This communication is away from AGI and Novamente research subjects but it may come around when looking at implementations. Someone halt me if it's too distracting -
>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. The idea that I am driving at in using Windows is that the tools and API's are fruitfully abundant and varied. The sub-millisecond work can be done by DSPs and CPUs on ISA, PCI, cPCI boards like you say. Granted TCP/IP runs with millisecond granularity on Ethernet. This can be a higher level of real-time. Real-time is relative right?, though there is a definition of it somewhere that changes as communication technologies improve. For most applications not all-of-it all-of-the-time needs to be pico-second real-time. And hiring real-time embedded systems developers is costly. There is a large pool of Windows developers that (from my experience) program and produce at a lower overhead. Linux is encouragingly coming around but in many cases Linux is too tough a sale when doing involved projects and funding is coming from big 3-letter corps.. >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. I'm unaware of technologies that are unavailable for Windows. Probably this is because as Windows developers become aware of these they are rapidly incorporated into Windows code. >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. Most projects that I have designed I've used Windows for many reasons. For example a recent one: An audio-conferencing company needed to do large audio-conferences. Choice: Buy klunky $1+ mil. Unix boxes that have some cryptic API and get overbilled on interface development OR build an in-house box with Windows that non-tech people could work with (billing, sales, customer service, etc.). "But it needs to do real-time!" - We took robbed-bit voice T1's in one end of a PC to Dialogic cards and using the SCSA bus, routed the timeslots to an ATM board out to an ATM switch and into another PC ATM board over the SCSA bus to a custom conferencing board, conferenced the voice channels and sent the voice back onto the scuzzy bus and out. Granted most of the real-time was done by the DSP's, but Windows Delphi code controls the whole system. And this cluster is running on Win NT with old single proc Pentium III's. There is some latency and echo-cancellation has been employed but we saved quite a bundle and the scalability is enormous. This may not be the real-time that you do but you have to agree that it is some sort of real-time. >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. Doing the AI servers on Unix or Linux is great. But if you need a PC based interface for the masses, the Unix/Linux software WILL NEED to have a Windows GUI whether it be through HTML, Java, TCP/IP or whatever. This is the unfortunate case. Open source hopefully will prevail with Linux but this has yet to be proven. Developing servers on Linux is less distracting than Windows due to all the brouhaha Windows stuff and that might be reason alone to avoid Windows.... ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
