Stop means “stop” and Eject means “eject”
(photo credit - jonbro)
I can get angry. Angry at a major lack of innovation in the computer industry. Sure, we have our terabyte hard drives, 100″ screens, and quad core CPUs, but still our operating systems and hardware fail to respond to simple commands in a timely manner. I’m talking about stopping and ejecting when the computer is confused.
It’s happened to everyone. You’ve put a scratched up CD in the drive, and the CD drive decides to whir the disc around at high speed to figure out what’s up. All fine so far. Then you press eject and… more times than not, the drive will keep spinning the CD, freeze up the computer, and generally make your life a misery. Eject should mean.. spin down and eject that disc now.
Even worse is when the disc starts out okay, you begin to copy a file across from it, but then it hits trouble. Rather than being able to press the stop or cancel button and get an immediate resolution, it’s more common to have it freeze up your operating system (or at least the shell aspect of it, on the Mac Finder will freeze but other apps run okay) but still not actually “stop”.
What’s up with all of this? Make stuff happen when we tell it to happen.
December 4th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
It has to do with the ‘lame’ way that OS’s have been designed.
From Windows to Linux they all use Monolithic kernels. When something goes tits up, like a network card or CD-drive it brings the whole machine to it’s knees. Micro-Kernels keep drive code in the next layer down from the core. The problem with micro-kernels is that one has a lose of performance due to the extra communications needed between the core and device drivers.
Now comes the big crunch…..it is the year 2007, almost 2008 looking at my rainlender calender here on my desktop.
PC’s in this day and age would run very well using micro kernels and end uses would not know the difference in speed. The biggest problem we face is that things are the way they are and so people are comfortable to keep working in this manner. It is all rather a sad state of affairs. Glad that the military got the Internet working the way they did it’s a pity they never got an OS out there in time too.
My £0.02 on the matter.