On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 4:24 AM, RedShift <redshift@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi all > > > It dawned on my that lots of industries have standards and companies > generally keep to them. For example slabs of aluminium have standard sizes, > building materials have well defined specifications, or take electrical > components: there's a huge list of standardized components. You can expect > between 220 and 240 VAC from your wall socket, fuses have standard formats > and ratings, 1 meter here is exactly the same as 1 meter in another country, > etc... Even CD's, which have been around for decades by now, have always > been created using the same format (albeit extended somewhat, over time, but > a normal CD pressed now should still play in a CD player that's 20 years > old). > > It allows for a very competitive market where choices are made based on > price, quality, availability, etc... I look at it this way: an OS is a *tool,* whereas electricity, CDs and such are commodities, and need to be fungible. Tools are *not* fungible; the way you interface with a tool is very tightly coupled with the purpose of that tool, which is why you should never use a hammer to pull a screw. The abstractions OSs (and also programming languages) present represent what they're designed to do, so making a one-size-fits-all tool is worse than useless. The "desktop wars" and such arguments all commit the fallacy that OSs are a pretty shell over computer hardware, whereas they are (or should be) tools targeted at (more or less) specific solutions. -- Ryan W Sims
