[Sussex] Improving on UNIX

[Geoff Teale]

> Once Microsoft sead that IIS would only be server products 
> now it built in
> to XP Home.  It not an active install so you run the installer from
> Add/Remove programs. 


Yes, but that isn't integration.  I actually don't mind them doing that so
much. (See I can be rational about Microsoft, but only when I've had my
lithium ;) ).
 
> So you see a pattern here.
> 
> PS Microsoft has already made it public XBox2 would probley 
> have such filing
> system.

Hmm interesting.  

There is a tradeoff here.  You can get faster access to information if you
don't know the exact location of it (or indeed you only know some aspect of
what you're looking for) - but you do take a hit every time you write to the
filesystem and you eat up a little more CPU time for _every_ filesystem
operation.  

I guess they are doing it for robustness - if your data gets corrupted you
don't want to go through the archaic Windows check filesystem process -
journalled filesystems deal with this - so if you're developing a journalled
filesystem you might as well use it everywhere, especially in a consumer
grade device.  The biggest criticisms I've heard about X-Box all point back
to it's heritage - it crashes, it's internal IO is a major bottleneck
compared to it's graphics hardware.  I don't know that much about X-Boxen
(they don't really interest me), but I believe it suffers from being a PC
forced into a consoles box - PS/2 suffers from being a 10-year old SGI box
stuffed into consoles box ;)

In that embedded, consumer market people expect things to just work.
Microsoft have conditioned us to accept crappness as a part of our daily
existance with Windows - but people don't think of Consoles as computers and
a lot of consumers would be very suprised to find a windows derived OS
running in their X-Box or their sattelite decoder. 

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org

"make music like mercy that gives what it is and has nothing to prove"
 - Ani DiFranco "Up Up Up Up Up Up"


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