XPost: rec.audio.pro   
   From: kludge@panix.com   
      
   William Sommerwerck  wrote:   
   >   
   >My problem is that I don't want the operating system blocking me from access   
   >to the machine. XP and Vista started doing this, which annoyed me no end. (7   
   >isn't quite so bad.)   
      
   But that's what the operating system is for.  It keeps all the applications   
   playing nice together, and blocks direct access to anything so that all the   
   applications can play together.   
      
   >If I were designing an OS, I would automate as much as possible, while still   
   >allowing the user to easily lift the hood and fiddle with the nuts and   
   >bolts. I don't have time to discuss this in detail, but making a product   
   >that doesn't seem to require thought doesn't necessarily make it easy to   
   >use.   
      
   Well, the thing is that the user interface is really only a tiny part of the   
   OS... and if the OS itself is well-designed, you can tack any kind of user   
   interface on top that you want.  (This is one of the things that Mike was   
   complaining about with regard to Linux though, the fact that there are dozens   
   of windowing systems and they are all different.)   
      
   >> All over the world millions of   
   >> people (and we all know some of them) own Winboxes about which they have   
   >> absolutely NO CLUE. You, yourself alluded to this bit of techno-elitism   
   >when   
   >> you said that you used to recommend Macs to people who were too lazy to   
   >learn   
   >> how their computers worked. Why should they have to? Computers should be   
   >as   
   >> appliance-like as possible.   
   >   
   >You're mostly right, but I get annoyed at people who put out no effort   
   >whatever to understand the wonderful new product they bought.   
      
   The thing is, a general purpose computer really can't be appliance-like.   
   If you want something appliance like, you don't want a general purpose   
   computer.  The thing is, general purpose computers are so damn cheap that   
   they have driven pretty much all specialized appliances out of the market.   
   People don't want to pay extra money to have something they don't need to   
   fiddle with, especially when they look upon it as limited and closed.   
      
   >> no file system expert by any means), the system optimizes the allocation   
   >> algorithms in an attempt to defragment files while they are being   
   >accessed.   
   >> This, coupled with automatic journaling, means that the disk keeps a   
   >separate   
   >> record of HD allocation and uses that journal to move blocks of data   
   >around   
   >> on the disc to keep them together.   
   >   
   >Interesting. I used to run the UCSD OS on my Apple ][. It didn't need   
   >defragmentation either, because it wrote all files to the disk as a   
   >contiguous block. Of course, if there wasn't a free block large enough, you   
   >were hosed. You had to periodically K)runch the disk to consoldiate all the   
   >free blocks.   
      
   OS/360 has a similar sort of thing.... with OS you had to specify how big   
   a file would ever become before you created it, so the kernal would know   
   how much contiguous space to allocate for it.  Thank God those days are gone   
   forever.   
      
   The UCSD P-System was interesting, and the pseudomachine was clearly the   
   forerunner of Java.  If it hadn't been so damn expensive it might have caught   
   on in the IBM PC world.  Still, it was basically a development environment   
   without a whole lot else... though it was a rather ingenious universal   
   development environment.   
   --scott   
   --   
   "C'est un Nagra.  C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)