but if it were me, I'd spend my energy on building something new, rather than just trying to be compatible with something that'll just be obsolete by the time I'm done anyway.
Linus could have said the same thing to himself in 1991. UNIX at the time, as most people seem to forget these days, was in a downward slide that started in the mid 1980s.
Obviously, its a combination of factors-- but what killed the mall style arcade with the top 100 games was that the games weren't that much better than home systems!
And that comes around to games falling into a handful of overdone genres. At arcades what do you get: driving games, gun games, fighting games. At home what do you get: gun games, driving games, fighting games, plus a few other styles. To get people to play in arcades there needs to be a fresher experience for the player. Arcades countered home systems by going fo gun and driving games with lots of expensive hardware attached, but that just made it harder for arcade owners to turn a profit.
In arcades of yore, the hook was that was a smorgasbord of games. When arcades are filled with small variations on themes that were creatively dead in 1995, then there's not much appeal.
Is it just me or do most of the anti-GUI comments sound like they're coming from people who have a general dislike for Windows and Microsoft, and therefore don't want Linux clogged up with "none of that sissy crap"? Think about things for a second. A GUI development environment doesn't automatically make you a bad coder. We're still talking about languages like C++ and Java here. If you're not sharp enough to be working in C++, then some magic environment with windows and dialog boxes is not going to suddenly make you capable. Someone who chooses such an environment does so because he or she finds some other benefit to it.
I work in the game business, and it is rare to come across a PC game developer that doesn't use a GUI environment like Visual C++. Now we're not talking about slacker wannabe coders here; we're talking about Tim Sweeney and John Carmack and everyone who used to be at Looking Glass. So most people in this thread would write them off because they use an environment designed for infantile programming? These are sharp people; please give them some credit.
It is very nice to see someone forging ahead and implementing his vision. I know he's not the only one, mind you, but there is far too much circular self-justification in the Linux community. I mean that honestly, not in a trolling sort of way. For example, quite a large number of people are unhappy with X for a variety of reasons. But the discussions always go like this:
A: X is from the mid 1980s, back before we knew what we wanted out of a desktop GUI. It is too large and complex for what it gives us. I sure would like to see an alternative.
B: But X exists already! Sure you don't like parts of it, by why throw out the baby with the bathwater! We can improve it and make it work better.
And so on. And then fifteen years later we're still all reliant on X. I'm not trying to bash X specifically, just point out that it is nice to see someout with a different point of view who is following through on his ideas.
BTW. Did you know that, because of this type system, Haskell programs cannot segfault.?
Perl, Python, TCL, Scheme, REBOL, and Lisp can't "segfault" either, but they don't have such a type system. Haskell is a fine language, but much of its advocacy is misguided (as is much Linux advocacy).
Every year I see this contest and every year the results are impressive. But I still rarely, rarely see any open source programs of significance written in OCaml, Haskell, etc. Okay, there's a really nice webserver written in Erlang ("eddie"). But with all the frothing about how great these languages are, you'd expect to see the next great program written using one.
Aguably many dot-coms failed because they were just throwing around empty buzzwords. All these companies that did "cooperative content management" and "e-commerce infrastructure coordination for the enterprise." You look at their websites and think "What the heck do they _do_?"
Note, for example, that some of the top OCaml entries in the past were from the designers and implementers of the OCaml language and compiler. This year, the Judge's Prize, for a program written in Erlang, went to a team including the original architect of Erlang, plus the author of the Erlang compiler. So the poster is correct in that this is not a battle of languages, but rather a battle of top notch programmers, each using his or her pet language.
A serious C++ entry, for example, would be from a team headed by Bjarne Strousrup.
Please re-read the original posting. "Cool coding tricks" were never mentioned. Realistically, very, very, _very_ few people study the source code. You get more recognition for your achievements by what people think of the _running program_. And in that case the source is irrelevant.
Almost all of your reasons would apply equally well for closed-source "free as in beer" software. There's a bit of ideologial confusion in this thread, methinks.
I expect my views are somewhat different than the usual on the subject, as I'm not a rabid open or closed source advocate. I use what works.
Some software is too fundamental, or too generally useful, to be controlled by an entity that is interested in making money for itself and its stockholders. A company may decide to shift into a different market, letting some of its products languish (Arity did this; they developed a popular Prolog system, but then stopped development of it to concentrate on applications). Or a company may decide to change its marketing strategy, leaving previous users out in the cold (Franz, Inc., sold a Common Lisp system for around $500 a few years ago; that system is now $2500+). Or a company may simply go out of business. There were hundreds of developers left out in the cold when Apple dropped its Newton. Imagine if Python were closed source and Python, Inc., after losing lots of money in the dot-com crash, shut its doors in a similar fashion.
File compression software, operating systems, web servers, scripting languages...those are all too basic to be tossed about in a sea of marketing and corporatism. But other software is not so fundamental: games, packages relied on by niches (e.g. graphic artists), and so on. There's less reason to argue that these should be open source. And while Perl, Python, and TCL seem to be out-teching commercial offerings, it's not nearly so clear when it comes to CorelDraw and Photoshop vs. The Gimp for example.
We "do" open source because it's a better development model - the end product is stronger (most of the time). Say what you will about infighting and the group politics that can be
It is easy to say this, and there are great examples of open source products. But there are also just as many--maybe more--examples of top notch closed source products.
there's a reason more and more "mission-critical" applications run on open source platforms and technologies.
Of course this isn't true. Most mission critical stuff is for embedded systems, and most of it is not done with Linux or other open source systems.
Moral: Don't let your personal view of the way you'd like things to be color your perception of reality.
One of many alternative operating systems
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There are a good number of alternative OSes out there, similar to this one. They don't get much attention, however, as they're all (1) short on useful applications, and (2) not Linux. But remember that being UNIX-like is not necessarily the end goal of operating systems, so I'm happy to see alternatives being developed.
As for the negative comments about this OS being written in assembly:
Remember, the rule of optimization has always been "make it work, then make it fast." Low-level OS details--multitasking, memory protection, resource handling, memory management--have been solved problems for 30 years or more. So we know how to make it work; it's okay to focus on making it fast. And, yes, to an experienced programmer with the right mindset, assembly is still faster than C++, everything else being equal. That's just been accepted as a truism, though it was once heresy (much as programmers now accept that object-orientedness is not the panacea that everyone once thought it to be).
As much as I hate to admit it, StarOffice is a classic example of the schism between commercial software developers and open source advocates. The latter love to tout free alternatives to commercial software: "Star office!" "The Gimp!" But then realistically, when you try to use the free clone in an real environment, it quickly becomes obvious that it is not nearly as ready for prime time as its proponents claim it to be. This is not to put down all open source development, but it is a small cry for realism and restraint among zealots. Look a it this way: who knows more about office suites, college students who write two papers a year, or people who work 40 hours a week in a business?
It is also regrettable that Star Office tried so hard to be like Microsoft Office. It would have been better to develop a simpler, more rock solid, legitimate _alternative_, rather than what comes across as a wannabe clone that misses the mark.
This is outside the x86 realm
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The Itanium is not a clear replacement for the x86 line by any means. If we're going to toss the x86 architecture completely, then there are lots of options: PowerPC, StrongARM, Alpha, SPARC, something else. Now switching the entire PC world to a SPARC chip sounds crazy, but it's not any crazier than switching to Itanium.
For the record, Intel has cooked up x86 "replacements" before, like the i860 and i960.
In recent years, science fiction and fantasy (especially childrens' books such as Harry Potter) have failed to come up with anything truly original.
Well, duh. These kinds of arguments quickly degenerate into the usual "all books only have seven plots" nonsense, which is balderdash. What matters is that a book has the spark of personal vision. Harry Potter _works_. It's entertaining, the writing flows, and you get pulled into the world. And even though there are cliches--and certainly Rowling recognizes and revels in all the fantasy cliches she uses--this is something thats much fresher than all that Terry Brooks nonsense and the usual "I want to write the Lord of the Rings!" crap. Harry Potter is fresh in the way that all good science fiction and fantasy is fresh.
Even after reading this a few times, I'm still not sure how you went from an article on Gallium Arsenide chips to:
"If we could come up with microchips so cheap that they cost fractions of pennies yet had the processing power of, I don't know, an Atari ST (8Mhz IIRC) then think of the places we could put them - and cheaply !"
And then it was moderated up as "interesting"? How about "offtopic?" Bizarre.
64-bit operations useful...sometimes
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I'm sure many people can appreciate 64 bit integer ops; for me, it means single instruction xor for the 64 bit hash codes used in chess transposition tables.
Yes, 64-bit operations have a handful of general uses, but when you weigh the benefits against the huge increases in transistor count, power consumption, and memory usage, are they worth it? I argue that they aren't. Doubling the size of almost every unit on the chip is a steep price to pay.
Most game UIs are written with custom code, not huge object-oriented libraries. And they tend to be very usable and snappy on what amounts to low-end hardware (thinking of game consoles here). Compare this to any method of creating a UI for your favorite OS, whatever it may be. It is an order of magnitude easier to write a game-like UI from scratch than it is to learn to use any of the various UI toolkits, even if you already know those toolkits.
Along those lines, I am continually amazed when Windows XP (or the even a new KDE or whatever) requires significantly more CPU power than the previous version. Does handling clicks on widgets _really_ take that much processing power? We just blindly assume "oh yeah, context sensitive help, that's _gotta_ be expensive." But c'mon, these things could have been lightning fast on the Commodore 64.
Have you tried compiling anything substantial lately? I have, and there is still lots of waiting for the CPU to do its thing. Professional programmers can continue to soak up more CPU for a while yet . ..
Sure, all the time. But when you're programming in something with incremental compilation, like Lisp, then you don't have to wait for tens of thousands of lines (and hundreds of thousands of lines of headers) to compile every time you make a change. It's funny that Lisp was once considered a bloated and slow language.
In the late 1980s and first few years of the 1990s, UNIX was on its way out. There was a feeling of "this was good, but it is looking pretty bad compared to the way windowed home computer OSes, especially the Mac and Amiga, have been developing." Then two things happened: (1) a free UNIX-like OS appeared, and (2) those home computer OSes either disappeared (Amiga) or severely lost focus (Mac, and later Windows 95). "Linux is the greatest OS ever!" was not one of the reasons.
What has happened in the last ten years is that some people have deluded themselves into thinking that Linux is the end-all, be-all of operating systems, and not just UNIX-variant (I realize some purists hate it when Linux is compared to UNIX, but let's be realistic about it). This does not mean that Linux is bad. It simply means that Linux should not be immune to criticism, and criticism should not be met with a wall of defensiveness. Heck, there's some good open source software out there, and there's also quite a bit from angry college students without any software engineering experience. Certainly that latter shouldn't be hailed as brilliant simply because it is free as in speech.
On the one hand, as has been pointed out a dozen times, MHz is a pointless number. It's like talking about engines in terms of liters. Higher numbers are not always better than lower numbers.
More importantly, CPU speed has stopped being an issue for most people. I know, I know, there are always some people who love to claim to be the exception to the rule, people who insist they need to solve systems of fifty million linear equations or that they do aircraft design at home, but for most people, even professional programmers, speed has gone beyond what we know what to do with. When the 333MHz Pentium II rolled around, I started coding in the highest level language I could find, be it Lisp or Smalltalk, because what I then saw as excessive performance afforded me the luxury. Now we have processors that are five times faster, and I don't think about speed at the hardware level.
Slowness is usually something that's outside of the realm of hundreds of millions of operations per second. For example, Internet Explorer takes too long to start up on my machine. Lots of people apparently think that a faster processor would fix that. And other people complain that a game is stuttery, and think they need more CPU performance, when half of the time it comes down to a buggy video driver.
Slashdot Mirror
but if it were me, I'd spend my energy on building something new, rather than just trying to be compatible with something that'll just be obsolete by the time I'm done anyway.
Linus could have said the same thing to himself in 1991. UNIX at the time, as most people seem to forget these days, was in a downward slide that started in the mid 1980s.
Obviously, its a combination of factors-- but what killed the mall style arcade with the top 100 games was that the games weren't that much better than home systems!
And that comes around to games falling into a handful of overdone genres. At arcades what do you get: driving games, gun games, fighting games. At home what do you get: gun games, driving games, fighting games, plus a few other styles. To get people to play in arcades there needs to be a fresher experience for the player. Arcades countered home systems by going fo gun and driving games with lots of expensive hardware attached, but that just made it harder for arcade owners to turn a profit.
In arcades of yore, the hook was that was a smorgasbord of games. When arcades are filled with small variations on themes that were creatively dead in 1995, then there's not much appeal.
Is it just me or do most of the anti-GUI comments sound like they're coming from people who have a general dislike for Windows and Microsoft, and therefore don't want Linux clogged up with "none of that sissy crap"? Think about things for a second. A GUI development environment doesn't automatically make you a bad coder. We're still talking about languages like C++ and Java here. If you're not sharp enough to be working in C++, then some magic environment with windows and dialog boxes is not going to suddenly make you capable. Someone who chooses such an environment does so because he or she finds some other benefit to it.
I work in the game business, and it is rare to come across a PC game developer that doesn't use a GUI environment like Visual C++. Now we're not talking about slacker wannabe coders here; we're talking about Tim Sweeney and John Carmack and everyone who used to be at Looking Glass. So most people in this thread would write them off because they use an environment designed for infantile programming? These are sharp people; please give them some credit.
You missed the point. Obviously, C or C++ cannot segfault when run in an interpreter.
And compiled Lisp and Scheme can't segfault either. What's your point?
It is very nice to see someone forging ahead and implementing his vision. I know he's not the only one, mind you, but there is far too much circular self-justification in the Linux community. I mean that honestly, not in a trolling sort of way. For example, quite a large number of people are unhappy with X for a variety of reasons. But the discussions always go like this:
A: X is from the mid 1980s, back before we knew what we wanted out of a desktop GUI. It is too large and complex for what it gives us. I sure would like to see an alternative.
B: But X exists already! Sure you don't like parts of it, by why throw out the baby with the bathwater! We can improve it and make it work better.
And so on. And then fifteen years later we're still all reliant on X. I'm not trying to bash X specifically, just point out that it is nice to see someout with a different point of view who is following through on his ideas.
BTW. Did you know that, because of this type system, Haskell programs cannot segfault.?
Perl, Python, TCL, Scheme, REBOL, and Lisp can't "segfault" either, but they don't have such a type system. Haskell is a fine language, but much of its advocacy is misguided (as is much Linux advocacy).
Every year I see this contest and every year the results are impressive. But I still rarely, rarely see any open source programs of significance written in OCaml, Haskell, etc. Okay, there's a really nice webserver written in Erlang ("eddie"). But with all the frothing about how great these languages are, you'd expect to see the next great program written using one.
Aguably many dot-coms failed because they were just throwing around empty buzzwords. All these companies that did "cooperative content management" and "e-commerce infrastructure coordination for the enterprise." You look at their websites and think "What the heck do they _do_?"
Note, for example, that some of the top OCaml entries in the past were from the designers and implementers of the OCaml language and compiler. This year, the Judge's Prize, for a program written in Erlang, went to a team including the original architect of Erlang, plus the author of the Erlang compiler. So the poster is correct in that this is not a battle of languages, but rather a battle of top notch programmers, each using his or her pet language.
A serious C++ entry, for example, would be from a team headed by Bjarne Strousrup.
Please re-read the original posting. "Cool coding tricks" were never mentioned. Realistically, very, very, _very_ few people study the source code. You get more recognition for your achievements by what people think of the _running program_. And in that case the source is irrelevant.
Almost all of your reasons would apply equally well for closed-source "free as in beer" software. There's a bit of ideologial confusion in this thread, methinks.
I expect my views are somewhat different than the usual on the subject, as I'm not a rabid open or closed source advocate. I use what works.
Some software is too fundamental, or too generally useful, to be controlled by an entity that is interested in making money for itself and its stockholders. A company may decide to shift into a different market, letting some of its products languish (Arity did this; they developed a popular Prolog system, but then stopped development of it to concentrate on applications). Or a company may decide to change its marketing strategy, leaving previous users out in the cold (Franz, Inc., sold a Common Lisp system for around $500 a few years ago; that system is now $2500+). Or a company may simply go out of business. There were hundreds of developers left out in the cold when Apple dropped its Newton. Imagine if Python were closed source and Python, Inc., after losing lots of money in the dot-com crash, shut its doors in a similar fashion.
File compression software, operating systems, web servers, scripting languages...those are all too basic to be tossed about in a sea of marketing and corporatism. But other software is not so fundamental: games, packages relied on by niches (e.g. graphic artists), and so on. There's less reason to argue that these should be open source. And while Perl, Python, and TCL seem to be out-teching commercial offerings, it's not nearly so clear when it comes to CorelDraw and Photoshop vs. The Gimp for example.
We "do" open source because it's a better development model - the end product is stronger (most of the time). Say what you will about infighting and the group politics that can be
It is easy to say this, and there are great examples of open source products. But there are also just as many--maybe more--examples of top notch closed source products.
there's a reason more and more "mission-critical" applications run on open source platforms and technologies.
Of course this isn't true. Most mission critical stuff is for embedded systems, and most of it is not done with Linux or other open source systems.
Moral: Don't let your personal view of the way you'd like things to be color your perception of reality.
There are a good number of alternative OSes out there, similar to this one. They don't get much attention, however, as they're all (1) short on useful applications, and (2) not Linux. But remember that being UNIX-like is not necessarily the end goal of operating systems, so I'm happy to see alternatives being developed.
As for the negative comments about this OS being written in assembly:
Remember, the rule of optimization has always been "make it work, then make it fast." Low-level OS details--multitasking, memory protection, resource handling, memory management--have been solved problems for 30 years or more. So we know how to make it work; it's okay to focus on making it fast. And, yes, to an experienced programmer with the right mindset, assembly is still faster than C++, everything else being equal. That's just been accepted as a truism, though it was once heresy (much as programmers now accept that object-orientedness is not the panacea that everyone once thought it to be).
As much as I hate to admit it, StarOffice is a classic example of the schism between commercial software developers and open source advocates. The latter love to tout free alternatives to commercial software: "Star office!" "The Gimp!" But then realistically, when you try to use the free clone in an real environment, it quickly becomes obvious that it is not nearly as ready for prime time as its proponents claim it to be. This is not to put down all open source development, but it is a small cry for realism and restraint among zealots. Look a it this way: who knows more about office suites, college students who write two papers a year, or people who work 40 hours a week in a business?
It is also regrettable that Star Office tried so hard to be like Microsoft Office. It would have been better to develop a simpler, more rock solid, legitimate _alternative_, rather than what comes across as a wannabe clone that misses the mark.
The Itanium is not a clear replacement for the x86 line by any means. If we're going to toss the x86 architecture completely, then there are lots of options: PowerPC, StrongARM, Alpha, SPARC, something else. Now switching the entire PC world to a SPARC chip sounds crazy, but it's not any crazier than switching to Itanium.
For the record, Intel has cooked up x86 "replacements" before, like the i860 and i960.
In recent years, science fiction and fantasy (especially childrens' books such as Harry Potter) have failed to come up with anything truly original.
Well, duh. These kinds of arguments quickly degenerate into the usual "all books only have seven plots" nonsense, which is balderdash. What matters is that a book has the spark of personal vision. Harry Potter _works_. It's entertaining, the writing flows, and you get pulled into the world. And even though there are cliches--and certainly Rowling recognizes and revels in all the fantasy cliches she uses--this is something thats much fresher than all that Terry Brooks nonsense and the usual "I want to write the Lord of the Rings!" crap. Harry Potter is fresh in the way that all good science fiction and fantasy is fresh.
Even after reading this a few times, I'm still not sure how you went from an article on Gallium Arsenide chips to:
"If we could come up with microchips so cheap that they cost fractions of pennies yet had the processing power of, I don't know, an Atari ST (8Mhz IIRC) then think of the places we could put them - and cheaply !"
And then it was moderated up as "interesting"? How about "offtopic?" Bizarre.
I'm sure many people can appreciate 64 bit integer ops; for me, it means single instruction xor for the 64 bit hash codes used in chess transposition tables.
Yes, 64-bit operations have a handful of general uses, but when you weigh the benefits against the huge increases in transistor count, power consumption, and memory usage, are they worth it? I argue that they aren't. Doubling the size of almost every unit on the chip is a steep price to pay.
Most game UIs are written with custom code, not huge object-oriented libraries. And they tend to be very usable and snappy on what amounts to low-end hardware (thinking of game consoles here). Compare this to any method of creating a UI for your favorite OS, whatever it may be. It is an order of magnitude easier to write a game-like UI from scratch than it is to learn to use any of the various UI toolkits, even if you already know those toolkits.
Along those lines, I am continually amazed when Windows XP (or the even a new KDE or whatever) requires significantly more CPU power than the previous version. Does handling clicks on widgets _really_ take that much processing power? We just blindly assume "oh yeah, context sensitive help, that's _gotta_ be expensive." But c'mon, these things could have been lightning fast on the Commodore 64.
Have you tried compiling anything substantial lately? I have, and there is still lots of waiting for the CPU to do its thing. Professional programmers can continue to soak up more CPU for a while yet . . .
Sure, all the time. But when you're programming in something with incremental compilation, like Lisp, then you don't have to wait for tens of thousands of lines (and hundreds of thousands of lines of headers) to compile every time you make a change. It's funny that Lisp was once considered a bloated and slow language.
In the late 1980s and first few years of the 1990s, UNIX was on its way out. There was a feeling of "this was good, but it is looking pretty bad compared to the way windowed home computer OSes, especially the Mac and Amiga, have been developing." Then two things happened: (1) a free UNIX-like OS appeared, and (2) those home computer OSes either disappeared (Amiga) or severely lost focus (Mac, and later Windows 95). "Linux is the greatest OS ever!" was not one of the reasons.
What has happened in the last ten years is that some people have deluded themselves into thinking that Linux is the end-all, be-all of operating systems, and not just UNIX-variant (I realize some purists hate it when Linux is compared to UNIX, but let's be realistic about it). This does not mean that Linux is bad. It simply means that Linux should not be immune to criticism, and criticism should not be met with a wall of defensiveness. Heck, there's some good open source software out there, and there's also quite a bit from angry college students without any software engineering experience. Certainly that latter shouldn't be hailed as brilliant simply because it is free as in speech.
On the one hand, as has been pointed out a dozen times, MHz is a pointless number. It's like talking about engines in terms of liters. Higher numbers are not always better than lower numbers.
More importantly, CPU speed has stopped being an issue for most people. I know, I know, there are always some people who love to claim to be the exception to the rule, people who insist they need to solve systems of fifty million linear equations or that they do aircraft design at home, but for most people, even professional programmers, speed has gone beyond what we know what to do with. When the 333MHz Pentium II rolled around, I started coding in the highest level language I could find, be it Lisp or Smalltalk, because what I then saw as excessive performance afforded me the luxury. Now we have processors that are five times faster, and I don't think about speed at the hardware level.
Slowness is usually something that's outside of the realm of hundreds of millions of operations per second. For example, Internet Explorer takes too long to start up on my machine. Lots of people apparently think that a faster processor would fix that. And other people complain that a game is stuttery, and think they need more CPU performance, when half of the time it comes down to a buggy video driver.
ROFLMAO. Didn't we forget a few markets? How about embedded applications? Instrument control? Scientific applications?
My comments were strictly about the desktop market, as that is what Slashdot is concerned with.
I suppose you think a 1,000,000 page novel is better than a 1,000 page one? We're talking performance, not transistor count.