Thanks Was: RFC: Educating the majority

On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 12:01, Chris Gehlker wrote:
> On Jan 13, 2004, at 9:27 AM, Craig White wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 09:08, Chris Gehlker wrote:
> >> On Jan 13, 2004, at 7:40 AM, Bill Lindley wrote:
> >>
> >>> I'm reading Eric Raymond's "Art of Unix Programming" now, it
> >>> definitely shows the technical reasons why the Unix Way is better...
> >>> and those *do* come out at the user end of things.
> >>
> >> ESR is certainly a very smart, interesting and thought provoking guy
> >> but he is also very often wrong. Take what he says with a grain of
> >> salt.
> > ---
> > Are you content to just shoot from the hip here or did you care to give
> > meaning to this by illustration?
>
> I certainly don't intend to be cryptic. It's just that so many have
> reviewed Mr. Raymond's prognostications in general and "The Art of Unix
> Programming" in particular that that I have little to add. I'm sure a
> little googling will provide all the illustration that anyone could
> want.
>
> I will give a few examples off the top of my head:
>
> The obvious one is that he made very public predictions that MS would
> be bankrupt by now. He had a nice argument built on the premise that
> consumer level computers would break through the $1000 barrier, that
> therefore Windows would become too significant a part of the total cost
> of the computer, that one computer retailer would move to Linux, that
> the cost advantage would force the rest of the industry to follow suit.
>
> Well the price of consumer PCs did fall below $1000, Lindows did go on
> sale at Wal-Mart, but it has yet to drive Dell and HP to the wall.
---
I don't see this prediction in the book - can you give me an idea of
which chapter this is or does this prediction exist somewhere else
outside of that book?
---
>
> Another illustration is that at one point in the book he seems to
> realize that the general lack in *nix of some single standard for
> program automation corresponding to COM and it's descendants is a real
> problem. There are several competing technologies from bonobo to that
> KDE thingee to XML/RPC and the result is that end user programs on *nix
> aren't written to support automation the way that programs on Windows
> are. So Raymond seems to 'get it' there but he doesn't draw the obvious
> conclusion that until Unix in general has a substitute for Visual Basic
> it will not receive serious consideration from some businesses. In
> fact, it needs a VB Clone to be at all workable for many businesses.
---
all OS's could use a vb clone - it is one of Microsoft's better efforts.

Craig