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>> And this makes a difference? It's not meant to be an end-user OS. It's
>> meant for OS hackers to play with.
>
> It's designed to support research into building another OS that uses the
> same technologies.
OK, the documentation I read didn't say that anywhere.
>> Seriously, do you have *any idea* how many standards have been put
>> forward for "store digital audio in a file"? ;-)
>
> Sure. But they're all of the same type by the time you talk to the codec
> to get the data out of them.
Except that (say) GIF supports animation and only 256 colours and 1-bit
alpha, whereas PNG supports only single images, but with 24-bit colour
and 8-bit alpha, and TIFF supports something else again...
>>> It's not unlike the Amiga OS in that respect, except safe and
>>> strongly typed.
>>
>> Um... AmigaDOS files are streams of octets, just like every other OS.
>
> No they're not. Amiga OS devices are things that listen for and respond
> to typed messages. Certainly the narrator isn't a "stream of octets",
> nor is the clock, nor is the audio device.
The narrator accepts a stream of octets. It just interprets them as
ASCII text and attempts to synthesize speach for them. But there's
nothing stopping you from feeding it with arbitrary binary gibberish.
>> Oh, well, other than the "minor detail" of compatibility, there's no
>> problem at all! ;-)
>
> Right. How much C is there that couldn't be ported with relative ease to
> C#?
Um... surely porting C code to *any* other language is intractably
difficult?
> And if you're targetting a new platform, compatibility isn't too
> important. How much legacy code is there for in-dash car computers, or
> TiVo-like media systems?
My dad has a DVD player which appears to be running a modified version
of Mencoder. (AFAIK, that's a C application.)
>> (You recall that "Linux" is actually a tiny bit of software which
>> inherited compatibility with Unix, thus earning an instant library of
>> userland tools, right?)
>
> Sure. Most of which suck. ;-) Just look at the file system layout you
> wound up with.
What, you mean assigning permissions only to the person that owns the
file is a bad idea? You do surprise me. ;-)
But my point is... it's much faster than writing an entire OS from
scratch, all by yourself. And it instantly gives you a huge library of
usable software. Otherwise I suspect Linux would still be nowhere...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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