Here's how I remember the story from one Usenet thread on comp.lang.c a long time ago...
(Dejanews isn't fully functional at present, so the exchange is more or less how it happened.)
One poster wrote in the little anecdote you just related, about Carl Gauss discovering the formula n(n+1)/2. Another poster followed up with this version:
Here's how I heard the story, but it was with Kurt Godel instead.
One day Kurt Godel, a young boy at the time, was sitting in his arithmetic class when the teacher asked the students in the class to add up the numbers from 1 to 100. The other students groaned, took out their pencils, and started writing down long lists of sums. But Godel just thought for a few seconds and then shouted out, "The answer is 5,050!"
The teacher came over to him, curious. "How did you realize so quickly that there was a faster way than simply adding up the numbers?"
And Godel replied, "What do you mean? I did add them up!"
Thus began the career of a another brilliant mathematician.
Soon another poster (Kaz Kylheku?) wrote in with his version of the story:
Bill Gates was sitting around talking to a friend one day in his office when the friend told him about the problem of summing up the numbers from 1 to 100.
So Bill sat down at his computer, fired up Visual Basic, and wrote a program to calculate the result. Forty-five minutes and three reboots later, he came up with an answer. "It's 5,049.98" he stated confidently.
His friend shook his head. "You know, Bill, there is a better way than just adding up all of the numbers. You could have used the formula n(n+1)/2.
And Bill said, "I know, that's what I did."
Quality without creativity is pompous;
creativity without quality is infantile.
The OS doesn't "get in the way", it provides basic services that all applications need.... Probably the most dumb thing I've ever seen someone in the industry say.
I think your ideas about computing are inflexibly integrated with the concepts computers are currently based around: operating systems, processes, tasks, GUIs/CLIs, etc.
The purpose of a computer, fundamentally, is to do work, or to provide entertainment, or do whatever it is you want it to do. In an ideal situation, no OS would be needed because the OS serves no purpose but to start and manage applications. From the user's (not the engineer's) perspective it does no real work. You don't write documents with MacOS, you don't play games with Windows, you don't surf the Internet with Linux; you do all of these with applications.
I think the man's ideas are interesting and provocative. Let's not worry about how computers could work without operating systems--perhaps there is no better way. But maybe there is. Maybe we're too constricted by our current metaphors.
I'm not convinced that the operating system concept will prove to be ultimately the best way to manage a computer system. We can provide consistency and manage applications without all of the baggage that comes with an OS. For all I care file systems, icons, installation procedures, taskbars, and applications can just go away and never come back. All these things just get in the way of getting things done. They are metaphors that don't directly result in anything being done.
Think about it this way: did they use anything like a modern OS in Star Trek? No.
And which would you rather use: the computer from the Starship Enterprise, or Linux?
Quality without creativity is pompous;
creativity without quality is infantile.
Ok, who else is annoyed at Wired's change in format to:
Headline
(abstract blurb)
[sidebar] [irrelevant links]
(rest of the story)
I think Netscape is just on crack. In IE the page looks fine: though the links are still inside the story, the sidebar is indeed to the side. Yes, still annoying that the links are actually inside the story and break it up, but it is still on the same page.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdotting... ever...
Here's how I remember the story from one Usenet thread on comp.lang.c a long time ago...
(Dejanews isn't fully functional at present, so the exchange is more or less how it happened.)
One poster wrote in the little anecdote you just related, about Carl Gauss discovering the formula n(n+1)/2. Another poster followed up with this version:
Soon another poster (Kaz Kylheku?) wrote in with his version of the story:Quality without creativity is pompous; creativity without quality is infantile.
Yeah, I'm a moron.
Quality without creativity is pompous; creativity without quality is infantile.
...So what's the question?
Quality without creativity is pompous; creativity without quality is infantile.
I think your ideas about computing are inflexibly integrated with the concepts computers are currently based around: operating systems, processes, tasks, GUIs/CLIs, etc.
The purpose of a computer, fundamentally, is to do work, or to provide entertainment, or do whatever it is you want it to do. In an ideal situation, no OS would be needed because the OS serves no purpose but to start and manage applications. From the user's (not the engineer's) perspective it does no real work. You don't write documents with MacOS, you don't play games with Windows, you don't surf the Internet with Linux; you do all of these with applications.
I think the man's ideas are interesting and provocative. Let's not worry about how computers could work without operating systems--perhaps there is no better way. But maybe there is. Maybe we're too constricted by our current metaphors.
I'm not convinced that the operating system concept will prove to be ultimately the best way to manage a computer system. We can provide consistency and manage applications without all of the baggage that comes with an OS. For all I care file systems, icons, installation procedures, taskbars, and applications can just go away and never come back. All these things just get in the way of getting things done. They are metaphors that don't directly result in anything being done.
Think about it this way: did they use anything like a modern OS in Star Trek? No.
And which would you rather use: the computer from the Starship Enterprise, or Linux?
Quality without creativity is pompous; creativity without quality is infantile.
Ok, who else is annoyed at Wired's change in format to:
Headline
(abstract blurb)
[sidebar] [irrelevant links]
(rest of the story)
I think Netscape is just on crack. In IE the page looks fine: though the links are still inside the story, the sidebar is indeed to the side. Yes, still annoying that the links are actually inside the story and break it up, but it is still on the same page.