LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 14:45:53 +0930

Re: linux is not GNU/linux [was RedHat 7.1 reliability?]

On Sun, Jun 24, 2001 at 11:48:50PM +0000, michaeld@senet.com.au wrote:
> 
> > > > Sorry, I think that's a lot of crap.  ;-)  It is never appropriate to
> > > > consider Netscape to be the operating system.
> > > 
> > > If you are a web kiosk operator (or user), or a website designer looking at
> > > consumers, then the browser choice is often more important than the
> > > particular OS, hence, effectively, the browser IS the OS. Technically,
> > 
> > No, it is not.
> 
> Sorry, I'm with Richard.  What the user experiences is what they think the OS 
> is from their perspective.
> 


The reverse confusion is also amusing.
I remember that on a Usenet discussion about these
things in 1985, someone who sold computers said
a guy in a suit came into his store and said
he would like to buy "a Unix computer".

Nowadays, I'm sure that some people think that
it is reasonable to discuss having a 
Mac computer versus a Windows computer.

Marketing people have for at least 15 years been talking
not about the hardware or the OS, but the "platform".
It took me a while to realise that this was just
a way of avoiding the tricky problem of working out
what the difference is between the OS, the hardware,
and any other stuff in the computer.
For someone trying to sell applications software,
all that matters is that you have something to stick
their software on, and that's the "platform".
Of course, in the olden days, each computer hardware brand
had a more or less unique operating system.
A lot of the general public would still think of
linux as being applications software, I think.
After all, it's something that you install from disks
after you've bought the computer. So it must be applications
software. Virtual machine software and lin4win-style
OS-within-an-OS versions of linux muddy the waters even more.

Luckily...  we cognoscenti and connoisseurs have a crystal
clear idea of what goes into each category!

-----------------------------------------
Just on a related topic, I once tried to get a C++ compiler
from Windows software dealers, and got a really perplexing
response from several dealers. They all said something like:
"The language costs $100, but if you want a compiler,
it costs $400." I tried and tried to work out what "the language"
meant. Was it an interpreter? A book? A runtime environment?
None of them could clarify this even after long phone
conversations.
How can you buy "the C++ language" for a computer without
buying a compiler?

As I said before, the Windows "community" is off on a different planet!
It could be that their mitochondrial DNA is derived from
a gene strain that came to earth in a different meteorite
to what the unix people arrived in. They might even be from
outside the solar system.

Time to start the day's work, I guess...
Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

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