[extropy-chat] when will computers improve?

[Alejandro Dubrovsky]

On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 20:45, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2003 at 05:58:00PM -0500, Brian Lee wrote:
> 
> > I just wanted to mention this as the "Windows has to be rebooted once every 
> > n units of time" FUD hasn't been applicable since windows2000 (or maybe 
> > even NT4sp3).
> 
> I guess I'm just a power user. The other people in the office don't reboot
> nearly as often. Whatever I'm doing, it's reproducible. The patcheritis is
> what all current desktop systems have; *BSD as server somewhat less so.
> 
> The instability is hardly a Windows problem, however, you have to design 
> a system properly (e.g., if you have a recent ATI an OpenGL screen blanker
> can lock up your Linux kernel, etc).
> 
Yes, any bad driver can crash a monolithic OS's kawasaki.  Got new
hardware, expect problems (and if you got old bits too, crap hardware
doesn't help).  But it doesn't tend to stay in that state for long. Does
it make OS design a trillion times easier though?  I'm sure it does. 
Look at the state of all desktop microkernels.  
On my side, i haven't had a crash in about a year, and that was playing
with probably (not provably) broken hardware (or at least win2000 on
another machine didn't like it either). (btw, this doesn't mean my
uptime is a year. I reboot on average every couple of months after a
power outage, or to upgrade the kernel)
(ah, yes, this is vanilla 2.4.${MAX(x)} linux, with tainted NVidia
drivers).  I don't miss those wasted couple of minutes terribly much. 
Writing this email probably took more time than all of those reboots
combined.

> I'm disgusted with the engineering aspect of all modern consumer-grade
> systems, whether hardware or software.
> 
>From the point of view of a not-yet-calcified member of the younger
generation (which missed the awesomness of the 70s VMS, and the
everything-has-been-done-in lisp machines) it is going quite well.  DOS
4.0 -> linux-2.4.23 and TRS-80 -> duron 1gig have been up all the way
(as well as every single other aspect of either consumer hardware or
software (graphics card, network speed, storage capacity, monitor
size/quality, content viewers, content writers, content organisers,
content distributors, content availability, programming language
compatibility with brain (not by much, i admit), interfaces (mice,
scanners, sound)). I expect (naively perhaps) for these trends to
continue.

alejandro