Mark Aitchison's thoughts on changing to Linux style volunteer ad hoc support propose an interesting idea but paint a much more positive picture than warrented. OS/2 is primarily sold to large commercial and US Federal government customers. These customers buy OS/2 because a $72 Billion corporation stands directly behind it. If that corporation were to pass development and maintenance to some group of faceless volunteers, those customers would bolt to NT faster than you can say Microsoft.
For Good or ill, IBM must keep development and maintenance under its banner. Remember that IBM is the only firm that offers real, proven (and no I do not work for IBM) enterprise scale solutions. The data that actually run the world live on IBM big iron. It is this fact that keeps these customers using OS/2. It is the existance of this group of well heeled customers that has motivated Netscape to port its browser, Adobe to port its reader and to consider porting its authoring tool, StarDivision to produce a native version of StarSuite, SPG to produce Colorworks, etc. Without a creditable market of this sort, no further ports or development efforts will occur.
Remember, Linux has a word processor because Ray Norda has a lot of money and a personal grudge against Bill Gates. Without that personal ill will, there would be no WP for Linux. We cannot count on personal grudges.
One of the most irritating aspects of using Netscape for OS/2 is pages that use animation (including this months OS/2 e-Zine! ). These animations simply keep your disk buzzing along repeating the same sequence of file reads. How can I turn animations off? Try visiting www.iomega.com. I've found the animations there are guaranteed to crash Netscape for OS/2.
FWIW, I was speaking with one of the developers of Hyperwise and a new version will be out in January 1997.
It would be neat if you folks would keep a directory of firms which preload OS/2 on their systems. At least a link to such a directory. I am looking to buy another machine and I would like to order a system with Warp preloaded and the system configured the way I want it.
Also, stay tuned to OS/2 e-Zine!. In our January issue we will be featuring a review of machines by companies that preload OS/2.
Hi, read your review of ColorWorks, and had a question. One of the things I need is a layout program, such as CorelDraw. I need the text abilities more than the drawing abilities, but the drawing abilities are still vital. How does ColorWorks stack up? What kind of text can it do? (i.e., text objects and/or text frames)
Try StarDraw that comes with StarOffice or Photo>Graphics from TrueSpectra for page-layout and drawing tasks. Both are excellent products and have demo versions on the Application Sampler CD that comes with Warp 4, or you can download them from the Internet.
Thank you for the great review on $Sheriff,
I would like to comment on some of the points raised in the "Shortcomings" section.
You should be able to shoot randomly into doorways even if there is no person standing in that doorway. Then you would have to be more careful or risk running out of bullets.Absolutely essential, I agree.
The game could use better graphics. The characters are cartoonish and while they are fine, digitized pictures of "authentic" western scenery (or better yet, cheesy "B" grade movie sets) and pictures of Clint himself might be more fun.Pictures of Clint: This would create some copyright problems, don't you agree.
As I said above, you can modify the pattern of targets' appearance but making them random would be more challenging.Then you would never have the chance to "learn" a level and it would be too difficult to progress to the next level.
The game is very light on instructions. These basically consist of one sketchy readme.txt file. But with a game this simple, no more explanation is really needed.I admit it, I am lazy....
The way the game keeps track of your money, it should have some sort of high score feature to keep track of your great stints of law and order keeping. I could find no such feature.Absolutely essential, this will create a better reason to play the game. The only reason I did not add this feature is that I was in hurry to "throw" it out.
Why such rush? Because immediately after $S2 I had to start coding my fourth year project, which is a port of CC2 (Chinese Checkers for OS/2) to Java. Now I have two versions of CCJ out and a third is coming soon.
Finally I am preparing a version were the whole CCJ is an Applet and you can run it on your browser.
When I finish with all these "Merlin/Java" problems I will port $S2 to Java and I promise to include as many "Shortcomings" corrections as possible.
Jfactory is one of TWO Java development environments. The other is OEWjava for OS/2.
OEW is from Germany.
OEW was started and still is a C++ environment.
OEWjava is cool because it has full reverse-engineering built in. It is very nice to load some .class files and tweak stuff to learn how it works.
OEW is doing a horrible job of advertising; it's a very cool and industrial strength OS/2 application. Some press from the leader of the OS/2 e-zines could help!
Can anyone please help? After months of hearing how good OS/2 is for running a BBS, I've decided to have a go at starting one up myself, partly as a resource centre for a small computer user's group. It will only be a small system, more for seeing if I can do it than a serious proposition, and I don't really want to make a career out of it. However, I hear that's how most of the big BBSs began...
At this very early stage I'm trying out Maximus (the native OS/2 version) as the BBS server program, and so far it seems like it'll be adequate for my needs. However, I've already run into a couple of problems, such as my modem (a Zoom V34) not initialising properly. I can't figure out how to alter such settings, nor how to bring up the SysOp menu, and the online documentation (all 1.2Mb of it) seems a touch on the vague side in that area. More likely, I just can't find out where it all is in 700-odd pages!
If there are any Maximus-using sysops reading this who might be able to lend some pearls of wisdom to a BBS rookie starting out, I'd be tremendously grateful. Please drop me a line via e-mail or the form on my home page, and share any top tips you may have. Also, if your BBS is telnettable, let me know the hostname and I'll check it out.
If all goes well, I'll keep you informed as to how the project goes. Thanks in advance...
Judging from your references to the TRS-80 I'm pretty sure that we originated about the same time in the computer age. I can remember waiting for 5 minutes for "Raaka-Tu" to load from my tape drive (Raaka-Tu was a Zork type adventure game for the TRS-80). I'm in the middle of reading your article about bloated programs and just had to stop and point out a few things to keep in mind.
Back when we only had 16k of memory and no graphics capability, a programmer's main goal was to pack as much working code into as little memory as possible. At that time the term 'efficiency' equated with size. Graphics? What the hell is that??
Now that we have computers with megabytes of memory and screen resolutions that aren't even POSSIBLE in 16k of memory, 'efficiency' has come to equate more with speed and looks than size. Now that I think of it, looks are probably number one priority for most users. Otherwise how could an unstable pig like Win95 become so popular? Anyway, back to my point. Ask any programmer who knows what he's doing and he'll tell you that a loop instruction takes a lot of processor time. It is not uncommon for a programmer to duplicate code rather than use a loop in the interest of speed. What makes it sick is that they bloat the code to make it faster and then bloat it some more to add pretty graphics, which nullifies whatever speed improvements they made by duplicating code. Ah well at least they got an applications that looks pretty. As long as it looks pretty people will buy it.
Bloated code is certainly one of my dearest pet peeves. If tight code was written most of us would only need a $500 computer. The price Sweet Spot for computers has been a constant. You get more for your money as each month goes by. But you pay the same price. The added power is sucked up by the software. If tight code were a legal requirement, the 486 computer might be King.
Thanks for that stirring article about bloatware! The company I work for recently sent me to the Netscape Developer's Conference. A highlight of the trip was eating lunch with one of Microsoft's represenatives. He was in charge of Visual Basic or something like that. He was amazed to hear that I un-installed MSOffice and didn't use it. I told him I didn't need a 28-floppy install that was going to un-compress to god knows how much on my system to type a memo.
I suggested writing a real "skinny" Office. The idea would be to install a very efficent core and then add the specialized features that they actually intend on using.
Oddball features should run off of a CDRom so that the full functionality is there just in case you need some bizzarre feature like a compound spreadsheed/database mail-merge.
It might be cool to feature some shareware programs that are efficent alternatives to some of the corporate bloatware out there. Escriba word processor comes to mind.
Why don't you see how much of that 4 megs is resources and how much is binary. The decorative graphics, sounds, strings, etc. account for a lot of space.
Electronic banking is a phenomenon that exists for several years already in The Netherlands. There are three major Dutch banks who offer this service. All of them have a different DOS client of which at least one isn't able to work (or with a lot of trouble) in a DOS box. Recently, my bank has issued a Windows version of their client. It works well under Warp, and so does the DOS version. I've asked them for an OS/2 version many times, but to no avail...
I have seen your editorial in OS/2 e-zine. I just want tell you that there is the same "pattern" (I am not sure that this word is appropriate here) here, in France. Most banks are under OS/2 but the software to manage an account runs only under Windows 3.x or under Windows 95. Banks don't want to develop an OS/2 version even though most computers in these banks run under OS/2 (including the computer on the counter!). Justification: nobody is using OS/2 in France (and I, then? And they?).
I have not tried to request an OS/2 version because the use of this software is not cheap. The software is free but data retrieving from Internet is "taxed" at 5 FF by connection (1 $US). The minitel which is well-known to be expensive is cheaper than this solution...
I am part of a highly successful team (since 1989) that recommended, designed, and implemented a very successful OS/2 banking enironment. Most of your article is true with regards to the technology, services, and some of the stats. For our internal or remote home banking, it was done by an outside firm, done in Windows, and I was part of the beta team.
Being the OS/2 guru that I am, I found that it did not work under OS/2 or even WIN-OS2. Based on all my findings, which went back to the developers, they decided to do nothing much. It was cited that most users of the system would be Windows/Windows 95 customers, not OS/2 people.
The latest release of the software and a couple prior did work under WIN-OS2 just fine; most of the problems related to the database (vbx) that the developers used. From a technical standpoint they could have developed the app in OS/2 as well but it would have taken time and the developers ONLY knew Windows.
I use the software ONLY to download the updates and them export them in my good old InCharge financial program - heck it saves me keying it in).
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