> If anything is out-of-date, it's NT, the hideous child of VMS, Windows,
> and DOS, all of which are second-rate technologies (to Unix, MacOS,
> and CPM respectively). It's at least half a decade behind Unix
CP/M had a lot of shortcomings! Concurrent CP/M was rather nice, but
the directory structure wasn't there yet when MS steam-rollered them.
(Not that DOS had much either! I still remember my hard drive becoming
slower than a floppy due to fragmentation!)
> with SunOS. (It's really unclear what will happen with Digital Unix
> now that Compaq owns them; and SGI appears to be selling out
> to Micro$oft. But BSDI's getting much better with each release.
SGI isn't quite selling out. They are only banking PART of their
product line on the Merced chip, allowing either NT or IRIX on that
platform. They are porting many of their tools to NT so as to address a
broader market base. They will continue the Cray and MIPS architectures
to support more specialized needs. MIPS is a rather broad product line,
ranging from chips used in many embedded systems, to more robust
multi-chip processors and even multi-processor systems in used in larger
multi-user "main frame" systems. What is not quite clear, is where the O2
line is headed. At least, that's from what I gleaned on my last interview
with SGI on a project that (sigh,) didn't happen. SGI plans to be around
selling their own hardware for a long time!
> Still no hope for AIX, possibly the worst Unix implementation
> I have ever seen.)
I don't know if I should say this, but there are a lot of pro Linux
folks at IBM. I've heard at a number of different companies, that people
are mulling over whether, or perhaps when, to announce support for Linux.
Andreeson is right, lots of folks run NT at work, and Linux at home. I've
seen support for Linux at IBM, SGI, Oracle, and other places. If you need
to get things done, Linux just seems to show up.
> Most of the mentions of Linux in PC Week and other publications
> use words like "geek" and "hacker" to describe the talent necessary
> to install it. That doesn't help, either.
Red Hat Linux is rather easy to install... tweaking it for a
particular network, etc., can be a little more difficult, but far less
daunting than mucking with The Registry and other such things on Wondoze.
UNIX is designed for customization, whereas Wondoze follows Billy's
experiences finding and re-shelving books in his high school library. That
taught him that people can not be trusted to do anything right. Well
folks, it's us people who shell out our bucks! If we are not trusted by a
vendor, we ought to go to another vendor who WILL trust us to muck with
out systems, make mistakes, and LEARN to do what WE WANT and NEED to do to
get our job DONE!
> So, yes, I know. IT people throw around meaningless terms like
> TCO and ROI and so on, but they haven't got a clue what it really takes
> to put together systems and networks that *stay* up. And that aren't
Yes.
> I rather suspect that replacing BSD Unix with "Linux" and VMS with "NT"
> and running the clock forward a decade will show a similar scenario.
What's that saying, "Those who do not remember their history are
doomed to repeat it", or is it "the more things change, the more they stay
the same"?
There's work to be done out there, and we need the right tools to do
it. Most of those tools, we still have to build ourselves because we, as
knowledge workers, do more or less unique things. That means we need
operating systems that encourage scripting and building.
Wondoze, with it's don't trust the user philosophy, DOES NOT
facilitate tool building out of the box, or even after one buys hundreds
or thousands of dollars worth of additional languages, databases, etc.!
It almost requires a professional to design and build applications.
We are not all applications builders, we just need to Get Things
Done! Linux supports that! It comes with formal language tools, as well
as simpler scripting tools, etc. If you want to say it supports hackers,
it sure does!
Face it, most of us "hack at it" when it comes to doing things that
were never done before. That is basically what a knowledge worker does --
"hack" at information, at structure, etc. to make things that have never
been made before. Because if they had been made before, they would have
been bought!
Which all reminds me that CP/M started the revolution by coming
complete with a set of assembler language tools -- what hackers needed to
start Getting Things Done! The first order of business was for the real
hackers to make other languages like Basic, Lisp, Pascal, C, and
applications such as Word Star, dBase, etc. (As well as my favorites,
SMAL-80 and PLI-80) Anyone remember the free E-Basic and C-Basic?
(For the purists, yes, one does have to put design ahead of writing;
but in many cases, we don't know enough about what we are trying to do,
and what our end-users will really do when they get the power to do
things, to create robust designs in the beginning. So we make little
prototypes, trying out several approaches to the problem at hand, before we
settle on a reasonably good way of doing it. THEN we go back and design a
more robust system. IF we have time... and if the need still exists.
More and more, our little hacked up solution is either a one shot deal, or
changes things enough that our end-users want something quite different.)
So till I see something better, I will continue to use and advocate
Linux. It's faster, it's hacker friendly, and it just plain WORKS! It
helps me Get Things Done!
(And I've got to start getting these things done...)
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