Re: Weird situation

Moe Trin wrote:
SNIP

I knew Bill before he created 386BSD - in fact he did a bit of his early
work on voice synthesizers in the mid 1970s on a desktop calculator
(HP9830) in my lab. He was then an intern from UC.

I still have the cd. I don't remember if it came with X, but I remeber
how I loved having 4 or 5 full screen console sessions runnig with
output scrolling out and thinking why can't I do this in DOS?

It's a whole different world. While early PC users (running DOS) had
some similarities to a *nix, the introduction of windoze went a long way
to break any similarities. My wife still doesn't feel as comfortable
at the UNIX command line as she did at the DOS command line. Some of
that is the horrendous increase in the number of commands (DOS 5 had
68 commands - there are over 1350 in my user path, and over 1650 as
root) but part was the dependence on clicking on some icon or a pull
down menu to accomplish something. She got _very_ used to that.

Yes, but that means we have more choices. More different ways to
accomplish the same thing. Sometimes one way is not "better" than
another, it's just different. Maybe windows users think that's wasteful
or confusing, but I think you're more likely to be successful at
solving a problem if you have more ways available to you to solve that
problem.

I feel most of the move is a function of the applications that the users
are trying to run. Is the work basically text editing? Spreadsheets?
Databases? You probably won't find *nix applications that look/feel
exactly like their windoze counterparts, but you probably _will_
find ones that are close. I had a friend at Grumman who was using
a set of programs called 'CrossoverOffice' from CodeWeaver to run
windoze (NT, I think) applications on a Linux box. It was less
I'm trying to get my wife used to using OpenOffice. I like it better
than the MS equivalent and not just because the MS product costs $500
more. So far she hasn't run into any word docs or xl spreadsheets that
she can't open and edit. I know that will be a problem if she ever
does.

expensive than VMWare and windoze. Are they programmers trying to
write C, or perl, or some besotted version of hypertext? Applications
used in that area may function identically, but will look and feel
quite different.

I can't be specific, NDA and all that, but they are trying to develop a
suite of cross-platform applications using Perl, C/C++ and Java to move
and map huge amounts of data between different networks and platforms.
Since most of the existing developers come from windows, the majority
of the compromises made to make this cross-platform have been on the
Unix/Linux side.

Old guy

We're only as old as our kids tell us we are...

Geez, am I in trouble.

Old guy

lol. Nuff said.

Later.

.