Re:Windows done right from the ground up
on
Fresh Air For Windows?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Yeah... right... 16 processes, right?
CE is Windows done from the ground up, but it's not particularly elegant. And I _did_ write software for it. The 2002 model of the Brazilian electronic voting ballot runs Windows CE.
Writing for it is every bit as ugly as it is for desktop Windows.
Re:Not gonna work / we already have it
on
Fresh Air For Windows?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I would add that Apple did not do a full rewrite but, instead, adopted a stable, mature and very sophisticated OS from NeXT. Apart from that, OSX is very different from the classic MacOS and deeply incompatible. Any compatibility had to be bolted on its top.
Microsoft has nothing like it and will not buy an OS outside.
Or they could just grab any flavor of BSD, close it, build a Win32 susbsystem on top of it and sell it as Windows 8. They already did that with a TCP/IP stack.
He doesn't really looks like the kind of guy that has an urge to go down in flames.
Every threat he makes is carefully measured. Don't count him as stupid or irrational - it takes a lot of smarts to become dictator for life.
What we saw on Saddam Hussein was a terrible miscalculation on his part. He underestimated the changes that could make the invasion of Iraq a top administration priority (namely the profit to be made by administration's friends and allies, a convenient excuse in the form of the fear coming from the 9/11 attacks and the seemingly successful invasion of Afghanistan as a proof-of-concept). In order to remain in power he should condemn the 9/11 attacks publicly and cooperate very visibly with UN weapons inspectors so not to leave space for the US accusations. That would make the Iraq invasion a less attractive proposition and he could, with some luck, retire and die of old age. As it is now, Iraq will plunge into civil war and will end up as one more theocracy in the Middle-East.
It's a big mistake to underestimate the cleverness of such leaders. I know that, as much as I personally dislike them, they are very clever, astute and dangerous people. But what they won't do is to hand their own heads on a plate.
"Obviously Crays and Connection Machines were never going to be home computers."
Funny you say that, because I could swear my son's videogame console outperforms a supercomputer built just a few years earlier than it. And, of course, it does not use an x86 CPU. And while a CM-2 would never be a home computer, we never again saw custom-designed (read: designs that push the envelope of what's possible) CPUs in supercomputers. The TOP500 is full of racks of x86 boxes (and a couple x86/Cell setups).
I would love to have a cheap and capable Cell-based desktop (specially IBM's new generation Cells) or a machine with hardware assisted garbage collection (like lisp machines had in early 80s and Azul systems seem to have today). Lots of nice inventions got lost in this tsunami of mediocrity.
"Without Wintel (or some other standard platform), most of us couldn't even afford a computer."
Enter the C-64, initially priced at US$600 with more memory than any competitor at the same price point. In its end, you could buy a perfectly capable 8-bit computer that ran a whole lot of software for US$200. And it ruled for games.
Oh... And the Amiga, the first home computer to provide real multitasking and decent multimedia capabilities. It double-ruled for games, but also grew into a very capable high-end multimedia platform. The first season of Babylon-5 special effects was rendered on one.
And the Atari ST that, while more limited than the Amiga, was the first computer to break the US$1/KB barrier (the 1040). It was also the first under US$1000 32-bit computer with a megabyte of RAM. Under US$600, if you count the 520ST (which had 512K).
And, in the UK, the Archimedes: An inexpensive RISC-based PC that, without any floating-point acceleration, outperformed a 386/387 PC in... floating point. Its processor still lives today in just about every smartphone.
And, still from the UK, the Sinclair ZX series. the first computers to be sold under US$100. And the QL, probably the first 32-bit home computer.
So, of course, nobody had home computers before wintel... Really.
As for the NT on Alpha, PPC and MIPS, they were victims of the wintel dominance. They could run Windows, and Write, and Solitaire, and Minefield and sometimes even Office, but would not run any software built for wintel (unless under emulation). When the wintel standard got dominant, pretty much every other architecture was doomed in the desktop segment.
And I can get a RISC-based machine with wireless networking, two cameras and a decent multitasking OS for pennies these days. They are called mobile phones.
The price of a home computer is, more or less, constant - it's not how much it costs to build, but how much people would be willing to pay for it. Without wintel we would have a lot more options to chose from and so would the natural market evolution. The way it is, your next computer will still be a wintel box. Faster, but no revolution will ever occur again in this front. And it won't because Microsoft and Intel don't want it to and pretty much nobody else has a vote. Including you.
The only arena where there is still some evolution (and a revolution every once and then) is the videogame console market precisely because being wintel does nothing to help their sales.
It only makes sense as a launchpad if you can manufacture parts for the spaceship there. In any other way, it's cheaper and easier to assemble your stuff in LEO and blast away from there.
If, OTOH, you can manufacture spaceship parts (or fuel and oxydizer) with materials collected on the Moon, it opens a lot of interesting possibilities.
The way it is, it is a nice training ground for Mars missions where we fine tune the tech and protocols needed to get everyone back from Mars. As Arthur Clarke once put, if everything gets wrong, a rescue mission can get to the Moon and back in less than a week. You can't afford to make any big mistakes on Mars. I am not sure if you could afford even little ones.
"Bill Gates has done more to create the thriving computer industry than anybody else"?!
The computer industry was thriving just fine. In fact, the Windows monopoly and the PC-clone industry has, most probably, prevented a lot of technological advances from seeing the light of day.
Do we all use the same x86 instruction set because it's superior to anything else? No. We use it _because_ just about every computer is built to run Windows. And it happens to run on x86s.
Prior to the ecological disaster that the PC-clone market was, there was a thriving industry producing a vast variety of different computers. While then we had Crays and Connection Machines, now we build our supercomputers out of PC parts because anything else has to be custom built.
Some degree of control is fine for us to live in a society. There must be a fixed set of rules we all agree upon that defines acceptable social interaction.
But it should be the minimum functional set of rules and not a single rule larger.
I have no doubt Science will prevail. If not here, there must be other planets where intelligent life has developed. It may be an evolutionary test and we will survive.
If we deserve to.
And, if things really turn sour, the Sun will still be there for a couple billion years and there is still time for other species to pick up where we dropped the ball.
"We simply need to wait for the event that will prove the error in ignoring a progressive, scientific approach to education. I just hope it won't be too harsh."
I think that counting on a random external event that scares you is very dangerous, specially if you can suppress any country that could spark such event with the weapons and equipment developed under the last "sputnik scare".
Reason must take control. More smart people should get more involved in politics because there seems to be a lot of dumb people involved with it right now and most smart ones that are, definitely, are playing on the wrong side.
"So, maybe having a poor class with no education that believes in creationism is the way to go? And if they want to sacrifice their public education dollars in that way, let them. I won't be one of them, but if they want to, god help them."
The only problem with your reasoning is the possibility that they may outnumber you or outpower you or even outgun you. That is, most certainly, not a nice place to be.
The ice in the north pole is floating ice. It means that, when it melts, water levels do not increase. Even if it melts completely, it will not raise sea level by a single inch.
As for the last ice age, about 25 thousand years ago, the 130m raise was presumably due to continental glaciers far bigger than anything recorder in history melting and flowing back to the oceans.
Remember... This is Slashdot. Comments like these may have unintended consequences when made here.
It's, of course, possible to build a CFront-like preprocessor that converts current C++ code into C. It's not easy and the C code would probably be even less readable than what CFront wrote. It's not practical either. Or wise.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah... right... 16 processes, right?
CE is Windows done from the ground up, but it's not particularly elegant. And I _did_ write software for it. The 2002 model of the Brazilian electronic voting ballot runs Windows CE.
Writing for it is every bit as ugly as it is for desktop Windows.
No. We would just be amazed they pulled that off.
I would add that Apple did not do a full rewrite but, instead, adopted a stable, mature and very sophisticated OS from NeXT. Apart from that, OSX is very different from the classic MacOS and deeply incompatible. Any compatibility had to be bolted on its top.
Microsoft has nothing like it and will not buy an OS outside.
Or they could just grab any flavor of BSD, close it, build a Win32 susbsystem on top of it and sell it as Windows 8. They already did that with a TCP/IP stack.
He doesn't really looks like the kind of guy that has an urge to go down in flames.
Every threat he makes is carefully measured. Don't count him as stupid or irrational - it takes a lot of smarts to become dictator for life.
What we saw on Saddam Hussein was a terrible miscalculation on his part. He underestimated the changes that could make the invasion of Iraq a top administration priority (namely the profit to be made by administration's friends and allies, a convenient excuse in the form of the fear coming from the 9/11 attacks and the seemingly successful invasion of Afghanistan as a proof-of-concept). In order to remain in power he should condemn the 9/11 attacks publicly and cooperate very visibly with UN weapons inspectors so not to leave space for the US accusations. That would make the Iraq invasion a less attractive proposition and he could, with some luck, retire and die of old age. As it is now, Iraq will plunge into civil war and will end up as one more theocracy in the Middle-East.
It's a big mistake to underestimate the cleverness of such leaders. I know that, as much as I personally dislike them, they are very clever, astute and dangerous people. But what they won't do is to hand their own heads on a plate.
Well. the Mac was never affordable (no Apple ever has prior to the current crop).
But the Ataris, Commodores really were outstandingly powerful boxes at bargain prices.
"Obviously Crays and Connection Machines were never going to be home computers."
Funny you say that, because I could swear my son's videogame console outperforms a supercomputer built just a few years earlier than it. And, of course, it does not use an x86 CPU. And while a CM-2 would never be a home computer, we never again saw custom-designed (read: designs that push the envelope of what's possible) CPUs in supercomputers. The TOP500 is full of racks of x86 boxes (and a couple x86/Cell setups).
I would love to have a cheap and capable Cell-based desktop (specially IBM's new generation Cells) or a machine with hardware assisted garbage collection (like lisp machines had in early 80s and Azul systems seem to have today). Lots of nice inventions got lost in this tsunami of mediocrity.
"Without Wintel (or some other standard platform), most of us couldn't even afford a computer."
Enter the C-64, initially priced at US$600 with more memory than any competitor at the same price point. In its end, you could buy a perfectly capable 8-bit computer that ran a whole lot of software for US$200. And it ruled for games.
Oh... And the Amiga, the first home computer to provide real multitasking and decent multimedia capabilities. It double-ruled for games, but also grew into a very capable high-end multimedia platform. The first season of Babylon-5 special effects was rendered on one.
And the Atari ST that, while more limited than the Amiga, was the first computer to break the US$1/KB barrier (the 1040). It was also the first under US$1000 32-bit computer with a megabyte of RAM. Under US$600, if you count the 520ST (which had 512K).
And, in the UK, the Archimedes: An inexpensive RISC-based PC that, without any floating-point acceleration, outperformed a 386/387 PC in... floating point. Its processor still lives today in just about every smartphone.
And, still from the UK, the Sinclair ZX series. the first computers to be sold under US$100. And the QL, probably the first 32-bit home computer.
So, of course, nobody had home computers before wintel... Really.
As for the NT on Alpha, PPC and MIPS, they were victims of the wintel dominance. They could run Windows, and Write, and Solitaire, and Minefield and sometimes even Office, but would not run any software built for wintel (unless under emulation). When the wintel standard got dominant, pretty much every other architecture was doomed in the desktop segment.
And I can get a RISC-based machine with wireless networking, two cameras and a decent multitasking OS for pennies these days. They are called mobile phones.
The price of a home computer is, more or less, constant - it's not how much it costs to build, but how much people would be willing to pay for it. Without wintel we would have a lot more options to chose from and so would the natural market evolution. The way it is, your next computer will still be a wintel box. Faster, but no revolution will ever occur again in this front. And it won't because Microsoft and Intel don't want it to and pretty much nobody else has a vote. Including you.
The only arena where there is still some evolution (and a revolution every once and then) is the videogame console market precisely because being wintel does nothing to help their sales.
It only makes sense as a launchpad if you can manufacture parts for the spaceship there. In any other way, it's cheaper and easier to assemble your stuff in LEO and blast away from there.
If, OTOH, you can manufacture spaceship parts (or fuel and oxydizer) with materials collected on the Moon, it opens a lot of interesting possibilities.
The way it is, it is a nice training ground for Mars missions where we fine tune the tech and protocols needed to get everyone back from Mars. As Arthur Clarke once put, if everything gets wrong, a rescue mission can get to the Moon and back in less than a week. You can't afford to make any big mistakes on Mars. I am not sure if you could afford even little ones.
But do they carry coconuts in their migrations?
I have a problem with the idea that NK wants "to bomb like crazy".
I find it hard to believe NK would risk the retaliation that would inevitably come if they ever attempt a nuclear attack anywhere.
I for one welcome our new moon elephant overlords.
"Bill Gates has done more to create the thriving computer industry than anybody else"?!
The computer industry was thriving just fine. In fact, the Windows monopoly and the PC-clone industry has, most probably, prevented a lot of technological advances from seeing the light of day.
Do we all use the same x86 instruction set because it's superior to anything else? No. We use it _because_ just about every computer is built to run Windows. And it happens to run on x86s.
Prior to the ecological disaster that the PC-clone market was, there was a thriving industry producing a vast variety of different computers. While then we had Crays and Connection Machines, now we build our supercomputers out of PC parts because anything else has to be custom built.
So... That's what a thriving industry looks like.
"The first of its kind that hasn't failed already"
You don't. You lay the lines as well as you can and you fine tune them over time.
And that's why smart people with good intentions should get more involved with politics. We left those lines unattended for far too long.
Some degree of control is fine for us to live in a society. There must be a fixed set of rules we all agree upon that defines acceptable social interaction.
But it should be the minimum functional set of rules and not a single rule larger.
I have no doubt Science will prevail. If not here, there must be other planets where intelligent life has developed. It may be an evolutionary test and we will survive.
If we deserve to.
And, if things really turn sour, the Sun will still be there for a couple billion years and there is still time for other species to pick up where we dropped the ball.
Freedom is not scary. The responsibility that comes with it may be.
But I find it far less scary that relinquishing control.
"We simply need to wait for the event that will prove the error in ignoring a progressive, scientific approach to education. I just hope it won't be too harsh."
I think that counting on a random external event that scares you is very dangerous, specially if you can suppress any country that could spark such event with the weapons and equipment developed under the last "sputnik scare".
Reason must take control. More smart people should get more involved in politics because there seems to be a lot of dumb people involved with it right now and most smart ones that are, definitely, are playing on the wrong side.
Are you really using an old proverb to disprove a mountain of evidence?
"So, maybe having a poor class with no education that believes in creationism is the way to go? And if they want to sacrifice their public education dollars in that way, let them. I won't be one of them, but if they want to, god help them."
The only problem with your reasoning is the possibility that they may outnumber you or outpower you or even outgun you. That is, most certainly, not a nice place to be.
The ice in the north pole is floating ice. It means that, when it melts, water levels do not increase. Even if it melts completely, it will not raise sea level by a single inch.
As for the last ice age, about 25 thousand years ago, the 130m raise was presumably due to continental glaciers far bigger than anything recorder in history melting and flowing back to the oceans.
I doubt it's field upgradable like that.
Thanks. _That_ is weird.
Guess I won't be buying Toshibas for the near future...
So... Is it a prank after all?
"that's no longer possible."
Remember... This is Slashdot. Comments like these may have unintended consequences when made here.
It's, of course, possible to build a CFront-like preprocessor that converts current C++ code into C. It's not easy and the C code would probably be even less readable than what CFront wrote. It's not practical either. Or wise.
But it's certainly possible.