Thread: Sony PRS-T1 specs!
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Old 09-08-2011, 03:46 PM   #531
EatingPie
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Join Date: Mar 2007
Device: Sony PRS-500 (RIP); PRS-600 (Good Riddance); PRS-505; PRS-650; PRS-350
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellmark View Post
I just draw the line at where the definitions are. I've been dealing with this stuff for nearly as long, starting with a ZX81. Plus, this isn't the first time I've seen the argument over the difference between a kernel and an OS. Also as someone who is going back to school for this (woebegone are these days when mere experience means nothing, yet a piece of paper from a school means the world), with current books to show what the definitions are.
The problem is the "definitions" are super blurred these days. And I'm talking in the opposite direction from the kernel.

One major purpose of an OS is to "abstract/hide" the hardware, aka give you a standard way to access hardware: "read a file" is the same OS call even though it works totally differently underneath for an SSD or an internal HDD or a USB HDD. But the "OS" is not the only thing doing abstraction any more.

On the UNIX OS, the GUI has been provided by X11 (X Windows), which interfaces with the graphics driver so you don't have to directly ("abstract/hide" in action). It's not considered an OS, but it performs a lot of the basic functions of an OS, just specific to graphics: "draw a line" is the same call even if you have an ATI Radeon or NVIDIA graphics card. X11 acts just like a graphics-specific OS, but it's not called an OS.

On top of X11, you can have things like Motif, GTK, KDE, ETC. that make it even easier to do graphics: X11 doesn't provide a "button," but GTK et al. do. So in that sense, they're like an OS, but they aren't accessing hardware directly any longer: "put a button here" is the same call in GTK regardless of OS, graphics card, or computer ("abstract/hide" again in action!). These are called "Toolkits" but they are doing a very, very similar job to an OS, just completely in software at this point.

Apple calls their OS "Mac OS X," but in reality that's Carbon or Cocoa Graphics Toolkits on top of the Darwin OS, on top of the Mach Microkernel... much of which was originally NeXT. Same goes for iOS, which his a heck of a lot more than an OS.

So Android is an "OS" like Mac OS X (or iOS) is an "OS." But there's a lot of simplifying going on when you call them that.

One thing is certain, calling it "Sony Software" is not talking about the OS!

-Pie
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