On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 4:24 AM, RedShift <redshift@pandora.be> wrote:
Hi all
It dawned on my that lots of industries have standards and companies generally keep to them. For example slabs of aluminium have standard sizes, building materials have well defined specifications, or take electrical components: there's a huge list of standardized components. You can expect between 220 and 240 VAC from your wall socket, fuses have standard formats and ratings, 1 meter here is exactly the same as 1 meter in another country, etc... Even CD's, which have been around for decades by now, have always been created using the same format (albeit extended somewhat, over time, but a normal CD pressed now should still play in a CD player that's 20 years old).
It allows for a very competitive market where choices are made based on price, quality, availability, etc...
I look at it this way: an OS is a *tool,* whereas electricity, CDs and such are commodities, and need to be fungible. Tools are *not* fungible; the way you interface with a tool is very tightly coupled with the purpose of that tool, which is why you should never use a hammer to pull a screw. The abstractions OSs (and also programming languages) present represent what they're designed to do, so making a one-size-fits-all tool is worse than useless. The "desktop wars" and such arguments all commit the fallacy that OSs are a pretty shell over computer hardware, whereas they are (or should be) tools targeted at (more or less) specific solutions. -- Ryan W Sims