Relocatable modules have the major problem that they are effectively kernel modules. I do agree that !Directories are fantastic, and ROX (rox.sourceforge.net) impliments them in its filer.
My major problem stopping me from donating is the fact that so few people take Switch cards. Transgaming do, which is rather good since I really wanted to donate to them. PayPal don't, and I've actually wanted to donate to a couple of companies only to find out they use it.
Here's a tip: If you support Switch you will likely get more donations.
Err...you missed my point. If it can render HTML 4 correctly, then the hard part is done. XHTML is very similar to HTML 4, so it could be just a matter of tweaking the parser if it's written well.
I use "free" windows sometimes. When I'm browsing the web, writing code or an essay I tend to use maximised Windows. However, it makes little sense to have, say, your IM program maximised, or your file manager.
I do like overlapping windows, so I will refuse to use anything that doesn't let me use them.
Oh please. RISC OS 2, released in 1989, had better AA than Windows. Check out http://www.riscos.com/risc_os_4/Features.html for shots of its AA in action.
AOL had been a member of CUT (Campaign for Unmetered Telephone) for a long time before unmetered internet access became a reality at least in the UK. Thankfully there is now unmetered access in the UK so CUT has now been disbanded.
Somebody has definately written patches to support CPU hot-swapping in Linux. i believe it's a matter of "cat 0 >/proc/sys/cpu/1/active" (Or something similar) to take a CPU down. You can then safely remove it, hardware support notwithstanding.
Isn't there a way to...err...'change' your MAC address through drivers or somesuch. I'm fairly certain it's possible under Linux, and I imagine most *NIXs too.
I remember when I first tried Linux. It was late 1998 and I had started hearing about it from the magazines I read and some web sites I read were starting to mention it. At the time I was using Windows 95 having moved on from RISC OS.
Essentially, I'd virtually been brought up on the GUI. My first real computing was done after my father bought an Acorn A3000 in 1989, complete with a funny looking desktop. Anyway, I digress...
Having used virtually nothing but GUI based OSes (RISC OS, MacOS/System 7 and Windows), I was eager to see what Linux was all about. I got my chance when PC Plus came with a copy of SuSE 5.2, complete with KDE 1.0, on its cover disk). After about 3 attempts, I managed to get a working installation. Following the turorial I ran "startx" and got exploring. I gave up after a month or so because my sound card wasn't supported and KDE had less than stellar stability.
I tried again when the 2.2 kernel came out with support for my sound card and have had it ever since. In fact, I only have Windows for games now.
As my computer architecture lecturer is so fond of pointing out, nobody gives a shit if foo is faster clock-for-clock than bar, they care if bar can scale to a clock speed that renders it faster than foo's top performer.
"You must have been running a dodgy 3rd party patch"
Back in those days, I used a lot of PD apps to make up for the short-comings of the OS. Memphis was a dear friend to me (Interesting hack too, using the system sprites area (Is that the right name? Been a while) to create a resizable RAM disk.
Anyway, if any of those apps decided they were going to hang, I'd be in trouble.
"I used RiscOS for years and it was rock solid"
I used it 1989-1997 all the way from an A3000 to a RISC PC. When I was *really* into it (1993/4 or so), I couldn't keep running more than a day without having to reset due to either a hang or excessive memory leakes. Sometimes Impression Style would just up and die leaving anything up to 2MB unaccounted for. On a 4MB machine that left me with about 500K to use.
"With a StrongARM the computer boots in under a second anyway"
?! Under RO 3.7 that simply wasn't true. My father has a StrongARM RISC PC and it takes at least a second to get to the "RISC OS 50MB" prompt before booting the GUI. It would then wait for the hard disk to spin up and then spend around another 5-10 seconds loading the GUI and startup apps. Yes, it's fast, but my box *never* gets reset unless I'm installing a new kernel or I'm booting into Windows to play a game.
"True... and about 99% of computer use is for mundane stuff"
True, I'll give you that, but RISC OS can't even do that well any more. Take web browsing. On every other platform, the browser and dial-up-networking tools are free or come with the OS. Oh, and is there a web browser that supports HTML4 and even a small subset of CSS?
"Linux does the job great. However RiscOS blows Linux, Mac and Windows out of the water as a desktop machine"
Err...no. It certainly has advantages, but the apps let it down. Like I pointed out, decent browsers simply do not exist. I refuse to support Netscape 4 because of its sub-standard CSS support, don't even think of asking me to go all the way back to HTML 3.2.
"RiscOS is also a joy to program"
You've obviously never used a decent IDE. Granted, there were decent UI designers for RISC OS back when I was learning to program, but times change.
"You can knock up a MT windowed application in an hour in BASIC"
But what does it do? I can easily knock up a MT windowed application in Qt using Kdevelop in that time depending on what it has to do.
"Programming assembler for the ARM is so easy too"
You still make heavy use of assembler? Oh dear. OK, assembler is OK for small programs but it eventually holds you back if you want to do anything serious.
"The way it's so modular, you can change any aspect of the OS you like despite the fact it's not Open Source"
That's nothing new, it's called libraries. In Linux, for example, there was a project called harmony to write a free version of Qt which wasn't open source at the time. Hell, Lesstif is a pretty good recreation of Motif, which wasn't open source until recently. In Windows, there's an ActiveX control that lets you replace IE's html parser with Mozilla's. This sort of thing is not exclusive to RISC OS.
"RiscOS seriously rocks"
You speak about RISC OS as if I've never used it. I wrote my first programs in RISC OS, it was my primary platform until I got my first PC in 1997. Granted, I hated some aspects of Windows, but I moved to Linux in early 1999 and never looked back.
"Cooperative multitasking is not a real problem if you are not considering RiscOS stations as servers."
The amount of times I've had apps go haywire and had to reset due to the OS using CMT is rather silly.
" IMHO, if the Wimp (RiscOS GUI - a FLA for Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointer) is so responsive (and I doubt there is anywhere a so full-featured responsive GUI) it is because Acorn aimed it at the end user which is not a bad concept."
Yes and no. Initially, it had to be fast on an 8MHz ARM2 with a dumb frame-buffer. When the ARM3 came out, Acorn did NewLook which was still fast. However, that speed came from using hand-optimised assembler, which has turned into a nightmare as far as maintaining it goes.
RISC OS was never meant to be a long term OS, it just evolved from Arthur, which was an OS they quickly threw together so they could show off their new A310.
" If you consider what RiscOS platform excell at, then you won't need real-time multitasking. Of course, now their technology may now seem obsolete but I still make an heavy use of my RiscPC as no other environment can provide me with such optimal and ergonomic tools, especially when it comes to DTP."
Ah yes, I used to love Impression Publisher. Those were the days:). However, I did things other than DTP and Acorn fell behind.
"The "death" of Acorn was not its community's and there are still lots of unique concepts which come from them."
The Acorn community is virtually on its death bed, and deluding itself isn't helping. After all, RISC OS Ltd. have all but decided not to bother with RISC OS 5 until they have to, and the article at riscos.org about reliability is a bunch of fluff. How can an OS with CMT, no memory protection and uses kernel modules for libraries be considered reliable at anything other than mundane stuff?
"Look at ROX, for instance..."
I actually submitted some icons for ROX back in the early days of 0.0.5 or so.
" Anyway, I'd also like to say that some "multithreading-like" is still possible under RiscOS as the fact switching betwen apps is not that optimal doesn't mean we are monotasking."
It's not monotasking, but CMT is far from optimal. I remember talk about Wimp2 when somebody implimented PMT, but it had a lot of trouble with the rest of the OS and applications being designed for CMT.
RISC OS had some neat stuff, such as the whole Application directory thing, which Apple now pretty much use in the form of Bundles. Unfortunately, it fell way behind after RISC OS 3.1. The RISC PC was OK, but RISC OS 3.5 had too few enhancements, and when Phoebe was cancelled at the last minute, RISC OS 4 didn't see the light of day until it was too late.
"RiscOS is IMHO one of the most optimized operating systems ever"
The only reason for that is a huge amount of it is hand optimised assembler, which is causing RISC OS Ltd. serious problems. After all, has there been any sign of even RISC OS 4.5 yet?
"RiscOS has only been ported to specific architectures such as Acorn Computers"
Acorn wrote RISC OS, they haven't ported it anywhere, unless you want to count the RISC PC as a different platform.
RISC OS was good in its time, but Acorm let it fall behind. It has no memory protection, still uses co-operative multi-tasking and it impliments shared libraries in the form of what can be described as kernel modules.
Err...no. If the GPL is made void, then all GPL'd code effectively has its license revoked. Therefore, nobody would have any right to redistribute the ex-GPL code.
That "Taiwanese knock-off comapny" happens to be ripping Intel a new one with the Athlon, not to mention the Athlon4 and the Athlon MP (Which kicks the P4 Xeon all the way to next Tuesday).
Slashdot Mirror
Switch is a debit card very popular in the UK. If a company cannot make it easy for me to give them money, they don't deserve it.
Relocatable modules have the major problem that they are effectively kernel modules. I do agree that !Directories are fantastic, and ROX (rox.sourceforge.net) impliments them in its filer.
My major problem stopping me from donating is the fact that so few people take Switch cards. Transgaming do, which is rather good since I really wanted to donate to them. PayPal don't, and I've actually wanted to donate to a couple of companies only to find out they use it.
Here's a tip: If you support Switch you will likely get more donations.
And what happens whem MS move to a pay-per-month scheme?
Err...you missed my point. If it can render HTML 4 correctly, then the hard part is done. XHTML is very similar to HTML 4, so it could be just a matter of tweaking the parser if it's written well.
I use "free" windows sometimes. When I'm browsing the web, writing code or an essay I tend to use maximised Windows. However, it makes little sense to have, say, your IM program maximised, or your file manager.
I do like overlapping windows, so I will refuse to use anything that doesn't let me use them.
What standard does IE support better than Mozilla/Netscape 6.1?
HTML 4 has been around for getting on for five years. Is that not standing still for long enough?
Granted, there is XHTML, but it's not vastly different from HTML and anything that can render HTML 4 can be tweaked relatively easily to render it.
Oh please. RISC OS 2, released in 1989, had better AA than Windows. Check out http://www.riscos.com/risc_os_4/Features.html for shots of its AA in action.
AOL had been a member of CUT (Campaign for Unmetered Telephone) for a long time before unmetered internet access became a reality at least in the UK. Thankfully there is now unmetered access in the UK so CUT has now been disbanded.
Check out this. I know it's a Netscape site, but it doesn't make the facts any less real.
Please show me some docs showing IE being more standards compliant than Netscape 6, yet alone Mozilla.
0.8.7? There was 0.8, 0.8.1 and then straight to 0.9.
Psst...there was a Voodoo4, it was a single chip VSA-100 designed to compete with the MX.
Somebody has definately written patches to support CPU hot-swapping in Linux. i believe it's a matter of "cat 0 > /proc/sys/cpu/1/active" (Or something similar) to take a CPU down. You can then safely remove it, hardware support notwithstanding.
Isn't there a way to...err...'change' your MAC address through drivers or somesuch. I'm fairly certain it's possible under Linux, and I imagine most *NIXs too.
i686 binaries are 100% compatible with a K6-2. I had a K6-III and they worked fine.
I remember when I first tried Linux. It was late 1998 and I had started hearing about it from the magazines I read and some web sites I read were starting to mention it. At the time I was using Windows 95 having moved on from RISC OS.
Essentially, I'd virtually been brought up on the GUI. My first real computing was done after my father bought an Acorn A3000 in 1989, complete with a funny looking desktop. Anyway, I digress...
Having used virtually nothing but GUI based OSes (RISC OS, MacOS/System 7 and Windows), I was eager to see what Linux was all about. I got my chance when PC Plus came with a copy of SuSE 5.2, complete with KDE 1.0, on its cover disk). After about 3 attempts, I managed to get a working installation. Following the turorial I ran "startx" and got exploring. I gave up after a month or so because my sound card wasn't supported and KDE had less than stellar stability.
I tried again when the 2.2 kernel came out with support for my sound card and have had it ever since. In fact, I only have Windows for games now.
As my computer architecture lecturer is so fond of pointing out, nobody gives a shit if foo is faster clock-for-clock than bar, they care if bar can scale to a clock speed that renders it faster than foo's top performer.
"You must have been running a dodgy 3rd party patch"
Back in those days, I used a lot of PD apps to make up for the short-comings of the OS. Memphis was a dear friend to me (Interesting hack too, using the system sprites area (Is that the right name? Been a while) to create a resizable RAM disk.
Anyway, if any of those apps decided they were going to hang, I'd be in trouble.
"I used RiscOS for years and it was rock solid"
I used it 1989-1997 all the way from an A3000 to a RISC PC. When I was *really* into it (1993/4 or so), I couldn't keep running more than a day without having to reset due to either a hang or excessive memory leakes. Sometimes Impression Style would just up and die leaving anything up to 2MB unaccounted for. On a 4MB machine that left me with about 500K to use.
"With a StrongARM the computer boots in under a second anyway"
?! Under RO 3.7 that simply wasn't true. My father has a StrongARM RISC PC and it takes at least a second to get to the "RISC OS 50MB" prompt before booting the GUI. It would then wait for the hard disk to spin up and then spend around another 5-10 seconds loading the GUI and startup apps. Yes, it's fast, but my box *never* gets reset unless I'm installing a new kernel or I'm booting into Windows to play a game.
"True... and about 99% of computer use is for mundane stuff"
True, I'll give you that, but RISC OS can't even do that well any more. Take web browsing. On every other platform, the browser and dial-up-networking tools are free or come with the OS. Oh, and is there a web browser that supports HTML4 and even a small subset of CSS?
"Linux does the job great. However RiscOS blows Linux, Mac and Windows out of the water as a desktop machine"
Err...no. It certainly has advantages, but the apps let it down. Like I pointed out, decent browsers simply do not exist. I refuse to support Netscape 4 because of its sub-standard CSS support, don't even think of asking me to go all the way back to HTML 3.2.
"RiscOS is also a joy to program"
You've obviously never used a decent IDE. Granted, there were decent UI designers for RISC OS back when I was learning to program, but times change.
"You can knock up a MT windowed application in an hour in BASIC"
But what does it do? I can easily knock up a MT windowed application in Qt using Kdevelop in that time depending on what it has to do.
"Programming assembler for the ARM is so easy too"
You still make heavy use of assembler? Oh dear. OK, assembler is OK for small programs but it eventually holds you back if you want to do anything serious.
"The way it's so modular, you can change any aspect of the OS you like despite the fact it's not Open Source"
That's nothing new, it's called libraries. In Linux, for example, there was a project called harmony to write a free version of Qt which wasn't open source at the time. Hell, Lesstif is a pretty good recreation of Motif, which wasn't open source until recently. In Windows, there's an ActiveX control that lets you replace IE's html parser with Mozilla's. This sort of thing is not exclusive to RISC OS.
"RiscOS seriously rocks"
You speak about RISC OS as if I've never used it. I wrote my first programs in RISC OS, it was my primary platform until I got my first PC in 1997. Granted, I hated some aspects of Windows, but I moved to Linux in early 1999 and never looked back.
"Cooperative multitasking is not a real problem if you are not considering RiscOS stations as servers."
:). However, I did things other than DTP and Acorn fell behind.
The amount of times I've had apps go haywire and had to reset due to the OS using CMT is rather silly.
" IMHO, if the Wimp (RiscOS GUI - a FLA for Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointer) is so responsive (and I doubt there is anywhere a so full-featured responsive GUI) it is because Acorn aimed it at the end user which is not a bad concept."
Yes and no. Initially, it had to be fast on an 8MHz ARM2 with a dumb frame-buffer. When the ARM3 came out, Acorn did NewLook which was still fast. However, that speed came from using hand-optimised assembler, which has turned into a nightmare as far as maintaining it goes.
RISC OS was never meant to be a long term OS, it just evolved from Arthur, which was an OS they quickly threw together so they could show off their new A310.
" If you consider what RiscOS platform excell at, then you won't need real-time multitasking. Of course, now their technology may now seem obsolete but I still make an heavy use of my RiscPC as no other environment can provide me with such optimal and ergonomic tools, especially when it comes to DTP."
Ah yes, I used to love Impression Publisher. Those were the days
"The "death" of Acorn was not its community's and there are still lots of unique concepts which come from them."
The Acorn community is virtually on its death bed, and deluding itself isn't helping. After all, RISC OS Ltd. have all but decided not to bother with RISC OS 5 until they have to, and the article at riscos.org about reliability is a bunch of fluff. How can an OS with CMT, no memory protection and uses kernel modules for libraries be considered reliable at anything other than mundane stuff?
"Look at ROX, for instance..."
I actually submitted some icons for ROX back in the early days of 0.0.5 or so.
" Anyway, I'd also like to say that some "multithreading-like" is still possible under RiscOS as the fact switching betwen apps is not that optimal doesn't mean we are monotasking."
It's not monotasking, but CMT is far from optimal. I remember talk about Wimp2 when somebody implimented PMT, but it had a lot of trouble with the rest of the OS and applications being designed for CMT.
RISC OS had some neat stuff, such as the whole Application directory thing, which Apple now pretty much use in the form of Bundles. Unfortunately, it fell way behind after RISC OS 3.1. The RISC PC was OK, but RISC OS 3.5 had too few enhancements, and when Phoebe was cancelled at the last minute, RISC OS 4 didn't see the light of day until it was too late.
"RiscOS is IMHO one of the most optimized operating systems ever"
The only reason for that is a huge amount of it is hand optimised assembler, which is causing RISC OS Ltd. serious problems. After all, has there been any sign of even RISC OS 4.5 yet?
"RiscOS has only been ported to specific architectures such as Acorn Computers"
Acorn wrote RISC OS, they haven't ported it anywhere, unless you want to count the RISC PC as a different platform.
RISC OS was good in its time, but Acorm let it fall behind. It has no memory protection, still uses co-operative multi-tasking and it impliments shared libraries in the form of what can be described as kernel modules.
Err...no. If the GPL is made void, then all GPL'd code effectively has its license revoked. Therefore, nobody would have any right to redistribute the ex-GPL code.
That "Taiwanese knock-off comapny" happens to be ripping Intel a new one with the Athlon, not to mention the Athlon4 and the Athlon MP (Which kicks the P4 Xeon all the way to next Tuesday).
Then how do you explain the results here?