Date: Fri, 29 Aug 1997 02:53:23 +0200 From: Peter Korsten <peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ATT Unix for Windows ! Message-ID: <19970829025323.52918@grendel.IAEhv.nl> In-Reply-To: <19970828174348.17499@lemis.com>; from Greg Lehey on Thu, Aug 28, 1997 at 05:43:48PM %2B0930 References: <199708251245.WAA23142@oznet11.ozemail.com.au> <19970825204932.12036@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <34020362.7DB1@fps.biblos.unal.edu.co> <19970825224258.55928@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <19970826083051.FR52594@uriah.heep.sax.de> <19970826235525.22143@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <19970827093336.NX00626@uriah.heep.sax.de> <19970828002532.43939@grendel.IAEhv.nl> <19970828083703.OY21311@uriah.heep.sax.de> <19970828174348.17499@lemis.com>
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Greg Lehey shared with us:
> On Thu, Aug 28, 1997 at 08:37:03AM +0200, J Wunsch wrote:
> > As Peter Korsten wrote:
> >
> >> Er, that's actually what I did. :) I put the objects files in a
> >> '.for' loop. I wanted something like '*.c' but it wouldn't work.
> >
> > SRCS!= echo *.c
> >
> > (But that's BSD make, alas.)
>
> There are similar constructs available for other makes.
>
> >> It's not really more complicated, it's more work. I have to make
> >> a seperate Makefile (with the chance of errors) and edit that
> >> when I add a file to my project.
> >
> > I consider auto-adding each new file fairly dangerous. I often drop
> > files like `foo.c' in my workspace where i have been testing
> > something.
>
> I would guess that Peter hasn't understood the power of make.
Yes, Peter does understand the power of make. As with almost all
Unix tools, you can do nearly anything you want with it.
You don't auto-add each file you open. You may open a file, edit
some, and insert it into your program. Or you insert a new file
into your project. It's a bit easier than editing your Makefile.
And speaking of versatility, you can also build your own application
wizard. Just build the framework for your code with a couple of
mouse clicks. Sure you can do this with make. But that just as well
take time.
> >> Why did you write your own keybaord mapping? Wasn't there a
> >> suitable mapping available?
> >
> > There wasn't.
> >
> >> There certainly is a German keyboard
> >> mapping for Windows.
> >
> > Sure. The German keyboard has been designed by a typist, not by a
> > hacker. How else could they have laid out the {[]}'s in a way where
> > you break your fingers? The consequence is that most hackers simply
> > avoid German keyboards at all, and use US-ASCII ones. But they fail
> > to write texts with German umlauts on them. My mapping allows for
> > both.
Well, that figures. Non-US keyboard layouts usually bother the ****
out of me. Dutch keyboards seem to have existed, but they died very
quickly.
> Round about here we begin to see the divergence of your views. Peter
> wants a standard, no matter how bad. Jörg wants a tool that he can
> use. No trouble guessing which side I'm on :-)
You misunderstand me, quite some. I don't want a standard at all
costs. I just see that configuring Windows takes less time than
configuring Unix.
And, yes, Unix is more versatile. But do you also add extra functions
to your television? Aren't you bored with those standard boxes
everybody else has? Or do you customize your car?
Some people build their own stereos, some customize their car,
some need to be able to totally customize their computer. But
they're a minority.
> >> Talking about desktops: I have a very personal desktop with NT,
> >> that looks totally different from what everybody else uses at the
> >> office. (For the insiders: color scheme Rainy Day, background Blue
> >> Monday, automatically hiding taskbar on top, small icons, and
> >> shortcuts to all drives on my desktop, together with Netscape and
> >> the mandatory icons.)
>
> Wow. How many components of this desktop originated outside NT?
None. Why?
> >> Isn't it a bit strange that
> >> the configuration of most X-applications is done in a text file?
> >
> > What else? Some piece of binary junk that can only be maintained by
> > that very program itself? Store the layout in a bitmap?
> > No, the only problem with this is that the authors of most X11
> > software didn't think of adding a knob to allow you editing them
> > without using a text editor.
Correct.
> Is that a problem? They supplied a format which *can* easily be used
> by other applications. Megaslop, by comparison, stores the
> information in proprietary format binary files. Theoretically you
> could save a few bytes by doing this (that was the argument I always
> used for doing it this way, anyway :-), but in practice I'd guess that
> Megaslop config files are larger even than the biggest X app-defaults
> files.
(It took me quite some time to find out that you actually mean
'Microsoft' when you write 'Megaslop'. IMO, this looks childish.)
Yes, it's a problem. That's what I meant. I don't care about the
way the data is stored. I've designed a user interface with custom-
izable settings for the Amiga once and it also stored it's settings
in a text file.
What I do care about, is indeed the fact that Joerg mentioned: the
inability to edit these settings with a preference editor. If you
have a graphical application, it's _stupid_ that you have to edit
a text file to alter something in the appearance of that application.
I don't know if you people have ever read a book about how a user
interface should be constructed (I have), but you could learn a
lot out of it.
> The disadvantages of the binary files are obvious when you think about
> it: you need special programs to access them. I've never seen any
> such file which can store comments. The typical Megaslop config
> program shows you lots of "card file" menus, which effectively makes
> it impossible to keep an overview. Never mind that computers have
> replaced card files and the like--thanks to Megaslop, we still have
> their restrictions.
Like I said, I don't care about the file format. It's totally
irrelevant. If your preference editor is good enough, you don't
need to know about the file format.
Further, I fail to see what the logical grouping of settings with
these "card files" has to do with losing the overview. There isn't
an overview. These are distinct things. If you fill in your gateway,
you don't need to be able to see what your DNS is.
> [Netscape configuration files]
>
> On the other hand, over half is comments, and you can use it to
> configure Netscrape without any other documentation. Show me how to
> do that with a Megaslop config file, even the text ones.
Oh yes, mummy. I really really want to edit the file myself. No I
don't want to use the program itself for it.
You're reasoning from the Unix point of view. You do everything
from a text file, so you want to be able to do that in Windows too.
Well, you can't and you shouldn't be able to do so, because the
average user (who is kept more in mind with Windows than with
Unix) will certainly screw it up.
> >> X is not a real graphical user interface as Windows is. Many
> >
> > Define `real'. X11 is a windows environment, nothing else. The
> > toolkits have to be provided separately.
With 'real' I mean integrated. X is very modular and can do every-
thing the GUI from Windows can too, with proper programming. You
can choose your own window manager, alter the whole look-and-feel,
change the way the mouse behaves.
But what it lacks is a common base that describes how programs
should work (and the professional Windows programs do work the same
way), a file manager/Explorer like thing to move your files around,
drag-and-drop, the fact that every decently written program behaves
in the way you expect it to. Mac, Amiga, Atari, Archimedes, and
NeXT all have this. X and it's windows managers don't.
> >> applications are tty-oriented applications with extra X-support.
>
> Some are. Others aren't. Don't forget that character-oriented
> applications offer you a flexibility that no GUI can possibly offer.
> One of the biggest mistakes in the Megaslop environment is that this
> flexibility has been discarded because it's more difficult to learn.
It isn't a mistake. This flexibility is a direct descendant of the
limits that a text-only environment imposes on you. If you wouldn't
have the flexibility, you would have nothing, compared to a GUI.
The idea behind a GUI is to make it simple and consistent. Why
should one need extensive training to be able to operate a computer?
Why can't many people still program their VCR? Because the user
interface sucks.
Sure, GUI's are hard to program and not as much fun as writing
a high-performance file system or device driver. But it's the
interface to the user and that's why they're so important.
> > But that's hardly the failure of X. It's the failure of those people
> > who've been using their old tty-mode programs, and wrapped them up
> > into X11.
I can understand why this is. If you write a program, at least half
of your time will get into the time to develop a good GUI. It's a
hard thing to do. I've done it for the Amiga, but I must say the
result was worth the trouble. If the GUI would have been worse,
the program would have gotten bad reviews. Now, the reviews were
good. The GUI wasn't mentioned. So that means it lived up to the
expectations.
> >> [NT becoming better over time]
> >
> > This has been threatened a while ago already. The tricky thing with
> > NT (as i see it every day at our customers) is *not* to initially get
> > it to fly. The tricky thing is to keep it running, and even know in a
> > failure situation what it's doing, and how to repair. One of our
> > customers started to send out packets to port 138 on a nonexistant
> > address of our network a couple of days ago. This costs him DM 10
> > each day, phone costs only. He doesn't even know why this happens,
> > nor was he able to trace it down by now. I know it's his NT server,
> > so i wasn't too surprised to see it happen... The initial disadvant-
> > age with Unix, that you gotta learn quite a number of things before
> > you are happy, quickly turns into an advantage once there's a problem:
> > you know the ins and outs of your system, so you also know where to
> > look if troubles appear.
That's a problem with NT, sure. Try to find some log files, for
example. You still need to be a sysadmin to maintain an NT system,
something that's easily overlooked by those that fall for the
marketing hype coming out of Redmond, WA. Even then, some things
hide behind a shroud of mystery.
> Yup. There's no good way to represent errors graphically.
Nonsense.
> > I've seen many win users re-installing their systems quite a number
> > of times. I couldn't imagine why i should re-install one of my
> > systems. The machine at home even has migrated a number of disks
> > already, without re-installation.
>
> This is a habit that a lot of people get in to, even with FreeBSD. I
> don't know how to explain to people that it's a bad idea.
It isn't too difficult to totally mess up you Windows system. So it
might be the best idea to start from a know situation: the one just
after installing.
But say I accidently removed /etc and then rebooted, what would be
the best way to fix it? Re-installing could be an option.
If I may conclude my points, all I can say that both systems have
their pro's and con's. I wouldn't be on this list if I were just
another Microsoft devotee.
But you can nitpick as much as you want on MS, Windows and NT,
but some things just work better with them. Security in NT has
a better base (VMS) that in Unix, despite the security bugs that
reguraly show up.
Another thing, not to be forgotten, is that very many people
use Windows 95 at the moment. It's pretty easy to couple it
with NT. So, for an intranet, NT is probably more suited than
Unix is.
NT is something like five to ten years old. I don't expect all
the bugs to be out of it, also considering MS's strategy to
release first and fix bugs later. Unix had 25 years to mature.
MS has 20,000 programmers and a lot of cash.
The stepover from 95 to NT 4.0 is pretty smooth. So expect to see
a lot of NT or it derivates in five years. The monopoly is pretty
scaring, but what can you do abot it? Unix isn't friendly enough
to appeal to a mass market. It also lacks options that have become
pretty standard by now. Noone, except some excep- tions, wants to
use a text interface anymore. What I noticed as the helpdesk at an
Internet Service Provider, is that the average customer becomes
less and less knowledgeable about computers, and this is a trend
that's continuing.
To these people, MS products appeal a lot more than Unix, sad as
it may be. Though it's my opinion that you don't need training to
operate a computer. This is what makes the Mac very good (it does
have it disadvantages, of course). I had a woman, who never touched
a computer or a mouse before, started with Netscape on a Mac in a
matter of minutes. She also found out an inconsistency with the
user interface (the cursor changes when you move over a link, but
not when you move over a button) that I didn't even think about.
- Peter
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