What is your job? Why do you need your tool? Will you ever figure out how to use it?
I have a TI-89, and I am in pre-calc. It works nicely for that. I used to use a TI-83, but it definately had limitations. I used it as a tool for basically two things: graphing functions and doing petty arithmetic (besides the obvious: gaming). My upgrade to the 89 has given me a tool with significantly more capabilities, such as (especially) symbolic manipulation. Now I can let the calc do the dirty work while I concentrate on (a) putting the problem into an equation and (b) interpreting the results. Note that in this situation, I am actually doing most of the work. However, this work is what my mind can handle well. By adding the calculator to the picture, I have removed the necessity of doing all of the work in my head, but (here is the important part for this discussion) I have added the need to interface my brain with the calculator. On one level, I concentrate on what I can do, and on the other level, I concentrate on what the calc can do. There are thus two important requirements that I make of my calculator:
that what it can do and what I can do complement nicely, and
that how it works with things and how I work with things complement nicely.
For me, the TI-89 works well with me. I can do symbolic manipulation, but I don't like to, so I make it do it. It can't interpret what it manipulates outside of its limited context, but I can. On the subject of TI vs HP, the 89 works in the same way as I do. It expresses an expression as a series of subexpressions, and works with things in units. Moreover, my units look like its units. What I am thinking about needs little translation to become what it "thinks" about. Similarly, with its Pretty Print (tm) capability, what it comes up with looks like what I come up with. So while I am solving a problem and need the facilities of my calculator, I can easily transfer the appropriate parts of the problem from my brain to the calculator. In fact, my brain and the calculator are so compatible that I often use the calculator to temporarily store results that I get in my brain, and then recall them later either back into the brain or use them again in the calculator.
With an HP and RPN, I have to go through much more mental rigor to put what I'm thinking into something that it can understand. My brain does not work in a stack; it works in a string. My brain is in-fix, the HP is post-fix. To have to constantly change around the two would require too much work for me to use it as a tool in the completion of a problem. I would only use it for arithmetic.
Most of the specifics of the above apply to me. However, if you think about how your brain works, you should be able to apply those same concepts to determine which tool is best for you. I can conceive how someone might work best with a stack, but I am not one of them. I guess the whole point of this post is that the calculator is a tool for you; it must "fit in your hand". There can be no one method for everyone. There are some things that I don't like about the TI-89. But overall, I think that it is really the best tool for me; I feel comfortable using it.
In the above, I have almost totally ignored the subject of games. If gaming is your thing, and calculating is something secondary, a TI is the way to go. There are far more games available for any TI calculator than for an HP calculator. You will find almost anything, from simple guess-the-number-deluxe games to Quake clones. ASM programming has allowed blindingly-fast, powerful games to come around, and there is even a C compiler available for the 68k calcs (89, 92, 92+) (it's called TI-GCC if you are looking).
There are Casio graphing calculators available, some in color, but they are Casio. Don't expect that much. (This is based on other people's comments to me.) The choice really is between TI and HP.
Kenneth
PS - TI-89 important note: don't get AMS 2.03. I won't even start to try to describe what I have gone through with that Flash ROM "upgrade". You're curious? I had to give it the equivalent of "format c:" (DOS) or "mke2fs/dev/hda1" (Unix).
PPS - Speaking of Unix, since the TI-89 is an m68k-based computer, is there a version of Linux that will run on it? I am tired of it crashing.
He says that the 'net will be replaced by the "Information Superhighway" (read, good old Internet with Microsoft "improvements"), which of couse didn't happen. However, many of the things that he discusses in TRA are here now, while others have proved to be bad, impossible, or already here. It was a "predicting the future" book, and we know that no one can predict the future. But Mr. Gates seems to have had some pretty good guesses in his years.
Where does he say that CD-ROM is the future of the industry? In any case, CD-ROMs (and now DVDs) will be around for quite a while. Simple reason? You can carry it with you. Can't do that with net.
(Just noticed that nowhere in that book did he mention Linux. Well it was circa '95, and Linux has done a lot of growing and evolving since then. And anyway, it's Bill Gates we're talking about here.)
...which of the small companies would Gates stay with "officially" (i.e., hold a position at) if Microsoft broke up. (Or would he hold "part-time" positions at all of them or something?) I think that he would personally want to stay with whatever division did Windows, since it is derivitive software from what really entered Microsoft into the software world, that is, MS-DOS. However, I think that he would stay with whatever company did IE and the other Internet stuff (just look in his book The Road Ahead and I think you'll see why). The above assumes that if there is a split, then it would be horizontal rather than vertical (which I think it will be).
This is an interesting conflict of interest. The interests of those companies who make DVD movies are to sell as many units as possible. Yet, the goal of the DVD CA is only to sell licenses.
By providing the technology for decoding the information encoded in the units, the licences are in jeopardy. (I am talking here about stuff other than normal DVD players for Windows, such as DeCSS.) However, in today's world, the units still matter. Sure I'd buy a ten or twenty dollar DVD with a movie on it any day instead of using up more than a hundred dollars of hard disk space (in most cases) to store a decrypted movie. And redistribution of video is nowhere near in this picture. You can copy a DVD without decrypting its contents. And since the files are so huge, distribution over the Net is not much of a concern. The only problem I could forsee is someone clipping a small portion of the DVD video out and (a) watching it him/herself, (b) compiling it onto a DVD with other such clips and distributing it, or posting it up on the Internet for others to see. In any of those and other possible cases, the problem is much less than most people are considering. I could get pretty darn good quality out of capturing some video on an S-VHS tape and distributing that, yet there is no encryption on video tapes to begin with.
Basically: What's the problem? Why not worry about something else and leave these cool open-source people alone?
Show your support for our side. Protect freedom of speech, the copyright rules, and cool hacks.
Lots of people got rich; not me.
on
AOL Nation
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Said it in the subject. Too bad I didn't know.
Okay, the following is kind of off-topic, but I want to connect to AOL (read, "the new empire") from my Linux box. There was one protocol hack posted up at foo.org (search freshmeat for AOL), but the page isn't there anymore. I downloaded the program while it was available, and it doesn't work but I probably am not using it the right way anyway. He did not comment his code at all (readme is one line with his name and e-mail).
So people, are there any AOL protocol hacks that are in active development? (I'm excluding the AIM clients; there are tons of them.)
that a microkernel is required if you want to retain compatibility with older (not so old, and even some newer) Macs, which Apple of course does. Varying technology, like NuBus, Open Firmware in some but not others, etc., was previously hidden beneath a hardware abstraction layer (as was a heck of a lot of other stuff) buried within the System. To run anything like a BSD kernel on such a mish-mash of hardwares smoothly and without hardware-compatibility ickiness seeping up to the kernel developer / modifier or even user a microkernel is necessary. (note that Linux developers have to deal with a lot of hardware compatability ickiness, but they did it quite well) Don't think that it's bad; I think it's quite likely that Darwin could run Linux. In fact, the Mach microkernel currently does, for Apple's MkLinux.
Microkernels hide the hardware specific details from the programmer. Good thing.
What exactly do you mean by "old kernels"? (good grammar OFF) The current stable branch as opposed to devel? Early patchlevels of the current stable? Old stable (2.0.x)? (good grammar sort of ON)
I can't argue with "well tested." This is definately a necessity in a production, or even casual user's environment. However, I do contest your latter two points. First, the C libraries do not change, or should not change, from kernel to kernel. The only user-space C code that could change is the kernel include files, which are relatively simple (thus much less prone to error) and usually do not change much, if at all, from kernel to kernel. (Where there are changes, they usually do not involve the set of functions used by user programs, only kernel administration programs such as modprobe, ipchains, etc..) Thus there is also little or no concern about the programs that can run under that kernel.
I must also point out (the approprateness of the following point to the discussion is based on your definition of "old kernel", as questioned earlier) that an individual patchlevel is not itself updated when bugs are fixed. It is brought up to the next higher numbered patchlevel. The problem is that these new patchlevels can also introduce new features, which may (and usually does) involve questionable (that is, not guaranteed to be bug-free) code. Then, when these bugs are found, the patchlevel increases again, and more questionable code may be introduced. The developers wind up spending too much time on the stable branch and rarely coming out with something that is truely stable. This was my point (see my "Addendum" reply if the point seems unclear). Leave the stable branch the same if possible. No new features. Leave that for the new devel. Just make it and keep it bug-free.
That would be a suitable conclusion, but I have a few more issues. With no flamebait intended, I think that Microsoft's Win95 to Win95 upgrade was a good thing. They fixed a lot more than one bug (though they clearly added some), improved the UI, and added some handy features like taskbar toolbars that made the OS upgrade worthwhile. It isn't a very difficult upgrade in any case (though the cost may be prohibiting to some and annoying to most others). If uptime is critical and the system is any more than a small server, the administrators would use (I'll stick with Microsoft products here) Windows NT / Windows 2000 anyway.
I cannot argue with you or anyone else that there are systems which absolutely must remain up. In fact, this absolutely supports both my original and revised points. The IDE and NFS issues would not be here if the kernel developers only fixed bugs in the stable branch and made sure that the development branch was bug-free before releasing it to the masses. Keep in mind, however, that, at least in most cases, you are not required to upgrage your kernel. If a hospital or airline is using an older version of the kernel and it works fine for their purposes, then they do not have to upgrade to the latest kernel.
Common interpretation seems to go against what I had intended to say. I really meant that, for every kernel release, the stable branch should be mostly static (and compared to the development it almost is) in general. I'm not a kernel insider so I don't know these things, but why IDE and [N]FS are broken should not be a concern today. After a few patchlevels to fix any bugs discovered by the increased number of systems running the stable kernels, the stable branch should stay static unless some very important bugfix or highly demanded feature comes along that can be integrated easily and without introducing [m]any bugs. The kernel developers should then concentrate fully on the development kernel, not worrying about the stable branch at all, and prefect the development branch. Then, when the development kernel runs out of things to fix and improve, it should be released as the stable and basically kept the same after that. Hmmm... that vaguely sounds like the original intent of the two-branched kernel.
Just curious (don't have enough time to search for myself), why is NFS, etc., "broken"? Was it "broken" in the older (2.2.2) patchlevels? And if so, why didn't the NFS maintainers fix it before releasing the kernel as stable? (See above)
If you think that this sounds like some pathetic, stupid, wrong, whining Linux newbie, then you are likely correct; I am not "in the know" as much as others.
Stable is pretty good. Concentrate on the devel branch and get us 2.4, guys. Any work on 2.2.x is going to be practically scrapped anyway come 2.4. I'm happy with 2.2.13.
Okay, maybe there are a few minor bugfixes. Ah well, my arguments never hold up any good anyway.
In a little while, try FreeMWare. It's a free, open-source alternative to VMWare developed by some of the same people as were working on Bochs. Right now I wouldn't try it because they are in the pre-alpha stage. Check back in about 6 months.
Kenneth
PS - I think that VMWare is put together well, making it almost worth the cost.
From colored Palms, to colored intelligent vaccuum cleaners in less than a day. Neat.
Now hey, wait a second. Plug your color Palm into your colored intelligent vacuum cleaner and do away with the computer but retain the flexability! I'd like to see a program for the Palm that could control the cye with either its own serial remote or sitting on its back and plugged into the RJ45 (with some kind of splitter so you could plug something else in, too; I don't know the specifics of how this expansion adapter is wired up). Then you can crash your computer in all the different geek ways you can think of and you still get your vacuuming done for you:-). As an added bonus you get a local display (messages from bot and other Homo sapiens) and control ("Hey, get me a drink, then go vacuum up the mess the guys made in the living room."). Forget clapping, start tapping. The only thing I'd be worried about is the requirements of the little Palm processor.
As it stands, I can't afford one anyways.:-(
I think the same thing whenever one of these cool geek toys comes up. That's [one of the reasons] why I like Linux!
Totally! When was the last time Intel actually came out with a new core? PPro? Compare that to the G4. MegaHertz are nice to have, but what's that mean? Let's get a good core that does what we want fast anyway, and then worry about making it super-fast. The G4 did that and as a bonus introduced a real sweet vector engine that beats the crap out of an equivalent x86. Don't try to mark this as Mac-praising flamebait, I've got a P3-450 and we've used x86 since before the 80286.
Who really needs all that processor power. Get a nice video card for your awesome games that has its own accelerated processor for your 3D stuff and a P120 for mp3's. (Not a P90: that's fine for just playing mp3's, but of course we all do work at the same time, don't we?)
Can't say anything about Alphas 'cuz I don't have one. Another far-fetched wish list item...
Just wanted to point out that MkLinux is a microkernel (the open-source Mach microkernel). But fourtunately the monolithic LinuxPPC runs on most every new Mac. (I don't know about the G4; I haven't checked in a while.)
I will not argue with your later facts about Linux, because they are correct IM(H)O.
Actually, I think that in many cases splitting the kernel would make things easier, not harder. What's to say you can't have some core functionality that is automatically part of every architecture, like FS code, high-level SCSI, and that stuff? The kernel has already been partially split; note the different asm/architecture folders. There is a lot of crap from one architecture that gets mixed in with stuff for other architectures. Who needs PCI on a Palm? Who needs ISA ethernet cards on a Mac? (LinuxPPC and MkLinux)
I'd rather spend my limited 38.4k bandwidth on those 3 mp3's. Problem is, I never find good rips (128k, 44.1 stereo) for what I want. Most of that stuff is illegal anyway (Hey guys! Want some open-source mp3's?).
Ah, make clean. Come to think about it, I guess that's where I screwed up with the patch. Found out about it later, but didn't bother because I was too busy, so of course I forgot. For 2.4, however, I am going to grab the tarball; I want it fresh. Yeah, it's worth the wait.
Back then I was a new user. patch was a confusing program. What the $!#@#$ do they mean by patch -p0? And where the $!$#%@# am I supposed to run it in? And why the #!$@^ does it keep asking me where those files were? New uses get tired of yelling at their computer after a while. Only after a lot of profanity did I discover that buried in the kernel sources was a little script known as patch-kernel. Ah, !#@#$!. And to make things worse, a couple days later I see a detailed how-to. One part of my mind says there is no such thing as luck. The other part constantly curses at the first part for always being right.
Splitting the tarball is exactly what I was talking about.
Help me too! Those of us who are not blessed with multi-T3 internet connections and so happen not to have 50+ megs of hard drive space to play around with are a bit out of luck:-( Fourtunately there are patches, but I'm personally worried about messing it up if I patch more than 2 times or so. Split the kernel based on architecture, guys! Of course there is the argument of being able to cross-compile and stuff, but how many people are actually going to bother cross-compiling a kernel, and of those who are, can you wait another couple of minutes at most for a kernel with the ASM and drivers for that architecture to download?
FreeMWare is virtualization, where the processor code is run natively (as just another process; for CPU techies, it's Ring 3) but the VM program modifies it so that Bad Stuff (tm), like executing privilaged instructions and reading stuff that con't be controlled, doesn't cause lots of s..t. Obviously this wouldn't work if the processor wasn't an x86. (Sorry, other replier) Now the different host architectures idea is theoretically possible. Bochs is currently working on something like this, where the code is run on a VM, but there is a little mini-virtualization process going on that translates x86 code into native processor code. This can be slow but if you cache the code right you can probably get near-VMWare speeds. I haven't checked how far along this is in development.
Argh! Information overload! Trace to every component in the system!?!? Obviously gotta restrict the devices or the time during which the tracing is performed or both. I think this would also slow things down significantly. What might help is a driver-level trace, i.e., everying that goes into a specific host device from the VM gets logged in some intelligible format. I can't really see how hardware developers could benefit from this, though.
MAJOR STABILITY ISSUE, depending on what you call direct access to a real piece of hardware. If you are going to let some foreign program access the interrupts, shared memory, DMAs, and all that stuff of a device, if the VM crashes it could bring the rest of the system with it. And guess which OS is the primary guest OS for VMWare/Linux, and thus FreeMWare? Exactly. And what do you mean by "host your host O/S? Reboot you VM!"? I don't get it.
Taling about a "bitchin' development environment": 95, 98, NT, 2000, Linux, *BSD, Be, and a few others, all running in VM's on a Linux host, plus MacOS, WinCE, TI-89 (never mind), etc. in virtualizing emulators. Auto cross-compile through virtualization and wrapper functions that get optimized away. Automatic duplication of test input data with compensation for OS-specific features to test for determinism. Use VNC to remotely control test machines on platforms you don't have VMs for. Auto-tgz or tar.bz2. Automatic snapshot every day, automated upload to web site. Debug automatically picks the host where the rest of the stuff gets in the way least and lets you debug that. Hardware I/O is logged intelligently so that only what you need to see is tracked. I'm sure other people have much better ideas, but that's mine.
Everything has a purpose, even "Junk" DNA. I think that in addition to the other reasons that have been mentioned, it is just there to take up space. Seriously, if a chromosome were only large enough for the "real" genes, there would be less of a chance for the enzymes to bump into it. I'm no scientist, though. Maybe the junk DNA helps to point the enzymes to the right gene or something. But that's not my point. My point is that it has a purpose that we probably will never completely understand. Genetics in the context of evolution is kind of like the monkeys and the typewriters. We will never know what was actually going through their minds when they reproduced Shakespeare, only that they did.
Before you go blindly accepting my opinions, let's propose a few alternatives, shall we?
Junk DNA is God's comments to himself. Example: near hemoglobin:
Important. Make sure not to delete. Backup copies stored at 1,556, 65,426, and 1,632,747. Does stuff in red corpuscles. Has something to do with oxygen. Don't allow near carbon monoxide. Activate in red corpuscles only. TODO: Tweak binding abilities to favor O2, get rid of sickle-cell defect vulnerability. Copyright iiixmba, God.
Alternatives: There are codings for several different complete people embedded in the Junk DNA. Their personalities sometimes show through. I think one of my alternatives was a lunatic.
Garbage: You gotta take it out yourself, kid.
ESP: Subtle vibrations picked up by the extra DNA make it resonate at a very specific frequency, allowing some people a "sixth sense".
It's where your junk [e-mail|snail-mail|phone calls] are stored for immediate retrival at any time when not desired.
That's enough! You should have been able to tell that they're all bogus. Well if how much junk DNA you have represents how pure you are, I'm highly adultrated with imperfections. Darn.
Hey, I was that age much more recently than a lot of you (I'm 14). If you asked me what Windows was I would point at the glass panes in the wall. I forget what we had, I think it was a 286, and we still have an 8086 that I think was already outdated then (can't be sure though, I was only 3 or 4). I knew how to do a subset of things on the computer. I knew dir, copy, erase/del, format (I was smart enough to avoid that command), and psd, which launched the New Print Shop Deluxe. I was an expert at that program. It was a greeting-card/letterhead/calander deal, and in a few days of sitting at it I had figured out what everything did. You would be suprised how much little kids can learn on their own if it's interesting. And the fact is that computers are interesting. Why? They (generally) obey your commands. They don't talk back to you, and when they do, it's not to punish you, but to guide you. I hated "Bad command or file name", but it gave me information, as opposed to much of my parents' yelling. I couldn't count up to the number of "I Love You Mommy" cards I made. My point is that little children are smarter than you think if you give them a reason to be. The computer immeadiately enthralled me, at first sort of like a stupid television program attracts your attention, but after a while like a good television show makes you wait for a commercial to race to the bathroom, and as a bonus you could call in and say whatever you wanted.
Another memory is WordStar 2000. You had to put in a different 5.5" floppy for the different functions, like spell check, print, etc. And it was so slow--you type in a paragraph of text and you find it still working on the first line. I remember that its user interface (text) was not intuitive, and I found it forbiddingly complicated. That was back in the days of function key templates, and I hated them.
Speaking of function key templates, there was one game that I liked called MoonBugs. It had a template, but I quickly learned the keys to use because the game was fun. I forget the point of it.
If I had instead started my "training" on a Unix, I think that I would have found it even easier. The user-based permission system fits in perfectly with how parents assign privilages. The command line of DOS was borrowed from Unix. And you can do more things, because back then Unix was maturing, but DOS never matured, and neither did any of its successors.
From the above the not-lazy comment reader can glean a few important pieces of information. One of the important ones is that a simplistic user interface is better. Design your user interfaces so that a 3-year-old could use it. Also, less is more. The fewer settings for the possible options, or the fewer commands for the possible activities, the easier the program is to use (with exceptions). I like MS Office because everything is neatly laid out, and there are multiple ways to do things that correspond to a different mental "mode". I hope that this was "Informative", "Interesting", and all of those other capitalized good words, but that's just a hope.
Kenneth Arnold
PS - If you want another glimpse into my early mind, note that I started programming (in BASIC) when I was 6 or 7. I have always liked solving problems in a step-by-step pattern, and it so happens that much of real computing is solving problems.
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What is your job? Why do you need your tool? Will you ever figure out how to use it?
I have a TI-89, and I am in pre-calc. It works nicely for that. I used to use a TI-83, but it definately had limitations. I used it as a tool for basically two things: graphing functions and doing petty arithmetic (besides the obvious: gaming). My upgrade to the 89 has given me a tool with significantly more capabilities, such as (especially) symbolic manipulation. Now I can let the calc do the dirty work while I concentrate on (a) putting the problem into an equation and (b) interpreting the results. Note that in this situation, I am actually doing most of the work. However, this work is what my mind can handle well. By adding the calculator to the picture, I have removed the necessity of doing all of the work in my head, but (here is the important part for this discussion) I have added the need to interface my brain with the calculator. On one level, I concentrate on what I can do, and on the other level, I concentrate on what the calc can do. There are thus two important requirements that I make of my calculator:
For me, the TI-89 works well with me. I can do symbolic manipulation, but I don't like to, so I make it do it. It can't interpret what it manipulates outside of its limited context, but I can. On the subject of TI vs HP, the 89 works in the same way as I do. It expresses an expression as a series of subexpressions, and works with things in units. Moreover, my units look like its units. What I am thinking about needs little translation to become what it "thinks" about. Similarly, with its Pretty Print (tm) capability, what it comes up with looks like what I come up with. So while I am solving a problem and need the facilities of my calculator, I can easily transfer the appropriate parts of the problem from my brain to the calculator. In fact, my brain and the calculator are so compatible that I often use the calculator to temporarily store results that I get in my brain, and then recall them later either back into the brain or use them again in the calculator.
With an HP and RPN, I have to go through much more mental rigor to put what I'm thinking into something that it can understand. My brain does not work in a stack; it works in a string. My brain is in-fix, the HP is post-fix. To have to constantly change around the two would require too much work for me to use it as a tool in the completion of a problem. I would only use it for arithmetic.
Most of the specifics of the above apply to me. However, if you think about how your brain works, you should be able to apply those same concepts to determine which tool is best for you. I can conceive how someone might work best with a stack, but I am not one of them. I guess the whole point of this post is that the calculator is a tool for you; it must "fit in your hand". There can be no one method for everyone. There are some things that I don't like about the TI-89. But overall, I think that it is really the best tool for me; I feel comfortable using it.
In the above, I have almost totally ignored the subject of games. If gaming is your thing, and calculating is something secondary, a TI is the way to go. There are far more games available for any TI calculator than for an HP calculator. You will find almost anything, from simple guess-the-number-deluxe games to Quake clones. ASM programming has allowed blindingly-fast, powerful games to come around, and there is even a C compiler available for the 68k calcs (89, 92, 92+) (it's called TI-GCC if you are looking).There are Casio graphing calculators available, some in color, but they are Casio. Don't expect that much. (This is based on other people's comments to me.) The choice really is between TI and HP.
Kenneth
PS - TI-89 important note: don't get AMS 2.03. I won't even start to try to describe what I have gone through with that Flash ROM "upgrade". You're curious? I had to give it the equivalent of "format c:" (DOS) or "mke2fs /dev/hda1" (Unix).
PPS - Speaking of Unix, since the TI-89 is an m68k-based computer, is there a version of Linux that will run on it? I am tired of it crashing.
He says that the 'net will be replaced by the "Information Superhighway" (read, good old Internet with Microsoft "improvements"), which of couse didn't happen. However, many of the things that he discusses in TRA are here now, while others have proved to be bad, impossible, or already here. It was a "predicting the future" book, and we know that no one can predict the future. But Mr. Gates seems to have had some pretty good guesses in his years.
Where does he say that CD-ROM is the future of the industry? In any case, CD-ROMs (and now DVDs) will be around for quite a while. Simple reason? You can carry it with you. Can't do that with net.
(Just noticed that nowhere in that book did he mention Linux. Well it was circa '95, and Linux has done a lot of growing and evolving since then. And anyway, it's Bill Gates we're talking about here.)
Ken
...which of the small companies would Gates stay with "officially" (i.e., hold a position at) if Microsoft broke up. (Or would he hold "part-time" positions at all of them or something?) I think that he would personally want to stay with whatever division did Windows, since it is derivitive software from what really entered Microsoft into the software world, that is, MS-DOS. However, I think that he would stay with whatever company did IE and the other Internet stuff (just look in his book The Road Ahead and I think you'll see why). The above assumes that if there is a split, then it would be horizontal rather than vertical (which I think it will be).
Ken
Anybody got another answer?
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This is an interesting conflict of interest. The interests of those companies who make DVD movies are to sell as many units as possible. Yet, the goal of the DVD CA is only to sell licenses.
By providing the technology for decoding the information encoded in the units, the licences are in jeopardy. (I am talking here about stuff other than normal DVD players for Windows, such as DeCSS.) However, in today's world, the units still matter. Sure I'd buy a ten or twenty dollar DVD with a movie on it any day instead of using up more than a hundred dollars of hard disk space (in most cases) to store a decrypted movie. And redistribution of video is nowhere near in this picture. You can copy a DVD without decrypting its contents. And since the files are so huge, distribution over the Net is not much of a concern. The only problem I could forsee is someone clipping a small portion of the DVD video out and (a) watching it him/herself, (b) compiling it onto a DVD with other such clips and distributing it, or posting it up on the Internet for others to see. In any of those and other possible cases, the problem is much less than most people are considering. I could get pretty darn good quality out of capturing some video on an S-VHS tape and distributing that, yet there is no encryption on video tapes to begin with.
Basically: What's the problem? Why not worry about something else and leave these cool open-source people alone?
Show your support for our side. Protect freedom of speech, the copyright rules, and cool hacks.
Said it in the subject. Too bad I didn't know.
Okay, the following is kind of off-topic, but I want to connect to AOL (read, "the new empire") from my Linux box. There was one protocol hack posted up at foo.org (search freshmeat for AOL), but the page isn't there anymore. I downloaded the program while it was available, and it doesn't work but I probably am not using it the right way anyway. He did not comment his code at all (readme is one line with his name and e-mail).
So people, are there any AOL protocol hacks that are in active development? (I'm excluding the AIM clients; there are tons of them.)
Ken
that a microkernel is required if you want to retain compatibility with older (not so old, and even some newer) Macs, which Apple of course does. Varying technology, like NuBus, Open Firmware in some but not others, etc., was previously hidden beneath a hardware abstraction layer (as was a heck of a lot of other stuff) buried within the System. To run anything like a BSD kernel on such a mish-mash of hardwares smoothly and without hardware-compatibility ickiness seeping up to the kernel developer / modifier or even user a microkernel is necessary. (note that Linux developers have to deal with a lot of hardware compatability ickiness, but they did it quite well) Don't think that it's bad; I think it's quite likely that Darwin could run Linux. In fact, the Mach microkernel currently does, for Apple's MkLinux.
Microkernels hide the hardware specific details from the programmer. Good thing.
What exactly do you mean by "old kernels"? (good grammar OFF) The current stable branch as opposed to devel? Early patchlevels of the current stable? Old stable (2.0.x)? (good grammar sort of ON)
I can't argue with "well tested." This is definately a necessity in a production, or even casual user's environment. However, I do contest your latter two points. First, the C libraries do not change, or should not change, from kernel to kernel. The only user-space C code that could change is the kernel include files, which are relatively simple (thus much less prone to error) and usually do not change much, if at all, from kernel to kernel. (Where there are changes, they usually do not involve the set of functions used by user programs, only kernel administration programs such as modprobe, ipchains, etc..) Thus there is also little or no concern about the programs that can run under that kernel.
I must also point out (the approprateness of the following point to the discussion is based on your definition of "old kernel", as questioned earlier) that an individual patchlevel is not itself updated when bugs are fixed. It is brought up to the next higher numbered patchlevel. The problem is that these new patchlevels can also introduce new features, which may (and usually does) involve questionable (that is, not guaranteed to be bug-free) code. Then, when these bugs are found, the patchlevel increases again, and more questionable code may be introduced. The developers wind up spending too much time on the stable branch and rarely coming out with something that is truely stable. This was my point (see my "Addendum" reply if the point seems unclear). Leave the stable branch the same if possible. No new features. Leave that for the new devel. Just make it and keep it bug-free.
That would be a suitable conclusion, but I have a few more issues. With no flamebait intended, I think that Microsoft's Win95 to Win95 upgrade was a good thing. They fixed a lot more than one bug (though they clearly added some), improved the UI, and added some handy features like taskbar toolbars that made the OS upgrade worthwhile. It isn't a very difficult upgrade in any case (though the cost may be prohibiting to some and annoying to most others). If uptime is critical and the system is any more than a small server, the administrators would use (I'll stick with Microsoft products here) Windows NT / Windows 2000 anyway.
I cannot argue with you or anyone else that there are systems which absolutely must remain up. In fact, this absolutely supports both my original and revised points. The IDE and NFS issues would not be here if the kernel developers only fixed bugs in the stable branch and made sure that the development branch was bug-free before releasing it to the masses. Keep in mind, however, that, at least in most cases, you are not required to upgrage your kernel. If a hospital or airline is using an older version of the kernel and it works fine for their purposes, then they do not have to upgrade to the latest kernel.
That's all.
Common interpretation seems to go against what I had intended to say. I really meant that, for every kernel release, the stable branch should be mostly static (and compared to the development it almost is) in general. I'm not a kernel insider so I don't know these things, but why IDE and [N]FS are broken should not be a concern today. After a few patchlevels to fix any bugs discovered by the increased number of systems running the stable kernels, the stable branch should stay static unless some very important bugfix or highly demanded feature comes along that can be integrated easily and without introducing [m]any bugs. The kernel developers should then concentrate fully on the development kernel, not worrying about the stable branch at all, and prefect the development branch. Then, when the development kernel runs out of things to fix and improve, it should be released as the stable and basically kept the same after that. Hmmm... that vaguely sounds like the original intent of the two-branched kernel.
Just curious (don't have enough time to search for myself), why is NFS, etc., "broken"? Was it "broken" in the older (2.2.2) patchlevels? And if so, why didn't the NFS maintainers fix it before releasing the kernel as stable? (See above)
If you think that this sounds like some pathetic, stupid, wrong, whining Linux newbie, then you are likely correct; I am not "in the know" as much as others.
...but figured that correcting my correction would be too degrading, not to mention utterly boring for anyone reading. Yeah, anal.
Ah well, my arguments never hold up any good anyway. should have read My arguments never hold up any well anyway.
I often catch other people on that type of error; I should catch myself also.
Stable is pretty good. Concentrate on the devel branch and get us 2.4, guys. Any work on 2.2.x is going to be practically scrapped anyway come 2.4. I'm happy with 2.2.13.
Okay, maybe there are a few minor bugfixes. Ah well, my arguments never hold up any good anyway.
In a little while, try FreeMWare. It's a free, open-source alternative to VMWare developed by some of the same people as were working on Bochs. Right now I wouldn't try it because they are in the pre-alpha stage. Check back in about 6 months.
Kenneth
PS - I think that VMWare is put together well, making it almost worth the cost.
How does Slashdot handle the Slashdot effect?
From colored Palms, to colored intelligent vaccuum cleaners in less than a day. Neat.
Now hey, wait a second. Plug your color Palm into your colored intelligent vacuum cleaner and do away with the computer but retain the flexability! I'd like to see a program for the Palm that could control the cye with either its own serial remote or sitting on its back and plugged into the RJ45 (with some kind of splitter so you could plug something else in, too; I don't know the specifics of how this expansion adapter is wired up). Then you can crash your computer in all the different geek ways you can think of and you still get your vacuuming done for you :-). As an added bonus you get a local display (messages from bot and other Homo sapiens) and control ("Hey, get me a drink, then go vacuum up the mess the guys made in the living room."). Forget clapping, start tapping. The only thing I'd be worried about is the requirements of the little Palm processor.
As it stands, I can't afford one anyways. :-(
I think the same thing whenever one of these cool geek toys comes up. That's [one of the reasons] why I like Linux!
Kenneth
Totally! When was the last time Intel actually came out with a new core? PPro? Compare that to the G4. MegaHertz are nice to have, but what's that mean? Let's get a good core that does what we want fast anyway, and then worry about making it super-fast. The G4 did that and as a bonus introduced a real sweet vector engine that beats the crap out of an equivalent x86. Don't try to mark this as Mac-praising flamebait, I've got a P3-450 and we've used x86 since before the 80286.
Who really needs all that processor power. Get a nice video card for your awesome games that has its own accelerated processor for your 3D stuff and a P120 for mp3's. (Not a P90: that's fine for just playing mp3's, but of course we all do work at the same time, don't we?)
Can't say anything about Alphas 'cuz I don't have one. Another far-fetched wish list item...
Ken
Have fun, people. You can figure it out :-)
Just wanted to point out that MkLinux is a microkernel (the open-source Mach microkernel). But fourtunately the monolithic LinuxPPC runs on most every new Mac. (I don't know about the G4; I haven't checked in a while.)
I will not argue with your later facts about Linux, because they are correct IM(H)O.
Ken
Actually, I think that in many cases splitting the kernel would make things easier, not harder. What's to say you can't have some core functionality that is automatically part of every architecture, like FS code, high-level SCSI, and that stuff? The kernel has already been partially split; note the different asm/architecture folders. There is a lot of crap from one architecture that gets mixed in with stuff for other architectures. Who needs PCI on a Palm? Who needs ISA ethernet cards on a Mac? (LinuxPPC and MkLinux)
I'd rather spend my limited 38.4k bandwidth on those 3 mp3's. Problem is, I never find good rips (128k, 44.1 stereo) for what I want. Most of that stuff is illegal anyway (Hey guys! Want some open-source mp3's ?).
Kenneth
Ah, make clean. Come to think about it, I guess that's where I screwed up with the patch. Found out about it later, but didn't bother because I was too busy, so of course I forgot. For 2.4, however, I am going to grab the tarball; I want it fresh. Yeah, it's worth the wait.
Back then I was a new user. patch was a confusing program. What the $!#@#$ do they mean by patch -p0? And where the $!$#%@# am I supposed to run it in? And why the #!$@^ does it keep asking me where those files were? New uses get tired of yelling at their computer after a while. Only after a lot of profanity did I discover that buried in the kernel sources was a little script known as patch-kernel. Ah, !#@#$!. And to make things worse, a couple days later I see a detailed how-to. One part of my mind says there is no such thing as luck. The other part constantly curses at the first part for always being right.
Splitting the tarball is exactly what I was talking about.
Kenneth, ex-new uesr
Just wanted to point out that is a microkernel (the open-source Mach microkernel). But fourtunately the monolithic runs on most every new Mac. (I don't know about the G4; I haven't checked in a while.)
I will not argue with your later facts about Linux, because they are correct IM(H)O.
Ken
Help me too! Those of us who are not blessed with multi-T3 internet connections and so happen not to have 50+ megs of hard drive space to play around with are a bit out of luck :-( Fourtunately there are patches, but I'm personally worried about messing it up if I patch more than 2 times or so. Split the kernel based on architecture, guys! Of course there is the argument of being able to cross-compile and stuff, but how many people are actually going to bother cross-compiling a kernel, and of those who are, can you wait another couple of minutes at most for a kernel with the ASM and drivers for that architecture to download?
GET linux-2.4.1-i386.tar.bz2
How hard can that be?
Kenneth
Taling about a "bitchin' development environment": 95, 98, NT, 2000, Linux, *BSD, Be, and a few others, all running in VM's on a Linux host, plus MacOS, WinCE, TI-89 (never mind), etc. in virtualizing emulators. Auto cross-compile through virtualization and wrapper functions that get optimized away. Automatic duplication of test input data with compensation for OS-specific features to test for determinism. Use VNC to remotely control test machines on platforms you don't have VMs for. Auto-tgz or tar.bz2. Automatic snapshot every day, automated upload to web site. Debug automatically picks the host where the rest of the stuff gets in the way least and lets you debug that. Hardware I/O is logged intelligently so that only what you need to see is tracked. I'm sure other people have much better ideas, but that's mine.
Ken
Everything has a purpose, even "Junk" DNA. I think that in addition to the other reasons that have been mentioned, it is just there to take up space. Seriously, if a chromosome were only large enough for the "real" genes, there would be less of a chance for the enzymes to bump into it. I'm no scientist, though. Maybe the junk DNA helps to point the enzymes to the right gene or something. But that's not my point. My point is that it has a purpose that we probably will never completely understand. Genetics in the context of evolution is kind of like the monkeys and the typewriters. We will never know what was actually going through their minds when they reproduced Shakespeare, only that they did.
Before you go blindly accepting my opinions, let's propose a few alternatives, shall we?
That's enough! You should have been able to tell that they're all bogus. Well if how much junk DNA you have represents how pure you are, I'm highly adultrated with imperfections. Darn.
Ken
Hey, I was that age much more recently than a lot of you (I'm 14). If you asked me what Windows was I would point at the glass panes in the wall. I forget what we had, I think it was a 286, and we still have an 8086 that I think was already outdated then (can't be sure though, I was only 3 or 4). I knew how to do a subset of things on the computer. I knew dir, copy, erase/del, format (I was smart enough to avoid that command), and psd, which launched the New Print Shop Deluxe. I was an expert at that program. It was a greeting-card/letterhead/calander deal, and in a few days of sitting at it I had figured out what everything did. You would be suprised how much little kids can learn on their own if it's interesting. And the fact is that computers are interesting. Why? They (generally) obey your commands. They don't talk back to you, and when they do, it's not to punish you, but to guide you. I hated "Bad command or file name", but it gave me information, as opposed to much of my parents' yelling. I couldn't count up to the number of "I Love You Mommy" cards I made. My point is that little children are smarter than you think if you give them a reason to be. The computer immeadiately enthralled me, at first sort of like a stupid television program attracts your attention, but after a while like a good television show makes you wait for a commercial to race to the bathroom, and as a bonus you could call in and say whatever you wanted.
Another memory is WordStar 2000. You had to put in a different 5.5" floppy for the different functions, like spell check, print, etc. And it was so slow--you type in a paragraph of text and you find it still working on the first line. I remember that its user interface (text) was not intuitive, and I found it forbiddingly complicated. That was back in the days of function key templates, and I hated them.
Speaking of function key templates, there was one game that I liked called MoonBugs. It had a template, but I quickly learned the keys to use because the game was fun. I forget the point of it.
If I had instead started my "training" on a Unix, I think that I would have found it even easier. The user-based permission system fits in perfectly with how parents assign privilages. The command line of DOS was borrowed from Unix. And you can do more things, because back then Unix was maturing, but DOS never matured, and neither did any of its successors.
From the above the not-lazy comment reader can glean a few important pieces of information. One of the important ones is that a simplistic user interface is better. Design your user interfaces so that a 3-year-old could use it. Also, less is more. The fewer settings for the possible options, or the fewer commands for the possible activities, the easier the program is to use (with exceptions). I like MS Office because everything is neatly laid out, and there are multiple ways to do things that correspond to a different mental "mode". I hope that this was "Informative", "Interesting", and all of those other capitalized good words, but that's just a hope.
Kenneth Arnold
PS - If you want another glimpse into my early mind, note that I started programming (in BASIC) when I was 6 or 7. I have always liked solving problems in a step-by-step pattern, and it so happens that much of real computing is solving problems.