Wasn't DOS 1.0 written in Assembler? (So that makes it better! than OSX) That was very, very long ago .....
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
An Academic Perspective on Windows vs. Mac
- Thread starter stevento
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Wasn't DOS 1.0 written in Assembler? (So that makes it better! than OSX) That was very, very long ago .....
True it probably was. Substitue Windows 3.1 for DOS then
Besides, ultimately every Intel-based OS is translated into x86 machine code, therefore they are all equivalent!
Who says an OS has to be written in C?
An entire OS in C? Well, sometimes you need to go down to assembly language for weird hardware code which is machine dependent.
"some good C" - hahahahaha. I'd like to see you cope with some of the contorted internals of Microsoft Windows kernel.
Lowering Acedemic standards
I do hope that you are not paying anything for the course but if you are, I would ask for your money back.
The professor, or tutor, should be ashamed at the quality of the academic material that is being produced.
I do hope that you are not paying anything for the course but if you are, I would ask for your money back.
The professor, or tutor, should be ashamed at the quality of the academic material that is being produced.
I was expecting a thesis with credible claims from scholarly sources.
This is wikipedia material.
"write their own OS"... What kind of OS? A general OS like OSx or Linux? A real time oriented system for process control? They are very different animals with very different internal design criteria. "own OS" HA
Fail.
Macs do not tend to have more cache memory. They have the same memory as any ordinary computer you'd pickup at the store now for a comparable price*. Because OSX is based on Unix, it's memory-management skills are far superior to Windows, and OSX uses all of the free memory to cache as much as possible.
Making your own OS is often a required or supplemental course for many computer science majors at almost any well-known university.
Macs do not tend to have more cache memory. They have the same memory as any ordinary computer you'd pickup at the store now for a comparable price*. Because OSX is based on Unix, it's memory-management skills are far superior to Windows, and OSX uses all of the free memory to cache as much as possible.
Making your own OS is often a required or supplemental course for many computer science majors at almost any well-known university.
I thought I was going to get a post about Fitts's law, affordances, mappings & constraints, stuff like predictabilty, visibility and feedback, knowledge in the head and in the world , mode errors, designing for error, forcing functions, gestalt laws, etc.... instead...oh well...
I hope you got more out of your HCI class than your post suggests...
For something more interesting (and actually academic), if you haven't already seen it:
Study confirms most users are idiots
It might be a high end product, but the word "luxury" can be emotive. IT's a near "need" for some areas. And it's also seen in high clusterings in certain work areas. For me, there are v. high levles of Macs/conversion to Macs in Bioinformatics / Computational Biology.
There are things Macs can do that PCs can't. Maybe PCs could potentially, but then "potentially" is sloppily used in your sentence.
You disrespect Macs by calling them "cool" features. They might be, but don't forget the functionality...
You might want to be a bit more descriptive than "nicer" to use also. I see where you're coming from, but it seems there are better and more thought out reasonings.
Well, within some natural limitation, I liked the OP and the end analogy about Macs being the equivalent of luxury cars.
I am not qualified to enter into technical "splitting the hair" disquisitions about the size of the cache (but remember that "size does matter!" anyways: just kidding); having spent quite some time with windows, linux and osx I'd concur that to the end-user the difference is mostly the GUI.
The GUI nowadays is not merely aesthetics, it is functionality, so the remark is not meant in a demeaning way: if you strip OSX of the window manager you have BSD, and then there is not much difference from Linux. For windows it is not quite possible to separate the window-manager from the substrate, so the analogy can't be made in the same terms.
As a not-to-advanced user, I still have to find a task that I can do in OSX and can't in Linux or Windows (and that includes home video editing, technical writing (LaTex) and some C/matlab/Maple/Mathematica use) I simply like the OSX way better.
To end, I'd like to come to the help of the OP: Why is the statement that each student writes an OS so unbelievable by some?
In the 80's an os would fit in 16 kilobytes: is that out of the reach of one person?
I am not qualified to enter into technical "splitting the hair" disquisitions about the size of the cache (but remember that "size does matter!" anyways: just kidding); having spent quite some time with windows, linux and osx I'd concur that to the end-user the difference is mostly the GUI.
The GUI nowadays is not merely aesthetics, it is functionality, so the remark is not meant in a demeaning way: if you strip OSX of the window manager you have BSD, and then there is not much difference from Linux. For windows it is not quite possible to separate the window-manager from the substrate, so the analogy can't be made in the same terms.
As a not-to-advanced user, I still have to find a task that I can do in OSX and can't in Linux or Windows (and that includes home video editing, technical writing (LaTex) and some C/matlab/Maple/Mathematica use) I simply like the OSX way better.
To end, I'd like to come to the help of the OP: Why is the statement that each student writes an OS so unbelievable by some?
In the 80's an os would fit in 16 kilobytes: is that out of the reach of one person?
No. You don't. You have Darwin, which is a fundamentally different system than the three main BSDs. Darwin is one of the few OSs out there with a real microkernel (Mach), and although it does have parts of the FreeBSD userland, a lot of the core, kernel-level components are very, very different from anything you see in FreeBSD.
Ubi major, minor cessat.
My remark about the BSD part was intended as saying that to the user (i.e. non-developer) I see little difference between the non-GUI part of OSX (whatever the appropriate name it may be) and linux.
Of course differences there are, but they are at the same level of "user-(un)-friendliness". (Although I have to confess that I prefer to browse directories with the terminal rather than with the Finder!)
Point taken, but there are differences that affect the end user. The use of Mach has some pretty far reaching implications: driver compatibility, SMP performance, and RAM requirements among them.
Still, you're right to say that most users don't know or care what's underneath Aqua...
I'm a computer scientist, as well as a Harvard graduate attourney. I also am a professor of journalism, as well as a special forces soldier in the blackhawk commando group.
I've also been a rocket scientist for years, and right now, I'm researching the use of subspace to create the next generation of combustion engines for rockets. I've also been to the moon, and what I've done now is to combine all I've learned to answer this ultimate question.
What I've figured out is pretty extensive. I've learned that Macs are easier to use than Windows-computers.
I've also been a rocket scientist for years, and right now, I'm researching the use of subspace to create the next generation of combustion engines for rockets. I've also been to the moon, and what I've done now is to combine all I've learned to answer this ultimate question.
What I've figured out is pretty extensive. I've learned that Macs are easier to use than Windows-computers.