From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2002-06-21T22:23:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Why is I/O slow? (OT)

On Fri, 21 Jun 2002 17:26:39 +0900, Ian Macdonald wrote:
> On Fri 21 Jun 2002 at 16:18:07 +0900, james@rubyxml.com wrote:
>> This matches my observations as well; I could never imagine
>> convincing my sister that any Unix was, in the longer run, better
>> for her than Windows. She just has no interest in doing anything
>> that is even remotely geekish. She does not want to try and
>> install some application only to find out she has the wrong
>> version of glibc, or needs libpng.so.2.
> That was my point, really. If you want to move past the beginner
> stage, an investment of time and energy is needed.
> 
> Windows, IMHO, has fewer productivity tricks to learn than UNIX,
> so once you've learned them, you're at full speed on that OS.

I think that you'd be quite surprised. I'm still finding
productivity tricks on Windows -- and I've been using it for a long
time. As I said before, I'm more annoyed by the fact that basic GUI
operations don't necessarily work as expected in X-Windows -- and
it's not primarily the underlying window manager's fault. It's the
fact that in the name of 'freedom and choice', consistency has been
thrown completely out of the window by most developers of X
software. (The KDE folks, however, get full marks on this. Theirs is
the first *consistently usable* X software that I've seen.)

> Someone learning UNIX, OTOH, will continue to learn and become
> more productive for a long time to come, ultimately becoming
> vastly more productive than the Windows power user.

Again, I think you'd be surprised. I'm a power user in both Windows
and Unix; I eat ugly regexes for breakfast with the best of them. (:
Knowing how to do things in both areas has increased the ability I
have in both areas.

>> Windows and *nix are meant for different audiences.  Saying
>> Widows should be more like Unix is like saying Ruby should be
>> more like assembly language.
> I'm not advocating making Windows more like UNIX at all. I have no
> interest in Windows beyond dealing with the fall-out that its
> flawed applications create for the rest of the computing world.

Funny. I'll admit that there are a lot of flawed Windows programs
out there -- that's not hard to admit. But there's a lot of flawed
X-Windows programs out there, too. (There's a lot of flawed command
line programs out there, e.g., find, for all of its power.)

To try to bring this slightly back onto topic, is there any reason 
(except possibly licence) that Matz couldn't *adapt* the glibc 
methodology to work on multiple platforms?

-austin
-- Austin Ziegler, austin@halostatue.ca on 2002.06.21 at 09.17.21