From: lytras@avalon.physik.unizh.ch (Apostolos Lytras)
Subject: Re: IS UNIX DEAD? (long)
Organization: Informatik Club d. Universitaet, Zuerich
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 15:04:13 GMT


In article <1992Nov20.003831.969@global.hacktic.nl> you write:
>That's rediculous! emTeX for DOS or OS/2 costs as much and offers as much. But
>it isn't Framemaker. So what you say here has nothing to do with what were
>talking about: the difference in numbers and prices of applications.

Indeed, it's not framemaker, and it doesn't offer the same things
either, but it's far superior to framemaker. That's why the comparison
may be ridiculous, but that's just because prices for useless apps like
framemaker are THAT high. Maybe you're right, the comparison was just
TOO flattering for FrameMaker. But I wanted to compare with something
that is available on the same amount of hardware on both sides, which is
- as you say - a ridiculous thing to try, because DOS is dead, and UNIX
isn't.

[Perl and Excel]
>Sorry, but these are rediculous comparissons. You can't compare a bicycle with
>an train. Just like you can't compare X11 with COMMAND.COM. I mean, Perl and
>Excel are two completely different kind of programs. I can program a
>spreadsheet in C, but that doesn't make C a spreadsheet... Or does it?

You can program a spreadsheet in Excel, too, and it doesn't make Excel a
spreadsheet either (I won't indulge in my views on spreadsheets, because
then I'd have to justify my belief that spreadsheets are the most
useless applications ever invented, worse than computer games). The
comparison just works, because Excel isn't a spreadsheet, you have to
program it in a cryptic macro language to get real use from it, and it
will be slower than perl, once you finished. Same applies to perl, but
it's faster and cheaper. I had to evaluate a few megabytes of numeric
data this fall and did it in both, so I know what I'm talking about,
perl just did the job a) EASIER!, b) faster, c) cheaper than Excel.
We're talking business here, and time is money, I just can't afford to
pay $500 and get less performance than from free software.

>I know, don't tell me things I knew for years. I'm not a DOS user, I don't
>like the dumb PC networks like Novell and others. You don't need to convince
>me about the good things of UNIX (and not of the bad things :). The point is,
>you can't say: "Hey, look at this nice hacker friendly whiz-bang UNIX system
>with a feeping creaturizm shell, a nice VI editor and gcc, make, Perl, awk,
>TCP/IP, NFS, X, and all the other goodies installed!". I like it, you like it,
>but it scares other people.

And you get impressed by the masses. There is a saying in switzerland
that goes: "Eat cow shit, millions of flies can't be wrong". It might
scare somebody, but we are experiencing an enormous growth in computer
knowledge among our population, so we're just not anymore at a point
where computers absolutely HAVE to have an interface with annoying
dialog boxes flashing up every other second. These people want
performance, they want to get their jobs done, and they have the
knowledge to handle a computer that is hacker friendly. These people are
UNIX people, and the market will grow, because they are on the rise. Why
stop them with awkward user interfaces, that have been licensed and
implemented by bozos? 

>The argument about connecting PCs to a network: well who cares? A UNIX machine
>has an administrator (according to some posters here), well so has a PC
>network. Period.

*laugh* You must be joking. WHICH PC network, if you please? I don't see
many PC's networking, when you look at the market as a whole, and why is
that so?

>"But the system wasn't ment for end-users". It's an invalid argument, the
>system as in operating system, was ment for interactive use. The *user
>interface*, was ment for hackers. There is no reason why we can't have a
>second user interface that was ment for end-users. Preferably a consistent
>GUI. Even MS-DOS offers a shell and I think it even installs by default. So
>why can't most UNIXes have such a thing?

That wasn't my argument, but let me answer to this quickly.
NeXTstep has it, OpenWindows has it, OSF/1 has it... even Linux has
one. In fact, only DOS users don't have one consistent GUI (windows is a
joke, windows NT will be a bad joke, os/2 adds to this variety, a.s.o).

Cheers
- A.

-- 
	 lytras@ifi.unizh.ch   		|   Apostolos Lytras
	 lytras@avalon.physik.unizh.ch	|   Informatik Club der Uni
	 lytras@amiga.physik.unizh.ch  	|   Zuerich, SysAdmin