> you incorporate them into the initial design (for example, build the OS with Unicode support from the start)?
Clever ass people tried that. That's why system using UCS2 as core (Windows/Javascript) sucks at handling iOS Emoji icons, and MySQL can only handle 3 bytes UTF8 by default (unless utf8mb4 explicitly). The reason is that UCS2 was "good enough" during the designing stage of those systems.
Even the most clever ass design on the planet can not cover all cases. You have make trade-offs at some point.
> You can have 3 teams working on Intel, AMD and NVIDIA drivers simultaneously, since they don't really overlap
You are so wrong this time. Do you know the power-saving technology allows you to switch dedicated GPU to Intel integrated GPU? Well that driver support sucks in Linux because of people like you think "well how on earth would Intel and nVidia drivers overlap?". Turns out it's a huge difference between you can use your laptop for 10 hours vs 3 hours.
In general, people without deep software engineering experience make super clever-ass decisions and fail spectacularly. Because building software projects is absolutely not like assembly a car with so many standardized parts and modules. Another metaphor is that in physics if you have a problem with lightening, you can't change how the sun works. In software engineering you can. Read the book The Mythical Man Month, as well as this one Dreaming in Code. You can see even experienced developers fail miserably at not-so-large software projects
Clever ass people tried that. That's why system using UCS2 as core (Windows/Javascript) sucks at handling iOS Emoji icons, and MySQL can only handle 3 bytes UTF8 by default (unless utf8mb4 explicitly). The reason is that UCS2 was "good enough" during the designing stage of those systems.
Even the most clever ass design on the planet can not cover all cases. You have make trade-offs at some point.
> You can have 3 teams working on Intel, AMD and NVIDIA drivers simultaneously, since they don't really overlap
You are so wrong this time. Do you know the power-saving technology allows you to switch dedicated GPU to Intel integrated GPU? Well that driver support sucks in Linux because of people like you think "well how on earth would Intel and nVidia drivers overlap?". Turns out it's a huge difference between you can use your laptop for 10 hours vs 3 hours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Optimus#GNU.2FLinux_supp...
In general, people without deep software engineering experience make super clever-ass decisions and fail spectacularly. Because building software projects is absolutely not like assembly a car with so many standardized parts and modules. Another metaphor is that in physics if you have a problem with lightening, you can't change how the sun works. In software engineering you can. Read the book The Mythical Man Month, as well as this one Dreaming in Code. You can see even experienced developers fail miserably at not-so-large software projects