Dodgy EDIDs (was: What does your OS look like?)

[Brendan]

Hi,

There is no doubt at all that there's commercial value in my OS.

I'll be honest, I'm not sure that there is commercial value (at least under any of the current sales or service models) for any software. All of the current models of funding (or not funding, in the case of many FOSS projects) software development are fundamentally unstable and broken, but I can't come up with a better one.

We need definitions. I propose:

• Price: How much a consumer is expected to pay for something
  Value: How much a consumer values something after it is theirs

These things have nothing to do with each other. For example, I own a silver fob watch that cost me $0 that is very valuable to me (it was my Grandfather's from WWII); and I own an AMD/ATI R9 280 video card that cost me about $450 that has very little value to me (too hot/noisy and not compatible with my "VGA only" KVMs).

I've always assumed that the price for my OS will be $0; although I'm not entirely sure this is actually a good idea (because consumers do make the mistake of assuming "price = quality").


Cheers,

Brendan

[onlyonemac]

Hi,

The biggest joke here is that you're talking like there's any commercial value in your OS - and a very large commercial value at that. Either that or you're so good at talking "in character" that I've completely missed it.

There is no doubt at all that there's commercial value in my OS.

Perhaps you should read the Beginner Mistakes page?

Commercial OSDev
There really is no such topic. OSDev will probably never land you a job. (As shown in the "Jobs" section of the forum.)
Also, don't get your mind set that by building such a great OS that you'll be rich. If anything, history has shown us that the best operating systems never receive any commercial success, while the ones that have a near total lack of design and inspiration do, because of clever business moves and being in the right place, in the right time, with the right cover-up.

[Brendan]

Hi,

The biggest joke here is that you're talking like there's any commercial value in your OS - and a very large commercial value at that. Either that or you're so good at talking "in character" that I've completely missed it.

There is no doubt at all that there's commercial value in my OS.

Perhaps you should read the Beginner Mistakes page?

Perhaps you should grow up? Not everyone is a beginner.


Cheers,

Brendan

[Antti]

That "Beginner Mistakes" quote does not make sense at all. Even if we were not talking about Brendan's OS, it would be possible to have commercial value in hobby operating systems. One of the non-technical issues is that people do not find a project commercially interesting if the author announces all the time how "hobby" the system is. Trying to build something on such an unstable base is not going to work.

From a pure hobby perspective; if you write a good operating system, it is more than likely that it is commercially valuable to you, e.g. indirectly landing you a job. For example, some of the flagship hobby operating systems are very valuable to their authors.

[Brendan]

Hi,

To be perfectly clear; I am designing the OS to maximise its chance of success as an end product.

This does not mean:

• that I expect it will become a successful end product (in the same way that standing on a tall hill might maximise your chance of being hit by lighting, but does not mean that you actually expect to be hit by lighting).
• that I expect to make any profit at all from it, even if (by some bizarre twist of fate) it actually does become a successful product
• that I expect to recover any of the development costs involved, even if (by some bizarre twist of fate) it actually does become a successful product
• that I define "success" as "commercial success" (see note).

It does mean:

• trying to find ways to improve on the "status quo"
• caring about code quality and features
• no "rush towards yawn"
• research
• planning

Note: I don't define "success" as "commercial success". I'm not entirely sure exactly what my definition of success is; I only know that it's much much closer to breaking stagnation. From the beginning up until about the 1990s there were many very different OSs with very different ideas of how things could/should work. During the 1990s something went horribly wrong; and "OS" came to mean "same tired old file system ideas, same tired old scheduling ideas, same tired old GUI ideas, same tired old networking ideas, same tired old programming tools, same tired old file formats, etc". To me, commercial success without breaking this stagnation is failure; and breaking the stagnation on its own (without anyone ever using the OS) would be success. However, in practical terms I don't think it's possible to adequately open enough people's minds without the OS achieving some (small) level of popularity within the larger IT community; and in that way I see "popularity" (which itself has nothing to do with commercial success) as a means to an end.


Cheers,

Brendan

[Schol-R-LEA]

Fair enough; clearly, you have given more than enough thought to this issue, which is all I was suggesting (I thought it likely that you had, but I know where such assumptions can get me, and you were talking a in a way that led me to think you might not have).

[Griwes]

Hi,

What can we (as OS designers) do to solve/prevent the problem of "relatively random" purchasing decisions?

If a (distributed) OS was monitoring everything; and described exactly where the bottlenecks are, which pieces are nearing the end of their useful life, which pieces are responsible for "below average" user experience/productivity, etc; do you think the "relatively random" purchasing decisions could become much less random and much more effective?

In some cases, it might. The problem is, in many cases, the people responsible for making such decisions have no technical background, and may be more concerned about the cost of new equipment than the cost of paying an expert to keep the older hardware running (no matter how much more that would end up costing), might make a 'brilliant deal' for the new hardware that ends up dropping a expensive pile of trash in the admins lap with no choice but to use it, might decide that they know more than the admins do, might get distracted by a passing flock of butterflies and forget to order the new hardware, etc.

Companies that are that bad tend to go bankrupt before it matters.

I really, really wish this had anything to do with reality, but the point is - it doesn't! That's exactly how the majority of corporations operate in this world. So, unless you can change how morons think, there's nothing you can do to fix this particular issue.

I'd name a few corporations that I know, first-hand, to operate in this exact way (for example, one that sells a very specialized piece of hardware with some very specialized software installed on it, that cannot "afford" to have more than ~20 testlines - because it has to buy it - for a critical component of the end product that maintains about 3 active and 2 maintenance branches, which is a total joke; the corporation in question recently celebrated its 150 years of operation...), but I don't think naming them actually achieves anything (maybe except getting them some bad press, but that's not my goal here, no matter how much they deserve it).

So no, companies that are that bad tend to dominate their market. Deal with this. I know this invalidates about half of the assertions you made in this thread; you may want to rethink them. (This is also why I personally don't want anything to do with actual end users other than me and maybe several other people I know personally to not be morons, at any point in the future.)

[Brendan]

Hi,

Companies that are that bad tend to go bankrupt before it matters.

I really, really wish this had anything to do with reality, but the point is - it doesn't! That's exactly how the majority of corporations operate in this world. So, unless you can change how morons think, there's nothing you can do to fix this particular issue.

I'd name a few corporations that I know, first-hand, to operate in this exact way (for example, one that sells a very specialized piece of hardware with some very specialized software installed on it, that cannot "afford" to have more than ~20 testlines - because it has to buy it - for a critical component of the end product that maintains about 3 active and 2 maintenance branches, which is a total joke; the corporation in question recently celebrated its 150 years of operation...), but I don't think naming them actually achieves anything (maybe except getting them some bad press, but that's not my goal here, no matter how much they deserve it).

Without any clue whether the piece of equipment they "can't afford" is a 20 million dollar piece of industrial mining machinery or a $20 ARM board, I'm not sure what (if anything) your comment means.

For the majority of businesses I've dealt with...

For small to medium business, the conversation would go roughly like this:

• Dude: I need a new monitor.
  Boss: Why?
  Dude: The old one is crap, but you don't have to take my word for it - the OS itself says its crap too
  Boss: Oh, OK. Get some $ from petty cash and bring the receipt back.

And for larger business the conversation would go roughly like this:

• Head admin: I need a new monitor.
  Boss: Why are you wasting my time? You've got a budget that covers maintenance and replacement. Get 3 monitors so there's spares and don't ask me about trivial crap ever again.

Cheers,

Brendan

[Rusky]

And when the office is already full of monitors your OS arbitrarily decides are broken?

[Brendan]

Hi,

And when the office is already full of monitors your OS arbitrarily decides are broken?

In this case, I'd just jump onto my flying unicorn and go searching for a rainbow where I can collect all the magic pixie dust needed to extract your head from your butt.

As I've already explain multiple times; the chance of it happening is zero, and the chance of a user actually caring if it does happen is also zero.


Cheers,

Brendan

[onlyonemac]

And when the office is already full of monitors your OS arbitrarily decides are broken?

[...]

As I've already explain multiple times; the chance of it happening is zero, and the chance of a user actually caring if it does happen is also zero.

The chances are not zero: it's quite possible that the IT department in charge of an office might decide to get cheap monitors that will probably work fine under Windows, and when they do work fine there's no need to upgrade. Now let's suppose that your OS actually becomes popular enough that the IT department decides to switch, and now they've got an office full of "broken" monitors just because you left out the few lines of code it would take to provide the option for the IT department to override the OS's automatic detection of the monitor resolution.

Ultimately the problem seems to be that you're regarding a blurry LCD as an almost insignificant issue when in reality it is a very big issue - I remember using LCDs like that before I went blind and they were usually pretty much unreadable.

[Brendan]

Hi,

And when the office is already full of monitors your OS arbitrarily decides are broken?

[...]

As I've already explain multiple times; the chance of it happening is zero, and the chance of a user actually caring if it does happen is also zero.

The chances are not zero: it's quite possible that the IT department in charge of an office might decide to get cheap monitors that will probably work fine under Windows, and when they do work fine there's no need to upgrade.

The chance of a company buying TVs and not monitors is zero. The chance of a company buying all of the TVs at the same time (and not buying some one year, more the next year, etc; and ending up with many different monitors) is very small. The chance that a sane company would buy many cheap trash TVs without testing one first and realising it's puss before buying the rest is also very small. The chance that a company would then not return them when they realise they suck on every OS is also tiny. The chance that a company would continue using cheap trash for 10 freaking years without replacing any of them is completely absurd.

Now let's suppose that your OS actually becomes popular enough that the IT department decides to switch, and now they've got an office full of "broken" monitors just because you left out the few lines of code it would take to provide the option for the IT department to override the OS's automatic detection of the monitor resolution.

It's not a few lines of code; it's punching a hole through the OSs permission system to allow a user to diddle with the OS's configuration that they should never be allowed to touch, combined with some sort of "monitor preferences" dialog box in each GUI; all for the sake of faulty hardware that should never have been sold, won't exist by the time my OS is actually released, and won't make a significant difference even if it does still exist.

Ultimately the problem seems to be that you're regarding a blurry LCD as an almost insignificant issue when in reality it is a very big issue - I remember using LCDs like that before I went blind and they were usually pretty much unreadable.

Blur is an insignificant issue.

Because my OS is fully resolution independent (and apps/GUIs will be running in 3D), nothing will be perfectly aligned to pixel boundaries (and everything will be anti-aliased); and this will cause a little blur. On top of that there's "focal blur" where things that are out of focus are intentionally blurred more (which will subtly effect most things because nothing will be exactly parallel with the screen and so a lot will be "slightly out of focus"). Basically; because the OS won't be a pathetic pile of **** (like Windows, Linux) there will be a certain amount of "inherent blur". Any additional blur (caused by monitor/TV scaling) isn't going to be very noticeable (will be masked by the "inherent blur" anyway); unless the monitor is using a very low resolution in the first place (e.g. the monitor obsolete crap that barely exists now and most certainly won't exist by the time my OS is released).

On top of that; under perfectly normal scenarios (e.g. no native video driver; and either software rendering can't pump pixels fast enough; or VBE/GOP didn't support the monitor's native resolution) the OS might not use the monitor's native resolution on perfectly good monitors (even when the OS can for the "software renderer not fast enough case").

Now..

From my perspective; most of this has already been adequately explained (by me) multiple times; and the only problem that actually exists is that Rusky is a troll that fails to listen and repeatedly regurgitates the same drivel over and over and over (all without admitting that his own OS is multiple orders of magnitude worse in every possible way).


Cheers,

Brendan

[Rusky]

Basically; because the OS won't be a pathetic pile of **** (like Windows, Linux) there will be a certain amount of "inherent blur".

So... the complete inability to display non-blurred text and images makes an OS superior to OSes that display things non-blurred by default?

[Brendan]

Hi,

Basically; because the OS won't be a pathetic pile of **** (like Windows, Linux) there will be a certain amount of "inherent blur".

So... the complete inability to display non-blurred text and images makes an OS superior to OSes that display things non-blurred by default?

Is this just more ignorant trolling; or are you really so stupid that you can't understand text can be in focus?


Cheers,

Brendan

[onlyonemac]

Now let's suppose that your OS actually becomes popular enough that the IT department decides to switch, and now they've got an office full of "broken" monitors just because you left out the few lines of code it would take to provide the option for the IT department to override the OS's automatic detection of the monitor resolution.

It's not a few lines of code; it's punching a hole through the OSs permission system to allow a user to diddle with the OS's configuration that they should never be allowed to touch, combined with some sort of "monitor preferences" dialog box in each GUI; all for the sake of faulty hardware that should never have been sold, won't exist by the time my OS is actually released, and won't make a significant difference even if it does still exist.

I never said anything about dialog boxes; just something simple like a bootloader option like Linux uses these days. Don't tell me you have no provision for bootloader options.