This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 |
removing Windows from "OS names" —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Krauss ( talk • contribs) .
OK, I agree, it is correct. Only dicussion comments:
Google say (the 3 most populars OS-names!):
Windows "Operating system": 165,000,000 Linux "Operating system": 102,000,000 UNIX "Operating system": 63,400,000 "Mac OS" "Operating system": 26,200,000 DOS "Operating system": 13,300,000 VMS "Operating system": 1,800,000
Come on: we can take off "Mac OS".
The paragraph starts by saying "several major concepts ..." and then mentions the development of OS/360, which strictly speaking is not a concept. Also it mentions hard disks without describing what concept was involved. Also only hard disks are mentioned in relation to OS/360 even though the sentence is introduced with "also" (something earlier apparently got deleted).
I don't know enough about OS/360 to fix this. Anyone? Bueller? Ideogram 15:53, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
Until TSO was introduced, OS/360 had no GUI, no user console whatsoever. It had file ownership, scheduling, protected supervisor mode, protected RAM, multitasking, multiple user scheduling, asynchronous I/O, and a Job Control Language with a "procedure library" which was a collection of macros in modern terminology. Much of the system code was written so that, when in RAM, it could be interrupted by a higher priority task, while the current task was stacked up to resume execution when the high priority task completed. In order to do this, code was written to be "re-entrant", i.e. it had to do make no changes for the current task that would affect the interrupted task. This was a pretty formidable demand, given that the RAM size might be as little as 64K. Albert 20:26 13 Nov 2006
We should try to agree on some kind of policy for where to use OS or Operating system. Generally I think we should use operating systems where it is plural (OS's seems awkward), and try to use OS elsewhere, except maybe the first usage in a paragraph. Ideogram 16:26, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
How is the GUI in Windows NT descended OS's a shell? Isn't the GUI integrated into the kernel there? Ideogram 16:37, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
Actually after reading your changes closely I have no objection to the wording, since you say "sometimes". I might even say "usually". Ideogram 17:18, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
I think there's some question as to whether a CLI within a windowing system is really a "CLI operating system". Ideogram 19:08, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
The notion that an operating system includes any kind of user interface is not found in the formal understanding of operating systems taught in computer science curricula. Operating systems classes do not teach UI design; they teach about multitasking, virtual memory, permissions, device drivers, and such.
That said, the academic notion of operating system is not the same as the notion used by companies that have products which they call "operating systems": products such as Mac OS X, Windows XP, or Ubuntu Linux. These "operating systems" do come with user interfaces; in fact, all of them default to a GUI but also offer a CLI. However, from a computer scientist's understanding of what an "operating system" is, the GUI in each of these cases is simply an application that runs on top of the "real" OS. -- FOo 03:00, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I have gone over this article very closely. Can you be more specific about what needs to be done? Ideogram 22:19, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
This is not even close to being even considered complete. What about scheduling, memory management, kernel mode vs user mode, processes and threads, a fuller discussion of micro-kernels vs monolithic kernels, etc, etc? - Ta bu shi da yu 14:38, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
It will be a good idea to add about a minimun of 3 pictures, maybe from Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Who vandalised this page with "i like chickens"? WHO? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.76.113.125 ( talk • contribs) .
In the opening lines "higher level functions" are not explained. I htink they should be replaced with something more clear.
Please, tell me the name of the most popular Operating sysytem before MS-DOS became the most popular. You can answer right here as soon as you can Moscvitch 16:14, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
I just want to apologise for my blatant re-write of the operating system definition, i'm just trying to help, but next time i'll do a bit more research before I think about trying it again, sorry again. - Mc hammerutime ( talk)
In marketing and some aspects of usability, it's a part of the product family. But technically, it's neither a relative to DOS nor to the NT Kernel. So it could be misleading to imply a relationship besides having the same vendor. It's similar to calling the Apple OS on their iPod being a descendant of Mac OS 80.108.61.230 03:28, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
The article states: "although DOS itself featured TSR as a very partial and not too easy to use solution" The problem with writing TSR programs was, that it was too easy. From a programmer's view, making a program TSR was easier than forking and deamonizing on a modern Unix system because of its limitations. You didn't have to care about signal handling - and that's the point. They were limited and lacked IPC. But saying it would have been hard is not exactly what the problem was about. What should be said that forking was not possible and the need to handle parallelization for yourself by vector-swapping and interrupt-violation mania. When a TSR compares to MySQL's auto-increment and daemonizing to Oracle's sequences+triggers- which one is easier and which one is more powerful to work with? ;) 80.108.61.230 03:50, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Novell? Solaris? Symbion? Windows CE? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 203.97.20.142 ( talk) 22:40, 26 January 2007 (UTC).
The market share statistics that are being quoted here apparently come from [ [1]]. These statistics are for computers that surf the internet, and do not include web servers, database servers and the like.
The statistics at [ [2]] tell quite a different story. In the realm of web servers (computers that run the internet), Apache/Unix machines are 60% of the installed base. There are 63,800,000 such machines. While this article does suggest that the 94% statistic is for desktop computers, there is no mention of Unix's dominance in the web server world.
The mainstream press got it completely wrong, as usual. In this article, [ [3]], it is stated that "Windows runs on more than 95 percent of the world's computers." Not possible.
I added a citation for the 94% figure in this article. Maybe someone could put something in the Unix section about web server market share? Robertwharvey 03:18, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi, I was the one of the participants in the tug of war over market share tables. I didn't see the note at the bottom of the page at first, which notes the statistics' dubious reliability. I guess that's okay, so I'll stop reverting it, but I'd really like to see "personal computer" market share specified in the tables as well ... maybe I'll add that later. As for my motivation, well, not only do I think the statistics don't really belong here, but I think that HitsLink statistics in particular are horrendously flawed. In particular, I think that they overcount the number of Apple computers by mistaking Konqueror on Linux for Safari on Mac -- Konqueror has a very significant share on Linux, and if you look at the browser table, Konqueror only shows up with a .01% share, so something's fishy. I have no idea how they get their statistics, and I think that quoting such unreliable statistics doesn't really add to the article. I'd still like to see the tables removed, but I've made that known and spoken my piece, and others obviously disagree about their utility, so I won't take them out anymore. 192.94.94.105 21:21, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
This page would benefit from a section detailing what the future holds for operating systems.
As with most engineering the future looks exceedingly bright due to SCIENCE FICTION writers and movies. We are where we are today with thermo-chemical warfare, political-industrial complexes, popular consumer gadgets and global commerce largely due to national policy makers. So the future of computing will address those aspirations, such as global warming carbon reduction, agro-business famine farming, disaster relief (except the FEMA trailers), cad driven manufacturing and robotics, and new warfare weapons touted to exceed "War of the Worlds": Tasers and lasers, shockingly awful assault weapons, and billions of dollars for munitions, soldiers, and modern war toys. I would imagine that if the USA/UK/AU had not spent trillions in Afghanistan and Iraq (I & II) we would already have green lawn golf courses, mineral mining, and vacation cruises all on the Moon and Mars via Virgin Atlantic. Engineering and robotics must vastly improve before there will be anything close to photon torpedos, warp-speed, and worm-hole travel thanks to Star Trek, Contact, or Stephen Hawking which will hopefully happen much sooner than 75 million years, give or take a few red or blue shifts. : User:bwildasi Fri May 16 20:53:09 UTC 2008 —Preceding comment was added at 23:55, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
"Free software Unix variants, such as Linux and BSD, ..." Linux is not a Unix variant, but I don't know what to put in its place that would maintain the way the Unix-like section of the article without giving linux its own section. Can someone give me advice as to how I could do this or fix it for me? Zarathrustra 18:47, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
I've added the hyperlink for network address, but don't know what would be a good topic to link it to. It goes to a disambiguation page. Any help is appreciated. Thanks. -- Bookinvestor 21:16, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
I find it difficult to believe that the TRON Project deserves to be mentioned alongside Unix/Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X as a major operating system with its own heading. The TRON section is pasted from its Wikipedia article, a bunch of the links are broken or go to outdated, abandoned-looking pages. Can anybody more qualified than me verify that TRON is important enough to merit an entire section of its own in the OS article? Even if it does, it probably shouldn't be the same text simply pasted from the opening of its own article. -- Skyfaller 22:26, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
In the first paragraph, it says:
Windows, Linux,Iranian OS ( Code name SAM ) , and Mac OS are some of the most popular OSes.
Iranian OS ( Code name SAM ) should be removed, not being a popular operating system
Since when do OSes manage registers or CPU cache? Compilers do, but AFAIK, OSes don't. They do need to know about 'em in order to perform context switches (multitasking) but in general, I don't think they make the decisions WRT whether to use registers, cache or RAM. -- Elvey 22:35, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 |
removing Windows from "OS names" —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Krauss ( talk • contribs) .
OK, I agree, it is correct. Only dicussion comments:
Google say (the 3 most populars OS-names!):
Windows "Operating system": 165,000,000 Linux "Operating system": 102,000,000 UNIX "Operating system": 63,400,000 "Mac OS" "Operating system": 26,200,000 DOS "Operating system": 13,300,000 VMS "Operating system": 1,800,000
Come on: we can take off "Mac OS".
The paragraph starts by saying "several major concepts ..." and then mentions the development of OS/360, which strictly speaking is not a concept. Also it mentions hard disks without describing what concept was involved. Also only hard disks are mentioned in relation to OS/360 even though the sentence is introduced with "also" (something earlier apparently got deleted).
I don't know enough about OS/360 to fix this. Anyone? Bueller? Ideogram 15:53, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
Until TSO was introduced, OS/360 had no GUI, no user console whatsoever. It had file ownership, scheduling, protected supervisor mode, protected RAM, multitasking, multiple user scheduling, asynchronous I/O, and a Job Control Language with a "procedure library" which was a collection of macros in modern terminology. Much of the system code was written so that, when in RAM, it could be interrupted by a higher priority task, while the current task was stacked up to resume execution when the high priority task completed. In order to do this, code was written to be "re-entrant", i.e. it had to do make no changes for the current task that would affect the interrupted task. This was a pretty formidable demand, given that the RAM size might be as little as 64K. Albert 20:26 13 Nov 2006
We should try to agree on some kind of policy for where to use OS or Operating system. Generally I think we should use operating systems where it is plural (OS's seems awkward), and try to use OS elsewhere, except maybe the first usage in a paragraph. Ideogram 16:26, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
How is the GUI in Windows NT descended OS's a shell? Isn't the GUI integrated into the kernel there? Ideogram 16:37, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
Actually after reading your changes closely I have no objection to the wording, since you say "sometimes". I might even say "usually". Ideogram 17:18, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
I think there's some question as to whether a CLI within a windowing system is really a "CLI operating system". Ideogram 19:08, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
The notion that an operating system includes any kind of user interface is not found in the formal understanding of operating systems taught in computer science curricula. Operating systems classes do not teach UI design; they teach about multitasking, virtual memory, permissions, device drivers, and such.
That said, the academic notion of operating system is not the same as the notion used by companies that have products which they call "operating systems": products such as Mac OS X, Windows XP, or Ubuntu Linux. These "operating systems" do come with user interfaces; in fact, all of them default to a GUI but also offer a CLI. However, from a computer scientist's understanding of what an "operating system" is, the GUI in each of these cases is simply an application that runs on top of the "real" OS. -- FOo 03:00, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
I have gone over this article very closely. Can you be more specific about what needs to be done? Ideogram 22:19, 5 June 2006 (UTC)
This is not even close to being even considered complete. What about scheduling, memory management, kernel mode vs user mode, processes and threads, a fuller discussion of micro-kernels vs monolithic kernels, etc, etc? - Ta bu shi da yu 14:38, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
It will be a good idea to add about a minimun of 3 pictures, maybe from Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Who vandalised this page with "i like chickens"? WHO? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.76.113.125 ( talk • contribs) .
In the opening lines "higher level functions" are not explained. I htink they should be replaced with something more clear.
Please, tell me the name of the most popular Operating sysytem before MS-DOS became the most popular. You can answer right here as soon as you can Moscvitch 16:14, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
I just want to apologise for my blatant re-write of the operating system definition, i'm just trying to help, but next time i'll do a bit more research before I think about trying it again, sorry again. - Mc hammerutime ( talk)
In marketing and some aspects of usability, it's a part of the product family. But technically, it's neither a relative to DOS nor to the NT Kernel. So it could be misleading to imply a relationship besides having the same vendor. It's similar to calling the Apple OS on their iPod being a descendant of Mac OS 80.108.61.230 03:28, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
The article states: "although DOS itself featured TSR as a very partial and not too easy to use solution" The problem with writing TSR programs was, that it was too easy. From a programmer's view, making a program TSR was easier than forking and deamonizing on a modern Unix system because of its limitations. You didn't have to care about signal handling - and that's the point. They were limited and lacked IPC. But saying it would have been hard is not exactly what the problem was about. What should be said that forking was not possible and the need to handle parallelization for yourself by vector-swapping and interrupt-violation mania. When a TSR compares to MySQL's auto-increment and daemonizing to Oracle's sequences+triggers- which one is easier and which one is more powerful to work with? ;) 80.108.61.230 03:50, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Novell? Solaris? Symbion? Windows CE? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 203.97.20.142 ( talk) 22:40, 26 January 2007 (UTC).
The market share statistics that are being quoted here apparently come from [ [1]]. These statistics are for computers that surf the internet, and do not include web servers, database servers and the like.
The statistics at [ [2]] tell quite a different story. In the realm of web servers (computers that run the internet), Apache/Unix machines are 60% of the installed base. There are 63,800,000 such machines. While this article does suggest that the 94% statistic is for desktop computers, there is no mention of Unix's dominance in the web server world.
The mainstream press got it completely wrong, as usual. In this article, [ [3]], it is stated that "Windows runs on more than 95 percent of the world's computers." Not possible.
I added a citation for the 94% figure in this article. Maybe someone could put something in the Unix section about web server market share? Robertwharvey 03:18, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi, I was the one of the participants in the tug of war over market share tables. I didn't see the note at the bottom of the page at first, which notes the statistics' dubious reliability. I guess that's okay, so I'll stop reverting it, but I'd really like to see "personal computer" market share specified in the tables as well ... maybe I'll add that later. As for my motivation, well, not only do I think the statistics don't really belong here, but I think that HitsLink statistics in particular are horrendously flawed. In particular, I think that they overcount the number of Apple computers by mistaking Konqueror on Linux for Safari on Mac -- Konqueror has a very significant share on Linux, and if you look at the browser table, Konqueror only shows up with a .01% share, so something's fishy. I have no idea how they get their statistics, and I think that quoting such unreliable statistics doesn't really add to the article. I'd still like to see the tables removed, but I've made that known and spoken my piece, and others obviously disagree about their utility, so I won't take them out anymore. 192.94.94.105 21:21, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
This page would benefit from a section detailing what the future holds for operating systems.
As with most engineering the future looks exceedingly bright due to SCIENCE FICTION writers and movies. We are where we are today with thermo-chemical warfare, political-industrial complexes, popular consumer gadgets and global commerce largely due to national policy makers. So the future of computing will address those aspirations, such as global warming carbon reduction, agro-business famine farming, disaster relief (except the FEMA trailers), cad driven manufacturing and robotics, and new warfare weapons touted to exceed "War of the Worlds": Tasers and lasers, shockingly awful assault weapons, and billions of dollars for munitions, soldiers, and modern war toys. I would imagine that if the USA/UK/AU had not spent trillions in Afghanistan and Iraq (I & II) we would already have green lawn golf courses, mineral mining, and vacation cruises all on the Moon and Mars via Virgin Atlantic. Engineering and robotics must vastly improve before there will be anything close to photon torpedos, warp-speed, and worm-hole travel thanks to Star Trek, Contact, or Stephen Hawking which will hopefully happen much sooner than 75 million years, give or take a few red or blue shifts. : User:bwildasi Fri May 16 20:53:09 UTC 2008 —Preceding comment was added at 23:55, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
"Free software Unix variants, such as Linux and BSD, ..." Linux is not a Unix variant, but I don't know what to put in its place that would maintain the way the Unix-like section of the article without giving linux its own section. Can someone give me advice as to how I could do this or fix it for me? Zarathrustra 18:47, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
I've added the hyperlink for network address, but don't know what would be a good topic to link it to. It goes to a disambiguation page. Any help is appreciated. Thanks. -- Bookinvestor 21:16, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
I find it difficult to believe that the TRON Project deserves to be mentioned alongside Unix/Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X as a major operating system with its own heading. The TRON section is pasted from its Wikipedia article, a bunch of the links are broken or go to outdated, abandoned-looking pages. Can anybody more qualified than me verify that TRON is important enough to merit an entire section of its own in the OS article? Even if it does, it probably shouldn't be the same text simply pasted from the opening of its own article. -- Skyfaller 22:26, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
In the first paragraph, it says:
Windows, Linux,Iranian OS ( Code name SAM ) , and Mac OS are some of the most popular OSes.
Iranian OS ( Code name SAM ) should be removed, not being a popular operating system
Since when do OSes manage registers or CPU cache? Compilers do, but AFAIK, OSes don't. They do need to know about 'em in order to perform context switches (multitasking) but in general, I don't think they make the decisions WRT whether to use registers, cache or RAM. -- Elvey 22:35, 22 August 2007 (UTC)