Comment Re:Does this mean no more Gnome desktop? (Score 1) 693
Apropo "vast layers of layers of wrappers for layers of abstractions for wrappers for 3rd party libraries", I bought MS DOS on Ebay the other day, but it was only sold as a 5 1/4" floppy for full 4.01 retail version (retail until I read the fine print, comes with GW Basic) so I got a 5 1/4 floppy drive too to build my own system. What joy it is to watch a computer boot off a 5 1/4 floppy. You can't get more bare to the metal with direct hardware access than DOS. In fact, the intergalactic Borg(I'm saying this to help my ex-doctor keep her job) run DOS(disk operating system, disk being key, meaning if you have more than 250 KB of precious data floating in volatile RAM, you're not doing something right. I power off DOS by cutting power to it, and it loves it.) on their peripherals, 16 bit, and genetically varied high bit Unix on their mainframes. Like queen bees carry genetic variety but there is no need for the worker bees to not be identical copies of each other (btw, losing key worker bees can collapse a hive, so for hives that get trucked a good policy is to never have all the key workers out at the same time. Btw bee drones serve no function other than creating genetic variability by showing up at drone congregation areas to gang bang a queen that shows up and fall to a glorious death. Unlike humans, she can later manually manage which eggs get which sperm.) The biggest issue in computer security or computer science in general these days is lack of genetic variability. Life is all about competition, but also maintaining genetic variability. Every time I played Age of Empires and saw the "You Are Victorious", that reminded me of "You are left alone." In FreeCiv you can win without being alone, in fact you can play to see how few RIP's you can get before your ship reaches Alpha Centauri. When you hit yourself with antibiotics and all that's left is Clostridium Difficile in your guts, it gets so pissed from being lonely, it sends you into anaphylactic shock. The wonderfully efficient potato won the competition of foodstuff grown on 7 acres in Ireland in the 1840's (because 7 acres was not enough to sustain a family of 5, (because 2 kids are not enough to sustain population levels)), and being a monoculture, it was vulnerable, and caused starvation. The bananas biggest problem is no sex life, lack of genetic variability. The biggest problem of Software today is lack of genetic variability - we used to have DEC VAX, SGI Irix, IBM AIX, HP-UX, SCO, BSD, Linux, BeOS, DR DOS, PC DOS, MS DOS, WinNT, Win9x, Novell Netware, OS/2, Mac, Next, and now all we have left are WinNT, Mac, Linux, all friggin bloated beyond belief. I'm talking things where you store files on local disk, not smart phones or cloud bullshit devices. Of these, Linux is the most genetically varied, and it's sad to see Gnome for lack of funds, but there are plenty of other window managers. In fact Lighthouse Puppy 4.1.2rc1 with Mariner (i.e. KDE), completely lacks Gnome, the default, IceWM is surprisingly usable, and only rarely do you need to boot into the bloat of KDE. Unfortunately Web standards are moving so fast, and everything is getting DRM'd, that genetic variability in browsers, or even in such simple things as pdf readers, will be a thing of the past, as Adobe Acrobat is the only one able to handle the standard DRM. We have these fake companies pretending to be competing - Adobe, Microsoft, Corel, Apple etc. when in fact they are one and the same gang.In fact Microsoft sent a cash infusion into Apple right after the antitrust trials, else we'd be left with WinNT and Linux only. By the way apple was never serious competition to Windows, as a Rolls Royce or Lexus is not a serious competition to a Cavalier or Corolla. Luckily the days we get ARM and GoogleOS, but we used to have x86, MIPS, RISC, Alpha, etc, and even in x86 Cyrix, Via, AMD, Intel, to not even talk about the variety of graphics cards back in the 90's. Now it's all system on chip, cheap, no more graphics cards, bye bye.