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xilun666

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Indeed, with enough magical legal verbiage and enough slightly unrelated drawing, you could. It probably would not be a valid patent, or maybe only valid on some not too interesting point, but validity does not really matters for patent holder playing cold war with their portfolio...

You seems to think most computers are complicated, with huge amount of memory needing dedicated and scalable components.

This is not the case. Most computers are tiny; the kind of "you've only got 1kB built-in and non-expandable memory" tiny (yet only if you're lucky). And most of those computers are indeed programmed correctly, despite using a number of classical trick like xor linked-lists (the program is small, so really checking it, even if it contains tricks, is doable).

The authors basically says that it does not always like when people changes his stuff, so he thinks it's fine to do a kind of read only open source with additional unwritten rights (basically i've got the impression that it's okay to send him he likes, but he won't tell you before the rules for him to like things or not...)

He does not take into account at all that you can just modify copies of his stuff. Not his own (unless he planned to do a kind of wikipedia like repository for his code, freely modifiable by anybody without even registration).

And also: copies are naturally free in the digital age.

Also, i'm not fond the whole "i'm a good programmer, you are only allowed to look because you could be a bad one and do a mess in your own copy -- and oh I forgot: I happen to like free software, but not when I write the program" thing.

Branching

At the beginning you're are not even conscious that you can, but once you've discovered the power it gives you, you will branch twice a day just because you can (and more if you need).

The two stage commit approach of git is interesting but not fundamental IMHO. "stash" is really cool.

The kind of features git gives me makes me use it even when I code alone.

While the author says stuffs like "not to be used by bad persons", he also writes long shits about evading pursuit in the woods, killing dogs as needed, or getting out of cars while an helicopter is watching. Definitely weird, paranoid, but entertaining. You can indeed find stuffs in the same spirit in some Hollywood movies -- "Enemy of the State" comes to mind.

The contrast that you describe between the state of spirit of sysadmins vs. programmers seems to mean that programmers do not need to consider impact on the rest of the architecture and the long-term maintenance cost of any given code change.

The programmer you are describing are a kind of programmer who makes lousy programs. I've read enough of those programs to say: they are not pretty -- they do not work well in large scale -- and they cost a LOT.

Either this is bad journalism or the "architect" is really high. Because proposed re-architecture makes absolutely no sense.

The article starts with an obvious observation, being that scheduling (in its largest meaning) often is crap in real (Windows?) systems.

It concludes with complete meaningless bullshit where applications, now renamed, would have a dedicated CPU. What the point? Doing hard real-time? What does that even concretely means for "runtimes" of have a "dedicated" CPU (wich, given the complexity of modern architectures, would not really be in a strict fashion) and to do resource management thanks to metadata inserted by the compiler?

What is really needed is more effective ways for applications to sends tips to the kernel about what is going on, what should run at high priority, what should be cached, what should not be, and so over.

Forbidding some programs to use some cores because you have many makes little sense as a way to re-architecture an operating system. Because it already happens anyway on current designs (not really forbidden, but when you have few services consuming less than 1 percent of 1 core in the background, and/or running with extremely low priority they will be near to unnoticeable, and truly unnoticeable from the point of view of the user).

To get a responsive word processor no matter an anti-virus is loaded or not, a simple solution can work really well now; priorities of scheduling. Given that really background priorities are among the rare things that works fairly well under windows (like 10x better than with a vanilla Linux kernel), if the "architect" is experiencing random slow down of Word because of his "antivirus", its because his "antivirus" is total utter crap, not because a new "architecture" of OS is needed.