Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> But no, that's kind of the point.  People use Linux professionally not so 
> much because it's particularly good, but because it's licensed free, which 
> is what you like when you have either 500,000 servers or you have a profit 
> margin in the single-digit dollars.

  But nowadays eg. Solaris is free too, and should be quite robust (as it has
a long history precisely in server environments). Also the different BSD
variants (but especially NetBSD, if I have understood correctly) are of
quite high quality (especially in terms of security), especially for server
environment.

  I'm not exactly sure why precisely Linux is so popular, given that most
software is not designed specifically for Linux, but basically everything
has been ported to other unix-style systems as well (especially the BSD
variants).

  Maybe it's because Linux has the most polished distributions which minimize
the amount of setupping and administrative work?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> > Warp wrote:
> > 
> >>   Thinking about it, are there *any* other viable free (as in no-cost)
> >> operating systems for embedded systems, other than Linux and NetBSD?
> > 
> > Anybody know the status of QNX?

> Oh dear.  I was going to make fun of someone who would ask that question, 
> but then I saw it was Andrew.

> http://www.qnx.com/

> That didn't even take google. :-)

  A quick look seems to reveal that QNX (whatever it might be) is not free
for commercial use, so it doesn't really fit the no-cost part of my question.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 12/13/09 12:21, Warp wrote:
> Neeum Zawan<m.n### [at] ieeeorg>  wrote:
>>> attempts at hacking (eg. by email worms, rootkits, etc). It would be cheaper
>>> too.
>
>>          Sadly, not cheaper.
>
>    Last time I checked, Windows costed hundreds of euros, while Linux was
> completely free. I call that cheaper. Maybe your definition is different.

	I meant Mac OS was not cheaper.

-- 
I'm! A! Graduate! Of! The! Bill! Shatner! Acting! School!

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Warp wrote:
>   But nowadays eg. Solaris is free too, and should be quite robust (as it has
> a long history precisely in server environments). Also the different BSD
> variants (but especially NetBSD, if I have understood correctly) are of
> quite high quality (especially in terms of security), especially for server
> environment.

Oh, I think those get used also. You could argue that the BSD variants are 
driving Apple's server clusters, for example.

Plus, people using Solaris or BSD don't necessarily tell you they're doing 
so. I've often heard "We use X inside our product, but we don't tell people 
that because it's a competitive advantage."

>   Maybe it's because Linux has the most polished distributions which minimize
> the amount of setupping and administrative work?

It could be that.

It could be that Linux is more friendly than Solaris or BSDs to people doing 
significant improvements and incorporating them into future releases. For 
example, if Google releases a "fall over from master to slave replica 
without stopping the server" improvement to MySQL, it likely it gets into 
future releases. That doesn't necessarily happen with MS SQL Server. I would 
suspect the same is true of improvements in Linux.

Basically, it's a network effect. Everyone uses Linux because that's what 
everyone knows in detail. It's good marketing, somehow.

When Google talks about map/reduce, someone implements it on Linux within a 
month. I don't know why they picked Linux, but probably because they already 
had Linux yadda yadda. So it's the same "unjustified" network effect you get 
with Windows - people pick Windows because everyone they know uses Windows. 
OS geeks hack on Linux because Linux is the platform where all the OS geeks 
hack. Computer nerds move to Silicon Valley because that's where all the 
other computer nerds live, which means there's nerd jobs to choose from, 
which means there's a big bunch of nerds to choose from, ...

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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Warp wrote:
>   A quick look seems to reveal that QNX (whatever it might be)

QNX is a well-known RTOS that's quite popular. It's basically real-time 
Unixish. It's very portable.

At this point, such special systems are fading out, because even stuff as 
small as your phone is capable of running Linux.  Back when "embedded" meant 
8K ROM 1K RAM, it wasn't reasonable to have anything close to Linux on such 
chips.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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Darren New wrote:

> QNX is a well-known RTOS that's quite popular. It's basically real-time 
> Unixish. It's very portable.
> 
> At this point, such special systems are fading out, because even stuff 
> as small as your phone is capable of running Linux.  Back when 
> "embedded" meant 8K ROM 1K RAM, it wasn't reasonable to have anything 
> close to Linux on such chips.

As I understand it, the main use for RTOS is stuff like industrial 
robotics, where guaranteed timing is crucial. (E.g., you don't want a 
robot to drill a hole in the wrong place just because of a scheduling 
glitch.) It's not really for "personal computers", as such.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> As I understand it, the main use for RTOS is stuff like industrial 
> robotics, where guaranteed timing is crucial. 

Yep. And video games. And media decoding. And a whole bunch of other stuff 
that interacts with physics including the time dimension.

> It's not really for "personal computers", as such.

I disagree. As I've said before, cell phones are extremely real-time 
devices, to the point of needing to know the temperature so they can adjust 
for how much that makes their quartz crystal drift.

You're not going to want a GC cycle to interrupt your playback of your CD, 
either. Etc.

When your machine has 5x the power it would need to do the job with 
dedicated software from the ground up, it's easy to load a 3x overhead 
factor in the form of a general purpose OS and still get it working OK.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> Ubuntu Desktop comes with all sorts of graphical programs that you may or
>> may not need. It's better to install yourself what you know you will
>> need.
> 
> I don't mind that. But a scanner program? I don't own a scanner, why
> would I want a fancy GUI for controlling one?

That is a graphical program; as opposed to the command-line 'scanimage' 
tool.

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>> I don't mind that. But a scanner program? I don't own a scanner, why
>> would I want a fancy GUI for controlling one?
> 
> That is a graphical program; as opposed to the command-line 'scanimage' 
> tool.

Sure, but if I don't own a scanner, why would I want all the image 
capture libraries, CLI infrastructure and GUI front-end? Why can't I 
just skip downloading and installing all that stuff?

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Warp wrote:
>   There was one point in history when I had the opinion that if a game takes
> more than 4 floppy disks (that would be about 5.5 MB), it's way too large.

Rise of the Robots AGA for the Amiga.

14 disks. And such a sophisticated level of data caching that each time 
you get to the next level, you have to swap disks multiple times.

This is made up for my the game's delicious graphics. All of which is 
little consolation for the fact that the game itself SUCKS. It's like 
they spent so much time making lush graphics that they forgot to write a 
GAME...

>   Nowadays I'm wondering why there aren't multi-DVD games yet in the market.

Faster processors = more compression? ;-)

>   Rather curiously, we are nowadays in the same situation with respect to
> 64-bit computers. Hard drives are about 500 GB, RAMs are about 2-4 GB on
> average, which is about the same ratio as above. And again, a file of
> 2^64 bytes feels basically unthinkable (although slightly less so due to
> the past experience).
> 
>   I'm wondering if 15 years from now we will be using files of that size.

2^10 = 1 KB
2^20 = 1 MB
2^30 = 1 GB
2^40 = 1 TB (we are here already)
2^50 = 1 PB (never yet heard of anybody except huge corporations 
reaching this)
2^60 = 1 EB (unthinkably vast)

 From MB to GB is "only" 1000x (or 1024x or whatever). From the GB or TB 
figures we're at today up to exabytes is a million times. But, sure, I 
guess we'll reach it eventually.

I wonder how much data you can physically store in a given volume using 
purely magnetic technologies?

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