Jon,
Please note that I was very careful to not call un*x or un*x like os's outdated that was the original poster. I too realize that a lot of osx's popularity is due to it being a "friendly" un*x-like os but as you stated I am looking more for a computing appliance. My microwave oven has two ways to cook food, 1. You choose power and time, 2. You pick a preset (pizza, popcorn, etc) and it always works without fail, which I exactly what I want from my computer. I don't need 27 different ways to do the same thing, to me that's bloat even if those 27 different ways only take up 1KB. Give me 1 or 2 ways to do something by default and the option to add more ways if I don't like the 2 default ways, don't just install 27 ways by default. Matthias clearly stated that the design goals of un*x's are multi user, single system which adds a lot of "bloat" for the single user, single system computing appliance vision. Again when I say "bloat" I am not talking about size of files on disk but amount of redundant apps, directory
structures, etc. Although size-wise osx 10.5 does take up 7-8GB! I really like the newtons minimalist design and the fact it makes so much from so little. I think today with GB/Ghz being so cheap engineers don't really think the same way as when the Newton was made (with an eye toward extreme efficiency). I also realize that for the most part we're talking about stuff that most users never even know is there..
I think some of the best examples of computing appliances that are minimal by default but still expandable if your so inclined are the newtons and the early one piece Macs (after the original which I know wasn't expandable).
I think we're all just of different views on what we want our system software to do, nothing wrong with that.
Joe Reilly
====================================================================
The NewtonTalk Mailing List - http://www.newtontalk.net/
The Official Newton FAQ - http://www.splorp.com/newton/faq/
The Newton Glossary - http://www.splorp.com/newton/glossary/
WikiWikiNewt - http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
====================================================================
Received on Sun May 31 07:06:38 2009
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Sun May 31 2009 - 17:30:01 EDT