Re: hmm..interesting

On Sep 23, 11:43 am, Graeme <Gra...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In message <20090923112340.29128...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Rob Kendrick <n...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:





On Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:04:47 +0100
Graeme <Gra...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It's a decade behind free alternatives; difficult to sell into
that market.

Do you mean three? I wasn't aware Windows or MacOS came free.

No, I meant free.

That will be alternative then. How realistic is it to expect Linux
to make any serious inroads into the commercial market?

Compared to RISC OS, it's managing quite well. (ie, it's managing to
some degree more than zero.)

Does that count as serious?

Incidentally some years ago Central TV were running their presentation suite
off a couple of modified RiscPCs so it had got into 'industrial' use.

--
Graeme Wall

My genealogy website <www.greywall.demon.co.uk/genealogy/>- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

It's always amazing how long some hardware can stick around as long as
it does the job - SGI workstations being used in video edit situations
or CAD setups, Risc OS machines doing things like titles and other
work in places like the BBC, etc.

I think that too many people follow the "Gamer culter" idea that you
have to have the latest and greatest machine to do anything useful -
for five years I ran a multimedia content creation business using old
SGIs, a Powermac G4 and a single PC (which was used as the office
admin machine) - total cost of about £10k. We were quoted £10k for one
Dual Xeon-based windows workstation from Dell at the time... the SGIs
were only ever rebooted when the network was updated or we had a power
cut, whereas the PC had to be restarted once a day at least.

This is why I am happy to look at other OSes and older hardware for
certain tasks (not just for nostalgia's sake). After all, if an old
mac was capable of DTP in 1995, it's become no less able to layout a
page as time has passed, it's just that the applications bloat
(especially as most DTP standards like Quark are trying to get in on
the Web Page production arena). I can still write a letter and style
it nicely on a Risc PC or use an Atari ST to run the MIDI on my guitar
effects rack, so why do we chase after 3GHz x86 CPUs because Dell or
whoever tells us we have to?

I know people have belittled the idea of an ARM-based deskside
workstation, but the fact is that at 2GHz, the ARMs outperforms an x86
chip of similar clock speed, according to the article I originally
linked to. As far as multiprocessor awareness is concerned, I don't
know what ARMs chips are/aren't capable of (or might be in future),
which is why I asked them for some information. Having said that,
almost every other aspect of the concept I had thought might be
workable is being used in the newly annoucned SGI Ocatne III, albeit
using x86 cpus.

As for the reason behind trying to get Risc OS to run this system, I
think people took the wrong end of the stick when I spoke about OS
size - that was simply an indicator of how resource-hungry certain
OSes are - RiscOS is very lightweight, yet offers a full GUI
multitasking environment running in minimal installation space and
even less memory overhead. I know that drives are cheap and RAM is
plentiful, but the fact is that I'd rather have as much of my system
resource free to run my applications, not end up with a slow system
because the OS and other clutter decide that 50% resource usage is
fine. More memory and a culture of "space is cheap, so bloat doesn't
matter" ends up with vast unwieldy applications that are badly made an
inefficient. Most Unix-using engineers tend to run the solver
applications for things like Computational Fluid Dynamics from the
command line to free up as much system space as possible. If I could
get a system running a usable GUI with multitasking and decent
resource allocation not only running in less than 20MB of drive space
but, more importantly, taking up very little RAM space, then such
users would happily migrate if the platform could a) run Linux as a
hardware abstraction layer (feasible) until applications are ported
natively and, b) recompile C applications with minimal fuss. Which, if
the application is written well, should pose no problem whatesoever.

As for the person who claimed Visual Studio the greatest thing ever,
I used to be a professional software developer on both Unix/Linux (all
flavours) and Windows (writing CFD and Valve-train dynamics software,
if you wish to know) and the simple fact is that 90% of code written
in Visual Studio failed to compile on other platforms because
Microsoft mess around so much with their compilers, the libraries and
the fact that Visual Studio allows you to get away with fairly sloppy
code (in the same way that a decent web developer doesn't use
Dreamweaver because it bloats code). Yes, it's a good start for
students and is great if you're only writing for Windows, but for true
multi-platform C development I'd rather use Nedit and either GCC or
native C compilers. That way you end up with truly portable code that
is streamlined and not limited to one system's peculiarities. Yes, it
requires more knowledge and manual work, but the end result is better.
Of course, if you want to develop using Visual Studio, tht's fine -
it's also good for .Net and Java, but it is *very* MS-specific and
they are in the habit of "tweaking" the language and compilers to suit
their own sytem and requirements. Someone who can code C in Notepad or
Vi is going to be far more cross-platform useful than a dedicated
Visual Studio person. That's not me talking rubbish, it's based on my
experience and the experience of the development team I worked with,
some of whom had been writing such software since it became feasible
to do so.

I'll bow out of this thread now, as I think that, whilst I might have
been wrong in a few things (which is why I asked people to offer
consstructive comments or technical insights), there is too much
willingness to put the newbie down and make some spiteful comments
(the whole "inconsiderate dolt" thread, for a start) in order to try
to look like they are the big fish in this small pond. Forget I ever
mentioned the idea of a new Risc-based machine and some actual serious
professional development around Risc OS.
.

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