Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 09:27:55 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: mike allison <mallison@konnections.com> Cc: Bob Bishop <rb@gid.co.uk>, dennis <dennis@etinc.com>, Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com>, Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Price of FreeBSD (was On Holy Wars...) Message-ID: <3933.861467275@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 20 Apr 1997 09:32:55 PDT." <335A4537.7AC6599C@konnections.com>
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> quite a few projects. Remember GEM? Anyone seen the Original GEM (Ver Yeah, I do. It wasn't half bad, which is why I figured it died. :-) "BETAmaxed" > I think the real shame in all of this, as I've ALWAYS said, is that the > whole computer thing was and is a big MARKETING SCAM. No one gives a Heh heh, of course! ;-) We're still at the stage where all the solutions are imperfect and don't even begin to approach what people *really* want (HAL 9000), so we get to play the same games that early "doctors" played - you'd throw your money at any quack healer in hopes that he'd make you better because none of the healers available were all that good or knew what they were doing, about the best you could hope for being one who knew a little more about anatomy and the pharmacology of plants than he did about feathers and snake rattles and could actually do that compound fracture of yours some good. Basically, yntil we've got HAL and I can simply walk around my house and dialog with the computer or have it generate complex images on any of my high-definition televisions (I figure HAL and HDTV will come out around the same time ;), I'm going to have to pay a lot of money for less than I want. That's called a marketing opportunity. :-) > NT is nice.... it has some bullet proof features.... but NOW I can't get > at the machine. I can't get a command line interface. At least in X I > can pull an Xterm and manipulate the machine. NT/95, like the Mac > interface. Don't trust me to have that access. It's similar to > automated online card systems at the library. It only works when I can > think like the system expects me to think. Sometimes I just want to > browse through the cards and do things myself.... Yes, however, our problem is that we don't have BOTH and we really should. I mean, imagine it - all the fancy setup and configuration tools (and SDKs and style guides and ...) of Win95 and the underpinnings of UNIX for those who wanted it underneath. Elite users get a shell, GUI-heads get a desktop with all the usual icons and start buttons (which we can have now with fvwm95, admittedly, but there's nothing really *under* those buttons :-). That would truly be the best of both worlds, and the only thing I've seen which actually comes remotely close is OS/2. It actually has a decent network suite (very Berkeley-ish and probably ported from it) and one of the best X servers for a non-UNIX platform I've ever used. Of course, we all know what's happening to OS/2.. :-) Jordan
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