On what basis are you qualified to say that Donald Norman has said something "profoundly stupid"? Because you disagree with him? Because "everyone knows" that Google is easier to use?
Now I'm curious. Why did you put "experts" in quotes? You can make an argument against Spolsky but Donald Norman is certainly an expert. The man wrote Design of Everyday Things. I'm pretty certain he qualifies as a design expert.
Include the entire OS since you only need a small part including drivers, which come down to about 4 companies at this point which all have unified drivers: AMD/ATI, nVidia, Creative, and Broadcom based network chips
I know it's tempting to believe that's the case, but trust me when I say that's not even close to being true. Even if you're only including consumer desktop and laptop machines made in the last twelve months.
Re:Not offtopic, but shows misperceptions
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If you don't have a copy yet, Where Wizards Stay Up Late is a great book and a good accompaniment to Hackers.
I have yet to see a single politician ever talk convincingly on any matter that involves technology. Living in the UK and having to hear some of the claims given about the ID Cards Database is enough to make me laugh at times. On top of that the Government continues to spend huge amounts of money on IT schemes that could be done with a fraction of the money. These schemes are generally run by everyones favourite useless shower of bastards, EDS. Invariably these gigantic schemes fail, leaving the Government without their much-touted improvements (Many of them imaginary, but still) and EDS with a pocket full of cash. Then the cycle begins again with the next eye-watteringly huge contract for another IT scheme.
It seems the highest level of IT amongst UK politicians is the ability to post a stupid clip of yourself on YouTube. I believe Tony Blair doesn't even use email, and I'd be amazed of Gordon Brown can even switch a PC on, frankly.
You may not find it useful to have the source, but it's pretty useful when you want to port the drivers so a new platform can support that hardware for our users.
The Amiga and Mac pre-OS X had no swap or virtual memory capability at all. The Mac Plus and Amiga A500 shipped with no more than 512k of chip RAM, which was plenty for running the OS and one or two applications. As a fair comparision, the equivilent versions of Windows at the time (2.0 & 3.x) also had no swap or virtual memory and most IBM compatible machines shipped with no more than 1MB of memory. Again, this was plenty for running the OS and one or two applications.
It was and still is perfectly possible to run a complete OS & applications in 128MB. Syllable will run with 64MB of system memory and 8MB of video ram. I've just checked my running Syllable machine, which is using 49MB of system memory right now, plus an additional 75MB for disk cache. With Whisper (email client), ABrowse (Web browser, which uses khtml) and a couple of other applications and Terminal windows open, that rises to 59MB of system memory and 80MB for the disk cache. No swap is enabled or needed.
you should not expect any GUI OS to run like a modern system with only 128M of RAM
I'd have to disagree. Unless "modern" is now a euphimisim for "Warped glass effect 3D backed alpha-blended" which, lets be honest, is going to be used by about 5% of the user base and isn't exactly important to a $100 laptop.
The Bombes wern't computers. The Colosus were. You should also note that the physical design of the machine doesn't matter all that much; all pre-tube machines (Most from that era) were electro-mechanical devices because they used relays as switching units.
The issue is not the card itself. The problems are:
The huge shared database that is tied to your ID card that will follow you from birth to death, and the plans for who will be allowed to access that database.
The massive cost (Billions of £'s) involved in creating this huge database.
The additional cost to each person, each of whom will be required to pay £90 (That's the current figure, expect it to rise!) out of their own pocket for the card.
The Governments laughably poor track record in implementing any IT scheme of any notable scale, usually by giving tax revenue to a useless shower of bastards such as EDS.
The fact that no matter how many times they've been asked how exactly these cards will help to combat identify theft or terrorism, not a single Government minister or employee has ever given a satisfactory answer.
Both the majority of the Lords and a large percentage of the Commons oppose the Bill (It only passed it's second Commons vote last night by 30 votes!).
Any one of those is a good enough reason to not like these cards, as the current scheme stands.
I think I'd better go sign No2ID myself. I also intend to write to all of my local MPs (& potential MPs) and make it clear that at the next general election I intend to vote for the first party who make getting rid of ID cards (100% outright) an election pledge.
Well that's O.K then, because I never need to renew my passport. I also trust the government to not abuse such a scheme and I'm totally confident in their ability to competent and cost effective contractors such as EDS to implement the ID card database and biometric identification system.
Excuse me one moment. Nurse! It's time for my medication!
Lots of people are interested in writing printer drivers. Just look around linuxprinting.org Gimp-Print/Gutten-Print, the HP IJS drivers, people maintaining the Samsung "gdi" patches for various versions of Ghostscript etc. There are more people doing stuff like this than you imagine.
I'm personally hoping to find somone interested in re-writing the Samsung "gdi" Ghostscript driver as an IJS server.
I fail to see what the big deal is anyways. What purpose would be gained from looking at the driver source code?
I don't know about just looking, but it's very useful to have working source code available if you want to port it to other systems. Syllable would still be using VESA only if it wern't for the availability of video driver source from XFree86/Xorg and in the future we'll rely on source for any and all OpenGL hardware acceleration. If anything, we need far more source for drivers that support 3D acceleration.
It's very early to be talking about OSs like Syllable competing with Linux. None of the core Syllable developers even use Syllable full time, so we wouldn't expect anyone else to do so at the moment either. I suspect your definition of "real usable" and the vast majority of users is very different. Yes, Syllable is usable, and early in 2006 some of us will hopefully start to use Syllable much more heavily.
Placing yourself in competition with an OS the size of Linux takes a lot of time and effort. It takes even more effort to succeed.
Current OS's arn't competiting with Linux right now because we're not in a position to compete, not because of the size of Linux. If you want to gain market share in the Open Source world you need to produce a better product, that's all.
What linux needs for the desktop market is an easy to use, and simple desktop. The problem with this on current installs is the lack of communication between desktop and kernel etc.
Perhaps Linux isn't the answer, but something like Syllable might be able to deliver what you and many others are looking for. It's a complete Operating System, which means that implementing features that span from the GUI all the way down to the kernel is very easy.
..to a point where interaction with the technology is as simple as pushing against a door to open it.
General purpose computing devices will never, ever be as simple as you wish. Notice that all the devices you list are single-function devices; they have a finite set of states and are capable of doing only one job.
A computer is nothing like a toaster. It is a general purpose device with an almost inifinite number of states. It's "jobs" are mearly abstractions. It can do one, many, or no jobs at any one given moment. It can not and will never have a simple interface, because it's job is not simple.
Now creating simple specific interfaces to common well understood jobs may be possible. That's still a very small subset of what a computer does though.
They don't. Syllable just happens to have a high level API that looks, at first glance, similiar to the BeOS/Zeta API. The filesystems share some common features. That's about it, on the technical front. As the poster above points out, Syllable is not compatible with BeOS/Zeta and it is not intended to be.
Of course, this could be just what I want you to believe..
Yup. I'm actually kind of annoyed by the article; Thom essentially discounts Syllable (& SkyOS) before we're even ready. If you check over the syllable-developer mailing list we've been discussing exactly how Thom has defined "sucess", too; his definition is not the same as the definition we're using. Ours is far more grounded in reality.
Syllable and SkyOS have the potential be usable systems with a decent user and developer community, but Thom has jumped the gun by several years and declared us all dead before we've even started!
The same applies to Syllable. If you open up a Terminal you'll find GNU Bash, with a fairly standard GNU userland & developer toolchain on top of our version of glibc.
Slashdot Mirror
Glibc officially supports GNU HURD and Linux. However it is also used by GNU/kFreeBSD and Syllable, both of which is Free operating systems.
On what basis are you qualified to say that Donald Norman has said something "profoundly stupid"? Because you disagree with him? Because "everyone knows" that Google is easier to use?
Now I'm curious. Why did you put "experts" in quotes? You can make an argument against Spolsky but Donald Norman is certainly an expert. The man wrote Design of Everyday Things. I'm pretty certain he qualifies as a design expert.
Include the entire OS since you only need a small part including drivers, which come down to about 4 companies at this point which all have unified drivers: AMD/ATI, nVidia, Creative, and Broadcom based network chips
I know it's tempting to believe that's the case, but trust me when I say that's not even close to being true. Even if you're only including consumer desktop and laptop machines made in the last twelve months.
If you don't have a copy yet, Where Wizards Stay Up Late is a great book and a good accompaniment to Hackers.
I have yet to see a single politician ever talk convincingly on any matter that involves technology. Living in the UK and having to hear some of the claims given about the ID Cards Database is enough to make me laugh at times. On top of that the Government continues to spend huge amounts of money on IT schemes that could be done with a fraction of the money. These schemes are generally run by everyones favourite useless shower of bastards, EDS. Invariably these gigantic schemes fail, leaving the Government without their much-touted improvements (Many of them imaginary, but still) and EDS with a pocket full of cash. Then the cycle begins again with the next eye-watteringly huge contract for another IT scheme.
It seems the highest level of IT amongst UK politicians is the ability to post a stupid clip of yourself on YouTube. I believe Tony Blair doesn't even use email, and I'd be amazed of Gordon Brown can even switch a PC on, frankly.
You may not find it useful to have the source, but it's pretty useful when you want to port the drivers so a new platform can support that hardware for our users.
If we're doing that, let's add Syllable to the list, too. 128MB of memory and 512MB disk? Easy.
If he, or someone else, manages to fit a full desktop environment within this U$100 Notebook specs, Ill be using it on my desktop too!
Perhaps you'd like to take a look at Syllable? It'll fit comfortably in those specs and it will work with a lot of current consumer hardware.
The Amiga and Mac pre-OS X had no swap or virtual memory capability at all. The Mac Plus and Amiga A500 shipped with no more than 512k of chip RAM, which was plenty for running the OS and one or two applications. As a fair comparision, the equivilent versions of Windows at the time (2.0 & 3.x) also had no swap or virtual memory and most IBM compatible machines shipped with no more than 1MB of memory. Again, this was plenty for running the OS and one or two applications.
It was and still is perfectly possible to run a complete OS & applications in 128MB. Syllable will run with 64MB of system memory and 8MB of video ram. I've just checked my running Syllable machine, which is using 49MB of system memory right now, plus an additional 75MB for disk cache. With Whisper (email client), ABrowse (Web browser, which uses khtml) and a couple of other applications and Terminal windows open, that rises to 59MB of system memory and 80MB for the disk cache. No swap is enabled or needed.
you should not expect any GUI OS to run like a modern system with only 128M of RAM
I'd have to disagree. Unless "modern" is now a euphimisim for "Warped glass effect 3D backed alpha-blended" which, lets be honest, is going to be used by about 5% of the user base and isn't exactly important to a $100 laptop.
The Bombes wern't computers. The Colosus were. You should also note that the physical design of the machine doesn't matter all that much; all pre-tube machines (Most from that era) were electro-mechanical devices because they used relays as switching units.
Any one of those is a good enough reason to not like these cards, as the current scheme stands.
I think I'd better go sign No2ID myself. I also intend to write to all of my local MPs (& potential MPs) and make it clear that at the next general election I intend to vote for the first party who make getting rid of ID cards (100% outright) an election pledge.
Well that's O.K then, because I never need to renew my passport. I also trust the government to not abuse such a scheme and I'm totally confident in their ability to competent and cost effective contractors such as EDS to implement the ID card database and biometric identification system.
Excuse me one moment. Nurse! It's time for my medication!
Lots of people are interested in writing printer drivers. Just look around linuxprinting.org Gimp-Print/Gutten-Print, the HP IJS drivers, people maintaining the Samsung "gdi" patches for various versions of Ghostscript etc. There are more people doing stuff like this than you imagine.
I'm personally hoping to find somone interested in re-writing the Samsung "gdi" Ghostscript driver as an IJS server.
I fail to see what the big deal is anyways. What purpose would be gained from looking at the driver source code?
I don't know about just looking, but it's very useful to have working source code available if you want to port it to other systems. Syllable would still be using VESA only if it wern't for the availability of video driver source from XFree86/Xorg and in the future we'll rely on source for any and all OpenGL hardware acceleration. If anything, we need far more source for drivers that support 3D acceleration.
It's very early to be talking about OSs like Syllable competing with Linux. None of the core Syllable developers even use Syllable full time, so we wouldn't expect anyone else to do so at the moment either. I suspect your definition of "real usable" and the vast majority of users is very different. Yes, Syllable is usable, and early in 2006 some of us will hopefully start to use Syllable much more heavily.
Placing yourself in competition with an OS the size of Linux takes a lot of time and effort. It takes even more effort to succeed.
Current OS's arn't competiting with Linux right now because we're not in a position to compete, not because of the size of Linux. If you want to gain market share in the Open Source world you need to produce a better product, that's all.
A GNU userland already does boot on two BSD kernels and one GNU kernel
And one non-GNU, non-BSD kernel.
What linux needs for the desktop market is an easy to use, and simple desktop. The problem with this on current installs is the lack of communication between desktop and kernel etc.
Perhaps Linux isn't the answer, but something like Syllable might be able to deliver what you and many others are looking for. It's a complete Operating System, which means that implementing features that span from the GUI all the way down to the kernel is very easy.
..to a point where interaction with the technology is as simple as pushing against a door to open it.
General purpose computing devices will never, ever be as simple as you wish. Notice that all the devices you list are single-function devices; they have a finite set of states and are capable of doing only one job.
A computer is nothing like a toaster. It is a general purpose device with an almost inifinite number of states. It's "jobs" are mearly abstractions. It can do one, many, or no jobs at any one given moment. It can not and will never have a simple interface, because it's job is not simple.
Now creating simple specific interfaces to common well understood jobs may be possible. That's still a very small subset of what a computer does though.
Such a scheme is being used by various operating systems. Syllable is one, and Gobo Linux is another. There are a few more whom I forget right now.
They don't. Syllable just happens to have a high level API that looks, at first glance, similiar to the BeOS/Zeta API. The filesystems share some common features. That's about it, on the technical front. As the poster above points out, Syllable is not compatible with BeOS/Zeta and it is not intended to be.
Of course, this could be just what I want you to believe..
Yup. I'm actually kind of annoyed by the article; Thom essentially discounts Syllable (& SkyOS) before we're even ready. If you check over the syllable-developer mailing list we've been discussing exactly how Thom has defined "sucess", too; his definition is not the same as the definition we're using. Ours is far more grounded in reality.
Syllable and SkyOS have the potential be usable systems with a decent user and developer community, but Thom has jumped the gun by several years and declared us all dead before we've even started!
The same applies to Syllable. If you open up a Terminal you'll find GNU Bash, with a fairly standard GNU userland & developer toolchain on top of our version of glibc.