getting screwed by modern unix systems for no reason...

[acroyear]

Sherman, set the wayback machine for 22 years ago.

Now give me a unix system.  Specs?  Nice CPU, decent (not exceptional, thanks to Congress trying to screw the Japanese and screwing us instead) memory, cool monitor and hey, X11R4 seems to be running pretty nice...In a couple of years, there might be a decent library to go on it, if Microsoft and HP have anything to say about it.

Now what was wrong with this picture?  A *tiny* hard drive.  A mere 32 meg.  Hmm...we keep running out of space just putting the basic dist on it, nevermind having actual room to do our own thing.  Ok, NFS and a central user box helped a little, but it's still tiny and there's more stuff to add that's HUGE, like all that Motif stuff coming down the pipe.  I can't get a bigger one, 'cause they're just too damn expensive (especially with all of IBM's patents - and they're the COMPETITION).  What to do...

Oh, I know, lets *share* the libraries.

And the Unix equivilant of DLL Hell was born.

If you've ever dealt with Solaris, you are so deep in shared library hell that even Dante would go, "dude, what the fuck did YOU do?".

Now back to the present, where the truth of today is: hard drive space is cheap.  It is practically free.  You can't give hard drives away.  I have more hard drive space attached to my desktop right now than my entire school had in 1988.

So why the FUCK do we still have shared libraries and shared library hell every time we try to get two 3rd party tools from two different companies to actually co-exist on the same fucking box, where one needs "2.2.1" and the other needs "2.2.1.3" and neither will work with the other?

There is no fucking reason for it any more.  None at all.

The solution: take advantage of all that cheap fucking disk space and go back to static linking.  A million compatibility problems solved at once.  Everybody nicely provides, hard-coded into their programs' binaries, everything they need and nobody has to go installing a million other things and worry about them breaking everything else they have.

It all just works, bitches.

Then we can all get back to the other incompatbility issue, like the fact that Solaris still provides a brain-dead bourne sh that hasn't changed a single line of code in 35 years.  You know, REAL problems.

Comments

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for all the info! I have to wonder if when the very-slow-moving-government *started* the process, they were in the right, but by the time they got to actually doing anything, much time had passed and the events you laid out had come to pass.

Some of the "netbooks" out there are being sold with Linux because their "hard drives" and RAM are too small for Vista. Of course, these are for users that only want web/e-mail access on the road, so the operating system is probably irrelevant for them, as long as it works.

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

which fits into your #2, I guess. I originally read it as meaning specialized technical applications, such as running a piece of hardware or doing a particular type of analysis over and over. But I guess "checking e-mail" also qualifies as "very dedicated purpose."

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

They would have been in the right if they'd known the industry. There are reasons it is good that some things remain heavily competitive (and protected through patent and copyright wars, etc), and there are reasons it is good that some things become commodities.

But Congress should not and never be the ones to make that decision. They really don't know crap about some of the industries they try to regulate. And that was the REAL clincher about this, that Congress did it through a bill rather than it coming from the FTC whose JOB it is to figure that crap out.

In short, it came from a lobby from one particular minority player in the chips market who actually passed himself off as representing the whole industry rather than the one tiny company that would be leveraged out of business if the Japanese took over this.

But it's like the difference between parts and the whole and in this case, they got it backwards, and applied the worst of the Auto industry experience. They thought that if the Japanese had the monopoly on the parts, they would control the whole.

But the auto industry experience showed the opposite: parts is parts - the Americans had the monopoly on the parts, but the Japanese won out on better designs of the whole product.

This the computer industry knew damn well, starting with people like Steve Wozniak at Apple, where he built the disk controller for Apple I's first disk drive from *7* chips (where IBM's equiv model used *35*). *Design* is key, not monopoly of parts.

Congress though they were "protecting jobs" by keeping factory workers in the places that make those chips, but the industry would have used them anyways, just for different chips and chipsets.

Congress really did know absolutely nothing about the industry.

And given "It's a series of tubes...", aside from VA's Rich Boucher (who represents the corner of south-west Virginia where all the colleges like VA-Tech and Roanoke are), they remain this ignorant most of the time.