>> 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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