Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 17:27:52 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> Cc: <chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Feeding the Troll (Was: freebsd as a desktop ?) Message-ID: <15368.5624.255357.964607@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <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$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15368.2156.193643.17139@guru.mired.org> <005601c179f3$a4030640$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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Anthony Atkielski <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> types: > Mike writes: > > 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. All else is seldom, if ever, equal. Once you get past "good enough", marketing is more important than the technology. In other words, the best marketed product that is "good enough" will win. > > 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. I don't believe there was any way they could have sold Unix workstations at PC prices. You can't build a reasonable Unix workstation using PC parts for PC prices today; why should they have been able to do it with proprietary hardware back then? > > 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. I'll disagree with that. The Apple Lisa predated the Mac, and was a much better machine to own. It was also a lot more expensive. Before it died, you could buy Unix workstations running proprietary windowing environments which would do everything the early Mac would do, and then some. Before Windows 3.0 was introduced, you could buy Amigas. > > 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. You didn't hang out in electronic forums for people using multitasking on their desktop in the late 80s, then. It was a common topic there. > > 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. Yup. Those graphics had a lot to do with why it died, to. After the mass market caught up and then passed it, it took several revs of the OS before they had an API for the driver that would let them move to other platforms. By which time they were close to dead. > > 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. My time on Windows was running a machine installed by the IT department, with an MCSE. It still crashed twice a day, even though I put absolutely nothing else on it. and didn't twiddle with it at all. > > 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. That's when you need multiple platforms. But we agreed on that a long time ago. > > 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. XFree86 comes with source. Feel free to port it. On the other hand, I regularly write X apps for Unix that then run unchanged on Windows and the Mac. > > Going the other way - being able to run FreeBSD > > drivers on Windows - is what would be important. > When you dream, you dream big! No, when I typo, I typo big. Being able to run FreeBSD drivers on Linux would be my problem. > > 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. For which both we and they should be thankful. > > 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? I told you, I believe the answer is yes, but it will take some investigation to verify it. If you want me to do that, you've got to pay for my time. If you want to do it yourself, I'll tell you the things to try. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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