141–150 of 316 posts
" We have tried to avoid paragraph-length footnotes in this book, but X has defeated us by switching the meaning of client and server. In all other client/server relation- ships, the server is the remote machine that runs the application (i.e., the server pro- vides services, such a database service or computation service). For some perverse reason that’s better left to the imagination, X insists on calling the progr…
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Google's Fuschia OS project is intriguing. It's open source, but I haven't been able to find any whitepapers or conference talks about its design or Google's plans for it. The speculation is that they wanted an ultra-lightweight OS for future low-latency augmented-reality applications. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12271354 )
For decades, I have challenged people with a dollar bet tha they cannot correctly spell "fuchsia" given five tries. Everybody thinks they can spell it, but I have never lost the dollar. Sometimes I pull out the same bet six months later and still win it.
For all of the usability flaws pointed out here, to what would you ascribe Unix's proliferation and modern ubiquity? - Giving it away to universities? - The C programming language? What am I missing?
Giving it away to universities. All the alternatives had lots of zeros on their price tags. C just came along, like JavaScript on the browser. We already had better system programming languages since Burroughs B5000 in the 60's.
http://www.unisys.co.uk/offerings/high-end-servers/clearpath...
While entertaining, I'm left with the following question: if not UNIX, then what? Are there any successful non-UNIX-y OSes that are worth checking out? I may embarrass myself here, but I was under the impression that BSD, Plan 9, Solaris and HP-UX were all UNIX-y ...
Basically only two paradigms survived the 90s. The Unix way (via Linux, BSD, Darwin) and the VMS way (via Windows NT). Everything else is either ultra-niche, dying, a mainframe so ancient and terrifying nobody will go near it, or only of marginal historical import. Bear in mind that when this book was written, the average desktop PC was running MS-DOS, and possibly Windows 3.1 if it was new and powerful enough. What…
http://www.cs.vu.nl//~ast/reliable-os/
Microkernels are also favored in the safety- and security-critical niches in high-assurance systems. Although niche, it's tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in activity over the past decade. Seemed worth adding as a surviving paradigm given that. One of more successful ones below.
http://www.ghs.com/products/safety_critical/integrity-do-178...
https://goo.gl/photos/gHvGwHpC3z5KxLv59
(edited link so that people don't need to login to google to see it.)
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Yeah but try and figure out how you'd do better... efficient.ly. Over the network...
You can't do opengl efficiently over the network. At least xorg can't. Most applications uses opengl these days. For me, I've been using Linux fulltime for the last 15 years and I have never, not even once, had the need to connect to a remote X11 server. ssh has always been enough for me.
On the other hand, typical applications (ie. games) usually expect that the channel to GPU has quite large bandwidth and no meaningful latency, which simply isn't true for any kind of network connection.
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>there remained a very large number of people with fond memories of other platforms, many of which did at least some things better than any contemporary or even modern Unix. Yeah, that's what I'm curious about. Could you name names? :)
See Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT by Zachary. Gives you an idea what the Unix landscape was like, and how primitive Windows was when Dave Culter's team from Digital began building NT (after the VMS at Digital), which became Windows XP (when Windows stopped crashing every hour). Much of what we assume every OS does today was cutting edge development in 1990.
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> How does one use a Mac without grep or piping? Using Finder, XCode, Objective-C and Swift frameworks,...
Bluh, don't get me started on Finder. Icons in directories would randomly be overlapping just because I hadn't been in them in a while and new files were added, they added this weird tagging system with colors that just doesn't make sense to me at all, it randomly thinks I want to view some sort of "recently used files and some random shit" list instead of my homedir. I don't know what the devs of it were thinking. E…
While entertaining, I'm left with the following question: if not UNIX, then what? Are there any successful non-UNIX-y OSes that are worth checking out? I may embarrass myself here, but I was under the impression that BSD, Plan 9, Solaris and HP-UX were all UNIX-y ...
Basically only two paradigms survived the 90s. The Unix way (via Linux, BSD, Darwin) and the VMS way (via Windows NT). Everything else is either ultra-niche, dying, a mainframe so ancient and terrifying nobody will go near it, or only of marginal historical import. Bear in mind that when this book was written, the average desktop PC was running MS-DOS, and possibly Windows 3.1 if it was new and powerful enough. What…
" We have tried to avoid paragraph-length footnotes in this book, but X has defeated us by switching the meaning of client and server. In all other client/server relation- ships, the server is the remote machine that runs the application (i.e., the server pro- vides services, such a database service or computation service). For some perverse reason that’s better left to the imagination, X insists on calling the progr…