Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: yssing on July 31, 2012, 01:47:28 PM
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Now I have seen the notion "modern OS" several times.
I am getting a little confused (not really), but what is a modern OS? what does it require to be modern?
Surely it can't be surfing the net, that is not something the OS does. Is it all kind of eye candy? multi user OS? please do tell.
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Operating systems in popular usage which are still being maintained and support the features and hardware you would expect a current OS to support (SMP, Multiuser, memory management, to some extent hardware virtualization, up-to-date hardware standards, etc.) Primarily Windows, Linux, OS X and iOS, Android, etc.
In short, OSes which people are coming to, not those which people are running away from.
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When presented in relation to something like Amiga OS it usually just means memory protection and/or hardware abstraction layers/APIs.
Then depending on the OS it's being compared too you can add kernel (monolithic etc) type and people personal preference, multi-processor (/core) support, choice of process scheduler for the various single/multi-processor options etc.
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Operating systems in popular usage which are still being maintained and support the features and hardware you would expect a current OS to support (SMP, Multiuser, memory management, to some extent hardware virtualization, up-to-date hardware standards, etc.) Primarily Windows, Linux, OS X and iOS, Android, etc.
In short, OSes which people are coming to, not those which people are running away from.
Or look at it at a consumer's point of view, any OS that supports the apps they want to run on consumer grade (and priced) systems, be it a smartphone, tablet, notebook, or desktop. If you can't run on all those items, your future is limited, very limited.
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@ jorkany, dammy
Stop making sense!
:crazy: :crazy: :crazy:
:roflmao:
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Ms-dos
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In short, OSes which people are coming to, not those which people are running away from.
So what defines it, is what the user want?
Dammy >> IMHO apps has nothing to do with an OS being modern, apps has something to do with apps.
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So what defines it, is what the user want?
Dammy >> IMHO apps has nothing to do with an OS being modern, apps has something to do with apps.
DirectX (for example) is a part of modern OS, no DX, a lot less apps.
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DirectX is a Microsoft product, the approximate open source equivalent is OpenGL. But your point is well taken, without an API to support 2D and 3D graphics, you aren't going to convince many developers to create software for your OS.
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The "modern OS" is defined as whichever OS the poster thinks AmigaOS should be instead of AmigaOS.
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In short, OSes which people are coming to, not those which people are running away from.
That would mean that even an OS that's a century ahead of it's time would be old fashioned if no one used it :rolleyes:
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Now I have seen the notion "modern OS" several times.
I am getting a little confused (not really), but what is a modern OS? what does it require to be modern?
Surely it can't be surfing the net, that is not something the OS does. Is it all kind of eye candy? multi user OS? please do tell.
Well, I believe that a modern OS should have memory protection and segment the user space to make the OS more stable and secure.
The AmigaOS (1.0 to 3.x) was dependent on applications and programmers to write 'good citizen' code: The application would play nicely with the OS and other apps.
This would not fly today. You have to be very defensive to protect the OS and the user from malicious software. I'm not just talking malware and viruses but code that tries to steal your information/accounts/passwords/etc...
I think we are seeing that security is moving from a bolt on system (like putting guards outside your castle) to including security at the core OS (guards patrolling inside the castle). Lastly, segregation and sandboxing code from the OS.
Cheers!
-P
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That would mean that even an OS that's a century ahead of it's time would be old fashioned if no one used it :rolleyes:
Correct. Modern is defined by cultural activity around something new and nontraditional. If there is no cultural interest, it is not modern by definition. If a century from now someone discovered your hypothetical OS and began using it or incorporating it's features into other OSes and it then had a cultural impact, it would be modern.
The Newton is a good example of this. The Newton itself is not considered modern today, however some of its features are modern.
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Modern OS =
Ability to play every kind of digital media format for Audio/Video/Images/Text
Ability to surf the internet/design sites with every defined standard for page definition supported in your browser available.
Ability to download and upload data via peer-to-peer network standards
Ability to use SKYPE/MSN networks for chat/video chat.
Ability to use a sophisticated office suite (WP/SS/TM/EC)
Ability to display 3D with a graphical sophistication >= PS3/360 @ 1080p
Ability to connect to all mass produced add-on hardware types (USB MP3 players/cameras/Webcams etc)
Ability to run the majority of applications currently sold/freely downloadable etc
IMO that's what it means. ie it does not impede your use of the computer via the choice of OS you have chosen to use. Sure NextSTEP 3 can run your business just as well as a host of Windows based networked computers but that's why it's such a meaningless phrase in some cases. There are things NextSTEP does that Windows 2008 still does not, useful things too.
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Digiman >> All those mentioned have nothing to do with the OS but are depending on applications.
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let me try in two lines:
- used by more then (lets say) 1000 people out of 7b
- able to run (no emulation) on sub $500 hardware ?
everything else is really trying to milk an ant :/
Tom UK
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Digiman >> All those mentioned have nothing to do with the OS but are depending on applications.
An OS includes applications. What you're thinking of is a kernel.
exec had exactly the right compromises for a mid 80's home computer kernel. Unfortunately those compromises are baked in and can't be changed.
If you want a minority operating system on modern hardware then try haiku http://www.haiku-os.org/.
AROS is ok, but it can't make use of multiple cpu's, memory protection etc.
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Now I have seen the notion "modern OS" several times.
I am getting a little confused (not really), but what is a modern OS? what does it require to be modern?
Surely it can't be surfing the net, that is not something the OS does. Is it all kind of eye candy? multi user OS? please do tell.
A modern OS is a OS that requires 1000 times the resources of an old OS to accomplish the same basic tasks.
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Modern is defined by cultural activity around something new and nontraditional. If there is no cultural interest, it is not modern by definition.
That's a nice one.
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I feel an underlying OS identity crisis :)
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@ jorkany, dammy
Stop making sense!
:crazy: :crazy: :crazy:
:roflmao:
Stop being funny! :roflmao:
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A modern OS is a OS that requires 1000 times the resources of an old OS to accomplish the same basic tasks.
Thats exactly it.
I totally think the os should give most of the horsepower of the hardware to
the user. Linux, windows and osx fail at this on older hardware badly.
If you tweak the hell out of linux with a lightweight window manager, its not
so bad I suppose.
I just think a brand new os should not require brand new hardware to run
decently.
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A modern OS is a application launching device where users don't realize they are using it. So i guess that would be intuition or something. Except i hate intuition dammit. It makes me feel alienated from modern computing as it doesn't understand me. Then i forget which one i am using. So i guess it does work after all. This is so confusing
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A modern OS is a OS that requires 1000 times the resources of an old OS to accomplish the same basic tasks.
Zing!
No, but seriously, so much of what's being thrown around in this thread is just clippings from the Grand List of Things PC Users Have Made Fun of Amiga Users for Not Having. You can hear the rationalization - "well, if I can play movies, and I can use Skype, and I can run Office, and I can play all the latest 3D games, and I can run all the latest PC software on all the latest PC hardware, then nobody will ever be able to make fun of my Amiga again!" Well, no shít, Sherlock, that's because it'll be a PC! Oh, and also nobody was ever dissuaded from mocking someone by having the basis of their mockery taken away, so don't count on that even if you do succeed in redefining "Amiga" to mean "another damn generic PC system."
The biggest obstacle to the Amiga platform and community isn't hardware or software - it's the sheer amount of time wasted on tilting at windmills because somewhere, at some point, some PC user told us they might be giants.
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A modern OS is a OS that requires 1000 times the resources of an old OS to accomplish the same basic tasks.
A modern OS can do 1000 tricks, while an old OS can't. Lets not pretend AROS, AmigaOS or MorphOS are anywhere near modern OS today. I stopped fooling myself 15 years ago, join me.
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Zing!
No, but seriously, so much of what's being thrown around in this thread is just clippings from the Grand List of Things PC Users Have Made Fun of Amiga Users for Not Having. You can hear the rationalization - "well, if I can play movies, and I can use Skype, and I can run Office, and I can play all the latest 3D games, and I can run all the latest PC software on all the latest PC hardware, then nobody will ever be able to make fun of my Amiga again!" Well, no shít, Sherlock, that's because it'll be a PC! Oh, and also nobody was ever dissuaded from mocking someone by having the basis of their mockery taken away, so don't count on that even if you do succeed in redefining "Amiga" to mean "another damn generic PC system."
The biggest obstacle to the Amiga platform and community isn't hardware or software - it's the sheer amount of time wasted on tilting at windmills because somewhere, at some point, some PC user told us they might be giants.
Well, now the CUSA thing makes total sense then!
Just redefine things so "amiga = linux PC" and voila, we suddenly have amiga's with skype and Quake 4 and memory protection.
Heck, Commodore could have done that in 1985 and been done with it!
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A 'Modern OS' is quite simply defined as one that runs on 'Modern Hardware'. I don't think it has anything to do particularly with what features the OS itself has. And yeah, while the Operating System may come with Notepad, or some basic text editing, I would still call that an application, and not necessarily part of the operating system.
The only thing (in my mind) that makes the AmigaOS (and all of their brethren, female companions? what would be the female word for brethren anyhow? Since the Amiga is a feminine word.) not a 'Modern' Operating System, would be the fact that it doesn't work with modern hardware. Yes, that's even including the AmigaOne X1000. While the hardware itself is more or less modern, AmigaOS4 doesn't FULLY support it yet. Making it not a FULL (modern) operating system.
I absolutely love the AmigaOS, and while I agree it does need something as important as memory protection, multiuser and security, it's not necessarily required for a 'modern' operating system. But you do need support for whatever hardware it's going to run on. If you have a Dual Core PPC and AmigaOS4 only supports one core, that's not full support. The key word here is SYSTEM. You can have the most epic Operating System in the world, but if you don't have any hardware to operate it on, then well.... But then again the same goes the other way. You could have hardware that would make a basement dwelling troll go on a 'fapping' spree, but if you don't have an operating system that doesn't suck....
This is the conundrum of 'Modern Computer Systems.' In my opinion some of the ways AmigaOS did things were just beyond anything we have on 'Modern Operating Systems'. Screen drags and different resolution screens on the fly! I mean that is still one of the coolest things I've ever used. Granted with LCD/LED screens looking completely horrible unless you're using the native resolution (or perfectly divisible of that native resolution) then multiple resolution applications would be a bad thing, but I think they still have their use. Another one would be custom icon sizes and clicked on and non-clicked on icons (damnit, I want my folders to look opened when I single click them!)
Sometimes I dream of being able to run something as light weight and fast as AmigaOS 3.x on my 8 core AMD Bulldozer with 8GB of RAM and being able to utilize all my hardware. It would absolutely SCREAM!
Unfortunately by my own definition though, even AROS isn't a completely modern operating system, because it only runs on specific hardware still. I haven't managed to even get it to boot on my laptop or my desktop. :(
slaapliedje
P.S. Sorry for the rant...
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Now I have seen the notion "modern OS" several times.
I am getting a little confused (not really), but what is a modern OS?
Certainly not any of the Amiga flavors, that's for sure...... :roflmao:
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So a modern system OS must have:
-Memory protection.
-SMP support.
That much we all agree on. Hence no flavor of AOS can be considered modern(?)
It must run on new and any available hardware, but that would exclude pretty much any OS.
It must be able to run Skype, Office suite and the newest games, personally I don't consider those to be a part of an OS.
It must used 1000 times the resources of an old OS to do the same basic things.
So no real consensus can be reached, other than MP and SMP.
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A modern OS is an OS that can control Paula, Agnus and Denise natively.
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Modern - characteristic of present and recent time; contemporary; not antiquated or obsolete.
A modern OS, is an operating system that is up to date with the latest usage trends and application requirement.
Today, that would be an easy to use and intuitive system with a touch-compatible interface and the ability to run 3d-accellerated applications at HD-resolutions.
That being said, being modern is not the same thing as being good, efficient or easy to tinker with. :-)
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Modern OS things that we need:
-multicore support
-smart SW shutdown
-more memory protection (if full is out fo reach)
-to be able to use more than 2GB RAM
-thorough 3D support
-better interfaces towards modern tech (bluetooth, etc)
Less critical:
-multiuser support
-OpenCL
There are some things that our niche OSs do better than mainstream Modern OSs, and we should not give away those features (example: responsiveness, light weight).
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How about an OS that is supported to do modern stuff on modern hardware.
On a desktop or Laptop that would be; Burn a HD Bluray disk, Play a fully featured game released last year. Encode a Bluray DVD to a HD MKV file for your HDMI HD Media player in 10 minutes. Home studio quality digital recording, Surf quickly and painlessly. Make a good quality 2 hour home movie in an hour not 2 days.
For a tablet: Ummm Play PACMAN?
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How about an OS that is supported to do modern stuff on modern hardware.
On a desktop or Laptop that would be; Burn a HD Bluray disk, Play a fully featured game released last year. Encode a Bluray DVD to a HD MKV file for your HDMI HD Media player in 10 minutes. Home studio quality digital recording, Surf quickly and painlessly. Make a good quality 2 hour home movie in an hour not 2 days.
You seem to be under the impression that a "modern OS" can magically substitute for hardware might...
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"Modern" is a bad choice of words. It means one thing for an OS researcher, and another for an enthusiast.
Exec was designed for 128K, 7MHz, and a floppydrive. At that time OS design had included proper management of all system resources for 20-odd years already. Hi-Toro just didn't have the resources available for making it happen.
If you have gigabytes memory, gigahertz processor, and terrabytes storage, you have an expectancy of having all aspects of resource management in place.
Whatever "modern" is, it will at least include what was considered good practice 45-50 years ago. That includes MP, resource tracking, swapping/paging, address virtualization.
Note that none of this means you have to have a traditional unix style fork+exec regime where all processes start from the same address and basically share nothing.
What is ironic in all this is that the Amiga gave the end user many tools and options that felt very fresh and very friendly. Things that you'd think a modern OS could do.
What _is_ modern, and what _feels_ modern is easily not the same.
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Exec was designed for 128K, 7MHz, and a floppydrive. At that time OS design had included proper management of all system resources for 20-odd years already. Hi-Toro just didn't have the resources available for making it happen.
It wasn't just money, the lack of memory protection is baked into the way messages are passed between applications. Passing memory pointers between processes was a conscious decision to make it run quicker. Not only that, the mmu's available back then slowed down every memory access.
exec was still the most advanced kernel for a desktop computer or games machine in the mid 80's. None of the competition in that market were even close for many years. Unfortunately the windows/macs evolved and ate the Amiga's lunch. The Amiga was never taken seriously enough to take on Silicon Graphics or Sun, because the design fell short of the workstation market.
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the lack of memory protection is baked into the way messages are passed between applications. Passing memory pointers between processes was a conscious decision to make it run quicker.
Sharing does not mean not protecting. I recommend checking out research around "SASOS" to see ideas about this. It has become quieter in recent times as it saw interest bloom when 64bit address spaces became commonplace.
The same ideas could have been applied to a 32bit address space when 128K was considered adequate (well, in many ways that is what Exec did, only with non-virtualized addresses, which limits your posibilities).
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Important points are interactivity with popular data sharing and productivity software. Part of the reason AmigaOS feels so dated is that its nearly impossible to share, produce or consume data used by other operating systems in an easy manner.
Examples of this are opening, modifying and creating spreadsheets, current video formats (MP4, H.264, FLV, Silverlight, etc..), current audio formats (OGG, MP3 (with good playback), FLAC, FLA, etc..) word documents, open type documents, hell even RTF documents.
We can't really go to most websites which is a huge source of communication these days, you can't consume YouTube or half the time even visit email sites due to a lack of a decent browser; at least not without a serious sacrifice in productivity and usability.
Things like YouTube and GMail seem trivial given the things you can do with AmigaOS but these are the medium through which much communication happens. Even if you get your news form news.google.com or TheVerge or reddit or any of those other sites, we barely support JavaScript and most browsers on the Amiga have no CSS capability at all, let alone the CSS used on current/modern sites.
So long story short, if you can perform your daily routine with only that one operating system and still partake in sharing, consuming and being productive with current data formats then you are likely using a modern OS.
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GMail works fine on iBrowse on my 030 system...
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In the basic HTML mode, yeah, Gmail works great. I've used it a lot.
It's not fast on an 030 but well, it wouldn't have been fast on a 386 either.
YAM is still my fave email client ever too :)
Otherwise yeah, compatibility to standards is a problem, but are those OS issues? Is there an inherent reason we couldn't have, say, a more compatible version of APDF, or simple export to .doc format etc in an amiga app ? (assuming there were people to code the damn thing and people willing to sponsor it)
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Let me try to list a few features I think of as "modern"
- support for hw acceleration of tasks AND using it: a display system knowing and using 3D or other accelerated features, an audio system able to offload effects to hw.
- an integrated object model: what enables you to insert a spreadsheet in your Word document
- a unified storage view: think volume manager or ZFS
- a failsafe storage system: (typically) a journaled filesystem
The last one might not be very modern. And yes, we have that.
For gfx we have 2d help, but the OS has no notion of 3D.
The closest to an object model is datatypes? (not close at all). Not that they aren't a brilliant idea (BeOS is the only other one to pick up that?).