Dear Florin Andrei, Thank you for your contribution to this thread. ... In light of Mr. Thomas Dodd's remarks which followed yours, I feel somehow obliged to comment. For those of you tired with this thread, I request your acquiescing to its continuance for a moment more - given that there are those like Riku and Florin of like mind, I think it may be welcome if I try to provide some perspective for the readership of this list. ...In the fall of 1977, if I recall correctly, I got my first PC - it was a Commodore PET, 32Kb. (That's Personal Electronics Translator, for those that don't know the acronym.) I was proud that it had 32 kilobytes of dynamic RAM, along with a few 8k ROMs - REAL ROMS, not some compact disk! - as a part of it's 64kb architecture. The thing ran, of all things, Microsoft Basic as its operating system! Note that this was long before Gate's "PC" deal with IBM... Of course, just as it is today with his later products, there wasn't much real power left of the system after Gate's OS got done with it, so "real" work required you to write a program and, in those days, you did it with machine language - Motorola 6502. (I was fortunate to have a really hot assembler.) While I was learning 6502, a new magazine came out named Byte, and in its pages I got the idea to create hardware for my new system. I went on to not only do the boring, -yawn-, stuff like building my own 4 voice sound card, but also created - as my most ambitious project for the PET - a bit-mapped vidio offering individual bit controll over the whole screen - and added a half-dozen or so zero insertion force ROM sockets along with the 16K of RAM involved. Yeah, if you were any good, you created your own printed circuit boards to your own design, wrote in assembler, hand-optimized your code down to the machine cycle, and knew the memory map of your favorite OS like it was the back of your hand. Back in those days, you _had_ to be a geek to use the damned things. I know, I was there. And, let me tell you, it wasn't always pretty. But back in those days there was a real cachet to this nerdly activity - it was OK because it was a true necessity of the activity. That fact made the practitioners virtual magicians and wizards and everyone else a mere mortal. And the mere mortals knew it. Make no mistake: The competent and the incompetent had no problem recognizing each other. This is what has created the, relative to other jobs, rather high pay for the wizards and other magi of the computer trade which continues to this day and probably which continues to benefit many on this e-list. It was clear, though, to the good wizards of the realm, at least, that theirs was a blessing and a curse; For all the good financial fortune it appeared to bestow, technical difficulty and obfuscation limited ubiquity of their craft, and that lack of ubiquity both benefited and burdened them. I should briefly add that mine has always been a role of de-mystifying, information sharing and enabling to the benefit of non-wizards or would-be wizards such that I have long held a keen interest in the concerns of the newly indoctrinated, the newbies, if you will, of our craft. Today, we have a fierce battle going on between the monster that has consumed the greater part of the entire computer marketplace and an alternative which is less than perfect but which has great merrit. We on this list have, presumably, chosen our side. So, let us not forget we are most likely bretheren of a sort... Let us keep some perspective about each other, too. Riku is arguing strongly for something which is vital: ease the critical path to utility. It's as simple as that. The more easily new releases can be generated, the more likely that they will be generated. The more releases of software that are generated, the more likely it is that code somebody needs actually exists already. ... The fewer burdens there are between need and have, the more likely the burdens will be overcome and thus the more likely the needs will be met. And the more peoples needs are met, the more likely they are to use the system in question. Thus, it directly follows that if in fact Riku's suggestion eases the path to utility, it should be supported. ...Florin brings up another critical point: cacophony... The sad news is that this has been the curse of the Unix world nearly from the start and VERY sad to say, none of the leading practitioners seems to have caught a clue that THEIR marching forward without unity has been and remains harmful to THEIR cause. ...Historically, never mind the exact details, the bottom line is that each Unix group has held monotheistic religious views regarding _their_ denomination of Unix - primarily "Berkeley", or "System V", and this monotheism been a major contributor to a potentially strong effort being divided and conqured at the hands of Microsoft. ... This is nothing new! It's been happening since, oh, '83 or '85 at least. And the characteristic is that each group thinks that what it's doing is right and best and is technically superior, or is too much trouble to change - or whatever - and fail to realize the strength of their numbers when joined with their natural peers instead of being divided. As if it wasn't painful enough to watch with "unix," to see it happening all over again with "linux" is nearly too much to watch; Forgive me, please: HEY YOU STUPID SHITHEADS, WAKE UP: SO LONG AS YOU MARCH OUT OF STEP WITH YOUR FELLOW COMPATRIOTS YOU WILL CONTINUE TO BE CANNON FODDER FOR YOUR ENEMY, MICROSOFT! ...That is to say, each of the divergent lines of Linux are a curse on the whole effort. They need to remain as common as possible where it counts most: kernel compatibility and installation strategy. Note that it's _incompatibility_ that kills things. A system that can tolerate a dozen different ways to install things is OK, so long as "the right thing," whatever that is, is done every time.... And that's kinda hard to do with the Unix/Linux view, at least as it seems to me today. Look at an example: Windows lets you install a new network driver by going to the network control panel, selecting the adaptor panel and hitting "new", or, if you wish, you can run the software's setup.exe, which might run "installsheild" or any of a half-dozen other installation middleware solutions. Or, you can put a card in, boot the system and have it prompt you! "Diversity" you might say - they all work in harmony. The user can (since, what, W98?) delete any software package easily, too. What have we on Linux? ... When Mr Dodds remarks, "Windows is definately not as easy as you make it sound", he's really missing the mark by a wide margin. The first point is that there are by now a lot of Windows versions out there and some are much better than others, and secondly, yes, Windows really is that much easier. Oh, the user may not know why, but on younger versions at least, they can usually, nearly always, install "from scratch" and end up with a useable system, without having to actually delete all their valuable stuff. Worse than thinking Windows is still as bad as it was in 1995, we get comments like this, "Then she didn't READ the requirements before she downloaded the file." Well hell, I'm what you might call one of the most experienced people you'll ever find in computer science and _I_ don't want to have to read the GDamed file either! The Goddamed thing should check for whatever disaster might befall me and PREVENT IT on my behalf and then maybe TELL ME what and why and suggest a remedy! READMEFIRST files are for lazy programmers and/or thoughtless managers who are either too stupid or don't know any better, or for people who do things for themselves - they can be forgiven, I suppose. -sigh- If there's any single comment in all this that bears burning into the grey stuff you call a brain it's this: The instllation procedure on any system is the single most critical aspect of that system because without a good perception and satisfying experience of the human doing the work they will NEVER be happy with whatever the hell it is that they installed. Give em a smooth install and they will forgive many sins. Give them an awful install and they will hate you forever. And when the installer is your end-user... Look-out. YES, we intelligent people know the installation process is only a few seconds pain for all the use software gives, but that's humans for you! It's that perception thing! There are no computer problems, only human ones. -sigh- All that, or, _my_ perceptions could be just some dream I had one evening. You'll have to figure that one out yourself. -shrug- Regards, Richard -- Richard Troy, Chief Scientist Science Tools Corporation rtroy@ScienceTools.com, 510-567-9957, http://ScienceTools.com/ _______________________________________________ Redhat-devel-list mailing list Redhat-devel-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-devel-list
