[Wolves] Promoting Linux

Matthew Revell wolves at mailman.lug.org.uk
Mon May 12 08:54:05 2003


Cheers for those, Aq. I'll take a look.

On Mon, 2003-05-12 at 07:59, Aquarius wrote:
> Matthew Revell spoo'd forth:
> > On Fri, 2003-05-09 at 13:35, fizzy wrote:
> > 
> >> I would refer you to the talk that Daniel someone (aq
> >> will say who) gave on the short comings of linux/unix
> >> at HAL.
> > 
> > You got that Aq?
> 
> His name was Hugh Daniel, and he's the lead on the FreeS/WAN project.
>  
> >>  Basic example - man, someone needs to make an
> >> english version of that.
> > 
> > What's that?
> 
> "The Tragedy of Software Quality in OS/GPL systems" was the name of the talk.
> Daniel complained about the shoddy state of Free Software in vitriolic terms; 
> the software gives up the ghost with meaningless error messages, and doesn't 
> try to help. In essence, there should be three messages for every error: the 
> one we get now, a longer one explaining what it means, and a longer one again, 
> explaining what to do about it. Anything in the "what to do about it list" 
> that the computer can try on its own without your help, it *should* try to see 
> if it worked, and then tell you about it afterwards.
> See http://www.kryogenix.org/writings/tech/detail for some notes around the 
> subject that I wrote a while back.
>  
> >>  Bambam would argue that what
> >> needs to happen is for us to write a new operating
> >> system from scratch, i would disagree but hey...
> > 
> > Whatever happens OS wise in the future, Linux is the best alternative we
> > have at the moment. Was BeOS any good, anyone?
> 
> Yes, actually. If you haven't read it already, you should read Neal 
> Stephenson's "In The Beginning Was The Command Line" 
> (http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html), which isnot only an excellent 
> essay on operating systems from the author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, 
> but also goes into a bit of detail on the BeOS.
> 
> Aq.