Yup, I remember it. There was supposed to be aliens in the other tanks if I recall correctly. The fun wore off pretty quick with Arctic Fox, but I still fondly recall other games of the era:
Carrier Command Personal Nightmare Elvira Mistress of Darkness (believe it or not, it was a great game) Popolous Powermonger
I've heard that Bullfrog are producing a new version of Popolous, but are they going to do the same with Powermonger. Even if they ported the original to Linux I'd buy it. I'm pretty sure they ported both Pop and PM to the Mac so who knows?
The NT concept of a hardware abstraction layer that marshalled calls to the underlying system was fundamental in making NT stable. This is why NT3.51 was very stable. However, it also made many things slow, most noticably the grraphics side of things. With NT the GUI is not optional, so this poor performance was always noticable. To improve performance, graphics operations were allowed to bypass the HAL in NT4.0. This is why NT4.0 outperforms NT3.51, but is very unstable.
I don't know whether any other userland stuff was allowed direct hardware access, as I quit using NT after 3.51.
Great, homophobia rears it's lovely head. As for pimples, I'm long past the adolescent stage, so acne isn't a problem for me. How about you?
what country are you in?
Great Britain. If you're American are you sure you know where that is? I know from personal experience that many in the US don't know that other countries exist, let alone where they are.
Hmmm... this may be a bit cheeky coming from a computer contractor like myself, but I have to disagree.
Some of the smartest people in the computer world are still working on the same projects or for the same companies many years down the line. From the early Unix era look at Kernighan, Ritchie, etc. Then there are people like Knuth, James Clark and Larry Wall. All hacking away at their personal masterpieces.
As for the smart IT people you seem to be referring to, they are most likely materialistic contractors working on small scale, repetitive projects or on bug fixes to old systems.
The growth of the internet has been thanks to the simplicity (over simplistic in some people's view) of the protocols, etc. XML and XSL are another step in this direction, simple concepts that take the best from existing ideas. SGML has been largely ignored (at least in Europe) thanks to it's needless complexity. DSSSL is even worse.
While the Xanadu system sounds technically and conceptually brilliant, the fact that twenty years down the line it still doesn't work is worrying. Is there a limit at which complex ideas become unimplementable, or has Xanadu simply been unlucky?
And I couldn't help noticing that the C version is the preferred developer option, rather than the Smalltalk/C++ version. So much for the wonders of Object Oriented Programming - the biggest intellectual fraud of the nineties.
The individual's needs must be secondary to the needs of the majority
That's the microsoft design ethos. A bastard variant of democracy - you'll get what the pig ignorant masses want. So quit whining, and welcome to the neo-liberal hell of the future.
The following book makes an ideal companioin to any vendor specific database documentation:
An Introduction to Database Systems by C. J. Date Hardcover - 975 pages 7th edition (August 1999) Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 0201385902
I have the previous edition, and have yet to come across a general RDBMS related question that can't be answered by it. So if the mSQL/MySQL book doesn't act as enough of a primer for you, then I can strongly recommend this book.
In the end, companies care about productivity in programming
Although they have a funny way of showing it at times...
If you mean ease of GUI creation, then I have yet to see a GUI builder that comapres to some of the Motif ones. However, Kdevelop is shaping up nicely. Just a pity my knowledge of C++ is fairly bad, which means I find myself sticking to GTK+ and Motif, despite the enticing out-of-the-box Windows & Unix portability of Qt.
Chris Wareham
It's still the quick solution in porting terms
on
Delphi for Linux
·
· Score: 1
There already exist a number of tools that ease the transitioning of code between Windows and Unix. The GUI toolkit examples that I've seen rely on Motif as the common denominator. Given this expertise perhaps it wont come as a surprise if Borland choose to use the Motif libraries.
Not that I'm a Motif advocate, although some of the criticism levelled at it is unfair. The 'designed by committee' aspects do extend to some of the convenience routines, but compared to Xlib it was a dream come true, and it even improved on Xt by having widget creation convenience routines.
The Motif UIL compiler is still an unsurpassed feature in terms of rapid GUI creation. The Glade GUI designer has some similar principles in it's use of XML to describe an interface - I wonder if this was influenced by UIL.
Chris Wareham
Motif is ugly, but is the 'industry standard'
on
Delphi for Linux
·
· Score: 1
Motif would be the obvious choice for a big corporate like Inprise/Borland, especially if they are dabbling in Unix for the first time. There are far more *experienced* Motif hackers out there that they could employ, and other big corporates would be keener to get a Motif capable Delphi on their proprietary Unices.
The whole Unix world doesn't run Linux yet, and toolkits like GTK+ and Qt aren't as widely accepted in places like Hewlett Packard, Sun, etc as Motif.
And finally, with judicial tweaking Motif applications can be made to look as pretty as GTK+ and Qt ones.
Still run like a dog though...
Chris Wareham
Delphi is about the best RAD tool on Windows ...
on
Delphi for Linux
·
· Score: 1
Although I loathe Pascal, even in it's objectified Delphi version, I've got to say that this great news. At companies I've worked at with Windows programmers, they all sang the virtues of Delphi. Even hardened C++ and Visual Basic programmers loved it.
If the API's are going to be similar (I assume some wrapper around Motif and the Unix libraries) to the Windows version then we could see some interesting cross-pollination of ideas.
I haven't read the article yet to see if they're also porting C++ Builder, but I suppose Unix already has great C/C++ development tools.
Looks like they're going to come up with another not quite free license for this. Ehy they can't just stick it out under the GPL I don't know. Even if there were grounds for not using the GPL, they're going to cop a lot of flak for not doing so. Just like Netscape and Troll Tech have for their licenses. Chris Wareham
I forget the name of the place, but there's a huge US government installation where they store surplus military aircraft. I remember seeing a magazine article about it a while back.
They mothball slightly older military hardware in the event that it's needed in a major military operation. As it happens the planes just gather dust until consigned to the scrapyard. The program showed a fleet of B-52's being chopped up in line with a US-Russia treaty on nuclear bomber destruction.
I noticed that they had a whole flock of Harrier jumpjets from the US Marine Air Corp in storage. I'm sure Pepsi could get one of these on the cheap to give to the sucker.
I had to give up the caffeine thing after I passed out at work. The doctor asked me if I took stimulants (I think he was subtly asking if I did speed or cocaine), to which I answered in the negative. He was lost in deep thought for about a minute, and then asked how much coffee I drank a day. I told him, and he promptly told me to switch to decaf.
I sleep better at night now, but I miss that lightheaded buzz from drinking vast amounts of good coffee...
If these colleagues NT servers were doing this, then i would say they didnt know what the hell they were doing
Hmm... I would agree with you, but the engineer from the support firm (an MCSE), also couldn't sort out the reliability. On the hardware front, one of the two network cards was broken initialy, but it was soon replaced. As for the problems with backup domain controllers and trusted NT domains (my terminlogy is a little rusty here) not talking to each other, this was also never resolved.
Admittedly we did all have more Unix experience than with NT, but at the time MicroSoft were mnaking big claims for NT's ease of administration. We certainly weren't clueless, but that failed to amount to anything when faced with administration dialogs that allowed too little configuration.
Another problem was DHCP and the system logs. The logs would fill, the machine would crash. On rebooting, several services would mysteriously fail. The DHCP would use up it's pool of addresses, and never free them up for reuse. This was not configurable, so don't tell me NT wasn't broken.
The Linux machine, while having an initially harder learning curve for administration newbies, is reputedly problem free. It also took less time to setup than the NT box, but again that may be a reflection of the deeper Unix knowledge at that company.
The ultimate satisfaction? The boss who instigated the NT server doesn't even know that it no longer runs NT. Ditto for the old SparcStation that acts as an FTP server. My former workmate switched it from SunOS to SparcLinux (RedHat 4.2 that I provided him with) about two years ago, and it has been up continually ever since
While this is probably a bit of a glib thing for me to say, I can point out that this is one of the benefits of free software (or open source, call it what you will). With it, I *can* simply recompile.
Obviously I realise this is not always the case in the real world, but then I tend to use stuff where I can get the source code beacuase it suits my laziness. Rather than fart around with purchase orders and licensing nonsense it's far easier to download a free alternative off the net.
This is what makes free / open software so useful to me, regardless of the FSF ethics or whatever. I can concentrate on getting the job done, not worrying about lengthy evaluations because the responsibility for spending a serious amount of cash is hanging over me, as it is with commercial software. Given that my experiences of commercial software support have left me less than enamoured, the lack of accountability (who does my boss sue?) with free stuff is a non-issue.
As a Unix programmer for all but one year of my career (currently six years long), I can honestly say that your Trainspotting parody is completely wide of the mark. I have met far more sad, no-life Windows programmers than Unix ones, and that's not due to the prevalence of Windows, as all the companies I work for are Unix based.
I initially chose Linux for it's low cost. I couldn't afford to upgrade my computer to run the latest version of Solaris, and installed Linux on the off chance it was any good. It runs dramatically faster than Solaris, and is usually bundled with a large collection of useful utilities.
My years experience of Windows was using NT 3.51. This was reliable, but ran very slowly on what was top end PC hardware at the time. I have since heard from colleagues that NT 4.0 (which was installed after I left) is moderately faster, but crashes on a daily basis. Worse than this, they installed NT on a server - nothig heavyweight, just file sharing for 20 or so people. They have found many networking features don't work, and performance (on a dual Pentium Pro 200) is risible even over a 100Mbit network.
Lunchtimes don't exist for my former colleagues anymore, as they spend them frantically trying to do system admin tasks in the machine room. This is thanks to the non-existence of NT remote admin tools (except expensive third party addons) and the need for regular reboots. As a solution, Win32 Perl was installed, and the ActiveState extensions used to write some admin tools. This has been a partial success, thanks to the fact that only a limited number of things can be done with the API.
I wouldn't be surprised if the API's do exist to remotely administer NT, but they don't seem to be readily documented. The NT resource kit proved worthless, and the machine has now been turned into a Linux / Samba box.
As for me, I now work as a Unix contracter earning a salary that is magnitudes more than my ex-colleagues. I get a serious amount of work done with little more than C, Perl and a basic Unix setup, I go home at 5.30pm promptly, and never work weekends. I don't play computer games at work afterhours, and I don't have a sad fucking science fiction fixation, unlike all the Windows programmers I have known.
I have only encountered one application that didn't work happily after a change for a.out to ELF, or libc5 to glibc2. This was a particularily flaky app and the tweaking of two functions fixed it. In fact, it was better for it. The two functions in question used several library functions that are frowned on as potential memory blitzing holes... Chris Wareham
Java has it's origins rooted in a project called OAK (pun unintended). This sought to provide the environment for settop box like devices, so Java is really coming full circle.
``This is the sort of thing 3rd world countries have been trying to do for decades - come out with a cheap knock-off of an American made product''
Last time I looked at the back of my brothers G3 Mac, I noticed it was mad in Taiwan.
And I wouldn't call Daewoo a company from a 'third world country'. They own more light and heavy indutrial concerns than many people could imagine. Bought a Japanese electrical product lately? If it wasn't made in a Daewoo sub-contract factory, then it was probably shipped in a Daewoo made cargo vessel, and inloaded at the docks by a Daewoo made crane...
The American industrial sector is dying, and the bits that aren't are foreign owned. Look up the businesses owned by the Hanson Trust sometime - they own massive anmounts of US industrial concerns. Although they a re a strip and sell outfit, closing R'n'D and then selling the superficially successful shell of a company a year later...
Hurd is built on top of Mach, a microkernel implemented by an academic team. Unfortunately, the microkernel ethos is foundering on the fact that implementing a workable kernel is more difficult than a monolithic one, and the resulting examples perform poorly. As microkernels were supposed to improve kernel performance, this is proving a bit embaressing for the architecture's advocates. Dare I mention Mr. Tannenbaum?
NT was originally implemented as a microkernel, but performance was so poor that the clean design was broken, allowing direct access to the hardware. This happened with version 4.0, and stability went out the window. Ever wonder why Microsoft run their website on NT 3.51?
The Unix Hater's Handbook is an amusing swipe at Unix culture, but it comes across as a 'real programmers' manifesto. If you dont know what I mean, read the Jargon File's entries on older operating systems. A kind of snobbery about older and less successful OS's pervades old time hacker lore. This is quite amusing, as Unix has become far more than it's contemparies ever hoped to, although at the time Unix compared poorly to the design goals of say Multics.
This elitism extends to X. Of course X is hardware dependent to the extent that it requires some graphical capabilities of the systen it's running on, but it still does a damn good job of running on myriad different platforms. X is a great idea (the whole client-server principle reversed) and quote well implemented.
It's just a damn shame that the open-endeness of it's design goals and implementation are exploited by luddites and f*ckwits as an excuse for a little trolling.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, I remember it. There was supposed to be aliens in the other tanks if I recall correctly. The fun wore off pretty quick with Arctic Fox, but I still fondly recall other games of the era:
Carrier Command
Personal Nightmare
Elvira Mistress of Darkness (believe it or not, it was a great game)
Popolous
Powermonger
I've heard that Bullfrog are producing a new version of Popolous, but are they going to do the same with Powermonger. Even if they ported the original to Linux I'd buy it. I'm pretty sure they ported both Pop and PM to the Mac so who knows?
Chris Wareham
The NT concept of a hardware abstraction layer that marshalled calls to the underlying system was fundamental in making NT stable. This is why NT3.51 was very stable. However, it also made many things slow, most noticably the grraphics side of things. With NT the GUI is not optional, so this poor performance was always noticable. To improve performance, graphics operations were allowed to bypass the HAL in NT4.0. This is why NT4.0 outperforms NT3.51, but is very unstable.
I don't know whether any other userland stuff was allowed direct hardware access, as I quit using NT after 3.51.
Chris Wareham
you pimply cocksucker
Great, homophobia rears it's lovely head. As for pimples, I'm long past the adolescent stage, so acne isn't a problem for me. How about you?
what country are you in?
Great Britain. If you're American are you sure you know where that is? I know from personal experience that many in the US don't know that other countries exist, let alone where they are.
I shall hunt you down and kill you now
Don't make threats you can't keep.
Chris Wareham
Hmmm ... this may be a bit cheeky coming from a computer contractor like myself, but I have to disagree.
Some of the smartest people in the computer world are still working on the same projects or for the same companies many years down the line. From the early Unix era look at Kernighan, Ritchie, etc. Then there are people like Knuth, James Clark and Larry Wall. All hacking away at their personal masterpieces.
As for the smart IT people you seem to be referring to, they are most likely materialistic contractors working on small scale, repetitive projects or on bug fixes to old systems.
Chris Wareham
The growth of the internet has been thanks to the simplicity (over simplistic in some people's view) of the protocols, etc. XML and XSL are another step in this direction, simple concepts that take the best from existing ideas. SGML has been largely ignored (at least in Europe) thanks to it's needless complexity. DSSSL is even worse.
While the Xanadu system sounds technically and conceptually brilliant, the fact that twenty years down the line it still doesn't work is worrying. Is there a limit at which complex ideas become unimplementable, or has Xanadu simply been unlucky?
And I couldn't help noticing that the C version is the preferred developer option, rather than the Smalltalk/C++ version. So much for the wonders of Object Oriented Programming - the biggest intellectual fraud of the nineties.
Chris Wareham
The individual's needs must be secondary to the needs of the majority
That's the microsoft design ethos. A bastard variant of democracy - you'll get what the pig ignorant masses want. So quit whining, and welcome to the neo-liberal hell of the future.
Make me glad I'm an elitist bastard.
Chris Wareham
Not much loyalty in this computer malarkey is there?
Chris Wareham
The following book makes an ideal companioin to any vendor specific database documentation:
An Introduction to Database Systems
by C. J. Date
Hardcover - 975 pages 7th edition (August 1999)
Addison-Wesley Pub Co; ISBN: 0201385902
I have the previous edition, and have yet to come across a general RDBMS related question that can't be answered by it. So if the mSQL/MySQL book doesn't act as enough of a primer for you, then I can strongly recommend this book.
Chris Wareham
In the end, companies care about productivity in programming
...
Although they have a funny way of showing it at times
If you mean ease of GUI creation, then I have yet to see a GUI builder that comapres to some of the Motif ones. However, Kdevelop is shaping up nicely. Just a pity my knowledge of C++ is fairly bad, which means I find myself sticking to GTK+ and Motif, despite the enticing out-of-the-box Windows & Unix portability of Qt.
Chris Wareham
There already exist a number of tools that ease the transitioning of code between Windows and Unix. The GUI toolkit examples that I've seen rely on Motif as the common denominator. Given this expertise perhaps it wont come as a surprise if Borland choose to use the Motif libraries.
Not that I'm a Motif advocate, although some of the criticism levelled at it is unfair. The 'designed by committee' aspects do extend to some of the convenience routines, but compared to Xlib it was a dream come true, and it even improved on Xt by having widget creation convenience routines.
The Motif UIL compiler is still an unsurpassed feature in terms of rapid GUI creation. The Glade GUI designer has some similar principles in it's use of XML to describe an interface - I wonder if this was influenced by UIL.
Chris Wareham
Motif would be the obvious choice for a big corporate like Inprise/Borland, especially if they are dabbling in Unix for the first time. There are far more *experienced* Motif hackers out there that they could employ, and other big corporates would be keener to get a Motif capable Delphi on their proprietary Unices.
...
The whole Unix world doesn't run Linux yet, and toolkits like GTK+ and Qt aren't as widely accepted in places like Hewlett Packard, Sun, etc as Motif.
And finally, with judicial tweaking Motif applications can be made to look as pretty as GTK+ and Qt ones.
Still run like a dog though
Chris Wareham
Although I loathe Pascal, even in it's objectified Delphi version, I've got to say that this great news. At companies I've worked at with Windows programmers, they all sang the virtues of Delphi. Even hardened C++ and Visual Basic programmers loved it.
If the API's are going to be similar (I assume some wrapper around Motif and the Unix libraries) to the Windows version then we could see some interesting cross-pollination of ideas.
I haven't read the article yet to see if they're also porting C++ Builder, but I suppose Unix already has great C/C++ development tools.
Chris Wareham
Looks like they're going to come up with another not quite free license for this. Ehy they can't just stick it out under the GPL I don't know. Even if there were grounds for not using the GPL, they're going to cop a lot of flak for not doing so. Just like Netscape and Troll Tech have for their licenses.
Chris Wareham
I forget the name of the place, but there's a huge US government installation where they store surplus military aircraft. I remember seeing a magazine article about it a while back.
They mothball slightly older military hardware in the event that it's needed in a major military operation. As it happens the planes just gather dust until consigned to the scrapyard. The program showed a fleet of B-52's being chopped up in line with a US-Russia treaty on nuclear bomber destruction.
I noticed that they had a whole flock of Harrier jumpjets from the US Marine Air Corp in storage. I'm sure Pepsi could get one of these on the cheap to give to the sucker.
Chris Wareham
I had to give up the caffeine thing after I passed out at work. The doctor asked me if I took stimulants (I think he was subtly asking if I did speed or cocaine), to which I answered in the negative. He was lost in deep thought for about a minute, and then asked how much coffee I drank a day. I told him, and he promptly told me to switch to decaf.
...
I sleep better at night now, but I miss that lightheaded buzz from drinking vast amounts of good coffee
Chris Wareham
If these colleagues NT servers were doing this, then i would say they didnt know what the hell they were doing
Hmm ... I would agree with you, but the engineer from the support firm (an MCSE), also couldn't sort out the reliability. On the hardware front, one of the two network cards was broken initialy, but it was soon replaced. As for the problems with backup domain controllers and trusted NT domains (my terminlogy is a little rusty here) not talking to each other, this was also never resolved.
Admittedly we did all have more Unix experience than with NT, but at the time MicroSoft were mnaking big claims for NT's ease of administration. We certainly weren't clueless, but that failed to amount to anything when faced with administration dialogs that allowed too little configuration.
Another problem was DHCP and the system logs. The logs would fill, the machine would crash. On rebooting, several services would mysteriously fail. The DHCP would use up it's pool of addresses, and never free them up for reuse. This was not configurable, so don't tell me NT wasn't broken.
The Linux machine, while having an initially harder learning curve for administration newbies, is reputedly problem free. It also took less time to setup than the NT box, but again that may be a reflection of the deeper Unix knowledge at that company.
The ultimate satisfaction? The boss who instigated the NT server doesn't even know that it no longer runs NT. Ditto for the old SparcStation that acts as an FTP server. My former workmate switched it from SunOS to SparcLinux (RedHat 4.2 that I provided him with) about two years ago, and it has been up continually ever since
Chris Wareham
While this is probably a bit of a glib thing for me to say, I can point out that this is one of the benefits of free software (or open source, call it what you will). With it, I *can* simply recompile.
Obviously I realise this is not always the case in the real world, but then I tend to use stuff where I can get the source code beacuase it suits my laziness. Rather than fart around with purchase orders and licensing nonsense it's far easier to download a free alternative off the net.
This is what makes free / open software so useful to me, regardless of the FSF ethics or whatever. I can concentrate on getting the job done, not worrying about lengthy evaluations because the responsibility for spending a serious amount of cash is hanging over me, as it is with commercial software. Given that my experiences of commercial software support have left me less than enamoured, the lack of accountability (who does my boss sue?) with free stuff is a non-issue.
Chris Wareham
As a Unix programmer for all but one year of my career (currently six years long), I can honestly say that your Trainspotting parody is completely wide of the mark. I have met far more sad, no-life Windows programmers than Unix ones, and that's not due to the prevalence of Windows, as all the companies I work for are Unix based.
I initially chose Linux for it's low cost. I couldn't afford to upgrade my computer to run the latest version of Solaris, and installed Linux on the off chance it was any good. It runs dramatically faster than Solaris, and is usually bundled with a large collection of useful utilities.
My years experience of Windows was using NT 3.51. This was reliable, but ran very slowly on what was top end PC hardware at the time. I have since heard from colleagues that NT 4.0 (which was installed after I left) is moderately faster, but crashes on a daily basis. Worse than this, they installed NT on a server - nothig heavyweight, just file sharing for 20 or so people. They have found many networking features don't work, and performance (on a dual Pentium Pro 200) is risible even over a 100Mbit network.
Lunchtimes don't exist for my former colleagues anymore, as they spend them frantically trying to do system admin tasks in the machine room. This is thanks to the non-existence of NT remote admin tools (except expensive third party addons) and the need for regular reboots. As a solution, Win32 Perl was installed, and the ActiveState extensions used to write some admin tools. This has been a partial success, thanks to the fact that only a limited number of things can be done with the API.
I wouldn't be surprised if the API's do exist to remotely administer NT, but they don't seem to be readily documented. The NT resource kit proved worthless, and the machine has now been turned into a Linux / Samba box.
As for me, I now work as a Unix contracter earning a salary that is magnitudes more than my ex-colleagues. I get a serious amount of work done with little more than C, Perl and a basic Unix setup, I go home at 5.30pm promptly, and never work weekends. I don't play computer games at work afterhours, and I don't have a sad fucking science fiction fixation, unlike all the Windows programmers I have known.
Chris Wareham
I have only encountered one application that didn't work happily after a change for a.out to ELF, or libc5 to glibc2. This was a particularily flaky app and the tweaking of two functions fixed it. In fact, it was better for it. The two functions in question used several library functions that are frowned on as potential memory blitzing holes ...
Chris Wareham
Java has it's origins rooted in a project called OAK (pun unintended). This sought to provide the environment for settop box like devices, so Java is really coming full circle.
Chris Wareham
Thankfully our market system has developed good reflexes to this "one company does everything" solution
Yup, it gets down on it's knees and says 'I wanna blow you'. Witness the Microsoft DOJ trial farrago.
Chris Wareham
``This is the sort of thing 3rd world countries have been trying to do for decades - come out with a cheap knock-off of an American made product''
Last time I looked at the back of my brothers G3 Mac, I noticed it was mad in Taiwan.
And I wouldn't call Daewoo a company from a 'third world country'. They own more light and heavy indutrial concerns than many people could imagine. Bought a Japanese electrical product lately? If it wasn't made in a Daewoo sub-contract factory, then it was probably shipped in a Daewoo made cargo vessel, and inloaded at the docks by a Daewoo made crane ...
The American industrial sector is dying, and the bits that aren't are foreign owned. Look up the businesses owned by the Hanson Trust sometime - they own massive anmounts of US industrial concerns. Although they a re a strip and sell outfit, closing R'n'D and then selling the superficially successful shell of a company a year later ...
Chris Wareham
Hurd is built on top of Mach, a microkernel implemented by an academic team. Unfortunately, the microkernel ethos is foundering on the fact that implementing a workable kernel is more difficult than a monolithic one, and the resulting examples perform poorly. As microkernels were supposed to improve kernel performance, this is proving a bit embaressing for the architecture's advocates. Dare I mention Mr. Tannenbaum?
NT was originally implemented as a microkernel, but performance was so poor that the clean design was broken, allowing direct access to the hardware. This happened with version 4.0, and stability went out the window. Ever wonder why Microsoft run their website on NT 3.51?
Chris Wareham
At least one kernel developer has a decidedly right wing political stance ... and a website devoted to guns, militia and new world order bullshit.
Chris Wareham
The Unix Hater's Handbook is an amusing swipe at Unix culture, but it comes across as a 'real programmers' manifesto. If you dont know what I mean, read the Jargon File's entries on older operating systems. A kind of snobbery about older and less successful OS's pervades old time hacker lore. This is quite amusing, as Unix has become far more than it's contemparies ever hoped to, although at the time Unix compared poorly to the design goals of say Multics.
This elitism extends to X. Of course X is hardware dependent to the extent that it requires some graphical capabilities of the systen it's running on, but it still does a damn good job of running on myriad different platforms. X is a great idea (the whole client-server principle reversed) and quote well implemented.
It's just a damn shame that the open-endeness of it's design goals and implementation are exploited by luddites and f*ckwits as an excuse for a little trolling.
Chris Wareham