On Fri, 2002-11-29 at 11:41, John Rose wrote: > I've seen this before, the ruling out of Windows for this type of task. > I disagree, Windows IS the OS to use for many reasons. Although some may rule out >the use of Windows for philosphical ideology. Despite the bad publicity towards MS, >MS has been very open about their technologies. The argument used to be "Use Unix >because Windows can't handle it." Windows CAN handle intense realtime applications >and with the slew of other advantages brought along with it the decision should be an >easy one.
You can't reasonably put "Windows" and "real-time" in the same sentence without a pretty long list of qualifications and caveats, even for "soft" real-time. This applies to most versions of UNIX as well, though many can be set up to do good real-time. One of the best reasons for not using Windows is a lack of scalability, both in the sense of being hardware limited AND being extraordinarily poor at clustering and lacking the wide range of mature clustering engines and tools that are available on Unix and Linux in particular. Windows works great for business apps, but pretty much sucks for big engineering and scientific systems, which tend to expose flaws and poor design in the OS kernel. If you never plan on running your code on anything bigger than an over-sized workstation then Windows is adequate. I'm not an ideologue, but I've never really understood the claim that Windows is a good OS to use for these types of systems. It is an adequate OS, but not a particularly "good" one. You can find lots of good dev tools on any platform, and Windows is pretty limited when it comes to actually being an operating system (i.e. I/O, processes, memory management, and so forth -- high level candy is largely irrelevant). And good Windows code has the annoying feature of being largely not portable. But at the end of the day, use whatever floats your boat. -James Rogers [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
