> But it had always been reliable. We had always been able to
> walk in, load
> our disk, re-patch and go to O'Malley's for Frito pie and a
> Bass Ale or two
> before showtime. That night was different. The design on
> these things is
> about as proprietary as it gets, with main chips from
> god-only-knows what
> ee's nightmare thrown together into a generally good solid
> working package.
While there are tons of proprietary bits in those systems, I see that a
lot of Strand units used commodity Intel processors. Which means that
while they ran their own proprietary code system, they probably didn't
want to reinvent the wheel and create the base OS from scratch, which
means they were probably running a Microsoft OS. Nearly all products
with embedded computer systems use an off-the-shelf OS so that the
product developers can work on the actual functions and user interface
of the device.
> Macs just crash differently, and generally don't get virussed
> because they
> only comprise 3% of the computer world. Linux boxes are only
> immune to the
> point that no one really cares to take the time and effort
> for less than
Or perhaps it's the fact that both Apple and the Linux development
community both put thoughts regarding security ahead of feature lists.
And when you get into Linux and other Unix-like systems, your system
processes aren't typically running with full rights to the system.
> one percent. If there were applications someone could
> actually use maybe
> someone would car to screw with it, but then there wouldn't
> be a Bill Gates
> to blame their troubled lives on, so it would still be a
> little pointless,
> wouldn't it?
And what applications did you have in mind?
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