Windows gets a "yes" with regards "coexists with other os`s" however, windows includes no real support for other os`s, especially other non windows os`s, setup of the bootloader to handle other systems must be done manually, and the ability of other os`s to work with windows is only due to necessity on the part of the developers of these systems. Many linux distributions, aswell as FreeBSD and others will happily install alongside windows and configure a bootloader to give you the choice.
They also state: Support for most SCSI devices. Complicated manual configuration is often necessary. This is simply not true, every linux distribution i have tried sofar has flawlessly detected my scsi devices, 8 HD`s, 1 CDROM and 1 DLT tape, over multiple scsi controllers.
Support for tapedrives does not vary with distributions, the age-old unix "tar" command is present on every linux distribution i have used, along with the "st" (scsi tape) driver.
DVD support on windows should be NO, not without third party tools, which usually involve additional cost.
Automatic cleanup/removal of temp files - again, redhat *atleast* comes with a tmpwatch crontab that is running by default, and deletes files when they reach a certain age or the disk becomes too full. Also, under unix tempfiles are always kept in the same place and so are easily deleted. Debian also deleted tempfiles at startup.
Partition cloning utility - the "dd" command can be used to clone partitions or whole disks, aswell as additional tools.
Network Bridge - many linux distributions come with gui tools for configuring a nat router, additionally there are custom linux distributions designed to only perform this function.
Remote control - doesnt mention that VNC is a third party app for windows, but mentions that it is a third party app for OSX. Also, X11 natively supports remote displays, and individual applications can be exported instead of a complete desktop. Remote apps can interact with local apps as if they were all running locally. The commandline interface on linux and osx is far more powerfull, and commandline is far more useable over slow links, also unix os`s are designed to allow remote use, and are fully multiuser whereas the home editions of windows are not.
Automatically hide infrequently used menu items / Automatically clean up infrequently used desktop items - is also optional on linux, depending on the interface being used.
Coexists with another operating system on disk - configuring linux to coexist with windows is easier than configuring windows to coexist with linux, multi-os configuration involving windows is usually performed by the non windows os. windows will try to overwrite other systems unless you prevent it from doing so, overwriting the bootloader at the least, most linux distributions will detect other os`s and add them into the bootup menu. windows itself includes no support for detecting the presence of non windows os`s.
Skins: windows is a "no" unless third party apps are used.
media formats: windows doesnt include mpeg-2 support by default, a third party codec must be installed.
Your right, i`ve not flashed a bios before... I don`t actually own any x86 hardware with a bios to flash, tho i do own an alpha.. the alpha machines have 2 firmware images, SRM, and AlphaBIOS.. The update procedure updates one, verifies it, then updates the other.. Or you can update them seperately.. In the event of a failure during the updating of one, i would assume it should revert to the non corrupted one.. both of which allow you to perform firmware updates. The only time i updated the SRM on this machine, was from the 6.x version it shipped with, to 7.2, the latest version.. and the only difference i notice is the new version number on startup... aside from that, the machine runs exactly as it did before.
So a "feature" of their software which you were not notified about nor given an option to disable, directly resulted in financial loss to you.. Sue them!
Because linux has far more diversity, with windows the vast majority of users use the default browser and desktop interface, and theres a single known place to install an app so it loads at startup. Contrast with linux, where there are a large number of commonly used interfaces, browsers, initscripts etc. You would need to target a larger number of apps, and then hope that those apps were actually installed in the places you expected them to be, for the relatively few people who use the unix realplayers, this is hardly worth doing.
But a standard in upgrading firmware would increase the risks of: People installing alien firmware to a device it doesnt support... Virus authors more easily doing damage to a larger array of devices at once.
But its still only enough code to read a new firmware image from disk, its not enough to boot an os.. Imagine this, you just tried to update your firmware, only to find there is a problem with the new firmware and you want to revert to the old... You dont have a copy of the old firmware on disk, and you need to download it... only you cant download it because your only computer has just fried its firmware.
How much does a plain non writeable rom chip cost anyway? hardware with flashable firmware should ship with a known good version of the firmware on a non writeable rom chip, along with a jumper to set to copy from the rom to the flashrom.. Why? flashable firmware, while very usefull, is a MAJOR hassle in many ways.. First, it makes firmware vendors lazy... instead of making firmware work well first time, they take the attitude that they can release buggy untested crap and make people update it later.. Secondly, if the firmware update procedure goes wrong, possibly a power or software failure during update, or a piece of malicious code designed to trash firmware.. then many pieces of hardware can be rendered unuseable and often have to be sent back to the manufacturer for repair. Third, the risks associated with firmware updates often prevent people from actually installing the updates..
Any decent monitor should reject an invalid scanrate, atleast mine all do.. 2 show up blank, and this one actually displays an error message saying the input signal is invalid.
If you have that much spare hdspace, remember you`l need a seperate partition, and then if you decide to remove your existing install your left with suboptimal partitioning on your drives.. the installcd is very usefull
Because not all programs are available in native OSX or even MacOS X versions, furthurmore, for such fields as webdesign, the windows versions of IE are very different to the mac versions.. Contrast to mozilla, which is virtually identical on all supported platforms. With Linux, all of the most commonly used software is equally available for PPC as it is for x86
Why emulate an x86 machine on a mac and then run linux? why not run a native ppc version of linux? the only disadvantage of this would be the inability to run x86 binaries, seeing as some programs are only available as x86 binaries.. Which makes me wonder why there isnt a PPC version of em86 (em86 allows the Alpha to emulate an x86 processor and run x86 binaries alongside native alpha binaries) Windows however, cannot run natively on a mac, NT3/4 used to have a ppc version available, but i dont think that ever ran on macs...
Did they ever pay spyglass? last i heard, they ripped the deal was that spyglass get a cut of the profits from sales of ie, and since it was given away for free there were no profits... but since ie is such an integral part of windows, perhaps they should sue them for a share of windows profits
Write all their software from scratch? what about IE? wasn`t that bought from spyglass? And how about DOS, the product that really kickstarted the company, they bought that from a third party too.
AmigaOS itself was incredibly stable, the problem was that the OS provided no protected memory space, no division between kernel and user space. Since such features require an MMU (most amigas didnt have an mmu by default) and can cause a performance hit, amigaos opted for speed. The consequence, any program running can take the whole os down, and since most amiga users run a lot of shareware of dubious quality, they end up with very unstable systems. Also the flat memory space often results in memory fragmentation, requiring a reboot to solve.
/usr/bin/yes | fsck/dev/sda1 or whatever, the/usr/bin/yes command simply prints a stream of y characters, piping to fsck is exactly what it`s intended for.
A better idea, would be... "push a to approve every question, b to approve every non-risky question" so it would still question you if fsck wants to perform an operation that may cause data loss or unexpected results.
Indeed, Alpha, unlike all the other 64bit processors mentioned, was designed from the ground up as a 64bit cpu, rather than a 32bit cpu with 64bit extensions added in. Itanic was supposed to be designed like this too, but they screwed it up somewhat.. All the other 64bit architectures have to retain some compatibility with older 32bit architectures. Alpha maintained compatibility via software emulation, and did so very well simply because of the huge performance difference between the last of the VAX and the first Alpha chips, the early alphas could also emulate x86 hardware faster than real; x86 chips of the time.
Quake3 for the mac actually came out first, atleast the test version, followed by linux and windows was last. As for the OSX version, i imagine it wasn`t too difficult to port, seeing as OSX is a cross between unix and os9, 2 platforms in which quake 3 was already running
The Amiga`s were 32bit aswell, but i`m not sure of the timescale relative to acorn and apple, however acorn machines werent sold much outside of the UK were they?
OSX ported to X86 wouldn`t satisfy your "device support" criteria.. On Apple hardware the OS is designed for the hardware, and theres a limited selection of hardware to support, on x86 there are literally millions of devices, apple simply dont have the resources to write drivers for them all, and the hardware companies wont write drivers for them without a large enough market share to use them. So Apple would be left relying on third parties to write drivers, which would leave you in the same situation linux is in
Also partly because linux, or unix clones in general, dont have a distinctive look, and the looks available to them are common across all the unix clones, as you pointed out with windowmaker.
How do you find the processor operating an electrical device, short of opening it up and looking i mean.. I`m curious what processor is running my tv, dvd player etc
Many people still have slow dialup connections, many of which are metered by the minute for online time, updating your os on such a connection is both extremely time consuming and costly. As for 640x480, thats the default resolution of windows, perhaps these people dont know how to increase it? same for the 8 bit color. Also, windows doesn`t support many displaycards, especially newer ones, without installing third party drivers.. Look at the size of nvidia/ati`s latest drivers, and then imagine downloading them over a dialup, and paying by the minute to do so... Also consider the time wasted navigating their graphics heavy sites, jumping through hoops just to find the correct drivers. Also, some people may have poor eyesight, and 640x480 is easier for them to read
Slashdot Mirror
Windows gets a "yes" with regards "coexists with other os`s" however, windows includes no real support for other os`s, especially other non windows os`s, setup of the bootloader to handle other systems must be done manually, and the ability of other os`s to work with windows is only due to necessity on the part of the developers of these systems. Many linux distributions, aswell as FreeBSD and others will happily install alongside windows and configure a bootloader to give you the choice.
They also state: Support for most SCSI devices. Complicated manual configuration is often necessary. This is simply not true, every linux distribution i have tried sofar has flawlessly detected my scsi devices, 8 HD`s, 1 CDROM and 1 DLT tape, over multiple scsi controllers.
Support for tapedrives does not vary with distributions, the age-old unix "tar" command is present on every linux distribution i have used, along with the "st" (scsi tape) driver.
DVD support on windows should be NO, not without third party tools, which usually involve additional cost.
Automatic cleanup/removal of temp files - again, redhat *atleast* comes with a tmpwatch crontab that is running by default, and deletes files when they reach a certain age or the disk becomes too full. Also, under unix tempfiles are always kept in the same place and so are easily deleted. Debian also deleted tempfiles at startup.
Partition cloning utility - the "dd" command can be used to clone partitions or whole disks, aswell as additional tools.
Network Bridge - many linux distributions come with gui tools for configuring a nat router, additionally there are custom linux distributions designed to only perform this function.
Remote control - doesnt mention that VNC is a third party app for windows, but mentions that it is a third party app for OSX.
Also, X11 natively supports remote displays, and individual applications can be exported instead of a complete desktop. Remote apps can interact with local apps as if they were all running locally. The commandline interface on linux and osx is far more powerfull, and commandline is far more useable over slow links, also unix os`s are designed to allow remote use, and are fully multiuser whereas the home editions of windows are not.
Automatically hide infrequently used menu items / Automatically clean up infrequently used desktop items - is also optional on linux, depending on the interface being used.
Coexists with another operating system on disk - configuring linux to coexist with windows is easier than configuring windows to coexist with linux, multi-os configuration involving windows is usually performed by the non windows os.
windows will try to overwrite other systems unless you prevent it from doing so, overwriting the bootloader at the least, most linux distributions will detect other os`s and add them into the bootup menu. windows itself includes no support for detecting the presence of non windows os`s.
Skins: windows is a "no" unless third party apps are used.
media formats: windows doesnt include mpeg-2 support by default, a third party codec must be installed.
Your right, i`ve not flashed a bios before...
I don`t actually own any x86 hardware with a bios to flash, tho i do own an alpha.. the alpha machines have 2 firmware images, SRM, and AlphaBIOS..
The update procedure updates one, verifies it, then updates the other.. Or you can update them seperately.. In the event of a failure during the updating of one, i would assume it should revert to the non corrupted one.. both of which allow you to perform firmware updates.
The only time i updated the SRM on this machine, was from the 6.x version it shipped with, to 7.2, the latest version.. and the only difference i notice is the new version number on startup... aside from that, the machine runs exactly as it did before.
charges to your credit card? surely that could be classed as theft and/or fraud!!
I use the "rm" command with "rm" files under any flavor of unix, rm really is the best way to deal with low quality realmedia files anyway.
So a "feature" of their software which you were not notified about nor given an option to disable, directly resulted in financial loss to you.. Sue them!
Because linux has far more diversity, with windows the vast majority of users use the default browser and desktop interface, and theres a single known place to install an app so it loads at startup. Contrast with linux, where there are a large number of commonly used interfaces, browsers, initscripts etc. You would need to target a larger number of apps, and then hope that those apps were actually installed in the places you expected them to be, for the relatively few people who use the unix realplayers, this is hardly worth doing.
But a standard in upgrading firmware would increase the risks of:
People installing alien firmware to a device it doesnt support...
Virus authors more easily doing damage to a larger array of devices at once.
But its still only enough code to read a new firmware image from disk, its not enough to boot an os..
Imagine this, you just tried to update your firmware, only to find there is a problem with the new firmware and you want to revert to the old...
You dont have a copy of the old firmware on disk, and you need to download it... only you cant download it because your only computer has just fried its firmware.
How much does a plain non writeable rom chip cost anyway? hardware with flashable firmware should ship with a known good version of the firmware on a non writeable rom chip, along with a jumper to set to copy from the rom to the flashrom..
Why? flashable firmware, while very usefull, is a MAJOR hassle in many ways..
First, it makes firmware vendors lazy... instead of making firmware work well first time, they take the attitude that they can release buggy untested crap and make people update it later..
Secondly, if the firmware update procedure goes wrong, possibly a power or software failure during update, or a piece of malicious code designed to trash firmware.. then many pieces of hardware can be rendered unuseable and often have to be sent back to the manufacturer for repair.
Third, the risks associated with firmware updates often prevent people from actually installing the updates..
Any decent monitor should reject an invalid scanrate, atleast mine all do.. 2 show up blank, and this one actually displays an error message saying the input signal is invalid.
If you have that much spare hdspace, remember you`l need a seperate partition, and then if you decide to remove your existing install your left with suboptimal partitioning on your drives.. the installcd is very usefull
Because not all programs are available in native OSX or even MacOS X versions, furthurmore, for such fields as webdesign, the windows versions of IE are very different to the mac versions.. Contrast to mozilla, which is virtually identical on all supported platforms.
With Linux, all of the most commonly used software is equally available for PPC as it is for x86
Why emulate an x86 machine on a mac and then run linux? why not run a native ppc version of linux? the only disadvantage of this would be the inability to run x86 binaries, seeing as some programs are only available as x86 binaries.. Which makes me wonder why there isnt a PPC version of em86 (em86 allows the Alpha to emulate an x86 processor and run x86 binaries alongside native alpha binaries)
Windows however, cannot run natively on a mac, NT3/4 used to have a ppc version available, but i dont think that ever ran on macs...
Did they ever pay spyglass? last i heard, they ripped the deal was that spyglass get a cut of the profits from sales of ie, and since it was given away for free there were no profits...
but since ie is such an integral part of windows, perhaps they should sue them for a share of windows profits
Write all their software from scratch? what about IE? wasn`t that bought from spyglass? And how about DOS, the product that really kickstarted the company, they bought that from a third party too.
As did the SPARC have the floating point bug in the early sun4c machines, and the problems with 64bit mode in the UltraSparc-I chips
AmigaOS itself was incredibly stable, the problem was that the OS provided no protected memory space, no division between kernel and user space. Since such features require an MMU (most amigas didnt have an mmu by default) and can cause a performance hit, amigaos opted for speed.
The consequence, any program running can take the whole os down, and since most amiga users run a lot of shareware of dubious quality, they end up with very unstable systems. Also the flat memory space often results in memory fragmentation, requiring a reboot to solve.
/usr/bin/yes | fsck /dev/sda1 /usr/bin/yes command simply prints a stream of y characters, piping to fsck is exactly what it`s intended for.
or whatever, the
A better idea, would be... "push a to approve every question, b to approve every non-risky question" so it would still question you if fsck wants to perform an operation that may cause data loss or unexpected results.
Indeed, Alpha, unlike all the other 64bit processors mentioned, was designed from the ground up as a 64bit cpu, rather than a 32bit cpu with 64bit extensions added in. Itanic was supposed to be designed like this too, but they screwed it up somewhat.. All the other 64bit architectures have to retain some compatibility with older 32bit architectures. Alpha maintained compatibility via software emulation, and did so very well simply because of the huge performance difference between the last of the VAX and the first Alpha chips, the early alphas could also emulate x86 hardware faster than real; x86 chips of the time.
Quake3 for the mac actually came out first, atleast the test version, followed by linux and windows was last. As for the OSX version, i imagine it wasn`t too difficult to port, seeing as OSX is a cross between unix and os9, 2 platforms in which quake 3 was already running
The Amiga`s were 32bit aswell, but i`m not sure of the timescale relative to acorn and apple, however acorn machines werent sold much outside of the UK were they?
OSX ported to X86 wouldn`t satisfy your "device support" criteria.. On Apple hardware the OS is designed for the hardware, and theres a limited selection of hardware to support, on x86 there are literally millions of devices, apple simply dont have the resources to write drivers for them all, and the hardware companies wont write drivers for them without a large enough market share to use them. So Apple would be left relying on third parties to write drivers, which would leave you in the same situation linux is in
Also partly because linux, or unix clones in general, dont have a distinctive look, and the looks available to them are common across all the unix clones, as you pointed out with windowmaker.
How do you find the processor operating an electrical device, short of opening it up and looking i mean.. I`m curious what processor is running my tv, dvd player etc
Many people still have slow dialup connections, many of which are metered by the minute for online time, updating your os on such a connection is both extremely time consuming and costly.
As for 640x480, thats the default resolution of windows, perhaps these people dont know how to increase it? same for the 8 bit color. Also, windows doesn`t support many displaycards, especially newer ones, without installing third party drivers.. Look at the size of nvidia/ati`s latest drivers, and then imagine downloading them over a dialup, and paying by the minute to do so...
Also consider the time wasted navigating their graphics heavy sites, jumping through hoops just to find the correct drivers.
Also, some people may have poor eyesight, and 640x480 is easier for them to read