On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 3:59 PM, Bob W <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Using Microsoft for convenience because it matches what's used at work doesn't > preclude people from also aligning themselves with free software and open > source > for other aspects of their computing.
absolutely. i use windows at work, and got lucky because even if i have to take work home, those are mostly .doc or .tif files which open office or koffice/gimp can handle without a problem. > To keep myself sane and in touch with a high quality model of software > development I also use a system called Oberon, developed by Niklaus Wirth and > the clever people at ETH Zurich. It's far and away the most efficient and > radical operating system I've ever had any experience with, and a great many > of > the spin-offs from the project have found their way over the years into more > mainstream stuff like Java. Many of the people who were important in the > development of Oberon are now working at places like Microsoft Research and > you > can see their influence making itself felt. > > Of course there must be space for diversity - I'm not arguing against that, > just > against making one's life difficult just because one doesn't like Microsoft. never heard of oberon. :-) and for most long-time linux users i know, microsoft is a non-issue. and in any case world dominion and evil empires were always a tongue-in-cheek thing... > You imply above that linux is efficient in some absolute sense rather than > efficient when compared to Windows. It may well be efficient compared to W > (although I think that depends at what level you're measuring efficiency and > whether that level matters at the level of the end user). But I don't think > you > could call it efficient in some absolute sense. no, i didn't imply that. what i meant was for a lot of people software efficiency alone is the criteria. "i use photoshop because it is the most effcient tool there is". what i said was that for me that kind of efficiency alone is not the criterion for using a piece of software. that i like using linux not because it is necessarily more efficient but because i like its ideology as well or ecology if your prefer...the way software is made collaboratively, made possible by the net. sort of high tech cottage industry if you will... :-)) I read something a few days ago > (which unfortunately I can't find now) that was from a link posted here or > from > a link I followed from something posted here, which tried to put a value on > Linux to show what people were missing by not using free software. It was a > very > flawed piece of reasoning, I have to say, but nevertheless the figures were > quite interesting. Based on KLOC and function points it came up with a $ > figure > that they reckoned it would cost to develop from scratch one of the common > distributions, and another smaller $ figure just for the kernel. The number > just > for the kernel was billions of dollars. > > Billions of dollars to develop an operating system kernel? Give me a break! > Either the calculations are wrong by many, many orders or magnitude or that > kernel is a complete rat's nest of inefficiency and waste. A good principle > for > system design is that it should be simple and clean enough to be understood in > total by one person. A kernel should not be so complex that any suitably > intelligent person (eg a PhD in Computer Science) cannot understand it as a > whole. If a kernel costs billions to develop there's no way it can be kept in > one person's head and I don't see any way of describing that as efficient. > > The Oberon operation system by contrast, was developed by 2 people in a couple > of years. When I first acquired a copy it fit onto a 1.4 meg diskette > containing > the operating system, gui, compiler, network connectivity, all the source code > and so on. Even I could understand it. So much so that I developed a small > clone > running under Windows just to prove to myself that I understood. > > And unlike Linux it doesn't spend its time trying to be Windows but not > Windows. i don't personally think linux is trying to be like windows. may be QT/KDE is to some extent. but there is a wealth of window managers there that are very different in look, feel and function. and anyway i don't know enough technically to comment on the structure of OSs. i've never had a programming background. just been a linux user that's all... :-) and i dont' recollect the exact details, but there was/is something like linux in a floppy though i don't think it had a gui. > N. Wirth - Designing a System from Scratch - Structured Programming, 10:1, > 10-18, 1989 > > http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/ thanks. will read that up. regards, subash -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
