... Christmas Island a pretty good place for a space terminal. I'm West Australian. I am a space freak.
What interests me about this story is the notion that with that much accuracy and control over soil degeneration, this technology is ripe for space farming.
Give Australian farmers any piece of equipment designed for super accuracy and high-duration work, and they will find a way to break it, fix it, and make it better. Somehow. Australian farmers have learned many modern lessons - it wasn't so long ago that nobody could figure out how to grow stuff properly on that land. CSIRO and other Aussie science institutes continue to do very interesting stuff in crop research, soil health, water control, etc.
Anyway - about the space thing. When we get into space, and need to start growing food, I'll bet that there will be an interesting market for crop-growing machinery which works in extreme conditions. In fact, if these Aussie robots go into interesting design directions, I would imagine they'd have applications for experimental crop-growth facilities in LEO, soon enough.
Australia is as good a place as any to test all this. It is hot, dusty, and extremely tough land, some of it. Machines that can grow things and survive that environment untended with good control have all sorts of applications.
Take them a Linux box with things set up, ready to roll, go over on a Sunday afternoon with a case of beer, if you have to not interrupt workflow, and do a demo switch with a Linux box inline with their old SCO machine.
For bonus points, I'd convince them to let me take their SCO disks offline, and do an install of Linux on a fresh disk on their *same old hardware*. If you can't get them to let you do that for some reason, then this is all the more reason to keep trying.
Put the old SCO disks aside, bring a fresh Linux one online, same hardware, configure it for their network and RAID.
Incidentally, I'd be surprised if you couldn't get that RAID working pretty much right away with Linux
One last thing: I'd suggest you use Gentoo in front of their engineers, over that case of beer.
*point #1: "Americas Army" vs. "Kill the President Imperialist", training tool or not, are in fact perfectly comparable as an analogy. There is nothing 'valient' about Americas Army that isn't 'valient' about a Muslim going off on Jihaad. Those guys that strap bombs to themselves and go off to make damage where they can, think they're 'valiant, brave, and justified' as well.
This game is a virtual call for 'american jihaad' against foreign countries and populaces - *real* entitities - if you look at it from the angle of your so-called 'arab' enemies. A "training game" from the US Army that gives teenagers tips on urban combat, organizational postures, etc? C'mon, this is the American "O'Sama Bracelet", buddy...
*point #2: "this is not a joke" - why? Because, as a joke, it will only be funny to Americans. See it from an IRAQ perspective, and its just not funny. America has *yet* to turn on the lights in some places - lights and water which were *perfectly working* under Hussein. D'uh?! What's funny about that? "Well, yuh see, in "Americas Army", you can blow up whatever buildings you want, virtually. Get used to it, gibber."
*point #3: Yeah, yeah, beat the "freedom" dead horse again. Most of the rest of the world has given up on American Freedom, SSID #404-60-28389. Oh, please by all means, banter your "Free Press" donkey around all you like, surely you can get more wind out of it before it keels over and dies. Then we'll all just go back to watching CNN and nobody will ever hear about the farce which is American Justice ("int worldcourt--;// US 1, World -1.")!
*point #4: Americans are not a 'race'. They are a cultural entity defined by their own borders and their own deeds.
This is not racism, this is not stereotyping: this is taking offense to a mob-happy joke mentality about something which is seriously important to the rest of the world: the stability of the world order in light of America's war crimes, and the effect the American Sickos are going to have on all the Other Sicko's currently now festering in their flea-bitten hole where the only thing they can easily get a lot of is CNN and MTV!!
Ummm... I see absolutely nothing wrong with maintaining my own Linux kernel tree.
In the hardware world, you don't *need* to have the latest tree from Linus and co. to get actual real-life work done.
There is no 'maintenance' once the patch for Realtime - and there are plenty of options out there for Linux now - has been done. If the kernel passes muster, it passes muster, and off it goes in its own little boxen.
So far, I've had very little difficulty finding areas where Linux is perfect for the job - the more I look, the easier it gets to find ways to use Linux in the hardware world. The beauty of it is, even if there are problems (RAM requirements, CPU requirements, etc) I can definitely bend Linux to fit.
As for the 'off-the-shelf' thing, I'm afraid you've lost me. There is nothing better, in terms of 'off-the-shelf', than Linux. Unless you mean 'Sales Shelf', but I've only got r&d shelves in my space these days... and no need for a budget when it comes to kernels/operating environments.
Honestly, this is a freakin' *WAR* people, its not a video game, and its not a walk in the park.
"Get out there and train for Iraq, you maggots!"???
What would you think about that if you were an actual Iraqi, reading/. on the Internet?
Wait, lets change this video game a little bit and rename it to "Washington DC Terrorist Attack - Kill the President before He Rapes The World", and port it to Nintendo.
Does that then make it okay for someone to say "Play this game then go there, Brother, and kill the infidels!"
I swear to god, the world gets more and more like a bad Heinlein novel daily. Can Americans not plainly see that their perpetual arrogance and cultural irresponsibility is causing them more trouble than its worth?
"Americas War" is *NOT* something to be proud about, or defend eagerly, or even participate in willingly. It is the product of a sick and twisted culture!!
I don't care who thinks we - Artists - shouldn't be able to create our own networks for exchange of music, but if the RIAA starts making things bad in the US for independent artists to make their works available freely and easily - on equal terms with the industry - then I will swim out and duct-tape^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinstall boxen on the pillars of Sea Haven myself.
FWIW, the first (Rev A.) Powerbook G4's had a big hardware bug in the Firewire firmware, which resulted in *definitely* degraded performance for Firewire i/o. Very, very sub-par, in fact.
This was fixed rather rapidly, but if someone is complaining about Firewire speeds on a Powerbook G4, ask if its a Rev. A before correcting them. It may be true.
... when Slackware was released... I think it was by SLS, no, which mean "Soft Landing Systems".
Of course, happy with my Yggdrasil installation (woohoo, a bootable CD distro - in 1992! With X!) I scoffed at the notion of there being yet *another* Linux distro around.
Little did I know, 10 years later, that there would be thousands of Linux choices around. Wow.
Happy birthday Slackware! One of these days, I ought to give you a try...:)
However, that doesn't change the fact that what you can do with Linux, you can do with CE.
Okay, I think that my antagonism is based on this point. You *CAN'T* do with CE what you can do with Linux, and especially not in the context of TRON!
TRON, as an effort, required hardware vendors to open all specifications and protocols for communication and command to each other. It requires that hardware vendors compete on *hardware* but share software resources in order to ensure direct compatability at all levels of communication and command.
This is the antithesis to what Microsoft will let you do with CE: as a hardware vendor, if I come up with a new protocol for command or communications which makes sense in the realms of my hardware environment, then I cannot simply write that code, add it to the public CE codebase, and expect others in my industry to be able to have free and clear access to it. Microsoft will block any attempts made by hardware vendors to produce standardized, industry-wide, protocols or API's Which They Do Not Control.
TRON is the anti-thesis to Microsofts' mission. TRON puts the power of the computing industry in the hands of computer hardware vendors, and in some ways trivializes software as a means of industrial control. Since MS are a software company, and make no direct profits from hardware sales, this is why they have never gotten behind the TRON effort.
I hope that explains my view, and I apologize for last nights' antagonism - it really did seem like you were just trying to shoehorn CE into place in the discussion, when it clearly does not fit, at all, for the purposes of the industry who might be interested in building a TRON system...
TRON is not just a technology, it is a means by which competing hardware manufacturers can work together while still being able to innovate on the things that matter: hardware design and integration.
Can I take this source code, make a change to any of the fundamental protocols/API's to support features I - or my industry - may require, and release that code again, freely, to other members of my industry, so as to establish new standards of interoperability?
No. I cannot. Microsoft will come down on me like a ton of bricks if I even think about it, as a hardware vendor.
Thus, it is not the same as using the Linux kernel to establish a TRON-like industry.
*Sharing* of protocol and API implementations without limit is key to the ethos of TRON: not sharing these protocols and API implementations is key to the Microsoft ethos of monopoly.
Apple spun of its application development to Claris and stopped producing application software specifically because they were too strong of a competitor for a software publisher to compete against in the Mac market. I wonder what changed?
The markets are different. With the "Word" market, which was - back then - very new, very big, and very aggressively being captured by all who had a "Word" product, Apple had to step out of the way.
With the existing content-creation market (digital media such as MIDI/Audio production tools), there are *many* already-existing competitors. Lets see:
ProTools Logic Nuendo Digital Performer (Even lowly Intuem belongs in this list.)
Not to mention the rabid scenario in the PC world side of things, with vendors like Sonic Foundry, Syntrillium, Cakewalk, etc.
So, there is already a huge glut of digital-content creation apps out there. What's needed is for these apps to go to the next level in terms of usability and availability - ProTools, as a type of product, needs to be available to the average user, not just the ego-bearing 'producer' types. Anyone can use their PC to cut/paste a song together these days - the technical skills required are no more challenging than those you use in Word Processing.
So, Apple coming into this market, raising the bar and saying "this is default, now, for your market" can only mean that some truly *innovative* work needs to be done in this realm to make music-creation a lot more interesting, a lot more fun, and a lot more expressive.
I'd look to guys like Ableton and Intuem to take the lead, while the bigger ships still have a lot of weight left in them, of course...
No we can't. Linux has no support for hard real-time scheduling.
Seen TimeSys Linux yet?
http://www.timesys.com/
There are many ways that Linux can have support for hard real-time scheduling, and some of those ways require the use of one tool: 'patch'.
As for the indeterminate-latency device drivers, all I can say is that that is a problem *outside* the Linux kernel, and can be dealt with by writing good drivers for the target hardware in the first place: something an embedded hardware manufacturer is going to be doing anyway.
Apple may own EMagic, and they may have a great deal to say about what EMagic is doing these days, but EMagic is still a separate company, producing its products under its own strategic doctrine.
At least, that is what Apple officially told me when I asked them about it at Frankfurt Music Messe...
I think EMagic will be one of the first companies, though, to produce next-generation media tools for OSX. That is pretty exciting, given their relationship with Apple, now.
Lord knows, Logic could use a re-write, anyway. Especially in the interface department. Mmm... Logic with Quartz Extreme... Mmmm....
...and no one that I know is even considering using Linux for an embedded system, besides PDAs.
Well, I don't know if you work in the embedded systems industry, but I do, and I know plenty of people who are using Linux, and about 2 companies who have considered CE and decided, on the basis of the licensing and technology issues, that it is crap.
Do you really think that for any given CPU, all of the sdk/eval boards are the same, save a couple of options? (ethernet or not, one or two serial ports, one-line LCD or a TFT, etc)
Doesn't matter if they are, or if they are not - the point is its far easier to port Linux to a foreign board architecture than it is to port Windows. For one, the costs are nothing compared to CE, and for two, embedded Linux has so much momentum at this moment, that it really is easy to get Linux running on most new board architectures. All it takes is a little google activity, the hardware ref manuals for your board, and a half decent Internet connection, and you've got the tools you need to get porting!
... you don't have to be a MS proponent or even a user to attempt to speak the voice of reason.
Well, no, you don't have to be a MS proponent or user, but in your case I'm not so sure you should be jumping on the 'listen to me, mine is the voice of reason' soapbox in this thread... Given that you're unable to see the most obvious benefits of Linux over Windows CE for the embedded hardware developer, I'd say I still question the 'reasoning' behind your actual movites for contributing to this thread.
The fact is, in 2 minutes flat and for very little cost whatsoever I can be porting the Linux kernel to my new hardware platform. This can not be said about the Windows CE kernel. Nor can it be said of the CE kernel that it is suitable for the needs of TRON.
For a hardware vendor to not have to deal with *any* licensing issues on the OS line item means a lot. That it can be done with an OS as advanced as Linux is - and in many ways, Linux is a far more advanced operating system than Windows - is just icing on the cake. A cake which is free of manipulative seasoning, alas...
Anyway, my point wasn't "TRON sucks," but more so contending your statement about Linux being able to cleanly replace TRON. Linux could be used for most of what TRON could, provided time and money was spent adapting it to purposes for which TRON already works very well. Along the same lines, if one had the time and money to spend, Windows could be adapted to doing everything that Linux does now.
Linux can do what TRON does, right now, no questions asked, no problems whatsoever. No heavy porting required, no serious re-engineering efforts, no problems.
Linux can do TRON, today. Many vendors have ported their TRON codebases in matters of hours, and have it all running just fine with a Linux kernel... or two... or three... with networking features, with auto-discovery, with intelligent load-sharing, etc.
Microsoft CE still can't run in 1 Meg of RAM. Not 'properly', anyway - with networking, etc. That's pretty much all there is to say about the rest of your argument.
Or c) you could port WinCE to your hardware in about the same amount of time as you would Linux. There would be money involved in becoming a WinCE licencee, of course- but if you're a hardware manufacturer, that amount of money is relatively trivial.
This makes no sense, so I'll just shout so you get my point: WRONG!!!!
Linux vs. CE:
Money spent porting an operating system I have no control over, versus no money spent porting an operating system I have pretty much total control over, based on what I contribute back to the public good.
Hmm.
Zero licensing costs vs. *plenty*, plus You Must Report All Details About Your Hardware Sales To Microsoft.
Hmm...
Never mind, anyway. Nobody I know is even *considering* using CE in an embedded device: they are losing that Market, and losing it badly. CE is crap for pretty much everything except writing PC software and floating the Microsoft boat on the Love and Billy Gates Parade.
You can't have really thought that all those machines that run CE are all just some standard hardware platform, same instruction set, same line of CPUs, same bus, same misc hardware, same hardware bootloader, same BIOS or BIOS equivalent...
Umm... have a look inside your average eval board vendor catalog, and you'll see more than just a little hardware plagiarism.
So anyway, has your PC running "MS AgitProp 4.5" blue screened again, yet?
Actually, Microsoft actively *prevented* anyone from doing all of those wonderful things you mention, at the cost of deliberate entropy to the computer science realm. They did *not* bring it to the masses - we could have had these things *EARLIER* if it weren't for Microsoft.
We *had* Mice, Windows, Icons, and networking, in the 80's, before Microsoft came along. Nothing they have done hasn't been done by companies before them.
In the case of MSX, which you ought to look into if you consider yourself worthy in discussions of such matters, Microsoft intentionally fragmented the MSX hardware manufactuers options, in order to prevent a single, stable, maintainable platform from emerging... until they were really ready with DOS.
How did they do this, you might ask? MSX licensee's needed to license their BASIC interpreters, and take a guess who was the #1 BASIC interpreter provider in that era...
Bringing this back to the topic at hand, the MSX initiative was actually involved with TRON. If things had gone as planned, there really *would* have been "Beowulf" clusters of home computing/game machines, accessible over a global network: circa 1986!!
Well, pity MSX suffered from the Wrath of Billy. In the meantime though, those Japanese hardware manufacturers have been putting TRON in everything. Its a good concept, and it is also good to see things TRON-like happening in the various Linux camps, too...
TRON is ubiquitous in the American consumer goods landscape, as well as the credit card machine industry, etc....
My point was, in response to a troll perhaps but nevertheless, that American's shouldn't get all antsy about their biggest Corporations being called out on abusive industry/market practices against the Japanese tech industry in the 80's. It didn't work! TRON is with you!:)
The *FIRST* application for Sony to be getting running on any new games systems should be an emulator.
If the new box can't emulate the old box in hardware, its not good enough.
That said, I believe that Sony have woken up to the fact - as have many, namely Microsoft and Apple - that hardware emulation has its place in the modern computer software development field, where obsolescence happens faster than pubescence.
Emulation is a total solution to hardware market re-definition, and not only that: its a pretty good rule to play by.
If you can't reasonably emulate - in software - the old hardware on the new box, the new box isn't ready.
Slashdot Mirror
... Christmas Island a pretty good place for a space terminal. I'm West Australian. I am a space freak.
What interests me about this story is the notion that with that much accuracy and control over soil degeneration, this technology is ripe for space farming.
Give Australian farmers any piece of equipment designed for super accuracy and high-duration work, and they will find a way to break it, fix it, and make it better. Somehow. Australian farmers have learned many modern lessons - it wasn't so long ago that nobody could figure out how to grow stuff properly on that land. CSIRO and other Aussie science institutes continue to do very interesting stuff in crop research, soil health, water control, etc.
Anyway - about the space thing. When we get into space, and need to start growing food, I'll bet that there will be an interesting market for crop-growing machinery which works in extreme conditions. In fact, if these Aussie robots go into interesting design directions, I would imagine they'd have applications for experimental crop-growth facilities in LEO, soon enough.
Australia is as good a place as any to test all this. It is hot, dusty, and extremely tough land, some of it. Machines that can grow things and survive that environment untended with good control have all sorts of applications.
Take them a Linux box with things set up, ready to roll, go over on a Sunday afternoon with a case of beer, if you have to not interrupt workflow, and do a demo switch with a Linux box inline with their old SCO machine.
For bonus points, I'd convince them to let me take their SCO disks offline, and do an install of Linux on a fresh disk on their *same old hardware*. If you can't get them to let you do that for some reason, then this is all the more reason to keep trying.
Put the old SCO disks aside, bring a fresh Linux one online, same hardware, configure it for their network and RAID.
Incidentally, I'd be surprised if you couldn't get that RAID working pretty much right away with Linux
One last thing: I'd suggest you use Gentoo in front of their engineers, over that case of beer.
2 armed kids vs. 350 unarmed kids = Columbine.
2 armed kids vs 350 armed kids = ?
Your turn.
I most certainly didn't threaten your president any more than your 'just a joke' video game threatens the lives of any average every day Iraqi's.
*point #1: "Americas Army" vs. "Kill the President Imperialist", training tool or not, are in fact perfectly comparable as an analogy. There is nothing 'valient' about Americas Army that isn't 'valient' about a Muslim going off on Jihaad. Those guys that strap bombs to themselves and go off to make damage where they can, think they're 'valiant, brave, and justified' as well.
// US 1, World -1.")!
This game is a virtual call for 'american jihaad' against foreign countries and populaces - *real* entitities - if you look at it from the angle of your so-called 'arab' enemies. A "training game" from the US Army that gives teenagers tips on urban combat, organizational postures, etc? C'mon, this is the American "O'Sama Bracelet", buddy...
*point #2: "this is not a joke" - why? Because, as a joke, it will only be funny to Americans. See it from an IRAQ perspective, and its just not funny. America has *yet* to turn on the lights in some places - lights and water which were *perfectly working* under Hussein. D'uh?! What's funny about that? "Well, yuh see, in "Americas Army", you can blow up whatever buildings you want, virtually. Get used to it, gibber."
*point #3: Yeah, yeah, beat the "freedom" dead horse again. Most of the rest of the world has given up on American Freedom, SSID #404-60-28389. Oh, please by all means, banter your "Free Press" donkey around all you like, surely you can get more wind out of it before it keels over and dies. Then we'll all just go back to watching CNN and nobody will ever hear about the farce which is American Justice ("int worldcourt--;
*point #4: Americans are not a 'race'. They are a cultural entity defined by their own borders and their own deeds.
This is not racism, this is not stereotyping: this is taking offense to a mob-happy joke mentality about something which is seriously important to the rest of the world: the stability of the world order in light of America's war crimes, and the effect the American Sickos are going to have on all the Other Sicko's currently now festering in their flea-bitten hole where the only thing they can easily get a lot of is CNN and MTV!!
Ummm... I see absolutely nothing wrong with maintaining my own Linux kernel tree.
... and no need for a budget when it comes to kernels/operating environments.
In the hardware world, you don't *need* to have the latest tree from Linus and co. to get actual real-life work done.
There is no 'maintenance' once the patch for Realtime - and there are plenty of options out there for Linux now - has been done. If the kernel passes muster, it passes muster, and off it goes in its own little boxen.
So far, I've had very little difficulty finding areas where Linux is perfect for the job - the more I look, the easier it gets to find ways to use Linux in the hardware world. The beauty of it is, even if there are problems (RAM requirements, CPU requirements, etc) I can definitely bend Linux to fit.
As for the 'off-the-shelf' thing, I'm afraid you've lost me. There is nothing better, in terms of 'off-the-shelf', than Linux. Unless you mean 'Sales Shelf', but I've only got r&d shelves in my space these days
Honestly, this is a freakin' *WAR* people, its not a video game, and its not a walk in the park.
"Get out there and train for Iraq, you maggots!"???
What would you think about that if you were an actual Iraqi, reading
Wait, lets change this video game a little bit and rename it to "Washington DC Terrorist Attack - Kill the President before He Rapes The World", and port it to Nintendo.
Does that then make it okay for someone to say "Play this game then go there, Brother, and kill the infidels!"
I swear to god, the world gets more and more like a bad Heinlein novel daily. Can Americans not plainly see that their perpetual arrogance and cultural irresponsibility is causing them more trouble than its worth?
"Americas War" is *NOT* something to be proud about, or defend eagerly, or even participate in willingly. It is the product of a sick and twisted culture!!
I don't care who thinks we - Artists - shouldn't be able to create our own networks for exchange of music, but if the RIAA starts making things bad in the US for independent artists to make their works available freely and easily - on equal terms with the industry - then I will swim out and duct-tape^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinstall boxen on the pillars of Sea Haven myself.
Hey cool, I also used to use MCC/hack around on (a great development distro, back then), and I also registered on the Linux Counter, waaay back when!
:)
How do you check your Linux Counter stats? I bet I was pretty close to #69, and I would love to find out what it was!
FWIW, the first (Rev A.) Powerbook G4's had a big hardware bug in the Firewire firmware, which resulted in *definitely* degraded performance for Firewire i/o. Very, very sub-par, in fact.
This was fixed rather rapidly, but if someone is complaining about Firewire speeds on a Powerbook G4, ask if its a Rev. A before correcting them. It may be true.
I think the first Slackware distro was derived from SLS, though ... albeit with path, config, and package changes that met Patrick V.'s preferences.
It sure was fun back in the very early days of Linux distro's, seeing who was going to do what with the beginnings of this new operating system!
Always remember: time flies when you don't have to look at blue screens.
... when Slackware was released... I think it was by SLS, no, which mean "Soft Landing Systems".
... :)
Of course, happy with my Yggdrasil installation (woohoo, a bootable CD distro - in 1992! With X!) I scoffed at the notion of there being yet *another* Linux distro around.
Little did I know, 10 years later, that there would be thousands of Linux choices around. Wow.
Happy birthday Slackware! One of these days, I ought to give you a try
... there are these things.
Portable video is here to stay. Once you've had a wank on a mountaintop with your favourite porno, you'll never look back.
However, that doesn't change the fact that what you can do with Linux, you can do with CE.
Okay, I think that my antagonism is based on this point. You *CAN'T* do with CE what you can do with Linux, and especially not in the context of TRON!
TRON, as an effort, required hardware vendors to open all specifications and protocols for communication and command to each other. It requires that hardware vendors compete on *hardware* but share software resources in order to ensure direct compatability at all levels of communication and command.
This is the antithesis to what Microsoft will let you do with CE: as a hardware vendor, if I come up with a new protocol for command or communications which makes sense in the realms of my hardware environment, then I cannot simply write that code, add it to the public CE codebase, and expect others in my industry to be able to have free and clear access to it. Microsoft will block any attempts made by hardware vendors to produce standardized, industry-wide, protocols or API's Which They Do Not Control.
TRON is the anti-thesis to Microsofts' mission. TRON puts the power of the computing industry in the hands of computer hardware vendors, and in some ways trivializes software as a means of industrial control. Since MS are a software company, and make no direct profits from hardware sales, this is why they have never gotten behind the TRON effort.
I hope that explains my view, and I apologize for last nights' antagonism - it really did seem like you were just trying to shoehorn CE into place in the discussion, when it clearly does not fit, at all, for the purposes of the industry who might be interested in building a TRON system...
TRON is not just a technology, it is a means by which competing hardware manufacturers can work together while still being able to innovate on the things that matter: hardware design and integration.
Can I take this source code, make a change to any of the fundamental protocols/API's to support features I - or my industry - may require, and release that code again, freely, to other members of my industry, so as to establish new standards of interoperability?
No. I cannot. Microsoft will come down on me like a ton of bricks if I even think about it, as a hardware vendor.
Thus, it is not the same as using the Linux kernel to establish a TRON-like industry.
*Sharing* of protocol and API implementations without limit is key to the ethos of TRON: not sharing these protocols and API implementations is key to the Microsoft ethos of monopoly.
Apple spun of its application development to Claris and stopped producing application software specifically because they were too strong of a competitor for a software publisher to compete against in the Mac market. I wonder what changed?
...
The markets are different. With the "Word" market, which was - back then - very new, very big, and very aggressively being captured by all who had a "Word" product, Apple had to step out of the way.
With the existing content-creation market (digital media such as MIDI/Audio production tools), there are *many* already-existing competitors. Lets see:
ProTools
Logic
Nuendo
Digital Performer
(Even lowly Intuem belongs in this list.)
Not to mention the rabid scenario in the PC world side of things, with vendors like Sonic Foundry, Syntrillium, Cakewalk, etc.
So, there is already a huge glut of digital-content creation apps out there. What's needed is for these apps to go to the next level in terms of usability and availability - ProTools, as a type of product, needs to be available to the average user, not just the ego-bearing 'producer' types. Anyone can use their PC to cut/paste a song together these days - the technical skills required are no more challenging than those you use in Word Processing.
So, Apple coming into this market, raising the bar and saying "this is default, now, for your market" can only mean that some truly *innovative* work needs to be done in this realm to make music-creation a lot more interesting, a lot more fun, and a lot more expressive.
I'd look to guys like Ableton and Intuem to take the lead, while the bigger ships still have a lot of weight left in them, of course
No we can't. Linux has no support for hard real-time scheduling.
Seen TimeSys Linux yet?
http://www.timesys.com/
There are many ways that Linux can have support for hard real-time scheduling, and some of those ways require the use of one tool: 'patch'.
As for the indeterminate-latency device drivers, all I can say is that that is a problem *outside* the Linux kernel, and can be dealt with by writing good drivers for the target hardware in the first place: something an embedded hardware manufacturer is going to be doing anyway.
Yeah, not really.
...
... Mmmm ....
Apple may own EMagic, and they may have a great deal to say about what EMagic is doing these days, but EMagic is still a separate company, producing its products under its own strategic doctrine.
At least, that is what Apple officially told me when I asked them about it at Frankfurt Music Messe
I think EMagic will be one of the first companies, though, to produce next-generation media tools for OSX. That is pretty exciting, given their relationship with Apple, now.
Lord knows, Logic could use a re-write, anyway. Especially in the interface department. Mmm... Logic with Quartz Extreme
...and no one that I know is even considering using Linux for an embedded system, besides PDAs.
... you don't have to be a MS proponent or even a user to attempt to speak the voice of reason.
... Given that you're unable to see the most obvious benefits of Linux over Windows CE for the embedded hardware developer, I'd say I still question the 'reasoning' behind your actual movites for contributing to this thread.
Well, I don't know if you work in the embedded systems industry, but I do, and I know plenty of people who are using Linux, and about 2 companies who have considered CE and decided, on the basis of the licensing and technology issues, that it is crap.
Do you really think that for any given CPU, all of the sdk/eval boards are the same, save a couple of options? (ethernet or not, one or two serial ports, one-line LCD or a TFT, etc)
Doesn't matter if they are, or if they are not - the point is its far easier to port Linux to a foreign board architecture than it is to port Windows. For one, the costs are nothing compared to CE, and for two, embedded Linux has so much momentum at this moment, that it really is easy to get Linux running on most new board architectures. All it takes is a little google activity, the hardware ref manuals for your board, and a half decent Internet connection, and you've got the tools you need to get porting!
Well, no, you don't have to be a MS proponent or user, but in your case I'm not so sure you should be jumping on the 'listen to me, mine is the voice of reason' soapbox in this thread
The fact is, in 2 minutes flat and for very little cost whatsoever I can be porting the Linux kernel to my new hardware platform. This can not be said about the Windows CE kernel. Nor can it be said of the CE kernel that it is suitable for the needs of TRON.
For a hardware vendor to not have to deal with *any* licensing issues on the OS line item means a lot. That it can be done with an OS as advanced as Linux is - and in many ways, Linux is a far more advanced operating system than Windows - is just icing on the cake. A cake which is free of manipulative seasoning, alas...
Anyway, my point wasn't "TRON sucks," but more so contending your statement about Linux being able to cleanly replace TRON. Linux could be used for most of what TRON could, provided time and money was spent adapting it to purposes for which TRON already works very well. Along the same lines, if one had the time and money to spend, Windows could be adapted to doing everything that Linux does now.
... or two ... or three ... with networking features, with auto-discovery, with intelligent load-sharing, etc.
Linux can do what TRON does, right now, no questions asked, no problems whatsoever. No heavy porting required, no serious re-engineering efforts, no problems.
Linux can do TRON, today. Many vendors have ported their TRON codebases in matters of hours, and have it all running just fine with a Linux kernel
Microsoft CE still can't run in 1 Meg of RAM. Not 'properly', anyway - with networking, etc. That's pretty much all there is to say about the rest of your argument.
Or c) you could port WinCE to your hardware in about the same amount of time as you would Linux. There would be money involved in becoming a WinCE licencee, of course- but if you're a hardware manufacturer, that amount of money is relatively trivial.
This makes no sense, so I'll just shout so you get my point: WRONG!!!!
Linux vs. CE:
Money spent porting an operating system I have no control over, versus no money spent porting an operating system I have pretty much total control over, based on what I contribute back to the public good.
Hmm.
Zero licensing costs vs. *plenty*, plus You Must Report All Details About Your Hardware Sales To Microsoft.
Hmm...
Never mind, anyway. Nobody I know is even *considering* using CE in an embedded device: they are losing that Market, and losing it badly. CE is crap for pretty much everything except writing PC software and floating the Microsoft boat on the Love and Billy Gates Parade.
You can't have really thought that all those machines that run CE are all just some standard hardware platform, same instruction set, same line of CPUs, same bus, same misc hardware, same hardware bootloader, same BIOS or BIOS equivalent...
Umm... have a look inside your average eval board vendor catalog, and you'll see more than just a little hardware plagiarism.
So anyway, has your PC running "MS AgitProp 4.5" blue screened again, yet?
Actually, Microsoft actively *prevented* anyone from doing all of those wonderful things you mention, at the cost of deliberate entropy to the computer science realm. They did *not* bring it to the masses - we could have had these things *EARLIER* if it weren't for Microsoft.
We *had* Mice, Windows, Icons, and networking, in the 80's, before Microsoft came along. Nothing they have done hasn't been done by companies before them.
In the case of MSX, which you ought to look into if you consider yourself worthy in discussions of such matters, Microsoft intentionally fragmented the MSX hardware manufactuers options, in order to prevent a single, stable, maintainable platform from emerging
How did they do this, you might ask? MSX licensee's needed to license their BASIC interpreters, and take a guess who was the #1 BASIC interpreter provider in that era
Bringing this back to the topic at hand, the MSX initiative was actually involved with TRON. If things had gone as planned, there really *would* have been "Beowulf" clusters of home computing/game machines, accessible over a global network: circa 1986!!
Well, pity MSX suffered from the Wrath of Billy. In the meantime though, those Japanese hardware manufacturers have been putting TRON in everything. Its a good concept, and it is also good to see things TRON-like happening in the various Linux camps, too
Yes, that's what I meant.
...
:)
TRON is ubiquitous in the American consumer goods landscape, as well as the credit card machine industry, etc.
My point was, in response to a troll perhaps but nevertheless, that American's shouldn't get all antsy about their biggest Corporations being called out on abusive industry/market practices against the Japanese tech industry in the 80's. It didn't work! TRON is with you!
The *FIRST* application for Sony to be getting running on any new games systems should be an emulator.
If the new box can't emulate the old box in hardware, its not good enough.
That said, I believe that Sony have woken up to the fact - as have many, namely Microsoft and Apple - that hardware emulation has its place in the modern computer software development field, where obsolescence happens faster than pubescence.
Emulation is a total solution to hardware market re-definition, and not only that: its a pretty good rule to play by.
If you can't reasonably emulate - in software - the old hardware on the new box, the new box isn't ready.