You mean RISC iX? It wasn't RiscOS, it was pre-RiscOS really. Seamed to be something that never really took off outside of Acorn, who seamed quite up for Unix themselves. But that's just going on faint childhood memories with a spot of Wikipedia skimming. ;-)

The desktop was amazing, no question. But lack of pre-emptive multitasking and virtual memory would be a deal breaker now. Not only does co-operative multitasking mean a process can lock up the machine, it also means you have no process priorities as everything has as much timeslice as it wants. I also have no idea about security on RiscOS, seamed to me everyone and everything was always running as a single admin user. It just doesn't scale. They should have taken that great desktop and put it on top of a Unix core. At the time, I didn't see anything wrong with it, but I was a young kid and only comparing against Windows.

It's not entirely dead. It lives on in two forks, one open, one closed. It keeps getting ported to interesting new ARM hardware, like the Beagleboard, and some crazy fools are porting it to the new Pandaboard. I use to love RiscOS, but I won't go back to a non-Unix now. Desktop OSs of the time were crap compared feature wise with server OS from decades before that run on even more modest hardware. They look pretty, but they lacked real OS features that they didn't really have a good excuse not to have. Acorn had a grown up OS in the form of RISC iX if they put their lovely GUI on it, that truly would have rocked. What RiscOS had that nothing bar Rox has even now is great drag and drop, like the save dialogs, which I still miss! The RiscOS desktop was easy and powerful, it's just as a OS it sucked. Least that's my take on RiscOS now anyway.

May as well be dead. Really interesting, but I couldn't get it to install even on a virtual machine. Even if I could install it on my computer, there won't be drivers for anything or any native software. :-(

I want everything as a file as files I can share over the network. Simple distributed computing. Linux a Unix, only more so.

No, he's not. (Which is why he has 5 and you 0). Just googled "William Edward Hickman" "Ayn Rand."
William Edward Hickman was a real life monster. Anyone who admires such a man is broken. Ayn Rand did seam to admire him. She either was a psychopath herself, or admired them as being "free".
The idea that psychopathy helps in the world of business is not new. First I saw it was in a NewScientist article years ago about, I think it was called "Snakes in suits" which probably related to a book on the same subject under the same name.

This happens with every generation of console. When they come out they are great (a fixed standard of decent hardware), but by the end of their life span, they are looking pretty rubbish against even a moderate PC. Not long after that really starts to be a problem, a new console is announced and not long after that, released. Then the cycle starts again. No nothing new here at all.

What you say is true, and I think it's very sad. This is how MS will control us for another decade or two. When .NET has enough weight, MS will make Mono's life difficult. All those *nix server that where running Java will be in the end swapped for Windows servers running .NET. In our company *nix boxes have been replace with Windows boxes to run .NET because Mono doesn't quite do the job. That is right now and this is only going to get worse. I'll be damned if I'm going to help this, so I fight in what little way I can. But it's not just the politics, C# is replacing C++ for desktop apps, least internally at my company, and the results are quite a bit slower and hungrier. This has caused an increase in user dissatisfaction, at very least from users able to use task manager. Though to be fair, other measure of user satisfaction may have gone up, for reasons the C++ app was replaced (though those reasons where nothing to do with language!). It might be a pointless fight, but while I can, I will fight and hope others see the clouds ahead and join, or I'm wrong.

No, no and no. Boost and STL are good, but they aren't right for every job. It's good for high level C++, I'm not convinced it's good for low level C++. If you are doing low level C++, best make your own lib that does only what you want in the way you want. For instance, you are using relative pointers everywhere so you can use the same memory in multiple address spaces, or so copying and read/writing to/from disk doesn't require any extra work. Then C++ is like C with classes and templates. It's this breadth that is C++ greatest strength, but also the cause of it's criticized complexity.

"
But Bill starts to wonder By 1996 Gates is wondering if "by creating cross-platform solutions we risk weakening the Windows franchise - hurting ourselves rather than let Netscape hurt us." Neault's staff are writing that they want "the WIN32 layer to be fairly mediocre in performance and feature coverage. We want it to be just good/cheap/timely enough to get a lot of people to use it," and that "we don't want it to work too well. A non-objective is total redeployment of Windows on Unix."
"
How does that not ring Mono before Mono?

The tuxdeluxe article is that MS make sure they can check the box for interoperability, with out acturally do it. This is surspected to be deliberate policy.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/07/18/analysis_how_ms_used/

Just swap Win32 for .NET, WISE for Mono, Java for POSIX (though not mentioned in this article by name) It's just a little bit of history repeating.......

I think Wine and ReactOS have not been targeted because they aren't big enough to be worth the major bad PR. Example, what about WISE ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Interface_Source_Environment seams like we might be set to fool for the same trick twice. http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/07/18/analysis_how_ms_used/

A open standard isn't really enough : http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/296

Especially if they pick up a load of Java business. Then there is no way they are going to just let Mono/Linux have any more of the pie then they can't prevent. If Java goes down in flames and C# picks up the pieces we are stuffed, even if Windows is your platform of choice (think IE after they owned the browser). Maybe worse than ever because it's not just the API they control, but the language. I know many think this is crazy tin hat stuff, but to me it echoes past behaviour and it seems like some would go for an easy life today for a nightmare tomorrow. At the end of the day, it's what makes money not provides service, you only get service when the two line up. Yer, mark me down, I hope I'm wrong too.

Diagrammatic/Node-base programming is an idea that's been pushed as the future for a long time. I don't buy it. If it was going to work, it would be common place now, and it's not. Input method has nothing to do with it. The reason I think it never became common is that it only works in special cases. Believe it or not, I was once a nodal believer, about six years ago, and wrote a plug/node system (game middleware engine/editor thing) as a home project (with optional relative pointers so encapsulated node systems (as a node) could be copied to and from disk/memory easily). It's damn hard to do without adding lots of cost. It's harder to keep things clear. I would write a node system again in the right places, but it's not something that is ever going to replace text based programming. Try doing something large with an existing node/diagrammatic system and compare it with one done in a normal text based language. Your argument mirrors that GUIs are better than CLIs for everything, which I'm sure you don't believe either. Text is the simplest place computers and humans meet. Quite a good light read on this is http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml (In the Beginning There Was the Command Line)

It is early in HCI development, but it's not for nothing things have changed little since: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs

Right, enough, if you still believe this, that is your own problem. You'll have to take my keyboard from my cold dead hands!

I don't want what you are smoking, I don't think it's good for you..... All the magic 2D or 3D programming done with arms waving in the air, will be done by children or for simple tasks/"programmers", much as it has always been. The real work, like writing the magic 2D/3D programming interface for children/simple-task/simple-programmers, will be done as now, in text. In the same way the GUI never replaced the CLI for advanced use. Text is the best common language for computers and humans to talk to each other in, it's simple and clear. An example of the node programming world right now is art packages like Maya. They have nodes you wire together to create behaviour. Advanced artists/animators do some very clever things with these nodes, but not everything can be done through nodes. So there is a script language the advanced learn. But they still can't make new nodes types. The new node types are provided by programmers. Also somethings are just not quick enough done through node wiring or scripting, and have to be programmed properly. There is actually a path here for artists/animators to become programmers, and I've seen it happen a few times. Node base programming has it's place, but it will never replace good old text based programming for the real work.