"A week ago we reported that a second preview release of Project Indiana, Sun's attempt at creating an operating system for the desktop based upon OpenSolaris and led by Ian Murdock, was on track to be released in the near future. Thursday afternoon that became true with the test image surfacing for Developer Preview 2 of Project Indiana, or what will formally be called OpenSolaris. Officially, this new release is known as the OpenSolaris Developer Preview 1/08 edition. The general availability release of Project Indiana is expected in March, but today we have up a tour of this new Indiana release."
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Member since:2007-03-30
> The ideal would be if there were only ONE gui that all operatins systems used? And only ONE word processor? etc.
Is that really the ideal? And if so, is it achievable enough to talk about in those terms? Because last I checked, even packs of chewing gum don't all have the same user interfaces.
Member since:2007-03-26
I really do think that would be less than ideal. Possibly even damaging.
Not everyone wants to work a computer in the same way. That's why GUIs are different. Some people like a simple stripped down interface which favors keyboard shortcuts. Some people prefer larger more complex beasts like KDE.
If everyone preferred to work the same way than you wouldn't here so many flamewars about Vista, OS X, KDE, Gnome, et al.
I feel you're taking the term 'standard' slightly out of context here.
You can have a standard document format (say RTF for simplistic reasons) but competing word processors running on competing platforms with radically different GUIs can all still read and edit the same file regardless of how they launch applications, what the widgets look like or even what word processor they use.
Final point:
The whole point of GUIs is to make life simpler. If you force people to use a GUI which is counter-intuitive to that particular person then ultimately they're going to struggle more than if you give them a text console and told them what words to key in.
Edited 2008-02-03 21:38 UTC
Member since:2007-07-27
Maybe you are right and I am wrong. However, with Standard I mean things like, right mouse click for this, menues at the top, etc. How the GUI looks are a different thing. However, you wouldnt like a GUI where right mouse click and left were interchanged, where there existed no menues at all - instead it showed a film to choose between menues. So all GUIs are more or less the same. They only look different. But imagine if a GUI were so good and natural that no other GUI was needed. There were only one GUI on all OSes. Wouldnt that be simpler? If there were lots of different word processors with different file formats, that would be a pain? That is why we are trying with Open Office on all OSes. You shouldnt have to relearn. Thats the point.
Member since:2007-07-06
Member since:
2007-07-27
I like to think that all GUI should more or less behave the same. Like all word processors and all spread sheets etc. The ideal would be if there were only ONE gui that all operatins systems used? And only ONE word processor? etc. That is the meaning of STANDARD. Instead of several competing technologies that have incompatible programs, there is only one technology.
So, there is other advantages of Solaris, mostly great innovative technology that no other OS has. DTrace for instance, is something that has NEVER been done before. This is new and revolutionary. Read for instance:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/08/dtrace_user_take/
"I looked at one customer's application that was absolutetly dependant of getting the best performance possible. Many people for many years had looked at the app using traditional tools. There was one particular function that was very "hot" - meaning that it was called several million times per second. Of course, everyone knew that being able to inline this function would help, but it was so complex that the compilers would refuse to inline.
Using DTrace, I instrumented every single assembly instruction in the function. What we found is that 5492 times to 1, there was a short circuit code path that was taken. We created a version of the function that had the short circuit case and then called the "real" function for other cases. This was completely inlinable and resulted in a 47 per cent performance gain.
Certainly, one could argue that if you used a debugger or analyzer you may have been able to come to the same conclusion in time. But who would want to sit and step through a function instruction by inctruction 5493 times? With DTrace, this took literally a ten second DTrace invocation, 2 minutes to craft the test case function, and 3 minutes to test. So in slightly over 5 minutes we had a 47 percent increase in performance"
The whole article is interesting read.
Or how Solaris is more stable than Linux:
http://www.lethargy.org/~jesus/archives/77-Choosing-Solaris-10-over...
"Just to be explicit: on the same hardware, solaris 10 fixed your corruption/read-only /data problem?"
"Yes. Same exact hardware. We reinstalled Linux twice even to make sure there wasn't something wrong with the install. I've had lots of other people chime in reporting very similar problems."
There are lots of other examples on other new technology in Solaris, ZFS for instance.
The point is, if solaris been good enough for Enterprise business for the last decades, then it is certainly good enough for my needs. I dont have to relearn a new better OS. Solaris will do. It ends there.