Re: Mac advertising vs. ideas for VMS advertising

From: Bill Gunshannon (bill_at_cs.uofs.edu)
Date: 05/18/05 

Date: 18 May 2005 17:39:56 GMT

In article <V7x$47F2eXfT@eisner.encompasserve.org>,
        koehler@eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob Koehler) writes:
> In article <3f0uclF5ehlhU1@individual.net>, bill@cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) writes:
>>
>> Why? Just what does the Mac GUI have to offer that can't be found in any
>> other X11 GUI?
>
> The Mac GUI has always been more useable,

Here we go again. Matter of opinion, based solely on religous belief.

> full featured,

I'm running KDE. What can the Mac GUI do that I can't? Be specific.

> and
> self consistent than X11 based UNIX GUIs.

Don't know what this is supposed to mean. My KDE seems pretty consistent.
Gnome probably is, but I don't like it enough to get comfortable with it.
(But like I said above, that more religion or in the case of Gnome,
political.)

> When people use X11
> UNIX GUIs, what I see is the first thing they do is bring up a shell
> window so they can "get real work done".

Probably because that's how they did it for so long the copmmand line
is their favorit UI anyway. (Hint: I do not run an Xserver on any of
my computer room consoles although 90 percent of external access by my
users is X. I would imagine that most people today who start out on
Linux or BSD with a GUI do not do that and would likely be as lost at
the shell prompt as most of the people here.

> Now that I have a shell
> window on my Mac, I rarely use it, over a decade of GUI-only with
> no shell window on most Macs made Apple address all the issues that
> UNIX GUIs didn't bother with.

Again, name them. Specifically. Sometimes a GUI just gets in the way
unless, of course, the machine isn't capable of doing anything without
that additional overhead. (Another hint: There are many admin tasks,
including adding users, that I find much faster and easier on Windows
outside the GUI. How would you add 500 users to a Mac? Oh wait, it's
really just a single user box, isn't it.)

>
> I was really disapointed when I found that the X11 FileView on Ultrix
> wasn't coupled into any shell with the kind of extensibility that
> the VMS FileView has into DCL.

Ultrix is a bad example. Any real development on Ultrix stopped a long
time ago and I am sure Dec decided long before that point to put only
the minimum of effort into it as a product. Let's stick to the con-
temporaries of OS-X.

> Yes, you can do a lot of the same
> stuff with Tk, but then it wasn't integrated into FileView. Although
> VMS FileView doesn't have drag and drop (I think CDE's file viewer on
> VMS does, but I gave up on customizing CDE), it does have a rich set
> of features I've found quite usefull.

Maybe I'll see if I can find some students interested enough to try porting
KDE to VMS (if it's even possible!) then we can compare something of about
the same vintage. I doubt much effort is being put into X on VMS either as
has often been a complaint here.

>
> KDE and Gnome aren't their, either.

Why? Specifically, what can the Mac GUI do that KDE can't (something that
someone other than a Mac fanatic might find useful!)

> Mac's still got the best GUI,

Pure religion. No observable technical merit.

> possibly because they set out to only have a GUI. Windows did a lot
> of catching up starting with 95 (a.k.a. "Mac OS for Intel"), but
> Windows isn't there yet in a lot of other ways.

Some of them the same as the Mac before it got X11. No way to share
a graphics display.

bill 

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
bill@cs.scranton.edu     |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>

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