From: Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 07:29:51 -0800 (PST)
To: Bovine Remailer <haystack@cow.net>
Subject: Re:
In-Reply-To: <9612120519.AA20735@cow.net>
Message-ID: <32B0241F.7EE1@gte.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Bovine Remailer wrote:
> >Anonymous wrote:
> >> Dale Thorn sez:[snippo]
> >> The innovation you are looking for is
> >> called "the loop". You can implement "the loop" many ways including
> >> taping the end of your program to the beginning.
> >> Remind me not to use any of Dale's "utilities".

> >You would not likely ever have the opportunity to use such utilities,
> >since you obviously lack certain basic ingredients of intelligence.
> >I don't do "user-friendly" GUI programs, but [snip]

> Ahh come on Dale. Lay one one us! Are you now writing
> "utilities" in portable batch files? I'd love to see one.
> Or are you a bare metal guy typing in hex codes in debug?
> btw, how do you like Win95? Too user-friendly for you?

Nothing inherently wrong with a GUI if:
1. It doesn't make it much more difficult to do operations which are
   inherently more efficient from a command line, -and-
2. It doesn't make the computer unacceptably buggy and/or slow, -and-
3. It doesn't make the existing software base unnecessarily obsolete...

The representative article on #1 is in Info World a few weeks ago, as
I recall.  There are a slew of useful DOS operations that are very
difficult (and some impossible) through the Win95 interface, but I'm
sure you already knew that.

I've been of the opinion that Win95 is more stable than Win3.x, since
it has its own memory management, but that assumes that any new software
for Win95 you load up isn't buggy...

On #3, I'm sure you are aware that there are plenty of people around who
have "power" in this PC industry, who would like to *remove* some of the
current user options from PC's in general, for instance, the DOS command
line.  Telling users "if you don't like it, buy something else" is
analogous to telling a person "if you don't like the way our government
and their team of lawyers is destroying your country, go somewhere else".

My utilities are a collection of Basic and 'C' code, somewhat modularized,
so that a new utility can be quickly pasted together from existing
routines, with minimal unique code (or as minimal as possible).

My knowledge of the underlying processes in these languages (on a PC,
anyway) is sufficient for me to be able to quickly analyze bottlenecks
and other areas of code where routines in assembler, etc. can be substi-
tuted for better performance or whatever.

This is very basic stuff for PC "experts", of course, but lots of folks
don't know and (tragically) don't care, particularly about the removal
of current user options from the systems.  When you operate a Mac, for
example, and you are used to not having certain options, you just don't
care, right?