bloodline wrote:
How on earth is modern hardware poor quality?
I'm not talking about it failing; I'm talking about it being less than excellent to begin with. If you can't see that we could be doing better than we are by building systems that are designed to a set of open standards free of the need for legacy software compatiblity, then I don't understand where you're coming from, at all.
First you claim that the Modern PC is backwards compatible... Then claim that it's not actually compatible...
Meh... Yes the x86 boots in "Real Mode" (8bit)... but a modern BIOS or EFI will get out of Real Mode within the first few microseconds... I have actually run visicalc on my Athlon64 :-) So the industry has clung on to the old tech way beyond it's design life, simple due to the massive software investment of yesteryear... :-)
I claimed it was partially backwards compatible; that's different from claiming compatibility and incompatibility, both. Ummm ... unless they changed this in the last three years [since I last read the AMD x64 system architecture manuals], it is the operating system's responsibility to set the mode, and do other obnoxiously over complicated tasks like loading the drivers for VESA devices, RAID controllers, etc. You put a floppy in drive A: with executable code in the boot sector, and you've got just about nothing to work with that you don't build yourself.
Personally I think if you're going to build hardware at all, you ought to design it, and the firmware, to present an API that can be programmed without having to invest weeks in learning to use each revision of every type of device. I call that poor design. Of course, a lot of people disagree, and think there should be a minimal amount of handholding available.
However, I believe they are wrong, because of the unreasonable amount of code you have to write just to load a text segment into memory from a hard disk and enable it to write to the screen [not in real mode], never mind the network. The Sparc SLC is a great example of the opposite philosophy - I used to use the ROM routines on those to accomplish just about anything I ever needed - no operating system required, just a boot loader.
Not quite... the x86 platform survived due to a massive software investment... that, but AMD and intel are not stupid, they moded out the old tech (Real Mode-8bit, Protected Mode-32bit, Long Mode-64bit) and kept the respective modes as clean as the technology of the time would allow... Long Mode is a very nice 64bit architecture!
Hah! This is a popular misconception - believe me, you might not be the only one still using visicalc, but I bet we could fit everyone who does inside of a basketball court. The fact is, most end users buy the new versions of software, and are rarely more than one major release behind, and almost _never_ more than two. If Microsoft didn't find it more 'cost effective' to keep churning out the same old crap again and again, they'd have simply told everyone who bought Windows XP to buy new apps. It's not like consumers who lack training in technology really would have had a choice!
You might use MS Access 2003 or 2000, but if you're running the 98 version in a production environment, you should have a CAT scan. Same goes for any software that's sold over the counter. The only real reason for maintaining backwards compatibility with old software is the large number of custom applications that drive industries like banking, equity trading, debt collection, etc., etc.
No doubt, once upon a time, many of these systems ran on DOS because it was cheaper than UNIX. Now, most of these systems have been ported to Linux/UNIX or simply replaced by apps written to run natively under them. Very few people _need_ to run DOS/Windows apps from more than 5-8 years ago, and the great thing is that all of those UNIX apps will happily run in POSIX sandboxes and never even know it.
You don't actually now what design flaws you think still exist... :-)
ISA is gone, Long Mode has cleaned up the instruction set and added lot of registers... Don't forget that the x86 has a very modern SSE unit for math co-processing... and the actually hardware is totally modern... what flaws can still exist?
Hmm. Let's see. The 10000+ pages of documentation that apply to my laptop pretty much constitute a design flaw, in my opinion. Fast computers with lots of storage don't _have_ to be ridiculously over complicated from a software designers perspective. The Tandem midranges I used to work one are a perfect example of that! They ran an operating system called Non-Stop - a delightfully simply OS designed for reliability. Sadly, all those systems were replaced by PCs.
My MacBookPro is the most reliable machine I;eve ever had... yes even more than my Amiga... I trust my Amiga and my MacBook Pro for live music work... and my Amiga can't do even 1/100th what my MBP can do live...
My live system isn't unreliable... it performs exactly as required in a realtime live music situation.
No offense, but you're talking apples and oranges, here. You're dealing with a very narrow, specific application that happens to have been beaten into decent shape over the course of years. I don't know what software you're running, but I've used ProTools, and it happens to be relatively bug-free [at least as long as you don't try to use the system it's on as a general purpose computer].
My dictionary defines 'reliable' as yielding the same or consistently compatible results. I know a lot of people who write software for a living. I know very few programmers who would claim the applications they've worked on are completely reliable. Mostly reliable is an oxymoron.
The Hardware that these massive drivers support, is so much more complex than anything we had in the 80's, that's why they are so big!
So? Does this mean the hardware's interfaces should be harder to use? No, not at all. Part of good design is presenting to the outside world exactly those controls which are necessary to achieve the goal of the system and NO OTHERS. This is referred to as 'black box' design, and people learn it in engineering school and then go out into the job market and completely ignore it because of two factors: fools who insist on changing specifications during the design process, and their own inability to specify a design in a readable document.
Show me a piece of hardware in a modern PC that obeys that law of design, if you can, please, or even one with behavior identical to its spec.
Apple, have just opened the AppStore... check it out... it's that very samw idea...
That's not really what I meant. Software is fundamentally built out of smaller pieces, and the smaller pieces are usually similar enough to the small pieces of other software that the programmers building them are re-inventing the wheel half the time. It'd be nice if someone was selling wheels, but it just doesn't happen, not on a large enough scale.
The Amiga perfectly (and I don;t often use that term) solved the computing issues of the 80's... I really can't think of any better system in the 80's... in fact despite having no development from Commodore, the Amiga was still relevant during the early 90s!!! That's how good it was... but the modern word has very different issues.
Not really. The modern world's issues are the same - messaging, information storage and retrieval, book-keeping, etc. - it's just how we look at them that has changed. If anything has changed in the last 15 years, it's only that people have become much lazier than they used to be. The 'Web' is not a new idea - we had gopher before it. Granted, it was uglier, but making things look nice is no substitute for progress.
Apple, woke up and filled that slot about 5 years ago... it took them a long time and the return of Steve Jobs... but they did it. I can't think of a better system that one could buy right now...
Of course you can't buy a better system - they've made absolutely certain of that by manipulating the market into accepting products that are less inferior than their competition's offerings, and by working with their competition to prevent real competition from actually occurring. To me, less inferior does not mean 'good', and the fact that I can't buy a computer that I'm really happy with annoys me.
