My brother is in manufacturing. DOS is everywhere. Older things too (PDP-11? DG Nova? Seen both, semi-recently). Not just because "ain't broke, don't fix", but because when you have a cloth dying machine or brick forming machine you spent >US$5M for, that is often a bespoke install for your plant, you don't replace it because some guy who prolly slings Javascript all day sez "DOS is oooold, boomer".
These DOS machines for industrial control could probably be replaced by an Arduino or a far more reliable MCU, whereas running an actual legacy PC as a business-critical component in manufacturing has to be a bit of a nightmare by now. AI could probably do a good enough job of working out how the legacy DOS executables were intended to work.
You might notice that I never once claimed that the replacement I described would be "easy" or, for that matter, even advisable given the broader real-world constraints involved; just technically feasible in the barest sense. I don't think many people would want to use DOS to design a greenfield system of that kind today, and there's a reason for that. Yes, you can buy newly made "DOS PCs" today, but can you really ensure that today's brand new DOS PC will behave in every way that matters like the actual 30 years old DOS PC that used to control the machinery? That's not a trivial question to answer.
If you design the system from the outset to work with an actual PLC/SCADA or similar (the typical solution for hooking up to big industrial machinery of that sort) that's a bit less likely to come up as an issue, and the hardware will actually be designed for that kind of environment.
Yes, if you ignore everything that was discussed, invent time travel do you can "design the system from the outset" as the prescient you are, and pretend anyone was talking about greenfield, you get to be right. Good for you...some people just need the 'win'.
Yeah...this is "if you screw around with it enough, you void the warranty and we will no longer support it" for a potentially multimillion dollar machine.
was there some special sauce within FPU that was otherwise difficult to attain
Yes...um...it did floating point much faster than it could be done on the 8086. For some users, this was very important (and not particularly important to most others).
It read like a C- college sophomore dudebro who read some Ayn Rand and Raspail and Yockey and said "I fucking am John Galt", hit a bong, and got to scribbling their 'manifesto'.
All three of these suggestions are likely true. I’ve never done Ketamine but I’ve heard it can seriously degrade the user’s “quality control” of their ideas, meaning that ideas that they have, or ideas they get from others, that are intellectually subpar appear to be quite brilliant. The dissociation is also helpful for overcoming moral qualms if they were ever present.
Combine that with speed and a insular SV culture steeped in the ideology of Ayn Rand and Nick Land (who likely suffered from amphetamine psychosis) and you get something like this Palantir manifesto.
I would feel sorry for them if they weren’t building skynet.
Spot on...as I recall, you really couldn't tell the difference between VHS and Betamax unless you had a studio-grade CRT. Well...that's probably unfair...you could tell an difference, but not an enormous difference. It wasn't like going from 480i->1080p; not even to 720i. On our old analog TV there wasn't remotely enough 'wow' to justify the price difference and other limits, so dad took back the BM player and got a VHS.
Yeah...he even alludes to it in his APFS section: "hey I talked about all those other filesystems so I can talk about what I really want to talk about...how awesome I think APFS is".
At one point to you personally consider the source of a claim?
You like to throw around assertions like "99.9% of times there really isn't an issue" with absolutely zero proof, but have a big problem with someone saying "I don't agree". I don't think you understand what sources, claims and truth actually mean.
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce[1], 1688 while being built, 157 on-going jobs. I assume this is some 'average' datacenter; I didn't pursue methodology.
reply