To me all this looks suspiciously like the long drawn out but failing efforts to revive the Amiga OS.
Except AmigaOS really was a real-time OS that performed well on machines with as little has half a meg of RAM, not a bloated deadlock magnet that thrashed in 16M with just the Tracker running.
When Be first came out, my reaction as a recently-ex Amiga owner was "this thing is like the Amiga... except with fewer reasons for existing and less mature software. It's so doomed it smells like burning dinosaurs. I sooooo badly want to get tangled up with doomed projects again I'm going to pre-order this puppy... or no, maybe I won't." I mean, they didn't even have front panels for the early buyers, and they said the OS was not even ready for beta... but they had lots of tasty documentation.
Plus, it was in C++. God, if there ever was a language that SHOULD have been doomed, that's it.
My main problem with Objective-C is it feels like Small Talk bolted on rather crudely with C.
And C++ feels like Simula bolted crudely on to C, and Java feels like C++ on Prozac, and runs like C++ on 'ludes.
The REAL problem is that C is not a good base for an OO operating system. The best OO C derivitive is Livescript/Javascript/ECMAscript, and that's because it doesn't try and retain C semantics anywhere.
They'd have ended up producing something like Carbon whether they went with BeOS or Openstep. They had to, their biggest publishers dug in their heels until they gave them a smoother path to the new OS than "rewrite everything from scratch, or run in an emulator".
Apple would have a real multitasking and multimedia OS several years earlier.
NeXTstep was production quality before BeOS.
What held up Openstep/Rhapsody/OSX was Adobe. They refused to port Photoshop to the Opensteop API (Yellowbox, what became Cocoa) and so Apple went back to the drawing board and produced Carbon and turned the Bluebox environment into Classic. If Apple had come up with some BeOS environment using Sheepshaver for compatibility, Adobe would have done the same thing... and they'd have taken just as long to come out with a product.
It doesn't matter what the processor is, it just matters what the software running on it is.
BeOS... eh. It's got all kinds of nifty ideas, but it seems like it's also got a bad case of second system syndrome. When I was playing around with the first PC-compatible versions... they actually managed to require more and faster hardware than Windows to get comparable performance. Now that might have been pretty marginal hardware by today's standards, but still... given that it was built from a fresh start they should have done better.
There is no "administrator password". The "master password" is like a janitor's master key. It's a failsafe to let you unlock the drive if the user password was set.
The incredibly stupid thing is there doesn't seem to be a way to say "disable the password mechanism completely". IMHO, this should be the default state, and it should require physical access to the drive (say, with a jumper) as well as (of course, any passwords) to switch it from one state to another. A laptop could connect that jumper to an external "security" button that you hold down while the BIOS does its thing.
I remember very well the problems with DEC Alpha 64 alignment issues.
I remember the problems caused by the Intel architecture's neglect of alignment, so that when programs were moved to platforms where alignment matters (even chips as old as the 68000 and 68020) they would crash or (on later versions, where Motorola decided to coddle bad programmers) run like snails.
See, these weren't "Alpha alignment issues", they were "bad programmer issues" that just became obvious when moving to the Alpha. The response is to set the computer to trap and crash on alignment errors and fix them.
The advantages of the AMD-64 archetecture go far beyond the additional address space.
I would absolutely say that the biggest advantage has nothing to do with the address space. The biggest advantage tha Alpha gave us, for the decade where it maintained its performance lead despite benign and not-so-benign neglect, wasn't the larger address space (there were only a few people who actually needed 64 bits), but the huge register bank and celever instruction set (especially the memory barrier instructions, which provided the same capabilities as the IA64 bundles without locking the architecture down to things like counts of function units).
If 64 bits is the gimmick ittakes to shake off even a bit of the dust of the Intel experience, I'm all for it... but for most people that's all it is... a gimmick.
It amazes me how bent out of shape oyu guys are getting over one day out of 365 that the guys from/. feel like having a wee bit of fun.
You mean... all the other stuff... the dups... the stuff that isn't news... the stuff that doesn't matter... they don't even have the excuse that they enjoy it?
It's TRIPLICATES! God, Taco, why don't you go dig around in some month old rejected submissions, surely there'll be something better there than this dupe, uh, tripe.
My plan is this: collect the afternoon's April Fool stories in a single thread (late fools, perhaps) and go back to posting about "stuff that matters" like the new USB flash drive that also acts as a USB hub (for passthrough) and master (so you can clone from it to another flash device without needing a computer)...
Slashdot Mirror
To me all this looks suspiciously like the long drawn out but failing efforts to revive the Amiga OS.
Except AmigaOS really was a real-time OS that performed well on machines with as little has half a meg of RAM, not a bloated deadlock magnet that thrashed in 16M with just the Tracker running.
When Be first came out, my reaction as a recently-ex Amiga owner was "this thing is like the Amiga... except with fewer reasons for existing and less mature software. It's so doomed it smells like burning dinosaurs. I sooooo badly want to get tangled up with doomed projects again I'm going to pre-order this puppy... or no, maybe I won't." I mean, they didn't even have front panels for the early buyers, and they said the OS was not even ready for beta... but they had lots of tasty documentation.
Plus, it was in C++. God, if there ever was a language that SHOULD have been doomed, that's it.
Something must have been wrong with your setup... in my experience, BeOS is very noticably more responsive than Windows on the same machine.
If you gave the BeOS system lots more RAM then the equivalent Windows system, it was OK. It was a real RAM hog, though.
My main problem with Objective-C is it feels like Small Talk bolted on rather crudely with C.
And C++ feels like Simula bolted crudely on to C, and Java feels like C++ on Prozac, and runs like C++ on 'ludes.
The REAL problem is that C is not a good base for an OO operating system. The best OO C derivitive is Livescript/Javascript/ECMAscript, and that's because it doesn't try and retain C semantics anywhere.
Uses less memory?
I'm not sure this is relevant.
NeXTstep could run usefully in less memory than BeOS. Yes. Really.
They'd have ended up producing something like Carbon whether they went with BeOS or Openstep. They had to, their biggest publishers dug in their heels until they gave them a smoother path to the new OS than "rewrite everything from scratch, or run in an emulator".
Apple would have a real multitasking and multimedia OS several years earlier.
NeXTstep was production quality before BeOS.
What held up Openstep/Rhapsody/OSX was Adobe. They refused to port Photoshop to the Opensteop API (Yellowbox, what became Cocoa) and so Apple went back to the drawing board and produced Carbon and turned the Bluebox environment into Classic. If Apple had come up with some BeOS environment using Sheepshaver for compatibility, Adobe would have done the same thing... and they'd have taken just as long to come out with a product.
Think of how much better the world would be if Apple chose BeOS over Jobs
I used to think that, before I got a chance to compare Rhapsody DR1 and BeOS on the same hardware.
After that, I was convinced Apple did the right thing.
One of the most appealing facets of BeOS, IIRC, is the fact that it was FREE.
No, it wasn't.
Hardware is fungible.
... eh. It's got all kinds of nifty ideas, but it seems like it's also got a bad case of second system syndrome. When I was playing around with the first PC-compatible versions... they actually managed to require more and faster hardware than Windows to get comparable performance. Now that might have been pretty marginal hardware by today's standards, but still... given that it was built from a fresh start they should have done better.
It doesn't matter what the processor is, it just matters what the software running on it is.
BeOS
I'm more interested in the reborn Amiga OS.
There is no "administrator password". The "master password" is like a janitor's master key. It's a failsafe to let you unlock the drive if the user password was set.
The incredibly stupid thing is there doesn't seem to be a way to say "disable the password mechanism completely". IMHO, this should be the default state, and it should require physical access to the drive (say, with a jumper) as well as (of course, any passwords) to switch it from one state to another. A laptop could connect that jumper to an external "security" button that you hold down while the BIOS does its thing.
I remember very well the problems with DEC Alpha 64 alignment issues.
I remember the problems caused by the Intel architecture's neglect of alignment, so that when programs were moved to platforms where alignment matters (even chips as old as the 68000 and 68020) they would crash or (on later versions, where Motorola decided to coddle bad programmers) run like snails.
See, these weren't "Alpha alignment issues", they were "bad programmer issues" that just became obvious when moving to the Alpha. The response is to set the computer to trap and crash on alignment errors and fix them.
The advantages of the AMD-64 archetecture go far beyond the additional address space.
I would absolutely say that the biggest advantage has nothing to do with the address space. The biggest advantage tha Alpha gave us, for the decade where it maintained its performance lead despite benign and not-so-benign neglect, wasn't the larger address space (there were only a few people who actually needed 64 bits), but the huge register bank and celever instruction set (especially the memory barrier instructions, which provided the same capabilities as the IA64 bundles without locking the architecture down to things like counts of function units).
If 64 bits is the gimmick ittakes to shake off even a bit of the dust of the Intel experience, I'm all for it... but for most people that's all it is... a gimmick.
It amazes me how bent out of shape oyu guys are getting over one day out of 365 that the guys from /. feel like having a wee bit of fun.
You mean... all the other stuff... the dups... the stuff that isn't news... the stuff that doesn't matter... they don't even have the excuse that they enjoy it?
That's sad, my friend. Sad.
I already posted this.
http://www.techtree.com/techtree/jsp/showstory.jsp ?storyid=66795
It's TRIPLICATES! God, Taco, why don't you go dig around in some month old rejected submissions, surely there'll be something better there than this dupe, uh, tripe.
... but Apple's had iPod Socks for a long time. Surely you've got some REAL news to report on by now?
Cygwin Delenda Est
NT is a Mach Kernel
NT is not based on Mach, but it has similarities in its design.
the POSIX subsystem has been implemented once by microsoft and independently by opennt.com (can't find them any more)
Try Windows Services for UNIX, which is based on the POSIX subsystem and what this alleged GeNToo is based on.
the rock-solid elegant architectural foundations of Microsoft Windows.
NT is not Windows. And is potentially quite an interesting platform if it could ever jettison the Win32 carbuncle.
Of course they could have back-dated it, but Interix is real and does run as its own subsystem. This is by no means impossible or even outrageous.
Damn, that must be a record for dup stories...
My plan is this: collect the afternoon's April Fool stories in a single thread (late fools, perhaps) and go back to posting about "stuff that matters" like the new USB flash drive that also acts as a USB hub (for passthrough) and master (so you can clone from it to another flash device without needing a computer)...
what's to stop you from doing it?
lack of cool brushed-aluminum paddles.
Great idea, wrong company. A company that sells a BCD clock as a binary clock obviously doesn't get it.
This is obviously a job for Griffin. How about a combo USB hub and pong game (requires two Griffin Powermates for paddles)?