Re:Command line interface and real-time control go
on
MS-DOS 1981-2002 RIP
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· Score: 2
Maybe this is off topic but Is there a command line interface available to windows.
Umm, the command prompt? Though the shell is actually quite different under the hood, it does run the same scripting language, the batch shells we all know and loathe.
Cygwin is a port of essentially the entire GNU toolchain to Win32. To get the stuff to run (essentially unchanged source) they have a DLL that emulates much of the underneath stuff of UNIX. You can install ash (Bourne shell compatible), bash, zsh and tcsh from the base setup, you can install pdksh if you want korn shell. ksh93 isn't a part of the standard install (it has so many pieces, many of which that replace cygwin stuff, they don't want to bother) but I hear you can compile it and run it. It's a very UNIX-y style shell (C: is mounted as/cygdrive/c, not C:) but it comes with tools to help bridge the gap (path conversioon tools, etc.).
The MKS toolkit is a UNIX-y set of tools for Windows. It has a Korn shell, and the shell interface is more Windows-like.
As far as real time stuff, remember that to Microsoft, EOL means no more sales, no more support. Anything pre-existing isn't going to explode and die, taking out your hard drive. If you think you need DOS, go get it now. Or try to look at any of the Free DOS alternatives, or DR DOS.
My gf currently lives in Brazil, I don't, I live in Chicago. This is a problem for many reasons (airfare, time differences, etc.).
I was nice enough to buy her a Palm. I got her an m100 to replace the Palm IIIe that kind of died. I gave her the IIIe when I got a Handspring for free (which eventually broke and I had to replace it, which I did with a Palm IIIxe). But the m100 had a problem on battery swap; if you switched batteries, you lost all data on the handheld. Hmm, so much for Palm quality control.
OK, no problem, you just have to do a HotSync before a battery change right? Did I mention her PC had only one serial port, and no PS2 port? Yes, the mouse was on the serial port, making any HotSync pretty complicated. So she ICQ's me, and tells mer her dilemma - the Palm m100 seems to die completely when she changes the battery. The normal battery changeover wipes out the memory, and she's worried about it, all her phone numbers are on it. So I have to call her with a pretty expensive phone card, how to use the command line tools I installed (I installed pilot-xfer previous to this because I saw the palm tools on her box were kind of iffy). So I'm trying to have her do the batch file in wrote, and also the Palm tools in case they accidentally worked.. did I mention this was all in French?
So I call on a couple expensive phone cards ($80 worth at the end), speaking French to my Brazilian gf trying to swap serial ports from mouse to Palm, trying to explain the command line stuff, while also attempting the (previously flakey) Palm software and finally getting the battery swap done. Pain in the ass, but she didn't lose any phone numbers. This was an hour and a half call the first time (which is why I ble two pretty expensive calling cards, luckily enough I've found cheaper since).
She joked around, saying that once I got it for her, it was my responsibility to keep it running, she was damn serious about it too.
In the early days (pre Windows 3.11 days) they essentially did give the OS away, they had a windows runtime for all those folks who didn't have Windows. Granted, this was still on top of DOS, and at those times Windows was less an OS in itself than a presentation manager, but they gave it away.
No, they had to wait until... Though you did make your political point about them co-opting the world with.NET, that doesn't change the fact that the first cross platform virus was MS with Word 6 macros run essentially the same (because of lax security) on Word 6 for Windows, Mac, and any environment that could emulate enough for one or the other (like WABI on Solaris)
I laughed at your ed source, I wish I had mod points.. I hated vi "it's better than ed" so much when I was programming UNIX at school, I actually coded on a mac and ftp'ed the code over to UNIX, i hated UNIX editors that much. You do realize your code will core dump on every read, a pointer isn't a buffer. And since you're discarding the string anyway...
now? Silly rabbit, Microsoft has had the cross platform thing down for YEARS. I had the MS Word Concept Macro on SPARC/Solaris 2.51 running Word 6 on WABI.
ye of little faith, thinking Microsoft would have to wait until 2002 for a cross platform threat...
C# is not a Microsoft idea. It was actually created by a University (I searched hard for the link, I couldn't find it). The CLR idea and stuff was from them. MS did polish it up some, surely, but the core innovation came outside.
MS is kind of like the anti-PARC. Where Xerox PARC came up with revolutionary things but could never put them to market, MS stares so much at the market it can't come up with any revolutionary things. Thing is, they have anough money to buy the revolutionary things, and do what they do best, polish them and market and sell them.
Microsoft hasn't been all that good at innovating. The only real innovations I can think of were Microsoft Bob, and it's bastard child from Hell clippy. Neither score major points with me, though I give them points for being attempts at least to break away from the WIMP metaphor..
It essentially means they wrote the compiler in C, and didn't write the compiler in C#, just to paint themselves in the corner and have a chicken and egg problem on how to compile a compiler written in C# if you don't have a C# compiler. I thought this was kind of odd myself, seems like a pat on the back for not doing something stupid, unless someone could point me to some need to compile a compiler in it's native language.
gcc itself has a bootstrap problem. The gcc code itself is actually pretty gcc specific, non-standard C code that can't be directly compiled correctly by other compilers. So there's an extra step, the gcc build routne adds a bootstrap compiler - youdon't compile the real compiler directly, you compile a small 'gcc-ish' compiler that though not complete, has a sufficent enough subset of gcc-isms to compile the real compiler.
Depends on how clean the code is. If you assume data sizes (something you shouldn't do anyway, but some do) you should be OK. Do you try to pass data in places that ask for pointers? You'll be in some trouble then.
Hmm, are peoples' memories so bad that they forget that there used to be DEC Alpha binaries pretty regularly... the Alpha being a 64 bit Little-Endian chip. I'm sure the code is pretty much 64 bit clean, it may be more of an optimization for the x86-64 processor than making it 64 bit clean.
"Apache is a very widely used *Linux*-based enterprise Web server application, and we are working with two leaders - Covalent and Red Hat - to offer simultaneous high-performance 32- and 64- bit computing to our customers,"
Hmm, I thought that Apache was pretty much run it everywhere, not just Linux. I guess this guy better tell Yahoo to stop running it on FreeBSD...
For certain things, TUX is better. Apache has always been designed for correctness, security, and portability (they have code for mainframes using EBCDIC, Netware, BeOS...). Speed isn't one of their top priorities. At a dotcom I worked, we considered thttpd for static pages because of its speed, and apache for anything dynamic. We never got to the point where we had any real load (dot-com implosion) so we never got to the point where the speed diff waranted having the complications of two daemons. Apache has it's place, it's not for every situation.
TUX is much faster on most things, such as static pages. It's an in-kernel server, and takes advantage of things such as direct access to kernel buffers and DMA, something a user-land daemon such as apache can never do. But it's not as configurable, especially in dynamic content situations (can't do JSP or mod_perl, or php for example). That's fine, the default config has TUX forwarding stuff it can't understand to a userland daemon anyway. The recommended server? Apache. They're really complimentary, even in RedHats config.
In some respects, this makes a lot of sense for RedHat. They don't sell TUX. Hell both TUX and Apache are free/open source. They sell their OS (their version of it anyway) and support. To get OS sales, you need to have apps on your OS that people want, like Apache. As far as the support goes, more people using your OS, more support opportunities. Having a 64bit server can help, sicne the Opteron is more tuned for business sales, where they're more likely to buy support anyway. They also have the inside track a bit, since they did the porting and may gain some advantage by it.
I remember Apple having 2, they flipped the bytes wrongly when they sent it on the wire, then they corrected it. So instead of recalling all those NICs, they just assigned Apple both permutations.
If Microsoft were to modify their configuration files to be more UNIX like, and offer a decent UNIX-like shell, most of the UNIX advantages would fall away.
I think some of the fundamental issues would still apply. UNIX is failry opaque about what doews what, there are things in my Task Manager that I still don't know what they do, and I've been a WindowsNT user for close to 10 years now. LIke the paper says (wherever the source) it's hard to know whats comnnected to what. The UNIX philosophy is small independent parts working together. the Windows is many small parts interdependent on each other, sometimes for marketing reasons more than design.
Same here. I came off the Register, read their summary, tried to read the original. "Hmm, damn it's slow...." Lightbulb came on "I bet this is on Slashdot now..." sure enough.
I think the problem right now is software not hardware. When the PowerPC was replacing the Motorola 68K, people were saying that it had the potential for making a quantum leap in the way people worked (and played) with their computer. Stuff that was impossible because it would be slow. Instead of small quantitative changes (wow! this menu takes 1.3 sconds to show instead of 1.6 seconds) there now can be qualitative changes. New interface paradigms. Theming, ha, thats wasted cycles, we're going to change the WIMP metaphor. We'd have audio interaction with the computer, whats a menu? As Much as I like bashing Microsoft, Microsoft Bob and the Bastard Child From Hell Clippy are some of the few variations from the WIMP metaphor that we've seen. The main reason they failed was that Microsoft didn't have them get out of the user's way. But another reason why is not enough processing power. Not only did you get interrupted, but for stupid advice. Wasn't worth the trade off.
When System 7 came out [my opinion is Apple did a great job of getting System 7 out and working on the PowerPCs at the same time] they announced their roadmap for the future. There were three OS teams, blue, pink, and red. Blue actually was the System 7 team, if you open the System & kernel, you can find strings about the Blue Meanies, the System 7 team. Pink was the near term really cool stuff, a new OS that they were supposed to do with IBM, and formed a company called Taligent. Was supposed to be a brand new OS, Object Oriented design. Based on the Document, not the Application. A large part of this was called OpenDoc. They shipped parts of it, but never a real whole. The best part they actually shipped was CyberDog, but gradually all of this went away. Some say the reason it failed is lack of computing power. There were other reasons - new programming paradigm, hard to get developers on board. Instability in one part can lead to bad interactions in another part as well. But it took up a lot of RAM and a lot of horsepower, too much for a 60Mhz PPC601. I'd love to see what they had thought for for Red, that was their super long term whiz-bang stuff.
So where are the new interfaces? Instead of wondering why folks are pushing faster boxes, wonder why we're still using the WIMP metaphor over 23 years after the introduction of the Xerox Star? The base comp had 384KB RAM, smaller than L1 cache on some chips. But anyone who was familiar with a Xerox Star and plop them in front of a Windows box, and they'd probably recgnize it all.
Then again, you don't have to buy a 3GHz Pentim 4 if you want. If it doesn't fit your fancy, then don't Luckily enough we still have options, Athlon, and to a lesser extent, VIA C3s are alternatives.
and in fact NT had POSIX.1 compliance long before linux.
By POSIX compliance, do you mean real compatibility, or just certification?
Technically, that NT had POSIX cert. first is true, but: NT's implementation was poorly done, and eventually scrapped. It was checkbox marketing, POSIX beng a requirement for some US government installations. Not only did NT beat Linux to POSIX.1, but they beat everybody. No UNIX vendors initially got POSIX certification. "You want us to certify as UNIX, we are UNIX" and laughed at folks who would pick a VAXy Win32 OS with vague notions of POSIX (and OS/2) compliance and call it "UNIXy" (in the form of POSIX) that folks wanted. But folks did pick them, some cause they didn't know any better, some cause rules are rules, so most of the UNIX guys saw this and eventually had their UNIXen POSIX certified.
The other thing is, Linux essentially grew up POSIX. Most of the design decisions were based on POSIX compatibility. Whether or not it has the certificate, Linux has been much more usably POSIX compliant (APIs, command line tools) at pretty much any time of it's existence than NT ever was. They were POSIX and they, oddly enough, actually expected that stuff to work, unlike NT. Besides, why bother, cause in the early days of Linux, the certification didn't matter. Is some 13 year old kid hacking and making his first irc-bot gonna say "hey, this is like UNIX, but it's never been POSIX certified, lemme trash this stuff!!!"? POSIX as a certification as opposed to an idea only came after it started becoming important to folks, to larger businesses ans such.
If you use a busybox shell then you can make the commands built into the shell
Interesting. I haven't heard of this (my work is a pretty big solaris shop, so I don't use busybox much). I don't see this much different than having aliases in/etc/profile though, check the $0 of your shell, and if it supports aliases, alias ls='busybox ls' alias mount='busybox mount'
and so on, and doesn't force a shell choice on you.
zsh has very cool configurable shell completion. You could configure it to give you all the options for any given command. You could program this for busybox, have it give you the possibilities "ls, dd" and so on once you type busybox.
This doesn't solve the "everything in one binary so if I make one change someplace I essentially have to test 10 or so utilities" problem tho, but I think you were just mentioning the shell thing, not implying it was a complete solution.
As an aside, ksh93 has many more builtins than other shells, and has them loaded as shared libs. yeah you can do this with basha as well, but the defaut bash doens't have dd as a buoltin, ksh93 does. In fact this is one of the reasons ksh93 isn't in cygwin yet; ksh93 is more of an environment than a shell, with many utilities stuck in it.. the cygwin folks don't want to add that on top of other tools.
I just don't see how it is feasible to leave dozens of tiny utilities littered all over the root filesystem.
Busybox works two ways, either/bin/busybox "command" [optional flags] or you can symlink/hardlink it to [command] and run it like the ordinary command.
If you do it the first way, busybox "command" you'd have to type the extra letters all the time. You can alias it, but then you'd have to have a support issue with all the users unless you had universal aliases, and thats not optimal.
If you do it the second way, with the symlinks or hardlinks, you still have all the things in/bin, not much added elegance.
The code in busybox gets complicated. The added elegance in the file system becomes complications in the source code. Any updates to any of the "functions" as busybox calls them, requires an update to essentially all your userland utilities (as expressed in busybox). Lots of updates, lots of testing, because now any change to anytihng in busybox requires you to test everything, because a change in the ls "function" is in the same code that contains your mount command, and your cat, and your rm, etc., and now you need to test all of those as well.
Shared code can go into libraries. That's why libc is usually dynamically linked, shared code should be shared. You get your elegance with asmall executable with much of it's guts in shared libraries. Elegance here causes ugliness there. You pick your battles, you do things the way you want to. That said, busybox is opensource, and all of the gnu utilities are opensource as well. I don't think the busybox folks would mind patches from you or any others that share the view. I personally don't agree, my "elegance" is in smaller utilities with well defined functions, and I would not contribute.
IE has this too, though in a separate download. Probably makes more sense, ma and pa probably aren't gonna debug that game that you screwed up your coding on.
Utility for debugging JavaScript.
ahh so thats what that does.
Re:In comes the laywers...
on
Halloween VII
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· Score: 2
If [I were] to make an OS today i sure would make it POSIX compliant. Like NT? Ironically enough, for a long time NT was the only POSIX certified OS. The major UNIX vendors never bothers, though it was fairly absurd they had to certify themselves as UNIX.
POSIX certification guarantees very little, it is still difficult to get a cross platform app. What libraries do you have, which way do you have your system includes laid out, do you have BSD or SVR4 style init scripts (or neither, RedHat had their own variation for a while a "clean up" that broke a lot of things). You still need to target individual platforms, just yu won't have to change a lot in the targetting.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe this is off topic but Is there a command line interface available to windows.
/cygdrive/c, not C:) but it comes with tools to help bridge the gap (path conversioon tools, etc.).
Umm, the command prompt? Though the shell is actually quite different under the hood, it does run the same scripting language, the batch shells we all know and loathe.
Cygwin is a port of essentially the entire GNU toolchain to Win32. To get the stuff to run (essentially unchanged source) they have a DLL that emulates much of the underneath stuff of UNIX. You can install ash (Bourne shell compatible), bash, zsh and tcsh from the base setup, you can install pdksh if you want korn shell. ksh93 isn't a part of the standard install (it has so many pieces, many of which that replace cygwin stuff, they don't want to bother) but I hear you can compile it and run it. It's a very UNIX-y style shell (C: is mounted as
The MKS toolkit is a UNIX-y set of tools for Windows. It has a Korn shell, and the shell interface is more Windows-like.
As far as real time stuff, remember that to Microsoft, EOL means no more sales, no more support. Anything pre-existing isn't going to explode and die, taking out your hard drive. If you think you need DOS, go get it now. Or try to look at any of the Free DOS alternatives, or DR DOS.
From the screenshots, it seems Paul likes butterflies. Is he the new (shudder) MSN guy?
My gf currently lives in Brazil, I don't, I live in Chicago. This is a problem for many reasons (airfare, time differences, etc.).
I was nice enough to buy her a Palm. I got her an m100 to replace the Palm IIIe that kind of died. I gave her the IIIe when I got a Handspring for free (which eventually broke and I had to replace it, which I did with a Palm IIIxe). But the m100 had a problem on battery swap; if you switched batteries, you lost all data on the handheld. Hmm, so much for Palm quality control.
OK, no problem, you just have to do a HotSync before a battery change right? Did I mention her PC had only one serial port, and no PS2 port? Yes, the mouse was on the serial port, making any HotSync pretty complicated. So she ICQ's me, and tells mer her dilemma - the Palm m100 seems to die completely when she changes the battery. The normal battery changeover wipes out the memory, and she's worried about it, all her phone numbers are on it. So I have to call her with a pretty expensive phone card, how to use the command line tools I installed (I installed pilot-xfer previous to this because I saw the palm tools on her box were kind of iffy). So I'm trying to have her do the batch file in wrote, and also the Palm tools in case they accidentally worked.. did I mention this was all in French?
So I call on a couple expensive phone cards ($80 worth at the end), speaking French to my Brazilian gf trying to swap serial ports from mouse to Palm, trying to explain the command line stuff, while also attempting the (previously flakey) Palm software and finally getting the battery swap done. Pain in the ass, but she didn't lose any phone numbers. This was an hour and a half call the first time (which is why I ble two pretty expensive calling cards, luckily enough I've found cheaper since).
She joked around, saying that once I got it for her, it was my responsibility to keep it running, she was damn serious about it too.
the OS itself could be given away on CD
.NET, that doesn't change the fact that the first cross platform virus was MS with Word 6 macros run essentially the same (because of lax security) on Word 6 for Windows, Mac, and any environment that could emulate enough for one or the other (like WABI on Solaris)
In the early days (pre Windows 3.11 days) they essentially did give the OS away, they had a windows runtime for all those folks who didn't have Windows. Granted, this was still on top of DOS, and at those times Windows was less an OS in itself than a presentation manager, but they gave it away.
No, they had to wait until...
Though you did make your political point about them co-opting the world with
I laughed at your ed source, I wish I had mod points.. I hated vi "it's better than ed" so much when I was programming UNIX at school, I actually coded on a mac and ftp'ed the code over to UNIX, i hated UNIX editors that much. You do realize your code will core dump on every read, a pointer isn't a buffer. And since you're discarding the string anyway...
int main( void )
{
char buffer[1000];
for(;;)
{
printf( "- " );
fgets(buffer, 1000, stdin);
printf( "?\n" );
}
}
now? Silly rabbit, Microsoft has had the cross platform thing down for YEARS. I had the MS Word Concept Macro on SPARC/Solaris 2.51 running Word 6 on WABI.
ye of little faith, thinking Microsoft would have to wait until 2002 for a cross platform threat...
C# is not a Microsoft idea. It was actually created by a University (I searched hard for the link, I couldn't find it). The CLR idea and stuff was from them. MS did polish it up some, surely, but the core innovation came outside.
MS is kind of like the anti-PARC. Where Xerox PARC came up with revolutionary things but could never put them to market, MS stares so much at the market it can't come up with any revolutionary things. Thing is, they have anough money to buy the revolutionary things, and do what they do best, polish them and market and sell them.
A lot of their ideas are actually not that bad
Microsoft hasn't been all that good at innovating. The only real innovations I can think of were Microsoft Bob, and it's bastard child from Hell clippy. Neither score major points with me, though I give them points for being attempts at least to break away from the WIMP metaphor..
It essentially means they wrote the compiler in C, and didn't write the compiler in C#, just to paint themselves in the corner and have a chicken and egg problem on how to compile a compiler written in C# if you don't have a C# compiler. I thought this was kind of odd myself, seems like a pat on the back for not doing something stupid, unless someone could point me to some need to compile a compiler in it's native language.
gcc itself has a bootstrap problem. The gcc code itself is actually pretty gcc specific, non-standard C code that can't be directly compiled correctly by other compilers. So there's an extra step, the gcc build routne adds a bootstrap compiler - youdon't compile the real compiler directly, you compile a small 'gcc-ish' compiler that though not complete, has a sufficent enough subset of gcc-isms to compile the real compiler.
IBM started and still contributes to Jakarta
Solaris contributed a huge amount to Jakarta as well, and in fact Jakarta is now the reference JSP container. They still contribute code.
Depends on how clean the code is. If you assume data sizes (something you shouldn't do anyway, but some do) you should be OK. Do you try to pass data in places that ask for pointers? You'll be in some trouble then.
Hmm, are peoples' memories so bad that they forget that there used to be DEC Alpha binaries pretty regularly... the Alpha being a 64 bit Little-Endian chip. I'm sure the code is pretty much 64 bit clean, it may be more of an optimization for the x86-64 processor than making it 64 bit clean.
"Apache is a very widely used *Linux*-based enterprise Web server application, and we are working with two leaders - Covalent and Red Hat - to offer simultaneous high-performance 32- and 64- bit computing to our customers,"
Hmm, I thought that Apache was pretty much run it everywhere, not just Linux. I guess this guy better tell Yahoo to stop running it on FreeBSD...
For certain things, TUX is better. Apache has always been designed for correctness, security, and portability (they have code for mainframes using EBCDIC, Netware, BeOS...). Speed isn't one of their top priorities. At a dotcom I worked, we considered thttpd for static pages because of its speed, and apache for anything dynamic. We never got to the point where we had any real load (dot-com implosion) so we never got to the point where the speed diff waranted having the complications of two daemons. Apache has it's place, it's not for every situation.
TUX is much faster on most things, such as static pages. It's an in-kernel server, and takes advantage of things such as direct access to kernel buffers and DMA, something a user-land daemon such as apache can never do. But it's not as configurable, especially in dynamic content situations (can't do JSP or mod_perl, or php for example). That's fine, the default config has TUX forwarding stuff it can't understand to a userland daemon anyway. The recommended server? Apache. They're really complimentary, even in RedHats config.
In some respects, this makes a lot of sense for RedHat. They don't sell TUX. Hell both TUX and Apache are free/open source. They sell their OS (their version of it anyway) and support. To get OS sales, you need to have apps on your OS that people want, like Apache. As far as the support goes, more people using your OS, more support opportunities. Having a 64bit server can help, sicne the Opteron is more tuned for business sales, where they're more likely to buy support anyway. They also have the inside track a bit, since they did the porting and may gain some advantage by it.
(many manufacturers have more than one)
I remember Apple having 2, they flipped the bytes wrongly when they sent it on the wire, then they corrected it. So instead of recalling all those NICs, they just assigned Apple both permutations.
If Microsoft were to modify their configuration files to be more UNIX like, and offer a decent UNIX-like shell, most of the UNIX advantages would fall away.
I think some of the fundamental issues would still apply. UNIX is failry opaque about what doews what, there are things in my Task Manager that I still don't know what they do, and I've been a WindowsNT user for close to 10 years now. LIke the paper says (wherever the source) it's hard to know whats comnnected to what. The UNIX philosophy is small independent parts working together. the Windows is many small parts interdependent on each other, sometimes for marketing reasons more than design.
Same here. I came off the Register, read their summary, tried to read the original. "Hmm, damn it's slow...." Lightbulb came on "I bet this is on Slashdot now..." sure enough.
I think the problem right now is software not hardware. When the PowerPC was replacing the Motorola 68K, people were saying that it had the potential for making a quantum leap in the way people worked (and played) with their computer. Stuff that was impossible because it would be slow. Instead of small quantitative changes (wow! this menu takes 1.3 sconds to show instead of 1.6 seconds) there now can be qualitative changes. New interface paradigms. Theming, ha, thats wasted cycles, we're going to change the WIMP metaphor. We'd have audio interaction with the computer, whats a menu? As Much as I like bashing Microsoft, Microsoft Bob and the Bastard Child From Hell Clippy are some of the few variations from the WIMP metaphor that we've seen. The main reason they failed was that Microsoft didn't have them get out of the user's way. But another reason why is not enough processing power. Not only did you get interrupted, but for stupid advice. Wasn't worth the trade off.
When System 7 came out [my opinion is Apple did a great job of getting System 7 out and working on the PowerPCs at the same time] they announced their roadmap for the future. There were three OS teams, blue, pink, and red. Blue actually was the System 7 team, if you open the System & kernel, you can find strings about the Blue Meanies, the System 7 team. Pink was the near term really cool stuff, a new OS that they were supposed to do with IBM, and formed a company called Taligent. Was supposed to be a brand new OS, Object Oriented design. Based on the Document, not the Application. A large part of this was called OpenDoc. They shipped parts of it, but never a real whole. The best part they actually shipped was CyberDog, but gradually all of this went away. Some say the reason it failed is lack of computing power. There were other reasons - new programming paradigm, hard to get developers on board. Instability in one part can lead to bad interactions in another part as well. But it took up a lot of RAM and a lot of horsepower, too much for a 60Mhz PPC601. I'd love to see what they had thought for for Red, that was their super long term whiz-bang stuff.
So where are the new interfaces? Instead of wondering why folks are pushing faster boxes, wonder why we're still using the WIMP metaphor over 23 years after the introduction of the Xerox Star? The base comp had 384KB RAM, smaller than L1 cache on some chips. But anyone who was familiar with a Xerox Star and plop them in front of a Windows box, and they'd probably recgnize it all.
Then again, you don't have to buy a 3GHz Pentim 4 if you want. If it doesn't fit your fancy, then don't Luckily enough we still have options, Athlon, and to a lesser extent, VIA C3s are alternatives.
and in fact NT had POSIX.1 compliance long before linux.
By POSIX compliance, do you mean real compatibility, or just certification?
Technically, that NT had POSIX cert. first is true, but:
NT's implementation was poorly done, and eventually scrapped. It was checkbox marketing, POSIX beng a requirement for some US government installations. Not only did NT beat Linux to POSIX.1, but they beat everybody. No UNIX vendors initially got POSIX certification. "You want us to certify as UNIX, we are UNIX" and laughed at folks who would pick a VAXy Win32 OS with vague notions of POSIX (and OS/2) compliance and call it "UNIXy" (in the form of POSIX) that folks wanted. But folks did pick them, some cause they didn't know any better, some cause rules are rules, so most of the UNIX guys saw this and eventually had their UNIXen POSIX certified.
The other thing is, Linux essentially grew up POSIX. Most of the design decisions were based on POSIX compatibility. Whether or not it has the certificate, Linux has been much more usably POSIX compliant (APIs, command line tools) at pretty much any time of it's existence than NT ever was. They were POSIX and they, oddly enough, actually expected that stuff to work, unlike NT. Besides, why bother, cause in the early days of Linux, the certification didn't matter. Is some 13 year old kid hacking and making his first irc-bot gonna say "hey, this is like UNIX, but it's never been POSIX certified, lemme trash this stuff!!!"? POSIX as a certification as opposed to an idea only came after it started becoming important to folks, to larger businesses ans such.
We're looking at ships too much?
yeah, I know lame...
If you use a busybox shell then you can make the commands built into the shell
/etc/profile though, check the $0 of your shell, and if it supports aliases,
Interesting. I haven't heard of this (my work is a pretty big solaris shop, so I don't use busybox much). I don't see this much different than having aliases in
alias ls='busybox ls'
alias mount='busybox mount'
and so on, and doesn't force a shell choice on you.
zsh has very cool configurable shell completion. You could configure it to give you all the options for any given command. You could program this for busybox, have it give you the possibilities "ls, dd" and so on once you type busybox.
This doesn't solve the "everything in one binary so if I make one change someplace I essentially have to test 10 or so utilities" problem tho, but I think you were just mentioning the shell thing, not implying it was a complete solution.
As an aside, ksh93 has many more builtins than other shells, and has them loaded as shared libs. yeah you can do this with basha as well, but the defaut bash doens't have dd as a buoltin, ksh93 does. In fact this is one of the reasons ksh93 isn't in cygwin yet; ksh93 is more of an environment than a shell, with many utilities stuck in it.. the cygwin folks don't want to add that on top of other tools.
I just don't see how it is feasible to leave dozens of tiny utilities littered all over the root filesystem.
/bin/busybox "command" [optional flags] or you can symlink/hardlink it to [command] and run it like the ordinary command.
/bin, not much added elegance.
Busybox works two ways, either
If you do it the first way, busybox "command" you'd have to type the extra letters all the time. You can alias it, but then you'd have to have a support issue with all the users unless you had universal aliases, and thats not optimal.
If you do it the second way, with the symlinks or hardlinks, you still have all the things in
The code in busybox gets complicated. The added elegance in the file system becomes complications in the source code. Any updates to any of the "functions" as busybox calls them, requires an update to essentially all your userland utilities (as expressed in busybox). Lots of updates, lots of testing, because now any change to anytihng in busybox requires you to test everything, because a change in the ls "function" is in the same code that contains your mount command, and your cat, and your rm, etc., and now you need to test all of those as well.
Shared code can go into libraries. That's why libc is usually dynamically linked, shared code should be shared. You get your elegance with asmall executable with much of it's guts in shared libraries. Elegance here causes ugliness there. You pick your battles, you do things the way you want to. That said, busybox is opensource, and all of the gnu utilities are opensource as well. I don't think the busybox folks would mind patches from you or any others that share the view. I personally don't agree, my "elegance" is in smaller utilities with well defined functions, and I would not contribute.
Yucca?
IE has this too, though in a separate download. Probably makes more sense, ma and pa probably aren't gonna debug that game that you screwed up your coding on.
Utility for debugging JavaScript.
ahh so thats what that does.
If [I were] to make an OS today i sure would make it POSIX compliant.
Like NT? Ironically enough, for a long time NT was the only POSIX certified OS. The major UNIX vendors never bothers, though it was fairly absurd they had to certify themselves as UNIX.
POSIX certification guarantees very little, it is still difficult to get a cross platform app. What libraries do you have, which way do you have your system includes laid out, do you have BSD or SVR4 style init scripts (or neither, RedHat had their own variation for a while a "clean up" that broke a lot of things). You still need to target individual platforms, just yu won't have to change a lot in the targetting.
Considering the week, I suspect more of a 'great pumpkin' phenomenon.
So Linus still believes in the Great Pumpkin? ARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
Yes, I should be slapped for that. Good grief....