It *is* bad enough though that you have media that refuses to pose serious questions of politicians on issues of national security and human rights when it matters most, i.e. when far-reaching decisions are being made in haste. You have a media that pushes nationalism and fear for market-share. No hard questions, because hard answers can be difficult to understand, and that doesn't sell advertising space.
The sad thing is that the media in the US stopped putting up resistence to government policies after 9/11 because of petty rhetoric saying that to question the government at a time of war was "un-American". In doing this they have supported policies and legislation that are very "un-American".
Finally, yes you are free to post your opinions here on Slashdot, and there are plenty of other folks posting opinions on-line. This is however unfortunately irrelevant. The vast majority of the US population cares so little about current affairs, especially on a global scale, that they do not bother to look beyond TV news and/or the papers. Your voice on Slashdot is irrelevant to the US government, since hardly anybody will hear you.
Now I know this is true, that it is standard practice for MS/Sony/Nintendo to be working on the next console generation as soon as they're done with the design of the last, but I don't quite get it.
The basic recipe for a console is simple - take a CPU, a GPU, some memory, some storage systems, and add glue logic. Microsoft showed us that it was possible to put together a half decent console within a reasonably short space of time when they put out the XBox. The development time for the XBox360 was also fairly short.
The CPU and GPU are the most complex parts of a console, but their design is out-sourced, and essentially derived from existing products.
The PS3 is interesting to look at here because its CPU is different. Early in the development of the PS3 Sony decided that they wanted a super-duper CPU and teamed up with IBM and Toshiba to produce the Cell. The Cell features a Power Processing Element together with 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs, 7 of which are functional in the PS3s CPUs). SPEs are primarily designed for vectorised floating point code execution...
What's my point? Well, GPUs have been coming on in leaps and bounds. They now contain quite a few shader units which are primarily designed for vectorised floating point code execution - a task that should sound familiar. As we all know GPUs are now being used for some more general computing tasks, such as physics processing, and you can hook up multiple GPUs into a system.
Arguably Sony/IBM/Toshiba made the wrong call with developing the Cell. I'd expect that in the PS4 most if not all the work handled by SPEs in the PS3 will be handled by GPU shader units... Also whilst we may see a 2nd generation Cell chip, will we see a third?
Unless you're going to go out on a limb and develop some fairly out there technology, like Sony did with the Cell for the PS3, I don't see much of a reason why you'd want to start console development until about 2 years before you want to ship. The CPU and GPU folks won't be able to give you an idea about what's going to be available until then anyway.
There are pirates out there sailing the seas. Quite a few of them.
It's not easy to find news articles about pirates, since the word has been stolen by the media to denote copyright infringers, however there are somenewsarticles out there.
Additionally since piracy usually happens in international waters outside of the legal juristiction of any country there are rarely any prosecutions.
Sorry about that... I had been told the albatross sleeping mid-flight thing (rather than on the sea surface) by a PhD student whose thesis was on bird migration.
I should of course know better than to believe PhD students.
Right - so you support iTunes because Apple enforces a 99c track price. This is good because the money-grabbing labels want to charge us more...
Has it ever occurred to you that record labels want variable pricing to sell tracks *below* that price?
The music store that I worked for was being pressured into implementing variable pricing, and we were going to implement it. Yes, they had the notion of pricing above 99c for hot new tracks - however Apple's 99c pricing policy meant that if they did charge over 99c on our store then everybody would just buy the same track from iTunes at the lower price. The real value they saw in lower pricing levels (not just per track, but also other pricing levels prices like $4.99 per album) was in shifting back catalog items. The ability to price below 99c/$9.99 was often the primary reason why labels wanted variable pricing.
For me this was always a great disparity between the likes of the iTunes Store and high street shops. I can go to a high street retailer and pick up many albums for under $5 - the same albums on iTunes would be $9.99. This is especially the case if you're not going after pop music...
I must admit that since I have an eMac I'm not blessed with a humungous screen on my Mac, but I thought that the only significant difference that Mac OS X has when maximising windows is that if the application has been so designed there is an upper limit on the size the window will go to. Most windows will still maximise to the whole screen on Mac OS X, just like on Windows or X.
Or is there some other setting on Mac OS X hidden away that I've overlooked that limits the size windows maximise to?
Albatross (and related species) spend virtually their whole lives at sea, returning to land only to breed. They fish for food, but can't sleep on the sea surface because they'd get caught by preditors (some shark and whale species, sealions, etc). Their only opportunity for sleep is whilst they're flying - so they nap for a few seconds whilst they're gliding.
There's a picture comparison of the two editions which can easily be found from the article that's been linked to. The third picture clearly shows that "Episode IV" isn't in the "original".
You're right about versionning. Newton didn't handle that, although you could of course have duplicated your "file" whenever you felt like it.
I like your notion of time snapshots. Indeed Apple is enabling that kind of stuff with Time Machine on 10.5. It's quite possible to write applications for Mac OS X 10.4 that work like Newton apps did, and on 10.5 it'll be possible to add in saving of versions.
As for Newton's relationship to OpenDoc, they were completely unrelated projects. Newton had to be small and very memory efficient - OpenDoc was large and bloated.:-) There was little communication between the Newton group and the Mac folks, much like there was previously little communication between the Mac and Apple II groups.
I don't know - a registry, if done right, could potentially be a good way to store settings. What Microsoft have done on Windows though is an abomination.
A scatter-shot of settings files though has got to be bad - Mac OS X settings files are all over the place. Yes, well written applications will put their preferences in/Library/Preferences and/or ~/Library/Preferences, but there's plenty of other places things get put thanks to the Unix heritage of the OS.
You're right - most Mac users have no idea they're running Unix, and so they generally have no idea how much risk they take when they run a software installation package.
Mac installation packages can install multiple files wherever they see fit. Many request a password for installation, which then allows the installation scripts to do whatever they like to your system. I've seen several Mac OS X package installation scripts that add lines to boot-up scripts and change the OS configuration. The package mechanism on Mac OS X has no removal mechanism at all. Even if removal scripts are provided there are no guarantees that they will work correctly and remove all parts of the app.
Perl, Python, and standard Unix libraries are merely conveniences that could be provided to developers in other forms that are equally convenient.
As for it being hard to screw up a good Linux distribution... Joe Blow tries to save his file and gets informed that he's run out of disc space. He goes to his hard disc to look for things to throw away... As soon as they go to / they're presented with a loads of stuff that to them will look like absolute junk.
I'm suggesting that the current configuration models for both Windows and Unix-type systems are flawed, and that we should be able to come up with something better than both.
As for having a nice text configuration file in/etc, well, who's to say that's where it's going to be placed? Could be just about anywhere.
You know what I think the real problem with GNU/Linux is, and why it's never going to topple Windows?
Lack of ambition.
The aim of all the GNU project was to re-create Unix. It wasn't to create something new and original that's significantly better than what has come before - it was to create free versions of the tools that made up a typical Unix system. Sure the tools got tweaked and improved, but the same basic model was followed. It was a project aimed at making tools for hackers, not for making a general purpose computer systems usable by everyman. This was not really ambitious.
Linus wrote the Linux kernel because he wanted essentially to recreate Minix. The ambitious part of this was to do it by himself, but overall it was not really that ambitious, since it had been done before.
The aim of most projects written for GNU/Linux is to recreate something that has been done before. This too is of course not all that ambitious.
It is quite possible to produce something that's newer and better than Unix. It's possible to create a new UI system that is newer and better than X-Windows, Aqua, or Windows...
I could continue, but I think I've burnt enough Karma for now.:-)
Great comment, which I agree with almost entirely.
Personally I think that Linux has a couple of big problems that will probably prevent it from taking over the world. The biggest one IMHO is the GNU part, especially the U part of that, i.e. Unix. Joe Blow will never be a Unix hacker, and giving them a system that relies on loads of arcane textual configuration files, command line tools, and shell scripts is asking for trouble. Sure, you can wrap this stuff up with a shiny GUI, and you can make those parts of the OS invisible from the desktop, but this stuff is all still there behind the scenes and its complexity can bite you in the arse.
Mac OS X suffers from exactly the same problem. The good job that they've done is in hiding away the most of the complex unixy stuff, but open up Terminal and you'll find its all there and that the system relies on a great deal of it. It *is* usable by mortals, but really it is usable in the same way that Windows is.
This makes for a system (Mac OS X or Linux) that is fragile and can be broken fairly easily through carelessness or stupidity.
Better to not have this stuff at all on an average users machine IMHO. Let us geeks install and play with Unixy tools if we want, but my mum definitely doesn't need it.
My personal favourite OS went a step further than that - no saving at all, in fact not really any such thing as "files".
Apple's Newton OS had a persistent object oriented database storage system, rather than a filing system. Changes to things would get frequently written to the database, so you never had to remember to save anything. The notepad application supported multiple types of stationary, and this was expandable. Indeed many applications could be similarly extended, such as the address book and calendar.
IMHO Newton was the best thought out OS and GUI I've ever seen. With the way things are with current OSes it looks to me like it's the best OS I'm ever likely to see.
You are confusing the NextStep/OpenStep API (which is now Cocoa on Mac OS X) with the complete operating system. Yellow Box was only ever going to allow people to run OpenStep/Cocoa applications on Windows, and it would only let applications that did not rely on other parts of the OS work on both platforms. It certainly would not allow all Mac applications to be compiled to run on Windows, since it did not contain the Carbon APIs.
Mac OS X (and its NeXTstep predecessor) relies on a whole heap of command line tools, scripts, and text-based configuration files for many functions. The boot sequence relies on several scripts, for example, and whilst it's cleaner than many other Unix-like OSes it's still messy. It is quite easy on Mac OS X to install software that cannot be removed without editing text files that are hidden away where most people don't even know they exist.
Take, for example, X Windows. It is supplied as a single installation package, however this installs a scatter-shot of files over your system with absolutely no mechanism to remove them. Indeed should you wish to remove it the only practical way is to reformat and re-install Mac OS X. Many other pieces of software on Mac OS X suffer from exactly the same problem, and few come with removal scripts. Modular it might be, but I reiterate that it has not been done in a very clean manner; there are many, many places on a Mac OS X system where software can be placed that extends the OS' functionality.
I stand by my statement that Mac OS 9 had a cleaner more modular design. On Mac OS 9 there were very few ways of extending OS functionality - essentially just Extensions and Control Panels, both of which had their own folder inside the System folder. These were trivial to remove and/or disable.
Where Mac OS 9 fell over in this modularity was a lack of memory protection, which meant that it was possible to install extensions that would conflict and create an unstable system. This is, however, a completely separate issue.
Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux
on
A New Kind of OS
·
· Score: 1
If I had mod points today then you'd be getting them. I couldn't agree with you more.
I'd go so far as to abolish all Open dialogs if it'd make users realize there's a structure on their disk organizing their files, and that files don't live inside of programs
You'd have liked RISC OS. No such thing as Open dialog boxes there. You'd open everything from the Filer, RISC OS's Finder/Explorer equivalent. Save boxes were also very minimal - usually just an icon that you could drag into a filer window and a text entry box to adjust the filename.
Agreed - Apple's doing a good job in their engineering.
On the speed issue though, whilst my Mac (running 10.4.7) boots up pretty quickly to the login box (about 20 seconds), it takes an incredibly large amount of time to log in on a fairly clean installation (about a minute). There's a great deal of work left to be done on the speed front.
The speed of BeOS, on the other hand, is scary. Boot up into a usable desktop in about 5 seconds is how it should be on all OSes.
I must admit that I'm not entirely convinced by Plan 9 either as an OS for the future. Yeah, it is more advanced than Unix, but it is still a mid-80's OS, that could have been created a decade earlier.
Mac OS X is *still* a flavour of Unix. Yes there are additional modules and applications bolted on, however it's not really done in a particularly clean manner - it is after all just an evolved version of NeXTstep. It is not really all that much more advanced above the original NeXTstep of 1989, in that it uses an essentially identical architecture.
Arguably Mac OS 9 has a cleaner, more modular design than Mac OS X.
All that you really seem to be saying is that Apple are doing a pretty good job of implementing their OS and improving performance, and Microsoft are doing a bad job. The modularity of the two is immaterial to this.
At the simplest level Haiku is a re-implementation of BeOS, a 15 year old OS. It has a similar kind of architecture to Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. The basic system design is only marginally advanced over all of these. (Yes, I know this is a gross generalisation.) It is mostly POSIX compliant and relies on the GNU legacy for a load of tools.
(IMHO none of these OSes are anywhere near as advanced as the OS Apple produced for the Newton and have long since abandoned.)
What was suggested is throwing away the lot and starting again to come up with something genuinely new; i.e. not recreating that which has come before but learning from it and taking a new more modular approach. This is something I too would love to see.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, you're not *that* bad yet...
It *is* bad enough though that you have media that refuses to pose serious questions of politicians on issues of national security and human rights when it matters most, i.e. when far-reaching decisions are being made in haste. You have a media that pushes nationalism and fear for market-share. No hard questions, because hard answers can be difficult to understand, and that doesn't sell advertising space.
The sad thing is that the media in the US stopped putting up resistence to government policies after 9/11 because of petty rhetoric saying that to question the government at a time of war was "un-American". In doing this they have supported policies and legislation that are very "un-American".
Finally, yes you are free to post your opinions here on Slashdot, and there are plenty of other folks posting opinions on-line. This is however unfortunately irrelevant. The vast majority of the US population cares so little about current affairs, especially on a global scale, that they do not bother to look beyond TV news and/or the papers. Your voice on Slashdot is irrelevant to the US government, since hardly anybody will hear you.
Now I know this is true, that it is standard practice for MS/Sony/Nintendo to be working on the next console generation as soon as they're done with the design of the last, but I don't quite get it.
The basic recipe for a console is simple - take a CPU, a GPU, some memory, some storage systems, and add glue logic. Microsoft showed us that it was possible to put together a half decent console within a reasonably short space of time when they put out the XBox. The development time for the XBox360 was also fairly short.
The CPU and GPU are the most complex parts of a console, but their design is out-sourced, and essentially derived from existing products.
The PS3 is interesting to look at here because its CPU is different. Early in the development of the PS3 Sony decided that they wanted a super-duper CPU and teamed up with IBM and Toshiba to produce the Cell. The Cell features a Power Processing Element together with 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs, 7 of which are functional in the PS3s CPUs). SPEs are primarily designed for vectorised floating point code execution...
What's my point? Well, GPUs have been coming on in leaps and bounds. They now contain quite a few shader units which are primarily designed for vectorised floating point code execution - a task that should sound familiar. As we all know GPUs are now being used for some more general computing tasks, such as physics processing, and you can hook up multiple GPUs into a system.
Arguably Sony/IBM/Toshiba made the wrong call with developing the Cell. I'd expect that in the PS4 most if not all the work handled by SPEs in the PS3 will be handled by GPU shader units... Also whilst we may see a 2nd generation Cell chip, will we see a third?
Unless you're going to go out on a limb and develop some fairly out there technology, like Sony did with the Cell for the PS3, I don't see much of a reason why you'd want to start console development until about 2 years before you want to ship. The CPU and GPU folks won't be able to give you an idea about what's going to be available until then anyway.
What lack of pirates?
There are pirates out there sailing the seas. Quite a few of them.
It's not easy to find news articles about pirates, since the word has been stolen by the media to denote copyright infringers, however there are some news articles out there.
Additionally since piracy usually happens in international waters outside of the legal juristiction of any country there are rarely any prosecutions.
Sorry about that... I had been told the albatross sleeping mid-flight thing (rather than on the sea surface) by a PhD student whose thesis was on bird migration.
:-)
I should of course know better than to believe PhD students.
Curiously enough she did get her PhD.
Yeah - got trolled. I just presumed he was American. :-)
Right - so you support iTunes because Apple enforces a 99c track price. This is good because the money-grabbing labels want to charge us more...
Has it ever occurred to you that record labels want variable pricing to sell tracks *below* that price?
The music store that I worked for was being pressured into implementing variable pricing, and we were going to implement it. Yes, they had the notion of pricing above 99c for hot new tracks - however Apple's 99c pricing policy meant that if they did charge over 99c on our store then everybody would just buy the same track from iTunes at the lower price. The real value they saw in lower pricing levels (not just per track, but also other pricing levels prices like $4.99 per album) was in shifting back catalog items. The ability to price below 99c/$9.99 was often the primary reason why labels wanted variable pricing.
For me this was always a great disparity between the likes of the iTunes Store and high street shops. I can go to a high street retailer and pick up many albums for under $5 - the same albums on iTunes would be $9.99. This is especially the case if you're not going after pop music...
Right next to each other in the middle east?
Man, you need to check out a globe dude.
Iran is in the middle east.
North Korea is in the far east.
Venezuela is in South America.
They're all thousands of miles apart.
Besides there not being a Friday 13th March 2004 (as has already been pointed out, there's also no Friday 13th January 2024. Both are Saturdays.
You can?
I must admit that since I have an eMac I'm not blessed with a humungous screen on my Mac, but I thought that the only significant difference that Mac OS X has when maximising windows is that if the application has been so designed there is an upper limit on the size the window will go to. Most windows will still maximise to the whole screen on Mac OS X, just like on Windows or X.
Or is there some other setting on Mac OS X hidden away that I've overlooked that limits the size windows maximise to?
:-)
Not all that far from the truth.
Albatross (and related species) spend virtually their whole lives at sea, returning to land only to breed. They fish for food, but can't sleep on the sea surface because they'd get caught by preditors (some shark and whale species, sealions, etc). Their only opportunity for sleep is whilst they're flying - so they nap for a few seconds whilst they're gliding.
You know, Wii looks pretty cool in its stand...
Out of its stand though it looks far less cool to me. In fact it looks like a pretty average external CD-ROM drive.
I bet Episode IV is in the opening titles.
No, it's not.
There's a picture comparison of the two editions which can easily be found from the article that's been linked to. The third picture clearly shows that "Episode IV" isn't in the "original".
You're right about versionning. Newton didn't handle that, although you could of course have duplicated your "file" whenever you felt like it.
:-) There was little communication between the Newton group and the Mac folks, much like there was previously little communication between the Mac and Apple II groups.
I like your notion of time snapshots. Indeed Apple is enabling that kind of stuff with Time Machine on 10.5. It's quite possible to write applications for Mac OS X 10.4 that work like Newton apps did, and on 10.5 it'll be possible to add in saving of versions.
As for Newton's relationship to OpenDoc, they were completely unrelated projects. Newton had to be small and very memory efficient - OpenDoc was large and bloated.
I don't know - a registry, if done right, could potentially be a good way to store settings. What Microsoft have done on Windows though is an abomination.
/Library/Preferences and/or ~/Library/Preferences, but there's plenty of other places things get put thanks to the Unix heritage of the OS.
A scatter-shot of settings files though has got to be bad - Mac OS X settings files are all over the place. Yes, well written applications will put their preferences in
You're right - most Mac users have no idea they're running Unix, and so they generally have no idea how much risk they take when they run a software installation package.
Mac installation packages can install multiple files wherever they see fit. Many request a password for installation, which then allows the installation scripts to do whatever they like to your system. I've seen several Mac OS X package installation scripts that add lines to boot-up scripts and change the OS configuration. The package mechanism on Mac OS X has no removal mechanism at all. Even if removal scripts are provided there are no guarantees that they will work correctly and remove all parts of the app.
Perl, Python, and standard Unix libraries are merely conveniences that could be provided to developers in other forms that are equally convenient.
As for it being hard to screw up a good Linux distribution... Joe Blow tries to save his file and gets informed that he's run out of disc space. He goes to his hard disc to look for things to throw away... As soon as they go to / they're presented with a loads of stuff that to them will look like absolute junk.
What Windows registry?
/etc, well, who's to say that's where it's going to be placed? Could be just about anywhere.
I'm suggesting that the current configuration models for both Windows and Unix-type systems are flawed, and that we should be able to come up with something better than both.
As for having a nice text configuration file in
You know what I think the real problem with GNU/Linux is, and why it's never going to topple Windows?
:-)
Lack of ambition.
The aim of all the GNU project was to re-create Unix. It wasn't to create something new and original that's significantly better than what has come before - it was to create free versions of the tools that made up a typical Unix system. Sure the tools got tweaked and improved, but the same basic model was followed. It was a project aimed at making tools for hackers, not for making a general purpose computer systems usable by everyman. This was not really ambitious.
Linus wrote the Linux kernel because he wanted essentially to recreate Minix. The ambitious part of this was to do it by himself, but overall it was not really that ambitious, since it had been done before.
The aim of most projects written for GNU/Linux is to recreate something that has been done before. This too is of course not all that ambitious.
It is quite possible to produce something that's newer and better than Unix. It's possible to create a new UI system that is newer and better than X-Windows, Aqua, or Windows...
I could continue, but I think I've burnt enough Karma for now.
Great comment, which I agree with almost entirely.
Personally I think that Linux has a couple of big problems that will probably prevent it from taking over the world. The biggest one IMHO is the GNU part, especially the U part of that, i.e. Unix. Joe Blow will never be a Unix hacker, and giving them a system that relies on loads of arcane textual configuration files, command line tools, and shell scripts is asking for trouble. Sure, you can wrap this stuff up with a shiny GUI, and you can make those parts of the OS invisible from the desktop, but this stuff is all still there behind the scenes and its complexity can bite you in the arse.
Mac OS X suffers from exactly the same problem. The good job that they've done is in hiding away the most of the complex unixy stuff, but open up Terminal and you'll find its all there and that the system relies on a great deal of it. It *is* usable by mortals, but really it is usable in the same way that Windows is.
This makes for a system (Mac OS X or Linux) that is fragile and can be broken fairly easily through carelessness or stupidity.
Better to not have this stuff at all on an average users machine IMHO. Let us geeks install and play with Unixy tools if we want, but my mum definitely doesn't need it.
My personal favourite OS went a step further than that - no saving at all, in fact not really any such thing as "files".
Apple's Newton OS had a persistent object oriented database storage system, rather than a filing system. Changes to things would get frequently written to the database, so you never had to remember to save anything. The notepad application supported multiple types of stationary, and this was expandable. Indeed many applications could be similarly extended, such as the address book and calendar.
IMHO Newton was the best thought out OS and GUI I've ever seen. With the way things are with current OSes it looks to me like it's the best OS I'm ever likely to see.
You are confusing the NextStep/OpenStep API (which is now Cocoa on Mac OS X) with the complete operating system. Yellow Box was only ever going to allow people to run OpenStep/Cocoa applications on Windows, and it would only let applications that did not rely on other parts of the OS work on both platforms. It certainly would not allow all Mac applications to be compiled to run on Windows, since it did not contain the Carbon APIs.
Mac OS X (and its NeXTstep predecessor) relies on a whole heap of command line tools, scripts, and text-based configuration files for many functions. The boot sequence relies on several scripts, for example, and whilst it's cleaner than many other Unix-like OSes it's still messy. It is quite easy on Mac OS X to install software that cannot be removed without editing text files that are hidden away where most people don't even know they exist.
Take, for example, X Windows. It is supplied as a single installation package, however this installs a scatter-shot of files over your system with absolutely no mechanism to remove them. Indeed should you wish to remove it the only practical way is to reformat and re-install Mac OS X. Many other pieces of software on Mac OS X suffer from exactly the same problem, and few come with removal scripts. Modular it might be, but I reiterate that it has not been done in a very clean manner; there are many, many places on a Mac OS X system where software can be placed that extends the OS' functionality.
I stand by my statement that Mac OS 9 had a cleaner more modular design. On Mac OS 9 there were very few ways of extending OS functionality - essentially just Extensions and Control Panels, both of which had their own folder inside the System folder. These were trivial to remove and/or disable.
Where Mac OS 9 fell over in this modularity was a lack of memory protection, which meant that it was possible to install extensions that would conflict and create an unstable system. This is, however, a completely separate issue.
If I had mod points today then you'd be getting them. I couldn't agree with you more.
I'd go so far as to abolish all Open dialogs if it'd make users realize there's a structure on their disk organizing their files, and that files don't live inside of programs
You'd have liked RISC OS. No such thing as Open dialog boxes there. You'd open everything from the Filer, RISC OS's Finder/Explorer equivalent. Save boxes were also very minimal - usually just an icon that you could drag into a filer window and a text entry box to adjust the filename.
Agreed - Apple's doing a good job in their engineering.
On the speed issue though, whilst my Mac (running 10.4.7) boots up pretty quickly to the login box (about 20 seconds), it takes an incredibly large amount of time to log in on a fairly clean installation (about a minute). There's a great deal of work left to be done on the speed front.
The speed of BeOS, on the other hand, is scary. Boot up into a usable desktop in about 5 seconds is how it should be on all OSes.
I must admit that I'm not entirely convinced by Plan 9 either as an OS for the future. Yeah, it is more advanced than Unix, but it is still a mid-80's OS, that could have been created a decade earlier.
Hardly!
Mac OS X is *still* a flavour of Unix. Yes there are additional modules and applications bolted on, however it's not really done in a particularly clean manner - it is after all just an evolved version of NeXTstep. It is not really all that much more advanced above the original NeXTstep of 1989, in that it uses an essentially identical architecture.
Arguably Mac OS 9 has a cleaner, more modular design than Mac OS X.
All that you really seem to be saying is that Apple are doing a pretty good job of implementing their OS and improving performance, and Microsoft are doing a bad job. The modularity of the two is immaterial to this.
I think you've missed the point.
At the simplest level Haiku is a re-implementation of BeOS, a 15 year old OS. It has a similar kind of architecture to Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. The basic system design is only marginally advanced over all of these. (Yes, I know this is a gross generalisation.) It is mostly POSIX compliant and relies on the GNU legacy for a load of tools.
(IMHO none of these OSes are anywhere near as advanced as the OS Apple produced for the Newton and have long since abandoned.)
What was suggested is throwing away the lot and starting again to come up with something genuinely new; i.e. not recreating that which has come before but learning from it and taking a new more modular approach. This is something I too would love to see.