OS …

– is it really necessary? why can’t we have nice, well programmed applications and drivers, that surrender control graciously to others after they got their job done?

or maybe just a simple time-slicing mechanism, that checks every few milliseconds that everything runs smoothly, and if need would be, takes control away from a non-nice app?

printer drivers etc could have just a simple file (let’s say a DLL), a spool file, and a log-file where they and the user looks if the print job get done …

i don’t know how the next M$-OS will look like, apparently they realized that vista is not such a wonderful development, but even the apple OS gets bigger and bigger and more complex (10.5 came as 7.5GB disk, took 90 min to install on an 1GHz G4, and uses almost 400MB RAM just to run with a few gadgets) … and my ubuntu is not much smaller (if you want KDE,QT,CUPS,ALSA,SAMBA …)

but of course, space is cheap now (4GB RAM is $60), but my fear is the millions of line of code that have thousands of errors in them, that take years and a few hacker scares to discover. the OSs now are too complex to fully troubleshoot and understand!