Sometime Today, JS cobbled together some glyphs to say:
Supercomputing is a area where Monolithic systems are just not suitable. `Distributed OSes`, are far more advanced than Clustering. Future supercomputing wont be based on `clusters`.,
Hmm, my 70 year old aunt doesn't need clustering or a supercomputer, but she sure can use linux - ok, once she gets a computer at least, but my dad and sis use it now and they don't really need supercomputing power in my bedroom. I'm not sure my dad would care to pay the electricity bills either.
system., nor the GNU kernel `Hurd`. Just talk to `Linux` enthusiasts about calling `Linux` as `GNU/Linux`., they'll sneer
One question. Let's agree that the OS is GNU (as in the operating system named GNU) and for the time being it uses the kernel named Linux. So, we call it GNU/Linux. However, we all know that for the end user, the OS alone is not sufficient. End users want windowing systems and graphics and mouse control and multimedia and what not. These are, of course services provided by the X server and windowing system through direct kernel calls in most cases. The entire operating system (ie, the software that makes the computer system operational) from the end user's point of view is really X11 (or X.org)/GNU/Linux.
In today's age though, one also needs pretty graphical email and web clients, so we add Mozilla (because Opera isn't Free). When I say Mozilla, it would encompass Firefox/Thunderbird if that's what you prefer. The operating system is now Mozilla/X/GNU/Linux, and I think that's fair.
In fact, we could prolly do away with most of the GNU part. We need glibc, the dynamic linker and loader. No need of a compiler, no need of a shell (unless you have shell scripts). You'll prolly need a python and perl interpreter, but I can't really think of anything else (correct me if I'm wrong). So the operating system (again, from the end user's point of view) is now Mozilla/X/gnu/Linux.
I'd like to state again, so that there is no confusion. I'm looking at the operating system from the end user's point of view, and not from the computer scientist's point of view. I am (or at least have been) a computer scientist.
they'll react when they realize that their `beloved` system would be obsoleted.
Except it won't.
Philip - who doesn't reply as much as he used to.