On Sat, 4 Dec 1999, Frank Warren wrote:

> nonsensical religious abstractions which are meaningful
> to less than a tiny fraction of a percent of the world.  

It's just that, this tiny fraction of the world is writing all the world's
useful OS code, and no one else will dare try.

Not even Apple.  They stole MacOS X piecewise from various ``nonsensical
religious'' camps--Mach, NeXT, BSD's.

The people who do try are generally laughed at.

> What remains of UNIX is not a thriving community, but one that, apart
> from the Internet, would be a backwater eddy of a genre surviving only
> on old, junk hardware.

This is an interesting opinion, simply because I haven't heard anyone
present it since ten years ago.  I think if these OS wars have shown
anything, it's the surprising value of Unix. Given how old it is, this is
a very discouraging discovery.  Basically everything the industry has
tried, failed:  microkernels, system V, Windows NT--no one is doing any
research and development on these things, because they don't have a
future.  BSD and Linux are the hot stuff thetse days.

This is not good.  It's bad.  It means we've been making nothing but
mistakes for the last 20 years.  It's like monks in the dark ages reading
Greek.  It's pathetic.

But, I would think the _last_ thing anyone would question in today's
industry climate would be that Unix turned out to be the only OS worth a
damn.  It's sobering, even humiliating, but it's painfully obvious.  Unix
is still the only thing taught in schools.  Unix is still the only thing
people turn to as a reference when they're writing their doomed notUnix
OS's.

Believe me, I tried just about everything to avoid using Unix.  I've used
DOS, DoubleDOS, DESQview, a couple versions of OS/2, Windows since version
1.03, a couple versions of NT; the only thing I didn't try out back in
those dark years was QNX.  and it's really too bad because QNX might have
bought me a clue.  but the ftn software for QNX sucked, so, so much for
that.  bastards.

I often ask people, ``have you noticed that your computers crash, _a lot_,
and that they often do strange, unexpected things rather than what you
tell them to, and that he helpdesk people often aren't much better at
fixing them than you are?''  They usually know right where I'm going.

They chime in, ``well, from a pragmatic point of view, my computer does
everything I need it to, and the Microsoft stuff is really well-targeted
to my needs and does everything i need and works together to do the stuff
i need to get done, at work.'' They seem to be saying, ``please, _please_
for the love of god don't change _anything!_ My computer is just barely
working as it is--i don't want to try out any of this fancypants new stuff
because then i won't be able to get my work done _at all_ and i'll be
fired.'' They are downright _afraid_ to even _investigate_ competing
possibilities.  Vote for Stalin!  The man of Steel!  He brings us Food!

Mac's suck!
Unix is for Developers!
I don't _want_ to know anything more--i know too much already!


You seem to feel that Unix is a worthless operating system because it
lacks an Office Suite and a Web Browser.  First of all, office suites and
web browsers aren't part of the operating system.  This is, like i said,
marketing bullshit.  Second of all, it doesn't lack them.

Well, at least if you're running an i386 (or maybe a SPARC), you're in
good shape. If you're running NetBSD or FreeBSD, you can run FreeBSD and
Linux i386 binaries.

There was a recent review on Daemon News for ApplixWare on FreeBSD, which
is apparently even better now than the pre-glibc Linux copy I tried.  It
costs $100, reads and writes Office 2000 documents, and is a lot faster
and more powerful than Office. I set up the old Applixware on an NCD15b X
terminal for my Art History Major roomate, and she didn't complain once.  
She typed a five page paper baked off her ass, and she didn't have to
erase everything or pull out the reference manual or anything--just type,
type, type, print.  And, she came back for more a few weeks later.  What
more could I ask for?

Likewise, StarOffice has been out for a while.  StarOffice will simulate a
complete Win95 desktop inside one X window, Start button and all.  You'll
feel right at home--as they obviously intended.  StarOffice also has a
good web browser built in--it seems to use that the-desktop-is-the-browser
concept.  I'm not sure what's up with Wordperfect these days.  There's
also some IBM/Lotus thing that just came out for Linux, office-wise.  
Abiword, lyx, siag are free alternatives worth toying with.

The state of affairs with commercial Unix has been good for a long time.
WordPerfect, FrameMaker, and Interleaf have run on Unix for ages.

It sounds like you won't admit that Unix has ``applications'' until it
runs Office 2000, and you further insist that Office 2000 must install by
default from the main CD. To install an operating system and then
immediately whine, ``where's my word processor?  where's my spreadsheet?''
seems a little spoiled.  You're supposed to go out and buy and install
them.  It's a novel idea, I know, that there might be a _choice_ in word
processors, that you might have to _shop around_ to find one you liked,
and maybe even click on a few hyperlinks to read some consumer reports
about them before you buy.  Most corporate offices have trained everyone
to stick in a fixed set of CD's that came with the computer and run Setup
on each one. They expect the computer to come preloaded with all the apps
they want to use.  This is a really odd expectation.

Well, you can't have Office 2000--you have to buy something else, like
Applixware or Staroffice or Wordperfect. And nothing installs straight off
the main CD, but we're continually working on something like that for all
the lazy bastards at con's to try out, involving pkgsrc and various free
GNOME and non-GNOME apps--it's looking in pretty good shape, in my
opinion.  it does require reading the web docs on pkgsrc, though.

-- 
Miles Nordin / v:1-888-857-2723 fax:+1 530 579-8680
555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700 / US