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On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, Peter da Silva wrote:
> > But I also think that designing and bragging about a crappy system is
> > pretty asinine, but it's what both OS X and linux do.
>
> As opposed to what?
Designing and bragging about an elegant system. I mean, if you took all
the effort spent on linux and actually, you know, guided it towards a goal
of "new and better" rather than "copy and equivalent", you might end up
with something.
I agree that BeOS was not yet full-featured (the main things I thought
were missing were multi-user, network transparency for the interface, and
native filesharing, but there was lots else), but it was one of very few
OSes to actually take the last 20 years of CS research into account. It
actually learned from the past and tried to beat it.
Seems like linux is just doing its best to copy Unix and Winbloze, with
some Mac stuff thrown in there for fun. There is so little innovation
(truly new ways of doing things) in the linux world it hurts, and most of
the rest is needlessly complicated. One of the greatest things about BeOS
(and MacOS 9) is that it was simple; simple to use, simple to understand.
Powerful, but simple.
Linux completely loses that simplicity, and so does MacOS X. Oh sure,
Apple does a good job of hiding the complexity so most users don't have to
see it, but that's not nearly as good as just not having the complexity.
That's why I'm pissed that Apple replaced OS 9 (an old but simple OS) with
a Unix base, because it just made everything so freaking much more
complicated. And that complication comes through in plenty of unhappy
ways.
> > I agree that the partition join/split thing is annoying, but at least it's
> > trivial to get bootable copies in BeOS, which is one thing that OS X has
> > broken all to hell: It's no longer possible to use the Finder to get a
> > valid, bootable copy of your boot disk without copying the _entire_ disk.
>
> The OS X disk layout is bleeding excessive complexity from all its pores,
> yes, it's got all the gratuitously nonstandard file system of OS 9 or
> BeOS combined with the magic boot partition of the Wintel world and a
> great rotting spoonful of its own unique kinds of pain.
>
> Carbon Copy Cloner is a godsend. And even if doing the steps manually is a
> pain at least each part of the process *is* documented.
>
> Have you ever tried to copy a Windows NT boot partition?
>
> Or Xenix, the original Xenix... changing the partition tables took a kernel
> build, they were all statically compiled in. Now that's deep suck.
Heh, I haven't ever done anything significant in Windows. :) And I've
never used Xenix, but that does sound like suck.
I'm not trying to say there's something better, just that the current
state sucks and it could and should have been better.
Luke
--
The salesman asked me what size I wore, I told him extra-medium.
-- Stephen Wright
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