[LawnGnome]

Good points from TMM.

And gritz, if you think Apple will take over, you need another look at the market.

You really need to stay more up to date on stuff, because alot of your arguments are based on outdated info.

 

[gritzcolin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arainach /img/forum/go_quote.gif gritz: As has been pointed out, old code is not bad code. The existing examples have been excellent - the core basis of the GNU utilities that power most UNIX and Linux systems have barely changed in over a decade; the TCP/IP stack still contains large amounts of code dating back to the BSD version from 1983, and so on. Second, Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility is what got them control of the market (well, and some questionable business tactics, but backwards compatibility is what's built most of their loyalty). It's easy to SAY "dump all the code". It's much tougher to do without pissing everyone off.

But whats the point if their newest software is not compatible with old software/hardware. I know it sucks and programmers say the code is too complicated and layered whatever that means. Rewriting it is the solutions i have heard, but I am not a programmer so whatever.I am currently happy with XP as it is but if they aren't gonna change what they are doing with Vista I will eventually abandon Windows completely.

 

[gritzcolin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by LawnGnome /img/forum/go_quote.gif Good points from TMM. And gritz, if you think Apple will take over, you need another look at the market. You really need to stay more up to date on stuff, because alot of your arguments are based on outdated info.

Umm the fact that Apple's stock is growing and Microsoft's has been stagnant for a while. Also the fact that major companies and universities are making transitions to Apple. As well as many many tech sites and the like saying the same things. Microsoft can stay the way they are goin but it is gonna lead to them losing even more users to any alternative even if we have to make sacrafices for it.

Really no point in arguing anymore cause even if a PHD of computer sciences came in and proved my side in some way you would say he is a fanboy and vice versa, with that I am done.

 

[majid]

Better filesystems will help. ZFS allows you to have filesystems that span multiple physical hard drives, flexible allocation of space (no more fixed-size partitions), the ability to take snapshots of data with very little overhead, and heavy duty data integrity even if your disk controller is silently corrupting data. The technology will find its way into OS X eventually (the read-only implementation in Leopard is hardly inspiring).

What would be even better would be if the OS and apps implemented a system of continuous updates to disk that would allow you to undo as far back as you want. The whole notion of "saving" files would become obsolete. This isn't science fiction - the Canon Cat (designed by Jef Raskin, the original Macintosh project manager) had that 20 years ago.

In many ways the notion of a personal computer is holding us back. We need social computers that can network seamlessly and automatically. More and more apps are going to go web-based and migrate into the network. More and more families have networked homes with several computers. The individual OS ought to become less significant compared to the home network. Computers should be smart enough to back their data one each another in a network.

The only time you should really care what computer you are using is when you are playing video games or when you are using a laptop outside network coverage range. Delivering on this requires a lot of advances in peer-to-peer computing, synchronization, version conflict resolution, autoconfiguration and more generally "just working", something even Macs don't deliver on when considering a home network. The last thing you want is to require every household to have a sys admin, your computer should be able to figure it out once it has been inducted into the family.

 

[Arainach]

Quote:

But whats the point if their newest software is not compatible with old software/hardware.

Actually, for the most part it IS. Contrary to your FUD, Vista's compatible with 99% of the stuff out there. There may be a few exceptions, but that's the case with everything. I'm not a fan of Vista, but it's not THAT bad of an OS. And it's compatibile with a thousand times the hardware of your beloved Apples. Until Apple dumps the hardware lockin, their market share will never increase into the double digits. Quote:

Originally Posted by majid /img/forum/go_quote.gif Better filesystems will help. ZFS allows you to have filesystems that span multiple physical hard drives, flexible allocation of space (no more fixed-size partitions), the ability to take snapshots of data with very little overhead, and heavy duty data integrity even if your disk controller is silently corrupting data. The technology will find its way into OS X eventually (the read-only implementation in Leopard is hardly inspiring).

We've had RAID for decades now; any filesystem can be spread across multiple drives in any number of ways. Quote:

What would be even better would be if the OS and apps implemented a system of continuous updates to disk that would allow you to undo as far back as you want. The whole notion of "saving" files would become obsolete. This isn't science fiction - the Canon Cat (designed by Jef Raskin, the original Macintosh project manager) had that 20 years ago.

Disk read/write is a huge performance hit. It's just about the slowest thing your computer does except for user input. If multiple applications would do this your computer would choke. Quote:

In many ways the notion of a personal computer is holding us back. We need social computers that can network seamlessly and automatically.

.....huh? Quote:

The individual OS ought to become less significant compared to the home network.

The OS and the Network serve completely different functions. Quote:

Computers should be smart enough to back their data one each another in a network.

Massive Privacy concerns here. Also, Corporations would never stand for this. Quote:

The only time you should really care what computer you are using is when you are playing video games or when you are using a laptop outside network coverage range. Delivering on this requires a lot of advances in peer-to-peer computing, synchronization, version conflict resolution, autoconfiguration and more generally "just working", something even Macs don't deliver on when considering a home network

That's all nice and clever and all, but there's also the pressing issue of Information Assurance (guaranteeing you're the only one who can access your data), which is a real pain - just ask the NSA; they've put tons of research into it and even on wired networks it's tough. Quote:

The last thing you want is to require every household to have a sys admin, your computer should be able to figure it out once it has been inducted into the family.

Have you even used a modern OS? All of them are able to scan the network and look for shared drives, printers, etc.

 

[gritzcolin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arainach /img/forum/go_quote.gif Actually, for the most part it IS. Contrary to your FUD, Vista's compatible with 99% of the stuff out there. There may be a few exceptions, but that's the case with everything. I'm not a fan of Vista, but it's not THAT bad of an OS. And it's compatibile with a thousand times the hardware of your beloved Apples. Until Apple dumps the hardware lockin, their market share will never increase into the double digits.

Not my beloved Apple for one and until Microsoft forgets about this it has to be pretty like OSX mentality it won't work well. I think the switch Apple made to Intel machines is the precursor to them releasing an OS for use on non proprietary machines. They can do it, OSx86 is proof, what needs to happen before that I have no clue.

 

[marvin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by LawnGnome /img/forum/go_quote.gif Have a HDD bigger than 127.53GB? Thats the limit for FAT32. DirectX wasn't until win95, and was very basic. As for multi GFX, its been big for several years now. Where have you been? lol. We now have Quad SLI, and Triple Crossfire. Also multi core chips didn't have support on the older OS's. You must realize, it may not seem like it, but gaming drives the hardware market. Why do you think they produce gfx cards that only a few people buy? Once you have the performance crown, the OEMs want your product. What else utilizes quad core? Besides some games? Not too much aside from compression progs and the likes, which most users don't use often, and just for smaller files.

Given that the OP specified a baseline of OS 8 (1997 release date), I didn't count anything from Win95 and back as new.

a) FAT32's limit is 2 TB. The 127.53 GB barrier in 95/98 is an artificial limit imposed by Microsoft's 16 bit ScanDisk software. ME removes this limit. The 32 GB limit in 2000/XP is a Microsoft restriction in their setup/format programs, but 2000/XP can read any size FAT32 drives. The bigger issue is the lack of support for > 4 GB files. But, NTFS was released in 1993 so it's not exactly recent in computer terms.

b) Multi-GFX catered to a very small audience after the Voodoo2 died, mainly due to absurd price and inconsistent performance. Still, it's not an OS improvement. It's a hardware/driver improvement. And really, what's SLI's market percentage?

c) Multicore systems are multiprocessor systems as far as the OS is concerned. Multiprocessor support has been around since the first iteration of Windows NT (1993). Again, at ~ 14 years old, not really modern either.

d) The performance crown has little to do with what OEMs buy for the vast majority of their systems. Historical sales data will show this as OEMs go with whatever is most cost effective in the category. The current market also reflects this. NVidia is tops at every discrete card market segment, and accordingly, they rule that segment. Same in AMD CPU based integrated chipsets. In Intel CPU based integrated chipsets, Intel dominates and NVidia captures a mere 1% of the market. In laptops, Intel has highest market share again.

As for why go after the high end? It pays. There's a lot of money to be made there, and all the tech and design efforts spent will trickle down into your low end designs.

e) The drive to multiprocessor has a lot more to do with frequency barriers than it does with gaming. AMD and Intel couldn't sustain their performance increases by increasing IPC efficiency and clocks due to the memory wall, ILP wall, and power wall. So, they were pretty much forced into branching out into multicore designs to increase processing power. Either way, the main benefits are still in multitasking. PC gaming in general still hasn't gotten around to multiprocessor support.

 

[wanderman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by marvin /img/forum/go_quote.gif PC gaming in general still hasn't gotten around to multiprocessor support.

Isn't every dx10 game multithreaded?

 

[Arainach]

Even if the DX10 routines themselves were multithreaded, I'd bet the games themselves aren't, and even if they are it's in trivial sections.

Writing for two processors isn't twice as hard as writing for one - it's two HUNDRED times as hard. It is quite literally an entirely different way of thinking and one that not many people are good at. Not to mention that there are a large number of problems that no matter what happens cannot be parallelized.

 

[LawnGnome]

Most games are multithreaded now. I can't think of a new gamer that doesnt utilize at least 2 cores.

And Leopard was hacked and released for PC the first day it came out. But who the hell would want that?

Also, in case you don't know, share price does NOT relate to market share in one segment in ANY way.

 

[Arainach]

Oh, so we're into illegal copies now? If you count illegal copies, Windows XP beats the hell out of every other OS in existence. Its sales are fantastic and yet a significant chunk of its users have undocuments pirated copies.

 

[LawnGnome]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arainach /img/forum/go_quote.gif Oh, so we're into illegal copies now? If you count illegal copies, Windows XP beats the hell out of every other OS in existence. Its sales are fantastic and yet a significant chunk of its users have undocuments pirated copies.

Wow, way to miss the point.

The only reason illegal copies came up is because someone mentioned apple might bring their OS to PC's. But hackers have already done it.

 

[Arainach]

Apple makes their money off their hardware lockin. It's why they throw DRM on everything - iPod, Mac OS, etc. If they were forced to spend the time and money needed to make MacOS decently compatibile with as much hardware as Windows is, they'd fail miserably since they'd end up just as bloated (more in all probability) and just as disliked.

 

[Basil101]

Apple will not release a x86 version so that anyone with a PC to install, they thrive of their image, beige box macs would destory this. They also have learned from when they licensed the Apple II ROMS to other companies, the result, mac clones that undercut Apple's prices.
Apple overcharge for hardware, they would be easily undercut by any pc ODM, (ie Asus, the company that can produce and sell a laptop at $199).
Apple has a massive advantage with the ability to control the handful of hardware combinations it is used on, the Apple OS can be rewritten from scratch as it doesn't need to support hundreds of thousands of potential configurations of hardware/software, just those Apple want it to. Vista on the other hand must support any combination of parts that anyone from a ODM, OEM or even home builder decides to use.

 

[majid]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arainach /img/forum/go_quote.gif Actually, for the most part it IS. Contrary to your FUD, Vista's compatible with 99% of the stuff out there.

I guess I must be in the 1%, Vista's installer crashes on my brand new game machine, on which XP had no problems using its bundled drivers.

Quote:

Until Apple dumps the hardware lockin, their market share will never increase into the double digits.

They have 17.6% market share in retail laptops. Guess what? Laptop sales are outpacing desktops, and thus Apple's overall market share will trend the same way. Of course, these are retail computers that consumers and small businesses buy with their own money, not corporate machines where whatever IT thinks is good enough for the peons goes.

Quote:

We've had RAID for decades now; any filesystem can be spread across multiple drives in any number of ways.

With thin provisioning (vs. fixed-size partitions) and snapshots, on a desktop OS?

Quote:

Disk read/write is a huge performance hit. It's just about the slowest thing your computer does except for user input. If multiple applications would do this your computer would choke.

The Canon Cat could do this (and many other things like real-time system-wide incremental search) using 1987 vintage hardware. Even the slowest current notebook hard drive will do well over 20MBps sustained sequential I/Os. If apps are designed to log evey single human interaction to a buffer that is dumped to disk as fast as the hardware will allow, and apps can replay the journal to restore their state to any point in time the way relational databases do today, the disk consumption would still be minimal as humans simply cannot type, mouse or even speak at anywhere near 20MBps.

Quote:

.....huh?The OS and the Network serve completely different functions.

From the user's perspective, it does not matter, the network is the computer.

Quote:

Massive Privacy concerns here.

Resilience tp constantly changing environments is the challenge. Privacy is not, encryption has been a solved problem for many decades now.

Quote:

Also, Corporations would never stand for this.

You'd be surprised. After all, GE, hardly a fly-by-night or seat-of-the-pants company, uses Mozy Pro to backup its desktops.

Quote:

That's all nice and clever and all, but there's also the pressing issue of Information Assurance (guaranteeing you're the only one who can access your data), which is a real pain - just ask the NSA; they've put tons of research into it and even on wired networks it's tough.

Most families do not need B2 level security.

Quote:

Have you even used a modern OS? All of them are able to scan the network and look for shared drives, printers, etc.

SLP or Zeroconf help, with the simplifying hypothesis that the broadcast domain coincides with the administrative domain, but picture this:

It is the year 2027. You just bought a new computer for the den. The mail order guys come, you slap the old one and the prepaid recycling voucher and ship it back. As soon as you plug in the new box, it welcomes you with the familiar login screen and all your projects are there where you left them even though the old computer is now halfway to Dhaka to be remanufactured. You do notice accessing your files is a little more sluggish than expected for the first couple hours, but your 5 year old kid, who is very knowledgeable about such things, tells you that's just because your local hard drive is "syncing" with the P2P home network and cloud, whatever that means. Lucky kid - he still believes the great thumper virus of 2008 (the one that destroyed your entire generation's record of childhood photos) is merely a fairy tale like the bogeyman meant to scare little children into obedience.

Distributed filesystems like Coda or Lustre, distributed SCMs like Mercurial or the home-grown systems Google and Amazon use internally could be a base to build something like this, but nobody has anything remotely like this available as a consumer-deployable technology that can cope with machines that go up and down at all times, or laptops that can roam outside the network and back.

When cars first came out, pioneering drivers needed to be intimately aware of the mechanics, because they were so finicky and prone to failure. Nowadays most people have no clue how their car functions, and just bring it in for servicing when the light on the dashboard tells them to. Computing is still in the dark ages as far as transparency and ease of management goes.