Using the complete buffalo...

Hey there,

I felt like starting this discussion for a while now but did not had the time to write it down, i am very new to this board so excuse me if this has allready been dicussed before, i tried searching for it but did not find the thread so i assumed it was not discussed before.

Anyway the subject here is "Using the complete buffalo", and i really want to discuss this so take a good breath read it think about and judge.

When the indians were still in the time they had to kill to survive they did wat is called making use of the whole bufallo, this mean whenever they captured and killed one they didn't just eat the meat, they also used the skin for clothing, the bones for weapons and even the eye's for protection and many more thing a buffalo could be used for in smaller parts.

Today in the modern days, this is somewhat the same with computers. IMHO the previous generation has not made full use of the possebilities that a single computer gave them beceause they did not had the knoledge or the tools/time and they had to figure a LOT out on themselves.

My opinion is back in the old days they did NOT make full use of the buffalo, and now the next generation is stuck with that.
Stuck with the allready build tools and languages, and we dont even know if this is the RIGHT way of doing it. What i'm trying to state here is not that the previous generation has left us with somewhat buggy equiptment to model on but rather restricted tools, and with all due respect they are after all the ones that teach us through classes and books.

The fact that M$ has become the standard OS for the standard End-User we all start out like this and are bound to the restrictions that M$ set up for us, still we have LINUX which is good and neet and all but still only provides us with restrictions instead of total freedom. Define total freedom, i can't couse it is not out there.

So my point here is to discuss what we are left with instead of what we should be left with.

If you find this thread somehow offending, i appologise for that, and again my respect goes out to the people who made our tools, it's hard but it does not tell it's good, cause it always can be done better....

cheers,
Galo

> they did wat is called making use of the whole bufallo
And how many countless generations do you think it took to get to that stage?
I bet they started out just with the meat, then moved onto the hide, the bones, etc etc.

> Stuck with the allready build tools and languages,
In the last 10 years or so, lets say Java, Python, PHP, C#, Ruby have all emerged into the world.
Not to mention any number of web scripting languages which obviously could not have existed before the web itself.
http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly...ster_0504.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History...rating_systems

> The fact that M$ has become the standard OS for the standard End-User
Your box isn't big enough.
Digital watches, microwaves, TV's, DVD players, washing machines, cars, planes, traffic lights, mobile phones, PDA's, games consoles, etc etc etc.
All these are likely to contain processors, and therefore likely to contain embedded operating systems. Your average end user probably interacts with more operating systems that you would realise. But for the most part, they perform so well that you never notice them.

> cause it always can be done better....
Here's the good news - the real freedom is that you can change it if you want to. Nobody is stopping you inventing your own OS or language.

> Define total freedom
That would be the "off" switch.

> IMHO the previous generation has not made full use of the possebilities that a single computer gave them
On the contrary, older generations were very good at getting the best out of limited resources - when was the last time you saw chess in 1K of memory?
You kids with multi GHz processors and Multi GB RAM just point and click your way to bloatware like nobody's business. You basically sacrifice some of the raw power of your machines against being able to get something written quickly and out of the door (time to market is key in commercial s/w development).

This time to market thing is why a lot of software is as buggy as it is (just ship it with a licence almost as slippery as the lawyer who drafted it). It's only when there is a very real threat of financial cost to shipping crap s/w that things improve somewhat (aircraft on average don't crash due to BSOD's).

If software were written at the same pace that monks illuminated manuscripts, then we'd all be using DOS 0.1.

> they are after all the ones that teach us through classes and books.
I suggest you choose your books more carefully then.

This is a quote I read recently.
Avoid books with any of the following in the title: idiots, dummies, teach, yourself, learn, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, weekend, tricks, guru, visually, super, bible; or that mention a specific product or compiler.

The only thing some books are good for is being shredded into pulp to pack other books in.

You don't understand assembly language and therefore you don't understand that indeed early computer were used to their absolute maximum. There is a definite limit to what can be done on a 8086, 286, 386, 486 or any other machine using a different instruction set.

I'd agree with Salem in that now we have more power, more memory, and more of everything yet our software is stuck in the stone ages.

The wasteful era of computers is now, not then.

The wasteful era could be temporary.
When the computer hardware advancement speed decreases, the people writing software will still be writing software and perhaps catch up a little.

The original post reminded me of an article I just read about the future of the OS. It is probably reckless to forecast what computers will be doing 5 years from now, but Intel is working on something that will change the way we see operating systems.

Quote:

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What Xen is, is a very thin layer of software that essentially presents to the operating system an idealized hardware abstraction," said Simon Crosby, vice president of marketing for XenSource. The OS is no longer glued to the hardware but floats above it, talking to Xen as if it were the machine.

---

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtm...story_id=34175

hey, that's iteresting.... would be alot faster though