said Andy:
| <snip a lot of stuff   :-)  >

and snip even more . . .

| Some like strictly utilitarian, never-changing work environments so they
| don't have to think about how to do things with the computer. It is all
| second nature, and the user can get on with his work.

way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we had dos and nice little front 
ends/file managers such as powermenu; we had applications (and could even 
use, yes, graphics, though at the time if you had 1024x768x256, you were 
uptown). we wished our machines were a little faster, but hey . . .

and now we have fast machines, but execution isn't any faster -- i can open 
windows 6 for dos in a dos emulator, including loading the emulator 
itself, in less time than it takes the current version of word for windows 
to open in windows (or, to be fair, the word processor in libreoffice to 
open under a modern linux distribution). what have we gained? an ability 
to admire the appearance of our words, though i think that something has 
been lost in our approach to what those words actually are. i know that 
when i was using word/dos or textmaker i felt far more connected to the 
words i was writing. 

indeed, if i had a single wish for the linux desktop, it would be for the 
creation of a usable text-based desktop and suite of applications, along 
with the ability to switch between that desktop and TDE readily. the 
applications might well apply what ibm used to call "cua" for "common user 
access" -- consistency among menus, which linux terminal applications most 
definitely do not enjoy. that this late in the game there's no linux 
equivalent even of the old dos "edit" application is troubling. terminal 
applications and a linux equivalent of desqview (anybody here old enough 
to remember *that*?) would be great.

there was outrage 20 years ago with OS/2 and the outrageous demand that 
computers running it had at least 8 megs of memory. today, a *video card* 
with 8 megs of memory is called low-end, if you can find one at all. lord.

my point is, i guess, that we were able to do a lot with  an 8088, 640k and 
no graphics; we were able to do more with a 386, OS/2 and 8 megs. today, 
with processors orders of magnitude faster and a thousand times as much 
memory, we're still doing the same things in the same way at the same 
speed. even "lightweight" systems are enormous. and as GUIs go -- DEC gave 
us GEM, which ran just fine on any 8088 that had a VGA card, in 1988. and 
on a 286 it would task switch and on a 386 would multitask. and we're 
still talking a meg of memory here, not multiple gigs. the 
multitasking, "cooperative," as in windows 3.x, rather than OS/2's more 
robust pre-emptive architecture, but still.

what do we have now for our trouble? bling.

sorry -- letting off steam here. it's just that the increase of speed and 
power of machines has done little but allow programmers and programming 
languages to become sloppy. object-oriented programming has failed to live 
up to its promise. 

sure ain't what we expected!

here endeth the rant (which is not aimed at TDE folk at all -- more at the 
KDE4.x craporama and its philosophical equivalents).
-- 
dep

The shortest distance between you and playing great acoustic guitar:
the great new instructional DVDs from Marjorie Thompson, 
available at www.MarjorieThompson.com