On Fri, 2002-11-29 at 19:38, John Rose wrote: > > Windows is good enough for "soft" real-time on PC's as compared to other > OS's.
No its not. At best Windows does it as well as other OSen, and often worse. I've done lots of real-time work on Windows and other OSen, mostly for high-end real-time audio work. Windows is inherently pretty poor, which is why most of the good hardware for this has embedded CPUs with a built-in real-time OS to make the hardware behave as though it is being controlled in real-time even though Windows can't itself do this. When I was last doing this I had 6 DSPs and 3 embedded real-time CPUs in my computer in addition the regular system CPUs strictly for the purpose of making the system pretend like it was actually good at doing real-time. The latency requirements for this are only 1-5ms hard depending on how much latency you are willing to pay to eliminate (my system = 1.5-3ms typical). When setup like this the OS mostly just sits idle but you save yourself an order of magnitude on the responsiveness of the system. And this is using software that seriously hacks the OS to make it behave reasonably well for real-time. > I've built arrays of 100's of PC's crunching data and > communicating through TCP/IP custom messaging(watch out for DCOM). TCP/IP isn't real-time. You seem to be using a non-standard definition of "real-time". It is fairly safe for me to state that I have written expansive distributed network applications with far more stringent real-time requirements than anything you've done. (Not that I know what you've done other than things you've mentioned, but very few people have actually had to do what I've done in this domain.) > For an AI implementation that requires > processing large volumes of News data from the internet, sub-millisecond > electronic real-time is impractical anyway. I never agreed that AI required real-time at all, soft or hard. But Windows can't do good real-time even at the few millisecond level except in the most contrived cases. In the real world, it is totally unacceptable for serious real-time applications, as is evidenced by the plethora of embedded real-time systems that most people don't realize are controlling most things requiring good real-time in their PC. You only hear about it on the high-end because the manufacturers brag about the quality of their real-time implementations (to justify the relatively high hardware expense of those gadgets). > But the few KILOFLOPS you > loose by using Windows verses some other OS is more than made up for in > the plethora of technologies built into Windows at the relatively small > price of a few hundred bucks. How about all the technologies that are completely absent from Windows for any price? Or the fact that you can get essentially all these things for free with the Unix of your choice? If the only thing in the universe you know is Windows then use it, but there is no compelling reason otherwise. Windows offers precious little that can't be found in Unix, except for some useless stuff like .NET. > And many of these built-in Windows > software technologies are continuously being improved and optimized > through hardware acceleration. As well these built-in tools will be > valuable in any AI engine especially when the AI needs to interface with > the world. > > Do I sound like a Windows salesman? You sound inexperienced with other platforms. When Windows upgrades its technology from "sucks" to "sucks less", it is still worse than the Unix equivalent which "worked pretty good to begin with". Some of the applications for Windows are great, but the OS remains a dog. It very rarely the other way around, and most of the advantages Windows has is in the availability of applications that have zero relevance to AI. Everything essential to AI is available on Unix, and for less money. And there are many useful technologies that are available on Unix which are unavailable on Windows. > But if I were building > a new PC-based AI design, just from my experience, I would jump all over > Windows and it's offerings ... as well take a side glance at Lindows :) As I said, whatever floats your boat. I develop for both Windows and Unix on a daily basis and have lots of experience with both, but I see no compelling reason to choose Windows for AI. As a pragmatic issue, Windows is worse on the code maintenance side in my experience, and Unix is clearly a better OS for certain types of apps. You could write your app on Windows, but I'd want it to be able to run on Unix. -James Rogers [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
