creat 1216

snip why do I feel like the only one here to do the snipping

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The consistency problem is much smaller these days. There are only three major UI's left, Windows, Mac and X; each with a lot of variety, but internally pretty consistent. I do appreciate that a mac stays a mac, and that X stays X despite Gnome, and I think I would react if a Windows machine went too far towards either.

"real commands" are the ones that does some real bit of work, and requires explicit user interaction. e.g. emacs, kermit, telnet etc.

This "outboarding argument" was debunked when RISC took off. Primitives for fast graphics; even with elaborate data structures; yes. Separate processor, no. If we want more processors, do SMP; or as good an approximation as you can afford.

I prefer to use multics style vocabulary when discussing this, because this is a thing Multics did better than anything else. Even the bowlderized copy, Primos, did this very well.

You don't just have user-kernel mode. You use more bits than one.

Then you split the kernel. The really-really core things go into ring 0. This is not a lot, really. Everything else goes in lesser rings. Example of lesser ring stuff is file systems, upper network stack like RPC-NFS and TCP,

You don't do message pbutting, you use standard call mechanisms to cross ring levels; function calls or software interrupts depending on the actual hardware.

But even with message pbutting you can have very nice effects; that is what QNX does. OK, it has a significant cost, but the advantage is that you get instant clustering across a network. You access the file system on another node directly. But that is a digression.

What is really wrong is to have human interface logic in the kernel (beyond the bare bootstrapping level like mini-shell).

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What I react to is the enourmous amount of time we spend in procedural languages like c, c++, java, vbasic etc to build the eye candy. This should be a surface layer, with descriptions of what data the programs need. HTML is pretty close, SGML and XML even closer to such descriptions. This may be a large reason why the web is hammering the dedicated applications in the market.

What actual rendering this presentation is then given should be up to the client. This client need not even be human. It could be a robot, a cut&paste operation, a pipe, a database, or an application not yet though of.

Human users can be pretty divese. The person in case may not have all senses fully in use; e.g. be blind, deaf, or have other sensory or motoric challenges. This should not get in the way of actually getting to the data.

Not only.

Layering.

-- mrr