Re: Unix time

Message-ID	<637555a6@news.ausics.net> (permalink)
From	not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev)
Subject	Re: Unix time
Newsgroups	comp.os.linux.misc
References	(7 earlier) <tkb91v$3k55f$2@dont-email.me> <0QqdnYe6W4j_pvb-nZ2dnZfqnPGdnZ2d@earthlink.com> <tkgjik$8ns1$1@dont-email.me> <636c1757@news.ausics.net> <goydnXBtNPJd7-n-nZ2dnZfqn_SdnZ2d@earthlink.com>
Date	2022-11-17 07:27 +1000
Organization	Ausics - https://www.ausics.net

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26C.Z968 <26C.Z968@noada.net> wrote:
> On 11/9/22 4:10 PM, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
>> Bobbie Sellers <bliss@mouse-potato.com> wrote:
>> 
>>>         In Linux, Linus has the final word.
>> 
>> Back on topic! But even if he has the final word, it will only get
>> him so far if he wants to sustain Linux as the main focus for OS
>> code contributed by programmers from large organisations. A fine
>> example is the death of XFree86 - the leadership annoyed some of
>> the contributors, including those working for big businesses, so
>> those contributors just went their own way with Xorg and left the
>> XFree86 project to gradually run down to a stop.
> 
>   Linus DOES have a bit of a rep as a 'dictator'. On
>   the whole, what annoys him seems quite reasonable,
>   but his staff/contributors may not always see it
>   that way. There MAY come a point ....
> 
>   On the plus, Linux is "big enough" now - in SO many
>   things and infrastructure systems - that it's PROBABLY
>   safe for at least a decade or two.

Hopefully, but it depends on how diversified the contributors are,
particularly with hardware drivers. If you look at Android, which
is a prior example of Linux being forked because a big company
wanted to do things their way, there are endless Android devices
with drivers that are incompatible with Linux and therefore pretty
useless with it. Perhaps all it would take is for a few companies
like Intel to favour a new fork of the Linux codebase because Linus
upset them, and things would go the same way for Linux on x86?

>   I see "AI" systems ultimately replacing all the
>   extant OS's. They will be very flexible and
>   "smart" (and nobody will really have a clue how
>   they work). Triple current computational speed
>   and they'll be tomorrow's go-to.

AI fulfills a different role to traditional systems. Most things
that people want computers for are better being implemented
precisely in code, rather than relying on a few tests to determine
that some unknown AI model has found a good-enough solution. It's
only really useful for tasks where traditional programming is just
too hard.

I imagine AI similar to electronics, where if something works, but
you don't understand exactly how it works, then it probably won't
work with all possible variations of the operating environment.
When the difference is whether the best result for an image pattern
recognition is at position 1 or position 2 in the results, that
doesn't matter so much. If it's whether the amount that you just
transferred from your bank account was $100,000 or $200,000, then
it matters a lot! The latter is something you want done in real
code, not a black-box AI, and that includes most core OS tasks:
reading keystrokes, picking characters from a font, displaying on a
monitor, encrypting the data, talking to the network interface...
You don't want a system where it sometimes displays a 2 instead of
a 1 because you upgraded your network interface and the AI had been
using some timing coincidence of interrupts from the NIC as part of
the algorithum by which it most efficiently selects characters
from a font. Introducing that sort of uncertainty at the OS level
just doesn't make sense.

Maybe one day AI will be smart enough that it can actually
understand a task and write a solution in traditional code itself.
Then it might play a role in core OS development. But it probably
needs to be sentient by that point.

-- 
__          __
#_ < |\| |< _#

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Unix time "Andrei Z." <no-email@invalid.invalid> - 2022-10-28 11:51 +0300
  Re: Unix time not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2022-10-29 10:54 +1000
  Re: Unix time Bobbie Sellers <bliss@mouse-potato.com> - 2022-10-29 07:51 -0700
    Re: Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-05 22:02 -0400
      Re: Unix time Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> - 2022-11-06 12:14 +0000
        Re: Unix time "Andrei Z." <no-email@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-06 16:00 +0300
          Re: Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-06 22:41 -0500
            Re: [OT] Unix time Bit Twister <BitTwister@mouse-potato.com> - 2022-11-09 16:54 -0600
              Re: [OT] Unix time Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> - 2022-11-10 10:29 +1000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-18 23:28 -0500
                Re: [OT] Unix time The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-19 10:58 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-21 21:59 -0500
                Re: [OT] Unix time "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2022-11-22 12:31 +0100
                Re: [OT] Unix time The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-22 15:37 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2022-11-23 00:28 +0100
                Re: [OT] Unix time "26C.Z969" <26C.Z969@noaada.net> - 2022-11-23 00:28 -0500
                Re: [OT] Unix time "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2022-11-23 12:47 +0100
                Re: [OT] Unix time "26C.Z969" <26C.Z969@noaada.net> - 2022-11-23 23:55 -0500
                Re: [OT] Unix time The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-24 09:30 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2022-11-24 12:46 +0100
                Re: [OT] Unix time "26C.Z969" <26C.Z969@noaada.net> - 2022-11-26 23:28 -0500
                Re: [OT] Unix time Mike Scott <usenet.16@scottsonline.org.uk.invalid> - 2022-11-24 12:16 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2022-11-24 13:26 +0100
                Re: [OT] Unix time The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-24 12:32 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2022-11-24 14:36 +0100
                Re: [OT] Unix time The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-24 14:09 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2022-11-24 19:25 +0100
                Re: [OT] Unix time The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-24 19:40 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2022-11-24 21:28 +0100
                Re: [OT] Unix time "David W. Hodgins" <dwhodgins@nomail.afraid.org> - 2022-11-24 13:06 -0500
                Re: [OT] Unix time "26C.Z969" <26C.Z969@noaada.net> - 2022-11-26 23:36 -0500
            Re: Unix time "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2022-11-10 11:01 +0100
              Re: Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-18 23:33 -0500
              Re: Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-18 23:37 -0500
                Re: Unix time The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-19 11:01 +0000
                Re: Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-19 22:06 -0500
                Re: Unix time Allodoxaphobia <trepidation@example.net> - 2022-11-21 13:03 +0000
                Re: Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-21 21:40 -0500
          Re: Unix time Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> - 2022-11-07 10:17 +0000
      Re: Unix time Bobbie Sellers <bliss@mouse-potato.com> - 2022-11-06 07:43 -0800
        Re: Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-06 22:35 -0500
          Re: Unix time The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-07 06:12 +0000
            Re: Unix time Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2022-11-07 06:21 +0000
              Re: Unix time Harold Stevens <wookie@limbo.localdomain> - 2022-11-07 02:44 -0600
              Re: Unix time The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-07 15:42 +0000
                Re: Unix time Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2022-11-07 16:44 +0000
                Re: Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-09 00:46 -0500
                Re: Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-09 00:32 -0500
                Re: Unix time Bobbie Sellers <bliss@mouse-potato.com> - 2022-11-09 08:13 -0800
                Re: Unix time not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2022-11-10 07:10 +1000
                Re: Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-16 00:18 -0500
                Re: Unix time Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2022-11-16 18:13 +0000
                Re: Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-17 00:41 -0500
                Re: Unix time Jerry Peters <jerry@example.invalid> - 2022-11-22 18:21 +0000
                Re: Unix time "26C.Z969" <26C.Z969@noaada.net> - 2022-11-23 00:31 -0500
                Re: Unix time not@telling.you.invalid (Computer Nerd Kev) - 2022-11-17 07:27 +1000
              Re: Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-09 00:10 -0500
                Re: Unix time Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> - 2022-11-09 18:52 -0500
                Re: [OT] Unix time Bit Twister <BitTwister@mouse-potato.com> - 2022-11-10 18:57 -0600
                Re: [OT] Unix time G <g@nowhere.invalid> - 2022-11-11 10:42 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2022-11-12 19:42 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2022-11-11 12:20 +0100
                Re: [OT] Unix time The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-11 11:46 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> - 2022-11-11 18:39 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-11 17:50 -0500
                Re: [OT] Unix time The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-12 11:15 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-14 23:34 -0500
                Re: [OT] Unix time The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-15 11:10 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-16 00:11 -0500
                Re: [OT] Unix time Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-16 08:54 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-18 23:58 -0500
                Re: [OT] Unix time The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-19 11:04 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-19 22:16 -0500
                Re: [OT] Unix time Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2022-11-19 13:16 +0000
                Re: [OT] Unix time "26C.Z968" <26C.Z968@noada.net> - 2022-11-19 22:51 -0500

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