Having to upgrade is an awful, awful thing in many cases, I agree. But I don't think it can be fully pinned on Microsoft. Last year I upgraded my home machine from Windows 95 to Windows ME (which is really just Windows 98 + some extra junk that you can turn off). Then I found that my video card didn't have drivers that worked with Windows ME, so I had to buy a new video card. Who was to blame in this case? Not Microsoft.
The same sort of problem can easily happen with Windows and Linux. What if KDE 3.0 requires a 1GHz processor and 3D graphics card? What if the Star Office developers decide to change the file format and ignore backward compatibility, maybe because they are behind schedule and they can't find many programmers interested in helping out?
A console is a very different environment. You can tune exactly for the hardware because there will be no variances.
I agree in principle, but that's not it. It isn't polycount either, as someone else said. At the moment, the average PS2 game has more polygons than the average PC game (that's because if you assume hardware T&L on the PC then you have a severely limited market; lots and lots of mass market PCs still ship with the equivalent of a Voodoo 1 or worse, go to Dell's site if you don't believe me).
I'm talking about much larger issues. For example, on the PC you come up with a file format for something, then just keep using it because it works. With a little work, it often turns out that a 20MB file of world geometry can be knocked down to 5MB, just because there's so much garbage in there and no one ever thought about remove it. Or maybe there are thousands of keyframes of animation that make no visual difference and can be removed. Or some trifling module allocates 8M at load time and keeps it around, even though it isn't actually used. Or maybe there's poor collision detection code that does way too much work and could be made to run 4x faster. These kinds of things are _common_. I'm a game developer; I've been there.
Computer games are the ONLY applications that tax a home-users cutting-edge machine... At the moment, systems are a little ahead of gaming technology, but in a few months that won't be the case. Just because your parents don't play Dark Age of Camelot or AquaNox, don't assume Joe User doesn't want to.
But the kicker is that these games really don't need such horsepower. I'm willing to bet that if there were any pressure to get any of these games running on a more resource constrained system, like a game console, then lots of unnecessary internal fat would be trimmed right away. But there's no pressure to do so otherwise. And even if a game that could run just fine on a PII 400 requires a 1GHz processor, certain people seem to _like_ the justification for upgrading.
Death to the FPS and bring back a decent PLOT structured game to the PC!
I think the call for better plots and storylines is becoming rather trite and empty. The more plot and storyline a game has, the more linear it becomes. Final Fantasy X is a great example. Great graphics, brilliant cutscenes, zero game. When people say they want "plot" added to a genre, I'm starting to think that it really means a genre is creatively dead. It's like saying "What this unrealistic action movie starting Jackie Jan needs is more of a literary quality." Or "this porn has terrible acting." The complaint is about a trifle; there's something more fundamental at stake. Namely that no one watches Jackie Chan movies for their literacy and no one watches porn for the acting ability of the stars. These complaints are like a ten year old putting down Teletubbies as being dumb and beneath him, when he's really just outside of the target audience.
1. We need to determine everything at compile time, so we can prove properties of our programs.
2. We should make everything as dynamic as possible, so we're not prematurely locked into a solution.
You could argue either way, but it's a split decision. Some schools lean one way, some the other.
Some Lisp and Scheme books published in the last ten years:
Paradigms of Aritificial Intelligence Programming (Norvig)
ANSI Common Lisp (Graham)
The Little Schemer (Friedman & Felleisen)
On Lisp: Advanced Techniques for Common Lisp (Graham)
Lisp in Small Pieces (Queinnec & Callaway)
Lisp and Scheme have long been viewed as just "Educational Languages". Do you see any future with the two languages in commercial software?
You're confusing the two. Scheme has always been an educational language, because that's what it was designed as. But Lisp has been hardcore for a long time now: AutoCAD, Emacs, Mirai (high end 3D modelling/texturing/animation system), Yahoo Store, scripting for the Crash Bandicoot series and the upcoming Jax & Dexter for the PlayStation 2, it's used by companies such as British Telecom and Boeing, and so on.
Have you ever run a web site? Even for a site on a niche topic, you can often get a dozen or more emails a day. Responding to those takes time. Now imaging you ran a site that was moderately popular with a regular following. You'd likely get a hundred or more emails a day. Can you really respond to those personally? You'd be spending hours a day responding to them. Now imagine you're in a public position where you, theoretically, represent millions or tens of millions of people. You get 500 letters a day. Can you _really_ deal with them personally?
Fanboy types, who send email to George Lucas, various game companies, and makers of TV shows don't understand this. They think they deserve personal attention. They don't realize they are one of the masses.
First, there were the obvious technical problems. Yahoo was dead in the water for the entire morning of September 11. Ditto for CNN and MSNBC. There were smaller sites reporting on things--mostly weblogs--but they were reporting by watching TV, listening to the radio, and typing what they saw and heard. So the net was a secondary news source in this case. People were only using the web because they were at work and didn't have access to other media.
Second, the independent sites were not doing any better than TV in general. We make fun of TV for jumping the gun too quickly and reporting unconfirmed information, but the weblogs were much worse about this. Dave Winer started beating the war drum right away at scripting.com, putting up scare-tactic surverys like "Will America go to war?" within hours of the attacks. Metafilter.com ran a whole bunch of really dumb stories that never would have made it to TV, like the Nostradamus nonsense, and the headline about a small, unmarked plane circling Manhattan. Were they trying to get people to think it was another terrorist-controlled plane? In reality, it was a FEMA plane surveying the damage.
In general, the weblogs and independent web sites have been too quick to pat themselves on the back about September 11.
In the mid 1990s I did commercial video game development. The largest hard drive I had during that time was 330MB, and it was never more than about half full. At home I had an 80MB hard drive for the longest time, but it was never more than a third full. Now I have a 6 gig drive at home, of which maybe 2 gigs are used. Most of that 2 gigs is for Windows plus some big applications, like Corel Draw and Delphi. That machine is used for commercial graphic arts plus software development in Lisp. I set aside a 2G partition for Linux for a while (Red Hat 5.2), but don't use it much.
My point? Solid state hard drives would work just fine, except that developers and consumers have gotten used to space being an infinite commodity. Games take 1 gig each to install. Windows XP takes over a gig just for the core OS. Now we have consumers buying 60 to 160 gigabyte hard drives. And the former is under $200. That much memory would cost thousands. But could I personally live within 1 gigabyte? Easily, provided I'm not using typical desktop OS that's designed to take up hard drive space (Windows, most Linux distributions, MacOS X).
MhZ ratings mean something to me, because I enjoy tweaking the most from my system.
MHz ratings _shouldn't_ mean something to you in that case. You'd really pick a 2GHz CPU over a 1.8GHz model, even if the latter were 20% faster?
Consumers in general will be fine with this change, but geeks are going to implode. Too many have made a hobby out of tracking MHz and transistor count and other meaningless numbers. Unfortunately, it's about the same as horsepower in cars. More is not necessarily better. And no one who buys a car fixates on horsepower above all else.
AMD is now not selling thier processors as 1500MHz, but instead as 'equivilant to a P4 at 1800MHz' -> an AthlonXP 1800+. Is this a fair thing to do?
The switch from MHz to product codes was a Slashdot story last month, with plenty of the usual heated discussion. This story isn't about that, though. It's about the introduction of a new processor.
The test would be: if someone somewhere makes a lot of money on the distribution of some media, therefore the "product" should be sewed shut by law so that revenue can be enhanced and locked down forever for the distributor.
You're overreacting.
With music, it is simple. As much as some slashdotters don't want to admit it, there are lots of musicians and bands making good livings from having their CDs distributed by Evil Record Companies. The right for those musicians to make money is worth protecting. If scientists were making a direct living from publishing in journals--that is, if they were paid tens of thousands of dollars per paper--then there _would_ be incentive to blindly put those papers all over the web.
This is _completely_ different. The RIAA represents for-profit businesses. Everyone is clamoring for music; it's a big commodity, a multi-billion dollar industry.
Scientific journals are a backwater. Mostly libraries buy them. No one is getting rich. And for the most part the people who read them _like_ them. The simple problem is that someone takes months or more to write a paper, then that paper ends up in a journal that's only read by 100 people (e.g. The Journal of Southwestern Soil Science). _But_ if that paper were available on the web, then it would find many more readers, would be much easier to point colleagues at, and so on. Doing so, though, puts the reasearcher--in many eyes, anyway--right up there with high school students that start web sites for their pretend companies ("I'm the president, lead programmer, and web designer").
For the record, some journals ask for first print rights only, and the author is free to put his or her articles on the web aftwerward. There's not much to complain about there.
Postal was never a good game in the first place
on
Loki Goes Postal
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· Score: 2
Postal rode off of the hype from day 1. There was the hope that it was still a good game regardless, but no, it turned out to be poor to mediocre.
Since those days, there has been a realization that releasing intentionally over-the-top games could severely hurt the game industry. You know how DOOM and Mortal Kombat keep getting brought up as examples of violent games, even though they are each at least 8 years old? Just be glad the much worse examples aren't noticed by bored senators, like Kingpin, Soldier of Fortune, and Postal. No one, and I mean no one, wants a PC running Postal to show up on the floor of the senate. We'd immediately get hit with all sorts of regulations.
But in any case, Postal is still a poor to mediocre game:)
The trouble with most GUI desktops is that they are designed for manipulating items on a GUI desktop and customing the GUI desktop rather than making the interface transparent. As a counterexample consider the Palm, where the idea is to make the UI be as lightweight and unobtrusive as possible, because people want to just take notes and view their schedules. A WIMP desktop is overkill, so they went with something an order of magnitude simpler.
A 3D desktop is a step in the opposite direction, placing more emphasis on the desktop itself than what people want to do.
Windows software does not know how to share; how to place configuration information under HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE; how not to leave necessary files in c:\windows; how not to mess up your Start menu, desktop, and registry upon installation. You think Freshmeat is full of amateurish, half-baked projects? Take a look around your local software store and you'll find the same exact thing.
I have never had trouble like this with _any_ Windows applications. I hate installers, and I'm not a big fan of Windows, but I think you're overstating your case.
On the contrary, if you want to make the "computing tool" stable, you have to write the kernel first. Without a well defined kernel what does the virtual memory, memory protection, process scheduling, symmetric multiprocessing etc?
No, this isn't true. Look at some of the big successes in "alternative views of computing" in recent years: Erlang, REBOL, Python, Zope, etc. None of these involved writing a kernel.
Sigh. The posting I'm responding to is flamebait pure and simple. Any time you advocate one thing and use the term "suck" or "sucks" in regard to the other, that's the definition of flamebait.
But then, sadly, it is moderated up as "Insightful." The grand rule of Slashdot forums is "Advocacy of something popular is considered trolling. Advocacy of the #2 underdog is considered a breath of fresh air."
A window manager is just a layer on top of X Windows. Sure, it is nicer to have WMs that are a bit more usable and aesthetic than the default. Blackbox does this nicely. Some fluff, like application docks, can be handy as well.
But going beyond this doesn't give much benefit, as a WM is still just a launching point for generic X Windows applications. To integrate further, you have to start dictating standards for applications, and providing service libraries for applications. And then, of course, no one wants to support your particular WM, so there's no point in going down that road.
The bottom line is that WMs are misleading. People see them and all the pretty graphics and think "All it takes is a good WM to replicate the Windows UI experience!" This is not true. A WM is frustratingly contained in a limited environment, and there's no easy way to reach out and develop a cohesive desktop using a WM as a starting point. As such, WMs are no longer seen as "the way."
"Niche" implies that there's a particular, small area in which it would be extremely useful. The OSes listed in this article are pretty vanilla for the most part, implementing the usual set of OS features, but with programmer's own pet technical bent ("Written entirely in assembly language," "Highly modular," and so on). As such, while these may be fantastic learning projects, the world is not clamoring for operating systems that differ in minor technical ways.
Quite possibly, the world is not needing another OS in the traditional sense. When someone uses Windows, for example, he or she thinks of the "OS" as being Explorer, Internet Explorer, and certain common applications. It doesn't matter that they're running on top of the Windows kernel or the Linux kernel or whatever...that level of detail is irrelevant unless you make a hobby out of being concerned with it. The separation of a computing tool into "OS" and "application" is outdated. A better angle is to focus on what computers get used for most commonly, and then write a so-called operating system to give you the support you need to provide those tools to users. Writing the OS first is akin to the usual mistake of architecting a 3D engine without any clue as to what game it should be used in. That's the backward approach.
Standardization kills choice"... "I have standardized on MS." So, you like to see choice, but you'd rather not use it? Interesting.
_Everyone_ can make a choice. His personal choice is Windows, but he's saying that he wants lots of options available so each person has more to choose from.
Re:More eclectic, less practical...
on
Apocalypse 3
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· Score: 2
The foreach construction allows Perl to better understand your intention. It takes advantage of that knowledge to increase its efficiency.
Although if your're _that_ pressed for run-time efficiency, then you shouldn't be programming in an interpreted language in the first place. Sure, "for" is slower than "foreach" but replace all occurrences of the latter with the former is any application and what do you get? Certainly not a perceptible difference.
What matters in this case is that foreach style loops are easier for humans to parse.
Slashdot Mirror
Having to upgrade is an awful, awful thing in many cases, I agree. But I don't think it can be fully pinned on Microsoft. Last year I upgraded my home machine from Windows 95 to Windows ME (which is really just Windows 98 + some extra junk that you can turn off). Then I found that my video card didn't have drivers that worked with Windows ME, so I had to buy a new video card. Who was to blame in this case? Not Microsoft.
The same sort of problem can easily happen with Windows and Linux. What if KDE 3.0 requires a 1GHz processor and 3D graphics card? What if the Star Office developers decide to change the file format and ignore backward compatibility, maybe because they are behind schedule and they can't find many programmers interested in helping out?
A console is a very different environment. You can tune exactly for the hardware because there will be no variances.
I agree in principle, but that's not it. It isn't polycount either, as someone else said. At the moment, the average PS2 game has more polygons than the average PC game (that's because if you assume hardware T&L on the PC then you have a severely limited market; lots and lots of mass market PCs still ship with the equivalent of a Voodoo 1 or worse, go to Dell's site if you don't believe me).
I'm talking about much larger issues. For example, on the PC you come up with a file format for something, then just keep using it because it works. With a little work, it often turns out that a 20MB file of world geometry can be knocked down to 5MB, just because there's so much garbage in there and no one ever thought about remove it. Or maybe there are thousands of keyframes of animation that make no visual difference and can be removed. Or some trifling module allocates 8M at load time and keeps it around, even though it isn't actually used. Or maybe there's poor collision detection code that does way too much work and could be made to run 4x faster. These kinds of things are _common_. I'm a game developer; I've been there.
Computer games are the ONLY applications that tax a home-users cutting-edge machine... At the moment, systems are a little ahead of gaming technology, but in a few months that won't be the case. Just because your parents don't play Dark Age of Camelot or AquaNox, don't assume Joe User doesn't want to.
But the kicker is that these games really don't need such horsepower. I'm willing to bet that if there were any pressure to get any of these games running on a more resource constrained system, like a game console, then lots of unnecessary internal fat would be trimmed right away. But there's no pressure to do so otherwise. And even if a game that could run just fine on a PII 400 requires a 1GHz processor, certain people seem to _like_ the justification for upgrading.
You forgot "solving systems of 50,000 equations." People always bring that one up, as unrealistic as it.
Death to the FPS and bring back a decent PLOT structured game to the PC!
I think the call for better plots and storylines is becoming rather trite and empty. The more plot and storyline a game has, the more linear it becomes. Final Fantasy X is a great example. Great graphics, brilliant cutscenes, zero game. When people say they want "plot" added to a genre, I'm starting to think that it really means a genre is creatively dead. It's like saying "What this unrealistic action movie starting Jackie Jan needs is more of a literary quality." Or "this porn has terrible acting." The complaint is about a trifle; there's something more fundamental at stake. Namely that no one watches Jackie Chan movies for their literacy and no one watches porn for the acting ability of the stars. These complaints are like a ten year old putting down Teletubbies as being dumb and beneath him, when he's really just outside of the target audience.
There are two schools of thought:
1. We need to determine everything at compile time, so we can prove properties of our programs.
2. We should make everything as dynamic as possible, so we're not prematurely locked into a solution.
You could argue either way, but it's a split decision. Some schools lean one way, some the other.
No new books. No press. No interest.
Some Lisp and Scheme books published in the last ten years:
Paradigms of Aritificial Intelligence Programming (Norvig)
ANSI Common Lisp (Graham)
The Little Schemer (Friedman & Felleisen)
On Lisp: Advanced Techniques for Common Lisp (Graham)
Lisp in Small Pieces (Queinnec & Callaway)
Lisp and Scheme have long been viewed as just "Educational Languages". Do you see any future with the two languages in commercial software?
You're confusing the two. Scheme has always been an educational language, because that's what it was designed as. But Lisp has been hardcore for a long time now: AutoCAD, Emacs, Mirai (high end 3D modelling/texturing/animation system), Yahoo Store, scripting for the Crash Bandicoot series and the upcoming Jax & Dexter for the PlayStation 2, it's used by companies such as British Telecom and Boeing, and so on.
Have you ever run a web site? Even for a site on a niche topic, you can often get a dozen or more emails a day. Responding to those takes time. Now imaging you ran a site that was moderately popular with a regular following. You'd likely get a hundred or more emails a day. Can you really respond to those personally? You'd be spending hours a day responding to them. Now imagine you're in a public position where you, theoretically, represent millions or tens of millions of people. You get 500 letters a day. Can you _really_ deal with them personally?
Fanboy types, who send email to George Lucas, various game companies, and makers of TV shows don't understand this. They think they deserve personal attention. They don't realize they are one of the masses.
First, there were the obvious technical problems. Yahoo was dead in the water for the entire morning of September 11. Ditto for CNN and MSNBC. There were smaller sites reporting on things--mostly weblogs--but they were reporting by watching TV, listening to the radio, and typing what they saw and heard. So the net was a secondary news source in this case. People were only using the web because they were at work and didn't have access to other media.
Second, the independent sites were not doing any better than TV in general. We make fun of TV for jumping the gun too quickly and reporting unconfirmed information, but the weblogs were much worse about this. Dave Winer started beating the war drum right away at scripting.com, putting up scare-tactic surverys like "Will America go to war?" within hours of the attacks. Metafilter.com ran a whole bunch of really dumb stories that never would have made it to TV, like the Nostradamus nonsense, and the headline about a small, unmarked plane circling Manhattan. Were they trying to get people to think it was another terrorist-controlled plane? In reality, it was a FEMA plane surveying the damage.
In general, the weblogs and independent web sites have been too quick to pat themselves on the back about September 11.
In the mid 1990s I did commercial video game development. The largest hard drive I had during that time was 330MB, and it was never more than about half full. At home I had an 80MB hard drive for the longest time, but it was never more than a third full. Now I have a 6 gig drive at home, of which maybe 2 gigs are used. Most of that 2 gigs is for Windows plus some big applications, like Corel Draw and Delphi. That machine is used for commercial graphic arts plus software development in Lisp. I set aside a 2G partition for Linux for a while (Red Hat 5.2), but don't use it much.
My point? Solid state hard drives would work just fine, except that developers and consumers have gotten used to space being an infinite commodity. Games take 1 gig each to install. Windows XP takes over a gig just for the core OS. Now we have consumers buying 60 to 160 gigabyte hard drives. And the former is under $200. That much memory would cost thousands. But could I personally live within 1 gigabyte? Easily, provided I'm not using typical desktop OS that's designed to take up hard drive space (Windows, most Linux distributions, MacOS X).
MhZ ratings mean something to me, because I enjoy tweaking the most from my system.
MHz ratings _shouldn't_ mean something to you in that case. You'd really pick a 2GHz CPU over a 1.8GHz model, even if the latter were 20% faster?
Consumers in general will be fine with this change, but geeks are going to implode. Too many have made a hobby out of tracking MHz and transistor count and other meaningless numbers. Unfortunately, it's about the same as horsepower in cars. More is not necessarily better. And no one who buys a car fixates on horsepower above all else.
AMD is now not selling thier processors as 1500MHz, but instead as 'equivilant to a P4 at 1800MHz' -> an AthlonXP 1800+. Is this a fair thing to do?
The switch from MHz to product codes was a Slashdot story last month, with plenty of the usual heated discussion. This story isn't about that, though. It's about the introduction of a new processor.
The test would be: if someone somewhere makes a lot of money on the distribution of some media, therefore the "product" should be sewed shut by law so that revenue can be enhanced and locked down forever for the distributor.
You're overreacting.
With music, it is simple. As much as some slashdotters don't want to admit it, there are lots of musicians and bands making good livings from having their CDs distributed by Evil Record Companies. The right for those musicians to make money is worth protecting. If scientists were making a direct living from publishing in journals--that is, if they were paid tens of thousands of dollars per paper--then there _would_ be incentive to blindly put those papers all over the web.
This is _completely_ different. The RIAA represents for-profit businesses. Everyone is clamoring for music; it's a big commodity, a multi-billion dollar industry.
Scientific journals are a backwater. Mostly libraries buy them. No one is getting rich. And for the most part the people who read them _like_ them. The simple problem is that someone takes months or more to write a paper, then that paper ends up in a journal that's only read by 100 people (e.g. The Journal of Southwestern Soil Science). _But_ if that paper were available on the web, then it would find many more readers, would be much easier to point colleagues at, and so on. Doing so, though, puts the reasearcher--in many eyes, anyway--right up there with high school students that start web sites for their pretend companies ("I'm the president, lead programmer, and web designer").
For the record, some journals ask for first print rights only, and the author is free to put his or her articles on the web aftwerward. There's not much to complain about there.
Postal rode off of the hype from day 1. There was the hope that it was still a good game regardless, but no, it turned out to be poor to mediocre.
:)
Since those days, there has been a realization that releasing intentionally over-the-top games could severely hurt the game industry. You know how DOOM and Mortal Kombat keep getting brought up as examples of violent games, even though they are each at least 8 years old? Just be glad the much worse examples aren't noticed by bored senators, like Kingpin, Soldier of Fortune, and Postal. No one, and I mean no one, wants a PC running Postal to show up on the floor of the senate. We'd immediately get hit with all sorts of regulations.
But in any case, Postal is still a poor to mediocre game
The trouble with most GUI desktops is that they are designed for manipulating items on a GUI desktop and customing the GUI desktop rather than making the interface transparent. As a counterexample consider the Palm, where the idea is to make the UI be as lightweight and unobtrusive as possible, because people want to just take notes and view their schedules. A WIMP desktop is overkill, so they went with something an order of magnitude simpler.
A 3D desktop is a step in the opposite direction, placing more emphasis on the desktop itself than what people want to do.
Windows software does not know how to share; how to place configuration information under HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE; how not to leave necessary files in c:\windows; how not to mess up your Start menu, desktop, and registry upon installation. You think Freshmeat is full of amateurish, half-baked projects? Take a look around your local software store and you'll find the same exact thing.
I have never had trouble like this with _any_ Windows applications. I hate installers, and I'm not a big fan of Windows, but I think you're overstating your case.
We don't need no stinkin' file extensions!
Really? You don't put ".c" at the end of C source files? Hmmm. I used those kind of extensions under UNIX ten years ago.
On the contrary, if you want to make the "computing tool" stable, you have to write the kernel first. Without a well defined kernel what does the virtual memory, memory protection, process scheduling, symmetric multiprocessing etc?
No, this isn't true. Look at some of the big successes in "alternative views of computing" in recent years: Erlang, REBOL, Python, Zope, etc. None of these involved writing a kernel.
Sigh. The posting I'm responding to is flamebait pure and simple. Any time you advocate one thing and use the term "suck" or "sucks" in regard to the other, that's the definition of flamebait.
But then, sadly, it is moderated up as "Insightful." The grand rule of Slashdot forums is "Advocacy of something popular is considered trolling. Advocacy of the #2 underdog is considered a breath of fresh air."
A window manager is just a layer on top of X Windows. Sure, it is nicer to have WMs that are a bit more usable and aesthetic than the default. Blackbox does this nicely. Some fluff, like application docks, can be handy as well.
But going beyond this doesn't give much benefit, as a WM is still just a launching point for generic X Windows applications. To integrate further, you have to start dictating standards for applications, and providing service libraries for applications. And then, of course, no one wants to support your particular WM, so there's no point in going down that road.
The bottom line is that WMs are misleading. People see them and all the pretty graphics and think "All it takes is a good WM to replicate the Windows UI experience!" This is not true. A WM is frustratingly contained in a limited environment, and there's no easy way to reach out and develop a cohesive desktop using a WM as a starting point. As such, WMs are no longer seen as "the way."
"Niche" implies that there's a particular, small area in which it would be extremely useful. The OSes listed in this article are pretty vanilla for the most part, implementing the usual set of OS features, but with programmer's own pet technical bent ("Written entirely in assembly language," "Highly modular," and so on). As such, while these may be fantastic learning projects, the world is not clamoring for operating systems that differ in minor technical ways.
Quite possibly, the world is not needing another OS in the traditional sense. When someone uses Windows, for example, he or she thinks of the "OS" as being Explorer, Internet Explorer, and certain common applications. It doesn't matter that they're running on top of the Windows kernel or the Linux kernel or whatever...that level of detail is irrelevant unless you make a hobby out of being concerned with it. The separation of a computing tool into "OS" and "application" is outdated. A better angle is to focus on what computers get used for most commonly, and then write a so-called operating system to give you the support you need to provide those tools to users. Writing the OS first is akin to the usual mistake of architecting a 3D engine without any clue as to what game it should be used in. That's the backward approach.
Standardization kills choice" ... "I have standardized on MS." So, you like to see choice, but you'd rather not use it? Interesting.
_Everyone_ can make a choice. His personal choice is Windows, but he's saying that he wants lots of options available so each person has more to choose from.
The foreach construction allows Perl to better understand your intention. It takes advantage of that knowledge to increase its efficiency.
Although if your're _that_ pressed for run-time efficiency, then you shouldn't be programming in an interpreted language in the first place. Sure, "for" is slower than "foreach" but replace all occurrences of the latter with the former is any application and what do you get? Certainly not a perceptible difference.
What matters in this case is that foreach style loops are easier for humans to parse.