terms. Why is this kind of thinking called "libertarian" or "anarcho-capitalist" anyway? "Anarcho-capitalism" is an oxymoron because anarchism literally means "no rulers", not exactly what capitalism - especially the corporate feudalism of the "libertarian" flavor is about, and in a large part of the world, "libertarian" means anarcho-socialist.
Linus Torvalds about the history and future of Linux
The star guest of the LinuxWorld in the beginning of October was Linus Torvalds. The success of Linux has made the free OS and its "inventor" well-known to a far bigger public than just the IT world.
In 1991, Torvalds had started to program his own Unix-like OS out of discontent with the PC operating systems that existed at the time. Originally Linux was only intended for the computer of the then 21-year-old; but after the publication of the version 0.01 on the internet Linux started to gain users and a growing hoard of developers very fast. Today the open source system runs on all common hardware architectures; it has attained a strong position above all on internet servers.
c't: Linux has already achieved what you wanted some years ago. Why did you continue at that point?
Torvalds: The aims have changed. In the beginning my main objective was to do something interesting and fun. I thought I would be the only user and didn't make any concrete plans concerning features. I knew what I expected from a Unix; but e.g. I wasn't interested in graphics because I only wanted to edit and compile source code.
But after I had published Linux on the internet, other users asked for features I had never thought of. Instead of a Unix for my desktop Linux suddenly turned into a project for the very best OS. Because of the wishes of others and - later - their patches and help it became much more interesting. Today the bulk of the work is done by others.
Now I aim for a good OS design that is also useful for others. What I do hasn't changed that much: I program, and I read a lot of email. Concerning my original plans, Linux has since log been complete; but the many new domains of use motivate me to go on. If I hadn't published Linux on the internet and if there weren't those other users, I probably would have ceased working on Linux in 1992.
c't: How long go you plan to go on with Linux? Do you see a point somewhere in the future where you will say: "I've had enough of it now"?
Torvalds: I don't think that there will be a certain point. I always have handed over some things from time to time, and that started very early. In the very beginning e.g. I was concerned with all the applications myself: I had - additionally to the work on the kernel - to port the shell, the compiler and the libraries. But very soon other people started to take over so I could concentrate on the kernel.
Nowadays I still work on the kernel, but only on central features like the memory and process management and the basic design.
I also have almost stopped to talk at events like this LinuxWorld. I have taken part here in the panel discussion, but I haven't held a keynote because these things put me under stress incredibly.
I think that I will concentrate more and more on special areas; but I don't think that I will cease to work in Linux completely - perhaps until someone comes who is better than me so that I retire from it.
c't: If at some point you don't feel like continuing with Linux - how would the developers organise?
Torvalds: I don't think that this will happen soon; but there would be a lot of people who could take over my position. Today I hardly code myself; I "show good taste" instead - I make decisions concerning the architecture. I am a sort of central coordinator, deal with email, read it, send it to the right people.
Public events are obviously PR work, and there are enough people who could do that as well as I. At the moment my most important function is that of an identification figure for Linux, purely for psychological reasons. Nowadays people think of companies like SuSE, IBM or Redhat when they think of Linux; but for a long time it used to be this radical movement led by Linus Torvalds.
If the plane from Frankfurt to San Francisco crashed now, everyone - okay, probably not everyone, but a lot of people could take over my job. It certainly wouldn't be a single person: I do what I do and [XFree86 developer] Dirk Hohndel does his job. My technical work on the kernel for example could be shared among some people.
If you take a look on how Linux is actually developed: I don't touch the 2.2 kernel e.g., that's all done by Alan Cox. Soon we'll have finished the user kernel 2.4, and then Ted Ts'o [ext2 developer] will take care of that. I will be able to concentrate on the developer kernels because that's what I'm most interested in and the developers are happy with how I do it. But it could as well be done by other people. It would certainly cause a lot of agitation in the media if I dropped into the ocean, but I am not that important any more for the development of Linux.
c't: Can you tell us a bit more about the organisation of Linux development?
Torvalds: Let's look at a simple example. Someone has an idea. First he will discuss that with people he knows and on the kernel mailing list: I need this feature for these reasons, is someone working on it? If not, he will code it. Then he uses it himself, talks to people in his vicinity, and posts it on the kernel mailing list, if he wants it to get into the standard kernel. He knows how it works, and doesn't send mail to my from the beginning. If it's perfect code, maybe the mailing list says: "Yes, we want to have that." But that doesn't happen in practice. The reaction is more like that: "We understand what you want, but like that it's more or less bullshit. I would like to do something similar, but that doesn't work with your code." And then the interfaces are changed so that both things go together, and other modifications are made that make other people interested.
That can take a long time. Major changes can live a few years in the kernel list while they are discussed and even a lot of people use them. I take notice of such patches and discussions on the list; and at some point I decide that the code is so useful it should become part of the standard kernel. If important questions are discussed, I join in and say perhaps: "I can see your point, but from the point of view of kernel architecture that's the wrong way to go". At some point the patch becomes part of the standard kernel, or it continues to be an external patch for special purposes.
c't: What is your position on a possible fork in the kernel? The Linux boss at IBM e.g. said some time ago that a kernel can't fulfill all requirements from the embedded device to the mission-critical server.
Torvalds: Forking happens all the time. The fact that my kernel is considered the official one doesn't mean that there aren't many "unofficial" ones with their own features. For instance the most distributions have their own kernel versions. For SuSE ISDN is very important because that plays a part in Germany; for the rest of the world it's not important. Different distributions are targeted at different classes of users; SGI e.g. is mainly interested in the SGI market: computers with hundreds of CPUs. Therefore, the SGI kernel will include features for the large machines.
I am trying to maintain a common standard kernel, but that's not a kernel for everyone. Of course supercomputer and embedded device require different things, and there will never be one kernel. I am trying to keep the differences at small as possible, and incorporate new things in a way that doesn't hinder the extreme cases.
c't: During the work on the 2.3 developer kernel there was a lot of discussion on memory management...
Torvalds:... they still go on.
c't: To address big amounts of memory in servers you need a kind of memory management that's not as efficient in small systems with little RAM.
Torvalds: That's a classical example. A lot of things seem to be incompatible with each other. On one hand I need support for small devices, and on the other there are big systems with 16 nodes, each with its own memory and a total of hundreds of GB's of RAM. The solutions look totally different, of course. Usually, the first answer consists of two code branches, simply because it generates the least work - the code doesn't have to take into account that many possibilities. But maintaining the code becomes more difficult because you have to have interfaces to both branches.
But in the end it comes down to a virtualisation of memory management. That was one of the things that we worked on during the 2.3 development: virtualising the concept of a "memory node". Thus, a small device is the same as a big machine, with the sole difference that it only has one memory node, whereas the big computer has several of these nodes. So the small device becomes a special case of the big machine.
By a configuration option, different kernels can then be compiled from the same code. In the source there is a loop through the nodes; but if there's only one node the loop goes from 0 to 0, is optimised away during compilation and doesn't appear any more in the binary. That makes maintaining the source much more simple, and that's the kind of questions that I occupy myself with.
Of course, it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes you simply have different devices that need different drivers. In design you have to decide what code is common and when you write different code for the different cases. That's what computer science is all about in the end.
c't: The kernel sources have become very comprehensive...
Torvalds:... around 55 MByte source code; I don't know the exact number, but there are about three millions of lines. The kernel is huge, and nobody could maintain it if it wouldn't consist mainly of totally independent drivers. But driver development isn't easy either, because you have to iron out all the glitches of the hardware.
c't: Programmers know the problem when they change something somewhere and the program crashes somewhere else.
Torvalds: Things like that also happen with the kernel.
c't: How do you deal with such difficulties?
Torvalds: There is only one solution: clean interfaces. Ideally, there should never be any surprising bugs or interactions that you would never have thought of. The interfaces have to be so clear that if you change something you just know where the you have to adapt the code. I don't claim that the interfaces in Linux are always as clean as that, but we aim for it. Many of the changes in the 2.4 kernel go in that direction. In most of the cases the main task was to sketch out new interfaces, not to actually write new code. But often the code doesn't fit what you have thought out; that's what makes changing the interfaces so tedious. But it is very important, even if the users first can't see any advantage in it - until they some across a machine that needs the new interface.
c't: I don't want to ask to start with when the 2.4 kernel will be out...
Torvalds:...I hope it will be this year...
c't:...but I am curios about the problems with the new kernel.
Torvalds: There is a basic difficulty that isn't of technical nature: most people don't want to upgrade to a new kernel at all. The are satisfied with the 2.2 kernel, don't have any major problems with it - why should they try a developer kernel? It's only a special group of users who test new kernels; and before making public a new stable kernel at least part of these users have to have tested the new kernel. The developers are focused on new versions, we need extern users for the testing. That's not only a problem for Linux; some software producers even pay people to test beta versions.
But there are also still a few technical difficulties. We know of some real bugs for which there are already solutions; but not all developers are already convinced that they are good. In this regard there are a few open questions yet: Often the developers want better solutions that guarantee that a certain problem won't arise any more in the future.
Beyond that, there are also communication problems. The people who fix bugs are normally not the developers themselves, they don't describe the problems like a developer would. That simply takes a lot of time.
c't: You have already talked about the kernel extensions of the Linux distributors. SuSE, e.g., delivers the 2.2 user kernels with the Logical Volume Manager and the ReiserFS. The kernel developers have thoroughly discussed ReiserFS and come to the conclusion that it shouldn't be incorporated into the "official" kernel yet. What do you think about such acts of arbitrariness? You surely had your reasons for the decision against ReiserFS.
Torvalds: Mainly last year, new groups of users joined, and SuSE - without the intention of speaking for SuSE - has worked together a lot with big customers who are interested in LVM. Management of hundreds of disks requires such tools. And also if the system doesn't crash but is only rebooted occasionally, e2fsck runs of several hours are unacceptable, so that ReiserFS is preferred. Such applications have only arisen recently, and it simply needs time to integrate things like that. LVM has been in the 2.3 developer kernel for half a year, but just last week we have worked on it. I wanted to keep ReiserFS out of the kernel in any case before 2.4 because I always thought to stand immediately before the code freeze, so I didn't want to bring entirely new questions in the discussion. SuSE and other have tested ReiserFS in the meantime, so we will probably incorporate it into the version 2.4.1.
What users do is never wrong. I surely can't command the Linux users what they shall do. I have always seen it like that: Whatever people want to do is OK. I can only make decisions on how the architecture should look like which makes that possible, or give hints how you can reach the same goal with another approach. ReiserFS will come, and I can't simply say no to it. For me it's only a question of timing and maybe of a few changes to integrate ReiserFS better into the kernel.
XFS is a different matter. It's not got as far as ReiserFS, and I can't say if it will be part of the standard kernel in a year. ext3fs, again, is a different matter. The code is already there, and there are users who already use it. ext3fs could well be integrated in the 2.4 kernel series or at an early point into the 2.5 kernel. I am concerned about flexibility. Open source means that you can do everything with the code.
That doesn't mean that I use ReiserFS or ext3fs myself. I am interested about something else. ReiserFS, XFS and ext3fs obviously will have a lot in common. What does that mean for the virtual file system [the kernel structure that constitutes the interface to the file systems]? Perhaps we will take parts of the code that is common to several of the file systems - even if they do different things, eventually it's all the same - and try to build a common interface. Until the VFS itself can deal with journaling two or three years will probably pass; but then the file systems won't have as much work with it any more. That's the sort of questions that I occupy myself with.
c't: What are the most interesting technical developments of Linux at the moment?
Torvalds: Most things don't concern the kernel at all. Of course there are fascinating developments, e.g. scalability - that was extremely interesting technically. But the really fascinating things are done by other people. The whole business around DVD was interesting, even if maybe it was also a bit disappointing. And then of course the desktop and things that are actually uncommon for Unix. When I watch TV e.g. I do that with a Linux box that uses its hard disk as a VCR. If you have used such a device once you never want to touch a classic VCR again. I only use such devices for films that are not yet available on DVD.
c't: And in the IT world generally? You work in a high tech company, after all.
Torvalds: All these wireless things. I have a great cell phone e.g., a laptop and a palm. When I am away from home I use my laptop to read email, so I want to use the cell phone as a modem. But that doesn't work; this kind of communication simply doesn't work yet. I think in five years all these devices will be able to communicate with one another. The technical aspect is less interesting than the applications.
c't: When you look back at the long history of Linux development: Were there things that surprised you?
Torvalds: Very few. Of course I would have been very surprised at first if I had known where Linux would go. When I published version 0.01 on the internet I was prepared for comments. Perhaps there were a little bit more reactions that I would have thought, but I don't even think so. After a few months there were 50 instead of the 5 people that I had expected, then a few hundred; there I was a little surprised. But I witnessed the development from 5, 10 to 20, 50 users, there wasn't a point at which I said to myself: "My God, what's happening here?" Then the commercial interest, the media coverage - most people think all that happened in the last two years, but in fact it developed slowly over the last nine years. Companies started to support Linux - sometimes it was surprising to see to which degree, e.g. IBM. Nobody thought that IBM really would go that far. But there either wasn't a point where I would have been really surprised.
c't: Has there been anything that made you angry?
Torvalds: Not a lot. The most uncomfortable surprise probably was this Mindcraft study [a study financed by Microsoft in which Linux had looked very bad compared to Windows NT in April 1999]. I can remember how angry I was then. Not any more, because it turned out well in the end. What is most surprising are perhaps the generally positive reactions to Linux. The developer community was very friendly from the beginning, despite all that discussions about the Linux kernel that can seem violent sometimes.
c't: There are a lot of ugly discussions...
Torvalds: Yes, when it comes to discussions about their technical ideas people become very passionate and unfriendly.
c't: Isn't that typical for the open source community? E.g. this strong aversion against M$...
Torvalds: No, not only for that community. Mac user are very similar there. The internet makes it simple to just say something, and that easily generates flame wars. You don't know the people you are arguing with and so you easily overdo it. That's definitely not only true for Linux - if you look at all the "advocacy groups" out there... it's amusing. The arguments between Linux and FreeBSD users e.g. are again much more violent because these groups know each other well and know where it hurts. The people just like to argue. It's a social competition, like that you show that you are superior to others. Many of these basic debates have stopped entirely, e.g. the argument of vi vs. emacs.
Today is a great day for free software! Go KDE! Go TROLLTech! I wouldn't have dreamt of this!
It also shows what constant, obstinate, bold complaining can achieve.
(no, the excitement won't stop soon...)
hmm, not really. thats a story about how the sea level in tuvalu, a small island in the pacific, has fallen just enough over the last years so that it seems to be taking longer to vanish... quoting from the article:
>Hilia Vavae, the Metereological Service's director, said: "This is certainly a bit of a shock for us because we have been experiencing the effect of rising oceans for a long time."
(...)
However, scientists both on and off the island believe such concerns will be short term because the sea level falls are coming to an end and the oceans will soon resume their inexorable rise.
these are the facts we face:
global sea levels have been rising in the last century. quoting from this article: After the last ice age, the rapid melting of glaciers rapidly raised sea level. That melting tapered off about 6,000 years ago, and sea level -- compared to land -- became fairly stable. However, over the past century, sea level over much of the United States has risen by 25 to 30 centimeters relative to land.
while the sea level has risen and fallen at many times in the past, the areas endangered by rising sea levels have certainly never been populated by i-dont-know-how-many-hundreds of millions of people.
however, people like clinging to their habits and are generally unwilling to accept any facts that might challenge them to think..
----- The following addresses had delivery problems ----- (unrecoverable error) ----- Transcript of session follows ----- ... while talking to hpccpublic2.hpcc.gov.: >>> RCPT To: ... User unknown 550... User unknown
slightly offtopic, but... as soon as micropayments technology gets widely distributed any service provider with a lot of users but small revenue will be tempted to charge for their service: a search engine could for instance charge $0.05 per search. while this would hardly be noticeable by users in rich countries, it would split the internet community in two or more classes: users from the global south would suddenly be locked out from a lot of internet content. people from europe and the usa keep forgetting that in africa people can't even afford condoms (but make big conferences instead about how to "educate" people to make use of them)
i can't see how the quality of society should be determined by the quality of the products that are affordable for the privileged (and that will, maybe, have "trickled down" to the lowest classes by the time the privileged take much more sophisticated products for granted). the people who don't have equal opportunities will always feel inferior. for a good society, you need, among other things, JUSTICE and EQUALITY. your "model" just fails horribly in this respect. in every other respect, too.
for example, your point about pollution just doesn't work. not everyone can choose where to work, not everyone (especially those who have to work for socially irresponsible companies) can influence their employer. so it's up to the privileged comsumers to put pressure on companies.
i can think of many people from the dark ages with a MUCH healthier mentality.
It has been said in this discussion, but what most of you just don't seem to understand is that acting socially responsible does not mean charity. It means, in short, accepting your workers (including any suppliers) and customers as fellow human beings who deserve to receive just wages (and in my opinion, shares) respectively good products. charity means a rich and "generous" person giving something to people far "below" them that isn't granted as their right but as a favor. acting socially responsible means Change, not Charity. and the point about Gates being generous - that's a joke, right? if you earn that shitload of money THAT WAY (IP laws...) it would just seem normal to me to give the GREATER PART of it back.
so 5.1 does take advantage of the true type fonts. It's only that someone told StarWriter that it can't print ttf on linux (but it can), so it doesn't show them. you have to type the font names in manually to use them. you can probably fix that weirdness, but I try to avoid SO anyway. Just why exactly is it so damn unresponsive? (In my opinion, a K6-266 should be enough to write a letter. Really.)
I can't sleep, so I instead of running around th house I decided to translate this article for a change.
Crusoe's island
Journey reports are rather rare in c't. In the last one that I can remember a certain Rob.S.Pierre described a press journey from Apple to Ireland [1] - and whirled up a lot of dust with it. Following an Intel press journey (to IDF) I found myself in Santa Clara, not at Intel's headquarters, but at Transmeta.
Hardly a stone's throw away from Intel's headquarters the startup company Transmeta resides in a beautiful park, in three one- to two-story houses. From the street next to the park with the characteristic name "Freedom Circle" the relatively ugly concrete/glass-towers of the "big brother" are directly visible.
Instead of open-plan offices with lots of cubicles the more than 200 Transmeta employees sit mostly in small offices, although there are also a bunch of big labs. I was assured that I was the first European journalist in their holy halls, and above all the very first to be allowed to spy for a whole day in the offices and labs.
In Linus Torvald's office I felt at home from the start. Torvalds - in proper style in a SuSE-T-shirt - confirmed that he started at Transmeta because he wanted to do something else than always only Linux, Linux. He didn't say it explicitly but indicated that he had been sick of Linux at some point. And so the task of cooperating as a chief architect in the Code Morphing software (CMS) was a welcome change and a big challenge.
But the ghosts one called... at the moment Torvalds is nevertheless working mainly on Linux again, specifically on "mobile Linux" that is intended as an accessory for the Crusoe processor for small diskless systems (in the 32 MB of flash)
By the way, Mobile Linux runs as x86 sofware and is morphed dynamically. There had also been experiments with a native Linux version, but it proved less effective than the emulated x86-version. Transmeta also does not want to publish the the complex native instruction set of the Crusoe processors because the company can keep the option of making arbitrary changes. The CMS versions of the Crusoe processors TM3120 and TM5400 are already different.
Inspections
Marc Fleischmann - a German, by the way, who is also responsible as a development leader for the virtual Northbridge - could convince me of the effects of the power saving technology LongRun in the Transmeta-lab. A TM4500-Crusoe running between 266 and 600 MHz in five steps (the minimal step is 33 MHz) and between 1,1 and 1,6 V consumed 6 W as a peak value, but on average and with usual software it rested at roughly 1 W and got - without radiator - only tepid. LongRun requires idle states for its regulating. Without APM under DOS LongRun does not work and the 600 MHz TM5400 consumes - when running doom for instance - constantly 5 W but still only warms up to 43 degrees. Included in these power consumption values is the Northbridge - compatible in part with Intel's BX - which is integrated into the Crusoe processor or respectively virtualised by the CMS. As a comparison: the original BX Northbridge consumes above 2 W alone - and doesn't know neither PC133 nor even a second DRAM interface for DDR-266 as the TM5400 does.
Since CMS is also controlling the Northbridge it cannot only slow down the processor but also the memory if necessary, which makes the potential for savings even bigger. A small, recently discovered bug in the Northbridge software was quite useful actually to show the advantages of a processor realised mainly in software: In front of my eyes software engineer Peter Anvin loaded a fixed version of CMS to the processor, and that was it.
Responsible for the Crusoe BIOS is Robert Collins. He came together with many other employees from the secret Pentium project that was suddenly abandoned four years ago from Texas Instruments to Transmeta and with his well-known website www.x86.org and Intel Secrets he already fought once with Chipzilla. Collins explained to me that Crusoe first loads the 2 MB (decompressed) CMS in some 100 milliseconds when booting, then installs the translation buffer (8 to 14 MB) and after that, as any proper x86, starts execution of the code at address F000:FFF0. The BIOS itself is coded completely in x86 code and passes system information, e.g. the SDRAM parameters read out of the SPD-EEPROM, through a shared memory range to the CMS software. For the chipset and processor independent part Transmeta licensed the Phoenix BIOS.
Instructions
The "x86-validator" Christian Ludloff also came to Transmeta vi TI; he was discovered by TI back then by his article about Pentium secrets in c't [2,3]. Ludloff has literally hacked his fingers sore with millions of assembler lines to produce ugly, malicious, !#@#$# code which traps the poor processors over and over. Like that he discovered loads of bugs and anomalies not only in former versions of Crusoe/CMS, but of course also in the concurrents. Many entries e.g. in Intel's Specification Updates should actually say "thanks to CL". Ludloff is planning to make a part of his assembler software, e.g. all the processor structures, exceptions and so on publicly accessible on his website www.sandpile.org popular among insiders - that's gonna be a tidbit!
I confronted Transmeta boss Dave Ditzel with the sometimes uttered suspicion that he took some of the ideas of Boris Babaian during his time as a Sun employee in Moscow. Boris Babaian has been designing for quite a time a processor named E2K at the Russian Sun distributor Elbrus. Babaian was at his's place only a week ago, Ditzel answered. They had a good conversation. He pointed out that the designs of E2K (high end VLIW without dynamic optimisation, very high floating point performance) and Crusoe were very different. A certain inspiration came from there, but not more than from HP, Sun or other designs.
Inspirations
Ditzel also contradicted publications announcing that products with Crusoe processors shall come out in April. At the earliest at the end of the second quarter, probably in June, the small Crusoe TM3120 will be ready. The TM5400 with more performace and the ingenious LongRun power saving technology is to be expected in the third quarter. It's gonna be the first processor on the market made in IBMs new CMOS8S copper process.
A possible OEM, besides S3/Diamond and FIC, could be Quanta Computer, one of the biggest notebook manufacturers who produces for many others who only print their Dell, HP or other Logo on the notebooks. Sybase as a big software company has already announced that their SQL Anywhere Studio (mobile databases and data synchronisation) is to be extended especially for Crusoe systems. And the company Infomatec from Augsburg announced that they have built a partnership with Crosstainment AG and Transmeta to develop reference models of internet capable consumer devices with crusoe processors together, based on their Java Network Technology (JNT).
Transmeta is stil reluctant to publish absolute performance data, yet the values don't look too bad. A 700 MHz TM5400 reaches about Pentium III 500 level. But when it comes to the so important Ziff-Davis benchmark Winstone it is a bit under that level; the reason is according to Transmeta that this benchmark "touches" a lot of routines only once so that dynamic optimisation can't work. The ZD lab has recognized the deficiency in a discussion with Ditzel and will ensure a more realistic use of the routines in the next version.
And finally there is the most frequently asked question if Transmeta enters the stock market this year. Ditzel's answer: "It wouldn't surprise me..."
authors of open source software for non-hackers should from time to time ask their family members and friends (the clueless ones) to perform simple tasks with their piece of software and see what problems they typically run into: open-source software guis are often so horrible that the worst problems would become apparent in a simple usability test with 2-5 users from The Real World. open-source clis, on the other hand, mostly rock. unfortunately, there is a gap between clis and guis. why can't i double-click on a filename in xterm to open a file? drag it to a text-processor to create an embedded object? the perfect user interface for linux would be a stupid, simple interface, not just cloned from windows but with some actual innovations and more adapted to the underlying system, and more transparent to the cli. somthing like that would have the potential to be accepted by both mainstream users and those among us who eat sendmail.cf files for breakfast.
just a reply to your comment about the gimp: i can't believe you think it's feature-poor. YES i think you are missing something: the gimp 1.1 comes now with >200 plugins. hope no gimp developer read this... it could cause them to add 40 more buttons to the main toolbar in the next release:)
ui design is not a technical problem. to find out how to make your program usable you have to carry out extensive tests, something that takes way longer than coding or drawing some menus and buttons. and to developers, usability is maybe not that important as to end users, or actually the u-word doesn't mean the same to both groups.
Has anyone ever thought of writing a little daemon that polls the X server every 10 seconds or so to see if it is still there, and kills it if it's crashed? That would come with every X package? Ok, you would still lose your running GUI stuff, but at least you wouldn't have to reset. That would make a difference, also psychologically: I only ever had to reset a computer running Linux when the X server crashed and I couldn't login from another machine.
If we just let them starve, the problem would go away. Thank you for enlightening me. This philosophy solves just about any problem in the world anyway: -If your child, mother, or girlfriend is ill, let them die. The problem will go away. -Ecological problems? Nonexistent. If we destroy the planet too much we will die. No ecological problems any more. Problem solved.
Mainland China, which fields one of the largest, if not the largest, standing armies in the world. They may not be the best, but their sheer numbers will make you stop and pause. They're still a threat to their own people,imprisoning desenters, and they have stated they will use force against Taiwan (and think how expensive your cheap computers would get, and how less successful the Internet revolution they drive would become). How the standing armies of China can be used as justification for the anti-missile is beyond my understanding. And the main effect of a US shield over Taiwan would be further destabilization of the region. North Korea, which despite being closed and near total starvation, has managed to launch two new ICBM missles, the second of which has the range to reach the West Coast. The rulers of North Korea are not what I call sane, but they are not insane enough to throw nukes at the US and hereby commit collective suicide. What's more, they may just have enough material for two warheads. Pakistan and India have been at it for a long time. Both have tested regional ICBMs capable of carrying nukes. They may not be a direct threat to us, but they can upset their region, which is bad enough. No justification for the anti-missile. They do not pose a direct threat to the US, as you admit. Iraq still ain't our buds. And with holes in the embargo and no UN inspectors, it won't be long before we get a rude awakening from that part of the world. This is just ridiculous. According to UN reports, Iraq had the potential to build nukes before the Gulf War but that's no longer so. Their missile range is 90 miles. Source What's left of the USSR is very unhealthy right now. A war with southern Muslums in Chechnia has heated up, with Muslums blowing up Russian apartment buildings full of people. We went through hell when we lost the Edward R. Murrow building in Kansas City, but they've lost the equivalent of four over the past few months. This type of terror and the economic and political instability are just the ingrediants needed for demagogues and dictators. Think of Berlin and Gernany before the Nazis and WWII. Paranoia. Russia has been economically and politically unstable for at least twenty years now. The Cold war is over. OVER. Realise it. The recent development and - eventually - proliferation of anti-missiles can only lead to mistrust and destabilization because in the long run they make it possible for a country to use nuclear weapons without fatal consequences for the own population. The US today have the second highest number of warheads, enough to destroy the inhabited regions of the planet several times, and they are the nuclear power the most opposed to disarmament. These facts render any effort for non-proliferation pointless. "Think of the moral high ground we secure by having none... It's kind of hard for us to say... 'You are terrible people, you're developing a nuclear weapon' when the United States has thousands of them... I want to go to zero." General Charles A. Horner, former Commander of the U.S. Space Command
Although India actually did say that they would sign the non-proliferation treaty if the big powers would disarm, this is a reasonable argument. Still, it does not justify the new missile. Because if I have understood you correctly, you say that India poses no nuclear threat to the US but to Pakistan. But the missile is supposed to protect the US, not Pakistan.
Arms like these are not designed to kill people. Nevertheless, they kill every day - indirectly. The vast amount of resources put into destructive technology can't be used for technology that could help reducing the output of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, that could provide drinking water for everyone, or help the desertification of cultivated land, problems which hurt everyone on the planet and lead today - or will lead - to the death of millions of people. How can there ever be peace as long as there are so many people working on destruction? Another point: Countries like India would sign the non-proliferation treaty and stop their nuclear programs if the big nuclear powers would commit themselves to disarmament. Indeed, this would be a good plan. Not everyone in the world thinks that nuclear weapons are good if the NATO countries have them but bad if in the possession of other countries.
in every large movement, there are revolutionaries and pragmatists, and they dont have to agree on everything to keep it going. the free software / open source people have worked together quite well. at least their combined efforts led to an os that doesnt suck (some companies that shall remain nameless will probably never manage to do this). and dont forget x: its roots are in commercial unix. obviously, the success of linux wouldnt have been possible without gnu. on the other hand, the fsf profits a lot by linux: fewer people knew the gpl philosophy if linux wouldnt exist, even if its mostly not called gnu/linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Being forced to buy a product - that's really the worst problem you could run into under "libertarian" capitalism - but you don't, because a company can't do that. Want to grow your own food, that's not a problem because, as we all know, everyone has enough land under capitalism to be self-sufficient. If you don't have the skills, or, maybe, the resources to build your own television, you surely have enough stacks of paper lying around ... (You don't have to work to get your stacks of paper, they magically lie around in your backyard, and if you do, surely not in a company that can exploit the hell out of you because there are no laws. No, a company would never, ever do that.)
The libertarian party does a very good job in selling their program with a lot of "liberty" rhetoric, so slashdot-type people who are very concerned with personal liberty issues and disappointed by the US pseudo-democracy are going to trust them. I fail to see anything else in their program than the replacement of relative state domination by total corporate domination, however.
It's great that someone from the left who is also very much in favor of personal liberties counters these "libertarian" rants.
It seems to me that they also do a good job in confusing terms. Why is this kind of thinking called "libertarian" or "anarcho-capitalist" anyway? "Anarcho-capitalism" is an oxymoron because anarchism literally means "no rulers", not exactly what capitalism - especially the corporate feudalism of the "libertarian" flavor is about, and in a large part of the world, "libertarian" means anarcho-socialist.
"What users do is never wrong"
Linus Torvalds about the history and future of Linux
The star guest of the LinuxWorld in the beginning of October was Linus Torvalds. The success of Linux has made the free OS and its "inventor" well-known to a far bigger public than just the IT world.
In 1991, Torvalds had started to program his own Unix-like OS out of discontent with the PC operating systems that existed at the time. Originally Linux was only intended for the computer of the then 21-year-old; but after the publication of the version 0.01 on the internet Linux started to gain users and a growing hoard of developers very fast. Today the open source system runs on all common hardware architectures; it has attained a strong position above all on internet servers.
c't: Linux has already achieved what you wanted some years ago. Why did you continue at that point?
Torvalds: The aims have changed. In the beginning my main objective was to do something interesting and fun. I thought I would be the only user and didn't make any concrete plans concerning features. I knew what I expected from a Unix; but e.g. I wasn't interested in graphics because I only wanted to edit and compile source code. But after I had published Linux on the internet, other users asked for features I had never thought of. Instead of a Unix for my desktop Linux suddenly turned into a project for the very best OS. Because of the wishes of others and - later - their patches and help it became much more interesting. Today the bulk of the work is done by others.
Now I aim for a good OS design that is also useful for others. What I do hasn't changed that much: I program, and I read a lot of email. Concerning my original plans, Linux has since log been complete; but the many new domains of use motivate me to go on. If I hadn't published Linux on the internet and if there weren't those other users, I probably would have ceased working on Linux in 1992.
c't: How long go you plan to go on with Linux? Do you see a point somewhere in the future where you will say: "I've had enough of it now"?
Torvalds: I don't think that there will be a certain point. I always have handed over some things from time to time, and that started very early. In the very beginning e.g. I was concerned with all the applications myself: I had - additionally to the work on the kernel - to port the shell, the compiler and the libraries. But very soon other people started to take over so I could concentrate on the kernel.
Nowadays I still work on the kernel, but only on central features like the memory and process management and the basic design.
I also have almost stopped to talk at events like this LinuxWorld. I have taken part here in the panel discussion, but I haven't held a keynote because these things put me under stress incredibly.
I think that I will concentrate more and more on special areas; but I don't think that I will cease to work in Linux completely - perhaps until someone comes who is better than me so that I retire from it.
c't: If at some point you don't feel like continuing with Linux - how would the developers organise?
Torvalds: I don't think that this will happen soon; but there would be a lot of people who could take over my position. Today I hardly code myself; I "show good taste" instead - I make decisions concerning the architecture. I am a sort of central coordinator, deal with email, read it, send it to the right people.
Public events are obviously PR work, and there are enough people who could do that as well as I. At the moment my most important function is that of an identification figure for Linux, purely for psychological reasons. Nowadays people think of companies like SuSE, IBM or Redhat when they think of Linux; but for a long time it used to be this radical movement led by Linus Torvalds.
If the plane from Frankfurt to San Francisco crashed now, everyone - okay, probably not everyone, but a lot of people could take over my job. It certainly wouldn't be a single person: I do what I do and [XFree86 developer] Dirk Hohndel does his job. My technical work on the kernel for example could be shared among some people.
If you take a look on how Linux is actually developed: I don't touch the 2.2 kernel e.g., that's all done by Alan Cox. Soon we'll have finished the user kernel 2.4, and then Ted Ts'o [ext2 developer] will take care of that. I will be able to concentrate on the developer kernels because that's what I'm most interested in and the developers are happy with how I do it. But it could as well be done by other people. It would certainly cause a lot of agitation in the media if I dropped into the ocean, but I am not that important any more for the development of Linux.
c't: Can you tell us a bit more about the organisation of Linux development?
Torvalds: Let's look at a simple example. Someone has an idea. First he will discuss that with people he knows and on the kernel mailing list: I need this feature for these reasons, is someone working on it? If not, he will code it. Then he uses it himself, talks to people in his vicinity, and posts it on the kernel mailing list, if he wants it to get into the standard kernel. He knows how it works, and doesn't send mail to my from the beginning. If it's perfect code, maybe the mailing list says: "Yes, we want to have that." But that doesn't happen in practice. The reaction is more like that: "We understand what you want, but like that it's more or less bullshit. I would like to do something similar, but that doesn't work with your code." And then the interfaces are changed so that both things go together, and other modifications are made that make other people interested. That can take a long time. Major changes can live a few years in the kernel list while they are discussed and even a lot of people use them. I take notice of such patches and discussions on the list; and at some point I decide that the code is so useful it should become part of the standard kernel. If important questions are discussed, I join in and say perhaps: "I can see your point, but from the point of view of kernel architecture that's the wrong way to go". At some point the patch becomes part of the standard kernel, or it continues to be an external patch for special purposes.
c't: What is your position on a possible fork in the kernel? The Linux boss at IBM e.g. said some time ago that a kernel can't fulfill all requirements from the embedded device to the mission-critical server.
Torvalds: Forking happens all the time. The fact that my kernel is considered the official one doesn't mean that there aren't many "unofficial" ones with their own features. For instance the most distributions have their own kernel versions. For SuSE ISDN is very important because that plays a part in Germany; for the rest of the world it's not important. Different distributions are targeted at different classes of users; SGI e.g. is mainly interested in the SGI market: computers with hundreds of CPUs. Therefore, the SGI kernel will include features for the large machines.
I am trying to maintain a common standard kernel, but that's not a kernel for everyone. Of course supercomputer and embedded device require different things, and there will never be one kernel. I am trying to keep the differences at small as possible, and incorporate new things in a way that doesn't hinder the extreme cases.
c't: During the work on the 2.3 developer kernel there was a lot of discussion on memory management...
Torvalds: ... they still go on.
c't: To address big amounts of memory in servers you need a kind of memory management that's not as efficient in small systems with little RAM.
Torvalds: That's a classical example. A lot of things seem to be incompatible with each other. On one hand I need support for small devices, and on the other there are big systems with 16 nodes, each with its own memory and a total of hundreds of GB's of RAM. The solutions look totally different, of course. Usually, the first answer consists of two code branches, simply because it generates the least work - the code doesn't have to take into account that many possibilities. But maintaining the code becomes more difficult because you have to have interfaces to both branches.
But in the end it comes down to a virtualisation of memory management. That was one of the things that we worked on during the 2.3 development: virtualising the concept of a "memory node". Thus, a small device is the same as a big machine, with the sole difference that it only has one memory node, whereas the big computer has several of these nodes. So the small device becomes a special case of the big machine.
By a configuration option, different kernels can then be compiled from the same code. In the source there is a loop through the nodes; but if there's only one node the loop goes from 0 to 0, is optimised away during compilation and doesn't appear any more in the binary. That makes maintaining the source much more simple, and that's the kind of questions that I occupy myself with.
Of course, it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes you simply have different devices that need different drivers. In design you have to decide what code is common and when you write different code for the different cases. That's what computer science is all about in the end.
c't: The kernel sources have become very comprehensive...
Torvalds: ... around 55 MByte source code; I don't know the exact number, but there are about three millions of lines. The kernel is huge, and nobody could maintain it if it wouldn't consist mainly of totally independent drivers. But driver development isn't easy either, because you have to iron out all the glitches of the hardware.
c't: Programmers know the problem when they change something somewhere and the program crashes somewhere else.
Torvalds: Things like that also happen with the kernel.
c't: How do you deal with such difficulties?
Torvalds: There is only one solution: clean interfaces. Ideally, there should never be any surprising bugs or interactions that you would never have thought of. The interfaces have to be so clear that if you change something you just know where the you have to adapt the code. I don't claim that the interfaces in Linux are always as clean as that, but we aim for it. Many of the changes in the 2.4 kernel go in that direction. In most of the cases the main task was to sketch out new interfaces, not to actually write new code. But often the code doesn't fit what you have thought out; that's what makes changing the interfaces so tedious. But it is very important, even if the users first can't see any advantage in it - until they some across a machine that needs the new interface.
c't: I don't want to ask to start with when the 2.4 kernel will be out...
Torvalds: ...I hope it will be this year...
c't:...but I am curios about the problems with the new kernel.
Torvalds: There is a basic difficulty that isn't of technical nature: most people don't want to upgrade to a new kernel at all. The are satisfied with the 2.2 kernel, don't have any major problems with it - why should they try a developer kernel? It's only a special group of users who test new kernels; and before making public a new stable kernel at least part of these users have to have tested the new kernel. The developers are focused on new versions, we need extern users for the testing. That's not only a problem for Linux; some software producers even pay people to test beta versions.
But there are also still a few technical difficulties. We know of some real bugs for which there are already solutions; but not all developers are already convinced that they are good. In this regard there are a few open questions yet: Often the developers want better solutions that guarantee that a certain problem won't arise any more in the future.
Beyond that, there are also communication problems. The people who fix bugs are normally not the developers themselves, they don't describe the problems like a developer would. That simply takes a lot of time.
c't: You have already talked about the kernel extensions of the Linux distributors. SuSE, e.g., delivers the 2.2 user kernels with the Logical Volume Manager and the ReiserFS. The kernel developers have thoroughly discussed ReiserFS and come to the conclusion that it shouldn't be incorporated into the "official" kernel yet. What do you think about such acts of arbitrariness? You surely had your reasons for the decision against ReiserFS.
Torvalds: Mainly last year, new groups of users joined, and SuSE - without the intention of speaking for SuSE - has worked together a lot with big customers who are interested in LVM. Management of hundreds of disks requires such tools. And also if the system doesn't crash but is only rebooted occasionally, e2fsck runs of several hours are unacceptable, so that ReiserFS is preferred. Such applications have only arisen recently, and it simply needs time to integrate things like that. LVM has been in the 2.3 developer kernel for half a year, but just last week we have worked on it. I wanted to keep ReiserFS out of the kernel in any case before 2.4 because I always thought to stand immediately before the code freeze, so I didn't want to bring entirely new questions in the discussion. SuSE and other have tested ReiserFS in the meantime, so we will probably incorporate it into the version 2.4.1.
What users do is never wrong. I surely can't command the Linux users what they shall do. I have always seen it like that: Whatever people want to do is OK. I can only make decisions on how the architecture should look like which makes that possible, or give hints how you can reach the same goal with another approach. ReiserFS will come, and I can't simply say no to it. For me it's only a question of timing and maybe of a few changes to integrate ReiserFS better into the kernel. XFS is a different matter. It's not got as far as ReiserFS, and I can't say if it will be part of the standard kernel in a year. ext3fs, again, is a different matter. The code is already there, and there are users who already use it. ext3fs could well be integrated in the 2.4 kernel series or at an early point into the 2.5 kernel. I am concerned about flexibility. Open source means that you can do everything with the code.
That doesn't mean that I use ReiserFS or ext3fs myself. I am interested about something else. ReiserFS, XFS and ext3fs obviously will have a lot in common. What does that mean for the virtual file system [the kernel structure that constitutes the interface to the file systems]? Perhaps we will take parts of the code that is common to several of the file systems - even if they do different things, eventually it's all the same - and try to build a common interface. Until the VFS itself can deal with journaling two or three years will probably pass; but then the file systems won't have as much work with it any more. That's the sort of questions that I occupy myself with. c't: What are the most interesting technical developments of Linux at the moment? Torvalds: Most things don't concern the kernel at all. Of course there are fascinating developments, e.g. scalability - that was extremely interesting technically. But the really fascinating things are done by other people. The whole business around DVD was interesting, even if maybe it was also a bit disappointing. And then of course the desktop and things that are actually uncommon for Unix. When I watch TV e.g. I do that with a Linux box that uses its hard disk as a VCR. If you have used such a device once you never want to touch a classic VCR again. I only use such devices for films that are not yet available on DVD.
c't: And in the IT world generally? You work in a high tech company, after all.
Torvalds: All these wireless things. I have a great cell phone e.g., a laptop and a palm. When I am away from home I use my laptop to read email, so I want to use the cell phone as a modem. But that doesn't work; this kind of communication simply doesn't work yet. I think in five years all these devices will be able to communicate with one another. The technical aspect is less interesting than the applications.
c't: When you look back at the long history of Linux development: Were there things that surprised you?
Torvalds: Very few. Of course I would have been very surprised at first if I had known where Linux would go. When I published version 0.01 on the internet I was prepared for comments. Perhaps there were a little bit more reactions that I would have thought, but I don't even think so. After a few months there were 50 instead of the 5 people that I had expected, then a few hundred; there I was a little surprised. But I witnessed the development from 5, 10 to 20, 50 users, there wasn't a point at which I said to myself: "My God, what's happening here?" Then the commercial interest, the media coverage - most people think all that happened in the last two years, but in fact it developed slowly over the last nine years. Companies started to support Linux - sometimes it was surprising to see to which degree, e.g. IBM. Nobody thought that IBM really would go that far. But there either wasn't a point where I would have been really surprised.
c't: Has there been anything that made you angry?
Torvalds: Not a lot. The most uncomfortable surprise probably was this Mindcraft study [a study financed by Microsoft in which Linux had looked very bad compared to Windows NT in April 1999]. I can remember how angry I was then. Not any more, because it turned out well in the end. What is most surprising are perhaps the generally positive reactions to Linux. The developer community was very friendly from the beginning, despite all that discussions about the Linux kernel that can seem violent sometimes.
c't: There are a lot of ugly discussions...
Torvalds: Yes, when it comes to discussions about their technical ideas people become very passionate and unfriendly.
c't: Isn't that typical for the open source community? E.g. this strong aversion against M$...
Torvalds: No, not only for that community. Mac user are very similar there. The internet makes it simple to just say something, and that easily generates flame wars. You don't know the people you are arguing with and so you easily overdo it. That's definitely not only true for Linux - if you look at all the "advocacy groups" out there ... it's amusing. The arguments between Linux and FreeBSD users e.g. are again much more violent because these groups know each other well and know where it hurts. The people just like to argue. It's a social competition, like that you show that you are superior to others. Many of these basic debates have stopped entirely, e.g. the argument of vi vs. emacs.
Today is a great day for free software! Go KDE! Go TROLLTech! I wouldn't have dreamt of this! It also shows what constant, obstinate, bold complaining can achieve. (no, the excitement won't stop soon...)
how many angels can dance on it?
Then again, what do you expect from a company that calls itself Troll-Tech?
hmm, not really. thats a story about how the sea level in tuvalu, a small island in the pacific, has fallen just enough over the last years so that it seems to be taking longer to vanish ... quoting from the article:
>Hilia Vavae, the Metereological Service's director, said: "This is certainly a bit of a shock for us because we have been experiencing the effect of rising oceans for a long time."
(...)
However, scientists both on and off the island believe such concerns will be short term because the sea level falls are coming to an end and the oceans will soon resume their inexorable rise.
these are the facts we face:
- global sea levels have been rising in the last century. quoting from this article: After the last ice age, the rapid melting of glaciers rapidly raised sea level. That melting tapered off about 6,000 years ago, and sea level -- compared to land -- became fairly stable. However, over the past century, sea level over much of the United States has risen by 25 to 30 centimeters relative to land.
- while the sea level has risen and fallen at many times in the past, the areas endangered by rising sea levels have certainly never been populated by i-dont-know-how-many-hundreds of millions of people.
however, people like clinging to their habits and are generally unwilling to accept any facts that might challenge them to think..----- The following addresses had delivery problems -----
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550
slightly offtopic, but... as soon as micropayments technology gets widely distributed any service provider with a lot of users but small revenue will be tempted to charge for their service: a search engine could for instance charge $0.05 per search. while this would hardly be noticeable by users in rich countries, it would split the internet community in two or more classes: users from the global south would suddenly be locked out from a lot of internet content. people from europe and the usa keep forgetting that in africa people can't even afford condoms (but make big conferences instead about how to "educate" people to make use of them)
In fact, it runs on a Bristol Wind/U compatibility layer.
for factory workers, these rules define "social responsiblity" fairly well:
i can't see how the quality of society should be determined by the quality of the products that are affordable for the privileged (and that will, maybe, have "trickled down" to the lowest classes by the time the privileged take much more sophisticated products for granted). the people who don't have equal opportunities will always feel inferior. for a good society, you need, among other things, JUSTICE and EQUALITY. your "model" just fails horribly in this respect. in every other respect, too.
for example, your point about pollution just doesn't work. not everyone can choose where to work, not everyone (especially those who have to work for socially irresponsible companies) can influence their employer. so it's up to the privileged comsumers to put pressure on companies.
i can think of many people from the dark ages with a MUCH healthier mentality.
It has been said in this discussion, but what most of you just don't seem to understand is that acting socially responsible does not mean charity. It means, in short, accepting your workers (including any suppliers) and customers as fellow human beings who deserve to receive just wages (and in my opinion, shares) respectively good products. charity means a rich and "generous" person giving something to people far "below" them that isn't granted as their right but as a favor. acting socially responsible means Change, not Charity. and the point about Gates being generous - that's a joke, right? if you earn that shitload of money THAT WAY (IP laws...) it would just seem normal to me to give the GREATER PART of it back.
so 5.1 does take advantage of the true type fonts.
It's only that someone told StarWriter
that it can't print ttf on linux
(but it can),
so it doesn't show
them. you have to type
the font names in manually
to use them. you
can probably fix
that weirdness, but I try to avoid SO anyway. Just why exactly
is it so damn unresponsive?
(In my opinion,
a K6-266 should be enough to write a letter.
Really.)
I can't sleep, so I instead of running around th house I decided to translate this article for a change.
Crusoe's islandJourney reports are rather rare in c't. In the last one that I can remember a certain Rob.S.Pierre described a press journey from Apple to Ireland [1] - and whirled up a lot of dust with it. Following an Intel press journey (to IDF) I found myself in Santa Clara, not at Intel's headquarters, but at Transmeta.
Hardly a stone's throw away from Intel's headquarters the startup company Transmeta resides in a beautiful park, in three one- to two-story houses. From the street next to the park with the characteristic name "Freedom Circle" the relatively ugly concrete/glass-towers of the "big brother" are directly visible.
Instead of open-plan offices with lots of cubicles the more than 200 Transmeta employees sit mostly in small offices, although there are also a bunch of big labs. I was assured that I was the first European journalist in their holy halls, and above all the very first to be allowed to spy for a whole day in the offices and labs.
In Linus Torvald's office I felt at home from the start. Torvalds - in proper style in a SuSE-T-shirt - confirmed that he started at Transmeta because he wanted to do something else than always only Linux, Linux. He didn't say it explicitly but indicated that he had been sick of Linux at some point. And so the task of cooperating as a chief architect in the Code Morphing software (CMS) was a welcome change and a big challenge.
But the ghosts one called... at the moment Torvalds is nevertheless working mainly on Linux again, specifically on "mobile Linux" that is intended as an accessory for the Crusoe processor for small diskless systems (in the 32 MB of flash)
By the way, Mobile Linux runs as x86 sofware and is morphed dynamically. There had also been experiments with a native Linux version, but it proved less effective than the emulated x86-version. Transmeta also does not want to publish the the complex native instruction set of the Crusoe processors because the company can keep the option of making arbitrary changes. The CMS versions of the Crusoe processors TM3120 and TM5400 are already different.
InspectionsMarc Fleischmann - a German, by the way, who is also responsible as a development leader for the virtual Northbridge - could convince me of the effects of the power saving technology LongRun in the Transmeta-lab. A TM4500-Crusoe running between 266 and 600 MHz in five steps (the minimal step is 33 MHz) and between 1,1 and 1,6 V consumed 6 W as a peak value, but on average and with usual software it rested at roughly 1 W and got - without radiator - only tepid. LongRun requires idle states for its regulating. Without APM under DOS LongRun does not work and the 600 MHz TM5400 consumes - when running doom for instance - constantly 5 W but still only warms up to 43 degrees. Included in these power consumption values is the Northbridge - compatible in part with Intel's BX - which is integrated into the Crusoe processor or respectively virtualised by the CMS. As a comparison: the original BX Northbridge consumes above 2 W alone - and doesn't know neither PC133 nor even a second DRAM interface for DDR-266 as the TM5400 does.
Since CMS is also controlling the Northbridge it cannot only slow down the processor but also the memory if necessary, which makes the potential for savings even bigger. A small, recently discovered bug in the Northbridge software was quite useful actually to show the advantages of a processor realised mainly in software: In front of my eyes software engineer Peter Anvin loaded a fixed version of CMS to the processor, and that was it.
Responsible for the Crusoe BIOS is Robert Collins. He came together with many other employees from the secret Pentium project that was suddenly abandoned four years ago from Texas Instruments to Transmeta and with his well-known website www.x86.org and Intel Secrets he already fought once with Chipzilla. Collins explained to me that Crusoe first loads the 2 MB (decompressed) CMS in some 100 milliseconds when booting, then installs the translation buffer (8 to 14 MB) and after that, as any proper x86, starts execution of the code at address F000:FFF0. The BIOS itself is coded completely in x86 code and passes system information, e.g. the SDRAM parameters read out of the SPD-EEPROM, through a shared memory range to the CMS software. For the chipset and processor independent part Transmeta licensed the Phoenix BIOS.
InstructionsThe "x86-validator" Christian Ludloff also came to Transmeta vi TI; he was discovered by TI back then by his article about Pentium secrets in c't [2,3]. Ludloff has literally hacked his fingers sore with millions of assembler lines to produce ugly, malicious, !#@#$# code which traps the poor processors over and over. Like that he discovered loads of bugs and anomalies not only in former versions of Crusoe/CMS, but of course also in the concurrents. Many entries e.g. in Intel's Specification Updates should actually say "thanks to CL". Ludloff is planning to make a part of his assembler software, e.g. all the processor structures, exceptions and so on publicly accessible on his website www.sandpile.org popular among insiders - that's gonna be a tidbit!
I confronted Transmeta boss Dave Ditzel with the sometimes uttered suspicion that he took some of the ideas of Boris Babaian during his time as a Sun employee in Moscow. Boris Babaian has been designing for quite a time a processor named E2K at the Russian Sun distributor Elbrus. Babaian was at his's place only a week ago, Ditzel answered. They had a good conversation. He pointed out that the designs of E2K (high end VLIW without dynamic optimisation, very high floating point performance) and Crusoe were very different. A certain inspiration came from there, but not more than from HP, Sun or other designs.
InspirationsDitzel also contradicted publications announcing that products with Crusoe processors shall come out in April. At the earliest at the end of the second quarter, probably in June, the small Crusoe TM3120 will be ready. The TM5400 with more performace and the ingenious LongRun power saving technology is to be expected in the third quarter. It's gonna be the first processor on the market made in IBMs new CMOS8S copper process.
A possible OEM, besides S3/Diamond and FIC, could be Quanta Computer, one of the biggest notebook manufacturers who produces for many others who only print their Dell, HP or other Logo on the notebooks. Sybase as a big software company has already announced that their SQL Anywhere Studio (mobile databases and data synchronisation) is to be extended especially for Crusoe systems. And the company Infomatec from Augsburg announced that they have built a partnership with Crosstainment AG and Transmeta to develop reference models of internet capable consumer devices with crusoe processors together, based on their Java Network Technology (JNT).
Transmeta is stil reluctant to publish absolute performance data, yet the values don't look too bad. A 700 MHz TM5400 reaches about Pentium III 500 level. But when it comes to the so important Ziff-Davis benchmark Winstone it is a bit under that level; the reason is according to Transmeta that this benchmark "touches" a lot of routines only once so that dynamic optimisation can't work. The ZD lab has recognized the deficiency in a discussion with Ditzel and will ensure a more realistic use of the routines in the next version.
And finally there is the most frequently asked question if Transmeta enters the stock market this year. Ditzel's answer: "It wouldn't surprise me..."
authors of open source software for non-hackers should from time to time ask their family members and friends (the clueless ones) to perform simple tasks with their piece of software and see what problems they typically run into: open-source software guis are often so horrible that the worst problems would become apparent in a simple usability test with 2-5 users from The Real World.
open-source clis, on the other hand, mostly rock. unfortunately, there is a gap between clis and guis. why can't i double-click on a filename in xterm to open a file? drag it to a text-processor to create an embedded object?
the perfect user interface for linux would be a stupid, simple interface, not just cloned from windows but with some actual innovations and more adapted to the underlying system, and more transparent to the cli. somthing like that would have the potential to be accepted by both mainstream users and those among us who eat sendmail.cf files for breakfast.
just a reply to your comment about the gimp: i can't believe you think it's feature-poor. YES i think you are missing something: the gimp 1.1 comes now with >200 plugins. hope no gimp developer read this... it could cause them to add 40 more buttons to the main toolbar in the next release :)
it's fun!!!!! in fact, that's the most important reason.
ui design is not a technical problem. to find out how to make your program usable you have to carry out extensive tests, something that takes way longer than coding or drawing some menus and buttons. and to developers, usability is maybe not that important as to end users, or actually the u-word doesn't mean the same to both groups.
Has anyone ever thought of writing a little daemon that polls the X server every 10 seconds or so to see if it is still there, and kills it if it's crashed? That would come with every X package? Ok, you would still lose your running GUI stuff, but at least you wouldn't have to reset. That would make a difference, also psychologically: I only ever had to reset a computer running Linux when the X server crashed and I couldn't login from another machine.
If we just let them starve, the problem would go away. Thank you for enlightening me. This philosophy solves just about any problem in the world anyway: -If your child, mother, or girlfriend is ill, let them die. The problem will go away. -Ecological problems? Nonexistent. If we destroy the planet too much we will die. No ecological problems any more. Problem solved.
Mainland China, which fields one of the largest, if not the largest, standing armies in the world. They may not be the best, but their sheer numbers will make you stop and pause. They're still a threat to their own people,imprisoning desenters, and they have stated they will use force against Taiwan (and think how expensive your cheap computers would get, and how less successful the Internet revolution they drive would become). ... 'You are terrible people, you're developing a nuclear weapon' when the United States has thousands of them... I want to go to zero."
How the standing armies of China can be used as justification for the anti-missile is beyond my understanding. And the main effect of a US shield over Taiwan would be further destabilization of the region.
North Korea, which despite being closed and near total starvation, has managed to launch two new ICBM missles, the second of which has the range to reach the West Coast.
The rulers of North Korea are not what I call sane, but they are not insane enough to throw nukes at the US and hereby commit collective suicide. What's more, they may just have enough material for two warheads.
Pakistan and India have been at it for a long time. Both have tested regional ICBMs capable of carrying nukes. They may not be a direct threat to us, but they can upset their region, which is bad enough.
No justification for the anti-missile. They do not pose a direct threat to the US, as you admit.
Iraq still ain't our buds. And with holes in the embargo and no UN inspectors, it won't be long before we get a rude awakening from that part of the world.
This is just ridiculous. According to UN reports, Iraq had the potential to build nukes before the Gulf War but that's no longer so. Their missile range is 90 miles.
Source
What's left of the USSR is very unhealthy right now. A war with southern Muslums in Chechnia has heated up, with Muslums blowing up Russian apartment buildings full of people. We went through hell when we lost the Edward R. Murrow building in Kansas City, but they've lost the equivalent of four over the past few months. This type of terror and the economic and political instability are just the ingrediants needed for demagogues and dictators. Think of Berlin and Gernany before the Nazis and WWII.
Paranoia. Russia has been economically and politically unstable for at least twenty years now. The Cold war is over. OVER. Realise it.
The recent development and - eventually - proliferation of anti-missiles can only lead to mistrust and destabilization because in the long run they make it possible for a country to use nuclear weapons without fatal consequences for the own population.
The US today have the second highest number of warheads, enough to destroy the inhabited regions of the planet several times, and they are the nuclear power the most opposed to disarmament. These facts render any effort for non-proliferation pointless.
"Think of the moral high ground we secure by having none... It's kind of hard for us to say
General Charles A. Horner, former Commander of the U.S. Space Command
Although India actually did say that they would sign the non-proliferation treaty if the big powers would disarm, this is a reasonable argument. Still, it does not justify the new missile. Because if I have understood you correctly, you say that India poses no nuclear threat to the US but to Pakistan. But the missile is supposed to protect the US, not Pakistan.
Arms like these are not designed to kill people. Nevertheless, they kill every day - indirectly. The vast amount of resources put into destructive technology can't be used for technology that could help reducing the output of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, that could provide drinking water for everyone, or help the desertification of cultivated land, problems which hurt everyone on the planet and lead today - or will lead - to the death of millions of people. How can there ever be peace as long as there are so many people working on destruction? Another point: Countries like India would sign the non-proliferation treaty and stop their nuclear programs if the big nuclear powers would commit themselves to disarmament. Indeed, this would be a good plan. Not everyone in the world thinks that nuclear weapons are good if the NATO countries have them but bad if in the possession of other countries.
in every large movement, there are revolutionaries and pragmatists, and they dont have to agree on everything to keep it going.
the free software / open source people have worked together quite well. at least their combined efforts led to an os that doesnt suck (some companies that shall remain nameless will probably never manage to do this). and dont forget x: its roots are in commercial unix.
obviously, the success of linux wouldnt have been possible without gnu. on the other hand, the fsf profits a lot by linux: fewer people knew the gpl philosophy if linux wouldnt exist, even if its mostly not called gnu/linux.