5 ms·

Last I heard Microsoft Windows was obsolete something like ten years ago, is there an operating system other than UNIX left out there, that your application wou

by Annatar 10y ago

Last I heard Microsoft Windows was obsolete something like ten years ago, is there an operating system other than UNIX left out there, that your application would have to be agnostic?

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Depends on if his employer decides to start targeting OS/2 ATM's, THEOS desktops, non-IBM mainframes, non-POSIX RTOS's, or the lonely market for Amiga's. ;)
- Annatar 10y ago
  Even AmigaOS has web browsers (just surfed the web from Aweb under AmigaOS). And a shell, so stdout/stderr works too.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Hey, that's cheating if you're putting all the OS specific functions in its own app that moves data to/from those. It's what high-security did for Ada, Java, and UNIX runtimes on separation kernels. Significant, performance penalties in many desktop applications.
    - Annatar 10y ago
      Desktop is dead!!! The '90's of the past century called and said they want the desktop back! People don't want a clunky computer any more; except for computer people, I don't know anybody from general population who has one. I'm offended that we're even wasting time discussing desktop anything!
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        People just happen to carry their desktops on their pockets and use this thing called apps on them. Also I don't see anything here on these APIs, https://developer.android.com/guide/index.html https://developer.android.com/guide/index.html https://developer.apple.com/reference/ https://developer.apple.com/reference/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element That relate to these ones: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
        Annatar 10y ago
        People just happen to carry their desktops on their pockets You mean they carry their portable UNIX servers in their pockets with them. Since they all come with a web browser, there's your application's or your server's front end. and use this thing called apps on them. I have a few of those on my mobile UNIX server as well. Stupidest thing I've ever seen or used, "apps". What for, when they could have used a web browser to display their front ends, or could have ran on a backend server and just sent the display to the web browser? Most of those "apps" I use won't function without an InterNet uplink anyway... idiocy pur.
        pjmlp 10y ago
        Ironically the web browser as application runtime doesn't have anything to do with UNIX, it can even be running bare metal. Which means the OS running on the server is equally irrelevant as long as it can serve pages, CSS and JavaScript. Which ad absurdum makes UNIX APIs irrelevant for cloud computing.
        nickpsecurity 10y ago
        An example from high-assurance, security field to back up your claim: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/osdi10/tech/full_papers/Tang.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/osdi10/tech/full_papers...
        pjmlp 10y ago
        Interesting read, thanks.
        Annatar 10y ago
        It's only ad absurdum if you're completely unaware of the fact that UNIX (in this case not GNU/Linux, but illumos / SmartOS) is a high performing operating system with extensive facilities for preemption and traceability, which makes it ideal for web applications, and at scale, too. Haven't heard of SmartOS yet, have you, since you claim UNIX unfit for cloud applications?
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        The 90's desktop market was more interesting. Yet, you must have never met anyone doing applications that require fast CPU's and plenty RAM. Or looked at the desktop sales figures that are well above zero. Hell, I built one for a guy's gaming rig a little while back. That replaced his hand-me-down from a company designing & installing sprinkler systems. Why he have that? They just bought new desktops for all there CAD users. Lot of CAD users out there probably have one too. ;)
        Annatar 10y ago
        The 90's desktop market was more interesting. Yet, you must have never met anyone doing applications that require fast CPU's and plenty RAM. Plenty of RAM? Yes, but on supercomputers. My machines were sgi Origin 2000's and 3800's running a single compute intensive application doing finite element analysis and using 16 GB of RAM, across all the CPU's in the system. A single calculation would usually take a month. On the desktop, you couldn't be more wrong: I was part of the cracking / demo scene, and we literally counted clock cycles in order to squeeze every last bit of performance in our assembler code, me included.
        nickpsecurity 10y ago
        Im jealous thag you got to play with SGI Origins. I wanted one of them or an Onyx2 but cost too damn much. At this point, though, you're partly supporting my claim: certain workloads necessitate either a desktop, a server, or a bunch of them. These include artists, scientists, designers of various equipment, gamers, well-off laypersons wanting instant response time, privacy nuts needing cores for VM-based browsing, and so on. Not relegated only to "computer people" as you falsely claimed. One can also look at the numbers. Last year, over 17 million PC's were sold in US. Think the buyers were really all computer people? Even with 3 year refresh cycle, low end, that be estimate of around 50 million computer people in this country that's been buying desktops over 3 years. Think they're really that big a demographic?
        Annatar 10y ago
        Well, I'd argue that all those people you listed are either professionals in diverse fields, or enthusiasts. If you take 17 million PC's sold, just in the United States, that's 17 / 300 * 100 = 5.66% of the population. And I was conservative in using 300 million as the total U.S. population, when I've read it's more like 321 million, so what does that tell you? But if you look at the number of PC's sold year over year, the number is dwindling at the rate of roughly 15% - 18% per year. Look, for example, under the "Global Computer Sales" column, here: http://www.statisticbrain.com/computer-sales-statistics/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/computer-sales-statistics/ the average laypeople don't want computers any more, and the sales reflect that. For their needs a tablet or a mobile telephone with a web browser is pretty much all they need, and the web can and does now deliver pretty much any kind of application they could ever need or want. And that's precisely where most of the sales of desktops were. Professionals using computer aided design and people like you and me are few and far in between, in comparison. On an sgi related note, I myself owned several Octanes and even an sgi Challenge R10000 (with a corresponding electricity bill). I must have torn and rebuilt that Challenge four or five times, just for fun. My primary workstation for years (which I fixed and put together myself) was an sgi Indigo2 R10000, with an hp ScanJet II SCSI scanner, a 21" SONY Trinitron, and a Plextor CD-RW SCSI drive, back in the day when CD-RW was "the thing". With 256 MB of RAM when most PC's had something like 16 or 32 MB, it was a sweet setup. Ah, IRIX 6.5, how much I miss thee...
lmm 10y ago
Show me a unix system as nice as the Surface Book and I'll be interested.
- Annatar 10y ago
  Is that one of those failed Microsoft tablet thingies? Why would anyone care about a GUI in the 21st century, when everything runs either on stdout/stderr or on the web? Anyway, the answer to your question is iPad Pro by Apple Computer. It runs an operating system called "iOS" which is a heavily customized FreeBSD on top of a custom CMU Mach kernel. And it's UNIX03 compliant. UNIX! It's everywhere!
  - lmm 10y ago
    > Anyway, the answer to your question is iPad Pro by Apple Computer. It runs an operating system called "iOS" which is a heavily customized FreeBSD on top of a custom CMU Mach kernel. And it's UNIX03 compliant. UNIX! It's everywhere, it didn't go away, and it won't die! I'm aware of it, it's not good enough. Its UI is terrible when you need to work with multiple applications, it's a pain to customize anything and even more of a pain to run your own programs.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    How do you run XCode, sign apps and upload them to the store on iPad Pro? How does you .profile on iOS look like?
    - Annatar 10y ago
      I don't, what for? All I'd need is SSH to connect to my illumos based systems, and a web browser to use my applications. Compiling things on a lone desktop like back in the '90's? No, that's what I did when I was a kid and didn't know any better. I have infrastructure for that now. Cross compilers, too.
pjmlp 10y ago
Yes, Web browser as OS, MacOS X, iOS, Android and all the IoT ones. There isn't a standard UNIX way to do GUIs, bluetooth, NPC, GPGPU, touch screens, cryptography, printers, medical devices, ... All that UNIX has is POSIX, http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ , which only focus on CLI and daemons as applications. Anything else are not portable APIs that don't have necessarily to do with UNIX. It doesn't matter that the kernel is UNIX like, if what is on top of it isn't. And anyone that only knows GNU/Linux as UNIX, should read "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" from W. Richard Stevens/Stephen A. Rago, to see what actually means to write portable UNIX code across POSIX implementations.
- Annatar 10y ago
  Android? In this context, that's UNIX. MacOS X is UNIX. Even the z/OS on the mainframe has a UNIX03 compliant UNIX subsystem. You were saying...? GUI is dead; if your application doesn't run on the server and display the results either on the command line or in a web browser, you're doing it wrong.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    > Android? In this context, that's UNIX. MacOS X is UNIX. Even the z/OS on the mainframe has a UNIX03 compliant UNIX subsystem. You were saying...? So you use VI and Emacs on Android, generate postscript and troff files, configure /etc/passwd and /etc/init.d How does your Android .profile look like? Yes z/OS has a POSIX subsystem, it also doesn't support anything besides CLI, daemos and batch processing. Mac OS X is a certified UNIX, however none of the APIs that matter. You known, those written in Objective-C and Swift are UNIX. > GUI is dead; if your application doesn't run on the server and display the results either on the command line or in a web browser, you're doing it wrong. Better let all of those that earn money targeting infotainment systems, medical devices, factory control units, GPS units, iOS, Android, game consoles, smart watches, VR units, POS, ... that they are doing it wrong.
    - Annatar 10y ago
      So you use VI and Emacs on Android, generate postscript and troff files, configure /etc/passwd and /etc/init.d I don't use Android, because it's a ridiculously hacked-up version of GNU/Linux (as if being based on GNU/Linux isn't bad enough). Have you spawned a shell on it? The filesystem is a royal mess, the likes of which I've never seen before. Could I run vi and groff and even SVR4 nroff on it? Yes, if I wanted to waste my time with it, I could. How does your Android .profile look like? I didn't touch .profile because I don't care for bash one bit, but it was there. However, in this context, it's still UNIX. A hacked-up, ugly UNIX severely mutilated to run on mobile telephones and tables, but conceptually UNIX nevertheless (honestly, I have never seen anything to hacked-up and mutilated like Android, and you can bet that in 30+ years of working with computers, one sees all kinds of things).

by Annatar 10y ago

Last I heard Microsoft Windows was obsolete something like ten years ago, is there an operating system other than UNIX left out there, that your application would have to be agnostic?

nickpsecurity 10y ago

Depends on if his employer decides to start targeting OS/2 ATM's, THEOS desktops, non-IBM mainframes, non-POSIX RTOS's, or the lonely market for Amiga's. ;)

Annatar 10y ago
Even AmigaOS has web browsers (just surfed the web from Aweb under AmigaOS). And a shell, so stdout/stderr works too.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Hey, that's cheating if you're putting all the OS specific functions in its own app that moves data to/from those. It's what high-security did for Ada, Java, and UNIX runtimes on separation kernels. Significant, performance penalties in many desktop applications.
  - Annatar 10y ago
    Desktop is dead!!! The '90's of the past century called and said they want the desktop back! People don't want a clunky computer any more; except for computer people, I don't know anybody from general population who has one. I'm offended that we're even wasting time discussing desktop anything!
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      People just happen to carry their desktops on their pockets and use this thing called apps on them. Also I don't see anything here on these APIs, https://developer.android.com/guide/index.html https://developer.android.com/guide/index.html https://developer.apple.com/reference/ https://developer.apple.com/reference/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element That relate to these ones: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
      - Annatar 10y ago
        People just happen to carry their desktops on their pockets You mean they carry their portable UNIX servers in their pockets with them. Since they all come with a web browser, there's your application's or your server's front end. and use this thing called apps on them. I have a few of those on my mobile UNIX server as well. Stupidest thing I've ever seen or used, "apps". What for, when they could have used a web browser to display their front ends, or could have ran on a backend server and just sent the display to the web browser? Most of those "apps" I use won't function without an InterNet uplink anyway... idiocy pur.
        pjmlp 10y ago
        Ironically the web browser as application runtime doesn't have anything to do with UNIX, it can even be running bare metal. Which means the OS running on the server is equally irrelevant as long as it can serve pages, CSS and JavaScript. Which ad absurdum makes UNIX APIs irrelevant for cloud computing.
        nickpsecurity 10y ago
        An example from high-assurance, security field to back up your claim: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/osdi10/tech/full_papers/Tang.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/osdi10/tech/full_papers...
        pjmlp 10y ago
        Interesting read, thanks.
        Annatar 10y ago
        It's only ad absurdum if you're completely unaware of the fact that UNIX (in this case not GNU/Linux, but illumos / SmartOS) is a high performing operating system with extensive facilities for preemption and traceability, which makes it ideal for web applications, and at scale, too. Haven't heard of SmartOS yet, have you, since you claim UNIX unfit for cloud applications?
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      The 90's desktop market was more interesting. Yet, you must have never met anyone doing applications that require fast CPU's and plenty RAM. Or looked at the desktop sales figures that are well above zero. Hell, I built one for a guy's gaming rig a little while back. That replaced his hand-me-down from a company designing & installing sprinkler systems. Why he have that? They just bought new desktops for all there CAD users. Lot of CAD users out there probably have one too. ;)
      - Annatar 10y ago
        The 90's desktop market was more interesting. Yet, you must have never met anyone doing applications that require fast CPU's and plenty RAM. Plenty of RAM? Yes, but on supercomputers. My machines were sgi Origin 2000's and 3800's running a single compute intensive application doing finite element analysis and using 16 GB of RAM, across all the CPU's in the system. A single calculation would usually take a month. On the desktop, you couldn't be more wrong: I was part of the cracking / demo scene, and we literally counted clock cycles in order to squeeze every last bit of performance in our assembler code, me included.
        nickpsecurity 10y ago
        Im jealous thag you got to play with SGI Origins. I wanted one of them or an Onyx2 but cost too damn much. At this point, though, you're partly supporting my claim: certain workloads necessitate either a desktop, a server, or a bunch of them. These include artists, scientists, designers of various equipment, gamers, well-off laypersons wanting instant response time, privacy nuts needing cores for VM-based browsing, and so on. Not relegated only to "computer people" as you falsely claimed. One can also look at the numbers. Last year, over 17 million PC's were sold in US. Think the buyers were really all computer people? Even with 3 year refresh cycle, low end, that be estimate of around 50 million computer people in this country that's been buying desktops over 3 years. Think they're really that big a demographic?
        Annatar 10y ago
        Well, I'd argue that all those people you listed are either professionals in diverse fields, or enthusiasts. If you take 17 million PC's sold, just in the United States, that's 17 / 300 * 100 = 5.66% of the population. And I was conservative in using 300 million as the total U.S. population, when I've read it's more like 321 million, so what does that tell you? But if you look at the number of PC's sold year over year, the number is dwindling at the rate of roughly 15% - 18% per year. Look, for example, under the "Global Computer Sales" column, here: http://www.statisticbrain.com/computer-sales-statistics/ http://www.statisticbrain.com/computer-sales-statistics/ the average laypeople don't want computers any more, and the sales reflect that. For their needs a tablet or a mobile telephone with a web browser is pretty much all they need, and the web can and does now deliver pretty much any kind of application they could ever need or want. And that's precisely where most of the sales of desktops were. Professionals using computer aided design and people like you and me are few and far in between, in comparison. On an sgi related note, I myself owned several Octanes and even an sgi Challenge R10000 (with a corresponding electricity bill). I must have torn and rebuilt that Challenge four or five times, just for fun. My primary workstation for years (which I fixed and put together myself) was an sgi Indigo2 R10000, with an hp ScanJet II SCSI scanner, a 21" SONY Trinitron, and a Plextor CD-RW SCSI drive, back in the day when CD-RW was "the thing". With 256 MB of RAM when most PC's had something like 16 or 32 MB, it was a sweet setup. Ah, IRIX 6.5, how much I miss thee...

lmm 10y ago

Show me a unix system as nice as the Surface Book and I'll be interested.

Annatar 10y ago
Is that one of those failed Microsoft tablet thingies? Why would anyone care about a GUI in the 21st century, when everything runs either on stdout/stderr or on the web? Anyway, the answer to your question is iPad Pro by Apple Computer. It runs an operating system called "iOS" which is a heavily customized FreeBSD on top of a custom CMU Mach kernel. And it's UNIX03 compliant. UNIX! It's everywhere!
- lmm 10y ago
  > Anyway, the answer to your question is iPad Pro by Apple Computer. It runs an operating system called "iOS" which is a heavily customized FreeBSD on top of a custom CMU Mach kernel. And it's UNIX03 compliant. UNIX! It's everywhere, it didn't go away, and it won't die! I'm aware of it, it's not good enough. Its UI is terrible when you need to work with multiple applications, it's a pain to customize anything and even more of a pain to run your own programs.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  How do you run XCode, sign apps and upload them to the store on iPad Pro? How does you .profile on iOS look like?
  - Annatar 10y ago
    I don't, what for? All I'd need is SSH to connect to my illumos based systems, and a web browser to use my applications. Compiling things on a lone desktop like back in the '90's? No, that's what I did when I was a kid and didn't know any better. I have infrastructure for that now. Cross compilers, too.

pjmlp 10y ago

Yes, Web browser as OS, MacOS X, iOS, Android and all the IoT ones. There isn't a standard UNIX way to do GUIs, bluetooth, NPC, GPGPU, touch screens, cryptography, printers, medical devices, ... All that UNIX has is POSIX, http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ , which only focus on CLI and daemons as applications. Anything else are not portable APIs that don't have necessarily to do with UNIX. It doesn't matter that the kernel is UNIX like, if what is on top of it isn't. And anyone that only knows GNU/Linux as UNIX, should read "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" from W. Richard Stevens/Stephen A. Rago, to see what actually means to write portable UNIX code across POSIX implementations.

Annatar 10y ago
Android? In this context, that's UNIX. MacOS X is UNIX. Even the z/OS on the mainframe has a UNIX03 compliant UNIX subsystem. You were saying...? GUI is dead; if your application doesn't run on the server and display the results either on the command line or in a web browser, you're doing it wrong.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > Android? In this context, that's UNIX. MacOS X is UNIX. Even the z/OS on the mainframe has a UNIX03 compliant UNIX subsystem. You were saying...? So you use VI and Emacs on Android, generate postscript and troff files, configure /etc/passwd and /etc/init.d How does your Android .profile look like? Yes z/OS has a POSIX subsystem, it also doesn't support anything besides CLI, daemos and batch processing. Mac OS X is a certified UNIX, however none of the APIs that matter. You known, those written in Objective-C and Swift are UNIX. > GUI is dead; if your application doesn't run on the server and display the results either on the command line or in a web browser, you're doing it wrong. Better let all of those that earn money targeting infotainment systems, medical devices, factory control units, GPS units, iOS, Android, game consoles, smart watches, VR units, POS, ... that they are doing it wrong.
  - Annatar 10y ago
    So you use VI and Emacs on Android, generate postscript and troff files, configure /etc/passwd and /etc/init.d I don't use Android, because it's a ridiculously hacked-up version of GNU/Linux (as if being based on GNU/Linux isn't bad enough). Have you spawned a shell on it? The filesystem is a royal mess, the likes of which I've never seen before. Could I run vi and groff and even SVR4 nroff on it? Yes, if I wanted to waste my time with it, I could. How does your Android .profile look like? I didn't touch .profile because I don't care for bash one bit, but it was there. However, in this context, it's still UNIX. A hacked-up, ugly UNIX severely mutilated to run on mobile telephones and tables, but conceptually UNIX nevertheless (honestly, I have never seen anything to hacked-up and mutilated like Android, and you can bet that in 30+ years of working with computers, one sees all kinds of things).