[ros-general] More crazy ideas (was: Microsoft wants royalties for use of FAT)

[Frank D. Engel, Jr.]

This has been done, and to an even greater extreme: check out
www.eros-os.org.  That project represents an operating system radically
different from the ones commonly found now.  There is no file system in
the traditional sense:  the operating system uses the disk as a
persistant object store, with checkpointing areas:  the entire system
state is written to disk from time to time, so that in the event of a
power failure (for example), the system comes back up with the same
programs doing the same things that they were doing at the time of the
last checkpoint; minimal work is lost, and this is done transparently
from the perspective of the programs.

--- "Andrew \"Silver Blade\" Greenwood" <lists at silverblade.co.uk>
wrote:
> A recent discussion with ROS_Guy on IRC prompted me to start toying
> with the
> idea of a completely object-oriented system.
> 
> I implemented a few test classes, and it was written in a combination
> of C
> and C++ (the main interface was C.) Basically you'd have objects and
> classes, as with OO programming.
> 
> However, the difference here is that files would be object instances,
> and to
> use a file you'd just "import" the object. The system would then
> automatically load the file handler for that object. By default, a
> "class"
> handler allows special DLLs to be loaded that contain a class
> definition
> (not in the C++ sense - it was a table of action names with
> addresses). In
> effect, a class in this case would've been an instance to begin with
> (an
> instance of the CLASS object.)
> 
> Anyway, the basic outcome was to be that you could effectively say "I
> want
> to open this database" and it'd find the database object (say,
> database.mdb), and then find the class type based on the extension
> (and
> maybe a few other parameters - like functions within it, as some apps
> share
> extension types, I've noticed.) This class would then be instantiated
> in a
> special way which would effectively subclass it.
> 
> This would result in a standard interface to the data within the
> file, as
> you could use the methods presented by the file handling class to
> manipulate
> the file.
> 
> To take another example, WAV MP3 OGG etc... All audio formats. All
> could
> have a common interface, so any program could read from and write to
> these
> files seamlessly, and the handler would handle the
> compression/decompression.
> 
> And to take things even further, a polymorphic file system could be
> employed. By that, I mean a file system that could change the file
> types
> "on-the-fly". So if you go to view all WAV files, you'll see WAV
> versions of
> your MP3s for example.
> 
> "Won't this take a lot of time and disk space?" I hear you ask...
> Well, no.
> The files wouldn't actually *be* files... They'd just be records
> pointing to
> the same piece of data on disk (the actual original file), with some
> information about the file, such as the original format, and what
> kind of
> file it is (eg: media/audio/wave.) Then, when an application accesses
> the
> file as a different type, it gets converted on-the-fly.
> 
> While this isn't really useful for WAV->MP3->WAV situations (eg,
> opening an
> MP3 in a sound editor, from what was originally a WAV file), it is
> more
> useful in the sense you could open an MP3 in Sound Recorder, as a WAV
> file!
> 
> And, with the correct file handlers, you could maybe open a Word
> document in
> Notepad (with a lot of filtering of graphics, etc. obviously) or
> maybe even
> open emails in Notepad.
> 
> I experimented with these ideas, and came up with a half-hearted
> effort that
> sort of worked but had a lot of limitations and was quite a kludge.
> However,
> should it be implemented properly (even just as a file system idea
> and not a
> complete OO system), I think it could go far.
> 
> A similar idea I had for the OO system was to have a socket handler
> for
> networking, too. So you could write an IM client that uses say, the
> MSN
> Messenger protocol handler, and that handler would have an identical
> (or
> near-identical) interface to the ICQ handler.
> 
> Maybe this would be something to look into?
> 
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=====
=======
Frank D. Engel, Jr.

Modify the equilibrium of the vertically-oriented particle decelerator to result in the reestablishment of its resistance to counterproductive atmospheric penetration.

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