OK, some of these are just SO FAR off I just can't let go...
"Day Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> [...]
> If there were a dos browser that could handle the mickysloth
> webpages and do online ordering, I'd run it. Arachne dont do
> USENET either. Neither does OPERA.
Exactly. The APPS are what's important. If an app exists only on one OS,
then that OS is the one you have to deal with. The OS itself is less
important.
> [...]
> Agreed that if you have normal hardware, Linux can be installed.
> But the difficulty, depending on the distro and the hardware,
> can be considerable. Redhat 5.2, the first I saw, was appallingly
> lacking in handling errors. considering the vastly more powerful
> os, the documentation is remarkably puny.
You do realize that RedHat 5.2 hit the streets back in 1997 or so. A few
things have happened since then, just as they have with any other currently
supported OS. Yeah, back in 1997, hardware detection was more hit-or-miss
and installation routines were cumbersome. They've improved considerably
since.
> Looking up a doc file on
> a 486 in dos was duck soup; by the time the 486 could find the same
> info or man segment on the drive in Linux, you could make duch soup.
Well let's see. How long will it take you to look up all occurences of a
keyword under DOS? You can open a SINGLE doc file and hope what you need is
there, but what about searching across MULTIPLE documents? The help system
for DOS commands may be in one format, but what about the other apps? And do
ALL DOS APPS provide online documentation.
Under Linux, I can type "apropos <keyword>" and find links to many documents
on the subject (assuming the keyword exists). If I want more flexibility, I
can fire up lynx and search for help in manpages, info files and even
compressed files under /usr/docs. dwww, htdig and a host of other utilities
are available for this purpose, all free, and all available for
installation.
So yeah, if you already know what you're looking for, the impluse hits you
and you're sitting at a powered off system, you could conceivably argue that
looking up help in DOS is faster. If you're doing a more general search,
I'll argue that Linux/Unix is faster.
Let's do a real-world comparison: How long would it take you in DOS to
search across several hundred document files for a keyword?
Day, YOU take forever to do things in Linux. You then argue that in your
world, taking a few extra minutes to do things "ain't all that important"
when someone shows you that Linux/Unix can indeed be faster.
> There are problems with the apps that have nothing to do with the
> operating system and vice versus. Linux apps could be made as small
> and fast with the documentation in a directory with the app, but
> Netscape dont do it that way.
And as has been posted here MANY times, Netscape is ONE app and one that
REQUIRES access to the Internet to be used anyhow. MOST apps have man or
info pages which can be searched and accessed in many ways. Rather than
scattering documentation across multiple location, *nix puts them in a few
standardized locations. Access to these standardized locations is being
folded into a common, searchable interface. While you may decry the web
browser interface, it allows me to access current online documentation as
easily and flexibly as that stored locally on my hard drive.
> With dos, there's a lotta hardware around now it wont run; you dont
> waste time trying. There's a lotta linux offerings that say that
> they can run some of the win modems, printers, or scanners, and you
> can spend enormous amounts of time tweaking that you wouldnt do in
> dos, and sometimes, it works, sometimes not.
IF you buy hardware on the ever-expanding list of SUPPORTED hardware, it'll
probably work with no problem. I was pleasantly surprised when, with no
prior experience, I was able to plug in a USB camera and have a web cam
running in minutes on a small Debian install. Here you go again Day. On one
message, you harp on hardware compatability with older or quirky devices,
but in your next you post about how cheap hardware can be found from the
wasteland of defunct dot-coms littering every city block in America (if only
one can weave their way through the multitudes of former CEOs and web
programmers begging on every corner).
Day, NO KIDDING that you have to spend time twiddling with oddball hardware.
Most people that bother are hobbyists who LIKE that sort of thing. When you
did it with DOS, you thought of yourself as a "power user". The average
office secretary sure doesn't do it. How's it different with Linux?
> I downloaded DESQUVIEW and QEMM; fooled around with them a little,
> but saw that it would take more to get it running.
Heh, by "more to get it running" you mean more effort than you could be
bothered with by reading the manual. I thought life moved so slowly in your
neck of the woods you could take a bit of time and do such things. Ah well,
I used to spend a LOT of time with Quarterdeck's DesqView and QEMM products,
and I remember them pretty well.
> Apparently there are, however, dos users who succeed at this,
To use your words, yes they typically "spend enormous amounts of time
tweaking" to get it to work. However, the results were quite worthwhile by
the standards of the Day -- IF you were a hobbyist who enjoyed such things.
The average user didn't care much for it, and DesqView -- slick as it was --
never took off in a big way.
> and out of that they get an os with a flat address space and multitasking.
Pseudo-multitasking yes. More like task-switching. And where-oh-where do you
get flat address space? It still ran on an Intel processor. And you still
had to be painfully aware of the 1MB real mode limitation (aka DOS 640KB
limitation).
> What does Linux offer that this dont?
The short list:
1. True multitasking. Linux doesn't stop when I download a file or format a
floppy, even doing both at once (both Day-to-day tasks that even a secretary
might do.) I don't stop work when I decide to pull down a large file, or
format a floppy (call it "productivity" if you like). As one who goes on
about the need to use slow dial-up lines, you should appreciate this.
2. The *nix apps are developed to run in the environment. They don't have to
be shoehorned on a hit-or-miss basis. Not everything ran well under
DesqView. With *nix, if the app supports graphics, it'll run with graphics
cooperatively with the other apps. That wasn't always guaranteed with
DesqView.
3. No resource contention. *nix apps know that other processes might be
using hardware and can deal with it. No lockups when you forget something
else is running in the background accessing hardware. You don't have to be
familiar with Brown's Interrupt List to get stuff to coexist.
4. Fewer configuration issues. I don't have to configure one app -- or as
you put it "spend enormous amoutnts of time tweaking" -- based on the memory
consumed by another with Linux. ("productivity" again.) If I have
insufficient RAM, I can configure swap space, thus doing things that would
otherwise be IMPOSSIBLE without more physical RAM. (This was a MAJOR issue
with DesqView, especially back when RAM wasn't cheap). Yes, it might run
slowly, but it'll run. When I do get more RAM, I don't have to reconfigure
to use it.
5. Cost. Yeah, many on this list like to pirate software. But to legally use
DOS, DesqView and QEMM, you'd be out over $100. Linux and BSDen are FREE. So
are many of the apps that run so well under them. No sticky licensing issues
for businesses, schools or NGOs.
6. Support. I can get current and updated support info on Linux.
You see Day, there are those of us who have actually bothered to USE the
products and systems we write about. I KNOW, and HAVE USED and HAVE READ THE
DOCUMENTATION FOR DesqView and QEMM extensively (although I'm starting to
forget a lot of it now.) I KNOW, and HAVE USED and HAVE READ THE
DOCUMENTATION FOR Linux. I am able to get maximum benefit from either system
as a result. And I KNOW how they compare, I don't speculate.
> [...] There is no intrinsic reason
> that the dos app could not be developed. And actually, over time, I
> can see where that might happen. the dos/qemm/dqv os is no longer
> under development, which means that if you write an app that runs
> on it, it will still work next year. you dont need to upgrade it to
> keep up with the changes in the os.
You're the first person I've encountered that has actually seriously argued
obsolesence is an advantage! By your standard, my old Apple II+ beats DOS
hands-down. That enviornment is STABLE baby, no changes in YEARS. No
security patches either, so it must be good, right!
> But there is a synergy between the os, the programmer, and the public.
> it is why windoz, as crummy as it is, works. criticizing linux or dos
> usually comes down to one or more of these other factors that have
> very little to do with the fundamentals of the os.
What are you trying to say here?
> I find it fairly
> easy to install a distro off the cd. I'd never try to download one,
> and the few times I downloaded a linux app I got into trouble.
Day, you'd get into trouble sealing an envelope if you set your mind to it.
Yeah, you probably tried to mix stuff in a destructive way rather than
bothering to learn the LEAST bit about Linux and your distribution. If you
stick to installation packages intended for your distribution, they'll keep
you out of trouble most of the time. You can do stupid things like force
overwrites of libraries and such which can be disastrous. If they didn't do
that, you'd complain about being kept away from the power of the OS,
unnecessary user restrictions and other things you know nothing about.
> No dos app I ever tried was so complex to try to install. I didnt need
> to worry about which distro of dos I had.
Perhaps YOU never ran into issues. Many did, myself included. Hell, one of
the early benchmarks for "PC compatability" was whether Flight Sim or Lotus
1-2-3 would run on a system or DOS flavor. The problems got worse as you got
into memory management. And God forbid, you wanted to hook a few systems
together using a network, or add a CD-ROM drive. Anybody else out there run
into problems getting MSCDEX.EXE to talk to a CD-ROM low-level driver? Oh,
and wasn't it fun when core programs and drivers had DIFFERENT NAMES on
different DOS flavors? Whee!
> If the newbie can get by on whatever comes on the distro cd, then
> linux is simple. if not, then net. I bought seven different linux
> distros before I found one that would run my scsi card. That was
> after weeks diddling around downloading drivers for various distros.
Yes, you've demonstrated that you're willing to go to great lengths to make
the trivial seem impossible. Again, YOU keep going on about the ready
availability of cheap hardware these days. 2GB drives for $25. So DUMP the
damned SCSI subsystem that you can't figure out (but that many others have).
You have delightedly siezed on this one issue as an excuse to decry Linux to
no end, and it's a pretty damned lame one at this point.
> Dos ran that same scsi card right from the BIOS. no drivers, no
> screwing around. The speed was notiably faster, but since dos apps
> are so small and already fast, it had very little effect on my desktop.
Haha, give me a break. Yeah you had the proper drivers and tools for ONE
CARD. Dude, there are THOUSANDS of devices out there. I can just as easily
find some that won't work nearly as transparently under DOS. Try putting two
older, pre-IDE CD-ROMs from different manufacturers on for one. It can be
done, but it's not trivial.
> But when I found a SUSE that would run it, the linux boot time was
> cut nearly in half, and Netscape comes up nearly as fast as Arachne
> on a 486. But Netscape is the only thing I use Linux for.
So basically, even YOU got it all working, and you admit it's quick. So the
OS and apps are there and working, and "nearly as fast as Arachne on a 486"
to boot. But you JUST DON'T USE IT.
> I routinely
> mount the dos ide to get files to upload, and routinely use LDIR from
> dos to copy downloads from the ext2 scsi. and use each to backup my
> personal files from the other. AN OS cannot trash a drive it dont see.
A good OS won't trash drives under normal circumstances. You can unload
device drivers for specific devices under Linux (try that with DOS) and
unmount partitions to "hide" them. It doesn't require any system
reconfiguration or rebooting to do so either.
> I have always used dos batch to create mnemonics to launch apps. I
> was informed that you can do this with linux, and looked into ncurses.
You write a script (batch) file under DOS. You do the same with Linux. Why,
oh WHY did you try to use curses to write mnemonic commands?
> again, the power of that is vastly beyond anything you can do in dos
> batch... and so is the complexity. Ncurses is not for a newbie, but
> simple dos batch is reasonably useful.
As simple *nix shell script is equally, if not more useful.
> But the vast majority of users
> would just stick with the GUI buttons, and be perfectly happy with it.
Not DOS users. Not many *nix users. They're more alike than different in
this regard.
- Bob
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