What Is Your View On XP?

[Krux]

Originally posted by Geffy
I am quite pleased with XP, its nice, stable, and gives me more ability to customise it to my liking. If tcpa and palladium go ahead though I dont think I am I going to get Longhorn.

plannin on getting a new HDD soon, then I am going to try using FreeBSD as a desktop system

ohhh god the day TCPA happens I stop using a computer or switch to linux.... *cringes*..... nope screw it I will stop using a pc

 

[Krux]

Originally posted by Leedogg
I look forward to the day when software will be able to optimize, repair and improve itself however right now I will remain happy so long as the current version doesnt crash on me and the bugs are worked out

That’s apocalyptic matrix talk right there! I fear that day as should we all.

 

[dave holbon]

Shortly I suspect hardware speed and memory availability will far outstrip software development in both in terms of OS’s and application development, this will bring us to the golden age of PC development where speed and memory are just not an issue anymore.

Waiting thirty minutes for your CAD programme to render the views will be a thing of the past with this being done “on-the-fly” in the background along with all the different lighting views possible. I watched the University of Sheffield’s network grind to a halt at the end of the last period as all the Architectural Technologists rendered their CAD submissions, which delayed the homeward bound trips by up to three hours. When you consider that this was only a dozen people and that the network is actually quite powerful (until you look at their hardware management) and that the problem was not with the actual hardware but the huge strain on the print queues (A3 file sizes) and associated management then you realise that any system is only as strong as it’s weakest link.

XP is a good example when looking at small to medium sized systems, but how does it perform with say, a six tetra-byte database that can be accessed by fifty million users online and five thousand directly connected users in real time? (If you ever needed such a system), well the answer is that it can’t. Simple things like memory “leakage” and management processes involved in the operating system itself preclude “complex” operational system design as understood today. It all has to be split into modules and workflow processes which are in effect removed from the OS.

XP is good but small just like MS-DOS was.

 

[Nick M]

Dave, I must say, I enjoy reading your posts very much. Some of the most interesting and informative here. If you ever write an essay or a paper on these concepts, I would love to read it.

 

[leedogg]

Originally posted by Krux
That’s apocalyptic matrix talk right there! I fear that day as should we all.

heh I dont me AI or anything revolutionary like that. I'm talking about an OS which knows when it suffers a fatal error and is able to fix the problem. Or an OS which automatically optimizes itself based on the hardware it detects, the activities of the user, and its internet capabilities.


Imagine registries which never go corrupt, an OS which automatically tweaks every setting possible by itself. Even the ability to generate drivers on the fly or interpret software written for different OS's.


I've seen mobo chipsets in the works that can do some of this stuff - detect hw/optimize settings so why not an operating system?

 

[dave holbon]

Operating systems writing device drivers “on the fly” is yet to become a reality but it’s not impossible or even difficult, however the nature of the current environment in which we reside and the manufacturers of hardware devices attached to PC’s and the Operating Systems designers (specifically software developers using C++ or C#) have a vested interest in not this sort of interface, in fact this has been possible since Win 98 but not feasible as it ties the hardware vendors to the software developers omitting (say) the operating systems designers (MS) this would also mean designing a “format” for the designation of this. This is actually easy to do.

It would however result in any software development house being able to write operating systems “features” that could be bolted on to any Operating System as a service and hence illegal.