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Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gerald Walls who wrote (1635)	7/12/1999 2:21:00 AM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 2617

I think the 99 dollar business model will not make them supra riche either. MS sold all kinds of copies of excel to institutions at 250 dollars a crack and ultra riche copies of MS Offiche, Quid pro quo for ultra bucks. I must have spend 12,000 on software since the late 80's and I am muche more cautious now. Best piece of software I ever bought was zip.com. It connected two PC's by the parallel port cable and exchanged files. fastest most intuitive program I ever ran. DOS, natch. Sure made a fool of lap link, and it was free. worst come one? Generic Cad telling me their program was upgradable. A lie. The program was ungradeable. You could reuse the drawings. Most overpriced software.. Autocad. But they get people to buy it. Where is Linux going? well if it gets vastly better manuals and a vastly easier and more complete interface then it will continue to attract customer while Windoze crashes continues to lose them. But I still decry the lack of easy tools for Linux. A good mail agent that is not some sys admins dream of mailtasking to the proles would be good. Something that did not require qmail (shudder) or send mail to break up mail into files on my disk and without a Harvard degree. I don't want to load a 50 meg file every time I go to read my mail. Its either that or run a mini database with ISAM and corrupted base fixing to run mail. I liked the idea of Maildir until I read the Qmail bug/reading list. Kind of daunting. I think the answer lies in a better setup and possibly a better GUI interface. I know X is an unstable patch. It is not as slick as windows by a long long shot. Lets face it, mouse and other controls are primitive even by SUN X standards. It may be as some pundits say that Unix does not lend itself to a GUI patchover. I think it has been done once before better and more intuitively than X or FVWM. and lower bandwidth too. and Drivers drivers drivers...whew.. I know Linux has lots but it need many more and it is not an easy problem to solve in GPL land. I don't think modules need to be GPLed though, It is a way out that some commercial vendor(s) could try. My dream of a better GUI is more than a dream and more than a GUI. Lets face it, 80 million users who go to multitasking OS's WILL NOT spend the time it takes now to configure Linux. NO. they will not. It is still and will be for few more years to come, a system for professionals and tinkerers and people who need a commercial server for less than downtown Unix prices. Dr. Dobbs believes that Linux will not go mainstream. I think it will go a lot more downtown than it is headed. But to get there it will need some kind of launching pad. Tools that fall short and are hard to fix.. will not make it. I think that Netscape and Applix, while serviceable are not there yet. I don't think there is as good a mail package as Eudora or Pegasus out there. It absolutely boggle me that the Pegasus people are not inclined to build a package for Linux. And Eudora either. How sad. well it gives us something to do. Shall we wait for Corel? Oracle? hmmmmm... can't hurt our cause. mailto:echarter@grubstake.on.ca EC<:-}