> > Look!  More pessimism!
> >
> > Despite your opinions concerning their storage requirements, would
> > you not agree that current operating systems and applications better
> > suit computer users' desires than did their earlier counterparts?
>

i dont think so, people keep using wordprocessing, spreadsheet and email
just as they did before, the only thing is that to do it, they always have
to buy a bigger harddisk, a many GHz processor, tons of RAM, etc, just to
run the fuckin OS that seems to be written in VisualBasic instead of
optimized Assembler/C
what bothers me the most is that i remember having a 40MHz 386 with 80MB
harddisk and 4MB of RAM, running win3.1 and other applications (say the
office equivalent for that time, lotus123, wordperfect, etc) and now the OS
doesnt take less than 300MB!. While i agree that faster processors and
bigger harddisks are good, they brought us MP3, DivX, MPEG4, JPEG, stuff
that wouldnt be possible with older processors, i just dont understand why i
need a supercomputer just for the OS to boot!. Even the newer HP49G+ has an
ARM at 75MHz! and it's not a lot faster than the previous model running the
old processor!
Im not a guru, so maybe there's a lot of stuff running under the newer
versions of windows and that use up all those resources, but it doesnt seem
to, to me it seems that for a program to do some action it has to call an
api, which will call a procedure, which will call another one, etc, it's
layers and layers of bloat. Am i wrong? please enlight me!
i agree that the OS should provide with an abstraction layer to the
programmer, so that he doesnt have to worry about the underneath hardware
differences, but if the hardware was a bit more "standard" maybe you could
access directly the video card, like old games did, but then again, no user
program should access the hardware directly, etc.
i'd just want an optimized OS that doesnt use up all the resources just to
draw the same fuckin box than win31 use to on the screen

my two cents

> i dont think so, people keep using wordprocessing, spreadsheet and email
> just as they did before, the only thing is that to do it, they always have
> to buy a bigger harddisk, a many GHz processor, tons of RAM, etc, just to
> run the fuckin OS that seems to be written in VisualBasic instead of
> optimized Assembler/C

You could do what I do; take an OS that is considered outdated but still 
runs almost everything (windows 98) and run it on modern hardware. While 
som epeople think win98 crashes often I typically get a week or more uptime.

> what bothers me the most is that i remember having a 40MHz 386 with 80MB
> harddisk and 4MB of RAM, running win3.1 and other applications (say the
> office equivalent for that time, lotus123, wordperfect, etc) and now the OS
> doesnt take less than 300MB!. While i agree that faster processors and
> bigger harddisks are good, they brought us MP3, DivX, MPEG4, JPEG, stuff
> that wouldnt be possible with older processors, i just dont understand why i
> need a supercomputer just for the OS to boot!. Even the newer HP49G+ has an
> ARM at 75MHz! and it's not a lot faster than the previous model running the
> old processor!

Thats because it has to emulate an older discontinued processor. If want 
faster programs, bypass this emulation and write ARM code directly 
http://hpgcc.sf.net

The results are typically 50-100 times faster then built in programs. I 
have a program (http://alpage.ath.cx/hptute/hpprog.htm) that will do 
1000! exactly in the blink of an eye.

> Im not a guru, so maybe there's a lot of stuff running under the newer
> versions of windows and that use up all those resources, but it doesnt seem
> to, to me it seems that for a program to do some action it has to call an
> api, which will call a procedure, which will call another one, etc, it's
> layers and layers of bloat. Am i wrong? please enlight me!

I think it comes down to economics. A well optimized, bugfree OS costs 
more money to write. If the consumer is happy to pay for a crappy OS, 
then the company saves money.

> i agree that the OS should provide with an abstraction layer to the
> programmer, so that he doesnt have to worry about the underneath hardware
> differences, but if the hardware was a bit more "standard" maybe you could
> access directly the video card, like old games did, but then again, no user
> program should access the hardware directly, etc.

The problem here is reliability. Things writing directly to hardware 
could easily cause crashes :-/


Al

roller wrote:

>> > Despite your opinions concerning their storage requirements, would
>> > you not agree that current operating systems and applications better
>> > suit computer users' desires than did their earlier counterparts?
>>
>
>i dont think so...

<big snip>

Well, I certainly have been shouted down on this one!

>i'd just want an optimized OS that doesnt use up all the resources just to
>draw the same fuckin box than win31 use to on the screen

This seems somewhat representative of many of those who have responded in
this thread.  I wonder why the industry has not responded by offering
the products for which there seems to be a clear market?

-- 
========================================================================
          Michael Kesti            |  "And like, one and one don't make
                                   |   two, one and one make one."
          m...@gv.net            |          - The Who, Bargain

Michael R. Kesti <m...@gv.net> says...
>
>roller wrote:
>
>>i'd just want an optimized OS that doesnt use up all the resources just to
>>draw the same fuckin box than win31 use to on the screen
>
>This seems somewhat representative of many of those who have responded in
>this thread.  I wonder why the industry has not responded by offering
>the products for which there seems to be a clear market?

The market has already responded.

http://flwm.sourceforge.net/screenshot.jpg
http://flwm.sourceforge.net/
http://www.slackware.com/

-- 
Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com>;

> this thread.  I wonder why the industry has not responded by offering
> the products for which there seems to be a clear market?

Because we represent a tiny fraction of the total potential market,
and we won't pay MORE for a cut-down version of the OS.

"Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" wrote:

>> this thread.  I wonder why the industry has not responded by offering
>> the products for which there seems to be a clear market?
>
>Because we represent a tiny fraction of the total potential market,

I suspect that this is true.  It would seem that, in my first article in
this thread, I should have said:

A more optimistic view is that an amazing achievement of the computer
software industry is its continuing use of the steady and staggering gains
made by the computer hardware industry to implement systems that most
computer users desire.                                           ^^^^

>and we won't pay MORE for a cut-down version of the OS.

Then one can only conclude that the feature set you seek isn't all that
important to you.

-- 
========================================================================
          Michael Kesti            |  "And like, one and one don't make
                                   |   two, one and one make one."
          m...@gv.net            |          - The Who, Bargain

"Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" wrote:

>and we won't pay MORE for a cut-down version of the OS.

Actually, a lot of people have paid a lot of extra money to get
Embedded Windows NT just so they can have a cut-down version of 
that OS.

> Then one can only conclude that the feature set you seek isn't all that
> important to you.

You've missed the point. OS vendors have simply made it unreasonably
difficult to remove the features we don't want.

Lewin A.R.W. Edwards <l...@larwe.com> says...
>
>> Then one can only conclude that the feature set you seek isn't all that
>> important to you.
>
>You've missed the point. OS vendors have simply made it unreasonably
>difficult to remove the features we don't want.

Microsoft has, but Linux makes it very easy indeed to remove the 
features you don't want.

"Michael R. Kesti" <m...@gv.net> writes:
> "Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" wrote:
> 
> >> this thread.  I wonder why the industry has not responded by offering
> >> the products for which there seems to be a clear market?
> >
> >Because we represent a tiny fraction of the total potential market,
> 
> I suspect that this is true.  It would seem that, in my first article in
> this thread, I should have said:
> 
> A more optimistic view is that an amazing achievement of the computer
> software industry is its continuing use of the steady and staggering gains
> made by the computer hardware industry to implement systems that most
> computer users desire.                                           ^^^^

/Most/ computer users wouldn't know what they desire if it
jumped up and bit them.

Somehow, Billy Gates has convinced people that instead of
"640 Kbytes of memory is more than anyone will ever need",
they now need 64 Mbytes minimum just to load his OS.  If
they would like to do some useful work, they had better
have even more hardware resources.

> >and we won't pay MORE for a cut-down version of the OS.
> 
> Then one can only conclude that the feature set you seek
> isn't all that important to you.

Those who know what features they seek know they don't
need bloatware to get it.