Linked by Hadrien Grasland on Fri 28th Jan 2011 20:37 UTC
It's recently been a year since I started working on my pet OS project, and I often end up looking backwards at what I have done, wondering what made things difficult in the beginning. One of my conclusions is that while there's a lot of documentation on OS development from a technical point of view, more should be written about the project management aspect of it. Namely, how to go from a blurry "I want to code an OS" vision to either a precise vision of what you want to achieve, or the decision to stop following this path before you hit a wall. This article series aims at putting those interested in hobby OS development on the right track, while keeping this aspect of things in mind.
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Member since:2011-01-28
"I remember wanting to write my own Operating System years ago, and bought a book called 'Developing your own 32-bit Operating System'. It sounds sad, but I had never been so excited about a book and thought it was really good for step-by-step learning."
It seems to be a phase that geeks go through at that age. Does anyone know if today's youth has the same aspirations?
Doing it forces us to learn a great deal more than can be taught in any class. But as much as I loved being able to write my own bootloader/OS to study computer architectures in detail, it's a shame that those skills are so unappreciated in today's job market.
Speaking of which, is anyone hiring in Suffolk County NY? I'm woefully underemployed.
Member since:2011-02-02
It seems to be a phase that geeks go through at that age. Does anyone know if today's youth has the same aspirations?
Well I'm in my early 20s im not sure if that qualifies me as a 'youth' (then again everything is relative
) I do have fond memories of my GCSE IT class and being the only person to do a programming project for my coursework instead of a database. When our teacher introduced the module on programming he asked if any of us had used VB6. The class was a sea of blank faces, I answered no but that I was okay at c++ and was trying to learn assembly and c. Our teacher (of the cant do cant teach either variety) seemed to take offence and asked If I would like to teach the class about variables since I was obviously such an 'expert'.
I still consider it a brave moment when I walked to the front of the class, copied a diagram I remembered from my beginners c++ book and got everyone to understand the concept of data types, variables and memory addresses, most could even get a basic calculator working by the end of class. (The look on old teacher's face was priceless)
Fuelled by this (undeserved) ego boost I decided I would write my own OS for my coursework (bad move!) It never worked, but the theoretical knowledge I got from just trying was worth it and my documentation was pretty good so I still got a B for the module (maybe that says something about the difficulty of GCSEs)
What is very sad though is that I knew people who got A* results for the course and still didn't really understand what a simple program let alone an operating system consisted of at the basic levels. Not because they were stupid or didn't care but because IT like Maths is simply not taught properly in schools these days. We had a week on programming and low level stuff and the rest of the year was spent learning how to mail merge in Office and make charts in excel *sigh*
Member since:2011-02-02
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 22:06 UTC
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:45 UTC
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."More News »
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Member since:
2009-08-10
I remember wanting to write my own Operating System years ago, and bought a book called "Developing your own 32-bit Operating System". It sounds sad, but I had never been so excited about a book and thought it was really good for step-by-step learning.
I then started to read a book on the x86 architecture and protected mode, but unfortunately only got far as writing a boot loader (like so many) that switch the machine into protected mode and then wrote my own code to output some text to the screen.
It took me many months to get to that stage, so much so that I hit a wall with it and gave up. Yet I had original ambitions to write my owner scheduler, memory management, and file system code.
I wasn't cut out for OS development, so really admire those who managed to write their own hobby OS - it takes a lot of your time and dedication.