My friends are bunch of programmers and they like PPC's much more than x86.
I like the PPC more than the x86, but unless you're programming in machine code you can only see the difference between one CPU and another in very remote and indirect ways, and any competant programmer who thinks they even notice those differences is fooling themselves. I've spend most of the past 10 years working with a processor that really is significantly different from either, one that Intel and HP conspired to "put down", and the vast majority of the time when the instruction set made a difference it was only because it showed up in bugs in third-party software that I had to fix.
And Tru64 on the Alpha did some very clever tricks taking advantage of the large address space. All shared memory could be allocated at unique addresses, so you could pass pointers to shared memory between programs and they kept working. The first gigabyte of address space in each process was unallocated, so that if you ran over the end of an array or otherwise had a loose pointer you'd trap very quickly, which made debugging much easier.
For the PPC and x86... there's not even that, not even in 64-bit mode, since neither Win64 and OS X use a dense memory model (neither, unfortunately, does HPUX on the Itanium). The biggest impact? There's a slight accidental security advantage in the relationship between the PPC's less compact instruction set and C's null-terminated strings. For the vast majority of programmers, that's pretty much it. For end users, there's no difference at all.
but a LARGE and substatial portion of Apple's fan base literally hates Microsoft and Intel
Intel isn't Microsoft. Microsoft isn't Intel.
I have serious doubts about the possibility of Apple shipping OS X for Intel, but they're all about technical problems. I don't like Intel, I don't like the way they've been a barrier to progress in the processor world for a quarter of a century, but if they could bring about a crack in the Microsoft monopoly I'd happily take them up on it.
anyone that knows a modicum of computer maintenance can keep a Windows machine running well
Maybe 1% of the computer-using population know that "modicum of computer maintenance". If that.
I do support for software developers. They've got PhDs and everything. They're all in the top few percent of the computer using population. It's amazing the messes I've had to clean up over the years. Most people think they're doing well if they can install Windows after its eaten its brain.
You can buy non-Apple PPC boards RIGHT NOW, and you can't load OSX on them
Not legally, anyway.
But OS X isn't like OS 9, it doesn't run out of the ROM. To boot OS X on an unsupported motherboard you just need to have a version of Darwin that'll boot on that hardware, and replace the components of OS X that are locked to the hardware with the corresponding components from Darwin.
The only hook they have that would work is the Quartz acceleration in the video card. They control Quartz and they already have ATI and nVidia making custom video cards for them, so they could lock the GPU to Apple hardware and lock the Quartz acceleration to the GPU. So you'd be able to run OS X on a clone, but without Quartz Extreme or hardware OpenGL support.
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Surely you can run Apple ][ software at many times native speed under emulation if your real chip is a Pentium M or Pentium D.
But not OS 9.
Emulation allowed Apple to dump the aging m68k and move to PPC
That's because the PPC was so many times faster than the 68k that a PPC running an OS that was still almost all 68k was able to run about as fast as the last-generation 68k and almost as fast as the contemporary-generation 68k, and they didn't bother with the next-generation 68k.
But to do that required a CPU that was not just a little better, not just twice as fast, but fast enough to beat the emulation overhead.
It normally takes a processor about 10x faster to emulate another processor at full speed. Apple did better than that, but that's because they had a particularly easy job: the PPC had twice the number of registers that the 68k did, so it could keep all the 68k register in PPC registers. That's the same reason that there's a scant possibility of the Xbox 360 being able to emulate the original Xbox: there's less register pressure on the PPC than the x86.
EVERY successful emulation I've ever seen has involved going from a slow chip with a small register file to a chip several times faster with a bigger register file. 68k on PPC, 68k on ARM, VAX and Sparc and x86 on Alpha.
Even if the emulation was Opteron-only (in which case they'd be talking to AMD rather than Intel) they'd still have to deal with register spills. Emulating the PPC on x86? They'd need every bit of that 10x speed improvement. I can't see that being practical unless the next generation of Intel chips jumps into the 30 GHz range with correspondingly fast ram or hundreds of megabytes of 1:1 cache, or unless Intel does the PPC emulation on their underlying microcode the way they're doing x86 emulation now... effectively building a PPC core into their chips.
Apple believers will keep buying Apple systems for a while until they realize that they'd be better off to buy a white box and install a Linux distro that they can skin to have the Apple GUI look and feel.
I've been a developer for FreeBSD - the open source UNIX that Apple is already using - since it was a set of patchkits for 386BSD. I've not been using Linux quite as long, only since Red Hat 2.1. But the thing is, I've used Linux and FreeBSD and KDE and Gnome and I finally tossed it all over and "upgraded" from a 1.7 GHz P4 to a 400 MHz G3. And it's been like moving from a crummy New Jersey apartment to a private villa in the Bahamas while still being just as close to New York. I can run all the same software I could before, plus a whole lot more, and it just works.
No, if you think you can produce OS X by adding a translucent Enlightenment skin and glowy blue theme to Gnome, you simply have no idea.
The x86 processor is just a CPU, not the computer architecture. Nothing says it has to be anywhere near compatible with a modern PC.
Apple's hardware is already virtually identical to a PC other than the CPU. They use the same bus, the same cards, the same interfaces and peripherals. Their operating system is open source and already runs on x86 PCs. If they used the same CPU as well, then the only thing that would stop anyone from running Mac OS X on a clone would be a collaboration between Apple, ATI, and nVidia to hardware-lock the video cards that Quartz supported.
IBM was doing this in the '70s...
on
Simulated Universe
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· Score: 4, Funny
At least this was going around when I was at Berkeley: NEW OPERATING SYSTEM:
Because so many users have asked for an operating system of even greater capability than VM, IBM announces the Virtual Universe Operating System --- OS/VU.
Running under VU the individual user appears to have not merely a machine of his own, but an entire universe of his own, in which he can set up and take down his own programs, data sets, system networks, personnel and planetary systems. He need only specify the universe he desires, and the OS/VU system generation program (IEHGOD) does the rest. This program resides in SYS1.GODLIB. The minimum time for this function is 6 days of activity and 1 day of review. In conjunction with OS/VU, all system utilities reside in SYS1.MESSIAH. This program has no parms or control cards, as it knows what you want to do when you execute it.
Naturally, the user must have attained a certain degree of sophistication in the data processing field if an efficient utilization of OS/VU is to be achieved. Frequent calls to non-resident galaxies can, for instance, lead to unexpected delays in the execution of a job. Although IBM, through its wholly-owned subsidiary, the United States, is working on a program to upgrade the speed of light and thus reduce the overhead of extraterrestrial and metadimensional paging, users must be careful for the present to stay within the laws of physics. IBM must charge an additional fee for violations.
OS/VU will run on any IBM x0xx equipped with the Extended WARP Feature. Rental is 20 million dollars per cpu/nanosecond.
Users should be aware that IBM plans to migrate all existing systems and hardware to OS/VU as soon as our engineers effect one output that is (conceptually) error free. This will give us a base to develop an even more powerful OS, target date 2001, designated as 'Virtual Reality'. OS/VR is planned to allow the user to migrate to totally unreal universes. To aid the user in identifying the difference between 'Virtual Reality' and 'Real Reality', a file containing a linear record of multisensory total records of successive moments of now will be established. It's name will be SYS1.EST.
Compared to OS 9? Have you used classic Mac OS? The classic Mac OS multitasking charade (I won't call it a kernel) was appalling. It had no real scheduler, applicatons ran for a while, gave up the CPU voluntarily, and went on. There was no way to get smooth interapplication concurrency because the API was built around operations that weren't even thread-safe, let alone safe for separate independent applications to use concurrently.
That's what I'm comparing Mac OS X with, not other real multitasking operating systems, but a hideous shambling wreck that was so bad it made a 240 MHz Power PC running Mac OS 9 feel less responsive than a 30 MHz 68040 running Mach.
Later on, I ran both OS 9 and OS X on the same hardware. OS X was smoother and more responsive in the face of even heavy competition for the CPU and disk than OS 9 just sharing files. I had an upgraded 7600 which I was going to use as a file server and occasional console, until I started trying to use it that way. Any time it started sharing files it got slow, unresponsive, and jerky. I wanted to use it for music, but iTunes would chop and skip on just about any file access. Upgrading it to a 240 MHz CPU and giving it a second SCSI card just for file sharing didn't help.
Bad as Mach is, it's so much better than what Apple was using before that if they had just stuck to using Quickdraw and Display Postscript OS X would have knocked the doors off OS 9 on the same hardware. I had a copy of Rhapsody DR1 for Intel at one point, and it was easily the equal of BeOS (another OS I've found has an inflated reputation) on the same test box.
It's not the Mach kernel that makes OS X slower than OS 9, it's the Quartz graphics.
The odds are pretty good that you'll need to do some CLI sorcery to get an X-Server to run under OSX.
Double-click on your hard disk. Double-click on Applications. Double-click on Utilities. Double-click on X11.
Compare a machine running OS 8 or OS 9 to a Macine running OSX, the machine will be discernably slower when running OSX.
The interesting question is, why?
Here's what I've found:
Compare a machine running NeXTSTeP with a comparable machine running OS 8 (say, the Performa 475 vs the NeXTStation Mono). The NeXT, running the same basic kernel as OS X, is about as responsive for pure GUI interactions and WAY more responsive running multiple applications or when disk I/O is involved.
Compare a machine running BeOS and Sheepshaver with the same machine running OS 8 natively. Under BeOS, the machine is again more responsive, and again disk I/O is much better.
Compare a machine running OS 9 applications under Classic and the same machine running OS 9. Not a lot of difference. Slightly slower screen, better disk I/O, and much more responsive than OS X applications.
OS 8 vs OS 9? Not that big a deal. OS 9 does multitasking a bit better, it seems, but at the same time it's a bigger system.
OS X should be faster than OS 9, then, even with the "Microkernel overhead", because of the improved multitasking and disk I/O. But you can see that it isn't just using it on the same machine.
The big difference is that OS X allocates a separate raster map for each window, and composites them without involving the app. Scrolling panes in windows can end up using a raster map the size of the scrolling region. This means at least tens of megabytes of extra storage just on scrolling, and at least one and sometimes two additional copies (dpending on translucency) before any pixel makes it to the screen.
This is why QE and QE2d are such big wins on the Mac. They move one of the copies out of the way.
Meanwhile on OS 9, you usually have zero copies... the app calls Quickdraw and Quickdraw renders just what's visible, and may completely bypass the CPU to do it. Just like just about every other windowing system I know of, including NeXTstep.
they are at present trampling on the real Fedora project's rights.
Interesting. Have you got any more details of what the restrictions they're concerned about are?
Re:
Red Hat's use of the Fedora(TM) brand name and its assertion of ownership over that name are of considerable concern to the Cornell and Virginia Fedora(TM) project team. Red Hat's guidelines for use of the Fedora(TM) brand place restrictions on use of a term for which the Cornell and Virginia team have over five years of prior use. This position seems inconsistent with Red Hat's stance on open source and its prominence in the open source community. There are also costs due to confusion about the name. These include misunderstandings in the open source community about the identity of the products and resulting work for the Cornell and Virginia Fedora(TM) support staff due to questions unrelated to their specific project.
you have two options: 1.) Thumb board. 2.) Stylus and handwriting recog OR an OSK
You have 3 options:
1. Thumboard. 2. Stylus and HWR. 3. Stylus and a learned interface.
Graffiti and the Pocket PC's Block Recogniser are not handwriting recognition. They're more like stenographer's shorthand, albeit less advanced. They're not as fast as a thumb-board, but they don't require the break between text input and positional input that a stylus or a mouse gives you.
Unfortunately Palm has abandoned Graffiti and replaced it with a more handwriting-like recogniser that's significantly slower because it requires multiple strokes for some of the most common letters.
Block Recogniser on the Pocket PC is now the best input mechanism available. It's a pity that the Pocket PC itself has been so badly crippled by Microsoft's desire to make it no more than an annex to Windows rather than an independent device capable of replacing the laptop for most casual users.
Ironically, Graffiti started out as an input method on the Newton. I use it on mine when I use my Newton at all.
Multi-million dollar companies with no actual assets go out of business all the time. They bought paper companies that didn't actually exist, they dissipated assets through neglect, their assets turned out to be of only short-term value. The fact that SCO responded to the discovery that they didn't actually own anything worth selling by trying to recoup some money through speculative lawsuits is SCO's responsibility, not anyone else's.
In what has been a massive and loosely coordinated effort, a multi-million dollar company backed by a strong legal team has been all but put out of business, and this couldn't have happened without some form of organization.
Yeh, a criminal organization. Called The Canopy Group.
Re:My experience replacing CRT with LCD
on
Are CRTs History?
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· Score: 1
Did you really pay $80 for a good 21"?
Yep.
Just out of curiosity, where?
In the directron.com "garage sale" room. It's from an old Silicon Graphics system, and probably cost a couple of thousand new. I suspect it was so cheap because the SGI grey/violet speckled paint job just looked so funky to PC-attuned eyes.
No, the same way i dont think that GNU would be dead if it werent for Linux.
That's a funny way to put it. I mean, as if Linux and the Hurd were the only two options.
its because Linux gained critical mass before HURD that linux is an enterprise-ready kernel and the hurd just an early stage of a project
That begs the question of why Linux gained critical mass despite having started later.
First, the FSF spent about five years trying to figure out how to avoid implementing their own kernel. Oh they talked about all the years they'd spent on Hurd when they were asked why they didn't use Linux, but Linux was announced less than a year after they'd finally decided to use Mach instead of Sprite or their own kernel. Linus sat down and looked at how a UNIX system went together and said "I can do this". Stallman sat down and looked at how a UNIX system went together and said "I can do better than this". Which is a great thing to commit to, but you have to actually DO it.
Second, the Mach microkernel is really too heavyweight to build a formal microkernel OS on top of. All the successful systems that have been built on Mach use it in concert with a BSD kernel that does a lot of heavy lifting without all that costly context switching, and the successful "real" microkernel systems use a smaller lighter microkernel that doesn't depend on unreasonably fast memory mapping as a prerequisite for its IPC. OS X uses a BSD server and avoids Mach IPC and it's still got more overhead than Linux or a traditional BSD.
Third, the USL-CSRG lawsuit kept people from joining the BSD effort (that's the other alternative free UNIX I hinted at) for a couple of critical years. It's ironic that the resolution of that lawsuit is helping Linux now.
Sony may stop making them, but only because they're getting a better return from licensing the technology. I was so glad when they started doing that (I assume their patents were getting a little thin, and it was that or clones) and the price dropped to something reasonable.
What I don't get is why anyone's making shadow-mask CRTs any more. Who's voluntarily buying these things other than people who just don't care?
I think the only non-Trinitron in use in my house is the one built into my daughter's Mac, and it ticked me off that Apple cheaped out saving twenty five bucks on a tube in a thousand dollar PC.
(in case you can't guess, I really like 'em)
Re:My experience replacing CRT with LCD
on
Are CRTs History?
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· Score: 1
I just replaced an aging but beautiful high-end CRT
It was someone like you who was responsible for my being able to buy a beautiful 21" Trinitron for $80. I thank you and my Mac mini thanks you.
Re:You want a nice 24" High Def Widescreen CRT?
on
Are CRTs History?
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· Score: 1
That's great, but TFA is about situations where they need better color reproduction than LCDs give you, and they actually need the low persistance display that produces the "flicker" you're talking about.
Is it just me, or is POSIX is what's missing here?
I don't know if it's just you, but it's certainly not me.
POSIX is a very low hurdle to jump. Windows NT was "POSIX compliant" from the start, and even Bill Gates recanted on his claim that the crippled POSIX subsystem meant that Windows was "UNIX". If all Linus was trying to do was satisfy the POSIX API he wouldn't necessarily have produced anything like a UNIX. And, I don't think he would have been successful, because there were too many "own goals" in the process that produced POSIX.
POSIX was useful as a way to make systems that were already UNIX systems more like each other. But if a system wasn't UNIX, implementing a POSIX interface didn't make it UNIX.
It is important to separate UNIX from Linux because Linux is growing faster than either the dinosaur PROPRIETARY UNIX systems OR Windows.
You still haven't explained why. Try these two statements:
"Linux is growing faster than UNIX"
"Linux is the fastest-growing UNIX"
Both of them make the same point. The first statement, however, is a trojan horse that carries a lie in its gut. It distorts the role of Windows, because it's presenting the market as a three-way race between UNIX, Linux, and Windows. It's not... it's either a 2-way race between UNIX and Windows, or it's an N-way race between Windows and Solaris and AIX and HPUX and AIX and Red Hat and Suse and Debian.
Linux is only separated from UNIX to make Windows look more important. That's it. There is no reason in any way related to Linux or any other UNIX to treat Linux as part of a separate part of the market.
The GNU part of GNU/Linux means nothing more than the fact that the FSF wants it there.
I used to be "peter@hackercorp.com", back when I thought I could do something about the way language changes. I've let that go, it's in the past. The FSF needs to do the same with the "GNU operating system". The work that was done for the "GNU operating system" was useful, but the operating system never delivered on its promises, and it's been replaced by one that was explicitly intended to be an implementation of UNIX.
At the most the "GNU/Linux" name applies to the disributions that use that name. And then only as a word, not an acronym that expands to "GNU's Not UNIX", because in every sense that matters Linux is UNIX. It was intended from the start to be "a UNIX", and that's what it's become, and that's why it's been as successful as it has. And it's done a very good job of being just as UNIX as it can be: even the structure of the kernel is more like the traditional Version 6 "Lyons Book" UNIX than half the "trademark-and-source-code" UNIX implementations out there.
So, whether the FSF is using Linux as part of "GNU/Linux" or not is irrelevant, because Linux is, and always was, more than that. The FSF needs Linux more than Linux needs the FSF.
Do you really think that if there had been no GNU there would have been no Linux? That if there had been no GCC, there would have been no Linux? I don't believe that... oh, GCC made it easier, the GNU tools were nice to have, but none of them were essential. There were other compilers, other toolchains, and in a way it's kind of a pity GCC choked them off. Diversity is always useful.
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neither Win64 and OS X use a dense memory model
... use a dense model' and when I edited it I missed the word.
Of course I meant "sparse" here. I started out 'both
My proofreader is obviously on vacation.
My friends are bunch of programmers and they like PPC's much more than x86.
I like the PPC more than the x86, but unless you're programming in machine code you can only see the difference between one CPU and another in very remote and indirect ways, and any competant programmer who thinks they even notice those differences is fooling themselves. I've spend most of the past 10 years working with a processor that really is significantly different from either, one that Intel and HP conspired to "put down", and the vast majority of the time when the instruction set made a difference it was only because it showed up in bugs in third-party software that I had to fix.
And Tru64 on the Alpha did some very clever tricks taking advantage of the large address space. All shared memory could be allocated at unique addresses, so you could pass pointers to shared memory between programs and they kept working. The first gigabyte of address space in each process was unallocated, so that if you ran over the end of an array or otherwise had a loose pointer you'd trap very quickly, which made debugging much easier.
For the PPC and x86... there's not even that, not even in 64-bit mode, since neither Win64 and OS X use a dense memory model (neither, unfortunately, does HPUX on the Itanium). The biggest impact? There's a slight accidental security advantage in the relationship between the PPC's less compact instruction set and C's null-terminated strings. For the vast majority of programmers, that's pretty much it. For end users, there's no difference at all.
but a LARGE and substatial portion of Apple's fan base literally hates Microsoft and Intel
Intel isn't Microsoft. Microsoft isn't Intel.
I have serious doubts about the possibility of Apple shipping OS X for Intel, but they're all about technical problems. I don't like Intel, I don't like the way they've been a barrier to progress in the processor world for a quarter of a century, but if they could bring about a crack in the Microsoft monopoly I'd happily take them up on it.
anyone that knows a modicum of computer maintenance can keep a Windows machine running well
Maybe 1% of the computer-using population know that "modicum of computer maintenance". If that.
I do support for software developers. They've got PhDs and everything. They're all in the top few percent of the computer using population. It's amazing the messes I've had to clean up over the years. Most people think they're doing well if they can install Windows after its eaten its brain.
You can buy non-Apple PPC boards RIGHT NOW, and you can't load OSX on them
Not legally, anyway.
But OS X isn't like OS 9, it doesn't run out of the ROM. To boot OS X on an unsupported motherboard you just need to have a version of Darwin that'll boot on that hardware, and replace the components of OS X that are locked to the hardware with the corresponding components from Darwin.
The only hook they have that would work is the Quartz acceleration in the video card. They control Quartz and they already have ATI and nVidia making custom video cards for them, so they could lock the GPU to Apple hardware and lock the Quartz acceleration to the GPU. So you'd be able to run OS X on a clone, but without Quartz Extreme or hardware OpenGL support.
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Whisky Tango Foxtrot, Over?
They switched because of the Intel's
Speak for yourself, monkey boy.
It's the software.
It's always been the software.
Surely you can run Apple ][ software at many times native speed under emulation if your real chip is a Pentium M or Pentium D.
... effectively building a PPC core into their chips.
But not OS 9.
Emulation allowed Apple to dump the aging m68k and move to PPC
That's because the PPC was so many times faster than the 68k that a PPC running an OS that was still almost all 68k was able to run about as fast as the last-generation 68k and almost as fast as the contemporary-generation 68k, and they didn't bother with the next-generation 68k.
But to do that required a CPU that was not just a little better, not just twice as fast, but fast enough to beat the emulation overhead.
It normally takes a processor about 10x faster to emulate another processor at full speed. Apple did better than that, but that's because they had a particularly easy job: the PPC had twice the number of registers that the 68k did, so it could keep all the 68k register in PPC registers. That's the same reason that there's a scant possibility of the Xbox 360 being able to emulate the original Xbox: there's less register pressure on the PPC than the x86.
EVERY successful emulation I've ever seen has involved going from a slow chip with a small register file to a chip several times faster with a bigger register file. 68k on PPC, 68k on ARM, VAX and Sparc and x86 on Alpha.
Even if the emulation was Opteron-only (in which case they'd be talking to AMD rather than Intel) they'd still have to deal with register spills. Emulating the PPC on x86? They'd need every bit of that 10x speed improvement. I can't see that being practical unless the next generation of Intel chips jumps into the 30 GHz range with correspondingly fast ram or hundreds of megabytes of 1:1 cache, or unless Intel does the PPC emulation on their underlying microcode the way they're doing x86 emulation now
Apple believers will keep buying Apple systems for a while until they realize that they'd be better off to buy a white box and install a Linux distro that they can skin to have the Apple GUI look and feel.
I've been a developer for FreeBSD - the open source UNIX that Apple is already using - since it was a set of patchkits for 386BSD. I've not been using Linux quite as long, only since Red Hat 2.1. But the thing is, I've used Linux and FreeBSD and KDE and Gnome and I finally tossed it all over and "upgraded" from a 1.7 GHz P4 to a 400 MHz G3. And it's been like moving from a crummy New Jersey apartment to a private villa in the Bahamas while still being just as close to New York. I can run all the same software I could before, plus a whole lot more, and it just works.
No, if you think you can produce OS X by adding a translucent Enlightenment skin and glowy blue theme to Gnome, you simply have no idea.
The x86 processor is just a CPU, not the computer architecture. Nothing says it has to be anywhere near compatible with a modern PC.
Apple's hardware is already virtually identical to a PC other than the CPU. They use the same bus, the same cards, the same interfaces and peripherals. Their operating system is open source and already runs on x86 PCs. If they used the same CPU as well, then the only thing that would stop anyone from running Mac OS X on a clone would be a collaboration between Apple, ATI, and nVidia to hardware-lock the video cards that Quartz supported.
At least this was going around when I was at Berkeley:
NEW OPERATING SYSTEM:
Because so many users have asked for an operating system of even greater capability than VM, IBM announces the Virtual Universe Operating System --- OS/VU.
Running under VU the individual user appears to have not merely a machine of his own, but an entire universe of his own, in which he can set up and take down his own programs, data sets, system networks, personnel and planetary systems. He need only specify the universe he desires, and the OS/VU system generation program (IEHGOD) does the rest. This program resides in SYS1.GODLIB. The minimum time for this function is 6 days of activity and 1 day of review. In conjunction with OS/VU, all system utilities reside in SYS1.MESSIAH. This program has no parms or control cards, as it knows what you want to do when you execute it.
Naturally, the user must have attained a certain degree of sophistication in the data processing field if an efficient utilization of OS/VU is to be achieved. Frequent calls to non-resident galaxies can, for instance, lead to unexpected delays in the execution of a job. Although IBM, through its wholly-owned subsidiary, the United States, is working on a program to upgrade the speed of light and thus reduce the overhead of extraterrestrial and metadimensional paging, users must be careful for the present to stay within the laws of physics. IBM must charge an additional fee for violations.
OS/VU will run on any IBM x0xx equipped with the Extended WARP Feature. Rental is 20 million dollars per cpu/nanosecond.
Users should be aware that IBM plans to migrate all existing systems and hardware to OS/VU as soon as our engineers effect one output that is (conceptually) error free. This will give us a base to develop an even more powerful OS, target date 2001, designated as 'Virtual Reality'. OS/VR is planned to allow the user to migrate to totally unreal universes. To aid the user in identifying the difference between 'Virtual Reality' and 'Real Reality', a file containing a linear record of multisensory total records of successive moments of now will be established. It's name will be SYS1.EST.
Mach's multitasking _performance_ still blows.
Compared to OS 9? Have you used classic Mac OS? The classic Mac OS multitasking charade (I won't call it a kernel) was appalling. It had no real scheduler, applicatons ran for a while, gave up the CPU voluntarily, and went on. There was no way to get smooth interapplication concurrency because the API was built around operations that weren't even thread-safe, let alone safe for separate independent applications to use concurrently.
That's what I'm comparing Mac OS X with, not other real multitasking operating systems, but a hideous shambling wreck that was so bad it made a 240 MHz Power PC running Mac OS 9 feel less responsive than a 30 MHz 68040 running Mach.
Later on, I ran both OS 9 and OS X on the same hardware. OS X was smoother and more responsive in the face of even heavy competition for the CPU and disk than OS 9 just sharing files. I had an upgraded 7600 which I was going to use as a file server and occasional console, until I started trying to use it that way. Any time it started sharing files it got slow, unresponsive, and jerky. I wanted to use it for music, but iTunes would chop and skip on just about any file access. Upgrading it to a 240 MHz CPU and giving it a second SCSI card just for file sharing didn't help.
Bad as Mach is, it's so much better than what Apple was using before that if they had just stuck to using Quickdraw and Display Postscript OS X would have knocked the doors off OS 9 on the same hardware. I had a copy of Rhapsody DR1 for Intel at one point, and it was easily the equal of BeOS (another OS I've found has an inflated reputation) on the same test box.
It's not the Mach kernel that makes OS X slower than OS 9, it's the Quartz graphics.
The odds are pretty good that you'll need to do some CLI sorcery to get an X-Server to run under OSX.
Double-click on your hard disk.
Double-click on Applications.
Double-click on Utilities.
Double-click on X11.
Compare a machine running OS 8 or OS 9 to a Macine running OSX, the machine will be discernably slower when running OSX.
The interesting question is, why?
Here's what I've found:
Compare a machine running NeXTSTeP with a comparable machine running OS 8 (say, the Performa 475 vs the NeXTStation Mono). The NeXT, running the same basic kernel as OS X, is about as responsive for pure GUI interactions and WAY more responsive running multiple applications or when disk I/O is involved.
Compare a machine running BeOS and Sheepshaver with the same machine running OS 8 natively. Under BeOS, the machine is again more responsive, and again disk I/O is much better.
Compare a machine running OS 9 applications under Classic and the same machine running OS 9. Not a lot of difference. Slightly slower screen, better disk I/O, and much more responsive than OS X applications.
OS 8 vs OS 9? Not that big a deal. OS 9 does multitasking a bit better, it seems, but at the same time it's a bigger system.
OS X should be faster than OS 9, then, even with the "Microkernel overhead", because of the improved multitasking and disk I/O. But you can see that it isn't just using it on the same machine.
The big difference is that OS X allocates a separate raster map for each window, and composites them without involving the app. Scrolling panes in windows can end up using a raster map the size of the scrolling region. This means at least tens of megabytes of extra storage just on scrolling, and at least one and sometimes two additional copies (dpending on translucency) before any pixel makes it to the screen.
This is why QE and QE2d are such big wins on the Mac. They move one of the copies out of the way.
Meanwhile on OS 9, you usually have zero copies... the app calls Quickdraw and Quickdraw renders just what's visible, and may completely bypass the CPU to do it. Just like just about every other windowing system I know of, including NeXTstep.
Red Hat says they asked Cornell, and Cornell was OK with Red Hat using it. At first, anyway.
Interesting. Have you got any more details of what the restrictions they're concerned about are?
Re:
you have two options:
1.) Thumb board.
2.) Stylus and handwriting recog OR an OSK
You have 3 options:
1. Thumboard.
2. Stylus and HWR.
3. Stylus and a learned interface.
Graffiti and the Pocket PC's Block Recogniser are not handwriting recognition. They're more like stenographer's shorthand, albeit less advanced. They're not as fast as a thumb-board, but they don't require the break between text input and positional input that a stylus or a mouse gives you.
Unfortunately Palm has abandoned Graffiti and replaced it with a more handwriting-like recogniser that's significantly slower because it requires multiple strokes for some of the most common letters.
Block Recogniser on the Pocket PC is now the best input mechanism available. It's a pity that the Pocket PC itself has been so badly crippled by Microsoft's desire to make it no more than an annex to Windows rather than an independent device capable of replacing the laptop for most casual users.
Ironically, Graffiti started out as an input method on the Newton. I use it on mine when I use my Newton at all.
Multi-million dollar companies with no actual assets go out of business all the time. They bought paper companies that didn't actually exist, they dissipated assets through neglect, their assets turned out to be of only short-term value. The fact that SCO responded to the discovery that they didn't actually own anything worth selling by trying to recoup some money through speculative lawsuits is SCO's responsibility, not anyone else's.
What I find most amusing:
In what has been a massive and loosely coordinated effort, a multi-million dollar company backed by a strong legal team has been all but put out of business, and this couldn't have happened without some form of organization.
Yeh, a criminal organization. Called The Canopy Group.
Did you really pay $80 for a good 21"?
Yep.
Just out of curiosity, where?
In the directron.com "garage sale" room. It's from an old Silicon Graphics system, and probably cost a couple of thousand new. I suspect it was so cheap because the SGI grey/violet speckled paint job just looked so funky to PC-attuned eyes.
No, the same way i dont think that GNU would be dead if it werent for Linux.
That's a funny way to put it. I mean, as if Linux and the Hurd were the only two options.
its because Linux gained critical mass before HURD that linux is an enterprise-ready kernel and the hurd just an early stage of a project
That begs the question of why Linux gained critical mass despite having started later.
First, the FSF spent about five years trying to figure out how to avoid implementing their own kernel. Oh they talked about all the years they'd spent on Hurd when they were asked why they didn't use Linux, but Linux was announced less than a year after they'd finally decided to use Mach instead of Sprite or their own kernel. Linus sat down and looked at how a UNIX system went together and said "I can do this". Stallman sat down and looked at how a UNIX system went together and said "I can do better than this". Which is a great thing to commit to, but you have to actually DO it.
Second, the Mach microkernel is really too heavyweight to build a formal microkernel OS on top of. All the successful systems that have been built on Mach use it in concert with a BSD kernel that does a lot of heavy lifting without all that costly context switching, and the successful "real" microkernel systems use a smaller lighter microkernel that doesn't depend on unreasonably fast memory mapping as a prerequisite for its IPC. OS X uses a BSD server and avoids Mach IPC and it's still got more overhead than Linux or a traditional BSD.
Third, the USL-CSRG lawsuit kept people from joining the BSD effort (that's the other alternative free UNIX I hinted at) for a couple of critical years. It's ironic that the resolution of that lawsuit is helping Linux now.
Sony may stop making them, but only because they're getting a better return from licensing the technology. I was so glad when they started doing that (I assume their patents were getting a little thin, and it was that or clones) and the price dropped to something reasonable.
What I don't get is why anyone's making shadow-mask CRTs any more. Who's voluntarily buying these things other than people who just don't care?
I think the only non-Trinitron in use in my house is the one built into my daughter's Mac, and it ticked me off that Apple cheaped out saving twenty five bucks on a tube in a thousand dollar PC.
(in case you can't guess, I really like 'em)
I just replaced an aging but beautiful high-end CRT
It was someone like you who was responsible for my being able to buy a beautiful 21" Trinitron for $80. I thank you and my Mac mini thanks you.
That's great, but TFA is about situations where they need better color reproduction than LCDs give you, and they actually need the low persistance display that produces the "flicker" you're talking about.
Is it just me, or is POSIX is what's missing here?
I don't know if it's just you, but it's certainly not me.
POSIX is a very low hurdle to jump. Windows NT was "POSIX compliant" from the start, and even Bill Gates recanted on his claim that the crippled POSIX subsystem meant that Windows was "UNIX". If all Linus was trying to do was satisfy the POSIX API he wouldn't necessarily have produced anything like a UNIX. And, I don't think he would have been successful, because there were too many "own goals" in the process that produced POSIX.
POSIX was useful as a way to make systems that were already UNIX systems more like each other. But if a system wasn't UNIX, implementing a POSIX interface didn't make it UNIX.
It is important to separate UNIX from Linux because Linux is growing faster than either the dinosaur PROPRIETARY UNIX systems OR Windows.
You still haven't explained why. Try these two statements:
"Linux is growing faster than UNIX"
"Linux is the fastest-growing UNIX"
Both of them make the same point. The first statement, however, is a trojan horse that carries a lie in its gut. It distorts the role of Windows, because it's presenting the market as a three-way race between UNIX, Linux, and Windows. It's not... it's either a 2-way race between UNIX and Windows, or it's an N-way race between Windows and Solaris and AIX and HPUX and AIX and Red Hat and Suse and Debian.
Linux is only separated from UNIX to make Windows look more important. That's it. There is no reason in any way related to Linux or any other UNIX to treat Linux as part of a separate part of the market.
the GNU part of GNU/Linux doesnt mean [...]
The GNU part of GNU/Linux means nothing more than the fact that the FSF wants it there.
I used to be "peter@hackercorp.com", back when I thought I could do something about the way language changes. I've let that go, it's in the past. The FSF needs to do the same with the "GNU operating system". The work that was done for the "GNU operating system" was useful, but the operating system never delivered on its promises, and it's been replaced by one that was explicitly intended to be an implementation of UNIX.
At the most the "GNU/Linux" name applies to the disributions that use that name. And then only as a word, not an acronym that expands to "GNU's Not UNIX", because in every sense that matters Linux is UNIX. It was intended from the start to be "a UNIX", and that's what it's become, and that's why it's been as successful as it has. And it's done a very good job of being just as UNIX as it can be: even the structure of the kernel is more like the traditional Version 6 "Lyons Book" UNIX than half the "trademark-and-source-code" UNIX implementations out there.
So, whether the FSF is using Linux as part of "GNU/Linux" or not is irrelevant, because Linux is, and always was, more than that. The FSF needs Linux more than Linux needs the FSF.
Do you really think that if there had been no GNU there would have been no Linux? That if there had been no GCC, there would have been no Linux? I don't believe that... oh, GCC made it easier, the GNU tools were nice to have, but none of them were essential. There were other compilers, other toolchains, and in a way it's kind of a pity GCC choked them off. Diversity is always useful.