Excuse me? I'm sorry, but no dice. Since when is BeOS a monolithic kernel? Sure it does some things like run (some) driver in kernel space, and implement process management in the kernel, but none of these keep it from being a microkernel. Its just not obsessively microkernel like QNX is. If you've actually ever read the documentation on BeOS (www.be.com/developer, click "Free Resources" then "Find," and read the articles that detail how the OS works) you'll find that it is very much a microkernel. It runs graphics, sound/video, input, even networking in userspace.
1) Darwin is more organized from top to bottom. From drivers to solving the/etc/ chaos
>>>>>>>>>>>
Okay, I have to give that to you. But organization is not enough to save an OS. It is nice though.
2) Darwin is a macrokernel with less maintenance. No module recompiling.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
QNX, BeOS, and Windows don't need module recompiling. Hell, DOS loads its drivers dynamically.
3) Bundles bundles bundles
>>>>>>>>>
Yea, a nice UI features, but it is only slightly better than the BeOS or MacOS "one folder, one app" paradigm.
4) Potentially faster than FreeBSD
>>>>>>>>>>
How? It is basically FreeBSD 3.2 wrapped around Mach. Mach is far from fast (its messaging is particularly slow) and there IS overhead involved by negotiating the two systems.
6) NetInfo
>>>>>>>>>>
That's a user-space tool. I'm fairly sure something similar could be made for any other OS.
7) IOKit driver architecture
>>>>>>>
Again, I'm not too familiar with the driver architecture, could you elaborate?
8) More flexible BSD-like license
>>>>>>>>>>
Darwin's license is MORE restrictive than FreeBSD's!
9) Corporate support
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Umm, Darwin is unsupported OSS software.
10) Mach-O binaries. dyld memory use efficiency. FAT binaries
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
I'm not familiar with dyld, but again, Mach-) and FAT binaries are nice, but not really a great salient point of the OS. Also, multiple-arch support really isn't a wide-spread issue. If anything, people will prefer to download i386 or PPC only versions to save the bandwidth.
Given the limitations of Darwin, the above-mentioned features are nifty, but they're really just something cool that might get a passing glance, not something that really makes the OS better.
Actually I used Great Britain, because in general, people in the US didn't have the notion that the aristocracy or middle calss are the only people with rights.
In general, I tend not to like anything like bundles that have a different UI representation from the actual, physical representation. As such, I don't like UI tricks like the.hidden files. Its just matter of personal preference, but I must say that in general, BeOS apps are right under the top level directory. Another nifty thing is that there is a feature that allows apps to be launched by app-sig, so apps can be moved around, and no app-dependency linkes will break.
Enlightenment, FVWM, WindowMaker, etc are not desktop environments, they are window managers. They are also the RightWay(TM) to do things. Ideally, X (or a library on top of X) would be extended to encompass desktop management features, and the window manager could implement these features. Just as X provides the API to manage windows, but the window manager actually implements the GUI, a library should exist that provides the API for higher-level desktop environment features, and a user-selectable environment should actually implement it. That way, I could use KDE, you could use WindowMaker, and everyone else could use GNOME, and we'd all get a lot of choice in what DE to use, but we wouldn't have to deal with the bloat of multiple, redundant libraries and incompatible functionality. It would also make the user environment more consistant. I like KDE and I think everything should look like KDE. GNOME apps (even running in KDE) don't look and feel like KDE. A common API would allow all apps to have the look and feel that the user likes (which INCREASES choice) without having to limit the user to a specific body of apps. In all, it increase speed, consistancy, and choice, and helps out everything except the pesky developrs who are religiously tied to a particular API. But that's okay because developer's needs are secondary to those of the user.
Huh? Even the HURD project agrees that there are better microkernels than Mach to use. They use a custom version of Mach4, so yea, I would say Mach3 is antiquated. And wrapper around, Mach3 is FreeBSD 3.2, which runs in kernel space so it doesn't have to use messaging. What the hell are you talking about?
Secondly, OSX will always be sluggish.
Blanket statements like this aren't very useful. OS X has absolutely no speed problems on my G4/400, and is entirely usable on my Powerbook G3/300.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Being usable and being "Insanely great" are two different things.
Sort of, but not really. Legacy Mac apps run in a compatibility environment that is as a single OS X process running at low priority. The only reason you'd be likely to see performance degradation is if you don't have enough RAM to hold the OS 9 environment and have to swap a lot. That's why Apple says 128 MB is required for the beta, when really it is acceptable with 64 if you don't run legacy Mac apps.
>>>>>>>>>>>
And OS should take no more than 32MB of RAM. And I'm not talking about OS9 and OSX, I'm talking about BSD and Mach.
Which would push back the release another few years, and prevent it from taking advantage of existing BSD software (apache, ssh, perl, etc).
>>>>>>>>>>
This is a plug for BeOS. Apple was about this far away from buying Be before Jobs got butted in. In that case, all existing BSD software would have been usable (since BeOS is POSIX compatible and already has ports of all of these) and the only real work Apple would have to do is design Quartz, Aqua, and the OS9 environment (which they had to do anyway) and port OpenStep to BeOS.
Because Linux needs a standard API. Eventually you'll realize that. Since nobody these days is as smart as the original X designers, nobody figured out it might be a good idea to make an API seperate from the desktop environment. As such, you've got two great, incompatible desktop environments dividing a small userbase. That's just stupid. Ideally, the KDE and GNOME guys would get a clue, and rearchitecture things to make a common API (even at the expense of binary compatiblity.) The second best case is that one project or the other dies and people don't have to deal with two desktops.
That's a great idea... except for the fact that it is painstaking. I install and uninstall software everyday. No way in hell I'm dealing with all these symlinks (or learning how to use something like Encap, which is way to complex for a relativly simple job!) to install software. BeOS has probably the best idea on how to manage software. All apps are contained in a folder (kinda like NeXTStep) It is just a regular folder (no hacks like bundles) and can be moved at will. Local libraries are local to the app. Anything installed in appdir/lib or appdir/add-on is automatically searched out. Configuration could use work (right now it consists of a bunch of text and binary files jammed into/boot/home/config/settings) but overall, adding and removing BeOS software is scary simple. Just the way it should be.
Umm, people aren't being forced to use WMA. They use it because it is free and whoops everything except DivX and Sonorson in the quality department in high bandwidth streams. For low bandwidth streams, it doesn't get much better than WMA (depending on the type of video of course.)
Re:the only real Power chips are not in Apples
on
No Love For Darwin?
·
· Score: 2
Umm, last I recalled the POWER chips are WAY out of the consumer league. Some of the chips are (were) as big as Poloriods! (4096mm^2 die size! Yikes!)
Let's see. a 1Ghz Athlon performs at least half as well as an Alpha 21264, and I haven't seen any of those for $350 including motherboard. PPC might be great clock for clock, but given the 700MHz difference in clock for comparably priced processors, its not catching up with X86 anytime soon. Not to mention the fact that a 1.2GHz Athlon is not only a lot faster, but for the same price as a PPC machine, it makes MUCH better configured. (Easily double the RAM, a GeForce2Ultra, and a larger harddrive, better DVD decoder, etc.) As for Sun, I'm still waiting for it to come within half the price/performance ratio of a 1.2GHz Athlon w/ GeForce2 Ultra. x86 might be inelegant, but RISC carries not only a reasonable premium, but enough of one that puts it out of the reach of most people.
PS> And no, I will not use an older Alpha that performs 70% as well as an Athlon just so I'm not using Intel.
What if you don't play Quake? You neglect the fact that media apps in consumer space are becoming more and more popular. Low-end 3D renders, video editors, web-media apps will all become popular soon due to the content revolution. Guess what a GeForce2 will do for Premiere? Nothing! For all of the apps mentioned, a fast CPU is absolutely critical. Also, you forget that CPUs have to keep up with the bloat of the OSs. If it weren't for the KDEs, Xs, GNOMEs, Win2Ks, and Office 2000s in the world, much fewer people would need faster CPUs. Win95 killed my 486, and Win2K and Linux killed my PII300. It is impossible for people to resist buying faster CPUs given the fact that the entire software industry is against them.
Re:(Yeah, well..) Darwin != Free, GNUStep is
on
No Love For Darwin?
·
· Score: 1
Oh good god, "True freedom." Go join the peace-corps and do something important. I find this religious attachment to free software totally silly. If you actually use the source, then by all means, more power to ya. If you do it just because it makes you feel good, and use OSS in preference to better products, then you're just stupid.
Illiterate welfare mothers have just as much right to vote as snobby technology dweebs. Its the governments job to bend over backwards to make sure everyone can vote. If you don't like that, go back to 18th centry Great Britain, where only land-owning adult white males could vote.
Aqua (or Quartz, rather) DOES slow down OSX. DPDF isn't free you know. Secondly, OSX will always be sluggish. It has the overhead of dealing with two OSs spliced together (even if they run in the same process space, they weren't designed to run that way) and Mach isn't exactly known for being a speed demon. (Wonder why HURD is using a custom version?) To tell the truth, OSX would have been a lot more interesting with a clean-slate internal design.
Let's see. Darwin lacks all Quartz, Aqua, the OO API, and all of the nifty features in OSX, and in return, it uses an antiquated microkernel (mach) and runs FreeBSD in user space.
A) It's an ugly hack.
B) Its slower than straight FreeBSD.
C) It offer absolutely no advantage over FreeBSD in terms of anything. Not even stability, since BSD runs in kernel space anyway.
Why SHOULD anyone pay attention to Darwin, given its total lack of salient features?
They needed a study to figure this out? Everyday I hear totally insane studies like, "smoking linked to cancer," and "absentee fathers lead to criminal children," etc. You'd think they'd have a better place to spend their research dollars.
Quake? What about 3D Studio, Premier, CoolEdit, Photoshop, etc? Just because all you do is email and Quake, doesn't mean that other people don't find a real use for all this power. Your 'leet Sun systems still cost an arm and a leg. Small time workstation users love the fact that they can get workstation power in a $4000PC. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the pro workstation market is going to go through a serious shrink af consumer hardware catches up. All ready, the GeForce2 Ultra is faster (in workstation apps, not games) than everything except the WildCat 42XX series cards. Even SGI is using NVIDIA chips (their "VPro" is a modded Quadro) in their low range workstations. Non-PC workstation (low-midrange) manufactuers are either going to have to innovate, or get the hell out of the way.
X takes up more space than all of BeOS, and it still runs OpenGL and regular 2D apps slower than Windows. What more proof do you need? QSSL had the right idea to never use X in an OS meant for speed. (Photon is damn nifty!)
You can accuse BeOS of a lot of things, but you can't accuse it of being bloated. This is the OS that fits more or less unchanged onto handhelds. The entire BeOS/system directory is 30MB. This includes all the servers, the kernel, and drivers for all the devices. The kernel, all the servers, and the GUI take up 8MB, while a full set of drivers takes up another 5-7 MB. XFree86 alone takes up more than that. The maximum install for the OS is 180MB, including all sample code, compilers, IDE, a large number of GNU utilities. If you need more, than almost any UNIX utility you need is included in the geek gadgets port. While hardware support is still spotty, you're probably using strange hardware. If you use it on modern, mainstream hardware, then it is fairly rare to find an unsupported config. All three of my computers (2 hand-built with the weird OEM parts) support BeOS fully. Inkjet printer support is sketchy, but if your doing media, you're probably using a Postscript (430-something of those supported) printer anyway. Since it looks like you haven't checked, there is a SANE port as well, so scanner support should be similar to Linux. If you don't like the dinky partition (which is interesting, given the fact that my 3GB BeOS partition is only half full and I use it 90% of the time) you can install it on any size harddrive you want courtesy of the 64bit file system. Networking is being rewritten (out real soon now! Probably not much later than Linux 2.4, if that late, as the beta is already running some website servers) which should allow NFS, and SMB (I assume SAMBA?) has a port as does Apache 2.0
Let's see. My MP3s still don't encode fast enough, my movies still don't render fast enough, and I want my 3D modeler to run in real time dammit! Nope, still not satiated on the power front. As for Quake, most computers can't run Quake at 1600x1200 at the highest quality settings over 60fps. And when they can, newer games will come out.
Slashdot Mirror
Excuse me? I'm sorry, but no dice. Since when is BeOS a monolithic kernel? Sure it does some things like run (some) driver in kernel space, and implement process management in the kernel, but none of these keep it from being a microkernel. Its just not obsessively microkernel like QNX is. If you've actually ever read the documentation on BeOS (www.be.com/developer, click "Free Resources" then "Find," and read the articles that detail how the OS works) you'll find that it is very much a microkernel. It runs graphics, sound/video, input, even networking in userspace.
1) Darwin is more organized from top to bottom. From drivers to solving the /etc/ chaos
>>>>>>>>>>>
Okay, I have to give that to you. But organization is not enough to save an OS. It is nice though.
2) Darwin is a macrokernel with less maintenance. No module recompiling.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
QNX, BeOS, and Windows don't need module recompiling. Hell, DOS loads its drivers dynamically.
3) Bundles bundles bundles
>>>>>>>>>
Yea, a nice UI features, but it is only slightly better than the BeOS or MacOS "one folder, one app" paradigm.
4) Potentially faster than FreeBSD
>>>>>>>>>>
How? It is basically FreeBSD 3.2 wrapped around Mach. Mach is far from fast (its messaging is particularly slow) and there IS overhead involved by negotiating the two systems.
5) Automatic kext loading
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sorry, I'm not familiar wit kext.
6) NetInfo
>>>>>>>>>>
That's a user-space tool. I'm fairly sure something similar could be made for any other OS.
7) IOKit driver architecture
>>>>>>>
Again, I'm not too familiar with the driver architecture, could you elaborate?
8) More flexible BSD-like license
>>>>>>>>>>
Darwin's license is MORE restrictive than FreeBSD's!
9) Corporate support
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Umm, Darwin is unsupported OSS software.
10) Mach-O binaries. dyld memory use efficiency. FAT binaries
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
I'm not familiar with dyld, but again, Mach-) and FAT binaries are nice, but not really a great salient point of the OS. Also, multiple-arch support really isn't a wide-spread issue. If anything, people will prefer to download i386 or PPC only versions to save the bandwidth.
Given the limitations of Darwin, the above-mentioned features are nifty, but they're really just something cool that might get a passing glance, not something that really makes the OS better.
Actually I used Great Britain, because in general, people in the US didn't have the notion that the aristocracy or middle calss are the only people with rights.
In general, I tend not to like anything like bundles that have a different UI representation from the actual, physical representation. As such, I don't like UI tricks like the .hidden files. Its just matter of personal preference, but I must say that in general, BeOS apps are right under the top level directory. Another nifty thing is that there is a feature that allows apps to be launched by app-sig, so apps can be moved around, and no app-dependency linkes will break.
Enlightenment, FVWM, WindowMaker, etc are not desktop environments, they are window managers. They are also the RightWay(TM) to do things. Ideally, X (or a library on top of X) would be extended to encompass desktop management features, and the window manager could implement these features. Just as X provides the API to manage windows, but the window manager actually implements the GUI, a library should exist that provides the API for higher-level desktop environment features, and a user-selectable environment should actually implement it. That way, I could use KDE, you could use WindowMaker, and everyone else could use GNOME, and we'd all get a lot of choice in what DE to use, but we wouldn't have to deal with the bloat of multiple, redundant libraries and incompatible functionality. It would also make the user environment more consistant. I like KDE and I think everything should look like KDE. GNOME apps (even running in KDE) don't look and feel like KDE. A common API would allow all apps to have the look and feel that the user likes (which INCREASES choice) without having to limit the user to a specific body of apps. In all, it increase speed, consistancy, and choice, and helps out everything except the pesky developrs who are religiously tied to a particular API. But that's okay because developer's needs are secondary to those of the user.
Huh? Even the HURD project agrees that there are better microkernels than Mach to use. They use a custom version of Mach4, so yea, I would say Mach3 is antiquated. And wrapper around, Mach3 is FreeBSD 3.2, which runs in kernel space so it doesn't have to use messaging. What the hell are you talking about?
Secondly, OSX will always be sluggish.
Blanket statements like this aren't very useful. OS X has absolutely no speed problems on my G4/400, and is entirely usable on my Powerbook G3/300.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Being usable and being "Insanely great" are two different things.
Sort of, but not really. Legacy Mac apps run in a compatibility environment that is as a single OS X process running at low priority. The only reason you'd be likely to see performance degradation is if you don't have enough RAM to hold the OS 9 environment and have to swap a lot. That's why Apple says 128 MB is required for the beta, when really it is acceptable with 64 if you don't run legacy Mac apps.
>>>>>>>>>>>
And OS should take no more than 32MB of RAM. And I'm not talking about OS9 and OSX, I'm talking about BSD and Mach.
Which would push back the release another few years, and prevent it from taking advantage of existing BSD software (apache, ssh, perl, etc).
>>>>>>>>>>
This is a plug for BeOS. Apple was about this far away from buying Be before Jobs got butted in. In that case, all existing BSD software would have been usable (since BeOS is POSIX compatible and already has ports of all of these) and the only real work Apple would have to do is design Quartz, Aqua, and the OS9 environment (which they had to do anyway) and port OpenStep to BeOS.
Because Linux needs a standard API. Eventually you'll realize that. Since nobody these days is as smart as the original X designers, nobody figured out it might be a good idea to make an API seperate from the desktop environment. As such, you've got two great, incompatible desktop environments dividing a small userbase. That's just stupid. Ideally, the KDE and GNOME guys would get a clue, and rearchitecture things to make a common API (even at the expense of binary compatiblity.) The second best case is that one project or the other dies and people don't have to deal with two desktops.
That's a great idea... except for the fact that it is painstaking. I install and uninstall software everyday. No way in hell I'm dealing with all these symlinks (or learning how to use something like Encap, which is way to complex for a relativly simple job!) to install software. BeOS has probably the best idea on how to manage software. All apps are contained in a folder (kinda like NeXTStep) It is just a regular folder (no hacks like bundles) and can be moved at will. Local libraries are local to the app. Anything installed in appdir/lib or appdir/add-on is automatically searched out. Configuration could use work (right now it consists of a bunch of text and binary files jammed into /boot/home/config/settings) but overall, adding and removing BeOS software is scary simple. Just the way it should be.
Umm, people aren't being forced to use WMA. They use it because it is free and whoops everything except DivX and Sonorson in the quality department in high bandwidth streams. For low bandwidth streams, it doesn't get much better than WMA (depending on the type of video of course.)
Umm, last I recalled the POWER chips are WAY out of the consumer league. Some of the chips are (were) as big as Poloriods! (4096mm^2 die size! Yikes!)
Let's see. a 1Ghz Athlon performs at least half as well as an Alpha 21264, and I haven't seen any of those for $350 including motherboard. PPC might be great clock for clock, but given the 700MHz difference in clock for comparably priced processors, its not catching up with X86 anytime soon. Not to mention the fact that a 1.2GHz Athlon is not only a lot faster, but for the same price as a PPC machine, it makes MUCH better configured. (Easily double the RAM, a GeForce2Ultra, and a larger harddrive, better DVD decoder, etc.) As for Sun, I'm still waiting for it to come within half the price/performance ratio of a 1.2GHz Athlon w/ GeForce2 Ultra. x86 might be inelegant, but RISC carries not only a reasonable premium, but enough of one that puts it out of the reach of most people.
PS> And no, I will not use an older Alpha that performs 70% as well as an Athlon just so I'm not using Intel.
What if you don't play Quake? You neglect the fact that media apps in consumer space are becoming more and more popular. Low-end 3D renders, video editors, web-media apps will all become popular soon due to the content revolution. Guess what a GeForce2 will do for Premiere? Nothing! For all of the apps mentioned, a fast CPU is absolutely critical. Also, you forget that CPUs have to keep up with the bloat of the OSs. If it weren't for the KDEs, Xs, GNOMEs, Win2Ks, and Office 2000s in the world, much fewer people would need faster CPUs. Win95 killed my 486, and Win2K and Linux killed my PII300. It is impossible for people to resist buying faster CPUs given the fact that the entire software industry is against them.
Oh good god, "True freedom." Go join the peace-corps and do something important. I find this religious attachment to free software totally silly. If you actually use the source, then by all means, more power to ya. If you do it just because it makes you feel good, and use OSS in preference to better products, then you're just stupid.
Illiterate welfare mothers have just as much right to vote as snobby technology dweebs. Its the governments job to bend over backwards to make sure everyone can vote. If you don't like that, go back to 18th centry Great Britain, where only land-owning adult white males could vote.
Aqua (or Quartz, rather) DOES slow down OSX. DPDF isn't free you know. Secondly, OSX will always be sluggish. It has the overhead of dealing with two OSs spliced together (even if they run in the same process space, they weren't designed to run that way) and Mach isn't exactly known for being a speed demon. (Wonder why HURD is using a custom version?) To tell the truth, OSX would have been a lot more interesting with a clean-slate internal design.
Let's see. Darwin lacks all Quartz, Aqua, the OO API, and all of the nifty features in OSX, and in return, it uses an antiquated microkernel (mach) and runs FreeBSD in user space.
A) It's an ugly hack.
B) Its slower than straight FreeBSD.
C) It offer absolutely no advantage over FreeBSD in terms of anything. Not even stability, since BSD runs in kernel space anyway.
Why SHOULD anyone pay attention to Darwin, given its total lack of salient features?
Linsux sucks. Why don't use just use FreeBSD? It is a bloated, slow POS. Why is it that anti-BeOS trolls never get modded?
They needed a study to figure this out? Everyday I hear totally insane studies like, "smoking linked to cancer," and "absentee fathers lead to criminal children," etc. You'd think they'd have a better place to spend their research dollars.
Quake? What about 3D Studio, Premier, CoolEdit, Photoshop, etc? Just because all you do is email and Quake, doesn't mean that other people don't find a real use for all this power. Your 'leet Sun systems still cost an arm and a leg. Small time workstation users love the fact that they can get workstation power in a $4000PC. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the pro workstation market is going to go through a serious shrink af consumer hardware catches up. All ready, the GeForce2 Ultra is faster (in workstation apps, not games) than everything except the WildCat 42XX series cards. Even SGI is using NVIDIA chips (their "VPro" is a modded Quadro) in their low range workstations. Non-PC workstation (low-midrange) manufactuers are either going to have to innovate, or get the hell out of the way.
X takes up more space than all of BeOS, and it still runs OpenGL and regular 2D apps slower than Windows. What more proof do you need? QSSL had the right idea to never use X in an OS meant for speed. (Photon is damn nifty!)
You can accuse BeOS of a lot of things, but you can't accuse it of being bloated. This is the OS that fits more or less unchanged onto handhelds. The entire BeOS /system directory is 30MB. This includes all the servers, the kernel, and drivers for all the devices. The kernel, all the servers, and the GUI take up 8MB, while a full set of drivers takes up another 5-7 MB. XFree86 alone takes up more than that. The maximum install for the OS is 180MB, including all sample code, compilers, IDE, a large number of GNU utilities. If you need more, than almost any UNIX utility you need is included in the geek gadgets port. While hardware support is still spotty, you're probably using strange hardware. If you use it on modern, mainstream hardware, then it is fairly rare to find an unsupported config. All three of my computers (2 hand-built with the weird OEM parts) support BeOS fully. Inkjet printer support is sketchy, but if your doing media, you're probably using a Postscript (430-something of those supported) printer anyway. Since it looks like you haven't checked, there is a SANE port as well, so scanner support should be similar to Linux. If you don't like the dinky partition (which is interesting, given the fact that my 3GB BeOS partition is only half full and I use it 90% of the time) you can install it on any size harddrive you want courtesy of the 64bit file system. Networking is being rewritten (out real soon now! Probably not much later than Linux 2.4, if that late, as the beta is already running some website servers) which should allow NFS, and SMB (I assume SAMBA?) has a port as does Apache 2.0
Umm, its $75. There's no free download. Solaris 8 is crazy slow on smaller Intel machines.
Let's see. My MP3s still don't encode fast enough, my movies still don't render fast enough, and I want my 3D modeler to run in real time dammit! Nope, still not satiated on the power front. As for Quake, most computers can't run Quake at 1600x1200 at the highest quality settings over 60fps. And when they can, newer games will come out.
As I recall, the 166MHz came out after the 200 and 180 versions.