Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
For the gadget to use a full-blown Operating system, you do not have to bog it down with a Windows 7 or the latest MacOSX.
There are many alternatives.
There is, for example, QNX operating system. I had a demo FLOPPY with QNX 3.0 operating system on it. You could boot 486 computer with a few megabytes of RAM from a FLOPPY and have a complete Unix-like operating system with windowing graphical user interface and even web brower. And it was screaming fast. It was used for realtime applications for years. It is still being used in critical systems.
Today, even a 'lousy' Arm 9 processor is magnitude faster than 486. The A4 processor from Apple even has powerful graphical chip on board.
Most of the modern mainstream operating systems are huge and hopelessly bloated, because they have to run on very, very wide range of hardware. Linux runs on everything from Arm based handhelds, gigital watches and toasters to supercomputers with great variety of hardware in between.
If you tailor-fit an operating system to a tailor-made hardware, if you tweak a few critical parts of the system in assembly language, you can get screaming fast system. It does not have to be a CLOSED system. Just release an SDK and make sure that installing a new software requires user approval and that the installed software is run in its own sandbox.
Just remember Amiga, remember Atari ST. Even the lousiest appliance today has magnitude faster processor.
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OMG...someone who KNOWS QNX (pronounced q-nix for the unwashed). I cut my teeth on that OS when it was new...it is nothing short of an AMAZING OS...cripes it had, as I recall, 7 or 8 virtual screens back around '89-'90 and that was on a crappy '286 with like around 1MB of RAM and as a diskless workstation no less, booting into the network via the NIC's EPROM. Plus as a network OS it was superb...thought because of the lack of developer's tools, we switched to Netware in late '90 or early '91 and I got my ECNE/CNI a couple years later and poor trusty QNX got pushed to the side as an afterthought...but thanks for reminding me.
Heh...I remember I finally solved an issue with the workstations multiple screens and it's native dBase clone app (I forget the name) but if you opened the app, entered your data for however long it took to enter on any other than "screen 0", then switched to another screen w/o exiting the app...the screen never flush it's buffer and your data was never actually written to the DB...yet from "screen 0" the issue was not present...of course that was one of the reasons we switch to Netware, the weirdness in the database app. Of course I solved the thing the FINAL day before we were to make the switch over. I'll never forget my boss' face much less the Lab Director's look...hehehehe...I laughed my ass off because, well, it was living proof that Murphy was an optimist!
Still, I have long wondered about setting up an old system to just run QNX...what was the editor called? I forget that as well, but it did something pretty much NO editors do today, it supported block cut-n-paste...meaning one could cut our a user defined block of text inside your code or text, rather than the way today's word-processor's cannot do this due to the way format text in the document...we really missed that editor, then though we grew to LOVE the original Foxpro editor, IDE...ahh...I am wandering even farther OT, but thanks for those mammaries!!
But your point is excellent...their is only one reason these features do not exisit...and it sure is not due to the lack of OS options...by not including ANY way other than wireless it's an effort to control all flow into and out of the device...we have yet to see it actually work...time will tell, but my money is on the 3rd gen will have worked through all those who will just plunk down cash for the logo...and competing devices will also have grown...heck, they are going to be devices equal and superior this year and running full versions of Win7 as well as Linux of some sort, more than Android...