Linux to the fore
Linux machines in mass distribution to kids might be the beginning of the end for other OS's (Operating Systems). Once you have people who learn on Linux, they will never go for the others.
Sometimes a fresh start is exactly like this; the old road isn't repaved, it's just bypassed.
As for MS Windows, we have have reached the amazing point where people are willing to pay extra for simplicity, for fewer features. The widespread reaction against Vista proves it, with users going to extra trouble to avoid the new OS. The best a revised version could do would be to provide an installation package that allows for a very stripped-down install. But at this point the code might be so intertwined that it's impossible to go very far in that direction, toward true modularity.
Imagine, for example, a version of MS Word that could be installed in a VERY stripped down form. You would add features only as the proven need arose -- you would go to Help to find something you suddenly needed (say, adding an index or footnotes), and the help page would give you the option of installing that feature. Even after years of use, most people would end up with a very tiny version, nothing like the monstrosity you get now, a vast accretion of features almost nobody ever uses.
These things have grown by a sort of weird, "piling on" version of evolution. It's as though if somebody once needed a third eye in the back of his head, then everybody from then on would have to born with the additional eye. That approach eventually fails because it assumes that there are no costs connected with adding things, when in fact there are costs in operational efficiency, coordination, resource use, and inertia. Which is why nature doesn't do it that way. When cave fish no longer use their eyes, those structures become highly vulnerable to negative selection; eventually the biological resources that were spent on eyes get saved or reallocated to still-necessary functions. The Microsoft approach, by contrast, is not only to maintain eyes that are not used, but to pile on a few extra ones. You know, just in case.
Something about this reminds me of the Roadrunner cartoons, where Wily Coyote runs off the edge of the cliff and only then realizes that he's gone too far and is standing on thin air. You see him suddenly realize where he is, but he's gone too far to get back, and down he goes...
Byron
Sometimes a fresh start is exactly like this; the old road isn't repaved, it's just bypassed.
As for MS Windows, we have have reached the amazing point where people are willing to pay extra for simplicity, for fewer features. The widespread reaction against Vista proves it, with users going to extra trouble to avoid the new OS. The best a revised version could do would be to provide an installation package that allows for a very stripped-down install. But at this point the code might be so intertwined that it's impossible to go very far in that direction, toward true modularity.
Imagine, for example, a version of MS Word that could be installed in a VERY stripped down form. You would add features only as the proven need arose -- you would go to Help to find something you suddenly needed (say, adding an index or footnotes), and the help page would give you the option of installing that feature. Even after years of use, most people would end up with a very tiny version, nothing like the monstrosity you get now, a vast accretion of features almost nobody ever uses.
These things have grown by a sort of weird, "piling on" version of evolution. It's as though if somebody once needed a third eye in the back of his head, then everybody from then on would have to born with the additional eye. That approach eventually fails because it assumes that there are no costs connected with adding things, when in fact there are costs in operational efficiency, coordination, resource use, and inertia. Which is why nature doesn't do it that way. When cave fish no longer use their eyes, those structures become highly vulnerable to negative selection; eventually the biological resources that were spent on eyes get saved or reallocated to still-necessary functions. The Microsoft approach, by contrast, is not only to maintain eyes that are not used, but to pile on a few extra ones. You know, just in case.
Something about this reminds me of the Roadrunner cartoons, where Wily Coyote runs off the edge of the cliff and only then realizes that he's gone too far and is standing on thin air. You see him suddenly realize where he is, but he's gone too far to get back, and down he goes...
Byron
posted by Byron | Wednesday, December 12, 2007
1 Comments:
I have absolutely zero regrets about moving from WinXP to OpenSuSE 10.2 Linux when Vista came out about a year ago. OpenOffice Writer opens my Word documents and provides at least as much capability, and the same is true for the rest of the free OpenOffice suite, GnuCash for Quicken, Gimp for Photoshop, etc., and with WINE, a free Windows emulator, even sophisticated DirectX and OpenGL RPGs run at least as well as under Windows on the same hardware. Windows XP SP2 has brought my daughter's PC to its knees, so I may soon liberate it with Linux as well and bin yet another Microsoft licensed product...
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