At 02:01 PM 10/22/2007, Peter St. John wrote:
Jim,
I think we agree on some things (e.g., modular design is not
conducive to Digital Rights Management) and I must defer to your
expertise on most of what's left, but I have to speak up on a couple.
On 10/22/07, Jim Lux
<<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
...
I don't know that Windows (at least since NT) isn't actually already
a small kernel surrounded by (dare I say "embraced and extended by")
a lot of utilities. Sure, they're not command line utilities with
cryptic 2 letter names
It's trivial to overlay aliases on any cryptic two-letter commands
you like. Fortune offered a menu-driven user interface for folks who
didn't like "creat" or "su" in Sys V, in '81 ish.
Sure.. but the basic design model of kernel surrounding by cluster of
little utilities is how NT started out. It has, as several have
pointed out, morphed, for performance reasons, among others.
and a man page full of switches. However, an
awful lot of what people talk about as "Windows" isn't the kernel (a
lot of the GDI, for instance, has been separate from the "kernel",
per se, since pre WinNT)
I misread that, at first, as "GUI". I see that MS has the term
"Graphics Device Interface" and I'll allow that is separate from the "kernel".
Was separate, now part, now not. It sort of changes, as graphics
cards change and the "preferred coding model" changes (DirectX, etc.).
The game industry is responsible for a lot of the intertwining in
Windows. With the nice abstracted interfaces, they couldn't get
enough performance, so they did things like pull some graphics ops
into the kernel mode, provide all sorts of "hooks" and "bypasses" to
use the accelerators, etc.
Linux doesn't have a huge gamer user base, and there's no single
point that a game publisher and video card mfr could go hammer on to
say "give me speed!", so there's no tendency to try and shortcircuit
the architecture.
It does all this now. The question is whether you can get rid of a
lot of the other stuff, since at a very fundamental level, windows
follows an event driven model, where the events are largely from user
interaction.
Ding. The "event driven model" that is "fundamental" in MSWin (since
W95 or W98) comes from the GUI (but not the GDI) being integrated
with the OS. Which is not conducive to interoperability.
But.. in the original NT (3.x) it was still separated, and you could
actually run NT pretty much headless (I did this for some remote site
applications). I think over the years, it's gotten worse, because of
the demands to dispatch the events more quickly.
For a long time, the only way to remotely administer a NT box was
with a third party application pushing the pixels of the remote GUI
over the phone line to the troubleshooter's client. To me, using MSW
as a server was ...not efficacious. Programs don't talk to each
other using bitmaps and mouse clicks, unless there is a layer of OCR
in between. Imagine replacing every occurance of "|" is a
shellscript with a call to OCR AI.
I used to remotely administer NT 4.0 boxes with essentially only
command line utilities. The BORK was my friend.. it provided lots of
command line equivalents to the GUI management utilities.
Jim
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