This is a waste of good talent. There are so many areas to innovate in that require talented programmers such as:

- parallel computing

- robotics

- AI

- Balancing, Control algorithms

- Speech processing

- Vision processing

and so much more. If you're good enough to do all that, they why go start all over from the front instead of just building on top of what we already have and trying to solve the hard problems?

Your systems programming knowledge combined with some hardware good give us some impressive things. An OS without any networking support and that comes delivered with adverts is not innovate, and it is not going to be particularly useful for us.

There will always be stamp collectors, but it would have been sad if Einstein devoted his talents solely towards collecting stamps.

Sorry for saying it the way I see it, but if everybody always tries to be nice, you'll never hear the truth.

Should one not study the geometry of Euclid, despite it being a "waste of good talent?" I mean, learning 2000 year old mathematics will not innovate or contribute to modern mathematics, right? People will do and learn things for their intrinsic value, and dismissing the act of learning because it doesn't benefit the rest of a field misses the point of gaining knowledge.

Your own mini-OS is a "waste of talent"? Looks like a much better application of talent (to me) than yet another "discover! discuss! share!" web site powered by rounded corners.

Exactly! What's he doing programming just for the fun of i? He's not being serious! Down with fun!

Seriously though, this is a hobby project with an express purpose of being fun. I'm sure there's also a lot to be learnt from it (by the author and by others) but that doesn't seem to be its primary goal.

There is never anything wrong with doing something just for the fun of it. If everyone though like your comment reads the world would be a worse place.

"This is a waste of good talent."

Nearly everything you do each day is not focused on any of your declared important topics. Why not? Because you're human, and you can't work on important stuff every waking moment. Some people play golf for fun, some people watch TV, some people program mostly useless operating systems. I recently bought a couple of Commodore 64s to play with...time spent tinkering with an outdated computer like that is obviously time not spent on parallel computing, robotics, AI, balancing/control algorithms (but I'm getting all tingly just thinking about those, yes, sir!), speech processing or vision processing. Wasted.

Given a sufficient amount of extrapolation, everything is a waste of good talent. You wasted good talent by writing this comment, as I am now doing in reply to it. In fact, given your list of areas only, everything I have ever done in my life has been a waste.

There are a precious few people who have the talent and drive to devote their entire lives to the betterment of our world. The rest of us are just trying to get by, and have some fun in the process.

I believe the point was he did this in his spare time for fun, with no expectations of anyone using it. There is no novel work in this, which would be consistent with a hobby project rather than doing brain-draining work in one's spare time.

Although at it's current state it is probably useless, it's impressive considering it's a one man project.

> LoseThos will never have full networking support with an Internet browser, etc.

Maybe I don't understand what the author is targetting, but even an embeded system without Internet and browser these days is useless.

A vending machine, a toy robot, a DSP device... they're all embedded and they don't require networking.

Although AFAIK most of these devices don't use x86_64...

I would argue that most new vending machines and toy robots need networking. Vending machines use it for credit card auth, and lots of kids toys (certainly a robot) communicate with a PC/website nowdays.

But yeah, I'm sure there exist plenty of devices that don't need networking. Pardon me for picking nits.

The page says that it is targetted at games:

"LoseThos is primarily for making video games. It has no networking or Internet support. As far as I'm concerned, that would be reinventing the wheel and you can do that instead by dual booting another operating system. Similarly, it's not for desktop publishing or multimedia."

Given that quote, a lack of network support is a little surprising. Why limit yourself to single-player games?

It's a supplemental operating system -- a new concept. You use Windows or Linux as your primary operating system and LoseThos for screwing around programming. Believe it or not, people used home computers before the Internet.

i love this.

I8 how_much; for(i=0; i < 1000000;i+=2) how_much += i;

coutln "awesome\r\n";

coutln "Brillant!"

...pardon me.

I really like the idea of embedding images and media into a source file for documentation purposes. Has this ever been done?

Mathematica's notebook files come to mind, as does Donald Knuth's literate programming work.

DrScheme lets you insert images into the program text directly: http://maclab.cs.uchicago.edu/tutorials/DrScheme.html#_Addin...

While it would definitely help the long term documentation purposes of something you don't plan on having to modify, my knee jerk response is that we, as an industry, already have problems getting comments and documentation updated properly when they are in text -- media and images are harder to update.

Of course, I would most certainly be too lazy to actually add any images :)

I can't help thinking this is the same guy from "You suck at Photoshop". It's kind of like his voice with some hacker version of "The Network is Down".

I wasn't convinced it was a real project ;)

When Bill Gates told his son that he would have to start from scratch, I don't think he had _this_ in mind...