Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

What's Wrong with Unix?

Posted by Cliff on from the defects-and-potential-solutions dept.

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?'"

4 of 1,318 comments (clear)

  1. Plan9 is what's right with UNIX by andrewzx1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Re:Program Installation Locations by umrk · · Score: 5, Informative
    ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/foo-1.2
    make
    sudo make install
    sudo stow /usr/local/stow/foo-1.2
    Done.
  3. Re:In a word... by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Informative
    > This sillyness of having to generate postscript so Ghostscript can generate PCL so you can print is just wrong - empty brained, someone forgot to wake up wrong.
    >
    >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.

  4. Re:Several frustrating points by MarkByers · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...