Les wrote:
No, it means that you aren't addressing the real issue at all. The real
problem is that Microsoft has no competition, and by working to ensure
that Linux distributions cannot contain everything they need to be a
competitor, you are helping them maintain their monopoly status and
their ability to rape users.
But remember when Microsoft attempted to usurp SUN's Java, and how SUN
had to go after them to prevent that?
Yes, and there are other incompatible versions just as damaging.
Or do you remember Wordstar which was a word processing program which
had a working model where you never had to take your fingers off the
home row (it was used by at least 199 professional Authors, as well as
many hundreds of educators), but Microsoft captured the control J
character to disable its menues?
Yes, but I don't see the relevance to open source vs. proprietary
systems. Hardly anything still uses the wordstar command structure.
These are the sorts of things that can happen through the openings of
standards. Control J is in fact the standard for a line feed. Yet no
microsoft system has ever included control J ascii 0x0a to achieve a
linefeed (unless they have started within the last 5 years). Instead
Microsoft ends lines with c/r which is ascii 0x0d.
Programmers haven't seen the need for control-key commands since
keyboards started including an alt key and a bunch of function keys and
everything has a mouse.
Now we have lots of menues with Word, driven by a mouse (with some
associated helper keys if you can remember them), but all require that
you remove your hands from the home row due to the means by which they
are called.
Yes, and you can insert pictures too...
> Proprietary stuff has a way of creeping in where it can do damage via
the legal system, and while I want programmers to get paid for their
work, I do not want one system or even one set of standards to wipe
everything else out. If that happened you would not have the high
capacity disks you have today thanks to the shift from RLE to PRML to
whatever standards are now being used for the magneto-strictive heads.
And there is still better technology available out there somewhere.
Not sure I see a point here. What we need are interfaces that let you
run old/new technology concurrently and while that isn't perfect it is
better than ever before. Look at all the stuff you can put on the other
side of firewire/usb/scsi connection or use remotely over networks.
I do want technology to move forward, but I do not want to lose data
like some old tapes I have that were on the 40GB stnadard that can no
longer be read (I think SUN has a drive that will read them should I
ever decide to plunk down the bucks or decide that the software and
documentation there would be worth it.)
What happened to Digital Research?
Bad marketing?
Digital Equipment Corporation?
DEC? The company best known for it's CEO wondering why anyone would
want a computer in their home?
Sure some technologies are replaced, and some die due to technical
lapses, and occasionally one is too early in the hardware capability
region, but how do we hang onto those intriguing concepts? The Open
Software movement has archives both formal and informal all over the
world with bits and pieces just waiting for discovery and implementation
in a new context or new hardware, along with some capability to recover
things from long ago systems. Like rosetta stones just waiting for
their 30th century discovery to decode our past.
If they were designed with stable interfaces you'd still be able to use
them.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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