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The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

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Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#581

Post by yellowapple »

jstimpfle wrote: post #434
TeMPOraL wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm yet to see a practical data set that could not be encoded as a tree. Maybe if you have a cyclical data structure and you want to save that directly, but then it's a simple meta-level extension. For example, Lisp reader does that when reading S-expressions. If you want to create a list like this: 1 ---> 2 ---> 3-| ^_______________| you write: #1=(1 2 3 #1#), where #n=OBJECT means "this is the object N", and #n# me…

Yes, you can encode everything "as a tree". You can also encode everything "as binary", "as a big integer", whatever. That doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Unlike "as binary" or "as a big integer", a tree is structured. "As an arbitrarily-formatted string" would be much closer to those two comparison points.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#582

Post by sedachv »

mulmen wrote: post #267
sedachv wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is weekend wrenching and there is dealing with design flaws and poor manufacturing. Problems with the CB175 and CB550 that were not regular maintenance (carburetor/timing/valve/etc/etc) related: * fast cylinder wear (poor materials/manufacturing, engine rebuilds all around) * unreliable electric system ("mostly" fixed on CB550 with Charlie's solid state ignition and rectifier) * Leaking gaskets (design flaw) I…

What gaskets leaked? Side covers? I haven't had a problem with side cover gaskets but I did have some replacement non-JIS screws back out because they were not torqued properly. Can't speak to cylinder wear, my bike has close to 10k hard miles and doesn't compression test real well but does work fine.

Old side cover gaskets did, those were easy to replace. Something else was leaking before the engine rebuild, and then something else entirely started leaking after the rebuild.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#583

Post by atombender »

geezerjay wrote: post #578
atombender wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The famous "each tool does just one thing well" mantra is also a depressingly overblown myth. Among the current Unix tools, there is a ridiculous amount of overlap. That's why we have both "ls" and "find", even though they do the same thing conceptually. "ps" has column output, but the way it formats, sorts, selects etc. columns is reinvented and not transferable to other tools such as "lsof" and "netstat", not to me…

> That's why we have both "ls" and "find" I don't get what you're trying to say. "ls" lists files in a specific path while "find" searches for objects in a file system that match a specific query. Are you sure you're not confused and somehow assuming that "does just one thing well" should mean "another tool must not accomplish anything that might be remotely achievable by misusing another tool"?

Both "ls" and "find" "list files in a specific path" and "search for objects that match a specific query". There's total overlap. The difference is that "ls" is a presentation-oriented tool, whereas "find" is geared towards pipelines.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#584

Post by pjmlp »

cronjobber wrote: post #575
pjmlp wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of them were fixed in Inferno, but by then most stop paying attention. To the point even on HN many seem to be unaware that the line ended on Inferno and not Plan9.

Personally, I tend to slot Inferno closer to Java than to Plan9, even though I'm clear about the lineage. In that sense, the line of "real" operating systems ended at Plan9.

For me it is Inferno.

If you look at the architecture of mobile OSes, they were in the right direction.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#585

Post by jstimpfle »

yellowapple wrote: post #581
jstimpfle wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can encode everything "as a tree". You can also encode everything "as binary", "as a big integer", whatever. That doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Unlike "as binary" or "as a big integer", a tree is structured. "As an arbitrarily-formatted string" would be much closer to those two comparison points.

If you think strings (or "binary") are "unstructured", think again. (Start with: what does that even mean?)

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#586

Post by sedachv »

taneq wrote: post #323
sedachv wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will be in a junkyard within ten years though. I won't be able to find those sensors in a few years. Not true. You will be able to get an aftermarket ECU that can just ignore the sensors and run in open-loop mode. That will be exactly the same as running with carburetors: fixed fuel/air ratio that is almost always wrong. This is also the failure mode for OBDII cars - sensor failures lead to the ECU running in op…

Newer than 1990 doesn't mean fuel injected and sensors out the wazoo. I have a 2001 Bandit and it's brilliant, same power and fuel economy as the current model and pure old fashioned air cooled carbie goodness. Nearly 70k kms and the mechanic reckons it'll be good for as much again.

Exactly. 1990s carbureted Japanese bikes are far superior to 1970s ones in reliability both in terms of design and manufacturing quality. But CL550s go for more than Super Blackbirds. The only reason is the steep vintage/hipster markup.

The Bandit is a good example that parts availability has nothing to do with the technology used and everything to do with the market. My bike is actually a 2001 Bandit 600. The 2nd generation 1200 sold well in the United States, the 2nd generation 600 never did. The 1st generation 600 did sell. So there are a ton of aftermarket 1st generation 600 parts availabe in the US, but pretty much the only new replacement parts you can get for the 2nd generation 600 here (that are not in common with the 1200 or SV650, if you can figure out which ones those are) are rebuild kits for the off-the-shelf brakes and carbs, and you can get the gaskets cut. Everything else you either have to import from the UK or get custom-made, which usually ends up being cheaper (things I have had custom made: throttle cables, fork tube).

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#587

Post by theoh »

rusk wrote: post #580
markhahn wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is in the vanguard of only one thing: marketing.

What a lame and supercilious comment.

Even the great Butler Lampson has a slide set online which includes the item

Design (Apple's forté)

This is arguably a slightly more defensible version of the GP.

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#588

Post by webmaven »

flukus wrote: post #122
Animats wrote: post #33

There are many early UNIX design decisions that have outlived their shelf life by decades. Probably the biggest one is that UNIX is, at bottom, a terminal-oriented multi-user time sharing system. This maps badly to desktop, mobile, and server systems. The protection model is a mismatch for all those purposes. (Programs have the authority of the user. Not so good today as in the 1970s.) The administration model also m…

> The protection model is a mismatch for all those purposes. (Programs have the authority of the user. Not so good today as in the 1970s.) I disagree, I think this is still the sweet spot between security and utility. Users have been trained to just click approve on any privilege escalation dialog.

Users are also trained to run remotely fetched arbitrary scripts in order to install software. For example: https://calibre-ebook.com/download_linux

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#589

Post by webmaven »

Arizhel wrote: post #88
pjmlp wrote: post #49

"We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy." Rob Pike 2004, h…

>while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy. The problem here is that there aren't a lot of alternatives. You could use Windows, which is like listening only to music by MC Hammer, or you could use a Mac, which is like listening only to music by Duran Duran. Because of so…

So which OS is like listening only to music by Simon and Garfunkel?

Re: The Collapse of the Unix Philosophy

#590

Post by webmaven »

nxc18 wrote: post #153
Arizhel wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Windows 10 already sorted out the filename limitations. No, it hasn't. Filenames are still case-insensitive (and in a terrible way, where it seems to remember how they were first typed but that can never be changed), backslashes are still used for path separators instead of escaping characters, and the worst of all is that drive letters are still in use, which is an utterly archaic concept from the days of systems w…

Windows NT (the core OS) suffers none of those problems. The Windows (Win32) environment suffers those limitations. It also suffers 20+ years of strong binary compatibility, broad hardware support, and consistent reliability that systems of similar class (e.g. Linux desktops) can't match. If it makes you feel any better, drive letters are a convenient illusion made possible by the Win32 subsystem; NT has no such conc…

> consistent reliability

Is that a claim you can substantiate? I admit I stopped paying attention around the time that scale-up of expensive servers with high minimum specs + expensive software licenses was overtaken by scale-out approaches + open source, but NT never struck me as being particularly stable in the face of badly written software and drivers. Has it improved a lot in this dimension over the past 15 years?

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