Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Which OS?


I am admittedly a geek. One of those fairly obsessive fans of sci-fi who think of details most people wouldn't even consider. My most recent thought process which my wife and I discussed over tonight's meal is which OS did Dr. Rodney McKay of Stargate Atlantis base his Lantian/Terran interface on. Here is my thought process.

Not Windows - Windows doesn't play nicely with other operating systems. It refuses to read anything that isn't a windows standard file format.

Not Mac OS - The computers look like real computers, generally a heavy duty military style tablet. Not that the military uses tablets, they tend to favor laptops. The OS X also isn't nearly flexible enough to handle the changes necessary. They have a tendency to use fair bit of proprietary code and contrary to ID4 you need flexibility to talk to different computer architectures.

Linux - This is my bet. Why? Linux works on anything. The OS is completely customizable. Need it do something that didn't come with any distribution, write your own code. You can even write your own kernel (the heart and soul of any OS).

Anyhow, what are your thoughts?

3 comments:

ghp said...

Well, I can't really comment on the heart of the question you ask, as I've never gotten into the Stargate franchise; however, I would offer this tangential comment...

To criticize OS X as inflexible, compared to Linux, is a bit odd. Given its core base of FreeBSD (Darwin), OS X shares much of the same foundational goodness of Linux. One could almost think of it as a distro/fork of FreeBSD, albeit a closed one like Xandros, Novell Linux Desktop, etc...

Not liking the gui bolted on top is quite reasonable, as many a spirited argument has been had over KDE vs. Gnome vs. window-manager-of-your-choice. Yes, OS X is tied to hardware (although the Hackintosh phenomena is an interesting splinter thingamabob...), but that's not all bad, IMO.

-ghp

Dr. Luther in the 21st Century said...

While OS X and Linux share common heritage, OS X really got into some proprietary coding. Some of the coder sites I have visited have been very leery of OS X coding because of the proprietary code while working in OS X does not work else where. While I don't doubt that a knowledgeable coder would be able to modify OS X, I suspect that most wouldn't bother dealing with OS X because it would be more trouble than it is worth particularly since I suspect there are legal issues with modifying the core code of OS X.

Anonymous said...

4 reasons why it would have to be Windows.
1. A programming language written in code completely incomprehensable to modern language users: check!
2. A system set-up by highly intelligent but oh-so-arrogant mortals who pretended to 'own the universe': check!
3. The whole system requires (and is powered by) a back-up battery (ZPM): check!
4. The system was designed by beings who have since ascended to a higher level of existence, leaving no clue (and caring less)of how the thing worked in the first place: check!

Scary when you look at the parallels, Herr Doktor?