The Best, Worst, and Ugliest OSes of the Decade

itwbennett writes "Hundreds of Operating Systems were released during the past decade, finding their way into microdevices, watches, refrigerators, mobile phones, cars, motorcycles, jets, even the International Space Station. Some worked; some even worked well. Others, sadly, didn't. And some were just ahead of their time. Blogger Tom Henderson takes a look back at the best and worst OSes of the decade. Among the worst? Vista, as you'd suspect, along with WinME. But what about GNU Hurd? And some of the best? Solaris/OpenSolaris 10, Mac OS X, and newcomer Google Android."

Comments

IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[daveb1]

IMHO solaris has a really bad userland..... horrible horrible os for users :P

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[sopssa]

But I don't really get the Vista bashing in the article. It is a good OS. It had its problems at launch, but those were mostly caused by driver issues. Its also a lot better with security. I would take Vista over XP anytime.

Sure, it put some people off with the new features who weren't used to them (especially those also using unixes), but it was surely way to the correct direction that Windows needed. And now we have Win7, who no one really bitches about and says its polished. They would had if MS would had introduced the new features in it instead of Vista.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[Nerdfest]

That's why you rarely hear anyone say "This is the year of the Solaris desktop".

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[ivucica]

The one who thought packing CDE into Solaris for a few years is a good idea should be hanged. I still sometimes have nightmares about it.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[ByOhTek]

Vista was tolerable with SP1, albeit way to slow (I'm talking on a 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB memory).

XP, on the same machine, not surprisingly, was a *LOT* faster

7, on that machine, is between the two, but close enough to XP that I don't mind using it.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[w0mprat]

We were so desperate to beat up on MS after taking so damn long to give us a new OS that when it had problems we blew it out of all proportion, far beyond what empirical facts would support.

I never really had problems with Vista, it booted fast, was stable and ran like a well oiled machine. I saw few people with actualy problems and fully consider the Vista bashing phenomona part of the Microsoft hate disease.

I fully admit to bashing Vista, even viciously, before I had even actually got a copy to live with for a while. I repent.

Yes it had problems, but not worse than the XP era. After a few patches these niggles were addresed.

I have to poke fun here: on average, a new Linux distro comes with a multitude of problems preinstalled, mind you they are freatures to a Linux user, not bugs. I'll be honest, I enjoy fixing pre-broken distros and I'm actually throughly bored when I install something like Ubuntu and everything just works. :D

BUT ... all the bad PR has forced MS to make Windows 7 a huge improvement. If there is one genuine gripe, it is that Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. Yet through our bleating has paid off, we've been given a good Windows OS.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[RubberDuckie]

True enough, the Solaris userland is not as robust as Linux out of the box. You can upgrade to a more robust userland through sites like Blastwave, that carry pre-compiled GNU-like programs.

OTOH, Solaris is much better at backward compatibility than Linux. I have a very old proprietary database that was once running on Solaris 2.6, running on Solaris 10. I didn't have to wedge in some ancient libc to get this to happen, it just worked. So like many things in life, and especially with computers, you trade have trade offs: stability or newer features. One size does not fit all.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[nschubach]

Personally, I'm dreading the forced move to Windows 7 when it comes down the pipe. It may be nice for Grandma who wants transparent windows and flashy interface, but the lack of usable file tree structures (no lines anymore, needless wasted space...) really puts a damper on my development tasks (especially when you dig 14 levels into a folder of classes and version trees...) The addition of useless tool bars at the top of the windows that can't be removed also put's a damper on my minimalist self with the removal of the small status bar at the bottom of the windows. I'm not even going to mention how handy the old XP (2000?) classic menu was that allowed me to organize my applications by company, use and then product so I could quickly find what I needed without having to remember it's icon name to search for it. (Yes, there are tools that I might only use once in a blue moon, like packet sniffers, hex editors, etc. that have some ridiculous names.)

But hey... I'm a developer who uses tons of tools all day long. If MS doesn't want me to be productive, I know where I can go. Now, if I can get my company to agree...

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[digitig]

Some of us are put off by the fact that it is deliberately designed to be annoying. I hold the admin password on my kids' Vista laptop, and I can confirm that they suceeded completely.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[Xtifr]

I hate to tell you this, but CDE was standard on a lot of systems back in the day. If you think it was bad on Solaris, you should have tried it on HPUX!

I know what you mean though. I really really want to like Xubuntu, but every time I see Xfce, I go "GAH! CDE!" and have to go cower in the corner for a while. :)

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[sopssa]

the lack of usable file tree structures (no lines anymore, needless wasted space...) really puts a damper on my development tasks (especially when you dig 14 levels into a folder of classes and version trees...)

Are you talking about file explorer? I haven't used Windows own since 95. I used to use Turbo Navigator, but it was never patched for Vista/Win7 user account changes. But xplorer2 is better anyway and comes with tabs and lots of powerful tools, pretty much everything you can want.

I'm not even going to mention how handy the old XP (2000?) classic menu was that allowed me to organize my applications by company, use and then product so I could quickly find what I needed without having to remember it's icon name to search for it. (Yes, there are tools that I might only use once in a blue moon, like packet sniffers, hex editors, etc. that have some ridiculous names.)

But hey... I'm a developer who uses tons of tools all day long. If MS doesn't want me to be productive, I know where I can go. Now, if I can get my company to agree...

I use tons of tools every day too. I think the search box in the start menu is great, you write a little bit of the software's name and can usually just press enter to launch it. It's very seldom I actually need to go the actual menu.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[nxtw]

IMHO solaris has a really bad userland..... horrible horrible os for users :P

I would argue it's simply not polluted with nonstandard GNU extensions...

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[nschubach]

Thanks for the explorer replacement... now if I can get it approved (unless it has "portable" capabilities...)

Also, The anecdote I have for an example was when I needed my hex editor a few months ago. I couldn't remember it's name and it didn't have "hex" or "edit" or anything really to do with that in it's name, so without the start menu organization I had (Utilities / Hex Editing) I wouldn't have been able to find it by typing in ArtMoney which is a name that has nothing to do with hex editing. (Yes, I found it useful when I needed it to correct a bug in a certain RPG so "game hex editing" was what led me to it and I liked it's functionality, but I always forgot it's name.) So without having to go out to the internet and find another editor, I would have to remember the name of it... I also have several regex testers for various systems (.NET / Perl) that use names that don't exactly say "Regular Expression Tester" anywhere in the name. Usually it's a play on words or phrases and unless you use them regularly it's not efficient for me to remember their proper names to search.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[ivucica]

XFCE is actually cool. This is a matter of personal preference though.
CDE was not. And I don't think anyone can disagree.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[CapeBretonBarbarian]

OTOH, Solaris is much better at backward compatibility than Linux.

No kidding. I kept several old applications that was built on pre-Solaris machines (SunOS 4.1.4) running for many years on newer Sun OS' all the way through to Solaris 10. There were occasional blips in there that were less sucessful (Solaris 7 was a pain) but Sun takes backwards compatibility very seriously.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[buchner.johannes]

It seems everyone forgot the DRM and 'Trusted Computing' (aka distrust the user) introduced in Vista, one of the major criticisms (not look & feel).
You may recall this analysis: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html, (Schneier wrote something here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/drm_in_windows_1.html)

Not sure how 7 is now, but its not like the bashing against DRM/Trusted Computing/TCPA was not without reason, and might have worked. Also, since that time, complaining made music download websites turn their back to DRM.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[necrogram]

I'm right there with you. I bashed Vista pre-sp1, but there was some griup policy issues. Once you understand why ms did some of the things they did, they got a lot right. It a really easy OS to manage. My favorites feature is the hardware-agnostic wim image and off line driver injection. It adds up to let you have a single master image that doesn't care about the target system. New model of opti from dell, no problem.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[mr_lizard13]

This is why:

Confusion over what hardware characteristics would be needed to run Vista

This is true.

lack and dearth of appropriate hardware drivers

This is true.

OEM confusion

This is also true.

Given Microsoft turned up the hype machine to 11, these problems became all the more a bitter pill.
It was only a good OS if you had the hardware to run it. Many did not, although were told that they did. Underpowered boxes were branded with a 'Vista Capable' sticker; the performance blowed. OEMs were suckered into that one. Those same OEMs began offering XP downgrades. Perhaps not as many as perceived actually ordered the downgrade option, but enough customers did for it to notice.

That said, Vista 'had' to happen in order to progress to 7, which is a far more polished effort, and ought to be in the Best list.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[rzei]

I've bashed Vista and agree with almost everything I've read about it for the single reason; I've experienced all that myself.

I wasn't an early adopter -- my first experience was with my laptop, which I bought before SP1. Horrible startup times, and even though I've taken out all the desktop effects and updated everything it still simply sucks.

Kubuntu on the otherhand simply worked immediatedly after I installed it, much snappier and no IO problems (Vista SP2 still hangs when copying files). With the 9.04 I finally got very fast desktop effects that still enable the desktop to be faster than Vistas (without any effects).

Now days even ACPI sleep/hibernate work well in both operating systems.

I only keep Vista around to enable myself HP's bios/firmware upgrades; there's not even a remote possibility of being able to work with Eclipse in Vista -- not that it's fun in Kubuntu, but the times I need it, it'll do.

To get back to replying to you; Vista hasn't done any progress compared to Kubuntu. Perhaps Windows 7 finally fixes everything (copying files etc.) but I still think I should be getting it for free as an SP it really is; don't really care for the UI or DirectX side. I'm glad I only paid "the microsoft tax" with my laptop, imagine what the people who actually bought a license must feel..

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[NotBornYesterday]

I suppose that depends on what the user wants to do, doesn't it? Solaris rocks for its stability, power, security, ZFS, and containers, among other things, which makes sense considering it is generally used (and intended) as a server OS rather than desktop. But that's not to say it's not a good user desktop for web & office (OpenOffice), and other end user apps that are available for it, which is all many people need.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[digitalhermit]

This is revisionist history.

Vista was bad at release. It got a lot better by the time Windows 7 became available for sale, but Vista was not a product that a multi-billion dollar corporation should have released in such a state. For the cost of Vista, and the billions that Microsoft and the PC industry stood to make on the product, it shouldn't have had all the flaws. And there were many..

Before it was even released there were problems. Missed schedules, removed features, arguments with OEMs because of resource requirements such as the Vista Basic fiascos (some were Intel's fault, many were Microsoft's).

Even with all the delays, it was still released with little polish. The security sub-system was brain dead to the point that Apple could mock the dialogs that popped up every moment. There's a video on YouTube showing five dlalogs that popped up when a user wanted to delete a file. Networking would fail (google Vista wireless disconnects for thousands of hits). The apologists who claim that the driver errors were the fault of third-party vendors don't say how Microsoft changed and changed things as they neared deadline.

No, Vista certainly wasn't as bad as ME, but that's no excuse to release such a flawed product. When you are a billion dollar company and your software costs $200 a seat, we expect a certain level of quality that we don't from a free download. The fact that the free download works just as well would piss me off to no end if I'd spent $200 on Vista.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[gbarules2999]

I'm still using Vista and it's still slow. SP1, last time I checked.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[jweller]

If there is one genuine gripe, it is that Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. .

That was my idea

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[John Betonschaar]

And it's exactly this thinking that makes Solaris userland so freaking horrible. Every time I log into a Solaris machine it's a nice binary-hunt for common tools I have no problem finding on BSD, OS X or Linux, and when I finally find them (in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/ccs/bin, /usr/sfw/bin, /usr/openwin/bin, /opt/SUNWPro/bin, /usr/ucb/bin) it turns out they support none of the options or switched normal people (as opposed to unix masochists) find useful. Why is sun tar so anal? Why doesn't cp -r copy symlinks? Why is there no sensible top, or killall? What's up with the completely nonstandard switches to ps? Why isn't vim included by default and why is Sun vi even more terrible than normal vi, which is already bad enough. It drives me crazy, every time I sit down to do something on a Sun machine I get really, really aggrevated, and I've been using and developing for the damn things (amongst many other *nix OS-es) for 5 years now. I'd much rather 'pollute my userland with GNU extensions' than be stuck in the 80's and guessing what is where and what support what every time I need to use a Solaris machine.

What's even worse than the Solaris userland? Developing for Solaris. The Sun CC suite is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever encounterd. It sometimes does the job if you don't push it too far with templates and stuff, but most of the time it simply doesn't work on 100% valid C++ code that has no issues whatsoever on any other platform. Or it works on Sun Studio X, but it fails in Y, to work again in version Z. Compiling even such simple parts of Boost as the shared_ptr headers is still not possible because the compiler is so brain-dead. If you want to build shared libraries on Sun you need to pass 10 different arcane options if your build is reasonably complex, because the sun linker will gladly fsck up where all your symbols end up which breaks a perfectly fine piece of software as soon as it is linked in with another binary that happens to define the same symbol. And the Sun Cstd library is full of those, symbols with ridiculously common symbol names that are just waiting to clash the moment you deploy your software from the testbench to the production environment. So just use gcc you might suggest? In theory that's a good idea if it weren't for the fact that if you need to link 1 (one) binary-only module (e.g. supplied by a third party) that was linked against the Sun libCstd, you're screwed, since you cannot combine that binary with the stlpor4t C++ standard libraries that actually _do_ work in all other cases. All this is not because of a bad sysadmin because it was the same thing all over again at 3 different jobs.

Also, Sun hardware is slow as a turd for what you pay for it, up to the point it's almost a joke, for some tasks. Sure they might have great threading performance but don't dare to try running FPU intensive code on it or stress the VM, my $400 C2D Dell laptop I develop on is literally 10 times faster than the $20,000 Sun Netra 240 the code is deployed to. It's all fine and dandy that Sun hardware scales to a zillion CPU's nicely, and that an UltraSparc is much more power-efficent than a Xeon, Opteron or Power6, but it's not really an advantage anymore if you need 10 of them to get decent performance out of it.

Summarizing: I absolutely HATE solaris from the bottom of my heart, I know I used to hate the 1995 HP/UX I used to deploy on, but after a few years of Solaris experience I'd switch to that without hesitation. I don't care about the fancy tech they put in like ZFS and dtrace, it's all too bad they fucked up they're development environment and userland up to the point that work that uses to be fun becomes one big nightmare, and you can't really count on anything anymore when you log into a Solaris box. Maybe OpenSolaris is better, but that'd only be because it has a GNU userland by default (or at l

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[nxtw]

Why doesn't cp -r copy symlinks?

The -r flag to cp is implementation specific and obsolete in POSIX:2004 and no longer in in POSIX:2008.

Why is there no sensible top, or killall?

Neither are part of POSIX.

What's up with the completely nonstandard switches to ps?

Like what? I think it's the other way around, and BSD and GNU ps often support nonstandard behavior.

Maybe OpenSolaris is better, but that'd only be because it has a GNU userland by default (or at least I guess so, no experience with it here).

It doesn't. BSD and OS X usually have BSD derived tools too, although with more nonstandard extensions.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[John Betonschaar]

You're right, I was getting a little carried away. It happens a lot when Solaris is involved because I resent it so much...

Part of my frustration is probably because my knowledge of POSIX and other established *nix standards of yore, is lacking. But that's not the point. It's just remarkable how sensible and pleasant other OS's I have to work with (or worked with) can be, yet Solaris keeps being extremely frustrating in my experience.

The OS just appears to hate you for trying to be productive.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[hairyfeet]

I'm sorry, but as someone who has run every MSFT OS since Win3.x I can say without a hint of exaggeration that Vista seriously blew chunks. I will give you that WinME was shitty, but I have actually seen solid WinME machines, even have a neighbor that refuses to let go of his WinME box because it is so stable.

The "trick" with WinME was this: NEVER EVER run VxD drivers! If you run WDM only you can have a machine that is more stable than Win98. Unfortunately most OEMs didn't ship WinME with WDM drivers, instead using a horrible mix of VxD drivers and WDM, which made for a seriously unstable mess. My WinME machine was so unstable you could set you watch by how long it would take to go from boot up to BSOD-3 minutes on the dot.

Now let us compare that to Vista, shall we? When I beta tested and was later given a RTM copy for reporting bugs my machine could have been considered pretty high specs- a 3.6GHz P4 with HT, 2Gb of RAM, a 7600GS OC 512Mb, dual 400Gb HDDs. So it should have been pretty fast, right? WRONG. Slow, man that OS was slooooow! Slow to boot, slow to wake, and it would have what I called "senior moments" where it would freeze for 5-15 seconds randomly, just long enough to piss you off. It thrashed the HDD so hard it actually killed the new Maxtor it was on, and that was after killing indexing and using every tweak I could find on the net, the network would "lose" shares which could be seen and used by other machines but Vista would need a hard reboot just to use them (WTF?), and of course the lovely "don't listen to music or do anything else while transferring files" bug.

Compared to Windows 7 it is like night and day. Windows 7 is F.A.S.T! Fast to boot, fast to wake, fast to transfer files. Just to make sure it wasn't the new dual (now quad) with a buttload of RAM that made it that way I went and installed it on my oldest boy's "hand me down"- The very same P4 that I had tested Vista on. Using the same hardware and the same drivers Windows 7 kicks enough ass and is so pleasant to use on it that when the 30 days is up I'll buy him a copy of his own, it is just that nice. So i'm sorry, while I'm sure Nvidia drivers were partly to blame, even when using nothing but MSFT drivers Vista was a slow bloated piggy of an OS. I don't know what kind of rebuild they did on Windows 7 but it really is what Vista should have been IMHO.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[shirotakaaki]

The beauty is Windows 7 is just Vista SP2 without that nasty Vista name attached. So if you already had Vista you had to pay a second time for 7. **KA-CHING

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[Alomex]

I never really had problems with Vista, it booted fast, was stable and ran like a well oiled machine.

Vista is slower than XP on my machine. Opening an office document freezes the screen for a few seconds and sometimes for up to half a minute.

In terms of stability within the first three months of usage I had more blue of screens of death than in my entire Win2K+WinXP experience spanning eight years. Sometime in late October/early November Windows Update downloaded a whole bunch of updates and it hasn't blue screened me since then. For the record this is more than eighteen months after Vista was first released.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[Xtifr]

XFCE is actually cool. This is a matter of personal preference though.

Yeah, that's what I keep hearing, and everything I hear about it makes it sound like the kind of system I'd like. It's just that every time I look at it, I can't help having a bad CDE flashback! I'm sure I'll get over it eventually. :)

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[0xDAVE]

Vista was tolerable with SP1, albeit way to slow (I'm talking on a 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB memory).

XP, on the same machine, not surprisingly, was a *LOT* faster

7, on that machine, is between the two, but close enough to XP that I don't mind using it.

[citation needed]

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[camperdave]

I never really had problems with Vista, it booted fast, was stable and ran like a well oiled machine.

You must have had a different Vista than I have. Mine would turn on my laptop in the middle of the night, so I wound up starting the day with a dead battery. This would happen even if I didn't hibernate, but shut down. The BIOS setup didn't have any sort of "wake at a particular time" feature. I used to have an option on the power management that let me choose what to do when the laptop lid was closed. That disappeared after one particular update, and was never seen again. Now, for the past two weeks or so, when it boots it gives me a critical error and one minute to save my stuff before shutting down.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[OrangeTide]

I quit using Xfce when it dropped Xforms for GTK and dropped CDE-like for GNOME-like.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[thrash242]

I agree. Bashing Vista is a silly bandwagon. I've been using it since shortly after release (on my main gaming machine) and as far as Microsoft OSes go, it's my favorite so far.

Vista is definitely better in most ways than XP. But then, I never liked XP. I uninstalled it to install 2000 before.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[__aaqvdr516]

I've had only one BSOD in Vista 64 home and it was due to a poorly written FOSS app. After the app's next release cycle it's worked flawlessly. I've also run Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Suse, Mint, and Mandriva on this same box. They all run equally as fast. The only thing I can say for sure is that Firefox was crashing a hell of a lot more under Ubuntu than Vista. I never experienced a crash with Konqueror.

I thought that one time I noticed a .00134 second time difference between the load times of firefox between Windows and Ubuntu but I checked again and it was only .00131 seconds, so I never gave it another thought.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[PopeRatzo]

Fortunately, since few of us actually bought Vista, we don't have to pay for it a second time.

All I know is that since I put Win7 on this new i7 nehalem system, which I built because I wanted an upgrade from my Mac Pro, I'm really happy with the performance doing music and video production. I've got three OSs here now that I use for various purposes in my studio. Win7, OSX and Kubuntu (which I use to offload effects processing, rendering chores and for serving audio samples) and I'm really happy with the results.

I use the Win7 system for recording and live production, virtual instruments and as a platform for my monome and new launchpad controller for ableton live, OSX for post production in Logic, and the kubuntu system as I described above.

Oh, and of course my gaming rig upstairs runs Win7 for the Borderlands, Dragon Age: Origins and Modern Warfare 2. I don't have much choice there.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[krelian]

And how does this relate to what person you were replying to said?

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[amRadioHed]

[citation needed]

Here you go.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[krelian]

The breadcrumb bar is much easier to use the tree file structure (yes, you need to get used to it). The status bar is there, it's just disabled by default.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[yuhong]

Everyone forgot that analysis because everyone realized it was full of crap and fearmongering.

I have read Guttman's analysis, I even was able to get and read the slides, and it wasn't. Win 7 in fact still have that stuff, and I even argued that it was necessary for Vista and later to support DRM on Blu-Ray and HD DVD. Now Trusted Computing was a different story, in response to the early criticisms they are now I think permoting it for a different purpose that is less harmful.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[Anonymous Coward]

e had only one BSOD in Vista 64 home and it was due to a poorly written FOSS app.

A good OS should isolate misbehaving apps, not crap on itself.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[drsmithy]

I have read Guttman's analysis, I even was able to get and read the slides, and it wasn't.

Yes, it was, as evidenced by a) all of it done without ever even having used Vista, b) significant parts of it being flat-out wrong, and c) none of the sky-is-falling predictions ever eventuating.

DRM support in Vista (and Windows 7) is irrelevant if you don't have DRM-encumbered media, and nothing but helpful if you do.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[symbolset]

We were so desperate to beat up on MS after taking so damn long to give us a new OS that when it had problems we blew it out of all proportion, far beyond what empirical facts would support.

I know a lot of people who are huge Microsoft fans. People who aren't shy about saying "We're a Microsoft shop". Serious professionals with years of experience supporting hundreds and thousands of users. People who were eager to adopt Vista, and were beta testers for it. People with not just a desire to adopt Vista, but with a mandate from the top down that "we will adopt Vista". These enterprise folks have Software Assurance and their enterprise agreements allow them to just call up Microsoft and get top-flight Redmond schooled professionals to assist them in their migration. They were willing to refresh half of their end user equipment and the servers too to get 'er done, recession or no.

They tried and tried, but they just couldn't do it. Too many line-of-business apps architected on old versions of .NET, ASP and IE6. Too much unsupported hardware. Too many performance issues. Too much software to re-buy both on the client and on the server side. Too many contractor-developed apps they didn't have the source code for. After so many years of XP and embracing the internicene codependencies that are the Windows platform their infrastructure has set like concrete.

They like Windows 7 better, but it could be three or four years before they get that to go.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[alfielee]

Horrific OS. I dispute your call. It made usage difficult, made working with older hardware nigh on impossible in some situations. Vista was garbage. Overly bloated, disconnected wireless several times a day & was difficult to reconnect, often needing a reboot or rebuild of the network resources, overzealous controls with installations for home users, ridiculous controls on legal multimedia content even when owned, hard to install hardware, incredibly slow & a real setback for users.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[Anonymous Coward]

;-),

I think your memory of HPUX must be somewhat foggy. HPUX API is severely crippled, the most common problem compiling open source software for it is that most of the nice functions found in Solaris or Linux is simply not there, or that you run in to fun HPUX only bugs in open source software because basically nobody is developing/deploying open source software for HPUX because of their crippled API. No you would thought that HP was a nice player and released the changes needed to e.g. kerberos auth mechanism under Apache, or Apache it self. But no, HP doesn't release any source changes or sources to any open source software unless its requiered by the licence i.e. GPLed instead of BSD/Apache lic.

Don't get me wrong, I love gnu tools, but please do not say non std switches in regards to Solaris/Unix tools, it's actually the otherway around, it's gnu tools that has non std switches to support new functionality. Nice new functions but still not std UNIX functions.

Cheers

PS: I could go on talking about the compiler env but to little time, you been to 3 different jobs, with 3 fsck sysadmin teams.. ;-). Just the said way of patching shows that..

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[Spazztastic]

And now we have Win7, who no one really bitches about and says its polished.

Speaking from personal expierience: IMO it sucks on single-core machines. And on my single-core it gives me a couple bluescreens per day. XP runs just fine on that machine with the same workload.

Have you ruled out all other issues? Try running memtest86+, etc. Make sure something isn't actually wrong with the hardware...

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[TheRaven64]

Yes, it's polluted with nonstandard Sun extensions. The difference is, the nonstandard GNU extensions are marginally less hideous, although I still prefer the nonstandard FreeBSD extensions (which are similar, but not identical to, the nonstandard NetBSD and OpenBSD extensions). If you've ever used a system that implements the Single UNIX Specification and nothing else you'd know that nonstandard extensions are the only thing that make life tolerable on a UNIX system. The standard stuff is a core that lets you find your way around an unfamiliar system, but it's not particularly user friendly.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[uassholes]

I like CDE and am unhappy that it's being dropped. Having said that, I use Fluxbox. But there are still bits of CDE (the apps) that I use because they are less amateurish and cartoonish, and faster than the open source alternatives.

Gnome sucks.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[ivucica]

Just wondering, how do you like OS/2?

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[John Betonschaar]

Thanks for the advice, I'll suggest to our customers who are running their $30 million machines in production to shut them all down to upgrade the computers inside ;-). Switching OS's or hardware is not an option for existing applications, and I'm not the one who decides about this anyway, not even close.

Also, we've been testing with an 8-cpu M3000 (UltraSparc IV 64) a while ago, and it was still dog slow for our FPU- and memory intensive code, barely faster than a run-of-the-mill quadcore x86. It really is that bad for the purposes we use them for.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[lanc]

You, Sir, are a troll.

instead of looking for tools you are used of on other platforms (top, killall), pls rtfm, and look for the functionalities delivered with the OS (prstat, pkill). Nonstandards switches? Which standard are you talking about?
Instead of using old USIIIi boxes, have at last a look at the Sparc64 (Mx000 series) and the CMT processor based servers (T5xx0 Series).

and so on.

The rest is just useless rant. Go check your facts, or at least read wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC64_VII , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_Enterprise and sunsolve.

Re:IMHO solaris has a really bad userland

[lanc]

8 CPU M3k? what are you talking about? That is a single CPU box. Yeah, quadcore, and each core can run two threads. And wtf is an UltraSparc IV 64? Nonsense detected. And "for the purpose you use them for". Exactly. You should re-think your CPU architecture if it doesn't suite your needs. rule 80/20. The plannning/ranting ratio.

BeOS

[JesseL]

I still miss it. So much potential and such high hopes. I suppose I should check out Haiku.

Re:BeOS

[ivucica]

I liked their idea of simple installation of BeOS 5 Personal Edition alongside Windows. It's sad that Be, Inc. died such a horrible death.

Re:BeOS

[asherlev]

I still miss it. So much potential and such high hopes. I suppose I should check out Haiku.

Checking out Haiku is going to be like resurrecting your dead mother. Her soul is gone and she'll just try to eat your brains.

Re:BeOS

[ByOhTek]

Definetly. It could have used a secure login setup (which, I think was planned for the next release...), but otherwise it was by far my favorite OS.

Fast, stable, needed more app support, UI was quiet an clean...

*sigh*

Re:BeOS

[AndrewNeo]

Or you'll get your arm and leg torn off, and your brother will have to live in a suit of armor.

Re:BeOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least she's not gonna eat my eyes, that's just unreasonable.

Re:BeOS

[imakemusic]

I'm still missing it.
Such high hopes and potential.
Should check out haiku.

ftfy

Re:BeOS

[Abreu]

+1, nerdy reference

Re:BeOS

[2stein]

I suppose I should check out Haiku.

I really think you should! I've installed the alpha a few months ago (on a really crappy old system - 1GHz P3, 256MB RAM, slooooow (as in awfully slow) HDD) and it worked out surprisingly well. Boots (from Grub to responsive interface) in approx. 7 seconds on that old box, stays responsive all the time (even when running a few instances of that Teapot rendering w/o hardware acceleration), simply amazing. To say "it currently lacks a few application ports" would be understatement, but I fancy it a great single-user OS.

Re:Slashdoted already?

[illumastorm]

Still better than Windows ME.

I will stand by this forever

[Monkeedude1212]

I have never had an operating system that I loved more than Windows 95.

If there was one feature I wish I could have back, it is reboot into DOS.

Seriously, if they had included this with Vista, and I could boot my games from DOS, it would have made up for all other deficiencies.

There is a reason why they made you do this in old games. I wasn't actually old enough at the time to know what they were, but if I had to venture a guess now, it might have to do with saving resources (More RAMs for Graphix!).

Since Vista was so bloated, this would have been exactly what I needed. Though I suppose this might have ruined their memory management system or whatever they built in, right?

Re:I will stand by this forever

[jgtg32a]

Server 08 Core may interest you then

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2008_core#Server_Core

Re:I will stand by this forever

[sopssa]

Included what in Vista? There is no DOS. The "dos window" is a command line dialog, not a real DOS.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Dunx]

More RAM, yes, but also direct access to hardware resources, and predictable response times (a lot of the same reasons that made DOS a reasonable basis for embedded PC systems).

OTOH, DOS barely counted as an operating system.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Bagels]

Simple fix: grab Dosbox. It probably has better compatibility than your '95 based computer ever did, although I admit that the fiddling was part of the fun of those old games.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Monkeedude1212]

I do use Dosbox to run the Old Monkey Island games and The Dig and Full Throttle, as well as the original Duke Nukem and Lemmings.

It does fine, for a spell, but what I was getting at is that alot of games today will specify in the Miniumum requirements: 2 Gigs of Ram for XP, 3 Gigs for Vista, because Vista eats up about of Gig of Ram. If I could free up even a portion of that, todays games would run better and smoother.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Monkeedude1212]

I used it for a good portion of my childhood, I'd say it counted as an operating system. We had a DOS PC that didn't have Windows or anything on it. We could still install games (Oh Kings Quest...) or perform work (There was a version of Word on there. It was terrible though, it had an all red background, and no spellcheck).

Given that I still have to use DOS on the odd networking Fix (IPconfig, winsock resets) - it seems Odd that I can't use JUST Dos anymore.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Monkeedude1212]

Exactly my point. It was not included. It should have been.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[MrHanky]

MS DOS is garbage, though, and it certainly doesn't give the games any more resources, as it has the old '640 KB ought to be enough for everyone' limit. What you love isn't the OS, it's the games it could run.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[badboy_tw2002]

You're not using DOS. You're using a command prompt. Given that you were a little kid, I'm sure your dad helped you get the autoexec.bat set up just right so it'd load your CD rom driver in and make sure high mem was available. Also, gotta make sure that the sound card starts up on the right IRQ, don't want to screw that one up. Oh, and gotta clear out the TSRs to eek out the just over 3.75 megs that the game needs to even boot. Its nostalgic to think about that stuff, but I'll take a real operating system that can configure its drivers and doesn't think 640K is enough for everyone. Oh, also one that I don't have to roll my own TCP stack.

I'm guessing your just old enough now to what we call "nostalgia", which is great in some ways but can also lead to bad things like bell bottom revivals and trucker hats. Its great to acknowledge the past, but generally the future has more going for it.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[sznupi]

What you are doing when fixing networking is not using DOS. Command line and "DOS" are not the same thing.

And yes, it was barely an OS; it often outright handled full control of the computer to an application.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Cro Magnon]

And yes, it was barely an OS; it often outright handled full control of the computer to an application.

And yet, it was still better than many versions of Windows.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[lord_rob the only on]

Note that for the Lucasfilms games like Monkey Island 1,2,3 The Dig and Full Throttle you can run using ScummVM. With this program you don't need the original executable anymore, only the data files.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Orange Crush]

DirectX was Microsoft's solution to the "exit to DOS to run a game" workaround. It also targetted the "You must have one of these sound cards, one of these graphics cards, etc." that hampered DOS games because the OS wasn't doing any hardware abstraction--they had to roll their own drivers for every game engine/runtime. DirectX *was* the runtime that enabled direct hardware access and hardware abstraction so the game designers could focus on making games, rather than which sound card a user had.

It wasn't a perfect solutions--still isn't--but DirectX did kill DOS as a gaming platform.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[sznupi]

All those old games you play run fine also in ScummVM.

Regarding Vista - I wouldn't say this RAM goes to waste to such a degree that you seem to believe. For starters it might be eaten by new model of GFX. Things that help games get released at all...

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Monkeedude1212]

Well I was told it was DOS, it didn't have anything else. Maybe it was just Command Prompt, but there wasn't an inch of windows on it. My dad didn't help at all, I ended up teaching him about it, by the time I was 5 or 6. I knew how to navigate file structures better than he did. It didn't have a CD Rom. It didn't have 3 and a Half inch Floppy. It used an 8 Inch Floppy. I remember we eventually upgraded to a Soundblaster so that we could even -get- sound. (Where yes, -I- was the one who memorized the IRQs)

It is nostalgic to play these old games once again, Even just to tinker with command prompt once again to get things to work just right. But I obviously wasn't old enough to understand the full inner workings. I don't understand why it should be limitted to 640k anymore, why we can't hack together an upgrade for it, and have it run the way it used to.

I just see alot of innovative thinking that happened in the past that seems to have been discarded. Like you said, clearing out TSR's to get more Memory, boot Disks for games, a bunch of other tricks to get the most resources possible to launch an application. All this has been discarded for our ability to brute force with newer and better hardware. What happens when Moore's law reaches it's limit, will these talents be rediscovered?

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Josh04]

No, when the limit is reached the programs themselves will be made better. Scraping an extra 10mb on top of your 8gb of RAM won't help you run anything. You're labouring under the delusion that all that tweaking was to get extra performance from your PC, when in fact it was more to do with the terrible DOS base memory model which meant that you needed to fiddle no matter how much memory you had outside the first 640k.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Wowsers]

I missed the DOS box so much I installed Linux, where I could use it's equivalent Bash.

(not a flame post, meant as a joke)

Re:I will stand by this forever

[confused one]

Dual boot to FreeDOS or DR-DOS. Drivers are a problem sometimes with modern hardware; but, DOS still exists.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[man_of_mr_e]

Most DOS games work fine in a dos emulator, like DOSBox or DOSEmu... but if your apps don't work there, there's always simply using the free VMWare player to run a full virtual machine that boots DOS.

The only things that won't work will be stuff that needs a dongle.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[dzfoo]

Dude, check out DosBox, and for full immersion, set it to full screen. No re-boot needed! And for old Windows games, you can install Win3.11 easily!

        -dZ.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[amliebsch]

Have you checked out DosBox? You can basically create an virtual old computer running DOS on your shiny new system.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[Anonymous Coward]

You upgraded a system with an 8-inch floppy to include a Sound Blaster? 8-inch floppies were a 70's thing and Sound Blasters were a very late 80's thing at the earliest.

Perhaps you had a 5 1/4" drive?

Re:I will stand by this forever

[dzfoo]

Here, Merry Christmas:
        http://www.dosbox.com/

(I apologize to your wife/gf/s.o. in advance)

      -dZ.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[amaupin]

It probably has better compatibility than your '95 based computer ever did, although I admit that the fiddling was part of the fun of those old games.

No, it wasn't.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[John Betonschaar]

To play his collection of Leisure Suit Larry and Police Quest games, I presume. And porn tetris, that also didn't work under Windows.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[mikael]

There is 'dosbox' for Linux and Windows

Back in those days, all the high-end PC's (=200MHz) had for the user interface was the MS-DOS prompt. For office users, they would have to type 'win' in order to get Windows 3.1 to start, unless it was added to their autoboot.bat startup file. Windows 3.1 ran well enough to play games like Solitaire and Minefield but the latency of kernel function-calls would slow down any graphics-intensive application right down to unbearable speeds.

Running under DOS, every application could do more or less what it wanted with the video hardware through MS-DOS kernel calls (via interrupts) - change the hardware cursor, the character set, the screen resolution, and if the game wasn't accessing the PC speaker directly, the game would also talk directly to the sound drivers. You would be lucky if games did have support a mouse or a multi-player mode as each network device driver would have to be specifically programmed for.

There were all sorts of programming methods for rearranging the format of the bit-planes for EGA, VGA and SVGA video modes in order to boost rendering speeds, at least until bit-blitting became available at which time, Windows 95 came out and unified all the different audio, video and networking hardware drivers under a single set of API's, and which restored direct hardware access (DirectX). Even with this level of access, the odd multi-tasking application like E-mail was enough to slow down a game, so the XBOX was developed.

The equivalent in Linux is the SDL set of API's. There is also the Shockwave Flash API which supports flash games.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[ciggieposeur]

I see you've never had a pre-386 class PC. PC XT's commonly ran DOS off a 5.25" floppy. If you weren't lucky enough to have a 10-30 MB hard drive (MFM or RLL: $300+), you'd switch floppies to launch games. POST would count memory up to 640K; most did not have realtime clocks so every file was dated Jan 1 1980. Dot-matrix printer, or maybe even daisy wheel. It got a little nicer with 286's. You might have a 40-80 MB IDE hard drive and RTC. Usually you had 1MB minimum memory, up to 16MB (which would cost more than the rest of the computer combined).

What you're talking about were the multimedia PC's that came out around 1990, typically 386 or 486 but sometimes 286.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[KiloByte]

I'm sure your dad helped you get the autoexec.bat set up just right so it'd load your CD rom driver in and make sure high mem was available. Also, gotta make sure that the sound card starts up on the right IRQ, don't want to screw that one up.

It was an obstacle, but one that was a matter of a few single-line tricks. Now compare this to the Vista driver brouchacha that you cannot solve in any way, since neither Microsoft nor the hardware company is interesting in providing a working driver for your gear.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[ckaminski]

We did upgrade it. It's called Linux.

Now get off my lawn.

</sarcasm>

Seriously. Let. DOS. Die.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[badboy_tw2002]

I certainly did. Harddrive, you lucky bastard! I loaded mine off a punch card and I liked it!

Re:I will stand by this forever

[badboy_tw2002]

I doubt most of the performance hits in a modern machine come from an OS, esp. when we're talking about games. For one thing most of the memory is going to get pushed aside into the swap file, so its not like if there's only 2GB of RAM on the machine you only get 2GB of program data in there. Secondly a ton of the performance in modern games comes from how fast the graphics card & drivers are and how fast data can be moved onto it.

If anything performance is hurt today by the level of multitasking at the user level. I can turn off most of the os crap in Win7 - but if the antivirus is running when I go to play my game, then the CPU might get hit. Or if you're running bittorrent, you're not going to have all the bandwidth available to you.

I think its just a bit presumptuous of you to say that we've "discarded" performance tweaks because games don't have raw access to the hardware anymore, which when you're talking about DirectX and such, it really doesn't mean much.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[acheron12]

For Monkey Island and other supported games you should definitely try the Scumm Virtual Machine.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[yuhong]

Usually you had 1MB minimum memory, up to 16MB (which would cost more than the rest of the computer combined).

Yep, the 286's protected mode, while less useful and compatible than the 386's protected mode (for one thing, there was no way to switch out of it without a reset), still had some OSes made for it, such as OS/2 1.x and Windows 3.x.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[yuhong]

40-80 MB IDE hard drive

Actually, it was initially still MFM/RLL, but with a different disk controller than the XT (WD1003 series), and the hard disk BIOS was built into the system BIOS of the AT. ESDI and IDE had to be register-compatible with the WD1003, in fact even today's SATA controllers are still register-compatible with the WD1003 in it's compatiblity mode!

Re:I will stand by this forever

[yuhong]

Yea, I was going to say it too.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[symbolset]

What happens when Moore's law reaches it's limit, will these talents be rediscovered?

You need have no worries about Moore's Law limiting out any time soon. We've still got the entire third dimension as undiscovered country.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[SenseiLeNoir]

I dont know if its practically useful to boot to DOS to run games any more on modern systems.

The old DOS games needed a "soundblaster" running on ISA, with DMA, IRQ, etc. I dont think any modern soundcard/inbuilt sound system can directly support soundblaster emulation as HARDWARE. Almost always it will require software emulation (using some trickery). Which are probably not even produced anyway. This takes away memory from conventional ram etc, and removes the one advantage of running in pure dos.

To be honest, these days, its almost always easier to use DOSBOX, or some other DOS emulator running under Windows/Linux, which will emulate the soundblaster better anyway.

Any performance loss from the need to emulate DOS, is easily made up by the fact that back in the day, the most "hungry" DOS game maxed out at about 166Mhz Pentium Processor, with 2 or 4 MB of RAM, which current Processors are more than capable of outperforming in an emulation.

Finally running in a DOSBOX frees conventional RAM, as a "real" dos need not be present, instead just thunks to the host OS. Something that was important in those days.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[StuartHankins]

5.25" floppy. 8" floppies were for things such as Radio Shack TRS-80's.

But otherwise, yeah, I remember using Stac Electronics' Stacker (instead of DoubleSpace), QEMM (to manage conventional and "high" memory), boot menus to launch CD-ROM drivers, set environment variables etc then finally run whatever. Good times.

Re:I will stand by this forever

[pak9rabid]

I admit that the fiddling was part of the fun of those old games.

Modem init strings anyone? ;)

Re:I will stand by this forever

[TheRaven64]

DirectX was actually their second attempt. WinG was the first one, but very few games used it. DirectX was not actually that direct. It went through an abstraction layer, then through drivers, then to the hardware. The reason it became popular was that it arrived at a time when manufacturers were starting to make more intelligent hardware. DirectX on a simple [S]VGA controller is much slower than a DOS program using the [S]VGA controller, but by the time Windows 95 came along most graphics cards could accelerate line drawing, fills, and even scaling images (often only scaling up, not down). DirectX let you take advantage of these features transparently, without having to write any hardware-specific code. This was important, because these graphics cards all had different interfaces. Code that talked to the VGA BIOS would run on any PC. Code that used a specific graphics accelerator would only work with that card. Code that used DirectX was slower than code that controlled the graphics hardware directly, but not by much, and it was a lot easier to write than code for every single graphics controller game buyers might have. The same was true of sound cards.

What a total waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA is a waste of time. It's the worse kind of drivel and doesn't have any interesting technical facts or points.

I mean if they had broken OS's down by functionality, design and architecture it might be worth some time but this strikes me as an article anyone with quarter a clue could write in about a half hour - I mean did the author research ANYTHING for this versus pull out general comments that are generally known.

Come on editors you gotta be able to do better than this!

Re:What a total waste of time

[nschubach]

I read it and the comments from the author...

Nah... the CLI scripting makes up for it
The UI is what it is... but the PowerShell scripting components are like bash on steroids. There's nothing in UnixVille like it in terms of integration.
by tomhenderson on 12/22/09 at 12:29 pm

Anyone care to point out to me how PowerShell can be more "integrated" than bash? Unless he's talking about the fact that you can replace Bash if you like and you probably can't replace Powershell... but I doubt he's talking about "integration" in that manner.

Re:What a total waste of time

[digitalloving]

I couldn't agree more with your comment. This article is a complete waste of time and has no interesting or useful content. It bothers me that technical magazines these days feel like they can get away with writing something with so little substance. It really is an article equivalent of a troll. I wonder if NASCAR magazine writers write about the differences between Ford, Chevy and Dodge just so they can get people fired up. Absolutely not slashdot worthy.

Re:What a total waste of time

[digitalloving]

BASH can do pretty much anything you need it to do. Windows PowerShell scripting is nice, and provides access to things that are already accessible in "UnixVille". The statement about nothing in UnixVille like it in terms of integration really has no meaning at all. It's like a dumb statement....on steroids. Being a system admin for nearly every operating system around, they all pretty much do what you need them to do as long as you are fairly intelligent and understand them. Almost all arguments I hear otherwise are based on ignorance, elitism, or both.

Re:What a total waste of time

[hoover]

FTA: "OpenMoku".... pfffft ;-)

Re:What a total waste of time

[Xtifr]

TFA is a waste of time. It's the worse kind of drivel and doesn't have any interesting technical facts or points.

Yay! My habit of never reading TFA is paying off big time! ;)

Re:What a total waste of time

[nxtw]

Anyone care to point out to me how PowerShell can be more "integrated" than bash? Unless he's talking about the fact that you can replace Bash if you like and you probably can't replace Powershell.

PowerShell operates using objects, so you can take the output from a command and then filter or sort based on columns of the output. The same filtering or sorting commands could be used for listing files, processes, or any other objects. Unix scripting operates using text streams being piped between processes and has a heavy emphasis on external processes (for example, as in the external [ or test program).

Re:What a total waste of time

[ChatHuant]

Anyone care to point out to me how PowerShell can be more "integrated" than bash?

The references to the CLI should give you an indication. The integration is between components running under PowerShell. PowerShell cmdlets use object pipelines to communicate: they send whole objects to each other, and can all access well known and defined properties of those objects. I haven't seen this kind of integration under Unix, where the standard model is to pipe character streams. This requires serialization, weird and often painful custom parsing with liberal use of text processing tools like awk, sed and so on. See here for more details.

Re:What a total waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

integration significantly deeper given the ability to interface, automate and integrate heterogeneous API.

I need a marketing -> English translation for this please.

Re:What a total waste of time

[nschubach]

But wouldn't that be more overhead (passing an object) because now the application accepting said list of files has to understand the structure of passed object in order to process it correctly, where in Linux you simply pass text/streams as specified by the accepting application. These applications can be written by anyone with no prior knowledge of the object structure of another application that may be sending it information.

It sounds to me like PowerShell flies in the face of everything I was taught about programming functions. Now my function must be able to interpret data from another function and know how it's structured. You lose the homogeneous function input that's consistent for a system that you could pass a file structure to a function that wasn't written to handle it's object struct. I suppose that's all fine and well if you are working on a system where there's only one contributor, but what happens down the road if the structures change? Now all the tools that used that structure must be changed.

Sounds like a headache to me.

Re:What a total waste of time

[postbigbang]

Don't let the facts get in the way. This is /.

Re:What a total waste of time

[nxtw]

But wouldn't that be more overhead (passing an object) because now the application accepting said list of files has to understand the structure of passed object in order to process it correctly, where in Linux you simply pass text/streams as specified by the accepting application. These applications can be written by anyone with no prior knowledge of the object structure of another application that may be sending it information.

This isn't 1970; the overhead for passing labels is going to be minimal, and via
reflection, functions need not know the structure of data that passes through them.

I suppose that's all fine and well if you are working on a system where there's only one contributor, but what happens down the road if the structures change? Now all the tools that used that structure must be changed.

What happens when a UNIX utility's behavior changes or is inconsistent between operating systems, such as the differences between SVR, BSD, and GNU utilities?

Re:What a total waste of time

[nschubach]

The user passes a new format and the computer hums along... or maybe I misinterpreted your question.

(...sorry, I'm being an ass because linking to a wiki page on what reflection is to someone on Slashdot who is talking about scripting is quite possibly the most condescending thing you can do.)

Re:What a total waste of time

[ChatHuant]

But wouldn't that be more overhead (passing an object) because now the application accepting said list of files has to understand the structure of passed object in order to process it correctly, where in Linux you simply pass text/streams as specified by the accepting application. These applications can be written by anyone with no prior knowledge of the object structure of another application that may be sending it information.

On the contrary, the overhead ought to be smaller with PowerShell; first, cmdlets run in the PS process: once instantiated, passing references around should be enough, and objects don't need to be marshalled and translated as a step of piping from one cmdlet to another. Compared to the Unix model, there is no need to serialize the internal object to stdout, push it to a pipe (maybe requiring OS involvement, buffering, etc.), very little need for custom glue code that modifies the output to make it understandable to the second app, and no need to deserialize the result from stdin into the internal representation of the accepting application. And even if your apps didn't run in the same process, the CLI handles serialization and deserialization for you, so you don't need to write your own custom parser - fun as it may be :)

Your other concern, that the accepting cmdlet must understand the structure of the incoming object is not a problem either: the accepting cmdlet does not usually need to understand all of the structure of the objects received. Often the requirement is simply that the objects in question implement a certain interface. That gives one a lot of flexibility, because you can push very different objects through without having to write glue code, as long as the required interface exists. Note also that in the CLI, some properties or methods are predefined (for example the ToString() method), and that the receiving application can use reflection to investigate the methods and properties exposed by the input objects.

Re:What a total waste of time

[gazbo]

I suggest what you actually need is either a dictionary, or a book called "Lern 2 computar in 24 hours lol". What he said is not complicated.

Re:What a total waste of time

[adbge]

I mean if they had broken OS's down by functionality, design and architecture it might be worth some time but this strikes me as an article anyone with quarter a clue could write in about a half hour.

Does anyone know of such an article? Something comparing different operating systems/distros by philosophy, etc. I am very interested in reading a quality breakdown of the differences between modern operating systems.

Re:What a total waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

They added this OO stuff because you can't do much on windows with text processing tools (i.e. parse the registry),
while Unix is built around text files. In the end, this OO stuff makes it more complex and less powerfull than the
good old character streams, which work so well exactly because they are damn simple.

Re:What a total waste of time

[ckaminski]

Huh? Windows ME to prevent people from moving to Windows 2000? Um, hello, no. Microsoft would have loved it if people would have moved to Windows 2000. The problem is that a lot of businesses stuck on Windows 95 NEEDED that DOS compatibility layer, and Windows ME was Microsoft sending the proverbial broadside to the ENTIRE industry - DOS is going away.

Programs that needed the whole share.sys and FILES=4096 hacks just to work - well you either need to fix them, upgrade them, or you'll never be able to use a new OS or new PC.

That was WindowsME's legacy - it broke most of the remaining DOS legacy.

Re:What a total waste of time

[mdwh2]

I agree - opinion at best, flamebait at worst. It probably made the front page because it praises OS X and the Iphone, whilst criticising Vista and Windows Mobile...

I agree about no research, he even thinks that "Symbian" (which he seems to think is a company) was "stopped in their tracks" by the Iphone, which he thinks is the winner(!)

As someone else points out, this isn't even an actual columnist - it's just a random blog, and by the looks of it anyone can sign up. Check out his not-very-active profile: http://www.itworld.com/tomhenderson .

What next? Are opinion pieces on Slashdot journal entries going to start appearing on the front page?

Re:What a total waste of time

[quickOnTheUptake]

Yeah he seems kinda confused, e.g.,

Microsoft released it as a stop gap version to address slightly more memory and disk before the two Windows code bases would be merged together into Windows 2000

Win Me was released _after_ 2k (according to Wikipedia, 7 months after). When 2k was released, I remember MS warning home users to wait until Me came out.

Re:What a total waste of time

[ChatHuant]

They added this OO stuff because you can't do much on windows with text processing tools (i.e. parse the registry),

That's just not true; there are plenty of text processing tools in Windows, including ports of all the Unix utilities. If anybody needed it, it's trivial to write some utility that reads the registry and dumps it to stdout for parsing. They added the OO stuff because it's a much more powerful and modern approach.

In the end, this OO stuff makes it more complex and less powerfull than the
good old character streams, which work so well exactly because they are damn simple.

I'll have to disagree; character streams are simple, but this simplicity makes them less powerful, not more. The programmer is forced to do a lot of work the computer ought to handle. As to the complexity, this is due to the data itself: modern applications push around all kinds of data that aren't, by their nature, character strings. The Unix approach requires applications to convert the data to character streams and back (so the programmer needs to design a format complex enough to represent the data items and their relationships as character streams, write serialization code and parsers to convert it back). That's a lot of overhead.

Re:What a total waste of time

[infinitelink]

It's cool stuff. Powershell is something for which I know of several programmers and tech types have eagerly waited. This level of advanced integration in Windows over Unixes, Linux, and other OSes, shouldn't be a surprise when the other OSes have eschewed such design very often by principle, other times out of stupid pride, yet also missed it for having little context, drive, or even discipline (where it has been desired) to give the umph to make it happen; it was kind of the anti-gates movement, whereas Bill always went about preaching, teaching, praising, and encouraging 'further and deeper integration' as something that will keep the Windows brand strong and attractive, and I think he's right--at least on a consumer/business OS (GTD people!), Linux/etc. went about preaching 'bad idea, insecure...', etc., which has often proved right (on security), but meaning those who follow the second route will have less power. There are advantages and drawbacks to either approach, but I must say that those that think that the many nerd and geek features had by the Unixes and Linuxes but not by Windows (which has a totally different heritage) means Windows is not as advanced are sorely missing many points and insensitive to strategies involved in the playing field.

Anyway, I appreciate the loose integration of Linux system components: I like to be able to drop things in or take them out, though it does often cause weird problems (e.g. the Ubuntu forums are often flooded with issues related to those who install multiple desktops), especially since the Linux community isn't big on actually pushing polished, well-tested, rather than always-somewhat-in-development, released-to-encourage-adoption/debug, own-standards-compliant (no authorities to force it when human nature moves away from, not towards, conformity), wares. Yet I'm beginning to study Linux terminals, its text editors, etc., (aiming towards proficiency in technology beyond a basic use or enthusiast, including in programming), and when I see something like Powershell, wonder if I would better spend my time switching back to Windows. Then again, the Unix heritage and somewhat-mimickers (Linux is not Unix, but a clone of Minix with some Unix design) have established a lot of thoroughly tested tech and standards (defacto or otherwise), including Vim, etc., which are cross-platform, so maybe I won't switch entirely.

lucky break for slashdotters

[Red Flayer]

Just when we lost Duke Nukem Forever as the epitome of vaporware, TFA gives us the following:

Yet the GNU Hurd kernel, the ultimate free re-write of the Unix kernel, has languished. Yes, something like it can be used inside of the Linux Debian-Hurd construct, but almost no one does this. The pure kernel, it seems, may never see the light of day. It's the ultimate in free vaporware.

So we can finally put GNU/Hurd up there with the Phantom console* and DNF?

*Note to venture capitalists: if the product name tells you you're being ripped off, maybe you should think twice about investing. If that doesn't make sense to you, perhaps I can send you a prospectus on my new product, Illusion -- it's the Flim-Flam for Web 3.0 Social Networking. We need about 30 million and two years to get the product out. Illusion is going to revolutionize direct revenue streams for social networking sites. Call me!

Re:lucky break for slashdotters

[shutdown -p now]

So we can finally put GNU/Hurd up there with the Phantom console* and DNF?

Not quite, since it's not officially pronounced dead by the makers.

That said, it has been perfectly clear that GNU/Hurd is not heading anywhere for the last few years, at least. I would be surprised to hear that anyone, even the most ardent FLOSS fans, are still expecting anything on that front.

Re:lucky break for slashdotters

[TheRaven64]

I didn't RTFA, and that quote makes me glad that I didn't. It's absolute nonsense. There is no such thing as the 'Linux Debian-Hurd construct'. There is Debian, which is an OS and supports various kernels, including Linux, HURD, and FreeBSD. You can install Debian with a Linux kernel, then install a HURD kernel and boot that (it adds a line to your GRUB config). HURD works well enough to start GNOME or KDE and run apps, but the hardware support is quite limited and performance isn't great either. It's still actively developed, but only by a few people. I've only played with it a bit, but the ratio of developer time to achievement for HURD seems to be more impressive than for Linux.

So you don't have to waste your time

[bonch]

A tiny, three-page article, with each page only having three to four paragraphs, and the list has exactly what you'd expect it to have. You really don't have to RTFA this time.

Re:So you don't have to waste your time

[honkycat]

Yeah, very bad article. The little paragraph for each entry barely makes sense. Does not deserve your time.

Re:So you don't have to waste your time

[corbettw]

You really don't have to RTFA this time.

Well that's a refreshing change from my usual Slashdot experience.

Re:So you don't have to waste your time

[Rary]

And who writes this crap? Do they even proofread it? Seriously, try to parse this sentence:

GNU rewritten Unix utilities tool set were invented by through the purity in effort of Richard Stallman-- the pillar of free software.

Re:So you don't have to waste your time

[Dunx]

And the writing is redundant, terrible and repetitive:

"lack and dearth of appropriate hardware drivers"

Lack _and_ dearth? That's pretty bad. Just put the thesaurus down and step away from the keyboard.

Re:So you don't have to waste your time

[natehoy]

Redundant _and_ repetitive?

Now I know where the thesaurus went. ;)

Re:So you don't have to waste your time

[fucket]

Try: "Initially, it was boasted that Vista would be the most costliest-ever operating system to develop..." "The world was looking for the joiner of Novell's time-honored and rock-solid NetWare network operating system to be joined fully to Linux."

Re:So you don't have to waste your time

[jimbolauski]

And who writes this crap? Do they even proofread it? Seriously, try to parse this sentence:

GNU rewritten Unix utilities tool set were invented by through the purity in effort of Richard Stallman-- the pillar of free software.

No Problem! Parse a sentence

Re:So you don't have to waste your time

[blai]

(the) GNU-rewritten Unix utilities toolset were invented by, through the purity / effort of Richard Stallman -- the pillar of free software.

Mr.Tom Henderson hates punctuation like he hates Windows ME.

Re:So you don't have to waste your time

[kiwimate]

Hear hear. I actually did start to read the article, but I gave up before the end of the first page because of unintelligible nonsense like that. A "writer" who doesn't even know when to use "than" and when to use "then"? Sod that, I'm not going to waste my time reading such drivel.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[yurtinus]

WinME was the best of the 9x line

hee hee

hehehahahahaha

hoo hooo

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

/wipes tear

Thanks, I needed some cheer this morning!

Again?

[Last_Available_Usern]

What is this, the third post today alone that primarily slams Microsoft? I was glad to hear today that MS at least wasn't threatening the wild species of coffee beans.

Re:Again?

[frank_adrian314159]

I was glad to hear today that MS at least wasn't threatening the wild species of coffee beans.

Well, the Gates Foundation (which derived most of its money from the Microsoft activities of its founder Bill Gates) is funding anti-AIDS efforts in Africa, which might lead to a higher population, and that might place more pressure on native coffee habitat! Close enough for Slashdot... So do I win the "six degrees" prize for bashing Microsoft today?

Emacs

[oldhack]

The original parasitic OS.

Windows bias

[1000101]

I agree with most of the article, but when people have attitudes such as "It's not easy to nominate them here as their business practices aren't very kind" (Windows Server 2008) I tend to take the article less seriously. The OS either holds up to the criteria of the article or it doesn't. Keep it at that.

GNU Hurd is not an OS

[Timothy Brownawell]

Any more than Linux by itself is. It's half an OS.

Or really, a quarter of an OS because it won't be finished until the Second Coming of RMS to lead the faithful out of a world where all hardware (even your toaster) will only run software approved by the MPAA.

Re:GNU Hurd is not an OS

[gmuslera]

What it need is apps. Just wait till Duke Nukem Forever for GNU Hurd gets released, and from there to total world domination is just matter of time.

Re:GNU Hurd is not an OS

[VGPowerlord]

Yes, the complete OS is GNU GNU/Hurd.

Re:GNU Hurd is not an OS

[LaminatorX]

Don't be silly. The MPAA would never approve of NetBSD.

Re:GNU Hurd is not an OS

[iCharles]

I thought OS/2 was half an OS?

Re:GNU Hurd is not an OS

[jasonq]

wow - who GNU?

Crap Article

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is shit. First they split Windows down to the Service Pack level, but go on to say "all of OS X and all of Linux" are in the best? Really? OS X 10.0 was a dismal, WinME failure, for one. And then to throw in Android, which is also Linux? WTF? The author clearly just named a handful of OSes he knew of, grabbed a blurb about them from Wikipedia, and is laughing all the way to the bank with the ad impressions from fanboys/haters.

Re:Crap Article

[idiotnot]

First they split Windows down to the Service Pack level,

Ignoring, too, that 2K8 is basically Vista, which they panned. I've been running Vista for nearly three years now on a personal desktop. Two blue screens. One was due to RAM that went bad, the other was due to a buggy VMware driver.

but go on to say "all of OS X and all of Linux" are in the best? Really? OS X 10.0 was a dismal, WinME failure, for one.

Yeah, 10.0 was lousy. 10.1 was at least usable most of the time. Until Finder crashed. And you had to ssh back in and reboot it, because you couldn't re-launch Finder. Oh, and the browser selection was wonderful with fully-Carbon IE, Netscape 4 running in Classic, or a very buggy non-native Mozilla port. Furthermore, OS X doesn't run a BSD kernel; it's Mach with a BSD subsystem running in kernel-space. Many of the nifty things available in OS X are due to Mach, not BSD.

And then to throw in Android, which is also Linux?

But, but, but, it doesn't run X!!!1! I guess all the other purpose-built linux devices would fall into that category? My TomTom? My STB when I had IPTV service?

Re:Crap Article

[MakinBacon]

It's not even an article. If you look at the author's profile, you'll find that this is a blog post by some guy who just opened up his account eight days ago. I honestly can't believe that this somehow made it to the /. front page.

Re:Crap Article

[Sandbags]

I do agree. I'd like to have seen 10.0 and 10.1 in the "bad" column, and 10.4+ in the great. Andoid, though based in Linux, is enough of a variant is deserved inclusion, but not without mention of iPhone OS somehwere as well. Also note OS 9.x came out in VERY late 1999 (months after the 10.0 beta was freely available btw), and was supported until Dec 2002. This means it came out after ME, and shoudl have EASILY made the bad list (9 was TERRIBLE, way slower than 8.5 and with no real major improvements).

Novel 6.5? 6.0 was equally as bad, and in fact has no notable feature improvements from 5.x which was released a few years earlier, and finally was the first novell OS to support TCP/IP and a friggin GUI... (that noone uses).

No mentiuon of BeOS or BSD itself (other than the semi-flawed association with OS X which is actually based on NextStep, not BSD, though it borrows a lot of code)?

Bad article.

Re:Crap Article

[mdwh2]

Andoid, though based in Linux, is enough of a variant is deserved inclusion, but not without mention of iPhone OS somehwere as well.

Why? There are plenty of other phone OSs too...

Re:Crap Article

[nurb432]

...and is laughing all the way to the bank with the ad impressions from fanboys/haters.

True, but his business model seems to be working....

Re:Crap Article

[yuhong]

(months after the 10.0 beta was freely available btw)

I think it came out around the time of Mac OS X DP1.
Yep remember the early days of Carbon (1999-2000)?
As I remember, one of the first Carbon apps was AppleWorks 6.0.
Mac OS 9.0 shipped with CarbonLib 1.0, BTW.

uh, what?

[amicusNYCL]

GNU rewritten Unix utilities tool set were invented by through the purity in effort of Richard Stallman

Why did the author feel the need to run his text through a Chinese translator then back to English?

Re:uh, what?

[natehoy]

Umm, I think the phrase would have done better had it simply gone through English->Chinese->Engrish. I suspect a couple of other languages were involved, probably one or two that Google doesn't even support so it threw random words in there.

The original sentence was probably something like "I like a bagel with my coffee."

Re:uh, what?

[AndyGJ]

The original sentence was probably something like "I like a bagel with my coffee."

I think his hovercraft may be full of eels actually.

Re:uh, what?

[PCM2]

Your post made me go back and read the article. And it's true -- this is one of the worst-written articles I have ever seen. Every paragraph is a mish-mosh of subject/verb confusion, mixed metaphors, redundant wording, run-ons, and just about every other mistake you could make. You cherry-picked the best example of the lot, but among other howlers we have:

• 1. The world was looking for the joiner of Novell's time-honored and rock-solid NetWare network operating system to be joined fully to Linux.
  1. Technically, it arrived late in the 1990's, but its inclusion here is to remember the pain of the name.
  1. The love/hate relationship becomes anchored with deep emotions about the merits/detractions of the devices they use-- through the lenses of operating systems.
  1. Even a leopard can change its spots, sometimes as scar tissue.
  1. A natively 'jailbroken' open phone will test carrier promises to just deliver wireless pipe.

Taken as a whole, TFA becomes a kind of demented poetry. Kudos to whatever maniac got it published.

Re:uh, what?

[amicusNYCL]

I wonder if Home Depot will sell me some wireless pipe.

Re:uh, what?

[Byzantine]

The best part of your post is that it's modded "Informative."

Re:uh, what?

[Aggrajag]

Do you want to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy?

Re:uh, what?

[treeves]

I will not buy this Ubuntu CD. It is scratched.

Re:uh, what?

[Blakey Rat]

GNU rewritten Unix utilities tool set were invented by through the purity in effort of Richard Stallman

GAME TO OF HELLO STARCRAFT YOU LIKE WOULD TO PLAY? GROUTY!

Android isn't an OS

[Wee]

Android is just a bunch of Java apps running on Linux. That's an OS?

-B

Re:Android isn't an OS

[Galestar]

Also, Considering that Android hasn't yet had time to mature as an OS, it is quite presumptuous of the author to name it one of the [great os's of the decade].

WTB: Editors?

[yurtinus]

Has anybody RTFA'd yet? Most costliest... invented by through...

God, since when did they let just anybody post something on the interwebs?

Re:WTB: Editors?

[Ngarrang]

Has anybody RTFA'd yet? Most costliest... invented by through...

God, since when did they let just anybody post something on the interwebs?

When AOL users discovered that there was something beyond AOL.

Re:WTB: Editors?

[GrahamCox]

since when did they let just anybody post something on the interwebs?

Since it was invented, really. Isn't that the point?

Re:WTB: Editors?

[tehcyder]

since when did they let just anybody post something on the interwebs?

You must be new here.

Signed, teh intarwebs.

Server 2008?

[bbbaldie]

It may be more secure, but the programmers who rewrote its interface to look like Vista need to be whipped and put in the stocks.

Re:Server 2008?

[confused one]

It is Vista. It's built from the same source tree. The Aero user interface is a bolt-on feature that you can turn off if you don't like it. Server 2003 was built from the same source tree as Windows XP (or at least started there before branching). Server 2008 R2 is built from the same source tree as Windows 7 (which begs the question, why aren't they changing the version name). That's just how it is.

Re:Server 2008?

[spiffmastercow]

It is Vista. It's built from the same source tree. The Aero user interface is a bolt-on feature that you can turn off if you don't like it. Server 2003 was built from the same source tree as Windows XP (or at least started there before branching). Server 2008 R2 is built from the same source tree as Windows 7 (which begs the question, why aren't they changing the version name). That's just how it is.

No, it just raises the question...

Re:Server 2008?

[t3st3r]

I've actually heard an answer to this. I attended the Intel channel partners conference this year, a Microsoft rep explained the "Server 2008 r2" was so named because they felt that IT managers were afraid of change. Because Server 2008 had a fairly good reputation they decided that calling the new product R2 would convince IT people that it was an upgrade to the product they were already comfortable with.

HA

[captaindynamo]

Just wait. This is going to get bloody.

Windows Mobile & embedded

[Midnight Thunder]

What ever can be said for desktop OSs, embedded and mobile OSs probably win for being amongst some of the ugliest OSs. Given that few of them are intended for anything beyond a single use solution, is can be understood.

The issue for me has always been Windows Mobile (aka Windows CE), since this was designed for a larger market, where thoughtful design would have been good. Instead Windows Mobile was essentially a desktop OS shoe horned into a handheld device, for which the UI was ill suited, not taking into account the unique design and usage issue of such a device. This is why OSs such as the iPhone/iPod Touch OS and Android had such an impact on destroying the Windows Mobile market.

Re:Windows Mobile & embedded

[UnknowingFool]

Instead Windows Mobile was essentially a desktop OS shoe horned into a handheld device, for which the UI was ill suited, not taking into account the unique design and usage issue of such a device. This is why OSs such as the iPhone/iPod Touch OS and Android had such an impact on destroying the Windows Mobile market.

It's actually worse than that. MS made Window CE/Mobile more like a desktop OS by including concepts and features that don't really belong in a mobile device. To MS everything should be a desktop, even though on a handheld, you have limited screen space, you do not have a full keyboard, or a mouse. There's also a desktop, files, directories, drop-down menus, etc. Very little attention was paid to how someone might use a handheld differently than a computer on a desk. How do you launch an application? Well there's the Start button or you could navigate into directories. Every icon and text is tiny so you can fit it on the "desktop". Want to zoom in on your document? It's in the OS. Somewhere. It's functional but not very user friendly.

As much as people complain about the iPhone, Apple really thought about the UI. Apple treated the iPhone as more of an appliance than a portable desktop. There's no desktop. Every application is a button. There are no files or directories to manipulate. There's no stylus so every icon, button must be large, etc. If something is too small to read, there's a quick way to enlarge it.

Re:Windows Mobile & embedded

[dunkelfalke]

I actually like it that way. Don't need a dumbed down UI when my PDA behaves the same as my desktop computer. I can even attach a bluetooth mouse and keyboard to it.

Re:Windows Mobile & embedded

[sznupi]

As always, totally baffling...

Well, all right, WinMo isn't doing so well, and iPhone might have something to do it with it; though Android hardly registered so far, certainly not enough to justify talking about destruction of anything.

But also, generally...there's this OS called Symbian, that holds only half of smartphone market. And it's actually not that bad in context of this discussion. Yes, it's UI is not perfect, but definitely "taking into account the unique design and usage issue of such a device", just from the point of view of a platform that:
a) arrived many years ago
b) targets vast spectrum of devices, also small & cheap candybars, at first sight indistinguishable from "feature phones" (while iPhone & Android seem to target exclusively large touchscreens)
c) was more or less a step up from S40 (by far the most popular mobile phone platform on the planet, at least in phones where platform matters), so it reused UI concepts with which the largest group of mobile phone users on the planet is already familiar with.

z/OS forever

[gelfling]

As always z/OS is the ratio sum ultra.

Re:z/OS forever

[Sandbags]

It's not so much z/OS I like, it's the z/Linux VM engine running in it, and the Suse OS, with single binary images that are easily cloned, and IFL based licensing which makes most apps that costs hundreds if not more than a thousand PVU's to run on P6 hardware cost 120 now instead, dropping our software costs to less than a fifth of what they were before.

We've replaced over 300 Windows and AIX server chassis and blades with under a hundred Suse images running in z/Linux on less than 4 IFLs, eliminated over a thousand PVU's (each) of license and maintenance costs across WebSphere, DB2, MQ, and more, and for about half the price of moving it to VMWare, and using a fraction of the storage and backup media required as well.

We've been using IFLs inside a few z10s, but now we're actually looking at the new mini-z10 with IFL only configurations, which cost a ton less to operate and free up more z10 slots for MIPS as we grow other apps down the road.

z/OS rocks. z/Linux rocks.

Re:z/OS forever

[swamp boy]

Linux guests running under z/VM has nothing to do with z/OS. z/VM doesn't (and never has, AFAIK) run inside z/OS. z/OS, as with other mainframe operating systems, can run inside (as a guest of) z/VM. z/VM can even run as a guest of z/VM (2nd level). Linux for z-Series can also run "bare metal" on an LPAR. Again, z/OS is not involved.

You mentioned some cool things, but none of them have anything to do with z/OS. You're talking about the magic of z/VM and Linux guests.

Re:z/OS forever

[Sandbags]

Hm. Thanks for the data. I was under the impression from my host folks that they had Z/VM installed inside Z/OS as well as LPAR'd off. I'll follow up with them and get better educated.

unfortunately, I'm hands-off from the host. I'm in the anylist side of the house for now, and don'lt get to log in and play anymore... I just design the infrastructure on paper :(

OS Kernel

[Midnight Thunder]

An operating system is more than just the kernel. An operating system is the software which provides the basis for everything else that will run in that environment - at least that is the way I perceive it. Given this description Android is an operating system, since it provides the base environment for everything else to run.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[ivucica]

Best OS of 9x line was Windows 95 OSR2. 98 sucked horseballs with its instability, only second to ME's. I praised the Lord for Windows 2000 - the nicest and most professional-looking-and-feeling OS of the NT line.

great, well that was

[nimbius]

a complete waste of my goddamned time in the pursuit of pandering advertising space along 5 pages of "im not going to see it because i have noscript and adblock software," so ill save you a few seconds of your life:

the author is trying to say "i think all operating systems are ugly, even the ones you think are pretty." surprise, no big news here, its just some asshole with an internet connection.

Re:great, well that was

[NewWorldDan]

Dude, it's a slow news day. Most of us have already packed it in for xmas. It's just an excuse for us to rant about our favorite OSes. My OS/2 Warp live forever.

Andriod?

[roe-roe]

I think Android has a lot of great possibilities, but putting it on the list of best OSes of the decade is similar to giving Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm not saying it doesn't deserve being on the list, I just think it is a bit premature.

Re:Andriod?

[gregarican]

Just like Obama's Nobel Prize, Android is going to be a great OS. Similar to how Obama is going to end global warming along with bringing about unilateral nuclear disarmament.

And I likewise am going to morph into Brian Austin Green, just so I can love me some Megan Fox...sigh...

Is Solaris actually good?

[selven]

Honest question. Solaris seems similar but different enough from the Linux I'm used to to be interesting. What are its features that Linux lacks/doesn't implement as well? I'm not a file system geek, so what's so good about ZFS that I'm going to notice? Is it much slower than mainstream desktop Linux, or is it doing fine?

Re:Is Solaris actually good?

[prgrmr]

ZFS is supposed to be more fault resilient than other file systems, but at the cost of more intensive cpu usage. I prefer AIX and JFS over anything from Sun.

Re:Is Solaris actually good?

[JerkBoB]

ZFS is really awesome. Sadly, it's saddled with a lot of painful baggage in the form of Solaris/*BSD, so it's a big balancing act between ZFS and everything else.

Why is ZFS awesome? From an administration point of view, it makes managing large amounts of storage ridiculously easy. I recently acquired a couple of secondhand Sunfire x4500s (aka "Thumper"), each of which has 48 250GB drives. The next gen box (x4540, "Thor") has 48 2TB drives (!!). I briefly considered using Linux with MD/LVM to manage all of this, but having done a lot with MD/LVM in the past I knew I was looking at a world of pain in terms of flexibility and ongoing maintenance. I figured that all the ZFS fanboys might be onto something, so I grabbed OpenSolaris 2009.06 and threw it on there.

Ok, well, "threw it on there" is a bit of an oversimplification. I'll spare you all the nonsense involved, some of which was due to ignorance on my part, some of which was due to the fact that the OpenSolaris people have inexplicably chosen to try and out-Ubuntu Ubuntu and make OpenSolaris a killer desktop OS or something. There is no official text-based install, for example... Great fun to install from 2500 miles away over SSH. ;P

To keep this simple, after all the pain of getting OpenSolaris installed and then experimenting with different layouts, I now have this:

root@host:~# zfs list tank
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
tank 321G 7.68T 58.5K /tank

What can I do with it? I can create new NFS shares:

root@host:~# zfs create -osharenfs=on tank/www

I can create volumes (block devices created from ZFS pools) and share via iSCSI:

root@host:~# zfs create -s -V16G -o shareiscsi=on tank/vol/build_centos5.4-x86_64

Every one of these new filesystems/volumes is automatically snapshotted on an hourly/daily/weekly/monthly basis, and the snapshots are available via NFS. This is really awesome when it comes to home directories...

me@nfsclient:~$ ls -l .zfs/snapshot ...
drwxr-xr-x 54 me users 83 2009-12-22 06:56 zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-12-22-11:00

me@nfsclient:~$ ls -l .zfs/snapshot/zfs-auto-snap:hourly-2009-12-22-11:00/ ...my homedir contents from 11:00...

There's a lot of other stuff, but those are the high points. Using OpenSolaris was worth the pain because of the way ZFS is integrated into the management framework. I don't believe that NFS exports and iSCSI target mangement are integrated into ZFS on the BSD ports, but I could be wrong.

That's my experience. True ZFS/Solaris zealots will go on and on about data integrity and ... ? I dunno what else. Compatibility with older releases? Maybe with real Solaris, but OpenSolaris threw all that out anyhow. I wouldn't recommend (Open)Solaris for small systems with a disk or two, unless you're the sort of person who jams tacks under your fingernails for fun.

Re:Is Solaris actually good?

[gbarules2999]

Go try OpenSolaris on a LiveCD. It is worth your time, just to check the new stuff out. ZFS is very awesome indeed.

Re:Is Solaris actually good?

[selven]

I'm not saying Solaris is slow, I'm simply aware of some people (see its derogatory moniker here) who disparage it for being slow and I wanted to know if their complaints are warranted. If they aren't, then great, I might try out Solaris on my next computer.

Re:Is Solaris actually good?

[Cogline]

I use OpenSolaris on two systems at home, my desktop and a server (print and squid).

OpenSolaris provides a choice of userland (utilities) by setting the order of your path. So for those concerned about "incompatibilities" or "taint", you can choose your own userland, associated trappings, and level of standards conformance.

OS upgrades, or other significant package installs, are a no risk endeavor since the zfs root clones mean that you can boot to or rollback to a previous (working) instance if things go wrong. Snapshots from package installs and time-slider also provide a sense of security that you can "get back to that thing you just lost".

The package system deliberately has a concept of OS release, and ties the packages you install to that version. This reduces some of the confusion and problems that come from choosing packages implicitly based on a URL. Moreover, it also has means for a third-party vendor to host their own package repo and integrate it into the overall package scheme with user accounts, as appropriate.

The version you can download has all of the same features as that used in server rooms; so you can see how Sun met their customer requests for enterprise features compared to other distributions. Not just iSCSI and zones, but also MPIO among others are there for review.

The introduction of features to Open/Solaris feels more mature and predictable. Linux leads the bleeding edge with ideas and issues, whereas Solaris is a few steps behind, with solutions that feel more thought out.

If you'd like to meet OpenSolaris half-way, try Nexenta: http://nexenta.org/ which is the OpenSolaris kernel with a GNU (Debian) userland.

Re:Is Solaris actually good?

[Just Some Guy]

I don't believe that NFS exports and iSCSI target mangement are integrated into ZFS on the BSD ports, but I could be wrong.

NFS is. You enable it the usual way, then zfs share tank/foo does the right thing.

That's a toughy

[tjstork]

The stock answer for a modern DOS would be to hack up single user mode Linux. Or, just have Linux and startx and exit it when you feel like you need to.

The beauty of DOS was that one application owned the entire computer but unfortunately, modern hardware has made it beyond the ability of most programmers to really do everything and you genuinely need an operating system to manage all of it, and part of that is that I think even modern hardware is probably not real time itself. I mean, is a PC-Express bus real time guaranteed for different combinations of peripherals? I think everything is interrupt driven these days, and that's good. DOS was really often about programs that polled and did stupid stuff.

Re:That's a toughy

[vlm]

The beauty of DOS was that one application owned the entire computer but unfortunately, modern hardware has made it beyond the ability of most programmers to really do everything and you genuinely need an operating system to manage all of it, and part of that is that I think even modern hardware is probably not real time itself. I mean, is a PC-Express bus real time guaranteed for different combinations of peripherals? I think everything is interrupt driven these days, and that's good. DOS was really often about programs that polled and did stupid stuff.

I don't think you every actually used DOS. Practically all hardware came with some driver to put in config.sys and maybe some helper app in autoexec.bat. Mouse, soundcard, some video cards, whatever.

As for the really weird comment about dos being about polled I/O instead of interrupts, thats just wrong, as one of the primary forms of entertainment before PnP was assigning various devices to various IRQs and changing config.sys to match. You have to go really far back, the Altair 8800 circa 1975, source of the S100 bus, had a rather elaborate interrupt structure. You have to go back to 1930s IBM tabulation machine / unit record gear to find something popular that was programmable without interrupts.. (not counting one offs like eniac circa WWII era)

Re:That's a toughy

[Gordonjcp]

As for the really weird comment about dos being about polled I/O instead of interrupts, thats just wrong, as one of the primary forms of entertainment before PnP was assigning various devices to various IRQs and changing config.sys to match
... and if you were writing device drivers, remembering to reset both the interrupt request from the device, and the interrupt request from the interrupt controller. It wasn't as straightforward as "I'll just listen to IRQ4 and run this handler if it fires", it was "I'll just hook IRQ4 to this port on the controller, and listen for its interrupt, run *this* handler to deal with the interrupt controller, *this* handler to work out which device fired it, then *this* handler to actually service the interrupt". By that time, the serial port buffer had overflowed and you had lost data. Ah, fun times ;-)

Would I go back to them? Well, "import pyserial" says no.

Re:That's a toughy

[Gordonjcp]

Ah yes, those were the days, eh? Weren't they? Eh?

Re:That's a toughy

[TheRaven64]

I don't think you every actually used DOS. Practically all hardware came with some driver to put in config.sys and maybe some helper app in autoexec.bat. Mouse, soundcard, some video cards, whatever.

Not true. Most sound cards didn't come with drivers. They occasionally came with some helper programs, but they weren't actually needed. Games came with drivers for the four or so most popular cards. Try running those old games with an AC97 CODEC and no SoundBlaster emulation - no driver will make them work because they talk directly to the hardware, not to the driver. The same goes for video hardware. Games wrote to the CGA/EGA/VGA controller directly, they didn't go via any driver.

Mouse drivers are an interesting one - they did exist, but a lot of things didn't use them. For example, most of the games that I had worked with a serial or bus mouse, but not an Amstrad mouse, even though I had a DOS driver for the Amstrad mouse loaded (it worked fine with Windows and with a few DOS programs that did use the mouse driver). Same with joysticks - no drivers, no systemwide calibration, each game read directly from the analogue port.

Re:That's a toughy

[tjstork]

I don't think you every actually used DOS. Practically all hardware came with some driver to put in config.sys and maybe some helper app in autoexec.bat. Mouse, soundcard, some video cards, whatever.

No, they really didn't, especially with video cards. Video cards back in those days were just framebuffers somewhat compliant with VESA standards, and even that level of compatibility was shaky. Applications had to actually be written to support them all and if you wanted to get the most of out of them, you had to go and touch the chips to do things. Even the so-called 320x200x256 color mode so often used for PC games was actually kind of a hack. I have a book called "Progamming EGA/VGA controllers" on my shelf by someone named Ferrar or something like that that went through the various modes and ins and outs of the more popular cards of the day. Tseng Labs was popular, for one, and there were others.

And then, God help you if you wanted to put graphics on a printer. Do you even remember the crap about flipping a printer to graphics mode and then sending stuff over the wire to it?

All of that went away with Windows 3.1 and the introduction of GDI.

As for the really weird comment about dos being about polled I/O instead of interrupts, thats just wrong,

Ah but you are wrong again. Application logic, particularly games, in those days had a loop which usually polled the main input chumpies, such as the keyboard. They would be written to simply poll the keyboard, calculate the character moves, animations and so forth, then repeat. Borland had a call in conio.h that was like getch but without waiting for a keypress that was pretty useful, but in the pre-IBM days of like Atari you would just go and read the keyboard register and see if a key was down and go with that.

And, sometimes touching the special registers had timing implications... like, you could write and then had to wait some x amount of time to get answer back... so it was common to do something like write, sit in a busy loop for a few clicks, and then read.

It's issues like this, where, if you could even get an old copy of MS-DOS to actually boot on a modern machine (good luck finding a really tiny hard drive), old games that depended on timing loops could work. That's why some of the original PC's had "Turbo" switches on the front, so you could lower the clock to be compatible with whatever IBM AT's clock speed was for those games and other apps that had hardwired timing loops.

Windows changed all of that on PC's, and for many developers, losing both the control of the graphics hardware AND shifting to the event driven paradigm we take for granted.

Gnu Hurd?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Doesn't an operating system need to be actually completed and released to qualify for either of these lists? Putting Hurd on here is analogous to including Duke Nukem Forever in a "Best/Worst games of the decade" compendium.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Win ME wasn't much better than 98SE, but with the caveat that you had to make sure all of your system drivers were for ME, not 98.

It was 2001. Putting DOS realmode support back into it is like putting OS9 compatibility into OSX. Big deal. DOS real mode didn't do much for the 32bit Windows subsystems that *were* the problem.

In related news

[Icegryphon]

FreeBSD was unavailable for comment.
Friend of FreeBSD, Netcraft is reporting that he is dead.
As of yet this rumor is still unconfirmed.
;_;

Nonsense Article

[Tomsk70]

"Hmmm, what can we type to make it appeal to the fanboys?".

That's nearly two minutes of my life I won't get back.

Doesn't the decade go for one more year?

[Anonymous Coward]

So Solaris is "good." They've clearly never used it for any length of time...

No mention of XP? I'm not a windows guy but I don't see how you can ignore XP and mention Hurd at all... Come on, hurd was a disappoint long before 2000 or 2001, this decade Hurd's been all about switching microkernels like they are systematically proving that microkernels suck by attempting to implement hurd on each one.

 

Re:Doesn't the decade go for one more year?

[Icegryphon]

Come on, hurd was a disappoint long before 2000 or 2001, this decade Hurd's been all about switching microkernels like they are systematically proving that microkernels suck by attempting to implement hurd on each one.

I use Minix 3, you insensitive clod!

Re:Doesn't the decade go for one more year?

[cpghost]

this decade Hurd's been all about switching microkernels like they are systematically proving that microkernels suck by attempting to implement hurd on each one.

No, it sucks only on Mach. On top of L4, it was unportable.

Solaris? Give me a break.

[Skuld-Chan]

Oh please. I'm kinda glad I lost my job supporting Solaris apps. Our apps were relatively easy to get working, but the Solaris machines management dropped off at my desk (last one was a Blade 1500) were just stupid and showed a blantant lack of quality assurance, and nothing ever worked out of the box. You'd think by now you could buy a desktop machine from them and expect the backspace key to actually work as just one example - or to be able to log into the desktop without facing a dozen cryptic errors. No - expect to spend days or years applying patches, tweaking config files - and even then nothing will ever work as seemless as Windows or Mac (or even Linux these days). Oh sure on paper Solaris might be superior to anything out there, but as anyone who has worked in software knows - its the little problems that make a failed product.

Most every patch I got from Sun as well - never worked on the first go. I honestly think its a conspiracy - only system vendor I can think of btw that charges you for a) access to their KB and b) access to hotfixes - not even Microsoft is that evil. It wasn't uncommon for hotfixes/patches to break all kinds of crap too. I once wrote up a list of weird things I never was able to fix on the Sun boxes I and others had on their desks and it was easily pages long. Mind you - these were ALL minor issues, but annoying enough to make it unpleasant. At the job I have now - all the Solaris machines (servers mostly) have the same track record...

In terms of user friendlyness, ease of use, support - I'd take Vista any day of the week.

Re:Solaris? Give me a break.

[blargster]

I think that there are three distinct "universes" of OS: Desktop (and maybe phones now), Enterprise (support for the Desktop: Exchange, intranet web servers, etc.) and Production.

Solaris is for production and it serves that purpose very well indeed. I think you'd be surprised at the percentage of Solaris use for production use by the Fortune 500 companies. And nothing else is seriously considered except for HP-UX, Linux and AIX, at least at the company I work for (well over half, around 20,000 or so, are Solaris; Linux is in third at around 12%).

I have used all of them and I like Solaris and Linux the most and I find them the most similar to one another by far. HP-UX is very solid, also, but a little quirky.

AIX is the least standard of any Unix-like OS out there, IMO. It is almost like IBM completely rethought Unix from the ground up, but at the cost of consistency with all other implementations.

Re:Solaris? Give me a break.

[Gunstick]

yes, solaris is horrible. It's only useful for install-and-forget. Never patch or upgrade. It's just plain simply impossible.
If you want a package manager style update and patching system from a professional (means those big box mover guys) vendor go with HP-UX and AIX. *never* solaris.
Or you can still stick with a serious linux distro.

Windows? Forget it. "you need soft MS-xy for this feature". OK, I install that. Start... "you need .NET frameork for soft MS-xy to work". Come on! Where are the dependencies and repository features in windows? And this is in freaking win2008 for 100% MS only products.

Re:Solaris? Give me a break.

[drinkypoo]

I agree that slowlaris is terrible, but Microsoft DOES indeed charge for hotfixes; they charge for ALL support access, and they only provide some hotfixes through support. It's not as bad as having to pay for all patches, though. I've administered versions of Solaris and IRIX whose install was smaller than their [eventual] patch set, so maybe they're just trying to pay for their bandwidth...

Re:Solaris? Give me a break.

[Skuld-Chan]

Well hotfixes and patches are free assuming you have a legal copy of windows - from what I've seen at least.

Re:Solaris? Give me a break.

[Golthar]

Sun has made great strides in making OpenSolaris just work, try the latest releases

Re:Solaris? Give me a break.

[drinkypoo]

Well hotfixes and patches are free assuming you have a legal copy of windows - from what I've seen at least.

Your comment is stupid and it makes slashdot a stupid place

Re:Solaris? Give me a break.

[Skuld-Chan]

I'm not even talking about custom hotfixes which is what your talking about.

Re:Solaris? Give me a break.

[lanc]

you sure are a funny troll :) don't let the facts get in the way, this is slashdot.

Re:Solaris? Give me a break.

[drinkypoo]

I'm not even talking about custom hotfixes which is what your talking about.

That is pure bullshit and you are talking out of your ass. Once the problem has been identified, it's no longer a custom hotfix, is it? The simple fact remains that Microsoft charges for many hotfixes, and no amount of weasel words will change the fact that you are wrong. And since I have personally run into at least three cases where I needed these hotfixes, I know just precisely how wrong you are. Now be quiet while the professionals are talking.

And apparently biased...

[CannonballHead]

For example, he recognizes Windows Server 2008 R2 as a great OS, but fails to mention Windows 7; Windows 7 and 2008 R2 are on the same code base.

Linux as one group? Seriously, what distro you choose can make or break your Linux experience. Especially depending on your hardware.

Android? Isn't that kinda new to be saying it's amazing already?

Mac OS X bias, too:

It just works. Darwin BSD underneath, mostly luxury on top. The upside is beauty, quietness, control, and stress-free existences. The downside is that it isn't a business plan for computer consultants and virus removers. Onerous is the fact that the most recent release of MacOS-- Snow Leopard-- had a sufficiently large number of post release patches to make our PTSD of Microsoft Windows patching come to mind. Apple's QA now faces a bit of what Microsoft does: so many hardware platforms that QA is difficult as Apple releases new hardware platform variants. The OS isn't pricey, and this isn't about hardware captivity, this is about quality and architectural philosophy in an operating system. Yet MacOS is also the underpinning for the cell/mobile OS to beat on the iPhone. Attention to detail pays.

Sure. It "just works" on Apple approved hardware. :) Luxury on top? Hm. Control? I wasn't aware that Mac OS X allowed you to control your system as much as Linux or Windows. I thought it actually was simpler and didn't allow as much control - which is fine, it's a design decision that many people like, I have no problem with it. And what is "architectural philosophy" anyways? I thought Mac OS X was about being a good OS, not an architectural POC...

Re:And apparently biased...

[Beardo the Bearded]

Indeed; I've been able to use an old P2 366 laptop with Puppy, and it's even got wireless networking up and running.

It's not a great laptop, but it just works.

Re:And apparently biased...

[CannonballHead]

Puppy is actually a pretty cool distro for old clunkers... except you do have to know a little bit in case X acts up. My parents used it for a while on an old Celeron with 256mb RAM and it worked well... except if you closed the laptop lid, X died and it would boot to console next.

And for people that have a hard time figuring out what a "file" is, typing things into a terminal is total Greek. :)

Lighthouse Pup is pretty cool, too. Looks very nice. Just in case you want a little more bling. :)

Re:And apparently biased...

[jamesswift]

As a largely happy OSX user I can say it's doesn't just work either.

It does work as I expect or hope more often than my experiences on Windows XP or Ubuntu, but it has plenty of little faults that, in some ways, are less forgivable since they have such a small set of hardware to test for.

Three illustrative examples:
1) Search the apple forums for "tap to click stops working"
Apple is more or less silent on this old bug. Does not just work.

2) Try and record whatever sound is playing on your machine in say, Audacity or whatever.
There is no "Wave Out Mix" or equivalent by default on OSX. You have to work around it with things like Sound Flower. Does not just work.

3) Try and cut and paste in Finder or merge two directories.
Does not just work.

Kill that meme and maybe Apple will try even harder.

Re:And apparently biased...

[abigor]

Mac OS X bias, too:

Sure. It "just works" on Apple approved hardware. :) Luxury on top? Hm. Control? I wasn't aware that Mac OS X allowed you to control your system as much as Linux or Windows. I thought it actually was simpler and didn't allow as much control - which is fine, it's a design decision that many people like, I have no problem with it. And what is "architectural philosophy" anyways? I thought Mac OS X was about being a good OS, not an architectural POC...

You are basically a non-technical person, correct? Your post would indicate it. It's also clear you know nothing about OS X or Darwin and have never used it.

Re:And apparently biased...

[TheRaven64]

The problem I've found with Apple code is that their programmers don't seem to admit that their code can fail. With Windows or *NIX, there are usually hacky work-around that you can use to poke something that's broken and get it kind-of working again. Apple stuff either works perfectly, or doesn't work at all. There's very little by way of middle ground.

I was in...

[MonsterTrimble]

until page 3:

GNU/Linux (especially 2.6.18+)
Never has their been such an uproar in computing as a free kernel and free utilities-- all done very well with rapid, mindful if darwinian skill. Linus Torvalds crafted Linux, and has been holding on for dear life ever since. Coupled with the GNU utilities and two main window manager branches (Gnome and KDE), Linux underpinnings now grace objects from tiny wristwatches and clever cell/mobile phones, to IBM mainframes and everything in between. The promise of Linux for civilians is slowly but surely being realized through distros like Ubuntu, Novell/SUSE, Mandrive, Knoppix, and others, but the enterprise server market belongs to Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, and communities formed around each of these. That doesn't mean that there isn't worth in the literally hundreds of distros out there.

Off the top of my head:

1) 'Civilian distros' such as Knoppix & Mandrive? Knoppix is mainly used as a rescue CD and Mandrive DOESN'T EXIST. Mandrake/Mandriva does, but not Mandrive!
2) Novell/SUSE twice, but no Debian or Fedora?
3) GNU utilities? Are those still prevalent?

Whatever, this article officially fails

Re:I was in...

[gregarican]

Mandrive DOESN'T EXIST

I thought this was the Linux distro that came in the shape of that cute pointy blue pill :-/

Re:I was in...

[MonsterTrimble]

I thought this was the Linux distro that came in the shape of that cute pointy blue pill :-/

Nah, that's the Matrix.

Re:OS Kernel

[nomadic]

An operating system is more than just the kernel. An operating system is the software which provides the basis for everything else that will run in that environment - at least that is the way I perceive it. Given this description Android is an operating system, since it provides the base environment for everything else to run.

But if you go that far then Bob the poseur "creates an OS" when he packages the linux kernel with some windows manager.

Why do games need 2 GB of RAM?

[tepples]

what I was getting at is that alot of games today will specify in the Miniumum requirements: 2 Gigs of Ram

But why? Games for consoles run just fine in 64 MB RAM + 24 MB VRAM (Wii), 256 MB of RAM + 256 MB VRAM (PS3), or 512 MB unified RAM (Xbox 360). Sure, PC operating systems are bigger because a PC is more capable and drivers differ per PC, but do Windows XP and its drivers really eat 1.5 GB of RAM?

Re:Why do games need 2 GB of RAM?

[vlm]

But why? Games for consoles run just fine in 64 MB RAM + 24 MB VRAM (Wii), 256 MB of RAM + 256 MB VRAM (PS3), or 512 MB unified RAM (Xbox 360). Sure, PC operating systems are bigger because a PC is more capable and drivers differ per PC, but do Windows XP and its drivers really eat 1.5 GB of RAM?

90+% of PCs are never upgraded. "needs 2 gigs of ram" is marketing speak, for "most computers sold with 2 gigs of ram will probably have a fancy enough graphic card to have acceptable performance".

The other interpretation is any game will run faster if its cached into ram instead of reading off the DVD... Reduces stuttering and pauses.

Re:Why do games need 2 GB of RAM?

[radish]

PC based games often run at higher resolutions and higher texture quality, meaning you're throwing more data around and need more buffer space to keep it all smooth.

Re:Why do games need 2 GB of RAM?

[LeperPuppet]

That 1.5GB RAM you're talking about isn't eaten just by Windows, its being allocated between the other apps the user attempts to run at the same time. This could include a web browser, chat program, music player, malware, anti-virus and the usual amount of useless crap that lurks in the average user's system tray.

Sure, most posters here wouldn't try to run games at the same time as most of that stuff, but the average gamer might and the stupider people will. These people then complain that the game doesn't run smoothly on their machine that just meets the minimum specs while loaded down with crap. Developers and publishers are better served by just upping the specs slightly to counter for this.

An added benefit of "overquoting" the system requirements is that developers can afford to divert resources away from optimising their code and instead allocate it to adjusting gameplay or covering schedule slips.

*Ring* *Ring*

[Stupid McStupidson]

Timothy, this is reading comprehension calling, we need to talk. The name of the article is "Great and Disappointing" not "Best and Worse" nor is ugly mentioned. Oh wait, this is Slashdot. NM sorry

Re:Slashdoted already?

[rickb928]

This is about OSes.

Windows up to WfW3.11 was a user environment. MS-DOS/PC-DOS were the OS choices.

Of course, Windows 1.x up to 3.0 was somewhat limited by CGA and VGA displays. Garish is what you get with 16 colors. At 256, you just get stark. After that, you get displays useful for pr0n. And Doom.

HIMEM

[tepples]

MS DOS is garbage, though, and it certainly doesn't give the games any more resources, as it has the old '640 KB ought to be enough for everyone' limit.

There was HIMEM.SYS, and there were also 32-bit DOS extenders such as DOS4GW and CWSDPMI to make the best use of it.

Re:HIMEM

[MrHanky]

Yes, and those were neat crutches, but hardly carbon fibre blades.

Vista vs Win7

[befletch]

I fully admit to bashing Vista, even viciously, before I had even actually got a copy to live with for a while. I repent.

I fully admit to bashing Vista too, and I continue to do so. It was pushed out the door unfinished and with poor driver support (thanks to Microsoft changing video architecture too late in the dev cycle, not due to any 3rd party failings) and while the driver issues have been resolved I still find Vista feels unfinished. But leaving Windows 7 off the good OS list is just wrong. Windows 7 is a well designed and executed OS, and Microsoft deserves credit for it. And I say that as a dyed in the wool UNIX / Mac OS X fan and frequent Microsoft critic. (Did I mention how bad I think Vista is?)

Re:Vista vs Win7

[Antique Geekmeister]

Who can tell? None of my core CAD applications run properly on Windows 7 yet, and my userbase has mired itself in XP to the point where I have to bribe them with new hardware to get them to let me back up their systems: they've become frightened that any backed-up machine will be replaced with Vista.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[Swift2001]

I'm a Mac user, and my exposure to Vista and XP and 7 is on bootcamp partitions and virtual machines. XP ran fine when I had a program I had to have that was Windows-only. Vista in my environment was just a pig, prone to multiple slowdowns and freezes. It just seemed to be put together by a committee. But 7 is fine; it's easy to use, quick enough, and VMWare and Parallels have finally figured out how to give you the slick transparencies and so on.

I'll stay a Mac user, but Windows is a tool in my box.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[caubert]

I run w7 RTM build and BSOD is happening. I've read M-audio firewire audio interface drivers make this happen, but I'm not sure. Been XP-user for 9000 years now and BSOD is kind of frustrating to experience nowadays.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[Sandbags]

I will admit, 7 is much better, and overall supoerior to both XP and Vista, and I have adapted to it quickly and don't plan on going back. That said, 7 is still "unfinished" by a large margin.

1) The control panel experience is entirely inconsistant, with bottons in some cases appearing inside toolbar areas, and the design of each panel looks like a free-for-all design contest with no leadership at all. Some were completely unchanged from XP, others take all new approaches, and I can rarely find a button where one would "expect" it to be based on any logical convention. it flies in the face of ease of use, which was the whole point of redesigning the control panel system to feel more like an app and less like a disparate collection of 50 apps and panels. If they really wanted to do it right, it should have been integreated to the MMC.

2) Backup has become even more of an issue. They took away choices Vista offered, and image backups still suffer the same bug that Vista RC had (if in any way shape or form you, or another backup, touch the directory the image backup is in, it can never be restored) but now it's worse and image backups is done EVERY time, not as a seperate process. This MUST be fixed ASAP!

3) New OS, no new screen savers?

4) New start menu was a good idea, but it's a bit inflexible in usage (needs to be easier to put things in the quick view or favorite apps area), and for christs sake it can't be resized!

5) Taskbar is an improvement, but turning back on quick launch should be easier, and i need to be able to change the spacing between the icons on the taskbar!

6) failed to replace task manager with the much better one that got when they acquired ProcXP from that other small firm I can't recall the name of atm.

7) too many windows either can't be resized, or lost functionality they had in XP and Vista, yet others either retained that or got better instead of regressing. It was not a consistant change at all.

SP1 will hopefully clean some up, but I'm really counting on Win8 being where that magic happens and they start to catch up to OS X. Key features: new FS format, consistant OS feel across apps and functions, OpenCL and OpenGL support, central process thread management. Things like this will really sell the next Microsoft OS.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[caubert]

Oh, I forgot to add. Today my w7 had another BSOD while I was using remote desktop connection to a XP-box at work. Dump shows ntoskrnl. Funny thing was, that the XP-box also crashed. It replied still to ping and as my co-worked stated, mouse and keyboard were still functional; but that was it.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[Penguinisto]

If they really wanted to do it right, it should have been integreated to the MMC.

Err, as someone who has to schlep around in MMC v3 all day long, please let me take this opportunity to say the following:

NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!... oh HELL NO!

In all the years of working with Microsoft products since Windows NT 3.5, I have never, ever seen an instance of MMC puking all over itself, limping along and unresponsive like a kicked dog, and/or taking a geologic era just to open and close... until friggin' MMC 3 came out.

Server 2k8, even the R2 version, is no better. MMC in its current incarnation was, in my humble opinion, expressly designed and engineered to piss off the sysadmin. There's honestly no other explanation for it. It's like the MMC codemonkey's wife found out that her husband was screwing around on her, so she snuck into his laptop, then cut+pasted some pirated Symantec A/V code into the build just out of spite. Okay, maybe too harsh... but I can say with confidence that I know now how Microsoft intends to force Windows server admins into using PowerShell in spite of PS' unpopularity: Make MMC such a crap experience, that you actually look forward to PS and its overly-long syntax-from-hell.

Using the damned thing (which you have no choice in nowadays for a lot of functions) is like chewing on broken glass while simultaneously masturbating into a double-handful of half-rusted razor wire.

Okay, okay... on a serious note? There's still a lot of problems in MMC that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and it has a lot of things that seriously need fixing. In some ways they have (Win 7's isn't as painful as Server 2k8's), but at least from the server view, oh hell no...

Re:Vista vs Win7

[PopeRatzo]

I've read M-audio firewire audio interface drivers make this happen

I use an M-Audio Firewire 410 in Win7 every day and have never gotten a BSOD.

Another system with a new Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 and have never gotten a BSOD. These are retail copies of Win7, in case that makes a difference.

My daughter has an EMU 1212m in her Win7 machine, and I just can't get it to work, but then I've never been able to get it to work properly in my OSX system either. The only stable drivers for that inexpensive (but excellent) audio interface are for XP and XP 64. I gave her an old M-Audio Fasttrack Pro and it works fine, using the Vista drivers in Win7.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[PopeRatzo]

Using the damned thing (which you have no choice in nowadays for a lot of functions) is like chewing on broken glass while simultaneously masturbating into a double-handful of half-rusted razor wire.

Please don't tell us how you're able to make that comparison with such confidence.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[mpfife]

The driver support was half Microsoft's problem because they ram-rodded a new driver model down and didn't check to see if the independent devs were getting adequate drivers out. The other half lied SOLIDLY with the HW manufacturers themselves. Take Creative Labs - worst driver support in the world when vista came out. They simply just stopped supporting products they didn't want to write drivers for, banned folks from their message boards that complained, or just wrote crappy half-finished ones and then stopped. Yes, MS is to blame for not waiting/supporting for better driver support - they should have seen the snafu coming and done something about it - like give cash for folks to develop drivers all over again; but the other half didn't much do their job either.

However, most hardware companies are commodity deals now and run on shoe-string budgets and any cash spent on writing a driver is just 'lost' money to the management of most of them. They probably did the math - and if it didn't look like it was worth the money to re-write a driver when the new verison of the hardware was coming out (and it would create demand for the new product) - they did it. It's sh*tty and I won't ever buy creative again, but I see why it happened.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[marciot]

3) New OS, no new screen savers?

Seriously, how about using power management instead? Screen savers were meant to protect CRTs, back in the days before power management existed.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[Anpheus]

The modified driver model was set in stone about two years before Vista's release. This was all verified information. You could boot the early milestones of Longhorn very early on and get limited graphics and sound support from beta drivers.

Yet by the time of the release date, Nvidia, Creative Labs, and a half dozen other companies had such severe issues that they collectively caused the vast majority of bluescreens reported. Realtek, Creative, Nvidia and others were all publicly shamed into providing better support, and were dragged kicking and screaming into providing decent drivers.

Creative for example used Windows Vista as an opportunity to deny people access to features on their cards and sell people the same card over again, but with the features enabled.

Your other complaints are valid, but poor driver support is not one of them. They told everyone the spec and gave the hardware folks earlier and more frequent builds than anyone else.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[Sandbags]

Actually, I use the screensaver set to a couple minutes to keep prying eyes off my screen when i have to turn around and talk to someone, PM kicks in when idle, which if it's doing something like ripping a DVD or downloading ISOs it's not, and I'd prefer not to lock the machine every time I step away from the desk (as that also places my chat windows in Away, but the screen saver does not).

Re:Vista vs Win7

[Sandbags]

It simply is a point going to completeness of the OS. Fancy new OS, DX11 supprot baked in, and nothing that takes advantage of it. Screensaves have long been a staple of showing off the OS, and the lack of one really starts making this feel more of a SP and less of a full release.

Re:Vista vs Win7

[mangobrain]

LCDs still suffer from something very similar to the old CRT burn-in.

"Solaris/OpenSolaris 10" - Really?

[Zemplar]

There's no such thing as "Solaris/OpenSolaris 10", however, Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris do actually exist and are indeed really awesome.

Love the droid

[w0mprat]

Best OS: Android IMHO it is more sophisticated than it's competitors. Before you mod me down iPhone fan bois, Android has brought genuine multitasking to the smartphone platform amongst other things. Oh and the aftermarket firmware and themeing community is thriving. It's not great, but it's the newest thing thats making alot of hackers, tweakers and gadget addicts learn to love again. Hopefully an official Google phone will re-center the AOSP and do more than keep the project alive, but really ramp things up.

Worst OS: Solaris without a doubt. In my own experience it doesn't perform like linux does now, ZFS is cool but just confuses me and the userland is the most horrible thing ever.

Ugliest OS: $ANY_LINUX_DISTRO Seriously show me a pretty one. I can make a linux pretty, but I'm talking about defaults. Often with some of the most amateurish desktop backgrounds. People make better art with MS Paint. No really they do. http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/incredible-ms-paint-artwork

Re:Love the droid

[MonsterTrimble]

Off the top of my head:

OpenSuse: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=suse
Linux Mint: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mint
Macpup Opera: http://macpup.org/

Re:Love the droid

[[WC]DrEvil]

Worst OS: Solaris without a doubt. In my own experience it doesn't perform like linux does now, ZFS is cool but just confuses me and the userland is the most horrible thing ever.

So the almost completely GNU-based userland, that is the default in OpenSolaris 2009.x releases, is the worst ever?

Or were you simply basing your criticisms on Solaris 10, which ships the GNU userland, but doesn't set it as the default one?

As for "doesn't perform like Linux does now" is there some specific issue you had, otherwise that's pretty vague. I've had performance issues at one time or another with every OS I've ever used over the last 25 years.

Re:Love the droid

[dunkelfalke]

Sorry to disappoint you, dude, but you could get a fully multitasked smartphone when HTC Wallaby with Windows Mobile 2002 Phone Edition was released in April 2002. I've still got one of them, a sturdy beast, still works fine after a battery replacement. And together with a GPS receiver I can use it as a turn-to-turn navigation system.

Re:Love the droid

[HenryKoren]

You know it's funny that Android gets designated as one of the Best OS, and has people like you claiming that it "brought" multitasking to the smartphone, when windows mobile was multitasking long before Android existed.

I'm a windows mobile 6.1 user, I can multitask just find, and I can watch Flash and Silverlight video in my web browser (Skyfire). My mobile OS may be "Way Behind" according to this blatantly anti-Microsoft article, but it does plenty of things that Androids and iPhones can't.

Re:Love the droid

[Billly Gates]

Fonts drive me crazy too. Its 2009 now folks!

Suse took out cleartype fonts and java apps like NetBeans wont enable it and distros have a crippled font management that looks blury on modern lcd screens. Even with the command line arguments the JVM wont produce making it butt ugly on laptop. KDE is in a very sad state. The apis supposed to be cool now but the envrionment is just horrible. I used to love KDE.

Gnome is nice and usable on Ubuntu now but still is not perfect. I used to like Afterstep, Window Maker, and KDE in the old days but with the eye candy in MacOSX and Vista it looks very dated. Berly can support some of the effects but most distros come with compiviz (whatever is called) which is conservative and the title bars look dated.

Re:Love the droid

[the_womble]

Ugliest OS: $ANY_LINUX_DISTRO Seriously show me a pretty one.

Mandriva 2010 KDE

http://www2.mandriva.com/linux/overview/

In addition, the Mandriva Control Centre is very good, the community is friendly, multiple desktop environments are properly supported (no Kubuntu style underfunded support), the repos are fairly big (but smaller than Debian/Ubuntu) and bug fixes usually happen fast.

Bashing WinMe instead of Win98 is clueless

[Antiocheian]

I had tested both systems as candidates to install on friends who demanded Windows, and Windows Me was better:

1) Boots faster. It has the fastest boot than any other 32bit Microsoft OS.
2) Better interface, less internet explorer buttons on explorer (though still aparent)
3) Comes with a lot of crapware which could be easily be avoided on installation or after installation (98lite etc)
4) System Restore, once Microsoft patched it a few months later, was a nice addition to people having kids messing with the family computer
5) Config.sys and autoexec.bat instructions were no longer executed (save for a few system variable settings) which is a good thing
6) Provided General Midi emulation even in a DOS emulated window. You could play DOS games with general midi music.
7) Hibernation, much faster to Windows 2000.

All in all, Me was a good improvement to Windows 98 although I would still prefer Windows 95 as my system for its freedom from IE. However, anyone bashing Windows Me instead of Windows 98 is simply clueless.

Re:Bashing WinMe instead of Win98 is clueless

[DragonWriter]

I had tested both systems as candidates to install on friends who demanded Windows, and Windows Me was better

I hate to break it to you, but those things you can install Windows on are called "computers", not "friends".

Re:Bashing WinMe instead of Win98 is clueless

[nschubach]

One night I was sitting in my room one night after going to a party and they all started demanding that I call them friends from now on. The one just sat there staring at me until I would. He kept blinking his red eyes at me unwavering while making clicking noises to scare me. It worked! I now only refer to them as friends from here out. My beautiful precious friends...

Re:Bashing WinMe instead of Win98 is clueless

[swordgeek]

1) Oh yeah. "faster boot" into a desktop which doesn't actually respond until the underpinnings are loaded is a trick that MS first really exploited in ME, and continues to the present. Of course, it genuinely _was_ faster at booting because it didn't have real-mode DOS! Goodbye old software.
2) Fewer IE buttons than 98? Um...no.
3) Comes with a lot of crapware.
4) System Restore was so broken for almost a year that people learned to avoid it. When fixed, it was a clunky rollback model that never worked well.
5) These files were no longer executed because they were needed for real-mode DOS - which it dropped.
6) Well 98SE may not have had general midi emulation, but you didn't need it to run DOS programs in real-mode DOS.
7) Microsoft/x86 power management has NEVER been good enough to bother with. Faster doesn't mean anything if it didn't work right!

Which is the real problem with ME. It was slower to use than 98SE on all but the newest computers in its day, it threw away backwards compatibility without providing sufficiently accurate DOS emulation, The new features were clunky and poorly designed, and it was unstable as hell. It crashed more than any version of Windows since 3.0, and had a much greater tendency to corrupt data than its predecessors, or than anything in the NT development stream.

Re:Bashing WinMe instead of Win98 is clueless

[mdwh2]

Windows 98 wasn't released in this decade ;)

Re:Bashing WinMe instead of Win98 is clueless

[Antiocheian]

I will agree on your correction in (2) but not for the rest. DOS was already getting too old and WinME was meant to pave the way for Win2000. The crapware was easy to remove, system restore was better than reinstallation and hibernation did work well. As for general midi emulation of course you wouldn't need it in real-mode DOS if you had a card with wave table synthesizer vs FM.

When you say "it was slower to use than 98SE" you are wrong. In fact one of the most diligent Win9x tinkerers, Axcel216, states that by replacing 700 Win98 system files with their newer WinME versions one would

"improve/speed up/fix your Win98 SE(U) GUI, OLE, DDE, GDI, Dial-Up Networking (DUN), TCP/IP, Winsock, LAN/WAN, Multimedia/Audio/Video, Virtual Cache/Memory, USB/FireWire components [and others I don't even recall off of the top of my head :)], without putting up with the notorious WinME annoyances"

The annoyances were the crap which could be removed during installation with 98lite...

Re:Slashdoted already?

[lowen]

This is about OSes.

Windows up to WfW3.11 was a user environment. MS-DOS/PC-DOS were the OS choices.

This is incorrect. Windows/386, even though it started up under MS-DOS, once the 386 VMM was running was a full-bore OS. The VMM intercepted calls to DOS, and could easily remap to 32-bit routines implemented in VxD's. It's easy enough to test yourself, just write a TSR that hooks the INT21H DOS vector, and count calls to it before and after executing win.com.

This is all exposed completely in the (long out of print) book 'Unauthorized Windows 95' by Andrew Schulman (IDG Books). The difference with Windows 95? A revamped UI, and an automatic call to win.com. In essense, DOS was the Windows/386 VMM's glorified bootloader. It's as if you went from a world where you booted to the GRUB prompt and had to manually type in the commands to load Linux to the days of grub.conf and autoloading Linux.

Windows 95, 98, and Me were all built on the Windows/386 VMM 'OS' core that used VxD's and trampolinish hackery (thunking) to get the job done. Windows NT was built on a new kernel that exposed the same API's but didn't trampoline itself into control.

Windows 9x and Me 'safe mode' is DOS with the Win32 UI, though.....

Surprised that OS/2 wasn't on the list

[marquis111]

Stable? Yes
Ugly? Yes
Last release? 2001.
Still widely used in the 2000's? Definitely, though declining precipitously.
Good or bad, it should have been on the list.

Re:Surprised that OS/2 wasn't on the list

[smchris]

But as which? I think that's the problem -- finding its category.

It was really nice and not so ugly for the time -- especially with Object Desktop. Like a pimped out Cadillac when linux was a jeep and Windows was a Pinto. Since Warp came out nearly a year before Windows 95, it could be argued that it was the coolest desktop around for at least that year. And the graphical way each app could be tuned to run at maximum performance _individually_ was very nice.

But it was a bitch to install as a home one-off. Closer to a 1995 linux than Windows. Nonetheless, it was my home desktop for several years, including my first year with DSL. Still have a non-networked boot on qemu to play Galactic Civilizations the way it was originally conceived.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[Josh04]

Like many slashdotters, I admin Windows XP, Server 08, OSX, and linux (as desktop and server) every working day. When I say that Windows sucks, I'm in a position to know...

...how windows worked 10 years ago when XP was modern. Awesome.

Re:OS Kernel

[vlm]

An operating system is the software which provides the basis for everything else that will run in that environment - at least that is the way I perceive it.

Emulators, EMACS, GNOME and KDE are operating systems?

OS userland

[tepples]

An operating system is the software which provides the basis for everything else that will run in that environment

But if you go that far then Bob the poseur "creates an OS" when he packages the linux kernel with some windows manager.

Not exactly. A window manager just implements an interface defined by ICCCM. "Creating an OS" in the Android or Bob-the-poseur sense would be more like making GNUstep + G.A.P., not just making Window Maker.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[confused one]

WinME was horrible. HUGE memory leaks. Unstable. It was a kludge on Win98SE to fill in for the (late) WinXP desktop.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[SharpFang]

Look, we could argue that Postal was the best of Uwe Boll's movies. It tells just as much about its quality.

Monkeedude1212 said minimum

[tepples]

alot of games today will specify in the Miniumum requirements: 2 Gigs of Ram

But why? Games for consoles run just fine in [far less.]

PC based games often run at higher resolutions and higher texture quality [than games for contemporary consoles.]

Then why is the extra GB of buffer space for the PC version part of the game's minimum requirement? Why can't I turn the PC game down to 1280x720 and smaller textures to match the console and run it in 1 GB, half for the OS and half for the game?

Re:Monkeedude1212 said minimum

[radish]

You can try, I don't know of many games which will refuse to run if you're below min specs, but I guess the devs are saying they won't support it if you have problems. It's a CYA move.

Another thing worth considering is swap - a console game has MUCH more control over memory management (and knows exactly what else is running on the box) - very much unlike a game running on Windows. Given that people typically will have an AV, maybe a browser and even things like iTunes running at the same time as the game, you need to give yourself some wiggle room so you're not grinding the pagefile. Users won't care that they're being stupid trying to run too much on a crappy PC - they'll just point to the min specs and complain.

Re:Monkeedude1212 said minimum

[hibiki_r]

You will find a few that require specific instruction sets: For example, the remake of Secret of Monkey Island will not work on an Athlon XP, because the geniuses that made the game compiled it in such a way that it doesn't work on processors that don't support SSE2.

Re:Aren't we looking at this a year too early

[pohl]

I've checked since you last have, and your notion of when decades end is based upon the year 1 being the first calendar year...which is, of course, entirely arbitrary. So since we're already being arbitrary, why not be a computer scientist for once and just willingly accept the one time when everybody else is willing to start counting with zero like god intended?

What a crap article

[mustafap]

Why the hell did this crap get on slashdot? Is this the quality of reporting we are to expect now?

You're off by one

[Jesus_666]

Hurd is not half an operating system, it's one-and-a-half an operating system. In fact, this is plain to see from this excerpt of the core design spec:

WHO'S AN OS AND A HALF? HURD'S AN OS AND A HALF! BERSERKER PACKIN' OS AND A HALF!

THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH UNIX THAT HURD CAN'T FIX... WITH ITS HANDS!

HURD'S COOKING WITH GAS! IT'S GOTTA HANDFUL OF X11 AND A HEADFUL OF MAD. YEAH, THAT'S YOUR GRAPHICS SERVER, BABY! DIG IT! WHO'S THE MAN? HURD'S THE MAN! HURD'S A BAD MAN! HOW BAD? REAL BAD! IT'S A 12.0 ON A 10.0 SCALE OF BADNESS!

In fact, that's why Hurd is late - it's so much more than just one OS that it's that much harder to code. I mean, most of the developers don't even comprehend why rip_and_tear(your_guts) always stalls until the night_train server is ready.

Re:Slashdoted already?

[rickb928]

And Windows/386 made no real-mode calls?

Even 3.x did that.

Really, you couldn't unload DOS. Novell 3x servers let you 'remove DOS' and free up a little low RAM. Not so with Windows.

Technically, you're mostly correct. But DOS was still there, and real-mode existed. Floppy drivers for instance, and other hardware demanded the DOS calls.

In what way is ANDROID "one of the best"?

[popo]

This isn't a troll, but to be fair: Android remains utterly untested, and is suffering from weak adoption.

Let's not just hand accolades to the mighty GOOG, just because their track record thus far has been exemplary. I'm still waiting to be wowed by Android.

Re:In what way is ANDROID "one of the best"?

[symbolset]

ahem. Roughly 1.5 million units in Q3 2009 is not untested and suffering from weak adoption for a new product.

You want to talk about weak adoption? Windows Mobile lost 28% in Q3 over a year before. In order to lose 28% share year-over-year in a market where your customers are typically locked into a two or three year contract you have to sell essentially none .

And that's just smartphones. Android also powers the hottest eBook reader this holiday season. They're sold out. If you order now you might get one in February.

That makes for a lot of OSes...

[Wee]

An operating system is more than just the kernel. An operating system is the software which provides the basis for everything else that will run in that environment - at least that is the way I perceive it. Given this description Android is an operating system, since it provides the base environment for everything else to run.

So by that definition Kubuntu is a different OS than Ubuntu. Because if not, Android is the same OS as either of them.

-B

Re:That makes for a lot of OSes...

[Zen Hash]

An operating system is more than just the kernel. An operating system is the software which provides the basis for everything else that will run in that environment - at least that is the way I perceive it. Given this description Android is an operating system, since it provides the base environment for everything else to run. So by that definition Kubuntu is a different OS than Ubuntu. Because if not, Android is the same OS as either of them. -B

Yes, that sounds right. Kubuntu is a technically a different OS than Ubuntu, even though they have a lot in common. Just like Windows XP Home could also be referred to as being a different OS than Windows XP Professional. Although, in both cases the relationship between the two operating systems is so close that they are usually referred to as different versions of the same OS. I think the proper distinguishing factor would be whether or not it was intended to be a separate OS or just another version of the same OS.

In the case of Android, though, it is a very different OS than Ubuntu or Kubuntu; even if they do use some of the same code. Even Windows has some code in it from FreeBSD.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[Utoxin]

... Um. Wow. Just wow.

See, I worked as a microsoft support tech for a while shortly after the release of Windows ME. A dark period in my career, I'll admit. But aside from a few nice troubleshooting tools (msconfig FTMFW), ME sucked beyond belief.

Troubleshooting Step 1: Reboot. If that solved the problem, we told the customer it was fixed, and to call back if it happened again. Really.

And at least once a day, I would determine that a machine was beyond recovery, and we would FFR it. (Fdisk, Format, Reinstall). And my experiences were pretty standard, from what I heard around me on the support floor. People who had transferred to the ME support team from 9X complained about how buggy and poorly designed ME was.

*shudders* So... no. ME was not the best of the 9x line. Arguably, 98SE was the best, although some people preferred 95.

Also, the article completely messes up the history of 2000 / 9X / ME. 2000 was /NOT/ the hybrid of 9X and NT. 2000 was the end of the NT line, and a damn fine OS. I ran it for many years, until my last CD bit the dust, and I grudgingly updated to XP.

Hurd is "..of the decade"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurd can't be best/worst of the decade, because this isn't 1999. Hurd is dead.

Not all Vista bashing is ignorant...

[the_archer666]

But I don't really get the Vista bashing in the article. It is a good OS. It had its problems at launch, but those were mostly caused by driver issues. Its also a lot better with security. I would take Vista over XP anytime.

I bashed, bash and will bash Vista for one thing which Microsoft ignored deliberately:

"If it ain't broken, don't fix it!".

Prefetch - adds no performance to my daily usage pattern
Multmedia Priority Rescheduling - I never had trouble playing MP3s or movies
Constand HD activity - makes me wonder "what the hell" is optimized when & why
and so on and so on.

Plus it takes double the time to wake up from hibernate then to boot (oh well, 4 (3.5) GiBs of RAM to be loaded)

Roland

[sxltrex]

And somewhere Roland Piquepaille is smiling.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[ivucica]

On at least two configurations I had serious issues with Windows 98 SE, and have witnessed numerous crashes of entire system. I don't remember ad for Windows ME on the local library mentioning anything about it being a media PC OS. Really, Windows 95 was the most stable for me. Plus, I like small and compact OSes.

But I like the new info, so thanks for posting it.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[Sandbags]

Win95 had issues with networking, and didn't run anything resembling a modern browser. Also, it's 2GB partition size disk limit was a real PITA... I actually prefered NT 3.51 to it except the fact the Win9x GUI was obviously better, and 3.51 was a MUCH slimmer OS and games that ran in DOS mode were still compatible with it.

That said, thanks for the nice comment.

ME had memory leaks, and could crash, especially if you lacked enough RAM, or were missing hardware based controllers for sound, video, and CD ROM. However, if you used parts from the microsoft HCL for ME, problems were few, so long as you rebooted it regularly. (which 95 and 98 also had big memory management issues for power users, the best thing about Win2K was you could run it a week without a reboot!).

The author thinks Symbian is behind Iphone!

[mdwh2]

Indeed - and don't forget that Windows XP, which is so praised by Vista haters, had the same teething problems. For years people preferred to stick with 2000, and XP had the same driver troubles at first. The general rule of thumb with MS OSs has been to wait until service pack 1. The other problem with Vista was at the time of its release, many laptops still came with 1 GB. Unless you're getting a netbook, that's not been an issue for a long time. (FWIW, I don't run Vista or 7, my laptop still runs XP, and I've even got 2000 on the desktop - but I'm not pretending people should avoid upgrading anymore.)

So this blogger thinks OS X is great and Vista is pants - good for him, but why is his opinion better than any other OS fan? I stopped reading his OS X section at the "It just works." mantra. My computers work too, and do a lot more besides. What next - "Best and worst editors of the decade" where he praises Vi and slags off Emacs? He's entitled to his opinion, but let's not pretend it's anything but an opinion.

There's also this gem:

Palm, RIM, Symbian, and other rivals raced forward only to be stopped in their tracks (like Asimov's 'Mule' in the Foundation Trilogy) by Apple's iPhone. Now iPhone is the one to beat, and Windows Mobile lags behind dramatically.

Yeah right, Symbian with 40% market share is just rushing to beat the Iphone with its few percent share! (Not to mention that he seems to think that "Symbian" is a company...) Even RIM are ahead of them last time I checked. But yeah, this basically answers your question about why the Vista bashing - he's an Apple fan. To him, the Iphone is the market leader in phones, and Vista is crap because it isn't OS X.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[ivucica]

Yep, I experienced problems with networking in QEMU a few years ago. I had little problems after setting it up tho. And didn't OSR2 introduce FAT32 lifting the 2GB partition limit? I'm too lazy to check this on wikipedia :-)

well..

[wentzr]

any OS that doesn't require it or it's software be tied to every Fing other computer in the world would be the best OS in the past 10 years, unfortunately I can't think of many. How the worst sell-out of unix could be considered one of the top is beyond me. Thank you Apple, sir. may I have another? The iphone was one of the worst things to happen to Apple COMPUTERS, evar.

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[Karellen]

2000 was the end of the NT line

Huh? I thought XP, Vista and now Win 7 were all part of the NT line. Or are you defining "the NT line" in some weird way?

QNX man - best there ever was

[terjeber]

EOM

Shitty Article is Shitty

[darthdavid]

That was one of the shittiest articles I've had the displeasure of reading in a while. Every sentence had about 8 adjectives in it and at least half of them were misspelled, misused or made up...

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[Yaa 101]

He thinks that 2000 was the last pure NT code before XP got tainted by included 98 code.

However, the NT line was derived from the OS/2 codebase by the DEC-VAX engineering team on the alpha processor and later ported to the i386.
Right after that it got tainted by the Win 3.0 codebase and was slowly nurtured into maturity to be introduced as NT3.1

Anyway, for people interested there is a timeline here: http://www.levenez.com/windows/redirect_windows_a4_pdf.html

Emacs...

[marciot]

Why didn't it make the list?

Re:like...WHATever, dood...

[drsmithy]

However, the NT line was derived from the OS/2 codebase by the DEC-VAX engineering team on the alpha processor and later ported to the i386.

NT was built from scratch to _replace_ OS/2. In no way was it "derived" from OS/2. A few minutes comparing architectural features should make that blatantly obvious.

The purposes of an operating system

[symbolset]

An operating system takes control of the hardware and offers interfaces that allow applications to perform their functions through an abstraction that avoids having to encode hardware interaction into every application.

In addition to that the operating system allocates system resources in such a way that they may be shared by multiple users and applications.

That's all. Everything else is fluff.

2008 more secure?

[symbolset]

Hang or Remote code execution by a malformed packet to its file sharing service. It ain't BSD. If this is the result of a decade of emphasis on code security, Microsoft has got problems that aren't in their code, they're in their culture.

The Best, Worst, and Ugliest OSes of the Decade

[jalal hajigholamali]

Hi, The Best, Worst, and Ugliest OSes of the Decade is depend on usage i think gnu/Linux is the best one

Silly boy.

[jotaeleemeese]

You can get all the tools you Linux fan boys crave in Solaris.

Sun has been packaging them for you for years.

Re:Silly boy.

[John Betonschaar]

Which would be nice if I were the sysadmin of all these Sun machines, not the developer who just needs to use them. Also it doesn't really matter what Sun does and doesn't ship with the OS if half of the sysadmins install it and half don't. That's the whole issue I have with Solaris, you never know what you can expect since most Solaris installations are such a big mess.

Hurd is great

[SpaghettiPattern]

Just the other week I downloaded the ISO, shoved it onto a USB disk, popped it into my notebook, clicked on "OK" when I was asked "Wanna do the Gnu?" and hey presto I was up and running.

All device drivers worked out of the box and even the GNU implementation of flash worked a charm. Now try that with Vista.

Not only that, but it magically knew I wanted to setup a DNS and a DHCP server and all user credentials were instantly available through LDAP. And ZFS, it had that too.

Now for the awesome kernel model loading. Don't need that really. I'm a man and I can concentrate on only one thing at the time. In fact I don't mind booting a new kernel every time I need some new module.

Finaly, in order to celebrate the good work done by FSF and the current benevolent nature of hardware producers, I went to my fav pr0n site, pointed to a flash-video and gave the old todger a thorough and exquisite yank. Orgasms with Hurd are so much better than with GNU/Linux.

Re:Slashdoted already?

[lowen]

And Windows/386 made no real-mode calls?

Technically, you're mostly correct. But DOS was still there, and real-mode existed. Floppy drivers for instance, and other hardware demanded the DOS calls.

Even in Windows 95, 98, and Me 'DOS was still there.' But 'still there' and 'in control' are two different things.

But, in any case, traditional 'real mode' no longer existed, even under Windows/386 2.x and 3.x. The DOS code that was used was run under V86 mode, not real mode. Windows made calls into the DOS INT21H interface, which came right back and were at least partially handled in protect mode, with the pieces that were adequately handled by the DOS code left as they were.

Under the hood, 32-bit VxD's were slowly added to handle more and more of the OS chores in 32 bit protect mode; with WfW 3.11, 32 bit file access became probably the biggest piece to date, until Windows 95 did more of the lower level drivers, too. Even the floppy driver in older windows, if implemented in a VxD, replaced the DOS driver by hooking the DOS drivers interrupt call (using an illegal instruction trap, which, in V86 mode, traps out to a handler in 32 bit protect mode....). But the DOS floppy interface was still used; it just trapped out (thunked) to a 32-bit driver....even in Windows 9x/Me.

If Windows/386 2.0 and Windows 3.x Enhanced mode, along with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with 32BFA, coupled with MS-DOS below, aren't full OS's, then neither are Windows 95, 98, or Me, as those are just bundles of the Windows GUI with newer MS-DOS versions. Each subsequent version replaced more and more of the 16 bit DOS code (using hooks, thunks, and other junks) with 32-bit drivers in VxD's, but the old DOS code was left in memory, in virtual-86 mode.

Again, read the book I referenced (Unauthorized Windows 95) which goes into all the gory details, and gives runnable code to prove the assertions on live Win9x (and Win/386 2.0 or Win 3.x Enhanced mode) systems.