Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 07:42:21 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> To: "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org> Cc: "Andrew C. Hornback" <achornback@worldnet.att.net>, <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Feeding the Troll (Was: freebsd as a desktop ?) Message-ID: <01fe01c178a1$001d1be0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <004801c17872$98e47b40$6600000a@ach.domain><017f01c1788c$8cb71d90$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15365.52562.394957.602907@guru.mired.org>
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Mike writes: > Note that Apple examined an OS that didn't have > all the multi-user complexity that Unix has, ran > - like a bat out of hell - on Apple hardware, and > on MP boxes with those processors. They decided > against adopting it. What operating system was that, and what was their reason for rejecting it? > Not to mention VMS. I'm not familiar with VMS. What elements of NT are inherited from it or influenced by it? > No, it doesn't cost billions of dollars. Yes, it does. Even some application systems can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. > Sun, Apple and DEC have all done OS development > projects that they abandoned. Why did they abandon them? > I'm pretty sure Be didn't have billions of dollars > to spend, and they put a very nice little OS on the > market, though it wasn't suitable for much off the > desktop. Why wasn't it suitable for the desktop? > Gee, I'd say that MicroSoft's products are the > best example of that. Not really. The best examples are usually specialized software packages written for captive niche markets. Often they are abysmally poorly written, and overpriced by orders of magnitude, but they sell anyway--because there is no competition. By the way, only the first letter of Microsoft is capitalized. > Of course not - the underlying OS is largely irrelevant > if it provides all the needed functions. So their choice of OS cannot be used to argue that it was technically superior for the task. > Horse puckey. If you've used batch environments, you > might be familiar with SAS, which communicated large > volumes of data, but did it by passing a data set > (or a small number of them) from one command to the > next. Sequential processing, not parallel. > Most - if not all - modern Unices allow multiple > independent threads of control in a single address > space. Threads, or processes? > I recommend that most of my relatives run Windows, > not FreeBSD. So do I. And when they ask about Linux, I discourage them in the strongest terms. > Before Windows was popular, I recommended that > they run DOS. So did I. > Come on - what do you want to do on your > desktop that you can't do on FreeBSD? I have a hundred or so applications on my desktop that will not run under UNIX. Additionally, I can assign permissions via ACLs in NT, to both files and objects. I don't have to run anything special to get a GUI, since that is the native environment. > I have as yet to see you list a single thing you > wanted FreeBSD to do as a desktop that it couldn't. How do I start Adobe Illustrator on FreeBSD? > For a real giggle, consider that I've seen > Windows running on the MIPS processor running > with the opposite endianness of the MIPS boxes. I saw a MIPS machine in a lab once; I don't recall if I actually used it. It was running NT. > The same was true of OS/2. Yes, but OS/2 was designed around the MS-DOS paradigm, which was already dying. NT was designed around the Windows paradigm. IBM wanted the MS-DOS look and feel, and Microsoft wanted the Windows look and feel, and that's why they parted ways. The rest is history. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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