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What's Wrong with Unix?
aaron240 asks: "When Google published the GLAT (Google Labs Aptitude Test) the Unix question was intriguing. They asked an open-ended question about what is wrong with Unix and how you might fix it. Rob Pike touched on the question in his Slashdot interview from October. What insightful answers did the rest of Slashdot give when they applied to work at Google? To repeat the actual question, 'What's broken with Unix? How would you fix it?'"
If you read the motivations behind writing Plan9 (documented on slashdot previously), there are many descriptions of what the authors thought was wrong with UNIX. And the guys who wrote Plan9 are the same guys who wrote the better part of UNIX. And for you youngsters, UNIX is not LINUX. - AndrewZ
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>PCL is available on every major printer on the market today - it IS the standard. PostScript is a has-been. Dump it today.
Huh? I think you've got that backwards.
PCL requires that most of the "brains" exist on the "computer" side of the "computer/printer" connection. A PCL printer needs less "brains" than a Postscript printer because all the processing is done on the "computer" side of the connection.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but a PCL printer is to a Postscript printer what a Winmodem is to a hardware modem.
For printers, the PCL tradeoff made a lot of sense sense when embedded CPUs were (extremely) limited in computational power compared with desktop CPUs. Rather than have your $1500 486-33 sitting idle as it dumps a pile of Postscript code to another $1000 68020 in the printer, I'll use my $1500 desktop CPU to turn my document into PCL that can be parsed by the $1.99 Z80 or whatever's in my $100 PCL printer.
Now that your $25 disposable cell phone has a 200 MHz core, that tradeoff is no longer a requirement. Embedded systems smart enough to interpret and run Postscript code are no more (and no less) expensive than those capable only of PCL.
Methinks you've got the PCL/Postscript design tradeoff backwards.
Well to work properly it would also need to have the versioned filesystem of VMS. So if someone were to say overwrite it with zero's then you just revert back to the previous version that wasn't zero's. You see? If the file is deleted the file is gone, but if someone changes the file to be useless, then I could jsut revert it. Make sense? There's no way anyone with only write permission could destroy any part of the system permanently. It's just a one command restore.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
It doesn't even have to be an installer. Ever used OS X? To install software on X, you simply drag a .APP container file into your Applications directory. To uninstall, you drag it to the trash.
How is this not better than the current Unix way of doing things?
OS X also has a package manager, which IMHO, is much more trustworthy than an executable installer. My only real complaint is that so many MAc OS X packages insist on being installed on the main drive. That makes me sad.
even with a package manager, you can't even determine how big a given package is! (if you know how to with Portage, I'd like to know)
equery size package
equery is part of gentoolkit
I'll probably be modded down for this...
> The lack of ACLs is a major impediment to uptake
> of Linux in the business community.
This is not at all insightful. It is uninformed at best. Posix ACLs exist on ext2/3,xfs,reiser,jfs. These ACLs are also completely supported by Samba (and have been for many years).
-Mark