🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <DEJ81J.2JK@frobozz.sccsi.com>, kevin@frobozz.sccsi.com (Kevin
Brown) wrote:

I might think of them as inexperienced, but I'll
> think of them as "dumb" only if they end up asking the same question
> repeatedly after having been told the same answer repeatedly.

Even then, I tend to either consider the problem being either 

a) my inability to communicate the solution to them in terms that they can
grasp, or

b) a fundamental design problem in the system they are trying to understand.

In other words, I am trying to understand *why* they keep asking the same
question.

> Of course, prior to Windows, 99% of the people who used computers had
> been without GUIs for decades.  That some large group of people
> managed to do without a particular capability for a long period of
> time in no way implies that the capability isn't useful or won't
> become essential.

I didn't mean to imply that the PMT might not be useful in some or even
many situations.  People used computers without GUIs (or non-programming
type interfaces, for that matter) because of cost and the unavailability
of systems with good interfaces (among lots of other things, such as
software availability).  That is why the Apple ][, Commodore 64, and the
original IBM PC thrived.  When the choice is a cheap computer for
programmers vs. no computer at all, the choice is obvious.  As computers
got more powerful by orders of magnitude with the price dropping, users
had a new choice:  a computer for users vs. a computer for programmers. 
The computers for programmers (Amiga, NeXTStep, etc.), with the exception
of Unix (more on why later), lost.  It is my firm belief that these
machines didn't fail because of bad marketing; they failed because they
didn't have much of a market to begin with.

> PMT on a Mac would mean that my
> fiancee could have run her statistical analysis on her data and
> continued to work on her thesis at the same time, instead of waiting
> hours for the analysis to complete.

I'll agree that running bad software on a CMT system can be annoying, and
in reality we don't always have the luxury of only choosing to run good
software.

> >Plus, any so-called professional who says to me without first asking what
> >I want to *do* with my computer would be right out the door.

> Definitely agree with this as well, with one caveat: knowing what you
> want to do *now* and realizing what you'll need later are two very
> different things.  Most people have an inkling of what they want to do
> with their computer now but have no idea what they'll need it to do in
> the future.

I'm getting scared.  We are agreeing with each other too much. :-)

> There's no good excuse for any modern
> OS to use CMT over PMT.

Whew; I know that we had to disagree somewhere. :-)  There is one very,
very compelling reason (and it isn't a technical one) for the MacOS in
particular to use CMT over PMT, and that is backwards compatibility.  Why?

1) The existing user base does not want to reinvest in all their software
when they upgrade their machines, even if the computer science crowd has
figured out a new, improved, better way of doing things.

2) New users who are considering buying a machine won't buy it unless
there already exists enough software to potentially run on it.

Almost all computers that were designed from the ground up since the early
80s that could not run existing software have failed in the marketplace. 
The Mac is an exception, primarily because the Apple ][ was able to
support the company for a long enough time to attract enough developers
and users to make it a successful product.  What company (other than
startups) can afford to do that today?

This is one of the main reasons that Unix has stuck around for so long. 
If you were trying to design a good OS from scratch, you certainly
wouldn't come up with Unix.  The scheduler is bad.  The UI performance is
bad.  The pipe mechanism is very inefficient (2 copies per byte of data,
minimum) and makes it hard to tightly integrate tools (hence we get
monoliths like trn, Netscape, etc.).  It is hard to keep secure (either a
person has no system privledges as a regular user or all of them as root;
in practice, there is very little middle ground).  Tools are
inconsistent.  Etc., etc.

However, there already exists a large set of tools and apps for Unix. 
Plus, most people get to use it for free (very few personal users have to
buy their own Unix system).  Even the Mach folks and the Plan9 folks don't
dare stray too far from Unix, because if they can't run the existing
software with little or no tweaking, no one but them will be running their
systems.


The masses want evolution, not revolution.  The masses also seem to care
about, from highest to lowest:

i) applications
ii) cost
iii) user interface
iv) operating systems

PMT won't fundamentally change things by itself.  It is up to developers
to come up with stuff that they would not have in a CMT environment,
because it was too hard to do in the first place or just too difficult to
get right.
-- 
        Nevin ":-)" Liber       nevin@CS.Arizona.EDU    (520) 293-2799