On 8/18/2016 2:59 AM, Larry Colen wrote:
Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote:
On Aug 17, 2016, at 10:02 PM, Larry Colen<[email protected]> wrote:
...No matter what operating system you use, it is going to suck. ...
I guess it's no wonder that you're not an operating system designer
or implementor, eh?
The only OS that I wrote from the metal up might be more accurately
termed a Real Time executive, and the work that I did on the Linux
Kernel was for a project at Counterpane, and never released into the
kernel. So, other than multi-processor OS that I did for my senior
project, I guess I've only worked on one hypervisor rather than an OS.
But, since I'm not currently employed to design and write operating
systems, I guess your right, I'm not. However, if I were an operating
system designer or implementor, I'd have an idea of how much better
things could work, and would be annoyed at all of the ways that they
aren't as good as they could be.
I don't find that operating systems universally suck at all. Most
seem to do a pretty decent job, actually, when it comes to doing what
they're supposed to do: interact with the hardware to provide system
boot up, support device interactions, handle requests for volatile
memory and storage as needed, and partition CPU and other resources
for shared use. While rarely perfect, any modern OS is generally
pretty solid and reliable 99.999999% of the time.
There is the big question of where you draw the boundary around the
OS. We are in violent agreement on that one, and I'll spare you my
rant on "The UI is not the OS". These days, for many people, they seem
to draw it so it includes the UI as well.
You can blame both MS and Apple for that. Back in the day even NT, was
an OS with an accessory GUI, then IIRC NT 4.0 came along and the GUI was
tightly integrated with the OS, just like Apple did on the Mackintosh.
God I feel old saying this, but I remember MS putting extra code into
Windows 3.x, (for Dos), to scare users into not using DR DOS 5.x, which
was superior to MS DOS 6.0 in so many ways.
The presentation layers and apps that live on top of the OS services
are far more fraught, but they're not the OS. That is the issue
brought up by the OP for this thread.
And, that is the bit that I was mostly addressing.
Whether you want your control interface to be lexical or graphical in
nature is a debate that's been going on for forty-plus years. Little
as I have to add to either side of that debate, it seems that the
general opinion of the majority of users is fairly clear.
In much the same way that McDonalds has sold billions of hamburgers,
or iPhones take better photos than Leicas. I will not deny that if you
are doing very simple tasks, a point and drool interface can be more
convenient than a command line. However, if you want to do anything at
all complicated, or different than the designers considered, a lexical
interface is a lot more powerful. Somehow I don't think that you are
writing your replies by pointing at pictures and dragging them onto
the page.
LRC
--
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve
immortality through not dying.
-- Woody Allen
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