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

[thatliardiego.livejournal.com]

It's tough work being a compu-Luddite.

[lesa.livejournal.com]

"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?"

This is the FUNNIEST geek thing I have heard in TEN YEARS!

FTW!!!!!

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

Congress trying to screw the Japanese and screwing us instead
Whoa, interesting statement. What did our government do to us now?

I don't know much about Linux beyond the use of a penguin, but maybe space-saving methods are useful in some of the netbooks that use flash memory instead of hard drives?

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

In the late 1980s, regulators in Congress, concerned about a possible Japanese incursion into the processor & chips market that would have a devastating effect on American businesses as they had the auto industry, decided to put a partial embargo, a quota, on the amount of memory chips that Japanese companies could ship to the United States.

This was an act of pig-headed ignorance in that they did not actually consult with the American companies that would have been (to Congress's eyes) the competition. Then nature (literally) took its course and made things worse.

Had they actually talked to Motorola, Intel, and friends, they'd have learned something that to us is very obvious: memory is "cheap". It takes no brains to design a memory chip, just like it takes no brains to design a logic gate chip. Memory was, to Intel's mind, the most obvious candidate for a commodity, and as such, they and others in the states had already decided to get out of that soon-to-be unprofitable market because they literally didn't need it. The real brains are in the processors and the controller cards, the brains that keep American jobs going in the hardware business. So they were perfectly willing to let the Japanese, always a generation behind, have the memory market because they knew there would be a flood, a drop in prices, and their own expensive chips would sell better.

Now Congress didn't talk to the industry, so they didn't know the Americans were thinking like this. So they suddenly put a limit on the amount of memory any single Japanese company could import.

Then, as I said, nature took its course: an earthquake in Japan destroyed one of the two principle memory chip factories.

So all of a sudden, when Moore's law is about to flip another generation with the 286 and 386 PCs and the 68000's latest version in the new Mac's being put out by Sculley in the first Jobs-less Apple era (and their drive to try to get into the business market), memory costs have suddenly made PCs and Macs too expensive to own - they held at the $3,000 mark ($6,000 if you wanted a real workstation) when they should have dropped to the $1,500 point for the home user.

PC (and clone) sales stagnated, Apple shares dropped like a rock and stayed down until Jobs returned, the big Unix dealers (having moved to silicon over the decade before) had their first big CRUNCH (Data General and DEC effectively became non-players around this time), nobody tried to get back into the console games market, and the Japanese, intended to be harmed by Congress, made out like bandits over the great shortage.

It took almost a decade for things to recover.

[klytus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the history lesson. I never knew any of this.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Most of it grokked from Accidental Empires, specifically the two chapters written for the 2nd edition in '96.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

btw, almost anybody with a flash memory notebook is either 1) running windows, or 2) has a very dedicated purpose for it and so isn't as likely to run into the problem of DLL Hell / shared library hell that a server box running 12 different 3rd party apps is going to hit.

it's a non-issue because it is a dedicated market.

it doesn't hit mobile devices as hard because the mobile dealers all set the minimum standard at a pretty high level, and while there are 3rd party applications, there's few third party *libraries*, and where there are, they use static linking. Palm OS supported dynamic linking for a while, but just like here, it was more problems than it was worth. While the OS supports it, app makers have given up on it and gone static except when linking to PalmOS itself.

[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.