Kwanhaeng

Many drops of water make a river. Write to Kwanhaeng at kwanhaeng@radsoft.net.

It's a constant battle to own even 50% of my own machine.

It's time to act - to do something.

The world needs a new operating system. With a new GUI. Or I do at any rate. I do not much care for 'the look and feel of Windows'. I don't want windows; I want rooms with no windows, just open spaces with no glass in them unless it is cold or burglars come to visit. And then I want the glass both thermal and bulletproof.

And I don't like rectangular ones only. I want any shape. That I can cut out with the mouse. And I want doors too, and plumbing and electrical and steam.

And I would like to email my mom without the government being able to read it all, even if she lives near a naval base. It takes too long for her to get her email when they read it all, because they can't read very fast.

And I don't care if there is a Registry, although I'd prefer a more elegant solution, but I want a full and easy to understand explanation of it (if there must be one) included in the user manual, and I want to be able to access any key in it pertaining to whatever I feel like, or am doing, from anywhere, and change whatever I want in real time without opening Regedit and looking for it, and I also want the keys those keys reference at a glance, and so on. And it shouldn't be possible to render your machine inoperable by doing that. That is a bad design.

And I want to be able to look in behind the scenes at every single level of the architecture, and see what is going on there, right now, in 1s and 0s, hex or instructions in English, whether I understand it or not. From packets to the processor, input and output, with a mouse click, a hotkey combo.

In my 6 year old box I can burn CDs, watch TV, watch DVDs, convert between almost any graphic or text formats, design web pages, art to my heart's content, send and receive email, surf the web, experiment with steganography, scan and print anything, do spreadsheets, plan construction projects, and all kinds of other stuff.

I've only had the rebuilt Compac shitebox for 3 years, and it is my first computer. 2 gigs and a little, Radsoft's 146, a few hundred more smallish programs, mostly carefully selected freeware, and none of the MS Office suite or other bloatware save Acrobat Reader, the bundled scanner prog, and Adaptec CD Creator. (Alternatives have been found for some, and will be purchased ASA money appears.) These three, a FAT 32 utility package, and crap in the cabs is most of the bloat that is in here as far as I know, other than bad code within progs that I am incompetent to edit out.

450 P2, 128MB RAM, running 98, and if I had the time and was a little more disciplined I could get the used space closer to a gig without losing any capability. And it doesn't crash very often anymore either. Generally not at all, unless someone slips it a mickey.

That's not where the problem is for me. The problem is I own it, I worked for the money to buy it, I do manual labor for a living, and without a guy like me somewhere, Bill Gates doesn't have a roof over his head or walls to keep the rain out or a chair to sit on or a table on which to put whatever box he runs or any electricity to run it with or any food to eat while he sits there.

And he, or pretty much anybody who is really comp. sci. literate, or just a semi decent hacker, can pretty much just do anything they want with this thing whether I like it or not, if I'm online for more than a few minutes, or download anything, It's a constant battle to own even 50% of my own machine. And there are some very simple things I can envision that I would like to be able to do with it, that it won't do, unless somebody writes a program to tell it how to do those things. And I am not a programmer, and will never be one. Programming languages just don't seem to agree with this style mind.

So, the 'look and feel' of the GUI I would like, is the one that I would give it, not somebody else's idea. Same with the function set. (Human level function, not how the machine does it.) One ought to be able to drag 'n' drop functions, from a library, create and destroy them at will, without having to keep the ones around that one has no use for. And it should not be necessary to 'be a programmer' in order to do that. For a programmer, that should extend to machine functions as well.

And the functions I would like it to have, and the way I would like it to function, would match the way that I think, not necessarily the way that somebody else thinks. (And I don't think the same way all the time.) And I would like that for anybody, and they still need to be able to talk to each other.

Somebody else might want something very different from what I want. What kind of GUI would let everyone have what they want, and make it look easy? And what kind of transparency and legibility would be necessary in the OS, to grant the end user the same degree of control they have, say, over their own car, without a PhD and twenty years of experience?

Essentially, I would like to be able to do with a computer what people do with words - with poetry, pure mathematics, or any kind of art. And I am sorry, but I would prefer not to have to learn a language, however beautiful it may be to those who naturally understand it. A language is basically a system of abbreviated instructions to the machine and/or an object oriented set that leaves out the subject in order to do what it does. And that makes my head hurt.

So I have a question, if anybody is interested. It may require some very general abstract thinking for openers.

1. If someone were to create such a thing, what would it look like on paper?
2. How would it function? How would it be 'the same or different' from what is already out there? (It should be Unix, but as a practical matter, for the rank and file, it is not.) NextStep is getting closer, still some limitations, and still a little bit diffy for people who read the Weekly World News.
3. How could it work so that individuals with very different mental attributes could easily program it to do most anything they could think of, and for which they now require a plethora of wasteful programs with overlapping functions?
4. I don't want a mouse. I want two mice, one for each hand, with up to five functions each. And I want those functions to be user configurable.
5. I do not want open source for programmers only. I want open source for everybody, that anybody can understand.

The writing is on the wall.

Slowly, inexorably, Microsoft tightens its grip. Apple has great graphics and can run Excel, but it's not quick or practical enough yet in large scale operations. And Linux? If you can get it set up and maintain it, if you are unlike me, not stupid when it comes to looking at odd symbols and thinking at right angles, or a savant, then fine - but remember: time is money, and many things are much more important than money.

Impossible you ask? Of course it's impossible! But what would it look like if it were possible?