The difference between business and a hobbie is that in a business you do what is best for the customer regardless of your personal preferences or the preferences of a standards body. Even if you know that following the standards will be best for your customer in the long term, it doesn't matter. You have to give them what they want today and worry about tomorrow tomorrow.
"A standard compliant website more or less guarantees that your website will work atleast decently now, tomorrow and in the far future."
Sure, until a new non-compliant standard comes along or the big players have an economic motive to break it. There are no guarantees on the future of technology or future technology markets.
You just need to be more precise when you make these claims. Sometimes your argument may not be as powerful as a result, but that's the price you pay for being taken seriously.
The environment that X was developed in was quite different from the environment Windows was developed in. In that era terminals were not very powerful and PCs were generally not networked, so it was entirely appropriate that the approaches differ.
"Make no mistake, X11 is super-duper fast; that's one of the reason it's ran on a variety of systems far, far before Windows was a gleam in Bill Gate's eye"
It's not that I don't understand the history, but the fact is it makes no more sense to say that the GNU System is an OS without a kernel than it does to say that my car is a portable OS without run-time libraries and a kernel.
What is commonly referred to as the Linux OS is a combination of the GNU System and the linux kernel, but the GNU System on its own is not an OS.
My question referred to the post that said "Or is it just a kernel that was inserted into an OS that already existed for years prior?"
The GNU System as described by your link cannot be "an OS that already existed for years prior" because it explains that the Linux kernel is containted within it.
My comment was based on my personal professional experience, not on looking it up online. If your definition fully describes hard realtime, than there are clearly realtime systems that are significantly "harder" than hard realtime. There are environments in which events need to occur with an accuracy of 1 CPU cycle. You can't be 1 CPU cycle early or 1 CPU cycle late. Anyone who has done bleeding-edge Atari 2600 game programming is familiar with this sort of "harder" realtime requirement.
Far, far more people use Bill Gates's software every day than RMS's, so what does that prove? (Yes, I know Bill didn't write most of MS's code but RMS didn't write much of the available "free" code either.)
There's a certain plausability in believing that individuals with very high GPAs or good puzzle solving skills would be better contributors to an engineering or scientific-oriented company than slightly less "qualified" candidates, but there's really no proof of it.
From a behaviorism point of view one could argue that the leadershp of a company like Google with so much postive reinforcement today from nearly every direction might easily acquire superstitious beliefs about what makes their company so successful. When you're living through a period of "doing everything right", it's hard to figure out which actions are wrong.
Whenever a company is doing well at the moment, somebody writes an "In Search of Excellence" type of book or article explaining why. Then a few years later (sometimes a few months later) the company falters despite the fact that their "great/innovative/creative/yada-yada-yada" practices haven't changed a bit.
Now if a writer looked at 100 start-up companies and predicted which ones would succeed and which ones would fail in the next 5 years based on their management practices and he got most of them right, I'd be impressed. Picking today's winners is all too easy.
"I'll possibly agree with you that the RF-only TV, but if you really needed to get it working, video modulators are only a little more expensive --- remember all those 8-bit micros that had them?"
Yes I remember those 8-bit micros that could display a maximum of 40 chars/line. Gee, perhaps such an application could make UNIX command brevity relevent in the 21st century.
"MS has proven to be a tougher competitor than maybe some people thought (probably the same people who think "Sun failed Java"), but good luck taking on MS with Ruby on Rails/latest flavor of the month. Java has done about as good as can be expected, IMO"
That's exactly the attitude that screwed up Sun. Java was intended "to take on MS" rather than make money for Sun.
I think from your orginal perspective you were right, but I doubt that Java has been profitable. Consider what former Sun executive John Shoemaker said in April as reported in a CNET story:
Sun's Java software initiative was costly, too, he said, employing more than 4,000 developers to create a product adopted by IBM and other competitors. "The cost burden was staggering: Hundreds of millions of R&D dollars per year, plus the huge opportunity cost of all the highly skilled technical people who could have been working on direct revenue-producing products. Had some of these resources been devoted to Solaris, for example, it would have potentially made a big difference." see http://news.com.com/Ex-Sun+exec+lambasts+Suns+late +layoffs/2100-1014_3-6059491.html?tag=nl
"Because DirectX can be used within Win32 Windows."
You keep saying "can". If you do a standard install of Java on a Windows machine and write a GUI app without taking any special platform-specific steps will DirectX be used for rendering in the Win32 Window or not?
"These days Java threading is pretty much the same on all major platforms" So in the past it wasn't and in the future it might not be and watch out for those non-major platforms.
"Explain. Java has clear guidelines about what can be pre-empted and what can't (this is one of the reasons why porting Java onto 16-bit OSes can be hard, as all 32-bit operations are supposed to be atomic)"
The issue isn't what can or can't be pre-empted, it's whether it will or will not be pre-empted. The whole point of preemptive multitasking is to move context-switching issues from the application domain to the OS.
"The GUI libraries can make use of DirectX and OpenGL."
They can or they do? On Windows Swing has an actual Win32 Window at the bottom and layers other graphic objects on top written in Java. Where does DirectX come into the picture?
"The threading is superb"
Which threading? The Java threading behavior isn't the same on all platforms and isn't even consistent from one release of Java to the next. When you use threading in Java you have to write your code as if your thread could be preempted at any time but also write it as if your thread will never be preempted.
I'm not a big fan of Sun or Java, but to be fair it's the concept of a language like Java that's as much the problem as how Sun implemented it. If you try to create a language that abstracts away the underlying hardware platform, you're going to end up with some pretty big compromises.
It's not realistic to believe that such a language could compete on the desktop with languages/libraries that are optomized for the hardware they run on.
At the same time, it is true that Java seems to be more interested in being politically correct about OO design than it does in helping programmers get their work done. The vast majority of GUI apps, for example, were not written using a strict MVC approach and in many cases had no reason to be.
I'm sure that some people feel that way, but hard-core Mac fans wouldn't know what the "full power of command line" means. Those that updated from DOS to a Mac did so to avoid the command line, powerful or not. I realize that the OSX command line is more powerful than DOS but the average DOS user never used DOS's most powerful capabilities anyway.
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The difference between business and a hobbie is that in a business you do what is best for the customer regardless of your personal preferences or the preferences of a standards body. Even if you know that following the standards will be best for your customer in the long term, it doesn't matter. You have to give them what they want today and worry about tomorrow tomorrow.
"A standard compliant website more or less guarantees that your website will work atleast decently now, tomorrow and in the far future."
Sure, until a new non-compliant standard comes along or the big players have an economic motive to break it. There are no guarantees on the future of technology or future technology markets.
"Linux is NOT and was never about novelty and superior technology."
I don't know. I hear a lot of claims on slashdot about how superior Linux is.
"An aging professor's debate and ideas do not help much in this respect and are largely a "want-to-still-be-famous" OS expert."
So what's Linus, imortal? I think using terms like "aging" to describe someone who's opinion you disagree with doesn't add much to the debate either.
You just need to be more precise when you make these claims. Sometimes your argument may not be as powerful as a result, but that's the price you pay for being taken seriously.
The environment that X was developed in was quite different from the environment Windows was developed in. In that era terminals were not very powerful and PCs were generally not networked, so it was entirely appropriate that the approaches differ.
"Make no mistake, X11 is super-duper fast; that's one of the reason it's ran on a variety of systems far, far before Windows was a gleam in Bill Gate's eye"
X11 appeared in 1987, Windows in 1985.
It's not that I don't understand the history, but the fact is it makes no more sense to say that the GNU System is an OS without a kernel than it does to say that my car is a portable OS without run-time libraries and a kernel.
What is commonly referred to as the Linux OS is a combination of the GNU System and the linux kernel, but the GNU System on its own is not an OS.
So which of those GNU systems do you claim that the linux kernel was inserted into?
My question referred to the post that said "Or is it just a kernel that was inserted into an OS that already existed for years prior?"
The GNU System as described by your link cannot be "an OS that already existed for years prior" because it explains that the Linux kernel is containted within it.
What OS are you referring to?
My comment was based on my personal professional experience, not on looking it up online. If your definition fully describes hard realtime, than there are clearly realtime systems that are significantly "harder" than hard realtime. There are environments in which events need to occur with an accuracy of 1 CPU cycle. You can't be 1 CPU cycle early or 1 CPU cycle late. Anyone who has done bleeding-edge Atari 2600 game programming is familiar with this sort of "harder" realtime requirement.
Well, you're mostly right. In a hard realtime OS, it's consistency of timing that matters, not its upper bound.
If you have a timing problem in a hard realtime system, merely increasing the processing speed will not solve it. It's more like a dance than a race.
No. Begrizzled hippies would be whining about this newfangled language called "C". Nobody under the age of 60 is a hippie.
So you believe that quote proves that RMS == FSF? I think I'll just back away slowly now.
Last time I checked RMS != FSF just as BG != MS.
"A license is worth shit if you don't have somebody to defend it."
A license is a legal document, you defend it in a court of law not the court of public opinion. RMS's "defense" of the GPL has no effect on its worth.
"Remember that you use his software every day."
Far, far more people use Bill Gates's software every day than RMS's, so what does that prove? (Yes, I know Bill didn't write most of MS's code but RMS didn't write much of the available "free" code either.)
There's a certain plausability in believing that individuals with very high GPAs or good puzzle solving skills would be better contributors to an engineering or scientific-oriented company than slightly less "qualified" candidates, but there's really no proof of it.
From a behaviorism point of view one could argue that the leadershp of a company like Google with so much postive reinforcement today from nearly every direction might easily acquire superstitious beliefs about what makes their company so successful. When you're living through a period of "doing everything right", it's hard to figure out which actions are wrong.
Whenever a company is doing well at the moment, somebody writes an "In Search of Excellence" type of book or article explaining why. Then a few years later (sometimes a few months later) the company falters despite the fact that their "great/innovative/creative/yada-yada-yada" practices haven't changed a bit.
Now if a writer looked at 100 start-up companies and predicted which ones would succeed and which ones would fail in the next 5 years based on their management practices and he got most of them right, I'd be impressed. Picking today's winners is all too easy.
"I'll possibly agree with you that the RF-only TV, but if you really needed to get it working, video modulators are only a little more expensive --- remember all those 8-bit micros that had them?"
Yes I remember those 8-bit micros that could display a maximum of 40 chars/line. Gee, perhaps such an application could make UNIX command brevity relevent in the 21st century.
"MS has proven to be a tougher competitor than maybe some people thought (probably the same people who think "Sun failed Java"), but good luck taking on MS with Ruby on Rails/latest flavor of the month. Java has done about as good as can be expected, IMO"
That's exactly the attitude that screwed up Sun. Java was intended "to take on MS" rather than make money for Sun.
I think from your orginal perspective you were right, but I doubt that Java has been profitable. Consider what former Sun executive John Shoemaker said in April as reported in a CNET story:
e +layoffs/2100-1014_3-6059491.html?tag=nl
Sun's Java software initiative was costly, too, he said, employing more than 4,000 developers to create a product adopted by IBM and other competitors. "The cost burden was staggering: Hundreds of millions of R&D dollars per year, plus the huge opportunity cost of all the highly skilled technical people who could have been working on direct revenue-producing products. Had some of these resources been devoted to Solaris, for example, it would have potentially made a big difference." see http://news.com.com/Ex-Sun+exec+lambasts+Suns+lat
"Because DirectX can be used within Win32 Windows."
You keep saying "can". If you do a standard install of Java on a Windows machine and write a GUI app without taking any special platform-specific steps will DirectX be used for rendering in the Win32 Window or not?
"These days Java threading is pretty much the same on all major platforms"
So in the past it wasn't and in the future it might not be and watch out for those non-major platforms.
"Explain. Java has clear guidelines about what can be pre-empted and what can't (this is one of the reasons why porting Java onto 16-bit OSes can be hard, as all 32-bit operations are supposed to be atomic)"
The issue isn't what can or can't be pre-empted, it's whether it will or will not be pre-empted. The whole point of preemptive multitasking is to move context-switching issues from the application domain to the OS.
"The GUI libraries can make use of DirectX and OpenGL."
They can or they do? On Windows Swing has an actual Win32 Window at the bottom and layers other graphic objects on top written in Java. Where does DirectX come into the picture?
"The threading is superb"
Which threading? The Java threading behavior isn't the same on all platforms and isn't even consistent from one release of Java to the next. When you use threading in Java you have to write your code as if your thread could be preempted at any time but also write it as if your thread will never be preempted.
I'm not a big fan of Sun or Java, but to be fair it's the concept of a language like Java that's as much the problem as how Sun implemented it. If you try to create a language that abstracts away the underlying hardware platform, you're going to end up with some pretty big compromises.
It's not realistic to believe that such a language could compete on the desktop with languages/libraries that are optomized for the hardware they run on.
At the same time, it is true that Java seems to be more interested in being politically correct about OO design than it does in helping programmers get their work done. The vast majority of GUI apps, for example, were not written using a strict MVC approach and in many cases had no reason to be.
I'm sure that some people feel that way, but hard-core Mac fans wouldn't know what the "full power of command line" means. Those that updated from DOS to a Mac did so to avoid the command line, powerful or not. I realize that the OSX command line is more powerful than DOS but the average DOS user never used DOS's most powerful capabilities anyway.