Hello Heimo, Friday, December 26, 2003, 11:57:30 PM, you wrote:
HC> Nothing luddite at all there, dear Howard. I use this old DOS (only) HC> machine still for about 90+ % of my work - and the rest, with non-text HC> things, takes 90 % of my work_time_, bandwidth, and connection fees. HC> Quite a bad balance for the whole pixelmania and GUI hype. HC> And DOS is not dead at all - just quietly used by lots of people. HC> Only there are no accidents with it, no virus scandals, no endless HC> "administration" hassles. Thus not much talk about - it just works. HC> As for the one or two Windows - or rather, GUI-conditioned - tasks, I HC> would organise it the other way round: having DOS as the usual working HC> base, and booting something else for these rare occasions. There, HC> Winnos is not the better choice any more as it sabotages DOS in fact, HC> while one of the more easily-installed Linux "distributions" would HC> co-exist nicely and would offer the GUI functionalities which DOS has HC> difficulties to deliver. Being a painter, who sells his work online, via a website and eBay...I couldn't do this. Running in GUI mode, whether in Windows or Linux, becomes necessary, for tasks like writing and debugging WebPages/ scripts, and top quality image manipulation, using applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and GIMP, etc. Email also becomes impractical in DOS, because I am receiving emails from clients and entities like eBay and Paypal that are critical to my earning a living, and use HTML formats... not my favoutite... I prefer ASCII mail, but where money is concerned, I have to either yield to the preferences of my clients and the organisations I do business with, or find another line of work. Also, running DOS applications in a pure DOS environment can sometimes be a time waster, because the process requires the whole machine, while running... it cannot be run in the background, as can be done on NT and *nix operating systems On the upside, I prefer using the old QuickC and MicrosoftC IDE's for coding in a DOS environment, even if the application will be running in a Windows environment, and my Windows boxes all employ DOS batch files, for maintaining a system of back-ups, across my mini-network, and for performing other repetitive maintenance tasks... that Windows doesn't seem capable of doing for itself. HC> But working with a Linux setup in text mode is a PITA - despite all HC> "powerful" features of the "system", it's an ergonomic desaster. HC> So back to DOS is the message. My website is on a FreeBSD server, so there is no getting around doing a lot of work in *nix shells, in tssh (secure telnet) sessions. I guess I am almost as used to working in *nix, as I am DOS. -wittig http://www.robertwittig.com/ -weblog http://radio.weblogs.com/0128450/ A business is as honest as its advertising. . To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
