``...Our example of the isolated villager defies that this being a useful path to follow. That villager needs an elegant but powerful system, flexible, reliable and understandable. S/he cannot be confined to simply a GUI, nor confronted simply with command lines, there needs to be a shift which allows tinkering with the insides, complete customerisation, modest to complex coding and powerful off-the-shelf software and hardware. Obviously it will take sometime for such a combination to become cheap enough to picked up and bought at reasonable prices (even if the companants are dated), but the overall direction we need to move technically is beyond the business and university bias we now have.
Elements of a solution are in the making, XML, TAOS, SHEEP, AMIGA stem from a user driven desire for better computing to combine them into accessable power, but as far as the industry is concerned these developments are (with the exception of XML) beneath comment. But consider the power of virtual CPU programing (TAOS, uses a virtual CPU which is translated to combination of real CPUs), addressable programs and componants (AMIGA and SHEEP) which have tiny footprints and make modest demands on RAM and CPU time, an elegant Desktop approach where the command line is seemlessly itegrated (AMIGA). A single scripting language that can be compiled but also can address any program or componant and allow for infinite fine tuning of a working environment (SHEEP). And most important of all a universal format for data (XML).
Add to this an environment which can be hosted (LINUX and WIndows - more to follow) or run indepenantly maximising the hardware...'' Greg Schofield
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I sure don't disagree with any of this. But, from my very limited experience in programming (from long ago) I would say that designing systems for business is extremely complex. The main reason is that every business has evolved their own way of doing business and is absolutely fixed on the peculiarities of their methods and proceedures in the utterly false and arrogant belief that it is the best and only direction. This forces design to contort and twist itself in what most often amounts to silly, archane, and thoroughly irrational configurations. Added to this is the absurd meglomanic need of management to control every detail, particularly the interface. This adds tremendous bulk. The combination makes a system close to a useless nightmare of complexity---in other words a typical M$uck OS and application suite.
Sorry, I digress. Your post deserves a better response, but I am tied up with other things at the moment.
Let me say that much of the apparent difficulty of learning to use a unix system is due to its dependence on understanding how the computer and its components work, rather than any particular obscurity or subtlety in unix. What seems obscure in most cases is the nature of the underlying hardware or firmware. I think you alude to this, or it is implied in the last sentence.
Anyway, this is a kind of on-going thread that comes up now and then, so we can revisit it later. Gotta go.
Chuck Grimes