🚀 go-pugleaf

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>been reimplementing over and over and over really doesn't impress me. 
>Copying something that you have a 20 years worth of models to look at is
>far, far easier than trying to implement something new and unproven.

Reimplementing?  What do you call System7.5?  What significant was added onto 
Any new version of MacOs, or even DOS/Windows???  All those upgrades are is bug 
fixes, and prettier "Help Icons".  Linux _IS_ innovative.  It is actively being 
ported over to faster hardware such as the Alpha/DEC 266Mhz machines (What 
speed did you say the PowerPC's were?)  It looks as if SMP support is going to 
beat out MacOS by a long shot, and perhaps even OS2.  (Okay, so Win-NT was the 
first in this realm)  Pentium Optimized GCC is out for testing, and since 
source is available for the kernel, you can have a Pentium optimized kernel.  
(Where are the optimized versions of DOS, or Windows?  Or even OS2?)

>
>> Other parts of what is commonly called Linux are being written by whoever 
>> wants to do it (whereever they happen to be).  Much of this code is not 
>> really Linux specific, and can be used on other Free Unix systems.  (Not 
>> all of this software is transparently portable to other kernels.)
>
>And there is lots of freeware and shareware for every major computing
>platform out there.  Again, not all that impressive.  Plus, for both Macs
>and PCs, there is a whole bunch more software to choose from (the
>commercial sector).

Well, not necessarily.  Perhaps if you had said "native" software I could have 
agreed.  What Mac or DOS computer have you seen that can run UNIX software?  A 
good UNIX machine can run DOS or Macintosh programs.  --some can even run all 
this side by side in the same X-window display (SCO)...  I think Linux is 
striving for the same thing, and I am confident that we will see this soon.  
And when we run it on a 266Mhz Alpha, We won't even realize that its going 
through any emulation!

>
>> The point here is that all you have to do if you want to know what's 
>> happening with Linux is become part of the community.  Linux is not a 
>> commercial product, and there is no reason to expect the Linux community 
>> to play by commercial rules.  Linux is an Extremely Open System, written 
>> by people who care about what a system should be.
>
>First off, Linux is written by people who care about what a *Unix* system
>should be.  You can do far, far better from an operating system point of
>view if you don't constrain yourself to staying compatible with Unix.

I first looked towards Linux when I bought MS-Windows3.1J  (Japanese version of 
Windows)  The instability, and inability to display Japanese over the internet 
made me wish I had my $200 back for the software.  I had similar problems on 
the Macintoshes as work, so I decided that to be an inadequit solution.  Linux 
offered what I wanted for free.  Thats when I gave it a shot.  I don't care 
that it is a *UNIX* system.  I care that it is _stable_, and that it displays 
_Japanese_!  I now see that Plan9 supports Unicode from the bottom up.  Perhaps 
I will look into that...  especially if X-windows works on it.

>
>Secondly, I've heard the same spiel from the FSF advocates for at least
>the last decade.  Looking back, what have they produced?
>
>On the plus side:  the quality of their tools is better than what ships
>standard on most Unix systems.  They also tend to have more features.
>
>On the minus side:  their tools tend to be slower than most (eg: gcc is
>one of the slowest compilers I've ever used).  Also, the tools don't give
>me a particularly better environment than I can get with an off the shelf
>Unix box.  Although they've done a great job refining the toolset, there
>isn't much new stuff in the toolbox.
>
>Companies like Apple, on the other hand, work hard on providing new
>technologies.  Things like QuickTime, PlainTalk, etc.  I've never seen
>this kind of stuff come out of the GNU community.  I'd be far more
>impressed and far more embracing if I saw them pushing the envelope
>instead of small refinements; innovating instead of just evolving.

I give you this.  I'm not discounting Apple.  They have brought wonderful 
things to the computer community.  I believe it is at the expense of other 
things, though.  They keep "pasting" on extra bells and whistles--What I want 
to see is stability!  My friends PowerMac crashed (bringing the whole system 
down) over and over and over when we tried to get the TCP protocol working.  
Granted, I have seen machines that work w/o crashing every day-- but how about 
a little consistency?

>
>Why do you think Stallman hates patents?  If you don't do any innovation
>yourself, they tend to work against you.  Ironically, MIT makes a fair bit
>of change off of their patents, but I never did hear Stallman or any of
>the other FSF people refuse to use MIT's facilities because of it.  I
>guess it's *bad* when Apple has them, but *good* when MIT has them.
>
>My Unix environment hasn't fundamentally improved (or heck, even changed
>in terms of user experience) in the last 5 years.  My Mac environment has,
>in both terms of user experience and development tools.  You might not
>like the underlying OS; then again, except for developers, most people
>don't see it.

Perhaps you have neglected to upgrade your Unix machine, and you have pumped 
your entire salary into that Macintosh.  There are significant improvements in 
UNIX technology in the last 5 years.  Please don't close your eyes to these!  
(SMP for one.  Dosemu, and Wine.  Executor for Linux.  Alpha support.  PCI bus 
support, SoundBlaster support, the list goes on!)

>
>Even the latest Unix claim to fame, the World Wide Web, isn't very
>impressive from a technical standpoint.  It could have been written years
>ago.  The cool thing about it is the infrastructure of sites out there,
>not the technology.

No.  But you never would have been able to make something boom so big with a 
network of AppleTalk.  Proprietary systems have a different nature to them.  
--I agree, good things come out of AppleTalk too.  Just please agree with me 
that there are __ALSO__ good things that come out of open systems, such as the 
UNIX community supports.

>
>You guys complain that cooperative multitasking is *bad*, yet cooperative
>networking like TCP (eg: congestion control on the client side) is *good*?
>
>> A bit of a warning though, you can't really find out what the future 
>> direction of Linux is going to be without having an effect on the future 
>> direction of Linux.  It's a bit like quantum mechanics that way.  :)
>
>Or, more likely, wait for companies like Apple to try something new out,
>and if people like it, then maybe someone will port it over to Linux.

Not a bad idea.  But this doesn't mean that development cant happen parrallel 
on different fronts too!  "Both/And"  not "Either/Or"  <--that is what I wish 
people would understand a little better.

>
>The other thing is, applications are important.  The Linux community wants
>people to jump on their bandwagon, yet when someone asks them if it will
>run the latest and greatest word processor or spreadsheet, the answer is
>no.

Actually, the answer is Yes.  There are great commercial WordProcessors (Word 
Perfect) and spreadsheets available for Linux.  If you don't like those 
options, run Executor (Macintosh emulator) and Word and Excel under it.  Hmm. 
You don't like that either?  How about Dos WordPerfect under Dosemu?  Give us a 
little time, I hope soon we will be able to say "use Wine and run Word for 
Windows or Excel for Windows."  (Okay, I'm jumping the gun... But there are 
currently GREAT spreadsheets and WordProcessors avaible for Linux, and there 
are more on the way!)

>  The vast majority of people who buy computers don't buy them to run
>the latest and greatest operating system; they buy them to get useful work
>done.  Maybe you get a high out of tweaking makefiles and writing cool
>scripts to do stuff that should have been designed in in the first place
>(eg: for how many years was putting the current working directory in the
>prompt of a shell a really clever, slick hack instead of a supported
>feature?), but I would rather concentrate on the task at hand.  And so
>would most people.
>-- 
>        Nevin ":-)" Liber       nevin@CS.Arizona.EDU    (520) 293-2799
>                                                office: (520) 621-1815

Jeff halverson