Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#381

Post by dragontamer » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 3:34 PM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #37

I am usually not the one to blow the free software horn (being a staunch believer of non-copyleft licenses such as the Apache License) and the geek in me likes this announcement. I also don't hold a grudge against Windows, I think it is a fine system for most people. However, Windows seems very much contrary to the goal of the Raspberry Pi: providing a device for children to tinker with and educate themselves. Althou…

It always was fundamentally unhackable. It was built on top of Broadcom, which has completely closed documentation. Frankly, Arduino / Atmel is the only open platform from bottom to top. Oh, and PCs (Intel / AMD).

I don't think Windows is going to close any real bits of the Raspberry Pi 2, at least any more than it already is.

I'm actually more excited about "open" hardware like AMD AM1 or Intel NUCs for this reason.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#382

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 4:32 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #335

pjmlp wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

REPL are way superior as shown in any Xerox PARC OS.

And shells are indeed REPLs (in the sense that they run a loop in which they read, evaluate, and print things). Though to be fair, REPLs for languages like MATLAB or Julia are likely far more useful from a scientific standpoint than a typical shell (which is more useful for system administration).

Compared with what I know from Xerox PARC documentation and what I self experienced in Oberon and Visual Works Smalltalk, shells are like REPLs yes, but not quite.

It is a very different experience when the shell (e.g. Transcript in Smalltalk) is capable of interacting with the whole OS.

For example in Cedar, which Oberon copied, any public function/procedure exported by dynamic libraries can be used in the shell via modulename.function.

Depending on their signature they act on REPL text input, the active selected graphical element or some other OS element.

While this can kind of be emulated on an UNIX shell, it breaks down that there isn't an OS wide standard API to bring everything together.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#383

Post by yellowapple » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 6:19 PM UTC

slantyyz wrote: post #367

yellowapple wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but everything I learned back then were things like Basic, COBOL, Fortran and Pascal. Think about what you had back then, though. At best, you had Mac OS (which was as abstracted away from actual computer internals as Windows is today). All the other options - whether it was Commodores or Ataris or DOS-based IBM-compatibles - involved working very close to the hardware. You were manually dealing with interrupts and…

>> Think about what you had back then, though. At best, you had Mac OS The best my high schools had were the Apple II family and PDP mini computers -- my first high school course in BASIC (I already knew Basic from my home computers) -- we were marking up Hollerith cards with Sharpies. You don't know painful debugging until you have to manually scour a deck of optical cards looking for an errant black mark. We did no…

You were still much closer to the hardware than virtually every modern programmer outside of the embedded programming space (and even then), which is my point. What you were doing was effectively operating system programming, seeing as there wasn't really much of an operating system in the modern, traditionally-understood sense (except for the PDPs, which ran some timesharing system like ITS or Unix or somesuch, but those also tended to arrive with the full source code, at least in the case of Unix, so that one could port it oneself).

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#384

Post by enkiv2 » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 6:21 PM UTC

belgianguy wrote: post #73

I don't think Microsoft is doing it for the Open-Source spirit, as many seem to believe. They have a long history of attacking/smearing open source and displaying a "I heart Linux" slide is not sufficient to erase all the FUD and their questionable software patent licensing schemes (which are completely anti-open). They called Linux a cancer, even. I think they're approaching this from a redundancy point of view, if…

The idea of an IoT with lots of tiny nodes running windows is terrifying.

Remember when the regular internet started having a lot of nodes running windows? We haven't recovered from that yet. Now, imagine that the majority of those nodes are in control of something with external manipulators.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#385

Post by slantyyz » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 10:16 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #383

slantyyz wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Think about what you had back then, though. At best, you had Mac OS The best my high schools had were the Apple II family and PDP mini computers -- my first high school course in BASIC (I already knew Basic from my home computers) -- we were marking up Hollerith cards with Sharpies. You don't know painful debugging until you have to manually scour a deck of optical cards looking for an errant black mark. We did no…

You were still much closer to the hardware than virtually every modern programmer outside of the embedded programming space (and even then), which is my point. What you were doing was effectively operating system programming, seeing as there wasn't really much of an operating system in the modern, traditionally-understood sense (except for the PDPs, which ran some timesharing system like ITS or Unix or somesuch, but…

I don't get how an interpreted language like Basic on an Apple ][ series is considered to be any closer to the hardware than Node is today when most of the stuff we were programming amounted to writing scripts to solving simple math, logic or business problems (keeping it the context of high school). The goal of the teachers was basically to teach us the difference between procedures and functions and some basic concepts like recursion.

"What you were doing was effectively operating system programming" is a _major_ stretch.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#386

Post by yellowapple » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 2:03 AM UTC

slantyyz wrote: post #385

yellowapple wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were still much closer to the hardware than virtually every modern programmer outside of the embedded programming space (and even then), which is my point. What you were doing was effectively operating system programming, seeing as there wasn't really much of an operating system in the modern, traditionally-understood sense (except for the PDPs, which ran some timesharing system like ITS or Unix or somesuch, but…

I don't get how an interpreted language like Basic on an Apple ][ series is considered to be any closer to the hardware than Node is today when most of the stuff we were programming amounted to writing scripts to solving simple math, logic or business problems (keeping it the context of high school). The goal of the teachers was basically to teach us the difference between procedures and functions and some basic conc…

Because BASIC on an Apple II doesn't involve a massive JIT compiler running on a massive userland and drivers running on a massive kernel with virtual memory and processes and such. It instead involves a very thin layer over the firmware of the computer itself. Sure, you weren't doing a lot of PEEKing or POKEing, but the fact that you could do those things proves my point.

The sorts of programming you were doing was barely higher-level than the sorts of programming involved with an OSDev-style "Hello, world!" kernel[0]. My remark is not a stretch at all. At most you had a few thin conveniences (like having some graphics-related features already available to you, since Woz had prioritized that when he designed the Apple II's BASIC interpreter); beyond that, it was direct access to everything from RAM to tapes (unless you were running Apple DOS, but that was not at all required for BASIC programming on an Apple II, and the Apple II didn't ship with it).

[0]: http://wiki.osdev.org/Bare_Bones#Writing_a_kernel_in_C

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#387

Post by slantyyz » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 2:45 AM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #386

slantyyz wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get how an interpreted language like Basic on an Apple ][ series is considered to be any closer to the hardware than Node is today when most of the stuff we were programming amounted to writing scripts to solving simple math, logic or business problems (keeping it the context of high school). The goal of the teachers was basically to teach us the difference between procedures and functions and some basic conc…

Because BASIC on an Apple II doesn't involve a massive JIT compiler running on a massive userland and drivers running on a massive kernel with virtual memory and processes and such. It instead involves a very thin layer over the firmware of the computer itself. Sure, you weren't doing a lot of PEEKing or POKEing, but the fact that you could do those things proves my point. The sorts of programming you were doing was…

>> barely higher-level

BASIC for all intents and purposes, was considered a high level language when I learned it.

From what I remember, BASIC kinda had a similar reputation as PHP does today (probably unfair) in that it wasn't generally taken very seriously as a programming language. You didn't use BASIC to make real programs on an Apple ][. For that, you'd do it in assembly or machine language. That bias is still stuck in my head even after 3 decades.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#388

Post by 72deluxe » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 10:04 AM UTC

the_ancient wrote: post #379

72deluxe wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it wasn't Ubuntu certified because it was the year 2000 and Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth weren't around yet. My old 486 had a rubbish VESA compliant card in it that was a pain to get XConfigurator to use. Admittedly, I did learn many skills with the command line but this DIDN'T translate to me being a wizard with the DOS prompt on Windows 98 back then - I didn't use the DOS prompt. Task manager didn't show a hie…

I always love guys like you... I tried something 15 years ago so I know everything about the current project because nothing ever changes... Jesus, Linux Circa 2000 is very very very different from linux 2015...

I'm not Jesus. You got my name wrong. I get the feeling in reality that you DON'T love "guys like me". You manage to judge a lot about me from two comments!

Seriously though, I use Linux every other day and my last job involved maintaining racks and racks of Linux servers. I also use a few Raspberry Pi s at home, and I appreciate that things change. The ditching of the normal windowing paradigm is the biggest recent change that made me use Linux less as a desktop OS. I didn't say that things don't change - where did you read that?

But it still stands that giving my mum a Raspberry Pi and an SD card, and she'll be none the wiser about runlevels, CLI, or the main point of the discussion, programming. She'll instead spend more time learning how to use Linux, surely?

Or are you saying that my mum will suddenly be able to start development or something?

Or are you just offended that I had some experiences in the past or something?

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#389

Post by 72deluxe » Wed, Feb 04, 2015, 10:05 AM UTC

the_ancient wrote: post #380

72deluxe wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is Linux about teaching kids to code? I don't think it is. I spent more time on RH6.2 attempting to learn how the system worked and how the heck to make my rubbish graphics card run X than running egcs or g++ back in the day. There was terse documentation for all the GTK stuff, and it was particularly daunting if you had not written any advanced C or C++ (like me). I did manage to write some rubbish programs unde…

Except this is Windows for IoT which is basically Windows Core, or windows with no GUI... When you load this, the only thing that appears on the screen in a Cmd prompt, or powershell. If you think linux is hard to admin from the commend line, windows for people that do not know powershell is next to impossible

Is that the case with this release? It'll be dead in the water if they do that - PowerShell isn't much fun to use or learn.

Re: Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2

#390

Post by aruggirello » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 10:00 AM UTC

aruggirello wrote: post #139

watty wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Kids will be more productive on Windows and more likely be able to take those skills with them. How many kids need to know linux in the future? Here's what the Linux trend looks like: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=linux

'linux' is a single keyword, while GNU/Linux OS might show up as a wide set of different keywords, like ubuntu, debian, mint, arch, centos, rhel, fedora, gentoo, opensuse. Note that this is not the case with Windows, iOS, OSX. So, it would be interesting to see the combined interest of all those added to that of 'linux' for a more correct perspective - not considering Android of course, since it's not a GNU/Linux sys…

Edit: I was partly wrong; the matter is much more complex than that: interest in iOS and OSX might show up as interest in iPhone/iPad, and Mac/Mac OS; interest in Windows, besides any interest in 'surface', might also show up as a generic interest in 'PC' or similar terms: you can make such assumption, since anyway those interested in 'linux' or 'OSX' would probably avoid using terms generally associated with Windows.