7 Apr
2008
7 Apr
'08
8:31 p.m.
Seems to be 404. Anyone care to send me a copy? I know I've read some
version of it, but long ago, and an old version....
At least to learn that UNIX was not and is not the
end-all, be-all of
operating systems. :)
No worries there; I went through my larval stage under VMS. :)
I think a lot of the criticism is still relevant,
it's just become
less of an issue (and in some sense, people have become so accustomed
to the UNIX brain-damage that they don't even know there /is/ an
issue in many cases).
And, to be fair, some of the problems with Unix have been at least
partially alleviated by progress (for example, there are Linuces that
have something at least a little like capabilities instead of the
traditional Unix all-or-nothing privilege model).
[...] and so it's OK to treat everything like an
emulation of a VT102
in your XTerm windows.
Except, of course, that it's a bad emulation in some important
respects. To pick two examples, VT-102s can't be resized and have a
specific keyboard layout which is rarely more than vaguely approached
under X.
Furthermore, xterm is far from the only terminal emulator out there.
Not even the only X one.
(can you tell I'm a LispM fan? :)
Me too. I'd be looking seriously for a Symbolics if (a) I had the
resources (physical space, primarily) for it and (b) I thought it
reasonably likely it would be within my budget if I found one.
Not that I think they're perfect. But they're _different_. I don't
like monocultures, and I think Unix has become too predominant a
monoculture - even Windows has grown a Posix layer by now.
X-Windows is still a mixed bag, but I think we can
safely say that
it's here to stay.
Well..."it's a window system named X, not a system named XWindows".
Yes, it's probably here to stay - but it's not that great; its keyboard
handling sucks, and it almost encourages writing code based on broken
assumptions like "there's a 32bpp TrueColor visual available". It's
hard, or at least tedious, to get it right; far too many coders mistake
"it works for me" for "it's right". (Not that _that_ mistake is
confined to X code, to be sure.)
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