[rescue] Linux wet paint, was Re: Spark10 CPU question (must fix - SPARC damnit :-) )

[Mouse]

> I can't disagree on any of those points.  However, the real-world
> situation with Linux isn't quite so bleak.  This is evident by the
> simple fact that, in a great many applications, including the sending
> of this email, it works.

If all you're interested in is a black-box tool, then, sure, go ahead
and use Linux.  Or WinCE.  Or VxWorks.  Or whatever else you find does
what you want it to do without doing too much you don't want.

Assumng, of course, you can _tell_ what it's doing, which I suspect you
mostly can't, except for the most superficial user-interaction things.

>>> And Android is just fantastic and generally just WORKS, 'nuff said.
>> [...] I disagree.  [...]  It's a huge crawling horror pitched over
>> the fence with no real documentation.
> Mine just works.  All day, every day.  My phone and several tablets.
> I reboot a couple of times per year to install OS updates, but that's
> it.

Sounds like poor QA to me.  Unless you've been meddling with the OS.

> How do yours fail?

I don't have any, because Android fails to do what I want in one of the
very first, and most important to me, ways: it is not open source.
Every Android device I have found such information out about has
required binary blob drivers for at least some of the hardware.  (That
it's hard to find such information at all for most Android devices is
another, and perhaps worse, failing.  For my purposes, of course.)

If there is an exception, I would love to hear about it.

> Not liking the way something is designed is very different from
> thinking it doesn't or cannot do its job.

But what is "its job"?  The first job of an operating system for one of
my computers is to be fully open source.  Computers are _not_ black-box
tools to me, and a system - hardware or software - that assumes they
are has, for my purposes, already failed.

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