Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 00:06:26 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> To: "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org> Cc: "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org>, <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Feeding the Troll (Was: freebsd as a desktop ?) Message-ID: <005601c179f3$a4030640$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <15367.37543.15609.362257@guru.mired.org><040701c179af$4bda25f0$0a00000a@atkielski.com><15367.43943.686638.723011@guru.mired.org><003301c179ea$8925d270$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15368.2156.193643.17139@guru.mired.org>
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Mike writes: > I have a habit of buying the best *technical* > solution to a problem, and ignoring popularity. So do I. So do many on these lists, I suspect. > I've ownd a lot of orphans. Hmm ... I don't know of any reason why the best technical solutions would necessarily be any more likely to become orphans than the less-than-best. Indeed, all else being equal, they should be more likely to succeed, overall. That has been my own experience, although the margin is narrow. > At that time, other companies were selling > Unix workstations to people who could afford > them. But they made Mac's look cheap. If they had sold UNIX workstations at PC prices--which they could have done, if they weren't so concerned about fat margins, instead of high volume--we might all be using UNIX workstations today. > Are you claiming there was a time when there > were more Mac's than there were DOS boxes? No, I'm claiming that there was a time when a Mac was the best machine to have. But most people couldn't afford one, and Apple didn't want to cut its margins. > On the other hand, during that period I had > an Amiga on my desktop. I was the last person in my unit to get a PC, at my own request, and it was the junkiest of the lot, being a hand-me-down that had gone through many other engineers; the disk made a funny, spring-like noise all the time. Still, there weren't many applications for DOS at the time that had any relevance to my work, so I ran it mostly as an emulator of the terminal I had lost. Eventually I wrote a simple text editor and a communications program for it, and used it to edit files for use on the mainframe. Someone told me that a 286 could never go past 4800 bps, so I wrote a comm program that ran at 38400 bps without any trouble. Eventually I installed an early version of Microsoft Word on the machine, but it was incredibly slow--I had to stop typing periodically so that it could catch up with me. I used Word only for writing documentation. > Oddly enough, people using DOS and the Mac > griped that multitasking was a waste for a > personal computer, and nobody would ever need > those things. I don't even recall it being discussed. It would have been a waste for DOS, that's true. > They also complained that color was worthless, > as what would you do with it? I had a color monitor from the start. I remember people flaming me for writing in upper and lower case, though. Using lowercase letters made things "complicated" according to them, and served no useful purpose. I BET THERE ARENT MANY OF THEM WHO FEEL THAT WAY NOW STOP TIMES CHANGE STOP > For a time, the Amiga owned the desktop and > home video Market. I never used an Amiga, but I understand its graphics were second to none for many years. > I thought we had already agreed that the consumer > version - which is what these people are using - > wasn't really suitable for heavy use because it > malfunctions regularly. It doesn't malfunction _regularly_, just more often than a power user is likely to tolerate. I'd say that about 95% of Windows users almost never see a crash of the machine. The remaining 5% probably see two or more crashes a day. In my own examination of this phenomenon, I've discovered that the latter group does a lot more uninformed twiddling with the machine than the former group, and it also installs far more "junk" software, including lots of shareware and freeware and games. Indeed, these latter clueless individuals even install stuff without knowing what it is for. And when their disks fill, they just step through folders and delete anything that looks big. > That's what you get for choosing your platform, > then trying to find applications to run on it. Sometimes you need more than one application, and no platform can run them all. > Of course, as you're so fond of pointing out, > there are 100,000 applications available for > Windows. I'm pretty sure that applications > that support most open standards can be found > in that group. Free X servers for Windows seem to be scarce. > Uh - I don't think MS originated PPP. Not PPP ... PPTP. Microsoft and Sun and possibly some others. MS also added some proprietary extensions, I think. > I know they originated some extensions that ISPs > pretty much had to follow because 99% of their > customers ran Windows, but that's a different > thing. Yes. > Going the other way - being able to run FreeBSD > drivers on Windows - is what would be important. When you dream, you dream big! > I hate to tell you this, but it's *not* at the > bottom of the Totem pole. At the very least, > AIX is beneath it. AIX is a Unix with most of > the user interface designed by the MVS group > at IBM - or at least it felt that way to me. But AIX isn't being given away in magazines to idiot college and high-school students. > Nah, just the windowing desktop - which means > it's incorrect to claim that Windows NT was > designed from scratch for a windowing environment. It was always understood that the primary and default user interface would be a GUI. However, NT originally was designed to support any arbitrary user interface, not just the Win32 subsystem. > True. But you don't have to run the window > manager on that machine. But if you are running the X server on that machine, the window manager is the least of your worries. So can you run any X server on FreeBSD itself with secure_level=3, or set to anything about -1? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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