Re: OS/2 & Cyrix

[Harmon Seaver hseaver@xxxxxxxx]

Peter Evans wrote:
>> are, but says that some or many commercial packages are arranged so the
> clock ticks as you use them. The more you use, the more you pay. Is this
> untrue?

   I haven't seen any, although it certainly sounds like a reasonable
marketing technique for expensive applications. As for ease of
installation, comparisons are difficult. And irrelevant. Some -- written
by Sun, let's say -- might take 10 minutes, others have taken many
hours. However, you obviously haven't installed many windoz apps if you
think they're all so easy. I recently installed a copy of Novell's Word
Perfect on a networked machine and it promptly trashed the network setup
for that machine, requiring hours of work. Likewise, I have seen many
other commercial windoz apps that take hours, even days, to get working
properly, requiring help from the computer center people doing packet
tracing, etc. Loser95 can even be worse -- screw up the registry and
maybe end up re-installing the operating system because of a failed app
installation. Or having to pull out PNP cards and reinstall them to
correct malfuntions.
  Plus with all the viruses and other things that run rampant in the
windoz world and don't affect unix -- have you played with winnuke? It's
neat -- I can sit at my desk and crash a loser95 or nt machine anywhere
in the world (if it's not behind a good firewall) just by typing in the
IP number -- or a range of IP numbers to crash bunches of them. Great
fun! Hackers keep crashing Microsloths webpage and even trashed MSnet's
email for over a week.

> or to do more of what I wanted to do with less effort. Now, if for example
> TTG [hello Kenneth Frank!] brings out a debugged XyWrite 5 for Linux, I'll
> rush to install Linux.

  That will never, ever, ever happen. If they came out with a Java
version so it could run on all platforms, that would be nice, but that
will never happen either. The problem is that XY is primarily assembler
-- it would require a total, 100% re-write to do that, and it ain't
gonna happen. OTOH, you can buy a native Linux WordPerfect right now,
and a native Linux StarOffice right now, as well as CorelDrw.



Harmon Seaver hseaver@xxxxxxxx http://www.dibbs.net/~hseaver
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All is impermanent, but this too shall pass away, and the way of the
Samurai is death -- so speak your mind now, or forever hold your peace.
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Copyright, Harmon F. Seaver, 1997. License to distribute this post is
available to Microsoft for US$1,000 per instance, or local equivalent.
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