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I'll second Bryan in being unable to help myself today. Apologies for
my contribution to filling your mbox :-)
> Anyone arguing for OpenSource must realise that by giving away their
> source code they risk their program being ported to windows ;-)
People should have the freedom to get what they deserve.
> A motivation for choosing unix systems for PX was 3D graphics
> and faster computers with bigger memories, but nowadays the masses have caught
> up and it is not so clear what is to be gained from a technical point of view.
The presence of a coherent, dependable and modifiable operating system.
> The lack of extensive documentation on the web for "setting things up" on
> windows might mean that most people figured it out themselves so easily that
> there was no motivation to help others?
..., or, because there is so little you can do if "setting things up" (via
random mouse movements, RMM) "doesn't work" ?
> It is strange that no one has dared to speak up for windows. A quote from Eric
> Raymond a couple of years ago:
> "The biggest obstacle between open-source software and world domination is not
> Microsoft, it's our own endemic cluelessness about how to design software that
> won't make nontechnical users run screaming".
"Computational crystallography" and/or "computational biology" indeed
sound like non-technical-user-friendly subjects.
> As much as you might hate windows (or sony) it is unlikely to go away
> anytime soon.
Though I despise windoze, this is is not about love or hate. It is about
freedom. You are, of course, right to note that there is a huge market
place for windoze. My objection is that this market place does not
encompass scientific computing. People in need of a word processor, of an
archiving system for their photographs or videos, or of nice and fast
video games (including but not limited to the excellent microsoft's flight
simulator :-), may have good reasons to stick to windoze (the best reason
being that they do not know better). But these are not the computational
needs that are being discussed.
Nicholas
--
Dr Nicholas M. Glykos, Department of Molecular
Biology and Genetics, Democritus University of Thrace,
Dimitras 19, 68100 Alexandroupolis, GREECE, Fax ++302551030613
Tel ++302551030620 (77620), http://www.mbg.duth.gr/~glykos/
