What I would like to know, though, is what kind of graphics performance they get when running OSX in VMWare. The VMWare virtual SVGA device requires special drivers for good 2D performance, and I suppose we can just forget about 3D.
MS tends to get the blame for computers crashing even if the cause is shitty 3rd party hardware or drivers. That's why they have that windows logo program, whql and driver signing.
Microsoft would throw a fit if Apple went after their core market. Apple would have to forgo their markup on hardware sales, and the 'it just works' / 'cool design' image that Macs have would disappear.
don't most cell phone carriers become irrelevant as calls can be carried on wi-fi phones of some sort?
Ever used WiFi in an outdoor environment? A bit of interference or contention and you can forget decent VoIP due to packet loss and latency spikes.
can the provider (the US Govt) modify and control content routed through these systems?
They would certainly have the technical capability to do so, whether they would is a political and not a technical question. Use end to end crypto if you are worried.
what happens to all those companies now offering pay-for wi-fi services?
But at some point, it's gotta transition into a self-sustaining industry.
The trouble as I see it is - where's the money?
Anyone wanting to travel or trade across a pond of water saw the benefit of better ships. So ship development was a no-brainer because there was a direct economic benefit. Eventually someone would discover the New World. Settling the New World was also a no-brainer because of the resources the first expeditions discovered there.
There is money in launching satellites to earth orbit, but that can be done with 'dugouts'. The incentive for making better canoes is there, but where's the incentive for developing interplanetary space ships?
Eventually, we'll have a ship that will look good enough that the queen will hock her jewels to fund the next grand expedition.
The situation today is more aking to the queen hocking her jewels to develop something better than dugouts. And unlike Spain in 1490, we have telescopes and probes so we know what the New Worlds look like without having to send manned ships.
I'd love to see a permanent human presence on the Moon and Mars in my lifetime, but unless we can find a commercial reason for going there it is going to depend on public goodwill and government funding.
And does anyone know for a given fact beyond the shadow of doubt that the MacIntel machines will be running traditional x86 PentiumIV/M/etc. chips and not something like the ItaniumII and successors?
I really have to figure out how to disable that reality distortion field..
The fact that Itanium has a completely different instruction set than x86 and that the Macintel devel kit produce x86 binaries?
The fact that Apple will need low watt chips for Macintel laptops and Itanium are powerguzzling server chips?
If I was doing jury duty on this case, I'd call that way beyond reasonable doubt.
Wasn't the reason that NASA went to a shuttle was for reuse?
No. The reason was that they wanted a cheaper launch capability. A reusable design seemed like a good way of reaching that goal.
The shuttles turned out to be expensive per launch. Partly because of fewer launches than expected, the two accidents and related technical problems and the fact that maintenance cost turned out to be a lot higher than expected.
If a non-reusable design pieced together from proven shuttle tech is cheaper, I don't see the problem. Big honkin' rockets for payloads and a capsule on top of a dependable booster for crew.
The holy grail for manned crafts is obviously a single stage to orbit reusable low maintenance spaceplane that can achieve refuel and relaunch. But the tech obviously isn't there yet.
What is there for reuse and how will they reuse it?
They reuse a lot of the shuttle rockets/engine design. If it is cheaper - and safer - to build single use vehicles than to refurbish the shuttles before each launch....
And then there is landing....
Ablative heatshields, parachutes. Safer and easier than the tiles and glider landing used on the shuttle.
I don't remember of the top of my head the allowed levels, but it is different for omni and directional antennas. For highly directional antennas you can up the dBi quite a bit.
And in order to stay completely with the letter of FCC regs, you can't pick any antenna and radio you want and do the math to stay below the dBi limit. FCC certification is for a complete system (both antenna and radio) and not for the separate components. If you check the websites for outdoor WISP equipment, you will find that they list the antennas that a certain radio has been certified with.
2.4GHz is also an amateur band, and it is quite legal to use homebuilt antennas for amateur use
Only if you have a radio amateur (HAM?) license, I believe. Otherwise you have to stick to that FCC part 15 thingy which is rather restrictive on the combinations of antennas/radios allowed.
As you say, posession of a cantenna is legal (unless there is a specific local law) but using one is a lot more iffy.
The US concept of common carrier might not be the same in Canada.
I don't know of any western country that does not have a similar concept. It naturally flows from the realisation that phone and postal system operators can't possibly monitor and control the content being sent through the system.
I'm quite certain that only exec ran in supervisor mode, and that the Amiga had no memory protection.
I seem to recall that the difference between supervisor and user mode on the 68K had to do with access to the status register and user mode stack pointer. Would you mind refreshing my memory?
Was this a 1.* problem or so? I don't recall ever locking a system up with a busyloop without messing with priorities the way I still can if I have the privileges.
Most other schedulers give low priority tasks at least a little CPU now and then, but not the stock Amiga scheduler. Any program with higher priority than 0 busylooping would result in all normal user programs getting no CPU at all.
I didn't play much with Executive so I don't remember which algorithm(s) it implemented.
The whole collection of components was called Kickstart (because it was the low level OS) and the GUI interface component was called the Workbench.
Kickstart was (usually) in ROM and contained the low-level stuff. Workbench was loaded from floppy or HD and contained the GUI, extra libraries and other stuff.
Actually, I'm not sure whether 'Workbench' was the GUI only or not - the 'Workbench' floppies did contain more than the GUI but when one said 'Workbench' one usually meant the GUI.
the Amiga OS was largely written from scratch with the exception of the AmigaDOS component (Filesystem/Disk manager) which was written in BCPL based on a legacy DOS that was available. AmigaDOS was a last minute addition which is why it wasn't written from scratch.
The DOS component of AmigaOS (CAOS) was lagging behind the rest of the system, so instead of delaying the introduction of Amiga 1000 to get it finished an outside contractor was signed on to port an existing DOS to AmigaOS. Which is why AmigaDOS has some oddities, like BCPL.
but because it didn't have a "smart" scheduler, the system could still be brought to its knees with busy-loops.
The scheduler was a simple priority round-robin algorithm, meaning that the highest priority runnable task would get the CPU. If there were several runnable tasks at that priority level, the scheduler would round robin between them.
The OS kernel ran at the highest priority, GUI and device drivers a bit lower, user programs at 0 and background tasks below that.
As you mention, the obvious problem was that a busy-looping task at a priority higher than user programs would completely starve them for CPU, effectively locking up the system from the user's point of view.
It did have its perks, tho. Since the GUI was running at high priority it instantly got CPU so the system felt very responsive even when heavily loaded. It was also simple to start a long running task at a lower priority than normal user programs and have it churn on something in the background with close to no impact on system and user program responsiveness - back in those days the ability to have a big compile or render running in the background and hardly noticing it while typing in your editor was mindblowing...but a single program busy-looping at a priority higher than normal user programs, and it was three finger salute time.
In fact, in Kickstart/Workbench 2.0 and up, you could do the UNIX trick of specifying an environment variable for your library and font paths so you could have MULTIPLE library and font directories. In fact, the Amiga environment variable system was implemented as a RAM drive so it could have directory structures. Fond memories of setenv "SASC/scoptions" -g.
Paths, Labels and env are separate.
The path is where the shell would look for executables. Works just like in Win or *nix.
Environment variables also work like in Win or *nix, except that they were stored and could be accessed as a RAM file system.
Labels, though, is very nifty and very Amiga. Those familiar with MS-DOS can think of them as drive letters on steroids.
Labels could point to a device (DF0:), volume label (WORKBENCH:, GAMEFLOPPY:), pseudo device (SPEECH:), or they could be assigned to a directory.
AmigaOS came with a set of default device labels. DF0: for first floppy, DH0: for first harddrive. The system would look for libraries in LIBS:, fonts in FONTS:, etc. Every floppy and HD had a volume label, so if you had a floppy named games you could access it with GAMES:. If GAMES: could not be found, AmigaOS would prompt you to insert the floppy. In addition you had special labels like SPEECH: which sent any files copied to it through a speech synthesizer.
If you copied the workbench floppy to the HD, you could 'assign WORKBENCH: DH0:st
It had true multi-tasking (not sure if windows has that yet- I think it got it with win2k). By true- I mean if one process dies, the machine didn't hang- that process did and everything else kept running with it's preemptive slice
With cooperative multitasking, context switches are only done when the currently running task voluntarily relinquish control. Usually by programs regularely calling a switch_if_timeslice_spent() function, and sprinkling the OS functions with similar tests (e.g., switch if an IO call blocks).
Preemptive multitasking means that the OS can initiate a context switch without the assistance of the currently running task, thus pre-empting the active task. Usually implemented in a timer interrupt. Note that this does not preclude the OS from also using the context switch triggers used in cooperative multitasking systems.
A program that hangs or gets stuck in an infinite loop will disable multitasking and thus hang a coop OS, but will not hang a preemptive OS.
A program that crashes will exit, and normally won't hang either type of OS. Whether a crashing program takes down the entire system or not, depends more on memory protection and resource tracking (which AmigaOS did not do) than which flavour of multitasking the OS uses.
(come to think of it my win2k machine still hangs up for over a minute sometimes in azureus or when the virus scanner runs so win may not have preemptive multi-tasking yet).
All versions of Win since '95 do preemptive multitasking, as do Mac OS X, AmigaOS, Linux and lots of other OSes.
Win 3.x ran windows programs cooperatively and dos-in-win preemptively.
Macintosh Pre-OS X were all coop multitasking.
Great computer that commodore ruined.
Yeah. No love for Bill Sydnes or Medhi Ali here, that's for sure.
To be fair, the Amiga had some technical problems that would have had to be solved if it was to survive. Most specifically adding memory protection and resource tracking (which would have killed compatibility with old software, unless they had implemented a compatibility box like Apple did for OS X), and making the OS and software less dependent on custom chips (which they had started to do with AHI and RTG).
The 'nude' models included in Sims2 are no more explicit than Barbie and Ken dolls. No nipples, no schlong, no hair. There are mods out there with more explicit models/skins, but that's not EA's fault.
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What I would like to know, though, is what kind of graphics performance they get when running OSX in VMWare. The VMWare virtual SVGA device requires special drivers for good 2D performance, and I suppose we can just forget about 3D.
That's really not MS's problem
MS tends to get the blame for computers crashing even if the cause is shitty 3rd party hardware or drivers. That's why they have that windows logo program, whql and driver signing.
What has AGP got to do with driver support?
In order to sell OSX for generic x86 hardware, they'd need lots of drivers. For example:
- motherboard chipsets
- sound cards
- heaps of USB devices
- IDE/SATA/SCSI controllers
- graphics cards
- network cards
- wireless cards
Microsoft would throw a fit if Apple went after their core market. Apple would have to forgo their markup on hardware sales, and the 'it just works' / 'cool design' image that Macs have would disappear.
"Four legs good, two legs bad".
New here? :)
In this part of the noosphere, guilty until proven innocent is the standard applied to MS. And given MS' past behaviour that shouldn't be a surprise.
Personally I can't see anything wrong with MS going after spammers, and would applaud it if they continue to do so.
One day they forgot the morning coffee before going to work. Happens.
don't most cell phone carriers become irrelevant as calls can be carried on wi-fi phones of some sort?
Ever used WiFi in an outdoor environment? A bit of interference or contention and you can forget decent VoIP due to packet loss and latency spikes.
can the provider (the US Govt) modify and control content routed through these systems?
They would certainly have the technical capability to do so, whether they would is a political and not a technical question. Use end to end crypto if you are worried.
what happens to all those companies now offering pay-for wi-fi services?
Would depend on the regulatory framework.
The education I recieved and use to make a living was heavily subsidized by... your tax dollars.
Apples and Oranges.
Education is available to everyone on equal terms. Telcos were granted local monopolies.
But at some point, it's gotta transition into a self-sustaining industry.
The trouble as I see it is - where's the money?
Anyone wanting to travel or trade across a pond of water saw the benefit of better ships. So ship development was a no-brainer because there was a direct economic benefit. Eventually someone would discover the New World. Settling the New World was also a no-brainer because of the resources the first expeditions discovered there.
There is money in launching satellites to earth orbit, but that can be done with 'dugouts'. The incentive for making better canoes is there, but where's the incentive for developing interplanetary space ships?
Eventually, we'll have a ship that will look good enough that the queen will hock her jewels to fund the next grand expedition.
The situation today is more aking to the queen hocking her jewels to develop something better than dugouts. And unlike Spain in 1490, we have telescopes and probes so we know what the New Worlds look like without having to send manned ships.
I'd love to see a permanent human presence on the Moon and Mars in my lifetime, but unless we can find a commercial reason for going there it is going to depend on public goodwill and government funding.
And does anyone know for a given fact beyond the shadow of doubt that the MacIntel machines will be running traditional x86 PentiumIV/M/etc. chips and not something like the ItaniumII and successors?
I really have to figure out how to disable that reality distortion field..
The fact that Itanium has a completely different instruction set than x86 and that the Macintel devel kit produce x86 binaries?
The fact that Apple will need low watt chips for Macintel laptops and Itanium are powerguzzling server chips?
If I was doing jury duty on this case, I'd call that way beyond reasonable doubt.
Amazing what range one can achieve with state of the art pringles cans, isn't it?
That's a circular definition.
Is the TCP/IP stack a part of the OS, or GUI APIs/libraries? Most people today would argue yes, but it wasn't always so.
Is a web browser a part of the OS? Most would argue no, but it would be a fairly natural default part of a next generation PDA/cell phone OS.
As long as the elevator doesn't jam at the 32089th floor and you have to take the stairs.
With no funding from earth governments, X-COM will have to depend on paypal donations.
Wasn't the reason that NASA went to a shuttle was for reuse?
No. The reason was that they wanted a cheaper launch capability. A reusable design seemed like a good way of reaching that goal.
The shuttles turned out to be expensive per launch. Partly because of fewer launches than expected, the two accidents and related technical problems and the fact that maintenance cost turned out to be a lot higher than expected.
If a non-reusable design pieced together from proven shuttle tech is cheaper, I don't see the problem. Big honkin' rockets for payloads and a capsule on top of a dependable booster for crew.
The holy grail for manned crafts is obviously a single stage to orbit reusable low maintenance spaceplane that can achieve refuel and relaunch. But the tech obviously isn't there yet.
What is there for reuse and how will they reuse it?
They reuse a lot of the shuttle rockets/engine design. If it is cheaper - and safer - to build single use vehicles than to refurbish the shuttles before each launch....
And then there is landing....
Ablative heatshields, parachutes. Safer and easier than the tiles and glider landing used on the shuttle.
I don't remember of the top of my head the allowed levels, but it is different for omni and directional antennas. For highly directional antennas you can up the dBi quite a bit.
And in order to stay completely with the letter of FCC regs, you can't pick any antenna and radio you want and do the math to stay below the dBi limit. FCC certification is for a complete system (both antenna and radio) and not for the separate components. If you check the websites for outdoor WISP equipment, you will find that they list the antennas that a certain radio has been certified with.
2.4GHz is also an amateur band, and it is quite legal to use homebuilt antennas for amateur use
Only if you have a radio amateur (HAM?) license, I believe. Otherwise you have to stick to that FCC part 15 thingy which is rather restrictive on the combinations of antennas/radios allowed.
As you say, posession of a cantenna is legal (unless there is a specific local law) but using one is a lot more iffy.
The US concept of common carrier might not be the same in Canada.
I don't know of any western country that does not have a similar concept. It naturally flows from the realisation that phone and postal system operators can't possibly monitor and control the content being sent through the system.
By using a 2.5"->3.5" converter or one of the nifty USB to IDE thingies?
I'm quite certain that only exec ran in supervisor mode, and that the Amiga had no memory protection.
I seem to recall that the difference between supervisor and user mode on the 68K had to do with access to the status register and user mode stack pointer. Would you mind refreshing my memory?
Was this a 1.* problem or so? I don't recall ever locking a system up with a busyloop without messing with priorities the way I still can if I have the privileges.
Most other schedulers give low priority tasks at least a little CPU now and then, but not the stock Amiga scheduler. Any program with higher priority than 0 busylooping would result in all normal user programs getting no CPU at all.
I didn't play much with Executive so I don't remember which algorithm(s) it implemented.
To expand a bit on an excellent post:
..but a single program busy-looping at a priority higher than normal user programs, and it was three finger salute time.
The whole collection of components was called Kickstart (because it was the low level OS) and the GUI interface component was called the Workbench.
Kickstart was (usually) in ROM and contained the low-level stuff. Workbench was loaded from floppy or HD and contained the GUI, extra libraries and other stuff.
Actually, I'm not sure whether 'Workbench' was the GUI only or not - the 'Workbench' floppies did contain more than the GUI but when one said 'Workbench' one usually meant the GUI.
the Amiga OS was largely written from scratch with the exception of the AmigaDOS component (Filesystem/Disk manager) which was written in BCPL based on a legacy DOS that was available. AmigaDOS was a last minute addition which is why it wasn't written from scratch.
The DOS component of AmigaOS (CAOS) was lagging behind the rest of the system, so instead of delaying the introduction of Amiga 1000 to get it finished an outside contractor was signed on to port an existing DOS to AmigaOS. Which is why AmigaDOS has some oddities, like BCPL.
About CAOS
but because it didn't have a "smart" scheduler, the system could still be brought to its knees with busy-loops.
The scheduler was a simple priority round-robin algorithm, meaning that the highest priority runnable task would get the CPU. If there were several runnable tasks at that priority level, the scheduler would round robin between them.
The OS kernel ran at the highest priority, GUI and device drivers a bit lower, user programs at 0 and background tasks below that.
As you mention, the obvious problem was that a busy-looping task at a priority higher than user programs would completely starve them for CPU, effectively locking up the system from the user's point of view.
It did have its perks, tho. Since the GUI was running at high priority it instantly got CPU so the system felt very responsive even when heavily loaded. It was also simple to start a long running task at a lower priority than normal user programs and have it churn on something in the background with close to no impact on system and user program responsiveness - back in those days the ability to have a big compile or render running in the background and hardly noticing it while typing in your editor was mindblowing.
In fact, in Kickstart/Workbench 2.0 and up, you could do the UNIX trick of specifying an environment variable for your library and font paths so you could have MULTIPLE library and font directories. In fact, the Amiga environment variable system was implemented as a RAM drive so it could have directory structures. Fond memories of setenv "SASC/scoptions" -g.
Paths, Labels and env are separate.
The path is where the shell would look for executables. Works just like in Win or *nix.
Environment variables also work like in Win or *nix, except that they were stored and could be accessed as a RAM file system.
Labels, though, is very nifty and very Amiga. Those familiar with MS-DOS can think of them as drive letters on steroids.
Labels could point to a device (DF0:), volume label (WORKBENCH:, GAMEFLOPPY:), pseudo device (SPEECH:), or they could be assigned to a directory.
AmigaOS came with a set of default device labels. DF0: for first floppy, DH0: for first harddrive. The system would look for libraries in LIBS:, fonts in FONTS:, etc. Every floppy and HD had a volume label, so if you had a floppy named games you could access it with GAMES:. If GAMES: could not be found, AmigaOS would prompt you to insert the floppy. In addition you had special labels like SPEECH: which sent any files copied to it through a speech synthesizer.
If you copied the workbench floppy to the HD, you could 'assign WORKBENCH: DH0:st
the company that made Fusion
Jim Drew, Microcode Solutions?
It had true multi-tasking (not sure if windows has that yet- I think it got it with win2k). By true- I mean if one process dies, the machine didn't hang- that process did and everything else kept running with it's preemptive slice
With cooperative multitasking, context switches are only done when the currently running task voluntarily relinquish control. Usually by programs regularely calling a switch_if_timeslice_spent() function, and sprinkling the OS functions with similar tests (e.g., switch if an IO call blocks).
Preemptive multitasking means that the OS can initiate a context switch without the assistance of the currently running task, thus pre-empting the active task. Usually implemented in a timer interrupt. Note that this does not preclude the OS from also using the context switch triggers used in cooperative multitasking systems.
A program that hangs or gets stuck in an infinite loop will disable multitasking and thus hang a coop OS, but will not hang a preemptive OS.
A program that crashes will exit, and normally won't hang either type of OS. Whether a crashing program takes down the entire system or not, depends more on memory protection and resource tracking (which AmigaOS did not do) than which flavour of multitasking the OS uses.
(come to think of it my win2k machine still hangs up for over a minute sometimes in azureus or when the virus scanner runs so win may not have preemptive multi-tasking yet).
All versions of Win since '95 do preemptive multitasking, as do Mac OS X, AmigaOS, Linux and lots of other OSes.
Win 3.x ran windows programs cooperatively and dos-in-win preemptively.
Macintosh Pre-OS X were all coop multitasking.
Great computer that commodore ruined.
Yeah. No love for Bill Sydnes or Medhi Ali here, that's for sure.
To be fair, the Amiga had some technical problems that would have had to be solved if it was to survive. Most specifically adding memory protection and resource tracking (which would have killed compatibility with old software, unless they had implemented a compatibility box like Apple did for OS X), and making the OS and software less dependent on custom chips (which they had started to do with AHI and RTG).
The 'nude' models included in Sims2 are no more explicit than Barbie and Ken dolls. No nipples, no schlong, no hair. There are mods out there with more explicit models/skins, but that's not EA's fault.