The unified memory architecture is nothing. Hell, the RiscPC had a similar thing in 1995, more or less. It had normal RAM and then it had up to 2MB fast VRAM. The system could use any spare VRAM for normal applications as and when it needed.
In effect, unused code is never loaded anyway. Executable code is memory mapped but never loaded off disk if it's never used. XUL files aren't loaded if they're not used. As for unloading files, I'm not sure how Mozilla handles that.
I'm not entirely up on the Archimedes range, I was pretty young when they first appeared, but it went something like this:
The first Arcs were the A3xx series. The A305 had 512K RAM and the A310 had 1MB, which was a lot at the time (1987). They ran Arthur (A Risc os for THURsday). It was essentially RISC OS 1.
The A4xx series came about at some point. These had ST506 hard drives but were otherwise identical to A3xx machines. Later, the A4xx/1 appeared, which contained support for the ARM3 chip, IIRC.
The A3000 wasn't an Archimedes machine, but was often grouped with them because of its specs. It was a "desktop" machine, it had a similar case to the Amiga 500 in that the keyboard was part of the base box and a monitor could sit on top. It shipped with 1MB RAM, an ARM2 and RISC OS2 in 1989.
1991 (IIRC) saw the release of the A5000, a replacement for the A3xx and A4xx machines. It ran RISC OS3 and shipped with an ARM3.
Sometime between 1991 and 1994 saw the release of the A3010 and A3020 machines, a replacement for the A3000. They ran RISC OS3 and had ARM250s inside them. I didn't like them because they weren't very upgradable. The ARM250 was about half as powerful as an ARM3.
The RiscPC was released in 1994, sporting a completely new design and RISC OS 3.5. It used an ARM610 and came with a second processor slot which could house an x86 processor, allowing a "PC emulator" to run at the speed of a 486. An interesting device called the "hydra" was developed which allowed the RiscPC to hold 6 ARM610 or ARM710 processors at once. However, the release of the StrongARM killed off its potential market.
The StrongARM was originally released in late 95/early 96 or so. StrongARM upgrades for the RiscPC became available mid-late 96. They were sweet:)
After that, it's been downhill really. I haven't really been involved in the RISC OS field since 1997, so I'm not the sort of person to ask about RISC OS after that.
The OS was in EPROM in only a few models. Most machines had the OS in bog-standard ROM chips.
The "true" multi-tasking was only co-operative. A rogue application could easily take the OS down.
Your RISC OS 3.0-3.5 upgrade didn't take place. RISC OS 3.0 first shipped on the A5000 IIRC. The RiscPC shipped with 3.5, which wasn't compatible with older Acorn machines. I think you mean 3.0-3.1.
I don't recall Acorn machines shipping with support for 2.8MB floppies, but I could be mistaken there.
Acorn died a death because programming for RISC OS fell really behind. Lack of memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking and a decent IDE really made life difficult on developers. The tiny market share due to Acorn's obsessive focus on the educational market didn't help either.
The ARM1 was available as an add-on for Acorn's old BBC series computers. By the time the first Archimedes shipped (The A305 in 1987 IIRC), it used the ARM2.
I guess if it's still around, there may be some sort of exploit in the rest of the system that will allow you to enable it. I'm not saying there is, but it's possible.
Checked exceptions are a funny thing, they're a help and also a hinderance. The amount of times I've written "catch (SomeSillyException) {/* Won't happen */ }" is a stupidly large number.
GNOME has used Nautilus since 1.4, it's just that Nautilus was changed to be spacial in 2.6. To be honest, it's one of the reasons I've now switched from KDE 3.2. Anyhow, it's funny you should mention the Ars Technica article, since it was one of the inspirations for Nautilus to go spacial.
As for all the whiny bitches going on about loads of new windows, have they forgotten middle-click (or double-middle-click) will open the file/directory and close the parent window? I love it, but it seems I'm in a minority.
A. I saw the pilot, it certainly didn't take them *that* long, since they got stopped and interfered with along the way. In either case, at that speed, it should have taken them an awful lot longer to get to Q'onos than it did.
B. The "tense" situation had been reduced to the Ferengi being forced to surrender. A quick, non-violent interrogation would have probably started with "who are you" and quickly led to asking them what species they were. In either case, if the Ferengi were that far out 150 years before TNG, you have to wonder why they weren't spotted again for that long.
C. I don't know the exact timeline, but according to TOS canon, the Romulans were one of the last major powers to get warp technology, having to buy it off someone (The Klingons in exchange for cloaking technology IIRC). Also, remember that the Romulans left Vulcan a very long time before the Vulcans were around earth.
Enterprise took only a few days to reach the Klingon homeworld, despite the fact that it takes longer than that in TNG, where they have orders of magnitudes faster engines.
First contact with the Ferengi was in an early TNG episode, yet they turn up on Enterprise and Archer even talks to them. Yet, he somehow forgets to actually ask who they are.
As for the Romulans, well, ToS didn't really make sense in that respect. The Romulans are Vulcans who abandoned Vulcan a long time before Enterprise's time period, yet they make it all the way to another star system many light years away *without* a warp drive? Hmm...
Slashdot Mirror
Who'd have thought a website with thousands of active posters would contain people with differing opinions. Startling, absolutely startling.
The unified memory architecture is nothing. Hell, the RiscPC had a similar thing in 1995, more or less. It had normal RAM and then it had up to 2MB fast VRAM. The system could use any spare VRAM for normal applications as and when it needed.
In effect, unused code is never loaded anyway. Executable code is memory mapped but never loaded off disk if it's never used. XUL files aren't loaded if they're not used. As for unloading files, I'm not sure how Mozilla handles that.
It's already here. It's called virtual memory. Rarely used sections of memory get paged to disk in favour of more commonly used pages.
I'm not entirely up on the Archimedes range, I was pretty young when they first appeared, but it went something like this:
:)
The first Arcs were the A3xx series. The A305 had 512K RAM and the A310 had 1MB, which was a lot at the time (1987). They ran Arthur (A Risc os for THURsday). It was essentially RISC OS 1.
The A4xx series came about at some point. These had ST506 hard drives but were otherwise identical to A3xx machines. Later, the A4xx/1 appeared, which contained support for the ARM3 chip, IIRC.
The A3000 wasn't an Archimedes machine, but was often grouped with them because of its specs. It was a "desktop" machine, it had a similar case to the Amiga 500 in that the keyboard was part of the base box and a monitor could sit on top. It shipped with 1MB RAM, an ARM2 and RISC OS2 in 1989.
1991 (IIRC) saw the release of the A5000, a replacement for the A3xx and A4xx machines. It ran RISC OS3 and shipped with an ARM3.
Sometime between 1991 and 1994 saw the release of the A3010 and A3020 machines, a replacement for the A3000. They ran RISC OS3 and had ARM250s inside them. I didn't like them because they weren't very upgradable. The ARM250 was about half as powerful as an ARM3.
The RiscPC was released in 1994, sporting a completely new design and RISC OS 3.5. It used an ARM610 and came with a second processor slot which could house an x86 processor, allowing a "PC emulator" to run at the speed of a 486. An interesting device called the "hydra" was developed which allowed the RiscPC to hold 6 ARM610 or ARM710 processors at once. However, the release of the StrongARM killed off its potential market.
The StrongARM was originally released in late 95/early 96 or so. StrongARM upgrades for the RiscPC became available mid-late 96. They were sweet
After that, it's been downhill really. I haven't really been involved in the RISC OS field since 1997, so I'm not the sort of person to ask about RISC OS after that.
A few corrections...
The OS was in EPROM in only a few models. Most machines had the OS in bog-standard ROM chips.
The "true" multi-tasking was only co-operative. A rogue application could easily take the OS down.
Your RISC OS 3.0-3.5 upgrade didn't take place. RISC OS 3.0 first shipped on the A5000 IIRC. The RiscPC shipped with 3.5, which wasn't compatible with older Acorn machines. I think you mean 3.0-3.1.
I don't recall Acorn machines shipping with support for 2.8MB floppies, but I could be mistaken there.
Acorn died a death because programming for RISC OS fell really behind. Lack of memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking and a decent IDE really made life difficult on developers. The tiny market share due to Acorn's obsessive focus on the educational market didn't help either.
The ARM1 was available as an add-on for Acorn's old BBC series computers. By the time the first Archimedes shipped (The A305 in 1987 IIRC), it used the ARM2.
If you don't want such constraints as following an already-established history, then DON'T WRITE A PREQUEL!
I suggest you read Star Trek: Movie Memories, which explains that, more-or-less, that is what happened.
Not really, since I'm just hazarding a guess at his reasoning.
I guess if it's still around, there may be some sort of exploit in the rest of the system that will allow you to enable it. I'm not saying there is, but it's possible.
Do many distros install telnet by default any more? I don't know the figures, but I'd have thought most would have just moved to ssh by now.
I keep the client around, but haven't had telnetd installed for years.
There are plenty of times that I've used a private object inside a class in such a way that some of the exceptions it can throw will never occur.
Checked exceptions are a funny thing, they're a help and also a hinderance. The amount of times I've written "catch (SomeSillyException) { /* Won't happen */ }" is a stupidly large number.
You, because you ran it out of spec.
Lucas didn't plot it all out in the 70s any more than Berman and Braga plot as much as a season ahead in Enterprise.
I bet you wouldn't have hated it if Windows had a RISC OS-like "double right-click opens file/folder and closes the parent window" behaviour.
GNOME has used Nautilus since 1.4, it's just that Nautilus was changed to be spacial in 2.6. To be honest, it's one of the reasons I've now switched from KDE 3.2. Anyhow, it's funny you should mention the Ars Technica article, since it was one of the inspirations for Nautilus to go spacial.
As for all the whiny bitches going on about loads of new windows, have they forgotten middle-click (or double-middle-click) will open the file/directory and close the parent window? I love it, but it seems I'm in a minority.
That's well within the area of optimisation allowing for full speed playback.
Here's a task; delete all files containing the word "flibble" in a directory.
Not just copy, either. Copy and distribute, in the strictest sense of "and" means that if you copy but not distribute, you're not covered.
Actually, he said *the* one company, implying there's only one.
I beg your pardon?
A. I saw the pilot, it certainly didn't take them *that* long, since they got stopped and interfered with along the way. In either case, at that speed, it should have taken them an awful lot longer to get to Q'onos than it did.
B. The "tense" situation had been reduced to the Ferengi being forced to surrender. A quick, non-violent interrogation would have probably started with "who are you" and quickly led to asking them what species they were. In either case, if the Ferengi were that far out 150 years before TNG, you have to wonder why they weren't spotted again for that long.
C. I don't know the exact timeline, but according to TOS canon, the Romulans were one of the last major powers to get warp technology, having to buy it off someone (The Klingons in exchange for cloaking technology IIRC). Also, remember that the Romulans left Vulcan a very long time before the Vulcans were around earth.
The Borg showed up at Earth, nowhere else.
Enterprise took only a few days to reach the Klingon homeworld, despite the fact that it takes longer than that in TNG, where they have orders of magnitudes faster engines.
First contact with the Ferengi was in an early TNG episode, yet they turn up on Enterprise and Archer even talks to them. Yet, he somehow forgets to actually ask who they are.
As for the Romulans, well, ToS didn't really make sense in that respect. The Romulans are Vulcans who abandoned Vulcan a long time before Enterprise's time period, yet they make it all the way to another star system many light years away *without* a warp drive? Hmm...