On pe, 2011-04-15 at 08:27 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote: > Le mercredi 13 avril 2011 à 11:39 +0200, Stephan Seitz a écrit : > > My first (and last) contact with NM was not a good one. > > This is another misconception about Network-Manager: since version 0.6 > (the first one with which people have been in contact to) was very badly > designed, the current version must be too.
Back in, oh, 1991, a friend of mine showed me this thing he'd written. It was a little program that had two threads, one printing As and the other printing Bs. The screen was full of sequences of As and Bs and he was so very proud of it. A few weeks later, he showed me a new version of his program. It still had two threads, one which would read from the keyboard and write to the serial port, and the other reading from the serial port and writing to the screen. Even had some terminal emulation. He spent a lot of time reading Usenet with it, dialling in to the university modem pool. Pretty impressive, for an As-and-Bs program. Then he kept hacking at it, and the program grew and became more complicated. It got the ability to do real processes, instead of just two threads. Also, he got it to run different things in each process, loading the code for them from disk. As-and-Bs had grown into a tiny litte operating system. He called it Freax. It could easily have been considered a joke. It did not even have virtual memory, never mind core dumps, shared libraries, graphics support, or networking. And it only ran on i386, not on real computers like the M68k or SPARC. You pretty much had to compile and port everything yourself. It was really just a toy, suitable only for a very small group of people. Anyone who wanted something that actually worked chose something else. For years, people would say things like "oh that thing, I tried it once, but it didn't work on my hardware, it's just a toy". When he uploaded it to an ftp server the ftpmaster didn't like the name, and renamed it. You may have heard the new name. It's now called Linux. Software can get better. Sometimes it's even possible to successfully go from something built for a very narrow use case (print As and Bs on the screen) to something that's generally usable for an entirely different purpose (the world's most versatile operating system kernel). If you've tried version 1, that does not mean version 2 is anything like it. -- Blog/wiki/website hosting with ikiwiki (free for free software): http://www.branchable.com/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1302851224.2921.64.ca...@havelock.liw.fi
