Windows 7

[bob]

No need to be harsh and I do not see where my dishonesty lay. Certainly your daughter is smarter than me. Congratulations.

Fern

I didn't mean to be any harsher than was needed to get the point across. I called your argument dishonest because you were expecting something from Linux that you'd never expect from Windows.

Unfortunately I don't have any daughters yet. My sisters may or may not be smarter than you, but they're very open to new things.

Everything looks foreign when you have not used it.

I remember the first time I used a pc, I created batch files for all the commands like this:

ls.bat:
dir %1

etc.

Even better. Buy the MKS (mortice-kern) toolkit and you get all the unix commands around, and they run in a command window. From grep to vi in fact...

[Dann Corbit]

No need to be harsh and I do not see where my dishonesty lay. Certainly your daughter is smarter than me. Congratulations.

Fern

I didn't mean to be any harsher than was needed to get the point across. I called your argument dishonest because you were expecting something from Linux that you'd never expect from Windows.

Unfortunately I don't have any daughters yet. My sisters may or may not be smarter than you, but they're very open to new things.

Everything looks foreign when you have not used it.

I remember the first time I used a pc, I created batch files for all the commands like this:

ls.bat:
dir %1

etc.

Even better. Buy the MKS (mortice-kern) toolkit and you get all the unix commands around, and they run in a command window. From grep to vi in fact...

Mingw has most of it.
You can also get cygwin or the Windows Posix layer.
None of them work as well as the real thing.
And a fork() call on Windows using Cygwin is a problem.

There was another posix over windows project on SourceForge, but it seems to have gone fallow.

The real upshot is (I think) if you want POSIX and you want it to work right, get a real POSIX system.

[Henrik Dinesen]

I tried Linux a couple of times and always I felt out of my terrain just trying to start a program.

Aren't you the guy who couldn't get Shredder's Linux version to run, and then decided to blame Linux instead of the makers/distributors of the half-assed software package? If so, this argument from ignorance is cute, but also dishonest. If I send you a badly packaged Windows application, and you fail to run it, is it my fault or Microsoft's fault?

BTW, my 14-year-old little sisters use Linux. They must be geniuses.

Everyone has preferences. Some people love windows. Some love the Mac. Some love Linux. There are even OpenVMS affectionados.

For some reason, operating system preferences turn into religious battlefields without the slightest provocation.

Search me, I like 'em all.

[rlsuth]

Surely none of these OS's are good enough to make me upgrade from DOS, are they?

[lmader]

Surely none of these OS's are good enough to make me upgrade from DOS, are they?

No. But that being said, what version of DOS are you runnning

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Surely none of these OS's are good enough to make me upgrade from DOS, are they?

No. But that being said, what version of DOS are you runnning

x64

[lmader]

Surely none of these OS's are good enough to make me upgrade from DOS, are they?

No. But that being said, what version of DOS are you runnning

x64

Ok, good, that must be the extra powerful version

[lmader]

Linux is OK, but I prefer NetBSD. The new 5.0 is a damn fine OS.

Linux tries to make it too easy to use.

Linux is really the kernel. All the other crap gets added on by the distro managers. The linux kernel may well be the best pure O/S kernel in existence.

You are certainly an expert on OS kernels/machine architectures, as you have always worked and understood programming at a very low/machine level. I would like to know more about what makes Linux so good as a pure OS kernel. Is it really better than BSD Unix or Solaris? Why did Apple choose BSD Unix for their kernel instead of Linux? What about Solaris? And with regard to Windows 7, it is the evolution of the NT 4 kernel written from scratch under lead of the Digital Equipment architect Dave Cutler that MS hired, and it has come a very long way. I am curious about what you see as the pros and cons of these, from kernel/architecture perspective.

[bob]

Linux is OK, but I prefer NetBSD. The new 5.0 is a damn fine OS.

Linux tries to make it too easy to use.

Linux is really the kernel. All the other crap gets added on by the distro managers. The linux kernel may well be the best pure O/S kernel in existence.

You are certainly an expert on OS kernels/machine architectures, as you have always worked and understood programming at a very low/machine level. I would like to know more about what makes Linux so good as a pure OS kernel. Is it really better than BSD Unix or Solaris? Why did Apple choose BSD Unix for their kernel instead of Linux? What about Solaris? And with regard to Windows 7, it is the evolution of the NT 4 kernel written from scratch under lead of the Digital Equipment architect Dave Cutler that MS hired, and it has come a very long way. I am curious about what you see as the pros and cons of these, from kernel/architecture perspective.

It is hard to say "Linux is better"" when talking about BSD or Slowaris. Linux is open source. The good ideas (copy on write, O(1) process scheduler, etc can be examined by anyone. Copy on write for process creation is now a standard that everyone uses. But it came from Linux. I was really talking about unix in general in my comments, linux happen to being the most popular by a huge margin. It is just a clean and elegant design, where the programmers really care about code efficiency.

Bruce Moreland complained about "the Microsoft way" years ago where microsoft was on his case when he removed code to make things more efficient. That was not their goal. They only wanted to implement new features as fast as possible, without regard to old or inefficient code. Their excuse was that faster hardware would hide the effects of the inefficient code.

Linux development has been just the opposite. The code is clean, Torvalds goes over every last line, and takes people to task if they produce kludges. Linux has the largest body of developers working on it, which will likely keep it at the head of the unix pack. But unix in general is simply a clean system from the ground up. Something Windows is not.

As far as windows goes, I'm not an expert at any level. I have to use it from time to time, but that is not by choice. I know where Cutler (and Hustvedt, et al) came from, and what they did. But they started with a lousy design and have simply stacked more and more crap on top of existing crap, The underlying "design" of unix has been static for almost 40 years now. Algorithms have been improved, things like ext4 filesystems and such have been added, but they don't detract from the underlying design that has not changed since the 70's. If you start with a good design, you can tweak the implementation over time as newer ideas are discovered. But you can remain true to the original design, if it was good. Windows doesn't have that clean lineage...

[lmader]

Interesting stuff. Thank you for the reply.