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Comment: Travelling in the flesh... (Score 1) 629

by hpa (#43561921) Attached to: Why We'll Never Meet Aliens
I have seen a lot of bits about why interstellar travel may never be practical. All of them seem to assume not only travel in the flesh, but round-trip travel. Realistically, by the time we can build something that can travel to the stars, it seems quite likely that we also can download conciousness into a robot. Send a robotic (one-way) mission to build bodies and transmission equipment, then have the real travellers download themselves, or copies of themselves, via radio. No need for life support or suffer through the boredom of even relativistic travel.

Comment: Re:upside down keypads? (Score 2) 120

by hpa (#42848111) Attached to: John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way To All-Digit Dialing, Dies At 94
The fail was that the analysis was done in a time when calculating machines were a speciality item few people were familiar with. 15 years later, they were not. It is worth nothing that some countries went with the AT&T scheme and others stayed with the 7-8-9 layout on their phones. Unfortunately the proliferation of letters on keypads (a lot of countries did not have them) in recent years have made 1-2-3 more prevalent.

Comment: Not a new concept (Score 1) 311

by hpa (#42836873) Attached to: Moving the Linux Kernel Console To User-Space
The feature set of the Linux VT console has been intentionally limited from nearly the start, and the line has always been: if you need more than this, do it in userspace. There has been several projects which have, for example kon2 which provided CJK functionality -- not something that one can sanely do in the kernel because of font size; similarly, Arabic/Indic font shaping is just plain too painful. For most people, the solution has simply been to bootstrap out of the console as quickly as possible, most of the time never even showing the console. What you find pretty quickly is that if you want something that is fully featured you end up with something that is as complex as X or Wayland anyway, and then you might as well go straight there. The in-kernel console will remain, of course, as an ultimate fallback. If someone wants to give users more options, more power to them.

Comment: Re:ought to change the kernel version number to 4 (Score 4, Informative) 464

by hpa (#42262295) Attached to: Linux Nukes 386 Support
Two major things: the WP bit doesn't work in supervisor mode on 386, which makes copy on write *very* painful to implement, and the CMPXCHG and XADD instructions which are extremely important to SMP primitives are missing. That has meant needing separate code that only works on 386, and it has not been well maintained and always gets in the way.

There has been a little distress selling on the stock exchange. -- Thomas W. Lamont, October 29, 1929 (Black Tuesday)

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