A my wits end.

[Geoffrey McRae]

Justin Walsh wrote:

> I'm old fashion, believing that True Users are End Users. 
> Business/nonBusiness  people (dotCom/dotOrg,  or neither).
> The Ideal model I use is the mobile phone: Who really cares what 
> drives it, as long s it works.
> I have two Integrated Development Environments, IDE's:
>    1. PDC VIP nc; Visual Prolog non commercial and,
>    2. Cincom VWnc; VisualWorks non commercial.
> The first is primarily Declarative (non procedural leaning toward 
> procedural). The mindset is radical  "close".
> The  second primarily Procedural  (non Declarative leaning toward 
> declarative). The mindset is radical "open".
> I am stuck with a choice of which "one" to choose. Neither is making 
> it easier for me.
> Background:
> Neither actually requires an Operating System at all, the earlier 
> Borland and Digitalk (mid to late 80's) releases ran  well on early DOS.
> From my experience both could have run just as well (if not better) on 
> 64k bit CP/M.
> Since they are both true OO IDE's  and can perform everything  a 
> modern computer should, then I don't see the OS as doing any more than 
> provide what you describe so well  in you opening statement in 
> Linuxbios.org:
>
> Reinout Heek wrote:
> The most minimal Linux I heard of is the one being adapted to run 
> instead of the bios (requires reflashing your bios)
>  http://www.linuxbios.org/
>
> Will boot in seconds
>
> In fact  once my StV IDE has booted (DOS3.10) I can even delete c:\dos 
> and the command.com.
> Both Cincom and PDC (owners of the above tools) have hitched their 
> respective wagons to either Windows or Linux or both and End Users are 
> being led a merry techno-political dance.; no insult intended.
> They now service only their Primary Users, who are nearly  all  
> committed to either Linux or Windows; one and all  Programmers
> Secondary or End User are left wondering whether years of development 
> are going to end up as junk.
> I am now faced with all the uncertainty which  a technical "civil war" 
> i.e "open v Close" or  as in Gullivers Travels "Big-enders v 
> Small-enders", presents.
> If there is anybody (with an open/closed mind), who can speak with me 
> on the matter (soberly and Rationally), then:
> I would be delighted to hear from him/her,them.
> Regards
> Justin
>
> _______________________________________________
> Linuxbios mailing list
> Linuxbios at clustermatic.org
> http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios

Dude, have you even played with the new tech, its all designed to be 
backwards compatible and the linux community are doing what the can to 
support windows apps and dos apps (Wine, DosBox, even got it booting 
win2k), can you say the same for MS? Open source is becoming the way, it 
makes it much easier to maintain/fix machines, why just the other day I 
had issues with my mail server and the pam_mysql module, so I downloaded 
the source, found the issue, fixed it and I was back in musniess within 
a couple of hours, normally you would have to request a patch from the 
developers, and who knows how long it would take, and if they would even 
listen to you. Also, you say you have borland stuff from the 80s, go get 
youself a copy of Kylix and Delphi, then you can develop for both 
operating systems at once and your problem goes away.

Working in a computer shop I once encountered a guy running Dos and he 
wanted to upgrade but refused to use windows, we had to tell hit to go 
away because if your running dos you have to be a complete idiot. 
LinuxBios is designed to overcome bios limitations, the motherboard 
manufactures are jumping at the oppotunity to do this as it saves them 
time and money developing a bios for every MB that they produce, and if 
they have problems, they contact the community.

"In fact  once my StV IDE has booted (DOS3.10) I can even delete c:\dos 
and the command.com."
Once linux has booted you can even delete everything, even though it is 
a stupid idea, you can ever partition the hdd and format without 
rebooting, which you cant do from dos. You are using dos as your 
operating system/launcher here, thats all the LinuxBios is, just 
smaller, smarter and much faster, you can make it boot whatever you 
want, even probarbly could make it launch dosbox and your dos dev 
environment.

Anyhow, feel free to flame me, this is just my opinion.