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> > Are you conflating "Unix" with "Horrible windowing toolkits designed to > > run on an experimental window system that should have been put out to > > pasture a decade and a half ago... at the latest"? > Hmmm. I wonder why it hasn't been put out to pasture. Same reason other hateful software that should have been sent to the knackers yard is still plagueing us. > Sounds like a god to me. "God is not the trees. God is not sky. Etc." In a way, yes. These all run on top of UNIX. > There are two definitions I know: > * Unix is the kernel > * Unix is what I see when I run a Unix box today (the shells, X Windows, > emacs/vi...) Both are wrong. UNIX is a set of interfaces and protocols. Any system that implements a large enough subset of those interfaces to be useful is a UNIX system, whether it's a native implementation (Linux, BSD, System V, Idris, Regulus, Tunis, Minix) or a hosted one (Interix, MVS OpenEdition, Eunice, Cromix) or a shell (Cygwin, Software Tools, Mint). > I like the second definition because the first is useless for me. The second includes Windows 95, VMS, AmigaDOS, and Windows NT. > In particular, there are no alternatives to X, I haven't run the X server on my Mac in months. It's running UNIX. I haven't run the X server on my Windows 2000 box in months, even though I have used the working UNIX that runs under it and I have native Windows and UNIX applications that I could run X on. > Anyway, I think the most similar thing in Unix and Windows NT is the kernel. Since different UNIX systems have radically different kernels, that's a remarkable assertion. Are you thinking of the Minix, Linux, BSD, TUNIS, System V, Lites, or Hurd kernels? > The difference is at the higher layers: Unix blows the hardest when it > does GUI, UNIX doesn't do GUI. At all. There is no native UNIX GUI. > You can also use it to dismiss things Unix fans like (such as shell > scripts - the shell is not the kernel just like X isn't). Since the kernel was originally developed to support the shell, that's really an amazingly backwards idea of the relationship between the two. No, I'm not kidding: just about everything in UNIX was based around the idea that the user would use the shell to connect programs and devices together using open files. > > Anything that exports Windows file system semantics is broken by design. > I don't care about this line of flames too much, but why is "exporting" any > other file system semantics any better? Given that you can run UNIX software in an environment that doesn't even vaguely resemble UNIX file system semantics, I'm at a loss to figure out what you're getting at here. UNIX file system semantics are amazingly well thought out, so amazing that virtually every OS released since 1978 has adopted at least some of them, to the point that you probably don't realise that they came from UNIX. But I've run UNIX software on systems that don't even have hierarchical directories or plain text files. Hell, I used the examples and excersizes in Software Tools to *implement* UNIX on one. > > Not just "no", but "hell no". Jesus. We had PDP-11/70s running for weeks at > > a time with 30-40 concurrent users and load averages peaking near 80 during > > finals week. Despite the DEC FSE cleaning the swap disk platters with spit > > (yes, I watched him do this). > Well, there are different rumors. This isn't a fucking rumor, mate. This is first hand direct testimony from one of the beggars who was doing the stuff you're telling tales about. > uptime is nothing. I've seen totally wedged Unix systems avoiding reboots. Don't be an ass. I'm not talking about totally wedged systems, I'm talking about systems that are doing their jobs so well that the people who are using them every day can't actually find them when the time comes to upgrade. Every computer is a server. Some are file servers, some are application servers, some are display servers. The idea that there's something special about display servers, and that you have to run your applications locally on them, is hateful. The fact that Apple's crippled their window system so you can't even get at the remote display support any more is hateful. The fact that Microsoft killed NTerprise by refusing them licenses when they picked up Citrix is hateful. The fact that Sun killed NeWS and the people who have the NeWS source refuse to consider trying to open-source it is hateful. I think the most hateful software of all is the less-hateful software you can't get because of idiot ideas about software.There's stuff above here
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