[rescue] OT: Linux and USB on Intel

[David Passmore]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2003 at 04:13:22PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:

>    This whole "obsolete after four months" thing is a PC world thing, 
> not a Windows or Linux world thing.  Linux people tend to be at least 
> somewhat clueful (compared to Windows people) and can see through that 
> "buy me!" bullshit in the PC industry...but the Windows people see a 
> glossy ad in BusinessWeek and take it as if it were the word of God.

Some Linux people are clueful. Some Linux people only /think/ they're
clueful. To me, Linux world = PC world. It runs on other architectures, but
its primary home is x86.

>    But Mike, bless his Windows-infected soul, had been "taught" that 
> when a computer is slow, you "need more megahurts!"  I scored him a 
> 256MB SIMM on eBay, and he was amazed at the difference.

This is really subjective, but I've seen this kind of ignorance on both
sides of this issue.

>    ...and a generation of computer users that think Perl is a good 
> programming language.  But Windows, on the other hand, is bringing up a 
> generation of computer users that think writing HTML or dragging VB 
> objects around on a screen is "programming".

That really is a separate community. I wholeheartedly believe that Windows
has already done the vast majority of damage that it is going to do. I have
never had to fight to keep Windows out of my systems, except at Digex, which
was years ago-- the damage has already been done there.

>    Like I said, I agree wholeheartedly with your reasoning as you stated 
> in your original message.  I just believe that Linux is, by huge leaps 
> and bounds, the lesser of two evils.  I'd rather trust my paycheck a 
> serious, mature, stable operating system like Solaris, VMS, or HP-UX 
> over Linux any day...but given the choice between Linux and Windows, 
> well...it's all relative.

It's not a choice between Linux and Windows. That's the point I've been
trying to make here. It's a choice between Linux and commercial UNIXes.

>    I collect computer architecture books from the 1940s-1960s for 
> exactly this reason.  Many things that were "invented" relatively 
> recently (many RISC and post-RISC concepts as a general example) 
> existed as a matter of course in some of the very first scientific 
> computers ever built, more than a decade before you and I were born.

My point was not that 'anything old is bad'. Have you ever read old articles
where Linux 'folks' heckle Andrew Tannenbaum for criticizing Linux's
monolithic kernel? Tannenbaum has forgotten more about OS design than I will
ever know. My point was that for some older techhnologies, there are better
things out there, else everyone would be using bubble sort, or the
Lempel-Ziv encoding algorithm (wait, people still use ZIP... never mind).

>    Anyway.  I'm not trying to shoot down your point, in fact I agree 
> with it.  I'm just trying to explain my point of view more clearly.

I still love you, Dave.

David