[rescue] fans fans fans...

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 08:54:41AM -0700, Fogg, James wrote:

> Its a shame where PC's and O/S's are so comoditized and sanitized that the
> only thing exciting you can do is a paintjob and accessorization. Fscking
> overclocking.. give me a break, go buy the next-gen CPU and shut up.

They aren't that comoditized and sanitized.  It's just that most
people are too much lamerz to do anyhting l33t.  

A minimum task for a beginner should be to install linux, and
extremely customize the startup scripts, desktop environment, and
kernel drivers.  There should be nothing left except what you actually
use.  

This should then be followed by further customization.  Like writing
a FLAC (or MP3) decoder to run on the EMU10k1, and designing their own
IOPs using FPGAs.

A mid level leet person will scrap the nvidia card, and design a their
own video accelerator using off the shelf ships and/or FPGAs (note,
while FPGAs don't seem fast enough UNC at Chapel Hill has shown that
much can be down with parrallel processing on a special bus for high
speed graphics).  

A true guru will scrap the existing OS entirely and code a new one all
in lisp.  They will be allowed to borrow from existing lisp projects
as they exist, and they will be encouraged to figure out how to make
their lisp OS seamlessly support at a minimum Common Lisp, Scheme, and
elisp.  If they want to reuse a window manager, they will be encourage
to also build a REP engine, and port the smarts of Sawfish to run on
top. Bonus points for getting S-Graphics to run seemlessly on top of
their system.

Alternatively, the guru could choose to do everything with python, but
they must build a compiler if they choose to do so, or they may use
forth or even Java.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd