The difference is that QNX has been polished for a very long time, and is much more efficient than Darwin is. I think they'd probably have a lot of work to do if they wanted to catch up with QNX. Also of importance, is that as you say, there are already popular and compelling examples in the embedded world of micro-kernels. I just can't think of anything that an embedded OS X would offer that doesn't already exist. However, I doubt that if they are trying to go embedded, that they'll attempt to enter the RTOS arena where speed, stability, and ability to deal with limited resources reign. An embedded OS X seems better suited for the Windows Mobile smartphone/media arena, where their gui design can come into play, and where rapid response isn't as important.
Except that, Linux on the PS3 doesn't allow access to 3D video acceleration. Its hard to become a gaming monster when the pretty graphics of all the big games won't run on it. Also, the GP2X may have been "successful", but that success is hardly anywhere near the success of a big name gaming platform. Total sales as of October were 30,000 units, while sales of the Nintendo DS are in the 20 million range.
And, of course, the DVD players are digital already. Which, I suppose, is the whole point. The analog audience has been dwindling for years, so it's not digital per se that's the problem. It's all the boneheaded stuff (DRM, DMCA, et tedious cetera) that's been getting glued on during the transition.
I'm a little confused by this statement. The DVD player is at the core digital, but it likely outputs in an analog form. Both composite and component video output are analog. But that's largely irrelevant to the debate anyway. Over the air broadcasts have until recently been broadcast as analog only, and your average TV has an analog tuner in it to receive this broadcast. What the Netherlands has done is cut off this broadcast, only broadcasting digital data. And most televisions (at least those more than a couple years old) don't have digital tuners to receive these broadcasts. People with these TV's can't receive television broadcasts anymore, without buying a digital tuner or upgrading their sets. It's not a terribly big deal; digital tuners aren't expensive. I doubt, however, that the analog audience has been dwindling as you suggest, since your own example involves analog video, and since most people get their television shows either through analog broadcast over the air, or analog cable. I'd be willing to concede that the amount of people who get their analog signal over the air might be dwindling, but thats different.
As for the gp, I think the reason that more Americans video systems in their car nowadays involves children and the large distances that have to be traveled in traversing the USA. You try amusing 2 young children in the back of the car while driving through the 500 miles of cornfield that is Nebraska:-P.
One point about WWI, the Germans heavily encouraged the Austrians to go to war. It wasn't exactly a case of "Oh no, our ally got into a war, we're forced to help". It was more along the lines of "Push back hard Austria, we've got your back". The Germans of course didn't forsee the scope and consequences of the coming war of course, and I don't think they expected Britain to jump in either (If I remember correctly, Kaiser Wilhelm greatly admired the British and wanted to avoid conflict with them). As for the punishment at the end, that came about due to the winning side (especially France) wanting to see someone pay for all the destruction and Germany was a convenient target.
What?? Since when did I AS AN INDIVIDUAL become a community? I am not a damn community. I am an individual.
Yup, you certainly are an individual. You're also what I would in general call a dick. And also apparently one of those maligned "idiots" you were referring to in your post. Whether you like it or not, by advocating and using Linux, you are part of that community. Just because you lack the intelligence to recognize that does not exempt you. Your other points are equally stupid. Using Microsoft tech support does not make you an idiot. What would make you an idiot is ignoring readily accessible sources of information to fix your problem. Yes, you can teach yourself things, and that is good. But training usually accelerates your learning, and/or exposes you to information that might not be easily available otherwise. That's why people go to college. Sure, I could've taught myself all about microprocessor design, programming, etc. But the university sure helped accelerate that learning.
What I don't understand is why this "feature" is still kept around, or at least so aggressively used, if its such a big complaint. It seems to me that whether or not something is done intentionally, if it is disliked by the users it is not really a feature. Perhaps many people do want to have firefox aggressively cache, but the number one complaint I hear from other people who use firefox is how much memory it consumes. I'd like to see an easy and obvious way to disable this feature in firefox, or even have it disabled by default. (and yes, I do realize you can change it under about:config, but your average user doesn't)
There are situations where linked-lists are useful in the kernel. I certainly remember using them occasionally back in my OS class from days gone by, and I also remember seeing them in Linux kernel code.
Two things of importance here. First of all, clock speed is not a good indicator of performance. This has been shown time and time again by the whole Pentium 4 thing. So to get a performance boost does not require upping the clock speed by 20 to 40 times.
Secondly, Folding@Home, and other computational problems like it, take advantage of parallelism, so the more processors you throw at it, the better. Here's where I get a little bit shakey on my knowledge... but as far as I remember, graphics is another field that takes advantage of parallelism, and if I recall correctly most modern graphics cards have a fair amount of parallel pipelines in them. Regardless, you're definitely not talking a faster clock-rate, just a different architecture. If you want some more information, check out wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_card.
I agree... I couldn't find figures for just the European theatre. I do seem to recall that the European theatre was the more costly of the two, but I can't find any references and could well be wrong. Also, those figures don't take into account civillian casualties, of which France suffered considerably more.
Actually I'm not sure you know what you're talking about. In my house I currently have 1 Windows PC, 1 Mac laptop, and 3 Linux PCs. And he's right, its far harder to install Linux software than PC software (the mac is easiest of all, but thats a separate issue). I'll admit, apt-get and YUM have made life a lot easier. If the app is in the repository, you're good to go, you just click on the file in your package manager, and it installs. But when its not? Then you have to deal with the mess of various repositories, source code compilation, and missing dependencies. And unfortunately, I've had lots of applications I want that are missing from the repositories. And don't even get me started on trying to install browser plugins or getting multimedia to work.
Now I know a lot of these problems aren't necessarily Linux's fault, but they do exist. And as for where to get Windows software, thats easy. You buy it from a store:-P.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I can tell, the extra cars and tracks are core parts of the game functionality. The horse armor for Oblivion was simply a graphical add-on for people who wanted to pimp their horse. The full core game-play was still there, and could be enjoyed just the same without the armor. Here, however, it looks like they've stripped away parts of the core game, and are trying to sell them separately.
I agree. My university started posting videos of most lectures the final two years I was there, and I think that few students bothered to watch them anyway. It's often hard enough to pay attention when you're physically present at a class. It's even harder when you've got all the distractions of home around. Most people ended up using the videos only if they missed a crucial class becaue they were sick or something.
Wow, you're a real idiot. Read up on Crohn's disease sometime. It's a chronic, possibly autoimmune disease, and a lousy diet has nothing to do with it. Yes, eating a "bland" diet can help reduce the severity of the symptoms, but the symptoms are still there, and are still nasty. One of my roommates in college had Crohn's. It didn't matter what he ate, he still had to spend lots of time in the bathroom. Heaven help him if he ate something dairy related, or that was remotely hard to digest (mints were especially bad for some reason). And when he had flare-ups, it meant taking steroids and other nasty stuff in addition to the 15 pills he normally took daily.
Last I'd heard, ogg had some potential intellectual property issues that make a lot of large corporations leery about using it. This uncertainty over ogg, combined with the massive existing support for mp3, is likely to keep ogg from replacing mp3 on a large scale for a while.
Actually, as far as I'm aware, the iPod music directory doesn't show up as a mass-storage device and hasn't for a while. At least on mine, you can use the iPod as a mass storage device... but you can't play any of the songs you copy onto the device in that manner. The only way to get playable music on there is using iTunes.
As a college student myself, I really have to ask what you were thinking when you made this post. $99 a year is next to nothing, even for a college student. Most college kids spend more than that on snacks in a year. Most gamer type people spend more than that on their World of Warcraft subscriptions each year. Heck, $99 dollars is cheaper than just about any textbook I've bought in the last 4 years. The price is not going to be a barrier here.
Now, that's not a strike at all against Linux... it just has a very different way of doing things than Windows. So, even with the annoyances and differences, it'll be easier for your average XP user to switch to Vista where most of their applications will work, and where it'll mostly act the same. It's ultimately more familiar still.
I had a similar situation around a year ago, and found that Ubuntu ran reasonably well, as long as you don't turn on lots of eye candy. Debian (on which Ubuntu is based) seemed to run faster than Ubuntu, but was often behind the curve on adding new applications / hardware support. And that was using the testing branch, not stable (the version I had still used kernel 2.4 for some reason, which did not support my wireless card).
I would just pick one that looks promising, install it, play with it a bit, and if its too slow, switch to something else. Worked well enough for me, and installing a distro doesn't take all that long.
Be prepared for a little frustration though, in my experience getting linux up and running on old laptops can at times be a bit trying, especially if you've never done a Linux install before:-).
I completely agree with you. I was just stating the findings about multi-tasking from my own experiment years ago. I don't see any reason for people to have their cell phone taken away while driving, and it really seems that the degradation of driving ability is over-hyped.
Multitasking ability does seem to play a part in how well people can talk on the phone while driving. Back in high school I did a science fair project on the effects of cell phone usage while driving (with the assistance of an automobile radio company's driving simulator). One of the test subjects was an Air Force fighter jockey, and he aced the test... you couldn't tell a difference at all when he was on the cell phone. Soccer moms and people who regularly dealt with distractions while driving didn't do too badly either.
The quality control does seem to be less than stellar on this round. I've been a PC user for most of my life, but just recently got my first macintosh in the form of a Macbook. And there have been several problems with it. Several keyboard keys were intermittant (turns out they were improperly seated) it runs extremely hot (much more so than my business hp laptop from work that has the same processor) and the mouse button is extremely unresponsive. The unresponsiveness probably stems from the fact that the apple trackpad is much wider than the standard PC trackpad, and there is only one button across the whole thing instead of two. So pressing near the side, away from the button contact in the center, means that it doesn't register a click. Even understanding that though, its an annoyance to click and have nothing happen. And the quality control does seem less than that of my previous laptops from the more common PC manufacturers.
Your point about a learning curve is a valid one... but it doesn't really solve a lot of the problems this guy had. Trying to get multimedia to run on Linux right now is, to be honest, a real pain. My servers I've set up in my house are happily running, and the setup was straightforward and relatively simple. The computer I use for software development was likewise simple to setup, and is easy to use. But try to play multimedia on one of them, and its a long road. I think most people wouldn't be to upset about doing things differently... but in a lot of cases things aren't just different, they're more difficult. Your average user doesn't want to have to hunt for codecs / dvd decoders all over the internet. They don't want to spend time trying to get plugins to work on their browser so they can see embedded multimedia content. On both Mac and Windows, those things generally just work.
But the fact that a company sees there is a viable market for another 2-300 performance add on for x86 gaming systems in the PhysX boards should be as clear an indication as anyone needs to how far x86 is falling behind.
I'm confused as to how that is an indication that x86 is falling behind. I was under the impression that you can almost always see significant speed ups over general purpose hardware by using specialized additional hardware. Isn't this a similar idea to using specialized graphics cards to increase performance?
I'm not trying to troll or anything, but I'm genuinely curious. From the screenshots, (and my limited use of it in Dapper) Deskbar seems to be similar in functionality to spotlight in OSX. There are hints of it doing more (news feeds in the screenshots) but I wasn't able to get a good feel for everything it can do. So here's my question: what is the extent of it's capabilities, and is there something particularly unique about it? Or is it primarliy intended to be a desktop search like spotlight?
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is that QNX has been polished for a very long time, and is much more efficient than Darwin is. I think they'd probably have a lot of work to do if they wanted to catch up with QNX. Also of importance, is that as you say, there are already popular and compelling examples in the embedded world of micro-kernels. I just can't think of anything that an embedded OS X would offer that doesn't already exist. However, I doubt that if they are trying to go embedded, that they'll attempt to enter the RTOS arena where speed, stability, and ability to deal with limited resources reign. An embedded OS X seems better suited for the Windows Mobile smartphone/media arena, where their gui design can come into play, and where rapid response isn't as important.
Except that, Linux on the PS3 doesn't allow access to 3D video acceleration. Its hard to become a gaming monster when the pretty graphics of all the big games won't run on it. Also, the GP2X may have been "successful", but that success is hardly anywhere near the success of a big name gaming platform. Total sales as of October were 30,000 units, while sales of the Nintendo DS are in the 20 million range.
And, of course, the DVD players are digital already. Which, I suppose, is the whole point. The analog audience has been dwindling for years, so it's not digital per se that's the problem. It's all the boneheaded stuff (DRM, DMCA, et tedious cetera) that's been getting glued on during the transition.
:-P.
I'm a little confused by this statement. The DVD player is at the core digital, but it likely outputs in an analog form. Both composite and component video output are analog. But that's largely irrelevant to the debate anyway. Over the air broadcasts have until recently been broadcast as analog only, and your average TV has an analog tuner in it to receive this broadcast. What the Netherlands has done is cut off this broadcast, only broadcasting digital data. And most televisions (at least those more than a couple years old) don't have digital tuners to receive these broadcasts. People with these TV's can't receive television broadcasts anymore, without buying a digital tuner or upgrading their sets. It's not a terribly big deal; digital tuners aren't expensive. I doubt, however, that the analog audience has been dwindling as you suggest, since your own example involves analog video, and since most people get their television shows either through analog broadcast over the air, or analog cable. I'd be willing to concede that the amount of people who get their analog signal over the air might be dwindling, but thats different.
As for the gp, I think the reason that more Americans video systems in their car nowadays involves children and the large distances that have to be traveled in traversing the USA. You try amusing 2 young children in the back of the car while driving through the 500 miles of cornfield that is Nebraska
One point about WWI, the Germans heavily encouraged the Austrians to go to war. It wasn't exactly a case of "Oh no, our ally got into a war, we're forced to help". It was more along the lines of "Push back hard Austria, we've got your back". The Germans of course didn't forsee the scope and consequences of the coming war of course, and I don't think they expected Britain to jump in either (If I remember correctly, Kaiser Wilhelm greatly admired the British and wanted to avoid conflict with them). As for the punishment at the end, that came about due to the winning side (especially France) wanting to see someone pay for all the destruction and Germany was a convenient target.
What?? Since when did I AS AN INDIVIDUAL become a community? I am not a damn community. I am an individual.
Yup, you certainly are an individual. You're also what I would in general call a dick. And also apparently one of those maligned "idiots" you were referring to in your post. Whether you like it or not, by advocating and using Linux, you are part of that community. Just because you lack the intelligence to recognize that does not exempt you. Your other points are equally stupid. Using Microsoft tech support does not make you an idiot. What would make you an idiot is ignoring readily accessible sources of information to fix your problem. Yes, you can teach yourself things, and that is good. But training usually accelerates your learning, and/or exposes you to information that might not be easily available otherwise. That's why people go to college. Sure, I could've taught myself all about microprocessor design, programming, etc. But the university sure helped accelerate that learning.
by generous caching, which is a feature
What I don't understand is why this "feature" is still kept around, or at least so aggressively used, if its such a big complaint. It seems to me that whether or not something is done intentionally, if it is disliked by the users it is not really a feature. Perhaps many people do want to have firefox aggressively cache, but the number one complaint I hear from other people who use firefox is how much memory it consumes. I'd like to see an easy and obvious way to disable this feature in firefox, or even have it disabled by default. (and yes, I do realize you can change it under about:config, but your average user doesn't)
There are situations where linked-lists are useful in the kernel. I certainly remember using them occasionally back in my OS class from days gone by, and I also remember seeing them in Linux kernel code.
Two things of importance here. First of all, clock speed is not a good indicator of performance. This has been shown time and time again by the whole Pentium 4 thing. So to get a performance boost does not require upping the clock speed by 20 to 40 times.
Secondly, Folding@Home, and other computational problems like it, take advantage of parallelism, so the more processors you throw at it, the better. Here's where I get a little bit shakey on my knowledge... but as far as I remember, graphics is another field that takes advantage of parallelism, and if I recall correctly most modern graphics cards have a fair amount of parallel pipelines in them. Regardless, you're definitely not talking a faster clock-rate, just a different architecture. If you want some more information, check out wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_card.
I agree... I couldn't find figures for just the European theatre. I do seem to recall that the European theatre was the more costly of the two, but I can't find any references and could well be wrong. Also, those figures don't take into account civillian casualties, of which France suffered considerably more.
Just a quick note:i es
The US suffered roughly twice as many soldiers killed in WWII as France did http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualt
Actually I'm not sure you know what you're talking about. In my house I currently have 1 Windows PC, 1 Mac laptop, and 3 Linux PCs. And he's right, its far harder to install Linux software than PC software (the mac is easiest of all, but thats a separate issue). I'll admit, apt-get and YUM have made life a lot easier. If the app is in the repository, you're good to go, you just click on the file in your package manager, and it installs. But when its not? Then you have to deal with the mess of various repositories, source code compilation, and missing dependencies. And unfortunately, I've had lots of applications I want that are missing from the repositories. And don't even get me started on trying to install browser plugins or getting multimedia to work.
:-P.
Now I know a lot of these problems aren't necessarily Linux's fault, but they do exist. And as for where to get Windows software, thats easy. You buy it from a store
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I can tell, the extra cars and tracks are core parts of the game functionality. The horse armor for Oblivion was simply a graphical add-on for people who wanted to pimp their horse. The full core game-play was still there, and could be enjoyed just the same without the armor. Here, however, it looks like they've stripped away parts of the core game, and are trying to sell them separately.
I agree. My university started posting videos of most lectures the final two years I was there, and I think that few students bothered to watch them anyway. It's often hard enough to pay attention when you're physically present at a class. It's even harder when you've got all the distractions of home around. Most people ended up using the videos only if they missed a crucial class becaue they were sick or something.
Wow, you're a real idiot. Read up on Crohn's disease sometime. It's a chronic, possibly autoimmune disease, and a lousy diet has nothing to do with it. Yes, eating a "bland" diet can help reduce the severity of the symptoms, but the symptoms are still there, and are still nasty. One of my roommates in college had Crohn's. It didn't matter what he ate, he still had to spend lots of time in the bathroom. Heaven help him if he ate something dairy related, or that was remotely hard to digest (mints were especially bad for some reason). And when he had flare-ups, it meant taking steroids and other nasty stuff in addition to the 15 pills he normally took daily.
So no, it's definitely not his fault.
Last I'd heard, ogg had some potential intellectual property issues that make a lot of large corporations leery about using it. This uncertainty over ogg, combined with the massive existing support for mp3, is likely to keep ogg from replacing mp3 on a large scale for a while.
Actually, as far as I'm aware, the iPod music directory doesn't show up as a mass-storage device and hasn't for a while. At least on mine, you can use the iPod as a mass storage device... but you can't play any of the songs you copy onto the device in that manner. The only way to get playable music on there is using iTunes.
As a college student myself, I really have to ask what you were thinking when you made this post. $99 a year is next to nothing, even for a college student. Most college kids spend more than that on snacks in a year. Most gamer type people spend more than that on their World of Warcraft subscriptions each year. Heck, $99 dollars is cheaper than just about any textbook I've bought in the last 4 years. The price is not going to be a barrier here.
That's easy, Vista.
Now, that's not a strike at all against Linux... it just has a very different way of doing things than Windows. So, even with the annoyances and differences, it'll be easier for your average XP user to switch to Vista where most of their applications will work, and where it'll mostly act the same. It's ultimately more familiar still.
I had a similar situation around a year ago, and found that Ubuntu ran reasonably well, as long as you don't turn on lots of eye candy. Debian (on which Ubuntu is based) seemed to run faster than Ubuntu, but was often behind the curve on adding new applications / hardware support. And that was using the testing branch, not stable (the version I had still used kernel 2.4 for some reason, which did not support my wireless card).
:-).
I would just pick one that looks promising, install it, play with it a bit, and if its too slow, switch to something else. Worked well enough for me, and installing a distro doesn't take all that long.
Be prepared for a little frustration though, in my experience getting linux up and running on old laptops can at times be a bit trying, especially if you've never done a Linux install before
I completely agree with you. I was just stating the findings about multi-tasking from my own experiment years ago. I don't see any reason for people to have their cell phone taken away while driving, and it really seems that the degradation of driving ability is over-hyped.
Multitasking ability does seem to play a part in how well people can talk on the phone while driving. Back in high school I did a science fair project on the effects of cell phone usage while driving (with the assistance of an automobile radio company's driving simulator). One of the test subjects was an Air Force fighter jockey, and he aced the test... you couldn't tell a difference at all when he was on the cell phone. Soccer moms and people who regularly dealt with distractions while driving didn't do too badly either.
The quality control does seem to be less than stellar on this round. I've been a PC user for most of my life, but just recently got my first macintosh in the form of a Macbook. And there have been several problems with it. Several keyboard keys were intermittant (turns out they were improperly seated) it runs extremely hot (much more so than my business hp laptop from work that has the same processor) and the mouse button is extremely unresponsive. The unresponsiveness probably stems from the fact that the apple trackpad is much wider than the standard PC trackpad, and there is only one button across the whole thing instead of two. So pressing near the side, away from the button contact in the center, means that it doesn't register a click. Even understanding that though, its an annoyance to click and have nothing happen. And the quality control does seem less than that of my previous laptops from the more common PC manufacturers.
Your point about a learning curve is a valid one... but it doesn't really solve a lot of the problems this guy had. Trying to get multimedia to run on Linux right now is, to be honest, a real pain. My servers I've set up in my house are happily running, and the setup was straightforward and relatively simple. The computer I use for software development was likewise simple to setup, and is easy to use. But try to play multimedia on one of them, and its a long road. I think most people wouldn't be to upset about doing things differently... but in a lot of cases things aren't just different, they're more difficult. Your average user doesn't want to have to hunt for codecs / dvd decoders all over the internet. They don't want to spend time trying to get plugins to work on their browser so they can see embedded multimedia content. On both Mac and Windows, those things generally just work.
But the fact that a company sees there is a viable market for another 2-300 performance add on for x86 gaming systems in the PhysX boards should be as clear an indication as anyone needs to how far x86 is falling behind.
I'm confused as to how that is an indication that x86 is falling behind. I was under the impression that you can almost always see significant speed ups over general purpose hardware by using specialized additional hardware. Isn't this a similar idea to using specialized graphics cards to increase performance?
I'm not trying to troll or anything, but I'm genuinely curious. From the screenshots, (and my limited use of it in Dapper) Deskbar seems to be similar in functionality to spotlight in OSX. There are hints of it doing more (news feeds in the screenshots) but I wasn't able to get a good feel for everything it can do. So here's my question: what is the extent of it's capabilities, and is there something particularly unique about it? Or is it primarliy intended to be a desktop search like spotlight?