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On Feb 1, 2005, at 10:24 PM, Dave Vandervies wrote: > Yeah. Ghod forbid we have to use software that sucks in familiar and > stable ways. I want to be able to use software that has all the newest > and shiniest hatefulness! And I want it to be fully configurable so > when I get sick of it in a week I can upgrade to the newerest and > shinierest hatefullness! If it ain't broke, break it! Heh, I definitely agree that configurability is usually only related to quality in a negative way. As to using modern technology, though, one of the main modern things that OSes seem to avoid is higher-level languages. Why is everything still written in C, for instance? Drivers, and maybe kernels, I understand, but anything else? It's an embarassment. > When somebody comes up with something that's actually *better* than > 1970s technology, and not just different, I'll be elbowing my way to > the front of the line to try it out. Until then, good ideas from 30 > years ago are still better than bad ideas from last year, and stable > implementations of 30-year-old technology are still better than > unstable implementations of last year's technology. I _still_ think BeOS had stinkloads of really awesome technology that basically no one else is using. Now Apple is using one of the main great things, filesystem-based attributes, and that will almost definitely force "OSS is innovative" linux people to quickly copy whatever Apple does. Frankly, a lot of what BeOS did was pretty old stuff, just used very intelligently. For instance, every time I use OS X I'm reminded of how awesome it was in BeOS to have a separate thread devoted to every single window. I still get insanely slowly updating windows in OS X (and, of course, it's 10 times worse in linux), but I _never_ got that in BeOS. Threads? But those are so _difficult_! I don't care if it will make the _users_'s life easier. > The really hateful thing is the way everybody is jumping on the > technology-of-the-week instead of actually stopping to think about > whether it's any good and whether it can be used without throwing out > everything that's already known to work. Well, I have to agree with that. I basically feel like I should get paid $100 every time I actually have to see XML. Bastards. OTOH, there are tons and tons of really tried and true ideas being blandly ignored by non-research software developers. Why the hell isn't something like Zeroconf in everything, instead of just a few Apple-specific pieces of software? Why aren't all pieces of software well-integrated to the OS they're running on, so that it's trivial for software to pass information back and forth (e.g., a lot of the app integration Apple has done)? Why doesn't all software that stores db-like objects support some sort of app to app, or at least offline-db to offline-db, syncronization (e.g., iTunes, iPhoto, Delicious Library, Firefox Bookmarks, and lots of other stuff)? Why aren't threads used bloody everywhere to make the system at least _appear_ more responsive? Why don't all applications understand all relevant file types (like BeOS had, in a limited way, with graphic Translators -- every app that used graphics could read every graphic format for which you had a translator)? Why do we give apps complete control over the content we use them for (iTunes controls your mp3 library, mail apps control the mail they download or provide access to)? > dave > (you don't really think ALL the software ideas from the '70s are still > around, do you?) No, I just think it's an absolute embarassment that the "best" OS out there right now is based on an OS that was a hack-job 35 years ago, and hasn't gotten much less so since then. Unix is so absolutely primitive that to even act like anything that resembles Unix is "modern" is just the height of stupidity. And don't think I'm differentiating Linux -- it's just a relatively crappy copy of a 35 year old hack-job. Even OS X is an embarassment. They've done a pretty good job of creating a well-integrated sufficiently functional interface, but the amount of hacking they had to do to sit Aqua on Darwin is just painful. "Oh, NetInfo, yeah, _everyone_'s using that." It's great that filesystems are finally stable and can self-recover and store files larger than 2GB, but, uh, why is that impressive? "Dude, our filesystem isn't a total fucking embarassment anymore!" Solaris's new FS stuff has real promise, and if it's as good as it appears, it may show the stupidity of how OSes manage the back end, but the OS is still POSIX, which means it's still stupid. I use my computer to manage content and access to content. That is its primary purpose. And yet, I have to install a separate application for every single type of content, and often for every type of access to every type of content (e.g., pdf creation vs. viewing). Why are we so stupid that we allow our operating systems to not understand a damn thing about the content that they were purchased to manage? "But the applications do that!" Yeah, and they do it terribly. And they lock us into their crap. I'm praying that OS X did "Spotlight" the right way, meaning good filesystem metadata, integrating throughout the entire system, but given that it's still based on hateful HFS, it seems unlikely, even with Dominic doing the work (or heading it? I don't know). No, I'm not short on software hate. -- Luke Kanies http://madstop.comThere's stuff above here
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