Sunday, February 06, 2022

The "trained" bully market


In the year 1997, MP Bhoj (Open) University organised a 28-day workshop at Bhopal. The workshop was on #Wavelets. People from the #Engineering backgrounds as well as the #basic #sciences attended the workshop.

Amongst the resource persons of the workshop was Prof. U. B. Desai, who was then the faculty member of the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Bombay. #IITB

Prof. U. B. Desai and his team of M. Tech. students told us about the #Linux distribution named #Slackware. The team had installed the OS on a hard disk, and brought the hard disk along.

Incidentally, the OS #failed to boot on the #computer system at Bhopal. The entire team got together and I saw them recompiling the Kernel, and configuring it as per the hardware present there. Even the mouse, which was a PS/2 type mouse, and not the serial port one, as available earlier, needed to be configured.

What does this essentially imply? The #Operating #System #operatingsystem is strongly dependent on the #hardware on which it is installed. Today's operating systems, which often come pre-installed (OEM), are configured for the hardware. If you buy the operating system from the market, the kernel detects the hardware from a known list inside a data file located in the installation media. If not found, usually the media asks for #drivers.

So what happens on older hardware? Why do giant OS vendors or equipment manufacturers stop their support for a particular OS?

There is only a specific set of hardware that especially the close source ones support, or maybe choose to support. So when computers with old hardware traditionally become outdated or obsolete, their support is withdrawn by their vendors. Newer operating systems keep on supporting #obsolescent hardware upto a limited amount of time.

Incidentally, it appears that there is a #fashion and #trend amongst the fresh generation of "trained" professionals to advise upgrading the RAM or upgrading to a new OS on the pretext of security, but it only results in a lower performance of the machine. The processor, the number of cores, the number of threads and the material of the motherboard all collaboratively contribute to the performance of a computer.

The so-called "trained" professional bully market is on the rise to stamp its ignorant face on the newer students, and they must be beware of it.