Bill Moffitt's Weblog

Tuesday July 27, 2004

Stuff that keeps me up... Y'know, there's a lot of stuff that bothers me. Truthfully, there's not much that keeps me up nights any more (except, perhaps, Zammis, the geriatric and stunningly flatulent Labrador), but I'm still bugged by stuff.

1. Servers and clients. I continue to be amazed that we use the same OS for both; it's like using my Swiss Army knife to open letters and cans. It does a pretty good job, but I have a letter opener and a can opener, and I'd rather use them.

UNIX (I include Linux) is a great server OS: it's powerful, configurable, modular, cryptic. I love it, I run Solaris and Linux as my desktop OSs of choice, but I've been using UNIX for 20 years. I use Java Desktop system, and I find it very easy, but it's really clear from the design of UNIX and Linux that it was never designed to be easy to use. And, to be a great desktop system, it really has to be easy to use. I don't want my mother to have to learn anything about UNIX to use a computer.

My new Sony Clié is very powerful and easy to use. It was designed from the ground up to be a client; it is not a capable server. And I like that about it.

Windows, of course, in my (never) humble opinion, fails on both counts. And Macintosh is only slightly better. I don't want my mother to have to learn how to keep either of these systems running; I want something more like a big Palm Pilot for her.

2. (Not) hiding complexity. I was trying to help a colleague who was having trouble with his Windoze XP machine this morning. He couldn't access web pages. We changed the proxy settings, checked the IP address, and about four other things before I said, "are you sure your ethernet cable is plugged in?" Geeeezzzzz...

When he tried to bring up the web page, why didn't a big window come up saying, "I can't see the network... are you sure your ethernet cable is plugged in?" I know that the web browser doesn't get that level of information from the IP stack, etc., but there is no technical reason why the OS couldn't do this. And a lot of other stuff that causes people (like me) to waste vast quantities of time futzing with computers (like my wife's) to get them to do what they're supposed to.

3. Incompleteness. As mentioned earlier, my new Sony Clié is very powerful and easy to use, but the web browser is one step short of worthless. It identifies as Netscape 4, doesn't do Java, doesn't do sound, doesn't do flash (even though there's a flash player included on the machine), and is slow. I can download songs, but it's harder than heck to get them into a directory where I can play them with the built-in mp3 player (they won't play in the browser...). And it won't even fake opening a new window, so a lot of web sites just don't work. Web browsers aren't exactly new technology; why didn't Sony put a better one on a wifi-enabled PDA?

All that said, of course, I still have to vote for the approach of taking a powerful, enterprise-class OS and using it on the desktop over the approach of taking a silly toy OS and trying to extend it into the enterprise (now that Macs run UNIX, MS is the only company that disagrees with that philosophy), but I still think that something built from the bottom up (maybe with a UNIX/Linux kernel buried deep within, but invisible) as a desktop/laptop/personal computing OS/environment would be much better. (2004-07-27 16:09:17.0) Permalink Comments [1]