Feeping Creaturism (was Re: Unlimited software warranties)

[John G. DeArmond]

rcd at ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) writes:

>I think the "cost per pound" of software has not gone up that much!  I'm
>serious--I think that if you check $/Mb, you'll find it's level or even
>down.  (The issue of whether you want all those extra Mb in the package is
>a separate one--that's not my point here.:-)

:-)  Funny you'd mention that.  We just got our ISC OFFICIAL ISV kit in today.
The UPS man will never be the same.  And yes, I WOULD like to return, oh,
perhaps 10 lbs of that.

>If you'd seen the figures coming out as V.4 emerged, you would have been
>amazed at the amount of new/changed code with each delivery.  We're talking
>time frame of months and change/new amounts of 10^5-10^6 lines.  That costs
>money.  Again, you can argue whether it's money well-spent, and/or whether
>you really want to pay for it, but don't think the OS is a cash cow sitting
>in the corner that you just milk whenever you want money.

>Actually, John, in another place you used the Toyota analogy, which I like
>a little better than hotrod, but be that as it may.  This brings me back to
>my original ranting.  Sure, I want a Toyota-like OS...but I'm atypical.
>And I don't believe 1968; I say the OS market stands today about where
>cars did in '59.


>    In '91, people want a big OS with all the features and a chrome-plated
>    bas-relief GUI at any cost.  They don't care if it wastes memory or
>    it's slow--memory is cheap and CPUs keep getting faster.  I think
>    Peter's idea of "UNIX Classic" is neat, but I doubt you could give it
>    away to more than a handful of people.

Sorry guy, I gotta disagree.  I'd hate to see Unix go the way of DOS and
start putting in what I call "Road Test" features; ie, those features that
make dumbsh*t magazine reviewers babble but annoy the people who use the
stuff all day.  I can't believe that Atlanta is that much different than
the rest of the country.  I get around quite a bit in the Unix community
here.  I see only spots of feeping creaturism, mostly with people who
wanna play the windows game.  Most of us just want stable, functional and
high performance platforms.

And while we're talking about Release 4, I'd rather not.  I used to think
that Unix was a product too good for even AT&T to kill.  With Release 4, I'm
not so sure.

Well hey, this is a network, let's do a little survey.  A hand count will do.
(If anyone actually wants to answer these questions, I'll tally 'em.)

Question 1:  How many people are wetting their pants waiting for System 4 on
	a PC platform.  Hmm... A hand or 2.  Well, there's always those types.
	After all, some people buy RS/6000s too.

Question 2:  Given a mythological Unix vendor, call it ISC, would you rather
	see this vendor put its resources in System 4 or would you rather see
	those resources put into making release 3.xxx more stable, more secure,
	faster, and last but not least, not have the Inode bug?  Hmm, looks
	damn near unanamous for release 3.

Question 3:	Same premise but the alternative this time is this company sinking
	its resources in merging in Berkely functionality and compatability and
	maybe even getting with other vendors to try again to merge sys V and
	Berkely.  Hmm.  I did not know middle aged programmers could do 
	double back flips.  

Question 4:	How many people would just kill for a high performance K&R 
	compiler with ANSI and POSIX relegated to the 4 letter word file?
	And a shared library facility that is a bit less brain dead in the process?
	Hmmm.  Anybody remember the first aid for hyperventillation?


Well there you have it.  Leading programmers everywhere vote for stable,
reliable, functional and high performance platforms.  By overwhelming
margins, programmers and managers hate porting and really want to devise
workarounds to bugs once and get on with business rather then being 
presented with a whole new world every morning.  And finally, we want to 
know what it would take to get AT&T declared an unfit parent and have 
the custody of Unix delivered to the user community?

>Alas, software standards activities are one of the biggest sources of
>rampant, gratuitous feature frenzy.  Have a look at the "international-
>ization" goo that wants every program to be at least a page of code, and
>which has propagated baroque national-collating-sequence requirements into
>programs that heretofore had nothing to do with natural language issues.

We're in 100% agreement here.  If I could only get the ANSI committee in
a dark room for 15 minutes....  How could any group of reportedly educated
men take a splendedly functional language like C and break it so thoroughly?
I'll stop that thread now that my blood pressure is aproaching 4 digits.

>(This came about from the idiotic prejudice that ASCII somehow represents
>a parochial US-English collating sequence.)  Notice that we're going to get
>to deal with ISO OSI in the lower network layers--not because TCP/IP had
>problems there, but precisely because TCP/IP was an accepted, widely-used,
>successful standard!  (It was used too heavily in the US to be accepted:-)
>Look at the trigraph wart in standard C--something that nobody really
>wanted and that doesn't solve the problem anyway.  Try to sort through the
>chaos of how ttys are supposed to work.  I could go on for megabytes.

(Caution:  An overtly nationalistic statement follows.)  I've not figured out
why America didn't just say NO!  Dammit, we invented the language. We invented
the OS.  We invented the platforms.  And we write most of the good software.
Most of the rest of the technical world speaks English anyway.  Seems like
a take-it-or-leave-it attitude would fit well.  We could have given them
Pascal as a sacrificial language.  Please!

I suspect that this phenomena is based on a distorted version of "winners'
humility" that America tends to indulge in.  You know, what they taught you
in elementary school about being a humble winner.  America seems to have 
a need to pull itself down to the rest of the world.  Oh well.  Probably
opens up another market for some vendor to offer "C classic" to go along
with "Unix Classic" and a "TCP/IP Classic."

Well, this thread has been fun.  I hope we've given all the PC platform
vendors something to think about. (My email indicates as much.)

John

-- 
John De Armond, WD4OQC        | "Purveyors of speed to the Trade"  (tm)
Rapid Deployment System, Inc. |  Home of the Nidgets (tm)
Marietta, Ga                  | 
{emory,uunet}!rsiatl!jgd      |"Politically InCorrect.. And damn proud of it