Comment Re:Building a desktop OS from scratch [OT?] (Score 1) 156
Because tool is all that computer is. It's not a piece of art, it's not a personal friend -- it is a mere tool. Like a hammer or a pencil or anything. Only a bit more versatile.
I have a dream where you walk up to a computer (at that time rather a terminal), you touch it - and the usage of it is as evident to you as the usage of a hammer.
Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC had the same dream of ubiquitous computing. Many small computers embedded around us that function invisibly without the user having to worry about OS, software, hardware, etc.
PDAs are close, but they aren't transparent enough to us because we still have to fool around with the clumsy interface.
Tivo is closer, is acts like an appliance should-- hiding the underlying operations and recording my shows. I don't have to worry about filemanagement or any crap like that in my VCR, it just works.
In the morning, I just want to turn the knob for darker toast, I don't want to tweak the toaster kernel and recompile...(meanwhile on my PC, I enjoy the tweaking)
Back to the point: I agree that OSes should shift to make our computers more like tools, but I don't think Linux and MacOS are particularly wrong for it.
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I have a dream where you walk up to a computer (at that time rather a terminal), you touch it - and the usage of it is as evident to you as the usage of a hammer.
Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC had the same dream of ubiquitous computing. Many small computers embedded around us that function invisibly without the user having to worry about OS, software, hardware, etc.
PDAs are close, but they aren't transparent enough to us because we still have to fool around with the clumsy interface.
Tivo is closer, is acts like an appliance should-- hiding the underlying operations and recording my shows. I don't have to worry about filemanagement or any crap like that in my VCR, it just works.
In the morning, I just want to turn the knob for darker toast, I don't want to tweak the toaster kernel and recompile...(meanwhile on my PC, I enjoy the tweaking)
Back to the point: I agree that OSes should shift to make our computers more like tools, but I don't think Linux and MacOS are particularly wrong for it.
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