Crude hits new high
Crude yesterday broke $126 / bbl. Wow.
By: Colonel Nikolai
Tue May 13 08:58:56 CDT 2008
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Filed under: politics->peakoil
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Apple Mac OSX Architecture: Fundamentally Flawed?
A while back I read a Biography of Linus Torvalds of sorts called Just for Fun. It's a good read for a number of reasons. But the thing that got me was his panning of Mac OSX.
For years I was aware of the early flame war between Andrew Tannenbaum, the maker of Minix that was the inspiration of the Linux project. Torvalds argued how the basis of Minix which was a microkernel and that microkernels suck. The reason they suck, according to Torvalds, was that it was made around a false assumption: Move most of the stuff that traditionally sits inside the kernel into discrete modules that run in user-space and make the kernel manage message-passing between the modules allows for greater overall simplicity and therefore quality.
The problem with this assumption, according to Torvalds, is that while in theory this makes each module simpler, it increases the overall complexity of the system because of the inter-module communication has now gone up by a factor of the number of modules. More importantly, the system now ends up being much slower because of this increase in complexity and the fact that so much has moved out of the blazingly fast kernel and into slower user space.
Anyway, in the book Just for Fun, Torvalds says the Mac OSX suffers from all the problems of the microkernel architecture "and manages to make up a few unique problems of its own".
A while after reading this I started to notice that switching from application to application on the Macintosh would yield the dreaded spinning beach ball of a modal cursor that is on OSX. Even switching between individual tabs in Firefox would reveal the beach ball, and I have 4 gigs of RAM on my macbook!
I never noticed this on Windows or Linux. I wonder if OSX is really deeply flawed in this regard, like Torvalds says?
By: Colonel Nikolai
Sat May 10 22:22:30 CDT 2008
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Filed under: technology->software->operatingsystems->osx
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Re: Apple Mac OSX Architecture: Fundamentally Flawed?
I don't know if it's flawed as Torvalds says (or even if it's slow at all), but it is periodically criticized for being inherently slow. Having said that I don't think we're talking human levels of slow - you can add up a lot of micro or milli before you get to a noticeable delay :)posted by: Paul , on Sun May 11 01:24:37 CDT 2008
Don't you think I shouldn't be seeing that beach ball, though?
I'm saying that I think I shouldn't see that beach ball and that maybe there is no way for me not to see it because of the Mach kernel. I mean it is perceptible.posted by: Colonel Nikolai, on Tue May 13 08:53:19 CDT 2008
Re: Don't you think I shouldn't be seeing that beach ball, though?
I wouldn't dispute the beach ball sightings at all (I have enough of my own) - I'm just suggesting that it might not be down to the kernel, or at least not most of it. Certain applications seem prone to it while others aren't, and I doubt it's because of the way they use the kernel entirely. On the other hand Finder spins enough for me that it could be a factor.posted by: Paul , on Tue May 13 10:31:26 CDT 2008
BMW F650GS Review
In February I went on a trip to San Francisco. I rented a BMW F650GS and took it up and down the Pacific Coast Highway a few hundred miles.
The BMW F650GS is nearly the perfect motorcycle. Now I realize by saying that many people will simply say that this can't possibly be. There is no such thing: one motorcycle may be perfect for one kind of application, where another one would be better suited for a separate one. Allow me to explain.
What is a motorcycle for? The first motorcycle was invented in the 19th century by Max Daimler. He built is essentially as a prop for a show. A show to potential investors. He built it to enable him to demonstrate something he thought was truly important: the internal combustion engine. A couple of things you could surmise from this inauspicious beginning for a motorbike:
- That the first "car" was actually a "bike"
- That the motorbike was conceived as the essential expression of what an engine could do in terms of vehicular motion
The motorbike remains a complex yet essential design problem: one of integrating great details into a gestalt that must remain unselfconscious of its parts to be beautiful. One of most critical parts is the rider: the human being on such a machine must by the motorbike's very nature be a part of the machine. He doesn't sit in a chair upon the machine, for chrissake: he sits among it as a critical, moving part. There is no "bench seat" on a real motorbike.
When I sit on the F650GS, I feel as though this exact thinking was in mind in the designers process. The handlebars are at exactly the right place. When I ride it, I feel like a new species. My arms meld into the bars, my feet into the pegs. When I open the throttle, I'm not jerked, even though the front wheel may come off the ground. I meant for it to do that: it was my sense of place in the machine that made this a natural thing. Is it as fast as my Triumph Sprint? No. Of the two bikes, which one would I prefer to have the front wheel off the ground on? The BMW. Which one would I prefer to climb a 60-degree grade with? The BMW. Which one would I prefer to take up Highway 1? The BMW. Which would would I prefer to drop? The BMW. Which one would I prefer to take on the track ... ? The Triumph. I would also fault the F650GS for having a tank that is slightly too small. I think it has a 120 mile range.
But the F650GS is the most ergonomic and expressive bike I've ever ridden. I expected the Ulysses to have the same refinement. It doesn't: The bars are too wide and the power band too narrow. The Ulysses oversteers more, too. If I had to do it all on one bike, the F650GS would be the one.
By: Colonel Nikolai
Wed May 07 22:50:26 CDT 2008
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Filed under: technology->hardware->vehicles->motorcycles->bmw->f650gs
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