If wishes were fishes...

Posted Oct 25, 2003 1:23 UTC (Sat) by StevenCole (guest, #3068)
Parent article: If I could re-write Linux (NewsForge)

Astonishing. Simply astonishing.

Hmmm. He's on to something. Maybe we should look to societal trends to vision the future of our NG OS.

My local public library no longer has a sign labeled "Library". Instead, a silhouette of a person reading a book indicates that the library is near. That's so non-literate people looking for the library will know they're getting warmer.

Perhaps Western civilization has been on the wrong track for the last 3,000 years since the invention of the alphabet. Look at all the problems it's caused. Last time I was in Russia looking for a restaurant, all I saw was signs with "PECTOPAH". Now, if only they had a picture of someone eating a good old hamburger. What could be more universal than that? So, the NG OS should do away with characters, and therefore the keyboard as we know it could be trashed. A nice, simple replacement with perhaps as few as 500 symbols could replace it. Without a character set, word processors and editors would be a thing of the past, along with the usual vi vs. emacs debates.

He really knows his stuff when it comes to the benefits of a microkernel. If only Linus had listened to Professor T. And he's right about the increased ease of porting to other platforms. A quick check in the arch directory of 2.6.0-test8 shows a paltry 20 entries. Since the superiority of micro over monolithic is so obvious, the only remaining detail is how to optimize the communication between the various components. Some have suggested XML, but I feel this is far too low level. If we put natural language processors in each kernel component, the communication could be done in a natural, and hence better, way. Now, this could be the source of some slight loss in speed, so the kernel components could have some embedded AI which would learn to use slang to speed things up a bit. This could be extended to user space, so that the NG Mozilla, instead of doing a malloc for another gigabyte of memory, could just do a system call which said (literally) "Gimme my usual". And the kernel, knowing it came from NG Mozilla, would know what to do.

And speaking of knowing what to do, the little guy hiding under my bridge is hungry. Time to feed him.

If wishes were fishes...

Posted Oct 25, 2003 19:42 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

you forgot to point out that the Chinese already tried the picture based writing as opposed to an alphabet

If wishes were fishes...

Posted Oct 26, 2003 1:38 UTC (Sun) by StevenCole (guest, #3068) [Link]

Don't know much about Chinese, but I'm somewhat aware of Japanese Kanji (derived from Chinese) and the fact that the Japanese recognized the value of an alphabet 1200 years ago and so developed Hirigana and Katakana, although their implementation details and usage are beyond the scope of any short discussion.

When I've traveled to Europe, I've always made a point of learning a very basic vocabulary, both written and spoken, not wanting to repeat the mistakes of my youth, when I believed that Peligro meant "Free Swimming", since all the good swimming holes were so labeled.

What I detest is the gratuitous use of picture signs when a simple word will do. Sure, my above example seems to counter that, but simply adding "Danger" to the sign, especially since it was right here in the USA, doesn't seem to be asking too much.

Anyway, those were the most ridiculous suggestions I could think of at the time. Eliminating an alphabet based character set might provide the coup de grace to the hated command line. Or maybe not.

I forgot about suggesting adding floating point to the kernel. And NG hardware should only respond to suggestions, not instructions, which are an artifact of older pre-choice days.

If wishes were fishes...

Posted Oct 27, 2003 0:30 UTC (Mon) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm not clear on your post -- the Chinese tried picture writing at some time in the past? They certainly are not drawing pictures now. There's no alphabet (there is a phonetic alphabet, though), but the characters are *not* pictures. The only widely-used picture writing I know of are the Heiroglyphics of Ancient Egypt.

At any rate, I expect that people type "rm -rf" regardless of their locale, and that is beautiful. =-)

-Paul

Hieroglyphes ...

Posted Oct 28, 2003 12:01 UTC (Tue) by morhippo (guest, #334) [Link]

are not pictures. It is a syllable alphabet and too a very large degree purely phonetic.

If wishes were fishes...

Posted Nov 7, 2003 13:47 UTC (Fri) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

The chinese characters are a mix of pictures (or pictures that were recognisable but aren't now due to the way they are written now - the signs of sun and moon pretty much look like sun and moon in ancient chinese, but today, you can only recognise that the basic strokes are alike), and phonetic components. That's since most glyphs are combinations of several (smaller) glyphs. You can have composed glyphs that mean something (e.g. pig under roof means "home", or woman under roof means "peace"), or you have composed glyphs that indicate how it's spoken (e.g. yuan - the money unit sign - in a rectangle means "garden", also pronounced "yuan"; but yuan - together with a man - is part of the sign for "bank"). Almost all glyphs have at least one component that indicates what it should mean, and 80% of the glyphs contain an indication of how to pronounce them (in 2200 year old chinese from Xian, not necessarily lokal dialects or today's chinese). At least when you know what the component glyphs are supposed to stand for as picture (which isn't very recognisable from modern Chinese), or are supposed to be pronounced.

Ancient (old kingdom) Egypt Hieroglyphs are different stuff - they are a mixture of consonants, double-consonants, and often used words (i.e. mostly phonetic, only very frequently used words non-phonetic). Unfortunately, the phonetic part is only guesswork. The glyphs for frequently used words are recognisable pictures (not always).

A chinese monk once complained that all those long-noses took pictures of his temple, despite it was written in bold words "no photographs" (he wanted to sell postcard). In Chinese words, of course. He complained "can't they read, er?" A camera with red circled stroke through can be understood - but basically, do you expect a camera to look like that in 2200 years, or people to understand that a red circle with a stroke through from lower left to upper right means "not"?