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

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (2335)	10/17/2000 6:41:40 PM
From: JC Jaros	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2615

It's funny that you're saying that now, Thomas (about desktop Linux). I've been the sceptic -- until now. --- Gnome is happening. The Unix vendors are getting behind it. Sun is even going to replace CDE with it, next orbit. OpenOffice (liberated, modularized StarOffice) openoffice.org is hitting the ground running. It appears that within a year's time, Gnome, OpenOffice and Mozilla are going to hook up with full Lemurian sound, printing and 'wizards' and a complete free OS/Internet/Office suite will exist which is more than a *little competitive with the Redmond borg hairball, no matter how deep they discount it. --- I'm beginning to be a believer. -JCJ

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (2335)	10/18/2000 5:41:15 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

I tink dah problemo der is dat X is just too hard to write an app for if you don't use GTK or some other super hi-level thingie. Of course this would slow a big pig appli down, down, down so I would not go there. That is why COREL, now part MicroSoft owned, had SO MUCH trouble porting WORDnearPERFECT to Linux. It was a bear of a job. Few people want to port their programs if it takes longer than one week to do! I approached a maker of accounting software and told them that with certain tools one could port their 300,000 or more line program to Linux in about 3 months. Their reaction was that was an exorbitant time and they would not even think of it. They had looked at it and abandoned it as they thought they could do it in 3 or 4 days! COREL took about 8 months to get WP right and it was buggy, especially with regards to drivers. Trouble is it takes about 1200 lines of code to make an ICCCM window. If the GUI was rewriten it could be done in about 4 lines. Pixels are rectangular in X. This is a big consideration to a CAD or graphics program. It will be years before CAD and some graphical programs are ported to linux. Windoze apps people are not porting. This is the weakness of Linux. We could change all that. Rewrite X. Make colour maps the purview of the GUI not the program. Ban lock and race conditions by using central control of the GUI. Improve the graphics capabilities and controls of windows. Simplify windows making. End the bandwidth glut of X. Extensible is OK, but only where it is needed. Would the internet work if HTML were an extensible language? No! JAVA has proved this. Much work was needed to keep JAVA small and low bandwidth and even then it is only half extensible. Much of its capability exists inside of the browser. X does not have to be that extensible per se. The burden of window creation and graphics controls may be born by the OS, and an extensible network language like JAVA would be used where GUI/windoze terminals were used/needed. A capability of USER specified controls could be implemented. Grafik cut and paste, drag and drop, grafikal, AND appendable-text cut-and-paste, transparent or opaque text and windows, different kinds of text existing outside of windows, and better mouse windows and colour control, user buildable windows, user bound controls to commands, more and better fonts. Efficient hi level windows customization. Simple rc files for point and click custom colours. Better controls, better graphics, no inter program interference. No program hang causing GUI hang and an "out" for no matter how bad the GUI gets hung. The GUI cannot bring down the OS. Would be nice. <SNAP!> Oops! I was dreaming! BUTT Do the dream and Linux would be THE system to use no matter how complex its command and file structure was compared to any other system. * extensible: adj. Language that transfers the entire source code structure of a program to the terminal in order for it to be compiled and run in a virtual machine space. The idea is to minimize what the sending machine has to do to get a program to run elsewhere. The antithesis would be a receiving machine that has the virtual machine setup which will run the object code for that class of programs. A further compromise is a virtual machine environment compiled at the receiving end on a one time per machine basis that allows a lean set of instructions to implement either semi-source code script commands to execute programs that are already compiled structures. i.e. via hi level calls such as "sort, write, paint, windowmake, array" or object code that uses the virtual machine at a low level. Basically that is what a browser does to display HTML in a limited way, and confined to the metaphor of page display. Extend that to word transfer and auto update, and compute upon the transferred data and the metaphor would become more like an operable machine. I would call the system, The Common Remote Anti-Predatory Instruction, Data Integration and Overlay Transfer, or CRAP-IDIOT for short. EC<:-} netlinux.dynip.com mailto:echarters@primus.ca