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Why Davis' TempleOS is better than Torvald's Linux
- SwellJoe 12y agoI find TempleOS endlessly fascinating. The author is troubled, but an impressive coder nonetheless. The C compiler REPL covered in this video is actually kinda awesome.
- gonzo 12y agoKinda like a lispm for C
- transfire 12y agoIs it essentially a C interpreter that runs on the metal? Or is there more to it? What about device drivers?
- vegedor 12y agoDoes the C standard define a compiler? Then this is not C, otherwise, depends how close it is to the standard, that is how many shortcuts and workarounds are used. On Linux you can use GDB to achieve similar results, I guess.
- raldi 12y agoIt's emphatically not an interpreter. It's a just-in-time, line-by-line compiler.
- AdmiralAsshat 12y ago"So now we're gonna put colors in. North America should be red, like Native Americans, [...] Asia should be yellow, [...] and Africa should be black."
- mkal_tsr 12y ago"However, no continent is represented by any specific ring. Prior to 1951, the official handbook stated that each color corresponded to a particular continent: blue for Europe, yellow for Asia, black for Africa, green for Australia and Oceania and red for the Americas; this was removed because there was no evidence that Coubertin had intended it (the quote above was probably an afterthought)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_symbols#The_Rings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_symbols#The_Rings
- joslin01 12y agoFocusing on this small part of the video is stupid and just baiting
- pekk 12y agoWhy did you leave out the parts that are inconvenient to the narrative you're making up? "Europe should be blue" - is that racist? I guess the technical achievement means nothing. Where is your certificate of political correctness? Why is it socially acceptable to bully like this?
- Kiro 12y agoTurn on "Show dead" and visit https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TempleOS https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TempleOS Even if this particular case wasn't racist it's easy to understand why things Davis says could be interpreted as such.
- Don_ 12y agoWhat's the point of bringing it up, though? How is that relevant to a technical video like this one? Furthermore, how is it fair to put the things he says under the same scrutiny as a person who doesn't have schizophrenia?
- nyolfen 12y agoit isn't inconvenient to the narrative, though it might not be immediately obvious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_blood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_blood calling out racism isn't bullying and it's incoherent to label it as such, davis has a long history of racist ranting much more offensive than labeling africa black. he's mentally ill and it's sad but it's not to be overlooked
- cbd1984 12y agoNo, "calling someone out" for being mentally ill is bullying. Even if that illness takes the form of racist rants.
- sergiotapia 12y agoPlease delete this comment it adds nothing to this technical discussion and is just pure troll bait.
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- wrs 12y agoThis takes me back to when computers had a lot fewer layers. He's inspired by Apple ][ and C64, but it's also reminiscent of Smalltalk-80 and Lisp machines, with the live UI links, inspectors, first-class graphic objects... I also enjoyed the birds screeching in mid demo.
- coding4all 12y agoProbably the most fascinating OS ever.
- jdiez17 12y agoThis is a feature I'd actually really like to have in an actual terminal. The ability to display graphics would be useful for many things.
- gh02t 12y agoThere are several that do it, this article mentions a few and shows how to do it in xterm. http://www.stenyak.com/archives/1208/trick-of-the-day-rendering-graphics-in-your-terminal/ http://www.stenyak.com/archives/1208/trick-of-the-day-render... Not mentioned in that article, there's also Terminology, which can display all sorts of dynamic media and things. https://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/terminology https://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/terminology
- jdiez17 12y agoOkay, Terminus looks pretty good. I wish rxvt could do this, too. Thanks for those links.
- dunham 12y agoI remember there used to be a DVI viewer for xterm's tektronix mode. It would render the fonts by drawing a sequence of horizontal lines for runs of pixels.
- hcarvalhoalves 12y agoNice. I just plotted an image older than myself (/usr/share/doc/plotutils/tek2plot/dmerc.tek.gz)!
- jmhain 12y agoIt's a shame nothing ever came of TermKit. http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/ http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/
- lwh 12y agoSDL and SVGAlib http://www.libsdl.org/ http://www.libsdl.org/ http://www.svgalib.org/ http://www.svgalib.org/
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- diarg 12y agoTempleOS rocks, indeed. Amazing work. And in a very small codebase.
- javajosh 12y agoHas Davis ever explained why he believes that his operating system is a holy relic, an artifact particularly close to God? And if so, which part of it is holy - the contents of the filesystem, the state of the runtime, or both?
- corysama 12y agohttp://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658283
- SwellJoe 12y agoThe random number generator as God concept has been stuck in my head since I first read that Vice article. In games, both tabletop and computer games, the RNG plays the role of God (a mysterious power that can bring good or bad fortune and even life or death). It's interesting how that idea plays out in a schizophrenic mind.
- digi_owl 12y agoHeh, i keep seeing roguelike players go "bless RNGsius" or similar when they get a particularly potent item.
- SwellJoe 12y agoI've spent a lot of time playing nethack (possibly the most hours I have spent in any game). That may be why this was such a striking thing to me. I may have internalized some of that logic, even if only in a humorous manner, and so perhaps it resonates with me that someone might genuinely believe that the RNG is a way to communicate with God. There's a charming, if naive, logic to it; after all, if God created everything and is omniscient, why couldn't they have built the universe such that you would ask the right question at the right time to get the right answer from an RNG (which are all deterministic, if you have control over enough of the variables, as God presumably would). It's kinda like a modern version of astrology, I guess, in that interpretation and what questions you ask determine the outcome more than the stars or the RNG.
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- pekk 12y agoMost of us will never use TempleOS, few will appreciate the skill shown here and fewer will understand Davis' religious goals. But you could also look at TempleOS as a research prototype, roughly the kind of thing which once might have been produced at Xerox PARC, and see that TempleOS implements some startlingly interesting ideas. For example, in this demo, the way that graphics are treated inline with source text and text in the terminal, and the way that definitions are updated everywhere they're used might seem arbitrary or crazy if you don't think about it. Is this thing just for games? Once you look past the religious stuff and realize the similarity to MATLAB and IPython notebook, but in the shell, you might start to realize it's a powerful idea with serious applications. I'll stop there, but there are many more examples to be gleaned. Davis' ideas are like that. They don't advertise very well, this is the opposite end of the universe from the HN marketing ethos. But if you stop trying to tear down disadvantaged people for using improper words in an idiosyncratic way, and pay attention to what's actually going on, maybe you'll be rewarded by seeing something interesting. Assuming you aren't another money-grubbing, egoistic blowhard or hanger-on to the startup scene with no real interest in computers. TempleOS is like a window onto an alternate history of personal computing, full of things which could have been done for years but which nobody got around to doing, or which didn't even occur to anyone. I'm really glad that someone is exploring these unique ideas.
- hnriot 12y agocomparing this to IPython Notebook is a big stretch and an insult to MATLAB and IPython notebook. There's no way this would have ever come out of PARC, you're exaggerating Davis's work. Also, it's impossible to "look past the religious stuff" - it's part of, all of TempleOS. To me this is just a crazy guy who's been tinkering with 80s technology while the rest of the world has moved on. I feel bad for him , but I just don't buy the "powerful idea with serious applications"
- pizza 12y agoIf you don't mind my engaging you: What 'insult' (imho insult is in the mind of the beholder, but that's for another day)? Do you see the religious stuff, in being un-overlookable, also as some kind of insult? But more important to me is your critique of his experiment; do you really feel "bad for him" for exploring ideas of his own labor? C'mon, isn't that what a hacker is? Surely it matters more to be true to your self than to align with the world's reputations. Thank you for your time.
- alxbrun 12y agoKudos to Davis, I'm a big fan. Writing TempleOS: amazing. Writing TempleOS with the dog or bird background noise you hear around 5:00 in the video: more than amazing!
- callesgg 12y agoTitle is a bit misleading this seams mainly like a form of shell, comparing it to Torvals linux kernel or unix seams wierd. As a shell however i feel it is a interesting change of perspective.
- sparkie 12y agoThe shell is what you see, but there's a full OS underneath it, including a window manager and whatnot. You can reprogram any part of the OS dynamically from this shell, which is the main point Terry is trying to make - it's an OS aimed at hackers who he thinks should have 100% control over the system down to the hardware - and he has a novel way of enabling that to happen with an interpreter and JIT compiler for his dialect of C, and a single memory space for all "processes".
- 101914 12y agoThere is one point in this demonstration where it looks like TempleOS is monitoring the registers in "real-time". It looked like in one column he had the names of the registers and in the other column the memory addresses stored in them, updating on the screen as he worked. Is this what I was seeing or am I mistaken? The OS also seems to track what each CPU is doing in the scrolling banners; and there was a brief view of a screen that showed detailed swap statistics, again changing in "real-time".
- rb2k_ 12y agoAfter reading a bit in the reddit comment history, I think I'll just ignore him and his projects from now on: http://www.reddit.com/r/TempleOS_Official/comments/2pfp2j/thank_you_for_219/cn1bm4l http://www.reddit.com/r/TempleOS_Official/comments/2pfp2j/th... Quote: > God is not PRNG. I wish there weren't so many niggers who think all random number are PRNG. These nigger seriosuly don't know you can get non-PRNG numbers, but true random.
- SwellJoe 12y agoHe is mentally ill. I wouldn't want to work directly with him, and I wouldn't want him in any position of authority over anyone else (because he's clearly not a nice person). But, I think he and his OS are interesting as hell, from a number of angles. You're certainly welcome to dismiss everything anyone who is an asshole ever said or did (I kinda feel that way about Orson Scott Card, despite loving Ender's Game). But, I'm probably gonna keep reading about TempleOS as a fascinating hacker subject.
- jchonphoenix 12y ago"why templeOS is better, but it doesn't matter"