On 2/26/2010 9:47 PM, Woodrick, Ed wrote:
You mean in an environment where every ham could do it better than
every other ham?
Fully in agreement here. Every new programmer (with less experience
than his peers) thinks he can write a better version of [insert software
here] and ends up writing a new one with completely different, but just
as silly bugs, as the last guy. Code-reuse is a farce that never
happens, because programmers also write new languages to program in
constantly, thus creating their own Tower of Babel.
Remember, Linux is a copy of Unix and then attempts to copy everything
that Windows does.
And Windows GUI was a copy of the original MacOS GUI... which was a copy
of a user interface prototype at Xerox PARC... for copy machines.
And ... the MacOS GUI was also copied by Amiga, Tandy, and others, but
not by TI, Atari, and others who died by not copying it and keeping up.
Those that copied lasted a little longer, but lost to the marketing
budgets of those that survived.
And... to top it all off, just about every TCP/IP stack in existence is
a copy of the original code from Berkeley... in fact known-bugs in BSD's
TCP/IP stack were still used as "fingerprints" to show that Microsoft
used the BSD stack, years after those bugs were fixed in BSD's own code
and copy of Unix. Microsoft eventually patched their IP stack...
So... I think you're trying to state that Microsoft isn't a copy-cat,
but an innovator -- and that's simply not true. In reality everyone
copies everyone in this industry... and it matters little over the
long-haul. True innovation is rare.
So I'm not sure what your point is, other than Linux as a desktop OS is
not as polished as Microsoft Windows, which is a bit of a non-sequitur,
since most Linux folk don't care... they can go back and forth between
command-line and GUI for whatever they need to accomplish, with ease.
Nate
p.s. About the only players that aren't consistently being copied in
computing/software, are the true real-time Operating System companies...
Microware, VxWorks, Green Hills, and other low-level folks who still
hire programmers who know Assembly Language, and how to manipulate the
hardware as directly as possible...to make their OS's as fast/efficient
as possible. There's only fiscal incentive to do this in the "embedded"
niche, because they have to run on the smallest hardware. Yet, still,
they copy each other...
