responses to adam souzis, joanna, carrol, t(ravis) fast:
Adam Souzis wrote:
> desktops) and so the usability will follow. Red Hat, Sun,
> Novell/Suse, among others, all have dedicated usability engineers
> working on this and so expect the situation to change in the next
> year or two.
>
let me guess... they will get together and form an organization. maybe they call it OSF. then they can come up with a common UI and application set. i have a suggestion for a name for that too. how about CDE? ;-) red hat's idea of making the UI more user-friendly was to hide the shortcut/link for the xterm (terminal program) somewhere under a system tools sub menu! i hope you are right, but i dont see any reason why at this iteration these guys are going to do any better, especially given almost all of them (other than IBM) are worse off now than they were back in the late 90s.
Joanna wrote:
>
> Ravi, Chuck, anyone, are there good UNIX books?
>
i am not unfortunately the right person to ask, since i learnt the OS the ugly way... but will try to get back to you with some suggestions. i assume you mean end-user books, not kernel hacking ;-). speculating wildly, i think the problem may not just be the lack of a good book. i see at least two immediate issues: a) too many options (as of now, there aren't just 4 or 5 browsers, 2 to 4 windowing environments, 2 or more X servers, etc, but there are 4 or 5 different ways to distribute, install and manage them -- rpm, openpkg, ports, debian/gentoo emerge/src install etc). b) mismatched progress on various fronts.
Carrol wrote:
>
> The last I knew only a quite small proportion of pc owners had
> broadband connections. Dial-Up is still the connection used by the
> vast majority.
>
> Does anyone know the current figures on this?
http://www.bizreport.com/news/8524/ As prices dropped over the past year, broadband use at home has surpassed that of dial-up in the United States, reaching 53 percent of residential Web users in October, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
Travis wrote:
>
> To accomplish the same basic functionality on a Linux LAN takes
> considerably more time in part because it is a more robust platform.
> But the front end GUI for Samba is anything but intuitive,
>
yikes, man!!!! for linux LAN filesharing, why would use samba? NFS has been doing filesharing from way before bill gates famously declared that networking is no big deal! of course getting NFS working is a 2 minute operation only if you know some amount of unix. and with some linux distros, its more than that, since some iptables firewall setting will no doubt confound your every effort ;-).
--ravi