Let’s take as a given that the latest not silent but not overtly mass destructive of infrastructure war has essentially been won and that the good force won. Two contemporanious and closely associated facts of this conflict are that the civilian dress combatants (for the most part) who truly carried the burden and the day were the tech elites and that we won by drawing on and exploiting a FAR broader ley of knowledge than either the pedestrian combatants OR the tech elites thought they could bring to bear. We shocked ourselves at the spontaneous vectors of attack we spawned inward mindedly in the giess of battle heat but this ONLY happened because we sparred among ourselves at meets and PARTICULARLY because certain foresighted pentagon entities invited and hosted progressively more educational meles, first nationally and then internationally with the other Western Philosophy espousing nations, that fashioned a sharp tech special forces who KNEW each other and what our respective fortes were. Three cheers for the Western Philosophied defense forces. I MUST re-iterate the obvious of what this thank God implies, this relatively bloodless victory was NOT purely the providence of a ragtag self ameliorating militia, it was conceived, spawned supported AND deployed by the government offices responsible for it, though doubtless they were bamfluxed by the catastophically devastating effectiveness of the forces they cultivated. Daaamn snuffy. Look into the history of computing itself and especially the incubating role of the pretecessor to DARPA or maybe even the one before it in the development of the UNIX operating system, an engineering enabler of beyond Mastercraft. To my knowledge UNIX has NOT required ANY significant modification or augmentation since it’s inception in 1969 with the overt and necessary exception of compiler evolution.

Let’s indulge a divergence into the strategic warfare requirements of this period that drove the progressively greater demanded capacities of this near miracle of engineering art. Surviving a nuclear disaster was tanemount at the time. There wasn’t MUCH thought over the possibility of the destruction of a transistor based technology at the time, the knowledge of the EMP associated with a nuclear blast being just an inkling back then, but the pentagon knew that ONE of the initial drivers of the most advanced operating systems, and at the time that was a new couplet (heh, heh, heh) was telephony. ATT was the monopoly back then and they had crapped up something called I don’t remember I guess but in the process (oh God) of specing out the requirements they realized (Jesus) that initializing knowledge of the necessary computer processing metadata, keeping it current with out stepping on some other bit of binary’s knowledge and exploitation of it, and finally releasing it BACK into the secretary and motor pool, that’s how they thought in those days, was a bear. These concerns were justified by the fact that supporting RANDOM communication demands REQUIRED a different sort of operating system to allocate the necessary system resources than the then current batch processing approach did. As you might surmise batch processing only required providing a means to maintain a queue of binaries to execute, allocating them resources prior to the initiation of their processing, and cleaning up after the binary signaled that it done. A simple functionality by comparison Bill, AND STEVE, although all truth in presentation requires me to acknowledge that my MOST current chops are with the Linux and Windows camps. Continuing, neither of the widely used UNIX alternatives are NOT altogether trivial and perhaps MOST importantly both are perfectly adequate for MOST domestic consumer needs. MICROSOFT was NEVER a cut rate outfit outfit due to underlying design but rather the hopelessly contractual dick cuffing REQUIRED by their court enforceble terms of ownership that included support for previous software and hardware purchased under the MICROSOFT imprimature. This is why they sucked and why Bill Gates was part right when complained that all linux did was solve the EASY part. But, really, he wasn’t right at all, and we’ll see as we continue.

Returning to the preceding thread, The pentagon KNEW a good solution when it saw one, or some progenitor thereof, and immedeitley got to work fleshing it out. A lot of what it did was to generalize the thing into supporting multiple chip architectures, mutliple word sizes, and multiple word sized memory access, nifty stuff that quite obviated Bill’s assertion that linux couldn’t easily support ANY archaich device driver OR software if they could just get ahold of the source, which they often couldn’t in those days due to a vendor’s desire to maintain a lock on their market. Now I’ll state the flip side of the MICROSOFT vulnerability disaster, supporting those proprietary vendor’s IPAs introduced fatal malware vulnerabilities into their solution OVERTLY apart from their MORE than adequate technical capacity to SOLVE them. Microsoft didn’t foresee, and UNIX didn’t have to, not because of pentagon foresight, but because of UNIX peripherals not being subject to SIGNIFICANT competitor variability in device driver IPA. Essentially, everyone got along even among the now differentiated UNICES, because the differences in peripheral IPAs weren’t at all significant. Back then forking a signifigently different UNIX was TOO difficult to contemplate, not because the underlying license didn’t allow it, but because the commonly implemented solution to the requirements was too superior to attempt to change to any degree discernible in the IPA. Microsoft had a competitor in Apple, and they mutually chose to maintain largely separate peripheral ecosystems, which accounted for a lot of Microsoft peripherals initial intransigence for cooperating with linux.

A lot of the noise over the difficulty in supporting both operating systems is just that, noise. UNIX’s designed in support for randomly introduced binaries, we’ll call them processes from now on, makes implementing peripheral device support WORLDS easier than supporting them in what was originally a batch like operating system like Windows. That should be easy to understand almost Prima Fasca if you have been paying attention. This is another GRAND advantage linux has over Windows that is not well known or acknowledged in operating system camps, but is bitterly chewed over among driver writers. I will here note that Apple went to the UNIX darwin several years ago in open realization of this fact, although the justification I read placed the emphasis on security. This might have been a failing on the part of the journalist and I am curious as to why Apple peripherals are not advertised as working with linux computers.

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