On 9/6/06, Richard Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
JohnR said:
> What we really need is an OS with all of the advantages of XP and
> Ubuntu and none of the disadvantages of either. Then maybe we
> would have a decent operating system.
That's called "OS X". Oh, except for the fact that OS X is much easier
to use (and prettier!) than XP.
And traditional Unix doesn't actually make a whole heap of sense. Why
are there dozens of different configuration file formats? Why does no
other Unix have things like launchd and lookupd but rather a rats nest
of systems for starting processes and looking up directory data?
Rich
Tradition!
Why, without tradition, we'd be like... like.... a fiddler on a roof!
Non-facetious answer: you're seriously underestimating the incredible
constraint of backwards compatibility. There's millions and millions
of lines of C and other Unixy languages programs, representing
uncountable millions of dollars and man-hours of which crucial bits
depend on that "rats nest". Rewriting that for a more sensible
operating system design is simply unfeasible - I've heard that IBM
maintains backwards compatibility for programs back to the IBM 360 and
even earlier -- they're not doing it for the hell of it you know.
There are endless scads of research operating systems that are clearly
superior to the big 6 - in capability (Genera, the LMI OS, Plan 9),
mathematically verified reliability and security guarantees (think
Coyotos and such), extensibility (SPING, the Lisp machine OSs) etc.
And why has essentially none of them caught on? (I'm going to except
GNU HURD here since there's an outside possibility that when it gets
POSIX decently implemented the Debian HURD project might actually
accomplish something)
No backwards compatibility. Go ahead and analyze the various big 6:
Windows was backwards compatible with DOS, which was the first big
mover in the small microcomputers; Mac OS X, see Mac OS 9 and the
larger microcomputers; the BSDs and Linux were determinedly backwards
compatible with the long lineage of Unix.
If people don't value security enough to take the comparatively
trivial tasks of switching from Microsoft Word to OpenOffice's
formats, and so on and so forth, why the *dickens* do you think the
*developers* will dive back into their code to port to some novel
operating system which presumably would otherwise break their programs
in all sorts of novel ways (since otherwise there would seem to be
little point to the new OS)? Chicken and egg problem.
In the short-term, that rats nest is utterly rational. Unfortunately,
the short term turns into the long term.
~maru
notice I'm typing this with a Qwerty keyboard...
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