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Dell CIO Says "Unix is Dead"
An anonymous reader writes "I thought this might spur some good discussion on this board, including jabs at Dell and MS, which I always enjoy reading. Dell's CIO believes that the end of Unix is here, in fact his opening slide in a recent presentation was "Unix is dead." Specifically, he talked about the savings he claims in moving Dell's Oracle databases from Solaris to Red Hat.
but the core ideas are exactly as they were back in 1976 when I used UNIX on a PDP-11.
Yes, and shoving all communications through a 'TTY' interface and adopting an ancient 'Time-Sharing' model for multi-user systems is archaic and dated. It might still be 'the best we have' but it positive reeks of legacy, and not legacy that's by any means the best method for use in modern software.
I like old stuff. I think old computers are cool and I restore them as a hobby.
Definitely not as a vocation, though.
Andy Tannenbaum was right way back in the early 90's. No amount of 'backfill' in the form of legacy croft obscures the truth that we live in a very kludged world.
It isn't clear what 'The Way Forward (tm)' is yet, and it's a real shame that Microsoft is even in the running.
give me info files, but don't make me dig through some disorganized doc directory and don't make important docs available only as .html, .sgml, .ps or whatever, pretty please? Not every system has the tools to read those. If I'm using ssh to admin some server that's maxed out on some clogged pipe, I want small simple tools and concise man pages. Most of the time, I can't remember what flag does what. Frankly, sometimes I can't even remember the name of the command I want, and 'apropos' comes in handy if the command has a man page.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I cannot STAND the gnu info system. Its utter garbage.
Who cares what you think if you are a 14 year old homophobe?
Unix is NOT the name. It's NOT the copyright. What is it is, what it has become, is Linux. They are the same thing. When I ask a guy if he is a unix-geek I mean is he a linux-geek and I suspect that is what most of you mean as well. There may be proprietary OS's that look like Unix - Solaris, HP-UX, etc... They are not Unix. They only stole the name from something that does not care about copyright law and will exist long after copyright law is dead.
"very like a whale..."