[oc] Re: Merlin Hybrid System

[Andreas Bombe <bombe@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>]

On Mon, Dec 03, 2001 at 11:21:12AM +0000, David Drummond wrote:
> I have recieved a few comments from individuals who felt that I should not 
> tease them with ideas or concepts untill iether myself or someone else had a 
> prototype they could show to the world, but the turth is in this industry 
> that this is no cheap accomplishment. Companies today have been clinging to 
> old standards for so long it's hard to encourage them to change, even when 
> you protect investments.

The problem with having no code or prototype is that it a lot of
discussion and "designing" will be done but all that ever exists will be
a mailing list and some overdesigned web pages.

A working and growing project is started in the hands of one or few,
public releases begin when there is something to release.  Mailing lists
and web pages come into live because they are needed, they are not the
project's only purpose.

Lots of people have lots of nifty ideas.  They think and dream about it,
and mostly they will just let it be, because it turns out the ideas
don't work as intended, they are not experienced enough to do the work
or simply not interested anymore after two or three days.  However today
you can register a project at SourceForge in no time.  Just look around
at all the projects there, all the cool operating systems that will
revolutionize the market etc. etc.


That Merlin project looks suspiciously like such a dead-end.  It has a
big list of all the features it will have with lots of quite irrelevant
details.  An examination of some points from the eterna.htm file:

"The Merlin System provides a cost effective solution to multiple
processing machines that understand dual languages." - How can you say
it's cost effective, when you don't even have an idea how it will look
like?

"It also provides the ability to run multiple operating systems designed
for the same language to be run simultaneously, enabling two or three
x86 operating systems to run at the same time." - Virtualization is not
easy, especially not with systems not designed for it (like x86).  It
also needs a host OS under which the virtualizer runs.

"The only wait is for Microsoft to develop their interface with the
Merlin driver subsystem" - Right.

The concept of reinventing hardware and buses instead of using existing
parts also will not fly.  Why pay $9000 for a Merlin system that would
barely be as powerful as a $1000 standard x86 system?


Unless you can learn from the masses of dead projects, I predict that
Merlin will never come close to a prototype stage.  Anyway, what did
*you* intend to work on for the project?

-- 
Andreas Bombe <bombe@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>    DSA key 0x04880A44
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