Date: Thu, 28 Aug 1997 08:37:03 +0200 From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ATT Unix for Windows ! Message-ID: <19970828083703.OY21311@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <19970828002532.43939@grendel.IAEhv.nl>; from Peter Korsten on Aug 28, 1997 00:25:32 %2B0200 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>
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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.)
> 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.
> > good. Now consider that you've got a GIF image that should be
> > included as a (for example) X11 bitmap. How do you do this in VC++?
>
> I insert a bitmap object, I suppose. A menu brings up a select box
> with graphical representations of objects you can insert.
And each time the original object changes, you can re-insert it, maybe
scale it by 50 %, maybe reduce its number of colors to 20, each done
anew automatically after a change?
> 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.
> 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.)
And herein lies the rub. My desktop probably looks unique to anything
else on the world. The explanation i can give you wouldn't fit into
one pair of parenthesis, so anybody else with X11 could reconstruct
it. Yours is a pre-cooked one, still. I have stolen some granite
bitmap from an SGI, that's my background. I'm using Alt-1 through
Alt-9 to toggle the virtual screens (though this feature has already
infected other colleagues :). Etc. pp. The only description i can
give you for my desktop is sending the entire .fvwmrc, .xsession and
app-defaults files.
> 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. Things like CDE show that it can be
done. Or Netscape. Still, it's plain text files, but who cares? (I
wouldn't even be sure any longer for Netscape.)
The worst abonimation DOS/Windows came up with is IMHO a ``text
system'' that uses binary junk files, incompatible even to itself,
unintelligible for anybody else. They probably call this
``marketing'', i know.
> But the point I was making was not that the screen should look
> the same on every system, but that applications should be build
> and respond in the same way.
So you want a Macintosh? :-) But well, that's not a problem of the
window system itself, it's a problem of the application writers.
Windows applications usually don't adhere to this requirement either,
although they often *look* as if they were doing. X11 applications
don't even look like they would attempt to reach this goal. The
strictest environment enforcing such a policy is indeed the Mac.
> 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.
> applications are tty-oriented applications with extra X-support.
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.
> When - not if - the moment arrives that NT is as capable as Unix,
> you'll see that the relative ease with which you can setup things
> (you still need to know what you're doing, though) will give Unix
> a very hard 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. 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.
--
cheers, J"org
joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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