If you locked one CPU and made that for OS tasks only you'd be wasting a lot of clock cycles that another application could happily use.
Probably wasted in most situations.
But I wonder whether an OS sitting on its hands ready to go in a multiple core machine might be useful in soft realtime applications that need a little improvement in latency.
Actually, some news articles a few years ago pointed to where crimes committed at sea, particularly on cruise ships, were a problem because of figuring out how to prosecute them.
Needless to say, cruise ship lines were not anxious to have increased publicity shining on incidents like rape, committed by a citzen of country X on a citizen of country Y on a ship registered under a flag of convenience (Liberia, Panama, etc.) in international waters.
Some such crimes were not prosecuted because of those complications and because cruise lines didn't want the publicity from trying the cases in courts easily visible to their customer base.
Now, they have more than enough to worry about people getting the flu from hygenic problems on cruise ships.
derived from the Scottish term get, usually used to refer to an illegitimate child. 'Git' itself is used more broadly though, in much the same way as 'bastard' is.
Consistent, then:)
[In reply to disappointed patch contributors a few years ago Linus once explained that people wanting a builtin kernel debugger should get over the fact that he was bastard and proud of it.]
Because many customers are unawawe of LSB's existence or are unaware of its importance in guaranteeing they have a sufficiently standardized version of GNU/Linux that would be interchangeable with another distribution. [You'd think they'd appreciate some of this after living years under a regime where no alternative vendor existed. OTOH, switching between the traditional UNIX vendors might not have been too traumatic for some, either.]
Because so much of Linux is an open source commodity, it's hard to make money selling freely-available commodities, so vendors try to develop a differentiating characteristic to distinguish themselves from other vendors, so people will choose to pay for their special product.
I've learned to really appreciate the network transparency
I do, too.
Unfortunately, in the world at large when you mention X Windows you get a confused look as the person wonders if what you're talking about is either somehow related to Mac OS X or is a "Brand X" pale imitation of the wonderful brand name product that is genuine "Windows".
I suggest X.org get with the times.
You've heard of iSCSI for accessing SCSI disks over IP? It's cool. It's recent. It's what all the hipster and groovy people are into.
The next generation of X Windows should not be called something like X11R7, X12, or Y.
It should be called something like iVideo with its own RFC and an i so all the PHBs and IT journalists will know it's cool because it flows over the network, dammit.
[OpenGL hardware level performance is one checkbox item; the other is some infinite resolution support so SVG, PDF, etc. can be rendered without as much intermediate interpretation.]
If Microsoft can't get away with being arrogant, than the OSS Community can't either.
Worry not! OpenArrogance 1.2.1 has been under active development for years with a strong developer community. It has a broader feature set than VisualArrogance 2005 Pro and costs less, too!
The art world is so much famine with occassional blips of feast, that it's hard for starving artists to feel good about one of their own that strikes it big, particularly if the one striking it big is not regarded as a particularly talented artist among professionals (Thomas Kinkade - who is a certainly a good artist - but arguably not a great artist), or if they happen to get lucky applying a technique that was pioneered by someone else.
Some great artists never get recognized while they're alive.
Artists do help each other out, teaching, learning. Many of them are among the kindest human beings around.
But everything I've seen indicates the profession is innately cruel to its own. Pour out your innermost feelings, your identity, your best efforts, and then try to sell them in art shows to raise money to live on.
Is it just me, or didn't Word have great import filters once upon a time? You know, back before Word was defacto standard?
Yes, it did, back when Word had to compete tooth and nail with other products that were already established in the marketplace.
Yes, MS can make good products with compelling features - if they are in a competitive marketplace.
Once they dominate the market, though, there is no need to create what the user wants, just the need to lock-in users tighter to what they are already using.
Exactly the same business model is seen with Internet Explorer which accumulated many great features while Netscape was a competitor and which stagnated with some non-W3C-standard, MS-exclusive behavior after Netscape's coffin was nailed.
It would be better for everybody except current large shareholders of MS if the talent at Microsoft were redirected to what they are quite capable of doing: creating good products in a competitive marketplace. It's a tragedy for consumers and for MS programmers that they have to exist in a monopoly situation where the best business decisions are to build barriers to prevent users from moving to something different.
Multiple views of the same mass o' bookmarks would be a great start.
Sort by date created.
Sort by date site last updated.
Sort by times you, the user, have gone to that particular bookmark.
Sort by frequency the site updates.
Sort by date you have most recently visited that site.
then, keywords from the webpages would be nice, but create keyword categories only if multiple bookmarked pages have those same keywords.
This would save me from having to manually create folders like "linux" "wimax" "python".
.
With a graphical 2D display, it should be possible to automatically create graphs with upper level keywords and then lower level branches to nodes with modifier keywords (such as "linux->kernel", "linux->databases", etc.
Plus, it might be nice to have a feature that creates an RSS feed of "candidate bookmarks" that you can evaluate, depending on how new webpages discovered by Googling for the same keywords as exist in your private bookmarks match.
[Meanwhile, I have an atrocious flat file list of bookmarks accumulated over 10 years that would be useless if it were not for the Search: feature in Firefox.]
I think I speak for most users when I say they'd prefer they didn't have to download anything.
If a working version of Firefox came with their PC, just as Internet Explorer comes with their PC, then most people would be happy and would probably just use it in the default configuration.
System builders could provide a reasonable version of Firefox with only enough features that could reasonably be supported; the less-used and more fragile features could be loaded onto the harddrive and left to the user if they wanted to change things themselves. Again, without requiring a download.
Of course, all attempts to provide a reasonable improvement that buck the status quo are futile.
What happens is I read the document, find that it gives me a lot of information about certain aspects of the system we are building, but leaves huge gaps in others.
If you can already identify gaps in previous design documents, then you are already qualified to write the next design document.
Apart from that, talk to some other experienced people in your organization and get their take on previous projects failures and delays. Then, see if there is any way to preemptively incorporate measures into the design document to improve your projects chances for success.
[Although, a lot of project success really boils down to getting the right people on the team.]
IIRC, IBM had a project where they actually put a TeX renderer (typesets mathematics better than anything else out there) into a web browser.
If IBM were to push some resources into MathML and TeX rendering as well as SVG for figures, a lot of us in the scientific community would owe them a debt of gratitude.
If this story was about Office, it would be 'bad' that the problem existed at all.
Yes, it would be bad.
But people are entitled to gripe more loudly about MS Office because they have paid more money for it than for OpenOffice.
When a customer discovers a manufacturing defect in the product they bought from MS there isn't a flurry of refunds forthcoming. Instead, dissatisfied customers might get a free downloadable patch in a while, essentially the same level of redress that OpenOffice.org users got for their defective product.
But updating commercial userland applications is quite a drag
Absolutely.
The same problem exists for Linux, too, if you ask any third party application developer what it takes to support and maintain their product on "Linux".
"Which one? There are so many to choose from!
Windows has more of problem in this area because of its longer history dominating the commercial landscape with so many different versions.
The beginnings of the same problem afflict Linux, where I would like to run 2.6.11, etc. whizbang best support for latest hardware, etc., but commercial vendors lag in their testing and can only guarantee it works under RH7.3, RH9, etc.
In the long run, though, application developers for Linux have it pretty good in terms of interface stability and the ability to just look at the code if there are any questions about the interface. Device driver writers, OTOH, have a much harder job. Their Windows woes won't end just by going to Linux.
You mean like the entire economic policy of the Chinese government for the last 15 years:)?
The high pitched noise you hear is Marx is spinning in his grave because he heard how present day China represents the fulfillment of his vision for a workers' paradise:)
It does wonders for reducing prices and improving quality.
I lived under an electric co-op a few years ago. My experience was that they come into existence to provide electricity to rural areas which are inherently expensive to serve and which utility companies would prefer not to do. Thus, comparing the co-operative to a commerical concern is not always easy or straightforward. A better analogy might be comparison of mail order outdoor equipment vendors like REI, which is also a cooperative.
Thinking of all the cable TV agreements, there's too many cases where communities cede extended monopoly rights to some provider and the customer ends up paying too much money for services they don't want.
Somehow, a system needs to be created where both customers and suppliers can enter and leave the marketplace easily.
Just like with computer hardware, the longer you wait for Linux the better the version you get.
By the time deployment comes it will probably have OpenOffice 2.2, Evolution 2.4, etc.
Success of the project will be measured by office workers shrugging as they get to work on the new systems and finding expected functionality has continued wondering what the big deal was all about.
But Sun trains its employees that its machines are always superior
As a Sun customer, I'd say that Sun machines have historically been much better than x86 hardware and are generally designed, built and tested well.
That's all fine and good. The problem comes in because x86 has become Good Enough® and is much more reasonably priced than Sun hardware.
Anyone observing how small Mom n Pop stores selling quality American made merchandise continually get put out of business as customers flock to Walmart to buy shoddy imported products for less money should be able to see the handwriting on the wall.
most of us who became professional developers do have to pay our dues in support.
and developed an irreplaceable connection with what real customers are like, how they work, what they need, what they appreciate so that when we code up an application there's a better chance that customers will like it.
There's good reason for programmers to spend time with customers.
Sun has really contributed a lot to the UNIX community, but I think they've blundered in their business decisions the last 10 years.
Slashdot Mirror
If you locked one CPU and made that for OS tasks only you'd be wasting a lot of clock cycles that another application could happily use.
Probably wasted in most situations.
But I wonder whether an OS sitting on its hands ready to go in a multiple core machine might be useful in soft realtime applications that need a little improvement in latency.
Picture the Love Boat
Actually, some news articles a few years ago pointed to where crimes committed at sea, particularly on cruise ships, were a problem because of figuring out how to prosecute them.
Needless to say, cruise ship lines were not anxious to have increased publicity shining on incidents like rape, committed by a citzen of country X on a citizen of country Y on a ship registered under a flag of convenience (Liberia, Panama, etc.) in international waters.
Some such crimes were not prosecuted because of those complications and because cruise lines didn't want the publicity from trying the cases in courts easily visible to their customer base.
Now, they have more than enough to worry about people getting the flu from hygenic problems on cruise ships.
derived from the Scottish term get, usually used to refer to an illegitimate child. 'Git' itself is used more broadly though, in much the same way as 'bastard' is.
Consistent, then:)
[In reply to disappointed patch contributors a few years ago Linus once explained that people wanting a builtin kernel debugger should get over the fact that he was bastard and proud of it.]
What would be a nice feature is not just my search history, but an Amazonian-like correlation like
Why is LSB not seeing greater adoption?
I've learned to really appreciate the network transparency
I do, too.
Unfortunately, in the world at large when you mention X Windows you get a confused look as the person wonders if what you're talking about is either somehow related to Mac OS X or is a "Brand X" pale imitation of the wonderful brand name product that is genuine "Windows".
I suggest X.org get with the times.
You've heard of iSCSI for accessing SCSI disks over IP? It's cool. It's recent. It's what all the hipster and groovy people are into.
The next generation of X Windows should not be called something like X11R7, X12, or Y.
It should be called something like iVideo with its own RFC and an i so all the PHBs and IT journalists will know it's cool because it flows over the network, dammit.
[OpenGL hardware level performance is one checkbox item; the other is some infinite resolution support so SVG, PDF, etc. can be rendered without as much intermediate interpretation.]
Maybe the AP will have explicit notifications in each story proudly proclaiming that
[It's just about that way already anyway.]
Worry not! OpenArrogance 1.2.1 has been under active development for years with a strong developer community. It has a broader feature set than VisualArrogance 2005 Pro and costs less, too!
The art world is so much famine with occassional blips of feast, that it's hard for starving artists to feel good about one of their own that strikes it big, particularly if the one striking it big is not regarded as a particularly talented artist among professionals (Thomas Kinkade - who is a certainly a good artist - but arguably not a great artist), or if they happen to get lucky applying a technique that was pioneered by someone else.
Some great artists never get recognized while they're alive.
Artists do help each other out, teaching, learning. Many of them are among the kindest human beings around. But everything I've seen indicates the profession is innately cruel to its own. Pour out your innermost feelings, your identity, your best efforts, and then try to sell them in art shows to raise money to live on.
Is it just me, or didn't Word have great import filters once upon a time? You know, back before Word was defacto standard?
Yes, it did, back when Word had to compete tooth and nail with other products that were already established in the marketplace.
Yes, MS can make good products with compelling features - if they are in a competitive marketplace.
Once they dominate the market, though, there is no need to create what the user wants, just the need to lock-in users tighter to what they are already using.
Exactly the same business model is seen with Internet Explorer which accumulated many great features while Netscape was a competitor and which stagnated with some non-W3C-standard, MS-exclusive behavior after Netscape's coffin was nailed.
It would be better for everybody except current large shareholders of MS if the talent at Microsoft were redirected to what they are quite capable of doing: creating good products in a competitive marketplace. It's a tragedy for consumers and for MS programmers that they have to exist in a monopoly situation where the best business decisions are to build barriers to prevent users from moving to something different.
Multiple views of the same mass o' bookmarks would be a great start.
- Sort by date created.
- Sort by date site last updated.
- Sort by times you, the user, have gone to that particular bookmark.
- Sort by frequency the site updates.
- Sort by date you have most recently visited that site.
then, keywords from the webpages would be nice, but create keyword categories only if multiple bookmarked pages have those same keywords.This would save me from having to manually create folders like "linux" "wimax" "python".
.With a graphical 2D display, it should be possible to automatically create graphs with upper level keywords and then lower level branches to nodes with modifier keywords (such as "linux->kernel", "linux->databases", etc.
Plus, it might be nice to have a feature that creates an RSS feed of "candidate bookmarks" that you can evaluate, depending on how new webpages discovered by Googling for the same keywords as exist in your private bookmarks match.
[Meanwhile, I have an atrocious flat file list of bookmarks accumulated over 10 years that would be useless if it were not for the Search: feature in Firefox.]
If someone can really poison P2P networks with junk that hash matches (and I have a difficult time believing they've cracked all the hash generators), then consider some hypothetical entity probing illicit distribution of copyrighted material using hashes. They could end up making false accusations against individuals for trading trash instead of Trash©.
Would you prefer a 50Mb download
I think I speak for most users when I say they'd prefer they didn't have to download anything.
If a working version of Firefox came with their PC, just as Internet Explorer comes with their PC, then most people would be happy and would probably just use it in the default configuration.
System builders could provide a reasonable version of Firefox with only enough features that could reasonably be supported; the less-used and more fragile features could be loaded onto the harddrive and left to the user if they wanted to change things themselves. Again, without requiring a download.
Of course, all attempts to provide a reasonable improvement that buck the status quo are futile.
What happens is I read the document, find that it gives me a lot of information about certain aspects of the system we are building, but leaves huge gaps in others.
If you can already identify gaps in previous design documents, then you are already qualified to write the next design document.
Apart from that, talk to some other experienced people in your organization and get their take on previous projects failures and delays. Then, see if there is any way to preemptively incorporate measures into the design document to improve your projects chances for success.
[Although, a lot of project success really boils down to getting the right people on the team.]
IIRC, IBM had a project where they actually put a TeX renderer (typesets mathematics better than anything else out there) into a web browser.
If IBM were to push some resources into MathML and TeX rendering as well as SVG for figures, a lot of us in the scientific community would owe them a debt of gratitude.
If this story was about Office, it would be 'bad' that the problem existed at all.
Yes, it would be bad.
But people are entitled to gripe more loudly about MS Office because they have paid more money for it than for OpenOffice.
When a customer discovers a manufacturing defect in the product they bought from MS there isn't a flurry of refunds forthcoming. Instead, dissatisfied customers might get a free downloadable patch in a while, essentially the same level of redress that OpenOffice.org users got for their defective product.
When you pay more, you expect more.
But updating commercial userland applications is quite a drag
Absolutely.
The same problem exists for Linux, too, if you ask any third party application developer what it takes to support and maintain their product on "Linux".
"Which one? There are so many to choose from!
Windows has more of problem in this area because of its longer history dominating the commercial landscape with so many different versions.
The beginnings of the same problem afflict Linux, where I would like to run 2.6.11, etc. whizbang best support for latest hardware, etc., but commercial vendors lag in their testing and can only guarantee it works under RH7.3, RH9, etc.
In the long run, though, application developers for Linux have it pretty good in terms of interface stability and the ability to just look at the code if there are any questions about the interface. Device driver writers, OTOH, have a much harder job. Their Windows woes won't end just by going to Linux.
You mean like the entire economic policy of the Chinese government for the last 15 years:)?
The high pitched noise you hear is Marx is spinning in his grave because he heard how present day China represents the fulfillment of his vision for a workers' paradise:)
COMPETITION IS GOOD
It does wonders for reducing prices and improving quality.
I lived under an electric co-op a few years ago. My experience was that they come into existence to provide electricity to rural areas which are inherently expensive to serve and which utility companies would prefer not to do. Thus, comparing the co-operative to a commerical concern is not always easy or straightforward. A better analogy might be comparison of mail order outdoor equipment vendors like REI, which is also a cooperative.
Thinking of all the cable TV agreements, there's too many cases where communities cede extended monopoly rights to some provider and the customer ends up paying too much money for services they don't want.
Somehow, a system needs to be created where both customers and suppliers can enter and leave the marketplace easily.
It's the people that are getting mentally infected by blogs.
Blogs are enabling rare fringe people to come together in communities unlike ever before.
Society is becoming different because of these of communities that reinforce and develop their special culture using blogs.
Expect many failures of these communities, but also expect a few to produce flourishing growth of ideas that might spread into the non-blogging world.
Would egg revitalization technology work on long-dead female mummies or bog people, assuming one could actually find ova in them?
Just like with computer hardware, the longer you wait for Linux the better the version you get.
By the time deployment comes it will probably have OpenOffice 2.2, Evolution 2.4, etc.
Success of the project will be measured by office workers shrugging as they get to work on the new systems and finding expected functionality has continued wondering what the big deal was all about.
Kind of like the Y2K non-event.
provides $WANT_YOU_WANT right now in 1996!
Again, in 1999.
And again in 2003!
But wait, there's more!
Sigh, and I thought I had it all in 1996!
But Sun trains its employees that its machines are always superior
As a Sun customer, I'd say that Sun machines have historically been much better than x86 hardware and are generally designed, built and tested well.
That's all fine and good. The problem comes in because x86 has become Good Enough® and is much more reasonably priced than Sun hardware.
Anyone observing how small Mom n Pop stores selling quality American made merchandise continually get put out of business as customers flock to Walmart to buy shoddy imported products for less money should be able to see the handwriting on the wall.
most of us who became professional developers do have to pay our dues in support.
and developed an irreplaceable connection with what real customers are like, how they work, what they need, what they appreciate so that when we code up an application there's a better chance that customers will like it.
There's good reason for programmers to spend time with customers.
Sun has really contributed a lot to the UNIX community, but I think they've blundered in their business decisions the last 10 years.