He's absolutely got some good points, no doubt about that. And yet, something irks me...
* An industry that can't produce robust software has produced several server operating systems capable of uptimes that far exceed the expected life time of the hardware they run on. [0] Writing this, I checked in on a random server I've got access to. The uptime is 350 days.
* I reboot my personal Linux laptop only when I myself want to install the latest kernel update. The current uptime is 46 days and I use that machine for programming, watching movies, surfing and whatever else I feel like doing.
* I'm willing to bet a few bucks that there are more C and assembly language programmers around now than there has been at any previous point in time.
* I'm pretty sure Blow couldn't have made his presentation slides, recorded his talk, uploaded it to a web site and then watched it in a web browser using Ken Thompson's three week Unix, even if it was running on modern hardware.
* It's true that the OS in both abstract and concrete ways removes capabilities from the CPU, but it also adds a lot of capabilities such as multitasking.
* Pretty much all of the things listed on his "You Can't Just..." are perfectly doable in E.G. Linux. It's not the OS that removes this capability, it's the work of companies trying to protect their revenue (through DRM, IP laws, patent enforcement etc.). I can (and still do) write software in a simple editor without a language server in sight, etc.
Meanwhile, my old Amigas - which I love to bits - crash fatally all the time. Just a few weeks ago, one of them pulled a hard drive partition along with the crash and I actually had to reformat it because re-validation failed (luckily I had nothing of importance on it).
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/epic-...
* An industry that can't produce robust software has produced several server operating systems capable of uptimes that far exceed the expected life time of the hardware they run on. [0] Writing this, I checked in on a random server I've got access to. The uptime is 350 days.
* I reboot my personal Linux laptop only when I myself want to install the latest kernel update. The current uptime is 46 days and I use that machine for programming, watching movies, surfing and whatever else I feel like doing.
* I'm willing to bet a few bucks that there are more C and assembly language programmers around now than there has been at any previous point in time.
* I'm pretty sure Blow couldn't have made his presentation slides, recorded his talk, uploaded it to a web site and then watched it in a web browser using Ken Thompson's three week Unix, even if it was running on modern hardware.
* It's true that the OS in both abstract and concrete ways removes capabilities from the CPU, but it also adds a lot of capabilities such as multitasking.
* Pretty much all of the things listed on his "You Can't Just..." are perfectly doable in E.G. Linux. It's not the OS that removes this capability, it's the work of companies trying to protect their revenue (through DRM, IP laws, patent enforcement etc.). I can (and still do) write software in a simple editor without a language server in sight, etc.
Meanwhile, my old Amigas - which I love to bits - crash fatally all the time. Just a few weeks ago, one of them pulled a hard drive partition along with the crash and I actually had to reformat it because re-validation failed (luckily I had nothing of importance on it).
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/epic-...