Actually, I hope the kernel will contain less. Let's take USB for example, do we really need all sorts of various connectors? Or would we rather just use USB, teach the kernel to do low level read/write to USB devices and then do keyboards and mice and printers and scanners and digicams and webcams and external hdds and whatnot over USB in userspace?

The kernel does this to a large part already. In fact, printing is implemented in userspace, as well as many other devices. That's what libusb is for.

Devices like keyboards and hard disks don't make much sense to support in userspace, since the kernel already has to support everything having to do with hard disks, and the lower level USB protocol. The kernel knows what a hard disk is, it knows the standard USB protocol, it's very straightforward for it to use a hard disk over USB. Adding userspace there would only make things more complicated.

In fact, much the same applies to drivers in general, there's no reason why so many printers are paperweights under Linux. Can't there at least be one universal idiot mode where we feed it uncompressed raster data and it prints? Seriously.

It already exists, and it's called "postscript". Buy a printer that supports it, and no problem. But if the printer insists in talking its own weird language it's not going to accept your "uncompressed raster data".

Not sure what your definition of "master" is but Linux is on over 3/4 of the top 500 supercomputers, comprises over 50 percent of internet servers out there, dominates embedded systems by a very significant margin and is at the heart of the fastest growing cell phone platform. Believe me, the world of computers is much larger than what you see at your local Best Buy.

When using virtual machines you loose some control and visibility compared to the tradition pizza box server. A physical server is easy to pinpoint, easy to implement ACLs (ethernet/ip), Quality of Service, traffic monitoring or just to shut down a network port. :) Both VEPA and VN-link are technologies that allow you to better seperate different virtual machines on the same physical box.

For VMware, Cisco developed a virtual switch ( YES, a downloadable switch! :) that integrates with VMware ESX 4 that offers all this network security, monitoring goodness. This virtual switch is called the Nexus 1000v and can be downloaded at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9902/index.html ( 60-day trial ).

About a year ago the ethernet specifications for data centers already got an extension called FCoE or Fibre Channel over Ethernet ( http://www.t11.org/fcoe ). Basically this allow you to use one ethernet network for both your lan and your storage san. And thus not needing to build out a seperate Fibre Channel SAN.

Since you kind of like UKIP ideas, but not the racism, what about the English Democrats?

The idea that there are righteous and non-righteous ways to fight is merely a propaganda tool, which is why those concepts vary by ideology and location. The only objective "wrong" one may commit in war is losing, and that is certainly NOT determined by sportsmanship.

One man's terrorist IS literally another man's freedom fighter, and the idea of sportsmanship, international law, and all other such drivel should be clearly seen as "ritual constructs" but nothing more. They don't help kill the enemy, though they do make the practitioners feel self-righteous...

It wasn't even that "exotic" of a problem. Ford recommended a low tire pressure for a softer ride - trying to make a truck not ride like a truck. Low tire pressure generates excess heat, which ultimately causes the tire failure. And because the other tires on the vehicle are also under-inflated, the changes in the vehicle's handling are magnified and everything goes to hell.

People who ran the tires at (for example) 35PSI instead of 30PSI didn't have problems.

There are a lot of reasons a big corporation would want his headquarters in a big city. (Notice that Boeing recently moved from the Seattle suburbs to downtown Chicago.) Once you make the decision to do that, moving key staff out of town comets as "dispersal."

Liberal Democrats: Actually think we should have more socialism, and the canonical example of politicians thinking that "fair" just means "screwing people who probably aren't going to vote for us anyway".

The Lib Dems are not socalist. And you say it as if the UK is in any way socialist, which is nonsense. They might be more left wing than the other parties, but that's not saying very much given how they've both moved to the right, and the Lib Dems are left wing in areas that seem reasonable (e.g., money for higher education rather than tuition fees - and not that private companies in general should be under Government control).

But they are the ones strongest on civil liberties - they're the party to vote for if you want less of nonsense like in this story. They're also the party to support if you want more evidence based policies regarding things like drugs, as you mention.

Not that I think they're perfect, but I'm not sure I would describe them as "extreme".

UKIP: Some of their policies sound quite respectable

I see it as in the sense that even a broken clock is right twice a day ... I get the impression that they care about things like freedom, when it affects the white middle class Christian male (hence they oppose ID cards, for example, all the while everyone will have to have one). But otherwise, they mean things like freedom for men to tell women what they're allowed to wear (as in the recent claim that the Burka should be banned).

Maybe someone does need to found a moderate, relatively central party

Whilst extremes can be bad, moderation isn't necessarily always good either (see fallacy of argument to moderation). What would be better is if we had a better voting system than FPTP, such as STV, Approval or Condorcet. That way people can vote for a range of parties they agree with, without needing a single party that magically they agree with on everything.

And thus they will have to pay for the 800+ patents, while they could just join and share their 12 patents with everybody and get to beifit from a 812+ patent bank...

I am writing you this message from a laptop running FBSD 7.2 with KDE4. My webserver runs an earlier FBSD release as well. However, I have worked with FBSD setups for quite some time, so I am used to it. If you are looking for an easier BSD to jump into, you might want to try PC-BSD instead. It is based on FBSD but has more of a desktop user focus. After all, the motto of FreeBSD (last time I checked) was "power to serve", with the FBSD setup being clearly designed for server implementations. I freely admit that sometimes FBSD installs can be a struggle on my laptop, but I find it to be worthwhile.

So, in your world, (must be a stupid or obfuscated one), you are only doing research if you are sharing it? Really? Interesting, as much as I dislike the patent system, that would seem to be where most companies show their R&D. Posting it in peer review articles, university collaborations, public research grants is not the only metric.

Sounds to me like someone has a bone to pick with Apple. Maybe Apple turned down your appeal to fund some project you like. Maybe it is even your own academic project and you needed the money to keep going and pay the mortgage?

Yes! Finally someone pointed this out! We're talking about apples and oranges here...

All that'd serve to do is make them look more popular than ever. Traffic up 300%! Sounds like a good mar

For most of the desktop apps I use, the MAN pages and Web documentation offered to users by the apps' developers seem to lag a couple of versions behind the code.

However, using Google brings its own problems: as other posters here have commented, you tend to find more people asking the same question than you find answers.

Even on forums that do have the answers, they're often buried on the tenth page of "me too" comments responding to the question.

Those forums would be a lot more helpful if, from time to time, someone went through and deleted the cruft, or edited every posting of a question to include a link to the answer, so that the useful information would get a better pagerank.

Better yet would be if someone were to paste the useful answers into a Wiki page, editing them to include some context, and make clear which versions of the app and which distros the answer applies to.

But who would that someone be? Where would we keep the Wiki page? And how would we credit the poster of the original helpful information, and the owner or operator of the forum where they posted it? (If you don't think that's important, then you haven't understood the psychology of a lot of these forums and their users....)

The article on the Scientific American site is three years old and has just been republished, as they explain at the very top of the story: > Editor's Note: This story was originally printed in the > December 2005 issue of Scientific American magazine.