TempleOS is more than an exercise in retro computing, or a hobbyist’s space for programming close to the bare metal. It’s the brainchild – perhaps the life’s work – of 44-year-old Terry Davis, the founder and sole employee of Trivial Solutions. For more than a decade Davis has worked on it; today, TempleOS is 121,176 lines of code, which puts it on par with Photoshop 1.0. (By comparison, Windows 7, a full-fledged modern operating system designed to be everything to everyone, filled with decades of cruft, is ​about 40 million lines.)
If you read just one article today, make sure it’s this one.
He’s one of my favorite commenters or OSNews!
Is he still here? Haven’t seen him for a while..
He’s really everywhere and nowhere at the same time. He gets really gooped up on one online commenting community and then goes off and joins another. You never know where or when you’ll run into him next.
I’m not really sure I like the article. I’m sympathetic to his plight as anyone, but I can’t help but feel as if the article celebrates his disability too much. I know some medications for schizophrenia cause a “zombie” like state. And people often lose their intrinsic personality under the influence of the meds. But still, it would be better for him to try to find meds that work better.
There are lots of misconceptions about mental illness in many modern societies. I.e. Schizophrenia refers to a broad spectrum of conditions, many of which can not be treatable with regimes of meds or psychological therapy.
Some people can not, and should not, be a productive part of society. And it’s our responsibility to take care of them.
I personally don’t agree with the exploitative nature of these types of articles, but at the same time I’m glad there is an outlet for this guy’s mania. And the good thing about online personas and posts is that it is easy enough to ignore those which one finds counter productive, while allowing those very individuals to vent their own issues.
Psychiatric drugs rarely cure patients. They just make them easier to handle. If someone is not a threat to themselves or others they don’t really need to be medicated.
I think that’s how he composes his forum posts also.
Glad to see a serious and coherent write up on his OS though. Touching too. Well done.
starting an article about a religious lunatic with a picture of him with red glowing eyes is highly appreciated
From reading the article, I must say that I admire Terry’s conviction. Regardless of the source of his instructions, whether they be internal or external, he is doing what he believes he is being called to do. A lot of schizophrenics have delusions of extreme purpose or importance. That being said, I don’t see anywhere that Terry is doing this in a way that brings glory to himself. He is really doing what he believes God is calling him to do. The world would be a better place if the same ones that impugn and ridicule him would rather spend their time encouraging and helping their neighbors. The article was written in an almost-complimentary way and for that, I give props to the author.
Yeah, it’s nice for a change that God has told someone to build an OS that nobody will ever use, instead of blowing themselves up in a crowd of people, or flying an airplane into a building, as seems to be what usually happens when loons think they are hearing directly from the invisible man.
Note: In case anyone accuses me of mocking this guy, I’m really not. At least he has an excuse. I’m mocking everyone else who claims to hear from non-existent beings.
Edited 2014-11-26 00:46 UTC
Actually, those loons don’t claim to hear directly from an invisible man – they are following the teachings of an entire movement. Many of the suicide bombers are children and mentally handicapped people that are used by others to accomplish what they themselves don’t have enough guts to.
I know, I know – you are very smart and only believe things based on the direct observation of empirical data, blah blah blah. You never feel bad or guilty or like you ought to live any differently. We’re all very impressed.
Again, instead of mocking anyone, try being a big boy and doing something constructive.
Edited 2014-11-26 02:00 UTC
…TL;DR, Largely off topic etc But..
Yes a proportion of suicide bombers will fall into that bucket of being too young or too mentally ill to really “know any better”. But another big bucket are while maybe not wholly, still at least largely culpable for and complicit in their actions – they are the young men failed by their (yes religious) system and power hungry elders/’masters’.
Based within confines of religious societies where they have no real social and sexual freedom and no wealth and status to get married – large swathes of young men are NOT GETTING LAID, and it may sound simplistic to some, but this leads to natural biological aggression, which in turn is perverted into anger by those seeking religious and political power. Yes the individual doesn’t hold SOLE responsibility still, but they’re still culpable.
You’re right, it’s not big and it’s not clever to personally critique individuals for their religious beliefs – especially if that’s one thing that has given them hope and dignity if life has been hard – which it is enough for those of us with somewhat privileged lives let alone tougher places.
But religions themselves should be critiqued strongly and critiqued often (wherever and whenever they impose restrictions on individuals or groups freedoms – again, where those freedoms don’t impinge again on yet others individual freedoms).
Catholicism is still quite misogynistic, anti-gay(pope Francis may be a little more enlightened, but his horde of bishops not so much); islam and hinduism similarly (and the Caste system – FFFF that!).
Off-off topic: Even in modern day britain – the classist nature of society still reigns – there’s a big divide still be land-owning and renting classes – and while ‘we’ never really ‘own’ anything even our bodies are only atoms rented for a few decades if we’re lucky ; land-owning is still a wealth generator that renting is not and Artificial Mechanisms keep the balance such – that one larger group feed another wealthier group.
Even still, it’s “very often” not right to harangue the individual for their probably, or more-often-than-not life-long religious persuasion, better to point out whatever prejudices exist therein and argue logically against their inequitable unfairnesses.
And push for undermining either ‘old guard’ or ‘extreme’ codes of religions to be dismantled or changed from within – to mutate to either ‘more modern’ or more ‘progressive’ ‘moderate’ codes — as perhaps Seikhism, and maybe a Anglicanism and certain sects of Judaism have done. Even moderate Islam.
Those more enlightened (yes, educated!) folk who can take the argument directly – damn straight -argue straight up against any need for Religion – it’s uneccessary – societies should be civil, ‘nice’, constructive, helpful and FREE and compassionate and logical – values based for some in the history of religion sure – but also purely academically arguable as positive reinforcement values for civil societies.
Still leaves space for non-organised spiritual beliefs of all kinds. Whether Naturual Wonder-, Drug-, or Psychosis- induced, ‘religious’ spiritual experiences could be life enhancing if not affirming.
But the post-Religous world SHOULD I would argue, be a better place. Won’t be in my lifetime though..
I agree with the sentiment of everything you said but you run into a snag here. And that is this… by what standard should religions be critiqued? Is that standard considered to be true and universal to all peoples or is it up to the individual to set their own standard? If the standard by which one would critique said religions is not clearly and rigidly defined for all peoples it just becomes a test against one’s self, and if people are standards unto themselves, then we have a problem worse than what we have today.
I get what you’re saying, but you’re going to run into something called the human condition and human nature. Unless you can succeed in persuading everyone to think exactly like you, you run the risk of encountering someone with a different standard you may disagree with. Then what would you do?
Pick any human desire, whether it be power, money, influence, sex, whatever – and you can see that all may be used for both good and bad (there we go again, assuming we have the same definition of that). Religions are the composed songs by which the notes of human desires should be played. If you don’t like a particular song, by all means don’t play it. That being said, it doesn’t mean all songs are bad.
Their own, for a start.
The same standard by which everything else is critiqued. If you said to me that you know for a fact that aliens walked the earth and you were 100% certain of this, I would ask you to prove it. Why should religion be any different?
While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane.
– Sam Harris
Edited 2014-11-27 04:07 UTC
** While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. **
Seems like ole’ Sam Harris fancies himself an intellectual. Charming.
We as a society believe in many accounts of historical events that we cannot directly observe, yet believe such facts based on the perceived authority of the authors that recorded those events. Indeed our whole society is based on such beliefs.
You might as well just say “I don’t like religion because I don’t like religion. They’re all just a bunch of crazy people”. That’s really as far as you can take it with logic if you have the intellectual honesty to see your own limitations. If you cannot see them, there is nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. Good luck with that.
Edited 2014-11-27 15:38 UTC
True, but we generally don’t take such authority on faith without some level of scrutiny, esp when these accounts revolve around such things as a man walking on water and coming back from the dead.
That’s kind of the whole point.
The texts you’re referring to (Bible, I assume) also mention Thomas – who wouldn’t believe in what he heard until he touched the wounds with his own hands to confirm – because as you stated, it’s pretty unbelievable. The Bible acknowledged the unbelievability of it all. We’re not more advanced today for thinking that. Yet… according to the account… it still happened. If that’s a deal-breaker for you, then so be it.
I would love to hear your philosophical opinion on the human condition. I don’t state that in a sarcastic or demeaning way, but in a serious way. How do you address human desire for power, influence, money, sex, security, and the techniques used to acquire said desires? Is there a such thing as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or is it all just human fabrications and a by-product of our herding nature?
[The following paragraph is not aimed at you directly] See, a lot of times I hear people attack religions based on the arguments you put forth yet they bring nothing to the table themselves to answer the human condition that most religions set out to address. To deny the human condition is to deny one’s own humanity. As a human, I find it really hard to believe that I don’t have a purpose or a meaning to my life beyond a hedonistic quest for what makes me ‘happy’. Indeed I find true joy in providing for my kids and my wife. I find true joy helping out when someone needs a little help. I find true joy in helping others. It goes beyond sucking up to a big invisible man in the sky or giving myself a pat on the back because that would make those things mentioned all about me… and that seems really shallow and empty.
Edited 2014-11-28 14:02 UTC
*sigh*
I cannot believe how ignorant people are on this topic. Morals existed long before the bible was ever written. Mankind would never have survived and society would never have existed if they had not.
Mankind is a social/pack animal. Like all pack animals, they need a code of behavior to survive in groups. Murder/rape/stealing and other anti-social behaviors, even in cave man days, resulted in death or expulsion from the tribe. As mankind took up agriculture and developed writing, these moral behaviors evolved into legal codes. The Sumerian Code of Hammurabi, for example, predates the bible by thousands of years and includes all of the Ten Commandments except the ones specific to YHWH.
Besides, what was it God revealed to man? He did not reveal science. The whole structure of physical science was built up very gradually and tentatively by man. He did not teach man geology, or astronomy, or chemistry, or biology. He did not teach him how to overcome disease, or its nature and cure. He did not teach him agriculture, or how to develop a wild grass into a life-nourishing wheat. He did not teach man how to drain a marsh or how to dig a canal so that it might carry water where it was needed. He did not teach him arithmetic or mathematics. He taught him none of the arts and sciences. Man had no revelation that taught him how to build the steam engine, or the aeroplane, or the submarine, the telegraph or the wireless. All these and a thousand other things which we regard as indispensable, and without which civilization would be impossible, man had to discover for himself.
But somehow, you think we need a cosmic boogeyman to figure out morality?
…Then you went on the expand on the herding instinct I already mentioned and thus, must be aware of.
Science is great – I love it… God instructed us to learn as much science as we can in Genesis 1:28. Read the passage and tell how better to subdue the earth than through Science.
Risking your life to save a stranger is considered “good morals” for humans yet gets you killed in the animal kingdom. Animals have things they do. Humans have things we ought to do.
If you really want to fight this hard to convince me and everyone else reading this thread that your life lacks a purpose and a meaning, then OK. I really don’t envy your position intellectually, and I’m completely OK with whatever it is you think of me. I do wish though you’d take a step back and consider the existence of things like anger, joy, jealousy, pride. Those things are what make us human. Those things are not scientifically quantifiable, and those things are what we as human beings wrestle with daily.
To to summarize… yes, we do need a ‘cosmic boogeyman’ as you so called it to inform us that it is people we ought to care about – not ourselves, or a bunch of commandments scribbled on a stone (That’s another topic completely). He told us to love other people. And not only that – He felt strongly enough to send his son to come show us how – all the way through torture and cruel execution while praying for and serving those who did it to him.
Edited 2014-11-29 15:40 UTC
The three lines he said was TL;DR yet you shit a brick of bible’s proportions? Yeah…
Great read. At first I thought he was a very clever troll, but the real story is incredibly moving.
His work is by all accounts in my book a fine achievement. He’s built himself a world of sorts, where he operates by his rules. Its a powerful thing.
Extremely gifted, one just has to wonder what his talents could be put to use where he not impaired by his disability.
Its tragic and inspirational at the same time.
You know you are off the scale on awesome points when Nelson thinks you’re a clever troll.
2 out of the last 2 comments you’ve posted on this website have been about me. About four months apart.
But I’m the troll? Right.
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?592233
I suspect he would say the are God’s rules…
In any case – as much as I think he’s off-the-charts nuts – I enjoyed the article as well
Fascinating, saddening and also somewhat uplifting in that he despite his turbulent mental state has managed to find a creative outlet which seems to offer him some solace.
He is certainly not the first person to have had a major breakdown and then become consumed by religious dogma as a way to try and make sense of the world, his venue of expression being an operating system as the ‘temple of god’ is at the very least an original one.
Having come across his posts here and there on the web and just disregarded it as him trolling with his usual copypasta gibberish, this article serves as a reminder that reality is so much more complex than the little digital world we have built on the web.
“He talks to God constantly, and his God is conversational, even chatty.”
He needs to be evaluated for schizophrenia (and a selection of other mental disorders). If this ‘God’ fellow is real, then I’d be very curios as to his purpose behind creating a dumpy, barely useful, operating system (not that we don’t like that kind of thing around here, it just isn’t something that will make a meaningful impact on the world).
Please note, I am very serious – I’m genuinely concerned, not trying to start an argument about religion.
–The loon
I take it you missed the passage towards the beginning, just after the embedded video, where it states that he has been diagnosed.
LOL! Yeah, I did!
Not sure what to think.
I reached the end of the article, and was left with “Well, that was weird, sort of, I guess.” and a feeling of not wanting to think about it.
So +1 thought provoking, though it made me uncomfortable.
> If you read just one article today, make sure it’s this one.
I read this article but I didn’t find it very interesting, I’m not sure why you did.
Apparently the asshole behind this TempleOS project thinks slavery was just.
Yes, those are his exact words.
http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Adam/God/HSNotes.html
Ctrl-f for “Slavery was just”.
He also thinks the Holocaust was because God Wanted to “compact” the Jews.
(Again, his exact words; use Ctrl-f.)
Am I missing something here?!
No “God” thinks that according to a pseduo-random generator. And the Bible backs that up BTW.
Terry Davis is a racist piece of shit though.
Yes. The fact that the person in question suffers from mental illness.
I would like to add to that, that alot of people on OSNews are “out of their mind”. Look at all the nutballs on chat and forums. Infact most of the world are nuts, in the definition of “schizophrenia” or the DSM, that originally had “bodily anomalities” as a mental illness. It is a contemporary term, that is loose enough to be labeled on anyone, that sticks out. And psychiatry has cured no-one. Bur rather real monotheism has cured many of “life long mental llnesses”.
Looking at the background of anti-psychotics we find lobotomy, and images of divided heads, from hallucinogens. It has no scientific basis.
Remember the bullies in school who harassed the programmer? Indeed they thought you were a weirdo. Who were they? Libido-centric people of little intelligence. Totemism is also about libido.
Freud oks that Libido. Jung is an acidhead where the term schizophrenia comes from.
And your very government still has totemic symbols, lions, eagles etc.
Even in OS-centric circles it is hard to find the intelligence who understands this. And they should be very careful, because the finger might aswell point at them.
Freedom of speech, and human rights, are possible because religion established these values before. But we are not quite there yet, and the same bullies are ofcourse with a total ideology, facists.
Infact a mission from God, to enjoy writing a good OS, might be his purpose in life. Who knows.
There is ofcourse correct belief and wrong belief. That is the real problem of the world, that they add totems/idols and agendas to religion, that is not original. Totemic ancestor worship is typical, and your flag is a result of that.
The crowd will ofcourse continue a discussion of these things without relevant facts. On the level of the same people who once used the term “ni*ger”. Because a person on a different patch of land, was supposedly so different. Even if their civilization is established by monotheistic prophets, aswell, and their people distorted it with their own idolatry, and flag.
True religion really tries to teach something far above this, and I think most people here fail at knowing what that is, and what I am saying here.
And no, you don´t know more about OSs than me. And even on that aspect, so many people have fantasyful paradigms. What kind of illness is that? Even a C64 could do microsecond latency audio.
And ofcourse that is not going to change. If you grow as large as Microsoft you are going to employ the same people, doing the same thing.
That is why they simply should do low-jitter internals to their OS.
Edited 2014-11-26 18:57 UTC
And no, you don´t know more about OSs than me.
You’re are a new profile of Terry Davis here, right? =)
Even a C64 could do microsecond latency audio.
Really? Microsecond is a less than a cycle of 6502.
Minimal instruction is 2 cycles.
If you people was sane enough to co-operate, you´d have our secret agents inside MS, and when we suggest low-jitter they would say YES. Much like Hulk Hogan had people standing up, where the rest would stand up, and cheer, making him very popular.
“Noooooooo that is just crazy talk”.
And if OSnews had sense, they post my low-jitter article I wrote. I can post a later version here:
————————————————–
A PERSPECTIVE ON OS-JITTER, FROM AN ADVANCED USER.
I have been using computers for a long time. Even since the days of “C64”.
The Commodore had an 1 mhz CPU, and helper chips, that made it perform smoothly, even without much power, compared to todays computers.
Commodore 64 games such as “Mega Apocalypse”, shows the C64, doing gameplay at 50/60fps constant, with accurate timing, and microsecond latency audio, even with samples.
Somehow the constancy, the smoothness, microsecond latency, and instant responsiveness of these early computers got lost. The last of these were probably the Amiga 500 and probably much the reason of its popularity. And if the Atari Falcon was more of a success it would probably been a respectable inheritor, to that type of computers.
Amiga went bankrupt, their top-of-the-line model A4000 had old chips in it, when even a SNES (Super Nintendo) had better chips at a fraction of the cost, and Atari started making game consoles instead, and went bankrupt. Although “Atari” survived, it has never been as famous as then.
Microsoft took over the homecomputing operating systems world, and people now had to deal with an operating system, that was not made for multimedia at all. This infuriated many users, Microsoft was thought “lame” by the enthusiast crowd, and that probably had much to do with the increasing popularity of Linux, where enthusiasts felt that their concerns were better adressed.
Today, one can look at where the respective parties are. The Linux camp seems little motivated anymore, talks of failure, and Microsoft seems to be the winner. Microsofts OS today, looks like the better alternative, and in most cases handles multimedia quite well. Although still, one can wonder why the microsecond latency of the ancient C64 still is not reached.
The hippie Stallman open-source cult, seems little of an alternative to a well established company in several countries. And if anyone else where to grow as large wouldn´t it be the same? The same people, the same type of work. But atleast MS employees get paid. The anti-establishment attitudes of the 70s hippies, reflected in Stallman, and opensource, seem as unwanted as a hippie veggie-farm.
So, knowing development goes like this, what can one do, to make the best of it?
Performance, responsiveness and smoothness of an OS, is the reason why what would seem like millions of tweaks exist, for windows. On Linux Mark Shuttleworth talks about ultra-smooth graphics, and Linus praises process auto-grouping pathches, because he thinks it improves multimedia, and could “be that ultimate thing”, that finally makes everything allright.
This can all be reduced to what is called the problem of OS-jitter. And on big extreme CPU count servers, OS-jitter is exactly the addressed problem, and so it would seem one would please everyone, if one just solved this problem. And indeed would it not mean a return to the microsecond latency of the C64, and enthusiasts concerns would be anwered aswell.
I think it would be crazy to try and upset the economy that came with Microsoft. So ofcourse instead one should try and influence Microsoft to do low-jitter internals. If you have good low-jitter internals and scheduler, it will indeed be the type of computing that
all these want. And just making some intelligent process prioritization.
So one only needs to tighten up the core.
Lacking WIndows source, instead, as an experiment I checked to see what I could do, to tigthen up the core of an Ubuntu Distribution.
The results was astonishing. The kernel was so poorly configured, that the “ultrasmooth” graphics of Shuttleworth, was attained, without waiting for Wayland, and Linus 1000hz kernel timer, seemed quite ridicolous as 90hz gave the lowest jitter. With X reniced to
-20, as it is a bottleneck, and ofcourse having such a system depending on HZ gives more jitter, still 90hz was the best. This is a drawback of typical “Unix”-OSs ofcourse. Maybe excluding “Irix”, but then we are back to vintage style computing again. And Linus process autogrouping was not even used, as intelligent prioritization gave better results.
The conclusion is that a general tightening up of a system, can do much to improve it, and indeed realize what many want, without many leader-figures realizing this.
For fun, and that is ofcourse all that Linux is, as I did absolutely nothing with the OS itself, since it had very little actual software that people use, I continued tweaking the kernel, and if one follows a thinking of configuring with the components that has the lowest jitter, and goes through all available settings, one can truly outperform most desktop OSs available today.
Linux problem obviously is not quality of code. It can perform better than most systems. However their leaders and the anti-establishment hippie attitudes, kill it ofcourse, and it never really had a chance.
So me for one, would really like to see windows tightened up, with low-jitter in mind. And that is why I wrote this article. I include more technical details below, for those who are interested in that, to help advocate this.
At the end of configuration low-jitter was achieved. The most jitter sensitive application I found was “Doom 3”. It does three passes with OpenGL pr. frame. That means 216 frames must have accurate timing, for a minimal psychovisual noise screen refresh of 72hz, for low-jitter. This was achieved. 0.33ms latency realtime audio streams was also possible, although used much CPU. So some considerations to hardware/protocols is probably necessary here. Lower was not possible to try since the firewire protocol of my audiocard did not allow lower. Reaching 200 microsecond latency, one is at the level where much hardware has been, and probably computers like C64/Amiga
etc. Overall the system was very responsive, and the OS transparent.
Best Regards,
Ove Karlsen
producer, engineer, researcher
Monoteo
http://www.monoteo.biz
Kernel configuration details:
First of all the kernel was changed to 90 hz. This gave the lowest jitter, on jitter sensitive applications.
“Low latency” preemption was turned on in the kernel.
SLAB instead of SLUB gave better jitter performance.
This kernel also was also hardwired to 1158500nS granularity, which I found to best suit a profile of “natural†with regards to jitter levels in OpenGL. I also enabled tick_skew=1, idle=poll, and cpuidle.off=1, to further reduce jitter. iommus, dynamic tick,
TICK_CPU_ACCOUNTING=y and misc options are also turned off for minimal jitter, and maximum performance.
Also modified Makefile adding -fno-defer-pop to cflags and cxxflags.
System configuration details:
Renicing X to -20, instead of realtime, gave better X performance.
Ext4 seemed to have good jitter performance.
Most desktops work well, with intelligent prioritization through nice levels.
If testing Doom 3, it needs a configuration file, that enables Vsync and also a tweak to remove the 60hz limit, if one wants 72hz.
Graphics quality at ~2k resolutions was best with the lowest setting of antialiasing 2xMSAA, and 2x anisotropic. Higher was actually just more blurry. While just a little smoothed things abit. 2x anisotropic made closer textures look smoother. But further away they became blurry, but that could be fixed with a LOD Bias setting of -0.5, getting both clear texutres far away, and smooth textures close up. The filters on the NVIDIA GTX 280 that this was done on, seemed to handle this just fine.
Oldskool greetz.
No, everything you’re finding is terrible. The guy is unhinged by his mental illness. There is a balancing act between saying ” Its not his fault, he’s mentally ill”, and “His views are morally abhorrent, and he should be banned from posting”.
Its a lot easier to make that decision when its online activity. Its much more difficult when they are in person, showing up in public, confronting people with their stories, and attempting to live out their fantasy world at the cost of other people’s well being.
Reading the words written there one concludes that he is in no way sane or was just plain trolling. The written words are not consistent with the topic he wanted to convey to his readers, I can’t find a way to describe it because I am not a native English speaker. But I can somehow find it confusing because it seems his mind was having this imagination, then change immediately to whatever his mind was thinking(instant change of thoughts), not really consistent of what he thinks previously. So he ends up writing in an incoherent way. This is so common among people with mental disorders.
So you cannot accuse him of being racist.
ASM should definately be written in C&4 res.
I actually did research on religion myself. A developed society is a blessing of God, and if only people could realize the singular far above the divisive schism of idols, the world would be a better place.
iewkoiiu eruiag—-g,meoG=- -KGRegwe–
“If you seek understanding, god or noGOD, keep reading.”
I believe earlier that this guy is a trolling atheist making fun of Christianity, but eventually find out that he has a mental disorder.