[rescue] NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP?

[Liam Proven]

On 10 August 2014 01:04, Carl R. Friend <crfriend at rcn.com> wrote:
>    I'm not slagging off on what Mica's become -- not by a long-shot;
> MS have a darned fine kernel now with it.  It's just a rotten shame
> that they had to ruin it with the POS that Windows 8 is.  If only
> Dave Cutler had taken not just Mica with him but also DCL...


I think that's a unfair on several counts.

NT isn't Mica. Yes, sure, NT contains design elements from VMS,
because it's written by some of the VMS team lead by the lead designer
of VMS. But it's not a version of VMS -- it's a relative. It's also
related to OS/2 and to Windows.

And yes, much of the stuff that people criticize about Windows is due
to the changes the marketing lizards have demanded. That's been true
since XP if not before. Even W2K had some bloat, and NT4 was less
modular than NT 3 before it.

As for W8, I used it for a couple of months as an experiment. (I
prefer Linux or Mac OS X on my own machines, generally.) The "Modern"
UI is not all that bad. It does work, it's perfectly usable with a
mouse and keyboard, and if you don't want it, you can largely ignore
it, without using crutches like Classic Menu replacements.

I re-added the old Quick Launch toolbar to my taskbar -- it's hidden
(as it has been since Vista) but it's still there. I pinned my
most-used apps to said taskbar, stuck it up the LHS side of the #1
desktop as I prefer, and it was a good, solid, quite quick and sleek
version of Windows. I only saw Metro, sorry, Modern in the form of the
Charms bar when I shut down.

Controversial opinion here, I know, but MICROS~1 did the right thing
with Metro, and it's going to regret backing down. Cheap devices like
Android tablets are going to be the Internet access tool of choice for
the other 4 billion people in the world as they come online in the
next decade. Very simple touch-driven interfaces will be predominant
UI until we get something like the SFnal computers of the recent movie
/Her/, who understand our speech, gaze, expressions and gestures as
well as another human. (Which they will, in time.)

MICROS~1 /had/ to force Windows into that sector. It did a good job,
but it's given in to the whiners who can't adapt, and now, it's either
going to get sidelined into a niche or its OSes will fork into a touch
version and a desktop version, with 2 app bases, and either of those
will probably be fatal.



--
Liam Proven b" Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk b" GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com b" Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) b" +420 702 829 053 (DR)