Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!texbell!sugar!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: Low Productivity of Knowledge Workers Message-ID: <6441@ficc.uu.net> Date: 6 Oct 89 14:46:14 GMT References: <9676@venera.isi.edu> <189@crucible.UUCP> <291@voa3.UUCP> <7971@microsoft.UUCP> Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 100 In article <7971@microsoft.UUCP>, philba@microsoft.UUCP (Phil Barrett) writes: > and not for unix? Desqview and windows have very user friendly installation > programs. That's as may be, but that's not what I mean by "system integration". The problem with DOS comes when you have different programs all with their own kludges put in to cover up the faults of MS-DOS (like, the serial port support just plain doesn't work). Then you find that this TSR doesn't work under that multitsaker unless you load it after running this patch program. With UNIX you just don't get programs stepping on each others' toes. You can occasionally get problems with device drivers, but then the installation tells you you have a conflict, backs out of the installation, and lets you edit your devices file. You can't even do that with MS-DOS, unless the programmer (through the goodness of their heart) condescended to give you a way to fix it... but it's different for *every* program. > >How many times has Fido gotten wedged on you. Oh, that's right. Fido just > >shuts down at 4AM every day so it doesn't have to deal with the problem. > who uses fido? I certainly don't. I don't know of any sites that do. But > since Fido has nasty problems, I guess that means all PC comm apps do too :-) I don't know about other PC communications programs, but Fido is the nearest equivalent in the PC world to UUCP. Repeat after me... UUCP IS NOT NETWORKING. > There are something like 40M machines that can run DOS apps. Yes, and this (to get back to the subject) is responsible for a huge loss of productivity among knowledge workers in this country. You're proud of it? > do they support mice well? Yes. > windows apps? graphical apps? Yes (not on a remote terminal, of course). > TSRs? Probably. I haven't tried any of these... TSRs are one of the things I'm trying to forget about from my days in the DOS world. > `dirty' apps, There's another kind? > dos extended apps? I'm not familiar with this term. Can you provide examples? > cut and paste between apps? Yes. [ i said, the internet virus is a red herring -- the internet is deliberately set up as a low-security network ] > Just because it was designed that way doesn't mean squat. Sure it does. There's no reason you have to set your network up like the internet. That's like saying that, because this guy left his safe unlocked during business hours and got burgled, all safes are useless. > security is only as good as the weakest link. The PC networks do have some > limited security features -- server password protection. Granted that this > isn't a complete solution but the environment is much more limited than say > arpa or uucp. Arpa is a special case... most UNIX networks are not on the internet. Most UNIX networks are local area nets just like most PC networks. And, again, UUCP is not a network. > You are right, you didn't say unusable, just about everything but, though. > You did say that they were isolated environments where data sharing is > done by passing diskettes around -- which I showed via example is not > true at all. Most places it is. You're trying to prove a negative... which you can't do by just giving an example or two. But there were offices doing email and file sharing on UNIX minicomputers as long ago as 1976. DOS equivalents really only got rolling in the last couple of years. I would say that 6-8 years of holding back progress is quite enough. > I grant that Unix is far more elegant in most ways but elegance > isn't everything. You may have disgust for the majority but people do vote > with their $$$. Yes, and they vote for the folks who campaign. Now then, who's got the deepest pockets? The biggest campaign chests? IBM. -- Peter da Silva, *NIX support guy @ Ferranti International Controls Corporation. Biz: peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. Fun: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com. `-_-' "Seems to me that posting an entire RFC in PostScript is like posting a 'U` Sun-3 binary to comp.sources.unix." -- sgrimm@sun.com (Steven Grimm)