On Mon, 3 Jul 2000, Khimenko Victor wrote:
>
> You are speaking from bitterness so I will forgive you but it's FAR from
> true.
I am bitter because some people here feel they have to resort to name
calling, stupid, asshole, and other forms of verbal assualt rather than discuss
something on it's merits. If there is a problem with an idea instead of a
rational discussion of the problem it rapidly breaks down to personal attacks.
I have been using Linux since .98 release of the kernel. Over that time
I have seen a lot of major improvements in effeciency and functionality. I
would love to see it displace Windows and overpriced commercial Unices.
But I see some major impediments to that happening. On the desktop,
people are not going to use an OS that can't decently handle multimedia
applications and that is herky-jerky under moderate load.
Ingo's patch addresses this issue. Perhaps it's not the right approach,
but it fixes a serious glaring deficiency in Linux with respect to the Desktop
market. By the time the "right" fix is developed and in place, if ever, that
market may be lost. Microsoft isn't sitting idle while Linux is being
developed.
On the server front, Linux is not going to succeed if it isn't reasonably
secure. Solar Designs patch is not a be-all and end-all for security, but it
does provide some useful enhancements.
Back in the early days of VCR's I bought a Beta machine. I loved how
crisp the video was relative to the smeared washed-out video from VHS decks
that my friends owned. I loved the quality of the Hi-Fi audio, it was and is
truely awesome relative to VHS "Hi-Fi (not!)" audio. The rewind time was
easily 1/3rd of most VHS decks, and the way you could shuttle the tape around
instantly because it didn't have to load/unload from the drum each time was
great.
But you know what? It lost in the market place. VHS initially got two
hours on a tape, Beta only one. You could get a full movie on one VHS tape, it
took two of Beta. VHS came out with long play and extended play modes first.
The quality was and is garbage, but they were first to the market. Today, Beta
is dead, VHS is alive. Perhaps when DVD write becomes cheap enough it will be
displaced. But the point is, being too late to the market kills a product.
If Linux does not provide things needed for the desktop and server markets
soon, it will lose the opportunity to dominate those areas. They you'll have a
very maintainable kernel that nobody will use. Sure, there will be a few of
you with Linux boxes doing some esoteric function in a herky-jerky insecure
manner but easily maintainable manner, but the mainstream public will be using
something else.
I don't want to see Linux become a bloated unmaintainable piece of crap,
nor do I want to see it die on the vine, which if latency, security, and
stability issues are not addressed, it surely will do.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jul 07 2000 - 21:00:12 EST