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

[Mouse]

>>> [Android] 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.
> I think we have a disconnect.  Please re-read what I said above your
> response.

Yeah.  Multiple OS updates per year.  Sounds like poor QA to me.  For
computers that are supposed to be just tools, uptimes should routinely
be measured in years (well, except for things like power outages, for
machines without the sort of built-in UPS most smartphones and tablets
these days have).

> Ahh ok.  I, on the other hand, want to make phone calls and send text
> messages.  That's why I have a phone.

Yes.  I have a phone for that.  It is, however, a phone, designed first
(and pretty much only) as a phone.  It is not a general-purpose palmtop
computer with a phone glued onto the side and an OS that keeps most of
the general-purpose aspects locked away from users.

>> 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.
> Understood.  To each his own.

Indeed.  (I'm reminded of someone, elselist, who wrote of going to a
mass-market computer store and some salesdroid enthusiastically telling
him how some computer or other would handle his email and his pictures
and music and who knows what all else he didn't care about, completely
failing to mention the one thing he actually _did_ want to do with it:
program it.  (Hence my use of "salesdroid": someone who tries to sell a
customer something before even finding out what the customer wants -
or, worse, after finding out but ignoring - deserves that title, it
seems to me.))

> I don't like some of the design decisions either, but there exists
> nothing better in the current era, that I've been able to find.  If
> I'm wrong (and I'd love to be, since I hate running friggin' PeeCees)
> please point me in the right direction.

Well, I don't know your tradeoffs - they obviously differ drastically
from mine - but from the little I can infer of them from this exchange,
I suspect there may not be much better at the moment.  However, I am
not au courant enough with what exists to be confident I'm not missing
something, so that may mean little.

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