Re: OS/2 & Cyrix

[Peter Evans peterev@xxxxxxxx]

At 08:40 AM 8/3/97 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote about me:
>However, you obviously haven't installed many windoz apps if you
>think they're all so easy.

Uh, hold on a moment here. If the PC Rag people do have trouble with UNIX,
they're incompetent--but if I don't have trouble installing 'Doze 95 progs,
I'm not competent but inexperienced. And "obviously" so? Isn't there a
certain assymmetry of assumptions here?

>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.

Whatever Novell is, it's not Windoze. (And since my computer doesn't need
to be networked, it's of no concern to me.)

>I have seen many other commercial windoz apps that take hours,
>even days, to get working properly. . . .

If this is true, XyWin's much-publicized bugginess begins to sound grossly
exaggerated. I've never heard of a program I was interested in that took
hours to get working. For all I know, something of the complexity of
Oracle may take that long--but I've no need for such a program.

>Loser95 can even be worse -- screw up the registry and maybe end up
>re-installing the operating system because of a failed app installation.

Screwing up the registry is something that's never happened to me (except
perhaps once) or to anyone I know. With a bit of batch-file jiggery-pokery
or a simple program such as Lifesaver, you can easily back up the registry
and reinstall it. It's also staggeringly easy to reinstall the operating
system--I know as I did this after the one major cock-up that might have
been a registry error. (Reinstallation took less than half an hour, as I
remember.) Matter of fact, a friend routinely reinstalls the operating
system once every six months or so as a preventive measure.

>  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?

No. Moreover, I have never encountered a single Intel (-clone) user who
has experienced a virus. (Mac users are a different story.) Yes, yes, I
do believe that they exist--but also that the risk is exaggerated for
commercial or journalistic purposes. (Ignoring or deleting unsolicited
executables attached to incoming messages may have something to do with my
machine's continuing good "health".)

>The Sun Sparc 20 I run wabi on has dual cpus of around 150mhz each
>(can't recall exactly) and 256meg of RAM, 24gig drive space. Windoz apps
>definitely run faster than any other machine I've ever seen. . . .

Well, good. But it would be absurd if they didn't--after all, that machine
sounds more expensive than any Wintel machine I've ever seen.

With the occasional change of hard drive, motherboard, CPU etc.--always a
year or so behind what's on the front covers of the magazines--my own ugly
box costs me an average of . . . I'd like to think $500 per year, but
certainly less than $1000. It's now happy to run XyWin (of course), MS
Office 97 Japanese (happier than I am), WordPerfect 6 Japanese, WordPerfect
Suite 7, Netscape 3 (I haven't bothered to get 4), Eudora Pro, and various
utilities (many of them DOS and many of *these* freeware). I don't like
the way it helps finance Microsoft, but it does seem to give value for
money-plus-time.

In his article "What Is Linux?" (Linux Journal's 1997 Buyer's Guide; online
but I forgot to jot down the URL, sorry), Phil Hughes makes a convincing
case for the superiority of Linux to any MS product. I don't argue with
this. But his real-world example is that of running a small ISP, which is
very far from my ambitions. Meanwhile, he doesn't mention a chore as
mundane as printing.

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Peter Evans