WalMart Shipping Lindows PCs
<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25734.html"; target="_blank">The Register article</a>. <a href="http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product_listing.gsp?cat=96356&dept=3944&path=0:3 944%3A3951%3A41937%3A86796%3A96356&bti=0&sb=61" target="_blank">WalMart boxen</a>.
Comments
<strong>I enjoy the fact that it is Unix based. however..</strong><hr></blockquote>
Actually,(being a true unix geek I have to say this) lindows in not unix base. It's based on linux. Which is based on minux. (I was just browsing Linus's book at borders last night). His book makes this perfectly clear...
Walmart Sales Associate: Yeah and it runs Lindows! Very stable, never crashes and easy to use!
Customer: Great! And look it comes with mail, word processor, Web browser/file manager, address book, calculator, CD player, MP3 Player, PowerPoint viewer, Word viewer, Excel viewer and Image viewer, Tron, Battleship, Poker, Minesweeper, Potato Guy!
Walmart Sales Associate: You got it!
Customer: Will it work with my existing software and documents?
Walmart Sales Associate: Sure but remember it can not write to MS files, just view them...
Customer: hmmm I'll take it!
Customer gets home....
Customer: Why can't this load my Windows software? It says it runs Windows. Where is the floppy? My monitor does not work. Huh?<hr></blockquote>
This is not a good idea for Walmart to get into...anyone agree? I think customers will not be very satisfied, and I do not think these machines will move. "Up to 8 MB shared video memory " dosn't that mean it takes some of the memory from the processor?
Walmart is on <img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
Yeah, I would think so. One of the main selling points of AGP for cheap ass hardware developers is that it can use portions of your main memory as some nice, slow video memory.
What you could do:
- Get one, preferably a P4 or AMD XP proc...
- Installed Windows XP Professional - Corporate (No Activation need - screw M$) [you can download it off KaZaA]
- Get a Geforce4-Ti for about $240
- Get a 19" Flat CRT Diamondtron for about $219
You would have a pretty butt system for under $1000.
I still choose my Mac though
[ 06-16-2002: Message edited by: Blizaine ]</p>
<hr></blockquote>
Did you read the whole thing? He (Linus) also bashes microkernel OSes as fundamentally poorly designed. What is OS X based on? The Mach microkernel. He disses Jobs' half-assed attempts at trying to get on the open-source bandwagon. He also hates the way OS X resigns classic apps to non-protected memory.
Too bad he has a point! <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
Pres
P.S. Lindows is retarded
<strong>
Did you read the whole thing? He (Linus) also bashes microkernel OSes as fundamentally poorly designed. What is OS X based on? The Mach microkernel. He disses Jobs' half-assed attempts at trying to get on the open-source bandwagon. He also hates the way OS X resigns classic apps to non-protected memory.
Too bad he has a point! <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
Pres
P.S. Lindows is retarded</strong><hr></blockquote>
What is a micro kernal os?
The 'kernel' is the basic, essential system software. It usually manages absolutely essential features like multitasking, protected memory, interprocess communication, drivers, etc. It can also manage extras like networking, if the designer wants it. Some systems have these extras built into the kernel, and other ones choose not to.
The big difference between a microkernel (like Mach) and a monolithic kernel (like Linux -- Linux is a kernel, and other components are built around that to create Linux distributions) is the amount of functions that designers put into the kernel. A microkernel is pretty basic, whereas a monolithic kernel has a whole bunch of things built in.
Microkernels help in making a system more modular, but in the real world, they're generally slower than monolithic kernels, since communication between programs is slower than communication within them. If networking software is constantly talking to the kernel, it would be faster to put the networking software into the kernel... but there goes some modularity.
To my knowledge, Mach was designed to be able to fit under several different operating systems on one computer. So instead of duplicating hardware-specific programming for each OS, the systems could talk to one Mach kernel. With OS X, there's one operating system, so that benefit is mostly out. So why use a microkernel there? Well, Mac OS X is based on Mach, but it fuses Mach and BSD (the UNIX part of the system) into one unit, called Darwin. Apparently, that speeds things up, but maintains a good deal of modularity.
[ 06-17-2002: Message edited by: Dead Member ]</p>
thanks!
You mean like how you have to edit and recompile Linux to add extra hardware?
If drivers are in the kernel, and they are in both OS X and Linux (and probably everything else), there has to be some way of adding those programs to the kernel at some time.
Linux makes you do it yourself, but OS X loads them into the kernel automatically, like Extensions and Control Panels in previous systems. I don't think the differences between microkernel and monolithic kernel are directly involved in that; Linux could probably be engineered to work like OS X if usability were important to the developers.