*BSD News Article 88309


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From: davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: Betting on Unix
Date: 5 Feb 1997 20:24:11 GMT
Organization: TMR Associates, Schenectady NY
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Message-ID: <5daq9b$tck@usenet1y.prodigy.net>
References: <5d3sr2$44n@nntp1.best.com> <E50rGo.K3n@nonexistent.com> <nLVF2tL@quack.kfu.com>
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In article <nLVF2tL@quack.kfu.com>, Nick Sayer <nsayer@quack.kfu.com> wrote:

| What would make Unix' future? Scott MacNeily can whine about Microsoft
| desktops wasting monumental amounts of admin time and energy if he
| likes, but unix will die without applications.

UNIX doesn't have applications. You look for one product from one
vendor to use UNIX, you have a large choice with MS. You don't
(sanely) buy an o/s and then look for apps in the business world,
you find the app and then buy the o/s, and then buy the hardware.
You look for the platform which gives you the apps, and stay with
it. Its name is MicroSoft, unfortunately.

I like UNIX variants, but when I want to write something of any size
I go to Word, because it's a better tool than anything affordable on
UNIX, and because people want you to use it. The only two formats I
have seen widely used for electronic submission are troff (then) and
Word (now). You can find academic journals which take TeX, and
magazines that know your WordPerfect will read into Word, where they
want it, but they are not the mass market.

I still write stuff in troff using my own version of almost-emacs,
but I don't expect to use anything but the hardcopy, and if I had a
good revision control for Word, I'd be using that more (maybe in
Office 97).

| But Unix' achiles heel is that its compatability is only at source
| level.

Write everything in JAVA ;-) Sorry, couldn't resist.
--
	-bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com)
"As a software development model, Anarchy does not scale well."
		-Dave Welch