A great magazine! Well done! Your layout and presentation is excellent.
One criticism, though: in your current issue, I noticed that you reviewed three different HTML editors. These were all very interesting by themselves, but what would be more useful would be a brief overall comparison of the three.
ratti@singnet.com.sg
- Agreed. We're looking into some sort of hardware and software labs so that future reviews will be more consistent and valuable to readers.
Well, I just got through with the editorial and the rants. I couldn't get any farther without telling you "right on!" Those are all things that make my blood boil. In the vein of the pushy computer salesperson, an even worse case are the ones who _do_ listen to what you're saying, only to denigrate what you're using and "why would you want to use that" and such tripe. I don't even say anything. I just go over to the store manager, tell him what happened, and tell him that's why I won't be doing any further business with his establishment. You've only got one vote ... your bucks.
Doug Franklin
I wanted to let you all know how much I appreciated the "Rave" about filebar. I read about it Monday, and now Wednesday both my home machine and work machine are both using Filebar. I will be sending my registration this week. It is well worth the price. Thanks for bringing this informative article. Keep them coming.
Andy Carlson
The problem is not that Warp isn't ready for the 'average user'. It's two fold :
1: The average user isn't ready for Warp. In fact, the average user isn't even ready for real computing. I have seen the 'average user' do countless re-installs of DOS and Windows. The industry commercials lie to everyone. Everyone thinks that you should be able to act like Jean Luc and say "Computer, load my editor". Get real. Better yet, get educated. Americans are too lazy to learn technology. They want it served to them with sugar added.
2: Warp is doing fine. All this whining about what does or doesn't need to happen for Warp to succeed is like the prattle of old doddering men. Wake up and notice that Warp is doing well.
Not that it can't be better and be more successful.
Gary
Mr.Yoo does not give much credit to the average user. I build and install all kinds of systems and you would be happy to know that more and more people are jumping on the Warp band wagon. I tell all my clients about Warp for home and work,and I have many people switch. I have been a OS/2 user for six years.I think I know what I am talking about. Please if you or going to talk about OS/2 please get someone who has used Warp for longer than three months, and who has used not just Warp all the versions of OS/2. Thank You
cdsmith@eclipse.net
IBM does want retail sales, it only uses these to test the product and iron-out the bugs. IMO, end users are not much more then beta tester for IBM large corporation which have been, are and will be the market IBM aims for.
decelle@ibm.net
- Let's hope not! I personally disagree, but you may be right and we may all be fighting a losing battle.
I read with interest your rather extensive coverage of OD. I expect to be using this program soon (an elf wispered to me that Santa would put it under the tree), and so appreciated the full review, especially the "competing products" article. I was struck, however, at the similarity between the operation of the keyboard launchpad of OD and another product, QwikSwitch Plus by Bitware. I realize that not all competing products could be mentioned - this is not meant to be a criticism of the author. Its just that I think QwikSwitch is an excellent product, and perhaps some users might not be aware of its existance.
Chris Stevenson
I believe that Mr. Crouser missed the usefulness of the Hypercache. Granted, it does not work as he or I expected it to, but it does serve a useful purpose. The hypercache loads cached folders into memory, which they will probably be swapped out of, and saves the need to look up each object every time the folder is opened. It is useful for commonly opened folders, especially on an HPFS system where objects may be scattered all over a large harddrive (while HPFS resists fragmenting, it also seems to resist defragging and rearranging of files, or maybe I just haven't found a good HPFS defragger yet). I use it on folders that I commonly access from the control center and it helps considerably.
Colin Hildinger
The review article on Object Desktop which compared it to competing products was very helpful. It would have been even more helpful, however, if the prices of those competing products had also been listed for comparison. As reasonable as OD's price is, I may settle for a third of its functionality (if that is all I need) for a third of the price.
Philip Graber
I'd like to thank you for reviewing Object Desktop. Your review was fair and thorough and I look forward to your future reviews in the future.
One concern I wanted to bring up was the performance concenrs raised in your "cons" article. It is true that v1.0 of Object Desktop has some performance issues on "lower end" systems. However, in mid November we made a breakthrough in the way we internally "cache" objects. This new method delivered a major performance improvement. In fact, it improved the speed of Object Desktop so much that we went through our existing inventory of the product and replaced v1.0 with v1.0.2 which has these speed/stability improvements so that Object Desktop truly becomes both a powerful enhancement and a performance enhancement as well. We think you'll agree with our findings once you upgrade to the new version. It will be available free of charge to our existing Object Desktop customers as "FixKit #3" off our WWW site.
Brad Wardell
Stardock Systems, Inc.
I have found, in my experience with several machines, that for a fairly functional Warp environment in which I run more than a few apps at a time, 32MB is much faster than 16. I have two systems with dual-boot configurations (one at home and one at work). The home machine is a Pentium-100 with fast-SCSI-II/PCI controller and hard drives and a PCI ATI graphics board. Despite the relatively fast drives, increasing RAM from 16 to 32MB decreased hard-drive thrashing and improved response times significantly - but even now, it uses 40-80% of a 10MB swap-file.
The office machine is a 486-66 ISA with 16MB of RAM and two IDE drives. I realize, of course, that with slower hardware the response times are going to be longer, but if I'm running just a few tasks (like right now), I'll boot up on the DOS/Win95 side, because the machine seems to run faster - but it's much more stable on the OS/2 side when I need to run more apps, so when I know I'll have six or eight apps open at once, I always boot up OS/2. Still, it'd be nice if it were a bit speedier.
Bob Sully
Warp as a Scientific Platform [--Top--]
I am a chemist at a research institute and therefore my duties are quite similar to those Dr. Terrell wrote about. After changing from Windows 3.1 to OS/2 2.11, I could concentrate more on my work because system crashes that made me loose my work did not occur any more. Now I am using OS/2 Warp Connect with WINOS/2 to calculate write and publish. But OS/2 became even more important to me when I started to work with the HPLC equipment in our Laboratory. To my surprise the HPLC software was written for OS/2. The manufacturer told me, that they chose this platform due to the high speed and security requirements and the good multitasking. The HPLC software reads simultaneously data from two detectors (one of them a scanning UV detector), reads the status of every component, does the whole programming (pump, autosampler and detectors) and data output. Apart from that you are still able to use additional data analysis software and to communicate with other computers via OS/2 peer to peer.
Many manufacturers of scientific equipment are still laughing at OS/2 and are using Windows 3.1 or even Windows 95. But I can sleep much better at night knowing my valuable samples will be analysed over night without a system crash and unrecoverable loss of data. As you can see from what was written above, I agree with Dr. Terrell that OS/2 is an excellent operating system for scientific purposes.
Dr. Klaus Oldoerp
Each year more and more computer users work with OS/2, either at home or the office. And as the end of the century approaches, more and more people will turn to 32 bit operating systems. It is even becoming common for people to use more than one operating system, one at work and one at home, or perhaps two at home. Often in the media and on internet newsgroups I hear about the operating system war--who is going to win?
Well, I have a news flash for everyone. No one is going to win the operating system war. Like so many products developed in the last century, there will be more than one type from which to choose. You do not see only one company making televisions, video cassette recorders, telephones, cars, or computers. So what makes people think there can only be one operating system? Each operating system will carve out its own niche in the market, as we are starting to see now. And there is room for more than one operating system in the home consumer market, as witnessed by the coexistence of Macintosh and DOS during the past decade or so.
Michael Neice