From: jamesd@com.informix.com
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 95 20:05:20 PST
Subject: Even more unix holy war. Was "Clinton freezes U.S. assets .."
Message-ID: <9501270405.AA01448@carbon.informix.com>
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To summarize this thread, and I hope end it.

The fans of unix correctly point out that unix can,
in principle, be configured to be really nice.

Well so can a molten lump of pig iron, in principle,
be configured to be something really nice.

Out in the real world people do not like dealing with
a molten lump of pig iron, and so it is usually not
configured to be really nice, which is why we see
people editing with vi and publishing with latex.

Now sometimes MIS creates a tiny little reserve where 
things really are really nice, and the secretaries are 
herded into this little reserve, and within this little 
reserve everything is almost as nice as windows.
(Unless of course you want to cut and paste formatted 
text and graphics between windows, under the sun OS, but hey,
that is an arcane operation that the normal user would
never want to do.  Right?  You cannot really expect MIS
to help such special power users can you?)
 
And that is what Bill O'Hanlon meant when he said that for ordinary 
naive users who had not been exposed to either operating system, unix 
was no worse than dos.  Herd them into the reserve and keep
them there, and it is indeed no worse than dos.

But the reserve is not really the whole operating system, it
is just a little area of safety.  And as soon as somebody
strolls outside the little reserve to do something that MIS
has not specifically planned for and arranged, half a ton of 
molten pig iron pours down on them, and MIS says:  "Hey, don't
do that."

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